7 ms·

My empathy for artists is fighting with my concern for everyone else's future, and losing. It would be very easy to make training ML models on publicly availab

by strken 4y ago

My empathy for artists is fighting with my concern for everyone else's future, and losing. 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.

allturtles 4y ago
> My empathy for artists is fighting with my concern for everyone else's future, and losing. 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.
- BudaDude 4y ago
  I don't get this argument. Artists will not be replaced by AI. AI will become a tool like Photoshop for artists. AI will not replace creativity.
  - wnkrshm 4y ago
    It does just that though? Don't tell me nobody is surpised sometimes while prompting a diffusion model, that can only happen if a significant portion of creation happens, in a non-intuitive way for the user - what you could describe as 'coming up with something'.
  - yamtaddle 4y ago
    I see two realistic possibilities: 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.
    - yunwal 4y ago
      3) The scope and scale of “art” that gets made gets bigger and we still have plenty of pro artists, designers. AKA art eats the world
      - yamtaddle 4y ago
        Maybe. But art was already so cheap, and talent so abundant, that it was notoriously difficult to make serious money doing it, so I doubt it'll have that effect in general. 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)
        yunwal 4y ago
  - rafaelero 4y ago
    > AI will not replace creativity. If people can't differentiate between computer and human generated art, wouldn't that be the definition of being replaceable?
- dangond 4y ago
  Work like this helps us work towards new approaches for the more difficult issues involved with replacing physical labor. The diffusion techniques that have gained popularity recently will surely enable new ways for machines to learn things that simply weren't possible before. Art is getting a lot of attention first because many people (including the developers working on making this possible) want to be able to create their own artwork and don't have the talent to put their mental images down on paper (or tablet). You worry that this prevents us from following more creative and interesting pursuits, but I feel that this enables us to follow those pursuits without the massive time investment needed to practice a skill. The future you describe is very bleak indeed, but I highly doubt those things won't be automated as well.
- lovehashbrowns 4y ago
  > 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. 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?
6gvONxR4sf7o 4y ago
> 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. 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.
- Negitivefrags 4y ago
  Well Stable Diffusion did give back. This doesn’t seem to satisfy the artists.
  - 6gvONxR4sf7o 4y ago
    I’m thinking about the people who use SD commercially. There’s a transitive aspect to this that upsets people. If it’s unacceptable for a company to profit off your work without compensating you or asking for your permission, then it doesn’t become suddenly acceptable if some third party hands your work to the company. 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.
  - kevingadd 4y ago
    "Giving back" is cute but it doesn't make up for taking without permission in the first place. Taking someone's stuff for your own use and saying "here's some compensation I decided was appropriate" is called Eminent Domain when the government does it and it's not popular. 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
yamtaddle 4y ago
Everyone else's future? 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.
- lovehashbrowns 4y ago
  What role exactly is it going to take? The role we currently have, where the vast majority of people do work not because they particularly enjoy it but because they’re forced to in order to survive? 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.
  - exceptione 4y ago
kevingadd 4y ago
> It would be very easy to make training ML models on publicly available data illegal 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.

by strken 4y ago

allturtles 4y ago

> My empathy for artists is fighting with my concern for everyone else's future, and losing. 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.

BudaDude 4y ago
I don't get this argument. Artists will not be replaced by AI. AI will become a tool like Photoshop for artists. AI will not replace creativity.
- wnkrshm 4y ago
  It does just that though? Don't tell me nobody is surpised sometimes while prompting a diffusion model, that can only happen if a significant portion of creation happens, in a non-intuitive way for the user - what you could describe as 'coming up with something'.
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  I see two realistic possibilities: 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.
  - yunwal 4y ago
    3) The scope and scale of “art” that gets made gets bigger and we still have plenty of pro artists, designers. AKA art eats the world
    - yamtaddle 4y ago
      Maybe. But art was already so cheap, and talent so abundant, that it was notoriously difficult to make serious money doing it, so I doubt it'll have that effect in general. 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)
      - yunwal 4y ago
- rafaelero 4y ago
  > AI will not replace creativity. If people can't differentiate between computer and human generated art, wouldn't that be the definition of being replaceable?
dangond 4y ago
Work like this helps us work towards new approaches for the more difficult issues involved with replacing physical labor. The diffusion techniques that have gained popularity recently will surely enable new ways for machines to learn things that simply weren't possible before. Art is getting a lot of attention first because many people (including the developers working on making this possible) want to be able to create their own artwork and don't have the talent to put their mental images down on paper (or tablet). You worry that this prevents us from following more creative and interesting pursuits, but I feel that this enables us to follow those pursuits without the massive time investment needed to practice a skill. The future you describe is very bleak indeed, but I highly doubt those things won't be automated as well.
lovehashbrowns 4y ago
> 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. 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?

6gvONxR4sf7o 4y ago

> 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. 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.

Negitivefrags 4y ago
Well Stable Diffusion did give back. This doesn’t seem to satisfy the artists.
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 4y ago
  I’m thinking about the people who use SD commercially. There’s a transitive aspect to this that upsets people. If it’s unacceptable for a company to profit off your work without compensating you or asking for your permission, then it doesn’t become suddenly acceptable if some third party hands your work to the company. 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.
- kevingadd 4y ago
  "Giving back" is cute but it doesn't make up for taking without permission in the first place. Taking someone's stuff for your own use and saying "here's some compensation I decided was appropriate" is called Eminent Domain when the government does it and it's not popular. 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

yamtaddle 4y ago

Everyone else's future? 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.

lovehashbrowns 4y ago
What role exactly is it going to take? The role we currently have, where the vast majority of people do work not because they particularly enjoy it but because they’re forced to in order to survive? 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.
- exceptione 4y ago

kevingadd 4y ago

> It would be very easy to make training ML models on publicly available data illegal 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.