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This was cathartic to read. The almost complete lack of calm, productive discussion about AI is honestly frightening. No matter where you land on this issue, y

This was cathartic to read. The almost complete lack of calm, productive discussion about AI is honestly frightening. No matter where you land on this issue, you have to admit that there is a credible chance of significant societal changes in the near future. But instead of discussing how to best manage these changes or how to support people who may be negatively affected, we waste our time with petty squabbles.

tjs8rj 4y ago
It's not exactly a both-sides thing. I don't have a strong opinion on the topic, but the side with the gun is the AI art generator side (not the artists). The artists are saying "stop" and the AI side is saying "you can't make me". One side would love a pause to have a productive discussion, and the other side doesn't want a pause at all.
- genericone 4y ago
  One side is horses, the other side is automobiles. Horses continue to exist, but automobiles were the inevitable future. The horse side would have loved the auto side to pause and discuss too, and say 'think of all the horse related jobs, culture, and infrastructure at risk'.
  - eropple 4y ago
    One side may be automobiles. The other side are human beings. If you don't immediately and intuitively grasp the moral weight of drawing comparisons between animals and humans in this context, perhaps you can at least understand why you're hated for it. "Let's just screw over everybody who we can grind between the gears of our APIs because ha ha, they can't stop us" is not a recipe for a functioning society.
    - gwoolhurme 4y ago
      It really sucks to be compared to a horse. It goes to the mentality of this that gives me such anxiety. I understand to my boss I am just a cog (horse), but damn… a bit of compassion would be nice before I’m turned to glue.
    - satvikpendem 4y ago
      And to extend your analogy further, humans use automobiles. Just like cars are tools for humans, so too are AI.
    - dragonwriter 4y ago
      > One side may be automobiles. > The other side are human beings. No, both sides are human beings. They are human beings using different tools in the same domain, and the side that wants to prevent the adoption of newer tools rather than adapt to them is…well, historically, that’s not a winning position, basically, ever. (In broad societal terms; if you want to create your own isolated subculture where certain newer tools are excluded, that can work.)
      - simonh 4y ago
        They don’t want to prevent the adoption of new tools, they want to stop their personal creative work being appropriated without compensation or permission to make those tools.
        dragonwriter 4y ago
        > They don’t want to prevent the adoption of new tools, they want to stop their personal creative work being appropriated without compensation or permission to make those tools. I think the arguments in this thread for why this is important, by supporters of it, indicate this is wrong. Yes, directly, this aims at preventing style fine-tunes from work of the artist who uses it (even though styles have never been proprietary.) But if you look at the arguments about why this is significant, its not anything connected to the copying of individual styles, but to the way the explosion of capacity of AI art generators is transforming the market. That’s the target. Even if a magic shield protecting every work that the creator wanted to protect from this day forward against style fine tunes (or AI training more generally) wouldn’t deflect that trend even a tiny bit – which it wouldn’t, IMO – that’s what this is aimed at sociologically.
        simonh 4y ago
        I don't think that's fair. The artist community seem to have a genuine and legitimate grievance. Arguing that they're only saying that because their jobs are being affected is, well, not the best looking argument I've ever seen. Surely if they have a legitimate argument and they are suffering economically, that strengthens their argument. How could it possibly weaken it? I'm not an artist and I'm excited to use AI art generation to realise visuals I can obtain affordably. I just would like to be able to do that ethically.
  - jachee 4y ago
    We kind of see it in transportation once more, with the ICE and EV sides of the automobile world.
  - amrocha 4y ago
    Others have already pointed out the lack of empathy in your current, but here's another angle: AI art literally relies on artist's output to train. It's not horses vs the car, it's horses vs a motor that grinds up horses to generate power.
  - bigDinosaur 4y ago
    And the proliferation of cars led to ruining many cities for people like pedestrians (and the destruction of neighbourhoods). Not all technology leads to great outcomes. Cars are useful but we've gone way too far in many cases, and we run the risk of doing the same with AI too.
- zoklet-enjoyer 4y ago
  Any information online is fair game to be used and remixed. Sampling is an art form
  - CatWChainsaw 4y ago
    I'm pretty sure the music industry disagrees with your stance.
eropple 4y ago
I think there is a substantial burden of proof necessary for the implicit claim that AI people, in the main, care in the slightest about supporting those who will be negatively affected. (Wringing one's hands about "well we should have UBI" is not caring when one knows it will not happen. It is moral dress-up.) As the sibling comment notes, only one side here is saying "stop" and only one side is saying "you can't make me."
- Last5Digits 4y ago
  Most people don't care in the slightest about supporting people that are suffering. Do you have sleepless nights because you know that the device you use right now required slave labor to be constructed? That's the main issue at play here and needs to be remedied by fair and empathic argument - not by railing against a group of people who you paint as unequivocally evil. Your comment was the exact kind of argument I was writing about. You took the emotionally easy path of thinking about a large group of people as some evil cabal that has the power, unity and desire to destroy the livelihoods of others, instead of actually assessing their arguments. People who are saying that AI can't be stopped are referring to the fact that even if they personally stopped using it - there would be millions of others who would not have such qualms. If OpenAI shut down tomorrow, new companies would open up the next day. If the government banned all AI, other countries would welcome it and start eating said government's lunch. Striving towards better social programs is the best way forward, and UBI will be thought of as impossible until a large enough group of people campaign for it. If you disagree with that, then argue against it, but don't construct some boogeyman version of the other side in order to dismiss them.
  - eropple 4y ago
    > Do you have sleepless nights because you know that the device you use right now required slave labor to be constructed? Yes. Literally yes. It sucks. I try to minimize purchases, I research the most ethical sellers I can within the bounds of available information, and I try to reuse as much as is possible. > That's the main issue at play here and needs to be remedied by fair and empathic argument - not by railing against a group of people who you paint as unequivocally evil. When they stop acting like their mission in life is to drive everyone else into precarity and then to ruin, or even at least stop acting like it’s so horrible that people in their gunsights are upset about it, I’ll stop drawing from their actions the obvious conclusions. UBI is a great way forward. Never said it wasn’t! But. It is clearly not on the radar of the people bankrolling this. If it was? They would expend the money and the political capital to do it. They would be on that goddamned stump. But Sam Altman isn’t out there buying congressmen for UBI. Could! But isn’t. So why would I believe that it’s any kind of priority? But okay, that’s uncharitable, I’m sure. Altman is busy. So show me who should convince me that there is an argument at all beyond “you can’t stop us”, could you? Show me who is making fat stacks off of the AI craze and is also doing the political work, won’t you? Show me who is going “I am now making bank and I want us to give back structurally.” I have looked. I don’t see them. I want to push those messages. But I am reasonably confident they don’t exist. I’d like to be wrong. I never said that there is any expectation of putting the genie back in the bottle, either. We do need political action, we do need to be emphatic and we do need to push for solutions (and UBI is a good one), and in so doing we might even fix the problems they create…but that doesn’t change their souls. It just means maybe we can work around them.

tjs8rj 4y ago

It's not exactly a both-sides thing. I don't have a strong opinion on the topic, but the side with the gun is the AI art generator side (not the artists). The artists are saying "stop" and the AI side is saying "you can't make me". One side would love a pause to have a productive discussion, and the other side doesn't want a pause at all.

genericone 4y ago
One side is horses, the other side is automobiles. Horses continue to exist, but automobiles were the inevitable future. The horse side would have loved the auto side to pause and discuss too, and say 'think of all the horse related jobs, culture, and infrastructure at risk'.
- eropple 4y ago
  One side may be automobiles. The other side are human beings. If you don't immediately and intuitively grasp the moral weight of drawing comparisons between animals and humans in this context, perhaps you can at least understand why you're hated for it. "Let's just screw over everybody who we can grind between the gears of our APIs because ha ha, they can't stop us" is not a recipe for a functioning society.
  - gwoolhurme 4y ago
    It really sucks to be compared to a horse. It goes to the mentality of this that gives me such anxiety. I understand to my boss I am just a cog (horse), but damn… a bit of compassion would be nice before I’m turned to glue.
  - satvikpendem 4y ago
    And to extend your analogy further, humans use automobiles. Just like cars are tools for humans, so too are AI.
  - dragonwriter 4y ago
    > One side may be automobiles. > The other side are human beings. No, both sides are human beings. They are human beings using different tools in the same domain, and the side that wants to prevent the adoption of newer tools rather than adapt to them is…well, historically, that’s not a winning position, basically, ever. (In broad societal terms; if you want to create your own isolated subculture where certain newer tools are excluded, that can work.)
    - simonh 4y ago
      They don’t want to prevent the adoption of new tools, they want to stop their personal creative work being appropriated without compensation or permission to make those tools.
      - dragonwriter 4y ago
        > They don’t want to prevent the adoption of new tools, they want to stop their personal creative work being appropriated without compensation or permission to make those tools. I think the arguments in this thread for why this is important, by supporters of it, indicate this is wrong. Yes, directly, this aims at preventing style fine-tunes from work of the artist who uses it (even though styles have never been proprietary.) But if you look at the arguments about why this is significant, its not anything connected to the copying of individual styles, but to the way the explosion of capacity of AI art generators is transforming the market. That’s the target. Even if a magic shield protecting every work that the creator wanted to protect from this day forward against style fine tunes (or AI training more generally) wouldn’t deflect that trend even a tiny bit – which it wouldn’t, IMO – that’s what this is aimed at sociologically.
        simonh 4y ago
        I don't think that's fair. The artist community seem to have a genuine and legitimate grievance. Arguing that they're only saying that because their jobs are being affected is, well, not the best looking argument I've ever seen. Surely if they have a legitimate argument and they are suffering economically, that strengthens their argument. How could it possibly weaken it? I'm not an artist and I'm excited to use AI art generation to realise visuals I can obtain affordably. I just would like to be able to do that ethically.
- jachee 4y ago
  We kind of see it in transportation once more, with the ICE and EV sides of the automobile world.
- amrocha 4y ago
  Others have already pointed out the lack of empathy in your current, but here's another angle: AI art literally relies on artist's output to train. It's not horses vs the car, it's horses vs a motor that grinds up horses to generate power.
- bigDinosaur 4y ago
  And the proliferation of cars led to ruining many cities for people like pedestrians (and the destruction of neighbourhoods). Not all technology leads to great outcomes. Cars are useful but we've gone way too far in many cases, and we run the risk of doing the same with AI too.
zoklet-enjoyer 4y ago
Any information online is fair game to be used and remixed. Sampling is an art form
- CatWChainsaw 4y ago
  I'm pretty sure the music industry disagrees with your stance.

eropple 4y ago

I think there is a substantial burden of proof necessary for the implicit claim that AI people, in the main, care in the slightest about supporting those who will be negatively affected. (Wringing one's hands about "well we should have UBI" is not caring when one knows it will not happen. It is moral dress-up.) As the sibling comment notes, only one side here is saying "stop" and only one side is saying "you can't make me."

Last5Digits 4y ago
Most people don't care in the slightest about supporting people that are suffering. Do you have sleepless nights because you know that the device you use right now required slave labor to be constructed? That's the main issue at play here and needs to be remedied by fair and empathic argument - not by railing against a group of people who you paint as unequivocally evil. Your comment was the exact kind of argument I was writing about. You took the emotionally easy path of thinking about a large group of people as some evil cabal that has the power, unity and desire to destroy the livelihoods of others, instead of actually assessing their arguments. People who are saying that AI can't be stopped are referring to the fact that even if they personally stopped using it - there would be millions of others who would not have such qualms. If OpenAI shut down tomorrow, new companies would open up the next day. If the government banned all AI, other countries would welcome it and start eating said government's lunch. Striving towards better social programs is the best way forward, and UBI will be thought of as impossible until a large enough group of people campaign for it. If you disagree with that, then argue against it, but don't construct some boogeyman version of the other side in order to dismiss them.
- eropple 4y ago
  > Do you have sleepless nights because you know that the device you use right now required slave labor to be constructed? Yes. Literally yes. It sucks. I try to minimize purchases, I research the most ethical sellers I can within the bounds of available information, and I try to reuse as much as is possible. > That's the main issue at play here and needs to be remedied by fair and empathic argument - not by railing against a group of people who you paint as unequivocally evil. When they stop acting like their mission in life is to drive everyone else into precarity and then to ruin, or even at least stop acting like it’s so horrible that people in their gunsights are upset about it, I’ll stop drawing from their actions the obvious conclusions. UBI is a great way forward. Never said it wasn’t! But. It is clearly not on the radar of the people bankrolling this. If it was? They would expend the money and the political capital to do it. They would be on that goddamned stump. But Sam Altman isn’t out there buying congressmen for UBI. Could! But isn’t. So why would I believe that it’s any kind of priority? But okay, that’s uncharitable, I’m sure. Altman is busy. So show me who should convince me that there is an argument at all beyond “you can’t stop us”, could you? Show me who is making fat stacks off of the AI craze and is also doing the political work, won’t you? Show me who is going “I am now making bank and I want us to give back structurally.” I have looked. I don’t see them. I want to push those messages. But I am reasonably confident they don’t exist. I’d like to be wrong. I never said that there is any expectation of putting the genie back in the bottle, either. We do need political action, we do need to be emphatic and we do need to push for solutions (and UBI is a good one), and in so doing we might even fix the problems they create…but that doesn’t change their souls. It just means maybe we can work around them.