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The trajectory of AI is both amazing and horrifying. Most of us are born in an era where we can witness the change and play with toy versions of AI products. Th

The trajectory of AI is both amazing and horrifying. Most of us are born in an era where we can witness the change and play with toy versions of AI products. The next generation of people will have their lives truly changed by AI, for the better or for worse.

cwkoss 5y ago
It will be better! Giving every human the tools to make expressive works of art without having to train for years will be awesome for society! I'm playing with some of the neanderthal-relatives of dall-e 2 and already have several that I kind of want to analog-paint copies of so I can hang em on my wall. I don't even think artists are going to be meaningfully hurt from this - in fact, I think this is going to increase demand for art, because now the 'patron' can participate in the composition process more meaningfully.
- troyvit 5y ago
  I hope you're right but the feeling I get is that it's going to increase the _supply_ of art until it becomes meaningless. For instance why should anybody paint an astronaut on a horse anymore? It was a great idea and now it's been done. In the near future when you look at art you won't know whether it was created directly by a human or by an AI. What will that do to its appreciation?
  - cwkoss 5y ago
    Why is a human-painting of an astronaut on a horse valuable now? I view this as detangling composition from the mechanical skills of art production. Perhaps this will make a new type of art job - AI wrangler - whose job is collaborating with AI to get a good composition, then the composition can be handed over to someone with the mechanical skills to render it in the real world, if humans making the brush strokes is important. I'd imagine that if we gave these tools to a skilled painter to help in their compositional brainstorming process, they'd find many good ideas they'd like to incorporate into their works in a short period of time. But, I'm not a skilled painter, so could be wrong.
    - troyvit 5y ago
      That's a good point. A lot of what I read in sci-fi these days is the job of AI wrangler but the idea of using it as a rapid development platform for cool ideas is also super cool.
- Jeff_Brown 5y ago
  > increase demand for art Good point. Custom art used to be the realm of only royalty, and later only the rich, but soon anybody will be able to afford the fifty cents or whatever it is of computing power that it takes to execute their vague artistic instructions.
  - cwkoss 5y ago
    Totally, Etsy has led an explosion of put you/your kid/your pet into a work of art type things (many artists create reusable templates, where the custom component can be plugged in, so help with scale). I foresee this trend accelerating as the tooling makes cost of producing this sort of thing cheaper.
- Jeff_Brown 5y ago
  > don't even think artists are going to be meaningfully hurt It might not reduce the number of artists, but it will surely change their composition (pun proudly intended). Only those flexible enough to adapt to the new landscape will be able to support themselves in the new AI art economy.
- zimpenfish 5y ago
  > already have several that I kind of want to analog-paint copies of so I can hang em on my wall. I've been doing that with VQGAN-CLIP with prompts of things like "line art", "watercolor", "linocut"[1], and "woodcut" - have got a stack of things waiting for some free time to render into the physical world. [1] "Dark Souls in the style of linocut" makes some really fascinating possibilities.
  - cwkoss 5y ago
    Ah that's a cool idea. I've been saving a collection of images from dream by wombo and nightcafe around the same theme, and think I'm going to try to render them into a single cohesive acrylic painting. (though my mechanical abilities will probably leave me disappointed)
- deltaonefour 5y ago
  Apply this to everything. AI that takes over all possible jobs involving any form of creativity and intelligence. What are the economic consequences of such a society?
ulnarkressty 5y ago
I wonder if this is how people born in the early 20th century felt about going from first flight to moon landing in a few decades. It took some serious conflicts for things to evolve to that point though. I'm not looking forward to the AI wars.
- aaaaaaaaaaab 5y ago
  >going from first flight to moon landing in a few decades And then nothing.
  - boplicity 5y ago
    Actually, space technology, via literal objects in space, impacts almost everyone's life (especially in wealthy countries), pretty much constantly. It's simply become so woven into our day-to-day lives that we don't even think about it.
  - Jeff_Brown 5y ago
    Progress is hard to quantify. We developed language, what, hundreds of thousands of years ago? And then very little seemed to happen, but it was a slow-burning fire that eventually exploded. Our use of computers seems almost sure to be similar. But that said, there are certainly structural factors inhibiting innovation. Scale problems make it nearly impossible to challenge someone like Google or Facebook (although TikTok did manage the latter). Were there more competition, one imagines there would be more innovation. Patents are likely a net drag. Laws, esp. tax laws, could be simpler. I'm sure I'm omitting other important factors.
    - deltaonefour 5y ago
      Yes. You omitted physical limits. It is very likely that Humanity will not achieve much of technology implied by science fiction. The only exception looks to be AI, because although we haven't created an AI that matches human intelligence... the existence of human intelligence itself implies that building an AI to the level of human intelligence is possible.
  - 5y ago
nonbirithm 5y ago
The scariest thing is that I don't think we can stop ourselves from innovating further even if we tried. The authors believed that the merit of displaying their progress outweighed the implications.
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 5y ago
  The quote about jobs comes to mind: "If it’s jobs you want, then you should give these workers spoons, not shovels." (full context: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/10/10/spoons-shovels/ https://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/10/10/spoons-shovels/)
karmasimida 5y ago
When Copilot and similar service gets this DALLE level of accuracy regarding coding ... It is going to be very relevant to the current software engineers, maybe just in next 5 years.
- Jeff_Brown 5y ago
  I'm skeptical. The thing about art is that so much qualifies as good. Something very close to a beautiful painting is probably also a beautiful painting. But an algorithm very close to the right way to count votes, or launch a rocket, or decide whether to lend to someone, is probably not the right way.
  - deltaonefour 5y ago
    There are already exists machines that can produce beautiful art: Humans. More than any other technology the physical existence of human intelligence itself implies that it such intelligence can exist, which implies it can be built. Something like interstellar travel or even a civilization on mars is actually much less realistic due to the lack of examples in existence.
    - Jeff_Brown 5y ago
      You're right, the existence of humans strongly suggests that artificial general intelligence is possible. But the existence of DALL-E 2, which is not AGI and nonetheless produces beautiful art, does not convince me that software will be writing reliable software before AGI happens.
  - BlueTemplar 5y ago
    Then you "just" have to use one of the formal proof languages and then verify the program ? Also, "decide how to lend to someone" is an interesting example, since it will always involve quite a bit of intuition even with a program helper (which won't be able to use a neural network due to transparency requirements).
    - 5y ago

cwkoss 5y ago

It will be better! Giving every human the tools to make expressive works of art without having to train for years will be awesome for society! I'm playing with some of the neanderthal-relatives of dall-e 2 and already have several that I kind of want to analog-paint copies of so I can hang em on my wall. I don't even think artists are going to be meaningfully hurt from this - in fact, I think this is going to increase demand for art, because now the 'patron' can participate in the composition process more meaningfully.

troyvit 5y ago
I hope you're right but the feeling I get is that it's going to increase the _supply_ of art until it becomes meaningless. For instance why should anybody paint an astronaut on a horse anymore? It was a great idea and now it's been done. In the near future when you look at art you won't know whether it was created directly by a human or by an AI. What will that do to its appreciation?
- cwkoss 5y ago
  Why is a human-painting of an astronaut on a horse valuable now? I view this as detangling composition from the mechanical skills of art production. Perhaps this will make a new type of art job - AI wrangler - whose job is collaborating with AI to get a good composition, then the composition can be handed over to someone with the mechanical skills to render it in the real world, if humans making the brush strokes is important. I'd imagine that if we gave these tools to a skilled painter to help in their compositional brainstorming process, they'd find many good ideas they'd like to incorporate into their works in a short period of time. But, I'm not a skilled painter, so could be wrong.
  - troyvit 5y ago
    That's a good point. A lot of what I read in sci-fi these days is the job of AI wrangler but the idea of using it as a rapid development platform for cool ideas is also super cool.
Jeff_Brown 5y ago
> increase demand for art Good point. Custom art used to be the realm of only royalty, and later only the rich, but soon anybody will be able to afford the fifty cents or whatever it is of computing power that it takes to execute their vague artistic instructions.
- cwkoss 5y ago
  Totally, Etsy has led an explosion of put you/your kid/your pet into a work of art type things (many artists create reusable templates, where the custom component can be plugged in, so help with scale). I foresee this trend accelerating as the tooling makes cost of producing this sort of thing cheaper.
Jeff_Brown 5y ago
> don't even think artists are going to be meaningfully hurt It might not reduce the number of artists, but it will surely change their composition (pun proudly intended). Only those flexible enough to adapt to the new landscape will be able to support themselves in the new AI art economy.
zimpenfish 5y ago
> already have several that I kind of want to analog-paint copies of so I can hang em on my wall. I've been doing that with VQGAN-CLIP with prompts of things like "line art", "watercolor", "linocut"[1], and "woodcut" - have got a stack of things waiting for some free time to render into the physical world. [1] "Dark Souls in the style of linocut" makes some really fascinating possibilities.
- cwkoss 5y ago
  Ah that's a cool idea. I've been saving a collection of images from dream by wombo and nightcafe around the same theme, and think I'm going to try to render them into a single cohesive acrylic painting. (though my mechanical abilities will probably leave me disappointed)
deltaonefour 5y ago
Apply this to everything. AI that takes over all possible jobs involving any form of creativity and intelligence. What are the economic consequences of such a society?

ulnarkressty 5y ago

I wonder if this is how people born in the early 20th century felt about going from first flight to moon landing in a few decades. It took some serious conflicts for things to evolve to that point though. I'm not looking forward to the AI wars.

aaaaaaaaaaab 5y ago
>going from first flight to moon landing in a few decades And then nothing.
- boplicity 5y ago
  Actually, space technology, via literal objects in space, impacts almost everyone's life (especially in wealthy countries), pretty much constantly. It's simply become so woven into our day-to-day lives that we don't even think about it.
- Jeff_Brown 5y ago
  Progress is hard to quantify. We developed language, what, hundreds of thousands of years ago? And then very little seemed to happen, but it was a slow-burning fire that eventually exploded. Our use of computers seems almost sure to be similar. But that said, there are certainly structural factors inhibiting innovation. Scale problems make it nearly impossible to challenge someone like Google or Facebook (although TikTok did manage the latter). Were there more competition, one imagines there would be more innovation. Patents are likely a net drag. Laws, esp. tax laws, could be simpler. I'm sure I'm omitting other important factors.
  - deltaonefour 5y ago
    Yes. You omitted physical limits. It is very likely that Humanity will not achieve much of technology implied by science fiction. The only exception looks to be AI, because although we haven't created an AI that matches human intelligence... the existence of human intelligence itself implies that building an AI to the level of human intelligence is possible.
- 5y ago

nonbirithm 5y ago

The scariest thing is that I don't think we can stop ourselves from innovating further even if we tried. The authors believed that the merit of displaying their progress outweighed the implications.

6gvONxR4sf7o 5y ago
The quote about jobs comes to mind: "If it’s jobs you want, then you should give these workers spoons, not shovels." (full context: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/10/10/spoons-shovels/ https://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/10/10/spoons-shovels/)

karmasimida 5y ago

When Copilot and similar service gets this DALLE level of accuracy regarding coding ... It is going to be very relevant to the current software engineers, maybe just in next 5 years.

Jeff_Brown 5y ago
I'm skeptical. The thing about art is that so much qualifies as good. Something very close to a beautiful painting is probably also a beautiful painting. But an algorithm very close to the right way to count votes, or launch a rocket, or decide whether to lend to someone, is probably not the right way.
- deltaonefour 5y ago
  There are already exists machines that can produce beautiful art: Humans. More than any other technology the physical existence of human intelligence itself implies that it such intelligence can exist, which implies it can be built. Something like interstellar travel or even a civilization on mars is actually much less realistic due to the lack of examples in existence.
  - Jeff_Brown 5y ago
    You're right, the existence of humans strongly suggests that artificial general intelligence is possible. But the existence of DALL-E 2, which is not AGI and nonetheless produces beautiful art, does not convince me that software will be writing reliable software before AGI happens.
- BlueTemplar 5y ago
  Then you "just" have to use one of the formal proof languages and then verify the program ? Also, "decide how to lend to someone" is an interesting example, since it will always involve quite a bit of intuition even with a program helper (which won't be able to use a neural network due to transparency requirements).
  - 5y ago