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AI writing is pretty bad, AI code is pretty bad, AI art is pretty bad. We all know this. But it's easy to forget how many new opportunities open up when somethi

by gizmo 2y ago

AI writing is pretty bad, AI code is pretty bad, AI art is pretty bad. We all know this. But it's easy to forget how many new opportunities open up when something becomes 100x or 10000x cheaper. Things that are 10x worse but 100x cheaper are still extremely valuable. It's the relentless drive to making things cheaper, even at the expense of quality, that has made our high quality of life possible. You can make houses by hand out of beautiful hardwood with complex joinery. Houses built by expert craftsmen are easily 10x better than the typical house built today. But what difference does that make when practically nobody can afford it? Just like nobody can afford to have a 24/7 tutor that speaks every language, can help you with your job, grammar check your work, etc. AI slop is cheap and cheapness changes everything.

grecy 2y ago
And it will get a lot better quickly. Ten years from now it will not be slop.
- atoav 2y ago
  Or it will all be slop as there us no non-slop data to train on anymore
  - Applejinx 2y ago
    No, I don't think that's true. What will instead happen is there will be expert humans or teams of them, intentionally training AI brains rather than expecting wonders to occur just by turning the training loose on random hoovered-up data. Brainmaker will be a valued human skill, and people will be trying to work out how to train AI to do that, in turn.
- rsynnott 2y ago
  Not sure about that. Stable Diffusion came out a bit over 2 years ago. I'm not sure that Stable Diffusion 3's, or Flux's, output is artistically _better_ than the original; it's better at following directions, and better at avoiding the most grotesque errors, but if anything it perhaps looks even _more_ generic and same-y than the original Stable Diffusion output. There's a very distinctive AI _look_ which seems to have somehow synced up between Dalle, Midjourney, SD3 and others.
  - GaggiX 2y ago
    You can generate AI images that do not have the "AI look": https://ideogram.ai/assets/image/lossless/response/icQM0yZQQMOmEppUm-V2uw https://ideogram.ai/assets/image/lossless/response/icQM0yZQQ... And it's been two years since SD v1, a model that was not able to generate faces well, and it only output blurry 512x512 1:1 image without further finetuning, I tested v1.5 a few minutes ago and it's worse than I remember.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
Gigachad 2y ago
Why do we need art to be 10000x cheaper? There was already more than enough art being produced. Now we just have infinite waves of slop drowning out everything that’s actually good.
- erwald 2y ago
  For the same reason we don't want art to be 10,000x times more expensive? Cf. status quo bias etc.
- gizmo 2y ago
  A toddler's crayon art doesn't end up in the Louvre, nor does AI slop. Most art is bad art and it's been this way since the dawn of humanity. For as long as we can distinguish good art from bad art we can curate and there is nothing to worry about.
  - foolofat00k 2y ago
    That's just the problem -- you can't. Not because you can't distinguish between _one_ bad piece and _one_ good piece, but because there is so much production capacity that no human will ever be able to look at most of it. And it's not just the AI stuff that will suffer here, all of it goes into the same pool, and humans sample from that pool (using various methodologies). At some point the pool becomes mostly urine.
    - gizmo 2y ago
      My email inbox is already 99% spam (urine) and I don't see any of it. The bottom line is that if a human can easily recognize AI spam then so can another AI. This has always been an arms race with spammers on one side and curators on the other. No reason to assume spammers will start winning when they have been losing for decades.
      - FridgeSeal 2y ago
        The spammers have been given a tool that’s capable of higher quality at much higher volumes. If nothing else, it’s now much more feasible for them to be successful by sheer force of drowning out any “worthwhile” material.
jay_kyburz 2y ago
Information is not like physical products if you ask me. When the information is wrong, it's value flips from positive to negative. You might be paying less for progress, but you are not progressing slower, you are progressing in the wrong direction.
GaggiX 2y ago
They are not even that bad anymore to be honest.
akudha 2y ago
The bigger problem is that we as a species get used to subpar things quickly. My dad's bicycle some 35 years ago was built like a tank. That thing never broke down and took enormous amounts of abuse and still kept going and going. Same with most stuff my family owned, when I was a kid. Today, nearly anything I buy breaks in a year or two, is of poor quality and depressing to use. This is by design, of course. Just as we got used to cheap household items, bland buildings (there is just nothing artistic about modern houses or commercial buildings) etc, we will also get used to shitty movies, shitty fiction etc (we are well on our way).
- precompute 2y ago
  Could not agree more. The marketing for "AI" would have you believe it's a qualitative shift when it's really a quantitative shift.
- slyall 2y ago
  One think to check about higher quality stuff in the past is how much it cost vs the average wage. You might be comparing a $100 bike from Walmart with something that cost the equivalent of $600
kerkeslager 2y ago
I think that your post misses the point that making something cheaper by stealing it is unethical. You're presenting AI as if it's some new way of producing value but it simply isn't. All the value here was produced by humans without the help of AI: the only "innovation" AI has offered is making the theft of that value untraceable. > You can make houses by hand out of beautiful hardwood with complex joinery. Houses built by expert craftsmen are easily 10x better than the typical house built today. But what difference does that make when practically nobody can afford it? Just like nobody can afford to have a 24/7 tutor that speaks every language, can help you with your job, grammar check your work, etc. Let's take this analogy to its logical conclusion: would you have any objections if all the houses ever built by expert craftsmen were given free of charge to a few corporations, with no payment to the current owners or the expert craftsmen themselves, and then then those corporations began renting them out as AirBnBs? That's basically what you're proposing.
sigmonsays 2y ago
how does this make our high quality of life possible when everything's quality is being reduced?
BobaFloutist 2y ago
>You can make houses by hand out of beautiful hardwood with complex joinery. We've logged an enormous amount of the old-growth hardwood forests the planet had doing this (and also shipbuilding). We literally don't have access to the same materials anymore.
Nemi 2y ago
The thing is, right now it is artificially cheaper. It is being heavily subsidized by all providers in a race to capture market share. It simply cannot stay this cheap forever at current costs. Now, if costs change then we have a new story. But that is not guaranteed.

by gizmo 2y ago

grecy 2y ago

And it will get a lot better quickly. Ten years from now it will not be slop.

atoav 2y ago
Or it will all be slop as there us no non-slop data to train on anymore
- Applejinx 2y ago
  No, I don't think that's true. What will instead happen is there will be expert humans or teams of them, intentionally training AI brains rather than expecting wonders to occur just by turning the training loose on random hoovered-up data. Brainmaker will be a valued human skill, and people will be trying to work out how to train AI to do that, in turn.
rsynnott 2y ago
Not sure about that. Stable Diffusion came out a bit over 2 years ago. I'm not sure that Stable Diffusion 3's, or Flux's, output is artistically _better_ than the original; it's better at following directions, and better at avoiding the most grotesque errors, but if anything it perhaps looks even _more_ generic and same-y than the original Stable Diffusion output. There's a very distinctive AI _look_ which seems to have somehow synced up between Dalle, Midjourney, SD3 and others.
- GaggiX 2y ago
  You can generate AI images that do not have the "AI look": https://ideogram.ai/assets/image/lossless/response/icQM0yZQQMOmEppUm-V2uw https://ideogram.ai/assets/image/lossless/response/icQM0yZQQ... And it's been two years since SD v1, a model that was not able to generate faces well, and it only output blurry 512x512 1:1 image without further finetuning, I tested v1.5 a few minutes ago and it's worse than I remember.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]

Gigachad 2y ago

Why do we need art to be 10000x cheaper? There was already more than enough art being produced. Now we just have infinite waves of slop drowning out everything that’s actually good.

erwald 2y ago
For the same reason we don't want art to be 10,000x times more expensive? Cf. status quo bias etc.
gizmo 2y ago
A toddler's crayon art doesn't end up in the Louvre, nor does AI slop. Most art is bad art and it's been this way since the dawn of humanity. For as long as we can distinguish good art from bad art we can curate and there is nothing to worry about.
- foolofat00k 2y ago
  That's just the problem -- you can't. Not because you can't distinguish between _one_ bad piece and _one_ good piece, but because there is so much production capacity that no human will ever be able to look at most of it. And it's not just the AI stuff that will suffer here, all of it goes into the same pool, and humans sample from that pool (using various methodologies). At some point the pool becomes mostly urine.
  - gizmo 2y ago
    My email inbox is already 99% spam (urine) and I don't see any of it. The bottom line is that if a human can easily recognize AI spam then so can another AI. This has always been an arms race with spammers on one side and curators on the other. No reason to assume spammers will start winning when they have been losing for decades.
    - FridgeSeal 2y ago
      The spammers have been given a tool that’s capable of higher quality at much higher volumes. If nothing else, it’s now much more feasible for them to be successful by sheer force of drowning out any “worthwhile” material.

jay_kyburz 2y ago

Information is not like physical products if you ask me. When the information is wrong, it's value flips from positive to negative. You might be paying less for progress, but you are not progressing slower, you are progressing in the wrong direction.

GaggiX 2y ago

They are not even that bad anymore to be honest.

akudha 2y ago

The bigger problem is that we as a species get used to subpar things quickly. My dad's bicycle some 35 years ago was built like a tank. That thing never broke down and took enormous amounts of abuse and still kept going and going. Same with most stuff my family owned, when I was a kid. Today, nearly anything I buy breaks in a year or two, is of poor quality and depressing to use. This is by design, of course. Just as we got used to cheap household items, bland buildings (there is just nothing artistic about modern houses or commercial buildings) etc, we will also get used to shitty movies, shitty fiction etc (we are well on our way).

precompute 2y ago
Could not agree more. The marketing for "AI" would have you believe it's a qualitative shift when it's really a quantitative shift.
slyall 2y ago
One think to check about higher quality stuff in the past is how much it cost vs the average wage. You might be comparing a $100 bike from Walmart with something that cost the equivalent of $600

kerkeslager 2y ago

I think that your post misses the point that making something cheaper by stealing it is unethical. You're presenting AI as if it's some new way of producing value but it simply isn't. All the value here was produced by humans without the help of AI: the only "innovation" AI has offered is making the theft of that value untraceable. > You can make houses by hand out of beautiful hardwood with complex joinery. Houses built by expert craftsmen are easily 10x better than the typical house built today. But what difference does that make when practically nobody can afford it? Just like nobody can afford to have a 24/7 tutor that speaks every language, can help you with your job, grammar check your work, etc. Let's take this analogy to its logical conclusion: would you have any objections if all the houses ever built by expert craftsmen were given free of charge to a few corporations, with no payment to the current owners or the expert craftsmen themselves, and then then those corporations began renting them out as AirBnBs? That's basically what you're proposing.

sigmonsays 2y ago

how does this make our high quality of life possible when everything's quality is being reduced?

BobaFloutist 2y ago

>You can make houses by hand out of beautiful hardwood with complex joinery. We've logged an enormous amount of the old-growth hardwood forests the planet had doing this (and also shipbuilding). We literally don't have access to the same materials anymore.

Nemi 2y ago

The thing is, right now it is artificially cheaper. It is being heavily subsidized by all providers in a race to capture market share. It simply cannot stay this cheap forever at current costs. Now, if costs change then we have a new story. But that is not guaranteed.