4 ms·

The mantra is "I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishe

by esafak 2y ago

The mantra is "I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes". - Joanna Maciejewska (https://x.com/AuthorJMac/status/1773679197631701238 https://x.com/AuthorJMac/status/1773679197631701238)

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
kapp_in_life 2y ago
Sure, but many people who are bad at art and writing would like AI to make art and writing that's tailored to their tastes and are fine doing laundry and dishes since they're good at that and we have already automated 99% of it with dishwashers and dryers.
- yuppiepuppie 2y ago
  The actual washing of the dishes we have automated, not the loading unloading, folding of clothes and organizing them in my closet. I spend at least 1 hour a week on that stuff… ~52hours per year I could be doing art and writing.
  - TeMPOraL 2y ago
    1 hour a week means you live alone. Add a partner and a kid or two, and someone will be spending one hour a day on unloading and sorting laundry into right wardrobes. (On average. Realistically, it's more like a day and a half every two weeks or something). Chores are terrible life suckers, and I for one subscribe to the notion of eliminating them with technology.
- dsr_ 2y ago
  You missed the point. One of those scenarios is available. The other isn't even being worked on in any serious fashion. And you definitely don't get to tell people that your product is just fine, they are wrong for wanting something else.
  - ben_w 2y ago
    > The other isn't even being worked on in any serious fashion. It is being worked on, it's just hard: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pycyMUQwiNs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pycyMUQwiNs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sq1QZB5baNw&t=34s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sq1QZB5baNw&t=34s I'm expecting a minimum of 5-10 years to pass between real-time vision AI getting good enough for level-5 autonomous cars and the same stuff fitting into the power envelope available to this kind of domestic robot.
  - kapp_in_life 2y ago
    >And you definitely don't get to tell people that your product is just fine, they are wrong for wanting something else. The original quote does that as well and I only reversed it to give the perspective of increative people :)
- falcolas 2y ago
  > many people who are bad at art and writing The thing is, you can get better at these. They are just creative skills that get better with practice (much like coding et.al.). And the skill will let you do things you can't do with AI. > are fine doing laundry and dishes since they're good at that and we have already automated 99% of it with dishwashers and dryers. With the minimal amount of sarcasm or ill intent possible: what are you doing with that spare time if not improving skills you clearly want the output of?
  - lovethevoid 2y ago
    You can also get better at those skills while also using AI. It’s not really an absolute. You can generate outlines sketches so you can practice shading techniques as a simple example. There are also those who don’t want to get better at those skills, as those skills are just a temporary medium. For example someone making pottery might be terrible at drawing and creating ideas, so they generate some and then get to working with clay. Essentially, references.
    - falcolas 2y ago
      Using AI is not free, in either price nor time. If all the time spent iterating over prompts to get the "right" output was instead spent working on skills, you (the royal you) could get a lot better at drawing/writing right off the bat. I've lurked through a few AI art boards, and the number of times people will spend dozens if not hundreds of hours iterating through prompts to get a simple anime character just right is mind boggling. Can AI create references? Certainly. Will they be more detailed than what a potter can create in a similar timeframe? Probably. Will they be accurate to the potter's desire? Probably not.
      - ben_w 2y ago
        > Using AI is not free, in either price nor time. If all the time spent iterating over prompts to get the "right" output was instead spent working on skills, you (the royal you) could get a lot better at drawing/writing right off the bat. Eventually, by practice, a person can get better at art. I've seen (pre-AI) artists spending dozens of hours just on icons, so the idea of artists spending hundreds of hours perfecting every detail of some character doesn't seem surprising, not even when the specific details really can be done by a better method than repeatedly changing the prompt. Conversely, even when I use an app on my phone for GenAI, it's making images in perhaps 90 seconds, vs. the entire day that my GCSE* art class gave the students to create the final project — even with the need to have multiple attempts or prompt variations, the AI just gets stuff done too fast for me to learn much in the same time period. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GCSE https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GCSE
- relaxing 2y ago
  Did you really just write most people are fine with doing chores and think that they are good at them?
bronco21016 2y ago
I think the missing piece is the generative AI being tied to a physical embodiment. My point is, we need the physical machine but we also need to work on this generative AI aspect to manipulate the machine. Unfortunately, making pictures and writing text seems to be the lowest hanging fruit of the Transformer AI era since we have significant datasets already available. Several companies are working on creating datasets to train transformers to apply to other tasks and I suspect we'll start seeing the results in a couple to a few years. Not sure how long before we have a consumer bot doing the laundry and dishes though.
- n4r9 2y ago
  You see generative AI as a stepping stone towards chores like dishes and laundry?
  - observationist 2y ago
    Unironically, yes. Detailed, nuanced, human level modeling of the world provides an interface with automation that allows for complex tasks and workflows to be built and trusted. "Go clean up the kitchen" might involve something where the question of "is this trash, or is this an adorable drawing made by a child that should be saved" or other such collisions between seemingly clear instructions and the vast context baked into the world requiring interpretation at a more-or-less human level. The system could even frame the above decision as "get clarification, or risk being thrown in the trash." One of the huge advances in the last 5 years has been categorization of images, alongside segmentation, in conjunction with reasoning about categories. LLM chatbots and generative images and audios are the simplest and least nuanced uses of transformers, with the least friction between training and deployment of a product. Generative models tend to allow perception as detailed, varied, and nuanced as their output produces, and integration of these software capabilities will happen in new and surprising ways for many years to come. TLDR; what they can create, they can see - advanced image models enable advanced computer vision.
    - n4r9 2y ago
      Thanks for the response; I see your point that housework can have pretty significant cognitive requirements. I'm not sure I understood sufficiently the argument for why LLMs are well-placed to attack that sort of categorisation, but it's something for me to mull over.
roughly 2y ago
SMBC with a similar sentiment https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/sad-2 https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/sad-2
- morkalork 2y ago
  Wow, tons more ads on their site than I remember 10 years ago. Even one of those extra annoying pop-up auto-play videos in corner!
VyseofArcadia 2y ago
I wonder to what degree generative AI came before e.g. as in the article an AI that does your taxes because it's hard to be wrong, creatively. If I ask an AI for a painting of a dog commanding a fleet of starships, I'd be hard pressed to define, specifically, an incorrect result. There's wiggle room. Some results are more wrong or right than others, but I don't know that I'd ever hand back a grade of 0. And even if I did, so what? The stakes are low. Try again. On the other hand, doing your taxes wrong is a thing. You can enumerate the possible mistakes. They're codified in law[0]. And these mistake have big stakes. Generative AI is "safer" than an AI to do a specific task that has consequences. [0] Yes, yes, I know, there's wiggle room here too and that's why we have courts
stared 2y ago
I think that this quotation captures the essence of the problem. It is nice to have the boring things automated - be it proofreading, generating mundane pieces of code, and stuff. The sad part In programming (at least, for now), I feel that it is a net positive for my happiness - less stuff spent hunting simple omissions, checking StackOverflow, or checking (not always so complete) documentation of changes between version 0.4 and 0.5 of some library. Yet, in other fields, it may be different. I am not a translator, but I did something for fun a few times (e.g. https://p.migdal.pl/blog/2019/10/the-statues-by-jacek-kaczmarski https://p.migdal.pl/blog/2019/10/the-statues-by-jacek-kaczma...). Now, with proper prompting, one can get very far (e.g. https://p.migdal.pl/blog/2023/05/genesis-az-by-gpt https://p.migdal.pl/blog/2023/05/genesis-az-by-gpt). For the first time, it gets me some existential chills, as it is taking away the joy of a linguistic puzzle of matching content, mood, atmosphere, and rhymes. It used to be an intellectual challenge only a real human being could do. At some points, event sparks of genius in breakthrough scientific discoveries will be more like solving a crossword rather than something WE can add to the culture.
- renewiltord 2y ago
  My wife is a creative director and she loves using this stuff. It's just another thing that she's added to her toolkit. It's actually remarkable to me how different people react to this stuff and just one more reason she and I are well-matched. Our reactions to LLMs and Diffusion Models are very similar. These are just new tools for us to accomplish what we want to do. She used to draw on paper, then a Wacom, now she only ever doodles on her iPad. She designed our wedding clothes with Dall-E + Adobe AI + illustrating in PS/Illustrator. I used to write code painstakingly in a text editor, then a rudimentary language-aware text editor, and then an IDE, and then an IDE with integrated LLMs. I ask my Mistral to find bugs and to tell me how to work with obscure systems. These tools are really wonderful for doing things. They're not perfect and don't replace humans. But at every stage I recall most people opposing this stuff. And at every stage I recall enjoying the new tool. So I can only assume that the opposition to LLMs is the same as the opposition to search engines back in the day: "Real knowledge isn't about just looking up stuff. You only really grok something if you read the manual. There's lots of bits that relate to each other that you have to know".
mbg721 2y ago
Laundry and dishes don't pay well. Art does, but only once in a great while, and AI gives you a ton of attempts for little cost. Since rapid iteration is the biggest strength of advanced computing, people just invented cultural pollution machines in the hope of striking it rich.
- dylan604 2y ago
  > Laundry and dishes don't pay well. Art does Art can. Sometimes it's after you're dead though. There's a reason the term "starving artist" exists
  - mbg721 2y ago
    Sure, but the AI fails as much as it needs to, and nobody starves. It can have awful output forever. That's the polluting machine.
- rnd0 2y ago
  Laundry and dishes aren't a source of revenue generation; that's why art is prioritized (it earns money, and reduces the costs of hiring creatives) whereas dishes and laundry doesn't earn startups cash nor is it worth eliminating the cost of.
- winternett 2y ago
  If I could afford to pay for a reasonably priced Ai laundry & delivery service I would surely do it. If it was done by a robot that also cooked basic meals and cleaned my house, that would be invaluable to not just me, but many. A company that ran that service properly and reliably would likely be very successful. That would likely free many of the people in maid and janitorial jobs to work within the companies that run those services as inspectors and managers instead of in the field... This is how the model works, not just by simply saying that category of work isn't profitable... A work hammer (the tool) doesn't profit, but the company that makes and sells it en mass (Like Stanley inc. or Craftsman) does.
surgical_fire 2y ago
This is such an awful take, that I always roll my eyes when I see it being reproduced. It gets cringer every time.
suyash 2y ago
I think the problem is because AI is mostly created by engineers who have no clue about 'art', all they know is how to automate and optimise for the sole purpose of efficiency which has been the cause of AI eating creative fields including programming ironically as there an art to coding as well.
unraveller 2y ago
Well I don't think OP persuaded the AI start-up to pivot to laundry services. The start-up is going after the low hanging fruit, things easy to do, and no one likes to be thought of as easily replaceable least of all artists.
winternett 2y ago
Ai is ages away from being able to emulate the passion and intuition behind music, writing, and art that humans have cultivated for centuries. It can only emulate that passion even still, so it relies on a theft from human intellect & reasoning as it very basis. This is why in the long run it will become apparent that undermining the source of creativity, and by ruining the ability of artists and writers to succeed properly in innovating nw things, eventually Ai will become bereft of new ideas, and easily turned into a source for garbage, cheap, copycat, and undesired output. There is also the looming risk that current creators may well turn towards corrupting their work specifically to hinder the corrupt idea theft currently occurring with Ai profiteers.

by esafak 2y ago

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

kapp_in_life 2y ago

Sure, but many people who are bad at art and writing would like AI to make art and writing that's tailored to their tastes and are fine doing laundry and dishes since they're good at that and we have already automated 99% of it with dishwashers and dryers.

yuppiepuppie 2y ago
The actual washing of the dishes we have automated, not the loading unloading, folding of clothes and organizing them in my closet. I spend at least 1 hour a week on that stuff… ~52hours per year I could be doing art and writing.
- TeMPOraL 2y ago
  1 hour a week means you live alone. Add a partner and a kid or two, and someone will be spending one hour a day on unloading and sorting laundry into right wardrobes. (On average. Realistically, it's more like a day and a half every two weeks or something). Chores are terrible life suckers, and I for one subscribe to the notion of eliminating them with technology.
dsr_ 2y ago
You missed the point. One of those scenarios is available. The other isn't even being worked on in any serious fashion. And you definitely don't get to tell people that your product is just fine, they are wrong for wanting something else.
- ben_w 2y ago
  > The other isn't even being worked on in any serious fashion. It is being worked on, it's just hard: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pycyMUQwiNs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pycyMUQwiNs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sq1QZB5baNw&t=34s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sq1QZB5baNw&t=34s I'm expecting a minimum of 5-10 years to pass between real-time vision AI getting good enough for level-5 autonomous cars and the same stuff fitting into the power envelope available to this kind of domestic robot.
- kapp_in_life 2y ago
  >And you definitely don't get to tell people that your product is just fine, they are wrong for wanting something else. The original quote does that as well and I only reversed it to give the perspective of increative people :)
falcolas 2y ago
> many people who are bad at art and writing The thing is, you can get better at these. They are just creative skills that get better with practice (much like coding et.al.). And the skill will let you do things you can't do with AI. > are fine doing laundry and dishes since they're good at that and we have already automated 99% of it with dishwashers and dryers. With the minimal amount of sarcasm or ill intent possible: what are you doing with that spare time if not improving skills you clearly want the output of?
- lovethevoid 2y ago
  You can also get better at those skills while also using AI. It’s not really an absolute. You can generate outlines sketches so you can practice shading techniques as a simple example. There are also those who don’t want to get better at those skills, as those skills are just a temporary medium. For example someone making pottery might be terrible at drawing and creating ideas, so they generate some and then get to working with clay. Essentially, references.
  - falcolas 2y ago
    Using AI is not free, in either price nor time. If all the time spent iterating over prompts to get the "right" output was instead spent working on skills, you (the royal you) could get a lot better at drawing/writing right off the bat. I've lurked through a few AI art boards, and the number of times people will spend dozens if not hundreds of hours iterating through prompts to get a simple anime character just right is mind boggling. Can AI create references? Certainly. Will they be more detailed than what a potter can create in a similar timeframe? Probably. Will they be accurate to the potter's desire? Probably not.
    - ben_w 2y ago
      > Using AI is not free, in either price nor time. If all the time spent iterating over prompts to get the "right" output was instead spent working on skills, you (the royal you) could get a lot better at drawing/writing right off the bat. Eventually, by practice, a person can get better at art. I've seen (pre-AI) artists spending dozens of hours just on icons, so the idea of artists spending hundreds of hours perfecting every detail of some character doesn't seem surprising, not even when the specific details really can be done by a better method than repeatedly changing the prompt. Conversely, even when I use an app on my phone for GenAI, it's making images in perhaps 90 seconds, vs. the entire day that my GCSE* art class gave the students to create the final project — even with the need to have multiple attempts or prompt variations, the AI just gets stuff done too fast for me to learn much in the same time period. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GCSE https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GCSE
relaxing 2y ago
Did you really just write most people are fine with doing chores and think that they are good at them?

bronco21016 2y ago

I think the missing piece is the generative AI being tied to a physical embodiment. My point is, we need the physical machine but we also need to work on this generative AI aspect to manipulate the machine. Unfortunately, making pictures and writing text seems to be the lowest hanging fruit of the Transformer AI era since we have significant datasets already available. Several companies are working on creating datasets to train transformers to apply to other tasks and I suspect we'll start seeing the results in a couple to a few years. Not sure how long before we have a consumer bot doing the laundry and dishes though.

n4r9 2y ago
You see generative AI as a stepping stone towards chores like dishes and laundry?
- observationist 2y ago
  Unironically, yes. Detailed, nuanced, human level modeling of the world provides an interface with automation that allows for complex tasks and workflows to be built and trusted. "Go clean up the kitchen" might involve something where the question of "is this trash, or is this an adorable drawing made by a child that should be saved" or other such collisions between seemingly clear instructions and the vast context baked into the world requiring interpretation at a more-or-less human level. The system could even frame the above decision as "get clarification, or risk being thrown in the trash." One of the huge advances in the last 5 years has been categorization of images, alongside segmentation, in conjunction with reasoning about categories. LLM chatbots and generative images and audios are the simplest and least nuanced uses of transformers, with the least friction between training and deployment of a product. Generative models tend to allow perception as detailed, varied, and nuanced as their output produces, and integration of these software capabilities will happen in new and surprising ways for many years to come. TLDR; what they can create, they can see - advanced image models enable advanced computer vision.
  - n4r9 2y ago
    Thanks for the response; I see your point that housework can have pretty significant cognitive requirements. I'm not sure I understood sufficiently the argument for why LLMs are well-placed to attack that sort of categorisation, but it's something for me to mull over.

roughly 2y ago

SMBC with a similar sentiment https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/sad-2 https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/sad-2

morkalork 2y ago
Wow, tons more ads on their site than I remember 10 years ago. Even one of those extra annoying pop-up auto-play videos in corner!

VyseofArcadia 2y ago

I wonder to what degree generative AI came before e.g. as in the article an AI that does your taxes because it's hard to be wrong, creatively. If I ask an AI for a painting of a dog commanding a fleet of starships, I'd be hard pressed to define, specifically, an incorrect result. There's wiggle room. Some results are more wrong or right than others, but I don't know that I'd ever hand back a grade of 0. And even if I did, so what? The stakes are low. Try again. On the other hand, doing your taxes wrong is a thing. You can enumerate the possible mistakes. They're codified in law[0]. And these mistake have big stakes. Generative AI is "safer" than an AI to do a specific task that has consequences. [0] Yes, yes, I know, there's wiggle room here too and that's why we have courts

stared 2y ago

I think that this quotation captures the essence of the problem. It is nice to have the boring things automated - be it proofreading, generating mundane pieces of code, and stuff. The sad part In programming (at least, for now), I feel that it is a net positive for my happiness - less stuff spent hunting simple omissions, checking StackOverflow, or checking (not always so complete) documentation of changes between version 0.4 and 0.5 of some library. Yet, in other fields, it may be different. I am not a translator, but I did something for fun a few times (e.g. https://p.migdal.pl/blog/2019/10/the-statues-by-jacek-kaczmarski https://p.migdal.pl/blog/2019/10/the-statues-by-jacek-kaczma...). Now, with proper prompting, one can get very far (e.g. https://p.migdal.pl/blog/2023/05/genesis-az-by-gpt https://p.migdal.pl/blog/2023/05/genesis-az-by-gpt). For the first time, it gets me some existential chills, as it is taking away the joy of a linguistic puzzle of matching content, mood, atmosphere, and rhymes. It used to be an intellectual challenge only a real human being could do. At some points, event sparks of genius in breakthrough scientific discoveries will be more like solving a crossword rather than something WE can add to the culture.

renewiltord 2y ago
My wife is a creative director and she loves using this stuff. It's just another thing that she's added to her toolkit. It's actually remarkable to me how different people react to this stuff and just one more reason she and I are well-matched. Our reactions to LLMs and Diffusion Models are very similar. These are just new tools for us to accomplish what we want to do. She used to draw on paper, then a Wacom, now she only ever doodles on her iPad. She designed our wedding clothes with Dall-E + Adobe AI + illustrating in PS/Illustrator. I used to write code painstakingly in a text editor, then a rudimentary language-aware text editor, and then an IDE, and then an IDE with integrated LLMs. I ask my Mistral to find bugs and to tell me how to work with obscure systems. These tools are really wonderful for doing things. They're not perfect and don't replace humans. But at every stage I recall most people opposing this stuff. And at every stage I recall enjoying the new tool. So I can only assume that the opposition to LLMs is the same as the opposition to search engines back in the day: "Real knowledge isn't about just looking up stuff. You only really grok something if you read the manual. There's lots of bits that relate to each other that you have to know".

mbg721 2y ago

Laundry and dishes don't pay well. Art does, but only once in a great while, and AI gives you a ton of attempts for little cost. Since rapid iteration is the biggest strength of advanced computing, people just invented cultural pollution machines in the hope of striking it rich.

dylan604 2y ago
> Laundry and dishes don't pay well. Art does Art can. Sometimes it's after you're dead though. There's a reason the term "starving artist" exists
- mbg721 2y ago
  Sure, but the AI fails as much as it needs to, and nobody starves. It can have awful output forever. That's the polluting machine.
rnd0 2y ago
Laundry and dishes aren't a source of revenue generation; that's why art is prioritized (it earns money, and reduces the costs of hiring creatives) whereas dishes and laundry doesn't earn startups cash nor is it worth eliminating the cost of.
winternett 2y ago
If I could afford to pay for a reasonably priced Ai laundry & delivery service I would surely do it. If it was done by a robot that also cooked basic meals and cleaned my house, that would be invaluable to not just me, but many. A company that ran that service properly and reliably would likely be very successful. That would likely free many of the people in maid and janitorial jobs to work within the companies that run those services as inspectors and managers instead of in the field... This is how the model works, not just by simply saying that category of work isn't profitable... A work hammer (the tool) doesn't profit, but the company that makes and sells it en mass (Like Stanley inc. or Craftsman) does.

surgical_fire 2y ago

This is such an awful take, that I always roll my eyes when I see it being reproduced. It gets cringer every time.

suyash 2y ago

I think the problem is because AI is mostly created by engineers who have no clue about 'art', all they know is how to automate and optimise for the sole purpose of efficiency which has been the cause of AI eating creative fields including programming ironically as there an art to coding as well.

unraveller 2y ago

Well I don't think OP persuaded the AI start-up to pivot to laundry services. The start-up is going after the low hanging fruit, things easy to do, and no one likes to be thought of as easily replaceable least of all artists.

winternett 2y ago

Ai is ages away from being able to emulate the passion and intuition behind music, writing, and art that humans have cultivated for centuries. It can only emulate that passion even still, so it relies on a theft from human intellect & reasoning as it very basis. This is why in the long run it will become apparent that undermining the source of creativity, and by ruining the ability of artists and writers to succeed properly in innovating nw things, eventually Ai will become bereft of new ideas, and easily turned into a source for garbage, cheap, copycat, and undesired output. There is also the looming risk that current creators may well turn towards corrupting their work specifically to hinder the corrupt idea theft currently occurring with Ai profiteers.