3 ms·

DDoSing is bad not because of the speed but because it overwhelms the infrastructure a product is designed for. Doing it to your own computer by making it crunc

by dzink 4y ago

DDoSing is bad not because of the speed but because it overwhelms the infrastructure a product is designed for. Doing it to your own computer by making it crunch AI models until it runs out of memory is perfectly legal and iterative. Printing pages of a book in seconds vs dedicating lives of people to hand draw each letter in the monastery is iteration. Computers are not people. Computers are iteration tools people use to free up precious lifetime they have and bring more value to the world. If you are a human who trains 10000 hrs to invest like Paul Graham, or draw like Thomas Kincade, or play the piano, or operate as a top brain surgeon, you have spent a fraction of your life to do this fast and reap the rewards. But that fraction of your life has tremendous cost on society. Many people paid with their time and money to feed you, teach you, house you, during that time and during your upbringing which allowed you to have those 10k hrs to dedicate to this task. Now all of that work can be used by you to do exponentially more with your precious life. Instead of spending days or years making a portrait, you’d spend seconds. Now you can find higher purpose and solve much bigger problems - instead of asking for 100 to hand draw a portrait for a few hundred people in your lifetime, you could create one for every teen who needs a boost in their self esteem and raise their confidence and ability to cope with challenges in their life at massive scale. More importantly, since there is a huge scarcity of people trained to fulfill each niche need that forms a bottleneck on society’s capacity to use that. Imagine if instead of airplane we counted on a few trained supermen to fly people who needed to cross places fast by hand. How many people would die before they see the world or are taken to a doctor, etc. The world can’t survive on superheroes or super trained people. The world can do more with the time and lives of people in it.

burkaman 4y ago
I disagree but this is a reasonable perspective. One specific point: > instead of asking for 100 to hand draw a portrait for a few hundred people in your lifetime, you could create one for every teen who needs a boost in their self esteem and raise their confidence and ability to cope with challenges in their life at massive scale. This is a misunderstanding that reminds of those startups that were like "we realized people love getting hand-written cards, so we built a product to learn your handwriting and generate them for you!" No, the effort is the point. For people who like those cards it's not about the aesthetics of handwritten text, it's about knowing somebody dedicated some of their limited time to you personally. A depressed person is not going to be cheered up by an auto-generated portrait, even if it's indistinguishable from one a human artist spent 12 hours on. You can't "scale" human connection like this, unless you hide the fact that robots are involved. I'm not saying all technology is bad. I think robo-surgeons would be great if they can save more lives, even if they put human surgeons out of work. In this particular domain, right now it seems like these tools have the potential to discourage future generations of artists, which would be self-defeating because the models are not AI and will stagnate without additional training data. I don't think they should be banned, but I think we should take human artists' concerns seriously, not co-opt someone's artistic identity if they ask us not to, and try to make sure we think about the unintended consequences of a powerful new tool.
- dzink 4y ago
  People who love to walk will continue to walk even when there are bikes, cars, airplanes, self driving tech, and teleportation etc, available to them. AI art does not discourage artists any more than restaurants discourage home cooks who enjoy cooking. In all of those scenarios the tech caters to people who are in need of a task done and not in desire to spend their life on the craft. There will always be unintended consequences and some will be severe. But what is happening now is pent up demand that finally found an outlet - like a bunch of high pressure mountain water that found a hole through a cave wall and into the ocean - it is gushing. Instead of blind fear of change, I try to see the value previously unseen and it is tremendous. As the creator in the article said she does not see her true art in the stable diffusion creations: the eyes that speak to character in each character, the poses that show confidence or query, or passion. Instead she sees images that mimic her style of drawing. I do see how someone may choose to not become an artist for a living because AI art becomes so ubiquitous that they could never make a living with a paintbrush. BUT, with so much 80-90% of desired art generated by AI, there will now be huge demand for skilled artists who can take a generated image the rest of the way to desired results. I trust that human ambition and taste always expands past superhuman capabilities. The artists if tomorrow will have much different brushes than those of yesterday and be far better and more productive than those of yesterday. There will likely be 3D art in the real world and universes to explore in the virtual one. I’m more concerned we will and are running out of space to store our contraptions. Data storage manufacturers will be thriving.

by dzink 4y ago

burkaman 4y ago

I disagree but this is a reasonable perspective. One specific point: > instead of asking for 100 to hand draw a portrait for a few hundred people in your lifetime, you could create one for every teen who needs a boost in their self esteem and raise their confidence and ability to cope with challenges in their life at massive scale. This is a misunderstanding that reminds of those startups that were like "we realized people love getting hand-written cards, so we built a product to learn your handwriting and generate them for you!" No, the effort is the point. For people who like those cards it's not about the aesthetics of handwritten text, it's about knowing somebody dedicated some of their limited time to you personally. A depressed person is not going to be cheered up by an auto-generated portrait, even if it's indistinguishable from one a human artist spent 12 hours on. You can't "scale" human connection like this, unless you hide the fact that robots are involved. I'm not saying all technology is bad. I think robo-surgeons would be great if they can save more lives, even if they put human surgeons out of work. In this particular domain, right now it seems like these tools have the potential to discourage future generations of artists, which would be self-defeating because the models are not AI and will stagnate without additional training data. I don't think they should be banned, but I think we should take human artists' concerns seriously, not co-opt someone's artistic identity if they ask us not to, and try to make sure we think about the unintended consequences of a powerful new tool.

dzink 4y ago
People who love to walk will continue to walk even when there are bikes, cars, airplanes, self driving tech, and teleportation etc, available to them. AI art does not discourage artists any more than restaurants discourage home cooks who enjoy cooking. In all of those scenarios the tech caters to people who are in need of a task done and not in desire to spend their life on the craft. There will always be unintended consequences and some will be severe. But what is happening now is pent up demand that finally found an outlet - like a bunch of high pressure mountain water that found a hole through a cave wall and into the ocean - it is gushing. Instead of blind fear of change, I try to see the value previously unseen and it is tremendous. As the creator in the article said she does not see her true art in the stable diffusion creations: the eyes that speak to character in each character, the poses that show confidence or query, or passion. Instead she sees images that mimic her style of drawing. I do see how someone may choose to not become an artist for a living because AI art becomes so ubiquitous that they could never make a living with a paintbrush. BUT, with so much 80-90% of desired art generated by AI, there will now be huge demand for skilled artists who can take a generated image the rest of the way to desired results. I trust that human ambition and taste always expands past superhuman capabilities. The artists if tomorrow will have much different brushes than those of yesterday and be far better and more productive than those of yesterday. There will likely be 3D art in the real world and universes to explore in the virtual one. I’m more concerned we will and are running out of space to store our contraptions. Data storage manufacturers will be thriving.