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It's just a technology. Much like you can still buy "hand made" shoes, there will be people that create curated hand made content. And if they use AI and you ca

by bko 2y ago

It's just a technology. Much like you can still buy "hand made" shoes, there will be people that create curated hand made content. And if they use AI and you can't tell the difference, does it really matter? I really don't understand why there is so much negativity for a new technology. It's never explained, just taken as a fact and people bemoaning the new state of the world.

wilted-iris 2y ago
Technology is not neutral.
latexr 2y ago
> And if they use AI and you can't tell the difference, does it really matter? It does, yes. To use your own analogy, if one pays for an artisanal product and is served something out of a production line in a factory, that is fraud. > It's never explained You’re not paying attention, it is often explained. One huge reason is that it devalues the work of artists who are already struggling to make any money by using their own work as a base without compensation. It’s not hard to find explanations if you really care to spend 5 seconds typing it into a search engine. Heck, I bet that if you asked an LLM, it’d tell you. https://www.reddit.com/r/Fantasy/comments/zn2e3c/eli5_why_does_everyone_hate_ai_art/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Fantasy/comments/zn2e3c/eli5_why_do...
- bko 2y ago
  Did washing machine devalue the work of people washing by hand? Did cameras devalue the work of portrait artists? ATMs to bank tellers? Tractor to farmer? Car to horses? Again, it's technology. I guess I shouldn't have said I never heard an argument. I just never heard a good one that can't be applied to pretty much any other technology that came before.
  - mrkpdl 2y ago
    These are false equivalences, or whataboutisms. The hand washers provided a very different ‘thing’. To that of artists. You mention things like getting clean clothes, getting from a to b in a car or on a horse, getting cash from an ATM instead from the teller at a bank branch. These are all completely different to the work of an artist or craftsperson that expresses something. So it’s very reasonable for people to seek insight/inspiration/catharsis/etc from things that they understand to be fully crafted by human minds and hands.
    - signatoremo 2y ago
      Do photographers express less than painters? Paint and brush are technologies. They enhance paintings. I expect there will be AI based art, not sure in which form, and people will still find joy in it.
      - xkqd 2y ago
        Considering a significant portion of art appreciation revolves around the artist themselves, the talent and story they possess, and the level of effort and expression that went into the piece… I don’t know about that. There’s plenty of visually impressive AI art out there right now. No one is celebrating it.
        zztop44 2y ago
        Some is also conceptually interesting and celebrated, for example the niceaunties project out of Singapore: https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/jul/19/auntieverse-art-niceaunties-surreal-fantasy-older-women https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/jul/19/auntie...
        rossriley 2y ago
        This is awesome, thanks for the link.
        iamacyborg 2y ago
        A quick glimpse and it seems wildly uninteresting, conceptually and visually.
      - mrkpdl 2y ago
        > Do photographers express less than painters? Paint and brush are technologies. They enhance paintings. I didn’t mean to imply artists don’t use technology. And certainly include photography in my definition of things made by the hands and minds of craft people. I have a degree in photography to back that up. But as with all technologies individuals will choose where their line of interest is drawn. There will be AI based art, and their will also be an audience who don’t want it.
  - shit_game 2y ago
    Things like washing machines and cars liberated people from labor and saved their time, which they couldn then use to persue other goals. For many, making art is their goal - generative AI isn't liberating people from the burden of making art, it's making art a non-viable endeavour for millions of people.
    - echelon 2y ago
      Generative AI lets me make films from my desk instead of 7 AM call times, steep bills at the rental houses, and unreliable post editors who fail to meet deadlines. This isn't just a net win, this puts power in my hand I've never had before. It's still work and art. No LLM is going to make a compelling story or make the right artistic choices. I do that. But now I get to control way more myself and I'm empowered to see the entire vision though.
      - totallymike 2y ago
        I always felt that the beauty of film is in the collaboration between all the people involved to create something larger than themselves. Everybody in the credits brings something irreplaceable to a film, and together they transcend a singular vision to build a work of art. This generative stuff feels reductive to me. There are no actors, no set designers, prop masters, musicians. Nobody’s bouncing ideas off a colleague or working with three other departments to bring a scene together. It feels less like art when it’s a computer using models based on real stolen art to generate content off of a prompt.
      - oofdere 2y ago
        > But now I get to control way more myself is this a good thing? to some extent sure but I feel like limitations and collaboration leads to better art in many instances
      - newprint 2y ago
        > But now I get to control way more myself. You are not, the LLM makes bulk of work for you and will choose a lot of things for you for the movie you are making. >I'm empowered to see the entire vision though. I think you fail to grasp one important thing about art in general - it is non-verbal by it's nature. You can't go and explain in LLM input some famous painting, it not how it works.
  - komali2 2y ago
    My argument is this: technology has been driving down the market value of human labor for the last century at least, and soon the market value of human labor will be pennies. I specifically use market value because the market valuation mechanism is irrational and its meaning of "value" is different from what people often mean when they talk about value. E.g. the contributions of a fireman are far more valuable to a society than those of a mutual fund manager, but the market value of the fireman's labor is far lower. Anyway I don't know when it'll happen but the cost of doing many things with AI, automation, etc will soon be very low, and having a human do the thing maybe worse maybe better, will be prohibitively expensive. Even if you argue that in the past new technologies have created new jobs, one can look at the labor market value trend of the last 70 years to see that it seems we've passed some turning point where human labor market value in emerging skillsets can't surpass the ability of technology to make them redundant - by which I mean take a look at them wages, they are slip sliding into oblivion. Maybe not all jobs, but if even 20% of people can't justify their existence under capitalism with labor in a way that feeds and houses them, that's a historic national crisis. Stopping technological development probably isn't the long term solution. Unions are great but also just a bandaid on a broken system - don't we want to enjoy the benefits of decreased scarcity? It's time to start having real conversations about how to organize our society as scarcity diminishes to near 0, or if you don't like that, how to organize our societies with the expectation that 20% of people or more simply won't be able to justify their existence through labor. If you can think of a way to make capitalism work in such a way without enforcing artificial scarcity, I'm all ears, but I'm skeptical. Probably we need to stop requiring people to justify their existence with labor and just let people have food, shelter, medical care etc in return for nothing at all. We almost certainly already have the resources to allow this, and if we don't today we definitely will in 50 years.
  - intended 2y ago
    Human attention doesn’t get freed up by creating more content. It gets consumed. In all your examples - 1) Yes. It was a good thing 2) Yes. It is now a thing done to learn how to draw, and a niche skill 3) Yes, yes, yes. IF people are bemoaning the devaluing of certain activity, yup it’s true. It happens. There are fewer horses than there were yesterday. Certain forms of activity get devalued. They are replaced by an alternative that creates surplus. But life goes on to bigger things. The same with GenAI. Content is increasingly easy to create at scale. This reduced cost of production applies for both useful content and pollution. Except if finding valid information is made harder, - then life becomes more complex and we don’t go on to bigger and better things. The abundance of fabricated content which is indistinguishable from authentic content means that authentic content is devalued, and that any content consumed must now wait before it is verified. It increases the cost of trusting information, which reduces the overall value of the network. It’s like the cost of lemons for used cars. This is the looming problem. Hopefully something appears that mitigates the worst case scenarios, however the medium case and even bad case are well and truly alive.
    - flamedoge 2y ago
      who's stopping you from Amish lifestyle? problem seems to be that people want authentic, hand-made 'art' but with price of a mass manufactured tech.
      - intended 2y ago
        For art - I can get the dissonance. It’s inherently subjective. I’m concerned with facts and science. I have to talk past a litany of falsehoods about mental health with my dad before I can get to the actual science that will help him. I have to remind people about things they studied in the 6th grade about history, to counter whatever hate group BS that has whatsapped itself into their heads. This is what I am concerned about. If it was cheaper to create true content, and more expensive to create non factual content, I wouldn’t be arguing about this with people who write code. It’s just cheaper to create content and more expensive to identify content.
  - traceroute66 2y ago
    > Did cameras devalue the work of portrait artists? Actually yes. Ask any professional photographer what they think of the selfie generation. Yes, you can argue "the best camera is the one you have with you". But ultimatley it has devalued the value of the professional photographer. I know photographers who, for example, spend their life swatting away phone camera users who turn up behind them at the spot where they've setup their camera etc. Its like, I've taken the time to find the spot, the angle, the light and you turn up and devalue all that....
    - Eisenstein 2y ago
      I don't understand. Why would people taking pictures for themselves devalue the work of a professional photographer?
      - latexr 2y ago
        Think of anything you can do well and with nuance. People pay you to do it professionally and properly. Now imagine there’s a tool that kind of does what you do, for free but sloppily. Suddenly people no longer pay you to do what you did, and all around you see the output of that subpar tool and the inferior result it produces. Your work has been devalued. No one is paying for it and most don’t understand why it was better, despite the fact that it was. Have you ever seen those “graphic design is my passion” memes? That’s a good analogy. Effective graphic design isn’t just plastering some words on a page, it’s understanding where those words go, where to break the lines, which font to use, what background is balanced… All things the tool doesn’t do for you but that affect the final result and how it’s perceived at a subconscious level. There is a difference between a good and a bad poster. Even if both have the same information, one of them will be better at its job (e.g. making people pay attention and pay for the concert ticket) even if the bad designer doesn’t understand what or why.
- dragonwriter 2y ago
  > One huge reason is that it devalues the work of artists who are already struggling to make any money by using their own work as a base without compensation. All productivity technology marginalizes sellers in the same field that choose not to use it. And somehow, I don't think the objections would be any less if models were trained on exclusivelt material in the public domain.
- seanmcdirmid 2y ago
  > It does, yes. To use your own analogy, if one pays for an artisanal product and is served something out of a production line in a factory, that is fraud. Isn’t this what happened to Etsy? You really can’t tell, so the artisanal goods became mostly factory produced in China. But beyond the romantic and ethical concerns, I wish there was real tangible advantage from buying from an artisan rather than a factory. At least interior designers and custom cabinets are impossible to mass produce…so far.
- kouru225 2y ago
  Ngl I think many of those artists’ work deserve to be devalued. As someone involved in art, there’s a huge amount of art that’s overly concerned with perfecting technique like a robot. Entire movies are made just to be “one single take without any edits” and no one stops to ask themselves whether or not that’s actually the most impactful way to tell the story. The vast majority of digital art was just filled with all these people who mindlessly copied the same styles of vaguely realistic characters in the same action hero poses and then demanded praise/money for it. It’s like I was meant to praise the artistic talent of someone just because their process was laborious… and the truth was it wasn’t ever good art. IMO AI art is just forcing many of these artists to take a look in the mirror, and they don’t like what they see.
  - iamacyborg 2y ago
    > As someone involved in art, there’s a huge amount of art that’s overly concerned with perfecting technique like a robot. > > Entire movies are made just to be “one single take without any edits” and no one stops to ask themselves whether or not that’s actually the most impactful way to tell the story. Yeah, craft is an important thing. I don’t want photorealistic tattoos, personally, but I appreciate that people have the talent and ability to do them.
    - kouru225 2y ago
      Craft isn't labor though, and there are plenty of people who think that just doing a laborious task makes their art interesting. It doesn't.
javajosh 2y ago
Subjectively, I find that the infusion of AI content makes the general internet experience worse. Have you ever researched something to find a video that is AI generated with an AI generated voice? It is the SEO spam of video. I think that platforms will go through several phases in their relationship to AI: first, they will like the artificially increased "content creator" numbers. Second, they will like the increase in short term engagement. Third, they will very much dislike the sharp decrease in long term engagement as the market finds whoever can filter low-quality results the best.
- internet101010 2y ago
  Pretty much any "top 10" product video on YouTube.
mxfh 2y ago
It's that I can't be forced to care about stuff the people that commissioned it, didn't even bother read, review or fact check. Everything feels like the laziest grind imaginable. For every Harry Potter goes to Berghain, there is an infinite amount of slop making it harder to find good content. Not even mentioning the biases baked into the model and copyright/IP issues and limitations. To me generated content triggers the same cringy feelings, like those unrequested flash holiday e-cards in your mailbox in 2010. At least those wellmeaning people didn't know better back then.
itishappy 2y ago
I distinguish between content and high effort content. I like both! AI generated content is fine, whatever, but slap an AI generated scene into a woodworking video and you bet it matters to me. I'm surprised you've never heard any explanations. Here are my personal thoughts on the matter (har har): https://chatgpt.com/share/6700aac4-8854-8004-b785-0784c6bfee52 https://chatgpt.com/share/6700aac4-8854-8004-b785-0784c6bfee...
koe123 2y ago
I feel as though people are concerned over a hypothetical. Can anyone show me AI generated content that has fully replaced the alternative? If this does exist, what exactly is the value that was lost if the “real” thing was so easily replaced?
taytus 2y ago
I'll tell you why. I think it's fair to say that most of the people who visit this site are technologists. Most of us love technology. So why are people reacting like this? Because we know how this will be used. We know of grifters and quick-buck schemes. We know that, unfortunately, the web as we know it is rapidly dying. We know of the scammers calling you with your loved ones' cloned voices. We know how powerful this tech is, how easy it is, and how it will be misused.
- jeltz 2y ago
  Yeah, I have done some grifting myself but quit doing it but still know a lot of really creative grifters. I know what a tool like this can do in their hands. These people managed to ruin a lot of Google searches with just human labour and some very basic automation. I know what evil they can do with good generative AI.
huimang 2y ago
> And if they use AI and you can't tell the difference, does it really matter? Yes. It devalues artists further (on top of only existing due to grand scale theft of art). It also is slop devoid of intention. If that's not enough, it's ecologically devastating. I would rather not waste millions of gallons of water on slop that gets generated and thrown away.
- intended 2y ago
  Human information networks are also an ecosystem. Having an abundance of slop stops the flow of information and knowledge. You have to filter everything that is shared to make sure you aren’t being predated upon.
  - huimang 2y ago
    Precisely - the amount of damage that openai and llms have done to human knowledge sharing and discourse is incalculable. Now we not only have to deal with humans manually writing junk due to perverse incentives, we also have to deal with people passing off machine generated junk at scale. And we're destroying the environment through rapidly increasing resource consumption to do so. This situation is incredibly fucked.
jajko 2y ago
You are saying reality and fake reality are alike, because hey can you spot the difference? Whole effin' Matrix movies premise was about that, remainder of human civilization rather went to suicidal fight than go back to more comfy fake illusion of reality. When I watch videos from friends or generally people, I am interested in their actual experiences, not lies they try to push about how they wanted their experiences to look like. That's frankly pathetic, you may of course not share the same view but luckily its dominant view in this world. When Mad max movies made most of their fights in real desert and it showed, god damn I had huge respect for all involved, thats an art. Green background just doesn't cut it. You also recharge in same way looking at phone wallpaper (or look at it in VR) of some mountains of forest, or actually being there and touching the trees and rock? One is cheap fake junk, another is proper awesome reality that makes you feel alive like nothing. Can't grok why the fuck do I need to even explain this to somebody, my 4 year old son gets it very well.
jayd16 2y ago
Well ok, but there's plenty of crap knockoffs that you need to worry about when buying shoes. It's not about being anti-technology. It's about new content being lower quality. You can tell but it takes effort that wasn't necessary before.
mejutoco 2y ago
It is not about the technology being bad. IMO it is just a tool. The problem is that tool enables the pollution of good content because it makes so easy to spam everything. It feels like it will undo all the progress of pagerank and original google, and we will be back to altavista/internet portals days with curation.
traceroute66 2y ago
> if they use AI and you can't tell the difference Except you can tell the difference and you will always be able to tell the difference. Its the nature of the beast. Throwing a bunch of content at AI and telling it to curate it is never going to be the same as a human that intimately knows it. Its the same with GPT coding. You can always tell the difference between what the machine spat out in 20 seconds and what a knowledgable human would produce. Artifical Intelligence is by definition artificial.
andrepd 2y ago
Yeah there's literally no reason why anyone should be wary at the harmful effects of social media and of AI slop.
unconed 2y ago
Never before has there been a technology that allows one to fake competency to this degree. This is occurring at a time when some people are bemoaning the general state of knowledge, the capacity for institutions to deliver on their goals and their mission, and the overall intelligence of the people supposedly in charge. Along comes a tool that promises to take some of the hardest, most challenging tasks, like photorealistic art, or high quality code engineering, and replace them with slop. Experts look at that slop and see garbage. Only people without experience, without a trained eye, without taste in code, will think it's great. It represents a tyranny of juniors and entryists. Where "fake it until you make it" will never even reach the second part of that phrase. The main thing that AI does, is make anything that comes out of it worthless. Infinite supply with nobody curating it.

by bko 2y ago

wilted-iris 2y ago

Technology is not neutral.

latexr 2y ago

> And if they use AI and you can't tell the difference, does it really matter? It does, yes. To use your own analogy, if one pays for an artisanal product and is served something out of a production line in a factory, that is fraud. > It's never explained You’re not paying attention, it is often explained. One huge reason is that it devalues the work of artists who are already struggling to make any money by using their own work as a base without compensation. It’s not hard to find explanations if you really care to spend 5 seconds typing it into a search engine. Heck, I bet that if you asked an LLM, it’d tell you. https://www.reddit.com/r/Fantasy/comments/zn2e3c/eli5_why_does_everyone_hate_ai_art/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Fantasy/comments/zn2e3c/eli5_why_do...

bko 2y ago
Did washing machine devalue the work of people washing by hand? Did cameras devalue the work of portrait artists? ATMs to bank tellers? Tractor to farmer? Car to horses? Again, it's technology. I guess I shouldn't have said I never heard an argument. I just never heard a good one that can't be applied to pretty much any other technology that came before.
- mrkpdl 2y ago
  These are false equivalences, or whataboutisms. The hand washers provided a very different ‘thing’. To that of artists. You mention things like getting clean clothes, getting from a to b in a car or on a horse, getting cash from an ATM instead from the teller at a bank branch. These are all completely different to the work of an artist or craftsperson that expresses something. So it’s very reasonable for people to seek insight/inspiration/catharsis/etc from things that they understand to be fully crafted by human minds and hands.
  - signatoremo 2y ago
    Do photographers express less than painters? Paint and brush are technologies. They enhance paintings. I expect there will be AI based art, not sure in which form, and people will still find joy in it.
    - xkqd 2y ago
      Considering a significant portion of art appreciation revolves around the artist themselves, the talent and story they possess, and the level of effort and expression that went into the piece… I don’t know about that. There’s plenty of visually impressive AI art out there right now. No one is celebrating it.
      - zztop44 2y ago
        Some is also conceptually interesting and celebrated, for example the niceaunties project out of Singapore: https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/jul/19/auntieverse-art-niceaunties-surreal-fantasy-older-women https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/jul/19/auntie...
        rossriley 2y ago
        This is awesome, thanks for the link.
        iamacyborg 2y ago
        A quick glimpse and it seems wildly uninteresting, conceptually and visually.
    - mrkpdl 2y ago
      > Do photographers express less than painters? Paint and brush are technologies. They enhance paintings. I didn’t mean to imply artists don’t use technology. And certainly include photography in my definition of things made by the hands and minds of craft people. I have a degree in photography to back that up. But as with all technologies individuals will choose where their line of interest is drawn. There will be AI based art, and their will also be an audience who don’t want it.
- shit_game 2y ago
  Things like washing machines and cars liberated people from labor and saved their time, which they couldn then use to persue other goals. For many, making art is their goal - generative AI isn't liberating people from the burden of making art, it's making art a non-viable endeavour for millions of people.
  - echelon 2y ago
    Generative AI lets me make films from my desk instead of 7 AM call times, steep bills at the rental houses, and unreliable post editors who fail to meet deadlines. This isn't just a net win, this puts power in my hand I've never had before. It's still work and art. No LLM is going to make a compelling story or make the right artistic choices. I do that. But now I get to control way more myself and I'm empowered to see the entire vision though.
    - totallymike 2y ago
      I always felt that the beauty of film is in the collaboration between all the people involved to create something larger than themselves. Everybody in the credits brings something irreplaceable to a film, and together they transcend a singular vision to build a work of art. This generative stuff feels reductive to me. There are no actors, no set designers, prop masters, musicians. Nobody’s bouncing ideas off a colleague or working with three other departments to bring a scene together. It feels less like art when it’s a computer using models based on real stolen art to generate content off of a prompt.
    - oofdere 2y ago
      > But now I get to control way more myself is this a good thing? to some extent sure but I feel like limitations and collaboration leads to better art in many instances
    - newprint 2y ago
      > But now I get to control way more myself. You are not, the LLM makes bulk of work for you and will choose a lot of things for you for the movie you are making. >I'm empowered to see the entire vision though. I think you fail to grasp one important thing about art in general - it is non-verbal by it's nature. You can't go and explain in LLM input some famous painting, it not how it works.
- komali2 2y ago
  My argument is this: technology has been driving down the market value of human labor for the last century at least, and soon the market value of human labor will be pennies. I specifically use market value because the market valuation mechanism is irrational and its meaning of "value" is different from what people often mean when they talk about value. E.g. the contributions of a fireman are far more valuable to a society than those of a mutual fund manager, but the market value of the fireman's labor is far lower. Anyway I don't know when it'll happen but the cost of doing many things with AI, automation, etc will soon be very low, and having a human do the thing maybe worse maybe better, will be prohibitively expensive. Even if you argue that in the past new technologies have created new jobs, one can look at the labor market value trend of the last 70 years to see that it seems we've passed some turning point where human labor market value in emerging skillsets can't surpass the ability of technology to make them redundant - by which I mean take a look at them wages, they are slip sliding into oblivion. Maybe not all jobs, but if even 20% of people can't justify their existence under capitalism with labor in a way that feeds and houses them, that's a historic national crisis. Stopping technological development probably isn't the long term solution. Unions are great but also just a bandaid on a broken system - don't we want to enjoy the benefits of decreased scarcity? It's time to start having real conversations about how to organize our society as scarcity diminishes to near 0, or if you don't like that, how to organize our societies with the expectation that 20% of people or more simply won't be able to justify their existence through labor. If you can think of a way to make capitalism work in such a way without enforcing artificial scarcity, I'm all ears, but I'm skeptical. Probably we need to stop requiring people to justify their existence with labor and just let people have food, shelter, medical care etc in return for nothing at all. We almost certainly already have the resources to allow this, and if we don't today we definitely will in 50 years.
- intended 2y ago
  Human attention doesn’t get freed up by creating more content. It gets consumed. In all your examples - 1) Yes. It was a good thing 2) Yes. It is now a thing done to learn how to draw, and a niche skill 3) Yes, yes, yes. IF people are bemoaning the devaluing of certain activity, yup it’s true. It happens. There are fewer horses than there were yesterday. Certain forms of activity get devalued. They are replaced by an alternative that creates surplus. But life goes on to bigger things. The same with GenAI. Content is increasingly easy to create at scale. This reduced cost of production applies for both useful content and pollution. Except if finding valid information is made harder, - then life becomes more complex and we don’t go on to bigger and better things. The abundance of fabricated content which is indistinguishable from authentic content means that authentic content is devalued, and that any content consumed must now wait before it is verified. It increases the cost of trusting information, which reduces the overall value of the network. It’s like the cost of lemons for used cars. This is the looming problem. Hopefully something appears that mitigates the worst case scenarios, however the medium case and even bad case are well and truly alive.
  - flamedoge 2y ago
    who's stopping you from Amish lifestyle? problem seems to be that people want authentic, hand-made 'art' but with price of a mass manufactured tech.
    - intended 2y ago
      For art - I can get the dissonance. It’s inherently subjective. I’m concerned with facts and science. I have to talk past a litany of falsehoods about mental health with my dad before I can get to the actual science that will help him. I have to remind people about things they studied in the 6th grade about history, to counter whatever hate group BS that has whatsapped itself into their heads. This is what I am concerned about. If it was cheaper to create true content, and more expensive to create non factual content, I wouldn’t be arguing about this with people who write code. It’s just cheaper to create content and more expensive to identify content.
- traceroute66 2y ago
  > Did cameras devalue the work of portrait artists? Actually yes. Ask any professional photographer what they think of the selfie generation. Yes, you can argue "the best camera is the one you have with you". But ultimatley it has devalued the value of the professional photographer. I know photographers who, for example, spend their life swatting away phone camera users who turn up behind them at the spot where they've setup their camera etc. Its like, I've taken the time to find the spot, the angle, the light and you turn up and devalue all that....
  - Eisenstein 2y ago
    I don't understand. Why would people taking pictures for themselves devalue the work of a professional photographer?
    - latexr 2y ago
      Think of anything you can do well and with nuance. People pay you to do it professionally and properly. Now imagine there’s a tool that kind of does what you do, for free but sloppily. Suddenly people no longer pay you to do what you did, and all around you see the output of that subpar tool and the inferior result it produces. Your work has been devalued. No one is paying for it and most don’t understand why it was better, despite the fact that it was. Have you ever seen those “graphic design is my passion” memes? That’s a good analogy. Effective graphic design isn’t just plastering some words on a page, it’s understanding where those words go, where to break the lines, which font to use, what background is balanced… All things the tool doesn’t do for you but that affect the final result and how it’s perceived at a subconscious level. There is a difference between a good and a bad poster. Even if both have the same information, one of them will be better at its job (e.g. making people pay attention and pay for the concert ticket) even if the bad designer doesn’t understand what or why.
dragonwriter 2y ago
> One huge reason is that it devalues the work of artists who are already struggling to make any money by using their own work as a base without compensation. All productivity technology marginalizes sellers in the same field that choose not to use it. And somehow, I don't think the objections would be any less if models were trained on exclusivelt material in the public domain.
seanmcdirmid 2y ago
> It does, yes. To use your own analogy, if one pays for an artisanal product and is served something out of a production line in a factory, that is fraud. Isn’t this what happened to Etsy? You really can’t tell, so the artisanal goods became mostly factory produced in China. But beyond the romantic and ethical concerns, I wish there was real tangible advantage from buying from an artisan rather than a factory. At least interior designers and custom cabinets are impossible to mass produce…so far.
kouru225 2y ago
Ngl I think many of those artists’ work deserve to be devalued. As someone involved in art, there’s a huge amount of art that’s overly concerned with perfecting technique like a robot. Entire movies are made just to be “one single take without any edits” and no one stops to ask themselves whether or not that’s actually the most impactful way to tell the story. The vast majority of digital art was just filled with all these people who mindlessly copied the same styles of vaguely realistic characters in the same action hero poses and then demanded praise/money for it. It’s like I was meant to praise the artistic talent of someone just because their process was laborious… and the truth was it wasn’t ever good art. IMO AI art is just forcing many of these artists to take a look in the mirror, and they don’t like what they see.
- iamacyborg 2y ago
  > As someone involved in art, there’s a huge amount of art that’s overly concerned with perfecting technique like a robot. > > Entire movies are made just to be “one single take without any edits” and no one stops to ask themselves whether or not that’s actually the most impactful way to tell the story. Yeah, craft is an important thing. I don’t want photorealistic tattoos, personally, but I appreciate that people have the talent and ability to do them.
  - kouru225 2y ago
    Craft isn't labor though, and there are plenty of people who think that just doing a laborious task makes their art interesting. It doesn't.

javajosh 2y ago

Subjectively, I find that the infusion of AI content makes the general internet experience worse. Have you ever researched something to find a video that is AI generated with an AI generated voice? It is the SEO spam of video. I think that platforms will go through several phases in their relationship to AI: first, they will like the artificially increased "content creator" numbers. Second, they will like the increase in short term engagement. Third, they will very much dislike the sharp decrease in long term engagement as the market finds whoever can filter low-quality results the best.

internet101010 2y ago
Pretty much any "top 10" product video on YouTube.

mxfh 2y ago

It's that I can't be forced to care about stuff the people that commissioned it, didn't even bother read, review or fact check. Everything feels like the laziest grind imaginable. For every Harry Potter goes to Berghain, there is an infinite amount of slop making it harder to find good content. Not even mentioning the biases baked into the model and copyright/IP issues and limitations. To me generated content triggers the same cringy feelings, like those unrequested flash holiday e-cards in your mailbox in 2010. At least those wellmeaning people didn't know better back then.

itishappy 2y ago

I distinguish between content and high effort content. I like both! AI generated content is fine, whatever, but slap an AI generated scene into a woodworking video and you bet it matters to me. I'm surprised you've never heard any explanations. Here are my personal thoughts on the matter (har har): https://chatgpt.com/share/6700aac4-8854-8004-b785-0784c6bfee52 https://chatgpt.com/share/6700aac4-8854-8004-b785-0784c6bfee...

koe123 2y ago

I feel as though people are concerned over a hypothetical. Can anyone show me AI generated content that has fully replaced the alternative? If this does exist, what exactly is the value that was lost if the “real” thing was so easily replaced?

taytus 2y ago

I'll tell you why. I think it's fair to say that most of the people who visit this site are technologists. Most of us love technology. So why are people reacting like this? Because we know how this will be used. We know of grifters and quick-buck schemes. We know that, unfortunately, the web as we know it is rapidly dying. We know of the scammers calling you with your loved ones' cloned voices. We know how powerful this tech is, how easy it is, and how it will be misused.

jeltz 2y ago
Yeah, I have done some grifting myself but quit doing it but still know a lot of really creative grifters. I know what a tool like this can do in their hands. These people managed to ruin a lot of Google searches with just human labour and some very basic automation. I know what evil they can do with good generative AI.

huimang 2y ago

> And if they use AI and you can't tell the difference, does it really matter? Yes. It devalues artists further (on top of only existing due to grand scale theft of art). It also is slop devoid of intention. If that's not enough, it's ecologically devastating. I would rather not waste millions of gallons of water on slop that gets generated and thrown away.

intended 2y ago
Human information networks are also an ecosystem. Having an abundance of slop stops the flow of information and knowledge. You have to filter everything that is shared to make sure you aren’t being predated upon.
- huimang 2y ago
  Precisely - the amount of damage that openai and llms have done to human knowledge sharing and discourse is incalculable. Now we not only have to deal with humans manually writing junk due to perverse incentives, we also have to deal with people passing off machine generated junk at scale. And we're destroying the environment through rapidly increasing resource consumption to do so. This situation is incredibly fucked.

jajko 2y ago

You are saying reality and fake reality are alike, because hey can you spot the difference? Whole effin' Matrix movies premise was about that, remainder of human civilization rather went to suicidal fight than go back to more comfy fake illusion of reality. When I watch videos from friends or generally people, I am interested in their actual experiences, not lies they try to push about how they wanted their experiences to look like. That's frankly pathetic, you may of course not share the same view but luckily its dominant view in this world. When Mad max movies made most of their fights in real desert and it showed, god damn I had huge respect for all involved, thats an art. Green background just doesn't cut it. You also recharge in same way looking at phone wallpaper (or look at it in VR) of some mountains of forest, or actually being there and touching the trees and rock? One is cheap fake junk, another is proper awesome reality that makes you feel alive like nothing. Can't grok why the fuck do I need to even explain this to somebody, my 4 year old son gets it very well.

jayd16 2y ago

Well ok, but there's plenty of crap knockoffs that you need to worry about when buying shoes. It's not about being anti-technology. It's about new content being lower quality. You can tell but it takes effort that wasn't necessary before.

mejutoco 2y ago

It is not about the technology being bad. IMO it is just a tool. The problem is that tool enables the pollution of good content because it makes so easy to spam everything. It feels like it will undo all the progress of pagerank and original google, and we will be back to altavista/internet portals days with curation.

traceroute66 2y ago

> if they use AI and you can't tell the difference Except you can tell the difference and you will always be able to tell the difference. Its the nature of the beast. Throwing a bunch of content at AI and telling it to curate it is never going to be the same as a human that intimately knows it. Its the same with GPT coding. You can always tell the difference between what the machine spat out in 20 seconds and what a knowledgable human would produce. Artifical Intelligence is by definition artificial.

andrepd 2y ago

Yeah there's literally no reason why anyone should be wary at the harmful effects of social media and of AI slop.

unconed 2y ago

Never before has there been a technology that allows one to fake competency to this degree. This is occurring at a time when some people are bemoaning the general state of knowledge, the capacity for institutions to deliver on their goals and their mission, and the overall intelligence of the people supposedly in charge. Along comes a tool that promises to take some of the hardest, most challenging tasks, like photorealistic art, or high quality code engineering, and replace them with slop. Experts look at that slop and see garbage. Only people without experience, without a trained eye, without taste in code, will think it's great. It represents a tyranny of juniors and entryists. Where "fake it until you make it" will never even reach the second part of that phrase. The main thing that AI does, is make anything that comes out of it worthless. Infinite supply with nobody curating it.