It would be very easy to make training ML models on publicly available data illegal. I think that would be a very bad thing because it would legally enshrine a difference between human learning and machine learning in a broader sense, and I think machine learning has huge potential to improve everyone's lives.
Artists are in a similar position to grooms and farriers demanding the combustion engine be banned from the roads for spooking horses. They have a good point, but could easily screw everyone else over and halt technological progress for decades. I want to help them, but want to unblock ML progress more.
My empathy for artists is aligned with my concern for everyone else's future.
> I want to help them, but want to unblock ML progress more.
But progress towards what end? The ML future looks very bleak to me, the world of "The Machine Stops," with humans perhaps reduced to organic effectors for the few remaining tasks that the machine cannot perform economically on its own: carrying packages upstairs, fixing pipes, etc.
We used to imagine that machines would take up the burden our physical labor, freeing our minds for more creative and interesting pursuits: art, science, the study of history, the study of human society, etc. Now it seems the opposite will happen.
How about we legally enshrine a difference between human learning and corporate product learning? If you want to use things others made for free, you should give back for free. Otherwise if you’re profiting off of it, you have to come to some agreement with the people whose work you’re profiting off of.
I see this as another step toward having a smaller and smaller space in which to find our own meaning or "point" to life, which is the only option left after the march of secularization. Recording and mass media / reproduction already curtailed that really badly on the "art" side of things. Work is staring at glowing rectangles and tapping clacky plastic boards—almost nobody finds it satisfying or fulfilling or engaging, which is why so many take pills to be able to tolerate it. Work, art... if this tech fulfills its promise and makes major cuts to the role for people in those areas, what's left?
The space in which to find human meaning seems to shrink by the day, the circle in which we can provide personal value and joy to others without it becoming a question of cold economics shrinks by the day, et c.
I don't think that's great for everyone's future. Though admittedly we've already done so much harm to that, that this may hardly matter in the scheme of things.
I'm not sure the direction we're going looks like success, even if it happens to also mean medicine gets really good or whatever.
Then again I'm a bit of a technological-determinist and almost nobody agrees with this take anyway, so it's not like there's anything to be done about it. If we don't do [bad but economically-advantageous-on-a-state-level thing], someone else will, then we'll also have to, because fucking Moloch. It'll turn out how it turns out, and no meaningful part in determining that direction is whether it'll put us somewhere good, except "good" as blind-ass Moloch judges it.
1) It'll no longer be possible to work as an artist without being incredibly productive. Output, output, output. The value of each individual thing will be so low that you have to be both excellent at what you do (which will largely be curating and tweaking AI-generated art) and extremely prolific. There will be a very few exceptions to this, but even fewer than today.
2) Art becomes another thing lots of people in the office are expected to do simply as a part of their non-artist job, like a whole bunch of other things that used to be specialized roles but become a little part of everyone's job thanks to computers. It'll be like being semi-OK at using Excel.
I expect a mix of both to happen. It's not gonna be a good thing for artists, in general.
Ideally we’d see something opt-in to decide exactly how much you have to give back, and how much you have to constrain your own downstream users. And in fact we do see that. We have copyleft licenses for tons of code and media released to the public (e.g. GPL, CC-BY-SA NC, etc). It lets you define how someone can use your stuff without talking to you, and lays out the parameters for exactly how/whether you have to give back.
That’s really what we’re protecting here?
I’d rather live in the future where automation does practically everything not for the benefit of some billionaire born into wealth but because the automation is supposed to. Similar to the economy in Factorio.
Then people can derive meaning from themselves rather that whatever this dystopian nightmare we’re currently living in.
It’s absurdly depressing that some people want to stifle this progress only because it’s going to remove this god awful and completely made up idea that work is freedom or work is what life is about.
AI powered surveillance and the ongoing destruction of public institutions will make it hard to stand up for the collective interest.
We are not in hell, but the road to it has not been closed.
Basically the current argument of artists being out of a job but taken to its extreme.
Why would these robots get paid? They wouldn’t. They’d just mine, manufacture, and produce on request.
Imagine a world where chatgpt version 3000 is connected to that swarm of robots and you can type “produce a 7 inch phone with an OLED screen, removable battery, 5 physical buttons, a physical shutter, and removable storage” and X days later arrives that phone, delivered by automation, of course.
Same would work with food, where automation plants the seeds, waters the crops, removes pests, harvests the food, and delivers it to your home.
All of these are simply artists going out of a job, except it’s not artists it’s practically every job humans are forced to do today.
There’d be very little need to work for almost every human on earth. Then I could happily spend all day taking shitty photographs that AI can easily replicate today far better than I could photograph in real life but I don’t have to feel like a waste of life because I enjoy doing it for fun and not because I’m forced to in order to survive.
> There’d be very little need to work for almost every human on earth.
When mankind made a pact with the devil, the burden we got was that we had to earn our bread though sweat and hard labor. This story has survived millennia, there is something to it.
Why is the bottom layer in society not automated by robots? No need to if they are cheaper than robots. If you don't care about humans, you can get quite some labor for a little bit of sugar. If you can work one job to pay your rent, you can possibly do two or three even. If you don't have those social hobbies like universal healthcare and public education, people will be competitive for a very long time with robots. If people are less valuable, they will be treated as such.
Hell is nearer than paradise.
Your diatribe about not caring about humans is ironic. I don’t know where you got all that from, but it certainly wasn’t my previous comment.
I also don’t know what pact you’re on about. The idea of working for survival is used to exploit people for their labor. I guess people with disabilities that aren’t able to work just aren’t human? Should we let them starve to death since they can’t work a 9-5 and work for their food?
I don’t understand this. It reminds me of the Go player who announced he was giving up the game after AlphaGo’s success. To me that’s exactly the same as saying you’re going to give up running, hiking, or walking because horses or cars are faster. That has nothing to do with human meaning, and thinking it does is making a really obvious category error.
You’re like half a step away from the realization that almost everything you do today is done better if not by AI then someone that can do it better than you but you still do it because you enjoy it.
Now just flip those two, almost everything you do in the future will be done better by AI if not another human.
But that doesn’t remove the fact that you enjoy it.
For example, today I want to spend my day taking photographs and trying to do stupid graphic design in After Effects. I can promise you that there are thousands of humans and even AI that can do a far better job than me at both these things. Yet I have over a terabyte of photographs and failed After Effects experiments. Do I stop enjoying it because I can’t make money from these hobbies? Do I stop enjoying it because there’s some digital artist at corporation X that can take everything I have and do it better, faster, and get paid while doing it?
No. So why would this change things if instead of a human at corporation X, it’s an AI?
The more computers and machines and institutions take that over, the fewer opportunities there are to do that, and the more doing that kind of thing feels forced, or even like an indulgence of the person providing the "service" and an imposition on those served.
Vonnegut wrote quite a bit about this phenomenon in the arts—how recording, broadcast, and mechanical reproduction vastly diminished the social and even economic value of small-time artistic talent. Uncle Bob's storytelling can't compete with Walt Disney Corporation. Grandma's piano playing stopped mattering much when we began turning on the radio instead of having sing-alongs around the upright. Nobody wants your cousin's quite good (but not excellent) sketches of them, or of any other subject—you're doing him a favor if you sit for him, and when you pretend to give a shit about the results. Aunt Gertrude's quilt-making is still kinda cool and you don't mind receiving a quilt from her, but you always feel kinda bad that she spent dozens of hours making something when you could have had a functional equivalent for perhaps $20. It's a nice gesture, and you may appreciate it, but she needed to give it more than you needed to receive it.
Meanwhile, social shifts shrink the set of people for whom any of this might even apply, for most of us. I dunno, maybe online spaces partially replace that, but most of that, especially the creative spaces, seem full of fake-feeling positivity and obligatory engagement, not the same thing at all as meeting another person you know's actual needs or desires.
That's the kind of thing I mean.
The areas where this isn't true are mostly ones that machines and markets are having trouble automating, so they're still expensive relative to the effort to do it yourself. Cooking's a notable one. The last part of our pre-industrial social animal to go extinct may well be meal-focused major holidays.
It might in a few areas, though. I think film making is poised to get really weird, for instance, possibly in some interesting and not-terrible ways, compared with what we're used to. That's mostly because automation might replace entire teams that had to spend thousands of hours before anyone could see the finished work or pay for it, not just a few hours of one or two artists' time on a more-incremental basis. And even that's not quite a revolution—we used to have very-small-crew films, including tons that were big hits, and films with credits lists like the average Summer blockbuster these days were unheard of, so that's more a return to how things were before computer graphics entered the picture (even 70s and 80s films, after the advent of the spectacle- and FX-heavy Summer blockbuster, had crews so small that it's almost hard to believe, when you're used to seeing the list of hundreds of people who work on, say, a Marvel film)
Also kinda curious how you deal with people that have disabilities and can’t exactly fight to survive. Me, I’m practically blind without glasses/contacts, so I’ll not be taking life lessons from the local mountain lion, thanks.
I am wondering why you define being in terms of having. Is that a slip, or is that related to this:
> I want to just push that further and subjugate nature with automation that can feed us and manufacture worthless plastic and metal media consumption devices for us.
Because I can hear sadness in these words. I think we can feel thankful for having the opportunity to observe beauty and the universe and feel belonging to where we are and with who we are. Those free smartphones are not going to substitute that.
I do not mean we have to work because it is our fate or something like that.
> Your diatribe about not caring about humans is ironic.
A pity you feel that way. Maybe you interpreted "If you don't care about humans" as literally you, whereas I meant is as "If one doesn't care".
What I meant was is the assumption you seem to make that when a few have plenty of production means without needing the other 'human resources' anymore, those few will not spontaneously share their wealth with the world, so the others can have free smart phones and a life of consumption. Instead, those others will have to double down and start to compete with increasingly cheaper robots.
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The pact in that old story I was talking about deals with the idea that we as humans know how to be evil. In the story, the consequence is that those first people had to leave paradise and from then on have to work for their survival.
I just mentioned it because the fact that we exploit not only nature, but other humans too if we are evil enough. People that end up controlling the largest amounts of wealth are usually the most ruthless. That's why we need rules.
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> I guess people with disabilities that aren’t able to work just aren’t human? Should we let them starve to death since they can’t work a 9-5 and work for their food?
On the contrary, I think I have been misunderstood.:)
I like my ideal world a lot better.
I am in, but just wanted to let you know many had this idea before. People thought in the past we would barely work these days anymore. What they got wrong is that productivity gains didn't reach the common man. It was partly lost through mass consumption, fueled by advertising, and wealth concentration. Instead, people at the bottom of the pyramid have to work harder.
> I like my ideal world a lot better.
Me too, without being consumption oriented though. Nonetheless, people that take a blind eye to the weaknesses of humankind often runs into unpleasant surprises. It requires work, lots of work.
This isn't the only option though? You could restrict it to data where permission has been acquired, and many people would probably grant permission for free or for a small fee. Lots of stuff already exists in the public domain.
What ML people seem to want is the ability to just scoop up a billion images off the net with a spider and then feed it into their network, utilizing the unpaid labor of thousands-to-millions for free and turning it into profit. That is transparently unfair, I think. If you're going to enrich yourself, you should also enrich the people who made your success possible.
Many people would probably happily allow use of their work for this if asked first, or would grant it for a small fee. Lots of stuff is in the public domain. But you have to actually go through the trouble of getting permission/verifying PD status, and that's apparently Too Hard
If people can't differentiate between computer and human generated art, wouldn't that be the definition of being replaceable?
That same work=survival idea is what incentivizes competitiveness and of course, under that construct, some humans will put on their competitive goggles and exploit others.
There are a lot of human constructs that need to fade away before we can get to a fully automated world. But that’s okay. Humans aren’t the type to get stuck on a problem forever.
Happiness needs loss, fulfillment, pain, hunger, boredom, fear and they need to be experiences backed up by both chemical feelings and experiences and memory and they have to be true.
But here's the thing, already the damage is done beyond just some art. I don't mean to diminish art, but frankly, look at how hostile, ugly and inhuman the world outside is in any regular city. Literal death worlds in fantasy 40k settings look more homey, comfortable, fulfilling, and human.
I think people will not stop forming a social hierarchy, and so competition remains a sticky trait I think.
> work=survival idea is what incentivizes competitiveness
True, the idea that you can do better than the Jones through hard work is alluring. Having a job is now a requirement for being worthy, the kind of job defines your social position. Compare with the days of nobility though, where those nobleman had everything but a job ("what is a weekend?").
This is not intrinsic, though. It is a cultural imperative, so perhaps we need to revisit that?
Now imagine that automation in food and expand it to everything. A table factory wouldn’t purchase wood from another company. There’s automation to extract wood from trees and the table factory just requests it and automation produces a table. With robots at every step of the process, there are no labor costs. There’s no shift manager, there’s no CEO with a CEO salary, there’s no table factory worker spending 12+ hours a day drilling a table leg to a table for $3 an hour in China.
That former factory worker in China is instead pursuing their passions in life.
This sounds mystical and mysterious; it would be a mistake to project one mode of production as being the brand all humans must live with until we go extinct.
Indeed, you should not read it as an imperative. The other commentator was also put on the wrong foot by this.
Maybe I should not have assumed people would know Genesis, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_Genesis. I should be more explicit: we are not some holy creatures. Don't assume that the few who are gonna reap the rewards will spontaneously share them with others. We are able to let others suffer to gain a personal advantage.
My probably perverse takeaway is that Barbara Streisand might have been wrong: people who need people (to appreciate their work) may not be the luckiest people in the world. One can enjoy one’s accomplishments without needing to have everyone else appreciate them. Or you can find other people with similar interests, and enjoy shared appreciation.
In the extreme, the need for external validation seems to lead to people like Trump and Musk. Perhaps a shift in how we view this would be beneficial for society?
I don't mean this in a "people love work, actually", hooray-capitalism sense (LOL, god no), but the sense that humans tend to be happier and more content when they're helpful to those around them. It used to be a lot easier to provide that kind of value through creative and self-expressive efforts, than it is now. Any true need for artists and creative work (and, for the most part, craftspeople) at the scale of friend & family circles or towns or whatever, is all but completely gone.
If you can't support yourself for whatever reason, you rely on others to do that work on your behalf. Social animals, wolves for example, try to provide for their sick and handicapped, but that's only after their own needs are met first.
We have physical needs just like other members of the natural world - food for example, if we can't provide food for ourselves, we'll starve to death just like an animal. Why bother judging this situation as good or bad when it's not something that can be changed.
Art is really not cheap. I think people think about how little artists generate in income and assume that means art is cheap, but non-mass-produced art is pretty much inaccessible for the vast majority of people.