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I understand artists etc. Talking about AI in a negative sense, because they don’t really get it completely, or just it’s against their self interest which mean

I understand artists etc. Talking about AI in a negative sense, because they don’t really get it completely, or just it’s against their self interest which means they find bad arguments to support their own interest subconsciously. However tech people who thinks AI is bad, or not inevitable is really hard to understand. It’s almost like Bill Gates saying “we are not interested in internet”. This is pretty much being against the internet, industrialization, print press or mobile phones. The idea that AI is anything less than paradigm shifting, or even revolutionary is weird to me. I can only say being against this is either it’s self-interest or not able to grasp it. So if I produce something art, product, game, book and if it’s good, and if it’s useful to you, fun to you, beautiful to you and you cannot really determine whether it’s AI. Does it matter? Like how does it matter? Is it because they “stole” all the art in the world. But somehow if a person “influenced” by people, ideas, art in less efficient way almost we applaud that because what else, invent the wheel again forever?

munificent 10mo ago
> Like how does it matter? If I look at a piece of art that was made by a human who earned money for making that art, then it means an actual real human out there was able to put food on their table. If I look at a piece of "art" produced by a generative AI that was trained on billions of works from people in the previous paragraph, then I have wasted some electricity even further enriching a billionaire and encouraging a world where people don't have the time to make art.
- terminalshort 10mo ago
  When you consider the inputs, human art uses much more electricity than the bit of inference that AI art takes.
  - munificent 10mo ago
    Yes, but that electricity consumption benefits an actual person. I'm so surprised that I often find myself having to explain this to AI boosters but people have more value than computers. If you throw a computer in a trash compactor, that's a trivial amount of e-waste. If you throw a living person in a trash compactor, that's a moral tragedy.
    - terminalshort 10mo ago
      The people who build, maintain, and own the datacenters. The people who work at and own the companies that make the hardware in the datacenters. The people who work to build new power plants to power the data centers. The truck drivers that transport all the supplies to build the data centers and power plants. These are all real people.
      - xvector 10mo ago
        One thing I've noticed - artists view their own job as more valuable, more sacred, more important than virtually any other person's job. They canonize themselves, and then act all shocked and offended when the rest of the world doesn't share their belief. Obviously the existence of AI is valuable enough to pay the cost of offsetting a few artists' jobs, it's not even a question to us, but to artists it's shocking and offensive.
        wasabi991011 10mo ago
        The opposite is also true, the tech world views itself as more sacred that any other part of humanity. You say it's obvious that the existence of AI is valuable to offset a few artists' jobs, but it is far from obvious. The benefits of AI are still unproven (a more hallucinatory google? a tool to help programmers make architectural errors faster? a way to make ads easier to create and sloppier?). The discussion as to whether AI is valuable is common on hackernews even, so I really don't buy the "it's obvious" claim. Furthermore, the idea that it is only offsetting a few artists' jobs is also unproven: the future is uncertain, it may devastate entire industries.
        ReliantGuyZ 10mo ago
        It's shocking and offensive to artists and to like-minded others because AI labs have based the product that is replacing them off of their existing labor with no compensation. It would be one thing to build a computerized artist that out-competes human artists on merit (arguably happening now), this has happened to dozens of professions over hundreds of years. But the fact that it was built directly off of their past labors with no offer, plan, or even consideration of making them whole for their labor in the corpus is unjust on its face. Certainly there are artists with inflated egos and senses of self-importance (many computer programmers with this condition too), but does this give us moral high ground to freely use their work? How many people is it OK to exploit to create "AI"?
acedTrex 10mo ago
> Does it matter? Like how does it matter? It matters because the amount of influence something has on you is directly attributable to the amount of human effort put into it. When that effort is removed so to is the influence. Influence does not exist independently of effort. All the people yapping about LLM keep fundamentally not grasping that concept. They think that output exists in a pure functional vacuum.
- mirekrusin 10mo ago
  Maybe they're just trying to say that robo taxis look like the future, not bike taxis?
- blastro 10mo ago
  the words themselves have influence, regardless of who spoke them.
- Cthulhu_ 10mo ago
  I don't know if I'm misinterpreting the word "influence", but low-effort internet memes have a lot more cultural impact than a lot of high-effort art. Also there's botnets, which influence political voting behaviour.
  - javier123454321 10mo ago
    > low-effort internet memes have a lot more cultural impact than a lot of high-effort art. Memes only have impact in aggregate due to emergent properties in a Mcluhanian sense. An individual meme has little to no impact compared to (some) works of art.
    - 8note 10mo ago
      said works of art dont on their own really have that impact either. its the hype oyher people make for them, fairly typically after the artist has died that makes the impact. stealing the mona lisa is what gave it its impact, rather than than brush strokes
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everdrive 10mo ago
I think we're all just sick of having everything upended and forced on us by tech companies. This is true even if it is inevitable. It occurred to me lately that modern tech and the modern internet has sort of turned into something which is evil in the way that advertising is evil. (this is aside from the fact of course that the internet is riddled with ads) Modern tech is 100% about trying to coerce you: you need to buy X, you need to be outraged by X, you must change X in your life or else fall behind. I really don't want any of this, I'm sick of it. Even if it's inevitable I have no positive feelings about the development, and no positive feelings about anyone or any company pushing it. I don't just mean AI. I mean any of this dumb trash that is constantly being pushed on everyone.
- terminalshort 10mo ago
  > you need to buy X, you need to be outraged by X Well you don't, and no tech company can force you to. > you must change X in your life or else fall behind This is not forced on you by tech companies, but by the rest of society adopting that tech because they want to. Things change as technology advances. Your feeling of entitlement that you should not have to make any change that you don't want to is ridiculous.
- fennecfoxy 10mo ago
  Well it's not really about AI is it then; it's about Millenia of human evolution and the intrinsically human behaviours we've evolved. Like greed. And apathy. Those are just some of the things that have enabled billionaires and trillionaires. Is it ever gonna change? Well it hasn't for millions of years, so no. As long as we remain human we'll always be assholes to each other.
- BloondAndDoom 10mo ago
  I honestly cannot agree more with this, while still standing behind what I said on the parent comment. As someone who's been in tech for more than 25 years, I started to hate tech because of all things that you've said. I loved what tech meant, and I hate what it became (to the point I got out of the industry). But majority of these disappear if we talk about offline models, open models. Some of that already happened and we know more of that will happen, just matter of time. In that world how any of us can say "I don't want a good amount of the knowledge in the whole fucking world in my computer, without even having an internet or paying someone, or seeing ads". I respect if your stand is just like a vegetarian says I'm ethically against eating animals", I have no argument to that, it's not my ethical line but I respect it. However behind that point, what's the legitimate argument, shall we make humanity worse just rejecting this paradigm shifting, world changing thing. Do we think about people who's going to able to read any content in the world in their language even if their language is very obscure one, that no one cares or auto translate. I mean the what AI means for humanity is huge. What tech companies and governments do with AI is horrific and scary. However government will do it nonetheless, and tech companies will be supported by these powers nonetheless. Therefore AI is not the enemy, let's aim our criticism and actions to real enemies.
nancyminusone 10mo ago
Art is not just about the physical painting or book itself, and if you think otherwise you have been and are missing the point.
- Cthulhu_ 10mo ago
  As someone else put it succinctly, there's art and then there's content. AI generated stuff is content. And not to be too dismissive of copywriters, but old Buzzfeed style listicles are content as well. Stuff that people get paid pennies per word for, stuff that a huge amount of people will bid on on a gig job site like Fiverr or what have you is content, stuff that people churn out by rote is content. Creative writing on the other hand is not content. I won't call my shitposting on HN art, but it's not content either because I put (some) thought into it and am typing it out with my real hands. And I don't have someone telling me what I should write. Or paying me for it, for that matter. Meanwhile, AI doesn't do anything on its own. It can be made to simulate doing stuff on its own (by running continuously / unlimited, or by feeding it a regular stream of prompts), but it won't suddenly go "I'm going to shitpost on HN today" unless told to.
  - BeFlatXIII 10mo ago
    …and the sting is that the majority of people employed in creative fields are hired to produce content, not art. AI makes this blatantly clear with no fallbacks to ease the mind.
- BeFlatXIII 10mo ago
  [ citation needed ]
rng-concern 10mo ago
Apologies, but I'm copy/pasting a previous reply of mine to a similar sentiment: Art is an expression of human emotion. When I hear music, I am part of those artists journey, struggles. The emotion in their songs come from their first break-up, an argument they had with someone they loved. I can understand that on a profound, shared level. Way back me and my friends played a lot of starcraft. We only played cooperatively against the AI. Until one day me and a friend decided to play against each other. I can't tell put into words how intense that was. When we were done (we played in different rooms of house), we got together, and laughed. We both knew what the other had gone through. We both said "man, that was intense!". I don't get that feeling from an amalgamation of all human thoughts/emotions/actions. One death is a tragedy. A million deaths is a statistic.
- herpdyderp 10mo ago
  On the other hand, I prefer playing video games against AI because human skill disparity almost always ruins PvP. Though really I simply prefer co-op.
  - hklgny 10mo ago
    I actually think this is the same point as who you’re responding to. If the human vs ai factor didn’t matter, you wouldn’t care if it was the human or ai on your co-op. The differences are subtle but meaningful and will always play a role in how we choose experiences
  - ericmcer 10mo ago
    There is also something personally ego-shattering about getting destroyed by another human. If I died 10 times trying to beat a boss in a game I wouldn't care much, but if someone beat me 10 times in a row at a multiplayer game I would be questioning everything.
- fennecfoxy 10mo ago
  >Art is an expression of human emotion Yet humans are the ones enacting an AI for art (of some kind). Is not therefore not art because even though a human initiated the process, the machine completed it? If you argue that, then what about kinetic sculptures, what about pendulum painting, etc? The artist sets them in motion but the rest of the actions are carried out by something nonhuman. And even in a fully autonomous sense; who are we to define art as being artefacts of human emotion? How typically human (tribalism). What's to say that an alien species doesn't exist, somewhere...out there. If that species produces something akin to art, but they never evolved the chemical reactions that we call emotions...I suppose it's not art by your definition? And what if that alien species is not carbon based? If it therefore much of a stretch to call art that an eventual AGI produces art? My definition of art is a superposition of everything and nothing is art at the same time; because art is art in the eye of the arts beholder. When I look up at the night sky; that's art, but no human emotion produced that.
ActivePattern 10mo ago
> I can only say being against this is either it’s self-interest or not able to grasp it. So we're just waving away the carbon cost, centralization of power, privacy fallout, fraud amplification, and the erosion of trust in information? These are enormous society-level effects (and there are many more to list). Dismissing AI criticism as simply ignorance says more about your own.
- deleted 10mo ago
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entaloneralie 10mo ago
I'm paying infrastructure costs for our little art community, chatbot crawling our servers and ignoring robots.txt, mining the work of our users so it can make copies, and being told that I don't get because this is such a paradigm shift, is pretty great..
phreezie 10mo ago
> Does it matter? Like how does it matter? Yes, it matters to me because art is something deeply human, and I don't want to consume art made by a machine. It doesn't matter if it's fun and beautiful, it's just that I don't want to. It's like other things in life I try to avoid, like buying sneakers made by children, or sign-up to anything Meta-owned.
- wccrawford 10mo ago
  That's pretty much what they said about photographs at first. I don't think you'll find a lot of people who argue that there's no art in photography now. Asking a machine to draw a picture and then making no changes? It's still art. There was a human designing the original input. There was human intention. And that's before they continue to use the AI tools to modify the art to better match their intention and vision.
  - deleted 10mo ago
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  - phreezie 10mo ago
    I would argue that with photography, only the tooling changed but the craft remained, while with AI the craft completely transforms in something else, in which I'm just not interested in.
baggachipz 10mo ago
The problem is that LLMs are just parrots who swoop into your house and steal everything, then claim it as theirs. That's not art, that's thievery and regurgitation. To resign oneself that this behavior is ok and inevitable is sad and cowardly. To conflate LLMs with a printing press or the internet is dishonest; yes, it's a tool, but one which degrades society in its use.
luke727 10mo ago
> The idea that AI is anything less than paradigm shifting, or even revolutionary is weird to me. Actual AI? Sure. The LLM slop we currently refer to as AI? lol, lmao even
throwmeaway820 10mo ago
> Does it matter? Like how does it matter? To me, it matters because most serious art requires time and effort to study, ponder, and analyze. The more stuff that exists in the world that superficially looks like art but is actually meaningless slop, the more likely it is that your time and effort is wasted on such empty nonsense.
aljgz 10mo ago
Big tech senior software engineer working on a major AI product speaking: I totally agree with the message in the original post. Yes, AI is going to be everywhere, and it's going to create amazing value and serious challenges, but it's essential to make it optional. This is not only for the sake of users' freedom. This is essential for companies creating products. This is minority report, until it is not. AI has many modes of failure, exploitability, and unpredictability. Some are known and many are not. We have fixes for some, and band aids for some other, but many are not even known yet. It is essential to make AI optional, to have a "dumb" alternative to everything delegated to a Gen AI. These options should be given to users, but also, and maybe even more importantly, be baked into the product as an actively maintained and tested plan-b. The general trend of cost cutting will not be aligned with this. Many products will remove, intentionally or not, the non-ai paths, and when the AI fails (not if), they regret this decision. This is not a criticisms of AI or a shift in trends toward it, it's a warning for anyone who does not take seriously, the fundamental unpredictability of generative AI
wasteofelectron 10mo ago
> I understand artists etc. Talking about AI in a negative sense, because they don’t really get it completely, or just it’s against their self interest which means they find bad arguments to support their own interest subconsciously. This is an extremely crude characterisation of what many people feel. Plenty of artists oppose copyright-ignoring generative AI and "get" it perfectly, even use it in art, but in ways that avoid the lazy gold-rush mentality we're seeing now.
- BloondAndDoom 10mo ago
  I hear you, that's not a problem of AI but a problem of copyright and other stuff. I suppose they'd enrage if an artist replicated their art too closely, rightly or wrongly. Isn't it flattery that your art is literally copied millions of times? I guess not when it doesn't pay you, which is a separate issue than AI in my opinion. Theoretically we can have worse that's only trained on public domain that'd have addressed that concern. Just like you cannot put piracy into the bag in terms of movies, tv shows you cannot put AI into the bag it came from. Bottom line, this is happening (more like happened) now let's think about what that means and find a way forward. Prime example is voice acting, I hear why voice actors are mad, if someone can steal your voice. But why not work on legal framework to sell your voice for royalties or whatever. I mean if we can get that lovely voice of yours without you spending your weeks, and still compensated fairly for it, I don't see how this is a problem. -and I know this is already happening, as it should.
Ritewut 10mo ago
Tech artist here so I hit a middle ground. > I understand artists etc. Talking about AI in a negative sense, because they don’t really get it completely, or just it’s against their self interest which means they find bad arguments to support their own interest subconsciously >But somehow if a person “influenced” by people, ideas, art in less efficient way almost we applaud that because what else, invent the wheel again forever? I understand AI perfectly fine, thanks. I just reject the illegal vacuuming up of everyones' art for corporations while things like sampling in music remain illegal. This idea that everything must be efficient comes from the bowels of Silicon Valley and should die. > However tech people who thinks AI is bad, or not inevitable is really hard to understand. It’s almost like Bill Gates saying “we are not interested in internet”. This is pretty much being against the internet, industrialization, print press or mobile phones. The idea that AI is anything less than paradigm shifting, or even revolutionary is weird to me. I can only say being against this is either it’s self-interest or not able to grasp it. Again, the problem is less the tech itself and the corporations who have control of it. Yes, I'm against corporations gobbling up everyones' data for ads and AI surveillance. I think you might be the one who doesn't understand that not everything is roses and their might be more weeds in the garden than flowers.
- BloondAndDoom 10mo ago
  It's not corps only though, AI at this point include many open models, and we'll have more of it as we go if needed. Just like how the original hacker culture was born, we have the open source movements, AI will follow it. When LLMs first gotten of, people were talking about how governments will control them, but anyone who knows the history of personal computing and hacker culture knew that's not the way things go in this world. Do I enjoy corpos making money off of anyone's work, including obvious things like literally pirating books and training their models (Meta), absolutely not. However you are blaming the wrong thing in here, it's not technology's fault it's how governments are always corrupted and side with money instead of their people. We should be lashing out to them not each other, not the people who use AI and certainly not the people who innovate and build it.
  - Ritewut 10mo ago
bigbuppo 10mo ago
When people talk about AI, they aren't talking about the algorithms and models. They're talking about the business. If you can't honestly stand up and look at the way the AI companies and related business are operating and not feel at least a little unease, you're probably Sam Altman.
dbspin 10mo ago
> I understand artists etc. Talking about AI in a negative sense, because they don’t really get it completely, or just it’s against their self interest which means they find bad arguments to support their own interest subconsciously. Running this paragraph through Gemini, returns a list of the fallacies employed, including - Attacking the Motive - "Even if the artists are motivated by self-interest, this does not automatically make their arguments about AI's negative impacts factually incorrect or "bad." Just as a poor person is more aware through direct observation and experience, of the consequences of corporate capitalism and financialisation; an artist at the coal face of the restructuring of the creative economy by massive 'IP owners' and IP Pirates (i.e.: the companies training on their creative work without permission) is likely far more in touch the the consequences of actually existing AI than a tech worker who is financially incentivised to view them benignly. > The idea that AI is anything less than paradigm shifting, or even revolutionary is weird to me. This is a strange kind of anti-naturalistic fallacy. A paradigm shift (or indeed a revolution) is not in itself a good thing. One paradigm shift that has occurred for example in recent goepolitics is the normalisation of state murder - i.e.: extrajudicial assassination in the drone war or the current US govts use of missile attacks on alleged drug traffickers. One can generate countless other negative paradigm shifts. > if I produce something art, product, game, book and if it’s good, and if it’s useful to you, fun to you, beautiful to you and you cannot really determine whether it’s AI. Does it matter? 1) You haven't produced it. 2) Such a thing - a beautiful product of AI that is not identifiably artificial - does not yet, and may never exist. 3) Scare quotes around intellectual property theft aren't an argument. We can abandon IP rights - in which case hurrah, tech companies have none - or we can in law at least, respect them. Anything else is legally and morally incoherent self justification. 4) Do you actually know anything about the history of art, any genre of it whatsoever? Because suggesting originality is impossible and 'efficiency' of production is the only form of artistic progress suggests otherwise.
- deleted 10mo ago
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dtn 10mo ago
> I understand artists etc. Talking about AI in a negative sense, because they don’t really get it completely, or just it’s against their self interest which means they find bad arguments to support their own interest subconsciously. Yeah, no. It's presumptuous to say that these are the only reasons. I don't think you understand at all. > So if I produce something art, product, game, book and if it’s good, and if it’s useful to you, fun to you, beautiful to you and you cannot really determine whether it’s AI. Does it matter? Like how does it matter? Because to me, and many others, art is a form of communication. Artists toil because they want to communicate something to the world- people consume art because they want to be spoken to. It's a two-way street of communication. Every piece created by a human carries a message, one that's sculpted by their unique life experiences and journey. AI-generated content may look nice on the surface, but fundamentally they say nothing at all. There is no message or intent behind a probabilistic algorithm putting pixels onto my screen. When a person encounters AI content masquerading as human-made, it's a betrayal of expectations. There is no two-way communication, the "person" on the other side of the phone line is a spam bot. Think about how you would feel being part of a social group where the only other "people" are LLMs. Do you think that would be fulfilling or engaging after the novelty wears off?
noobermin 10mo ago
This kind of talk I see as an extension of OP's rant. You talk as if mass theft of these LLM growing companies was inevitable. Hogwash and absolutely wrong. It isn't inevitable and it (my opinion) it shouldn't be.
intended 10mo ago
As someone who spends quite a bit of time sketching and drawing for my own satisfaction, it does matter to me when something is created using AI. I can tell whether something is a matte painting, Procreate, watercolor, or some other medium. I have enough taste to distinguish between a neophyte and an expert. I know what it means to be that good. Sure, most people couldn’t care less, and they’re happy with something that’s simply pleasant to look at. But for those people, it wouldn’t matter even if it weren’t AI-generated. So what is the point? You created something without having to get a human to do it. Yaay? Except we already have more content than we know what to do with, so what exactly are we gaining here? Efficiency? Generative AI was fed on the free work and joy of millions, only to mechanically regurgitate content without attribution. To treat creators as middlemen in the process. Yaay, efficient art. This is really what is missing in a world with more content than we have time to consume. The point of markets, of progress, is the improvement of the human condition. That is the whole point of every regulation, every contract, and every innovation. I am personally not invested in a world that is worse for humanity
- BloondAndDoom 10mo ago
  I mean we have already stopped caring about dump stock photos at the beginning for every blog post, so we already don't care about shit that's meaningless, let's it's still happening because there is an audience for it. Art can be about many things, we have a lot of tech oriented art (think about demo scene). Noe one gives a shit about art that evokes nothing for them, therefore if AI evokes nothing who cares, if it does, is it bad suddenly because it's AI? How? Actually I think AI will force good amount of mediums to logical conclusion if what you do is mediocre, and not original and AI can do same or better, then that's about you. Once you pass that threshold that's how the world cherish you as a recognized artist. Again you can be artist even 99.9% of the world thinks what you produced is absolute garbage, that doesn't change what you do and what that means to you. Again nothing to do with AI.
SkyeCA 10mo ago
>I can only say being against this is either it’s self-interest or not able to grasp it. I'm massively burnt out, what can I say? I can grasp new tech perfectly fine, but I don't want to. I quite honestly can't muster enough energy to care about "revolutionary" things anymore. If anything I resent having to deal with yet more "revolutionary" bullshit.
ike2792 10mo ago
I work at a company trying very hard to incorporate AI into pretty much everything we do. The people pushing it tend to have little understanding of the technology, while the more experienced technical people see a huge mismatch between its advertised benefits and actual results. I have yet to see any evidence that AI is "paradigm shifting" much less "revolutionary." I would be curious to hear any data or examples you have backing those claims up. In regards to why tech people should be skeptical of AI: technology exists solely to benefit humans in some way. Companies that employ technology should use it to benefit at least one human stakeholder group (employees, customers, shareholders, etc). So far what I have seen is that AI has reduced hiring (negatively impacting employees), created a lot of bad user interfaces (bad for customers), and cost way more money to companies than they are making off of it (bad to shareholders, at least in the long run). AI is an interesting and so far mildly useful technology that is being inflated by hype and causing a lot of damage in the process. Whether it becomes revolutionary like the Internet or falls by the wayside like NFTs and 3D TV's is unknowable at this point.
- nunez 10mo ago
  Case in point: subscription costs for everything going up to justify the "additional value" that AI is bringing _whether you use it or not_. This would have been an additional, more expensive, subscription tier in the past. Anecdote: Literally this morning, krisp.ai (noise cancellation software that succumbed to slop-itis two years ago and added AI notetaker and meeting summarization stuff to their product that's really difficult to turn off, which is insulting seeing how most people purchased this tool JUST FOR NOISE CANCELLING, but I digress) sent an email to their customers (me) announcing that they would no longer offer a free tier and will, instead, offer 14-day trials with all features enabled. Why? "As AI has become central to everyday work, we’ve seen that most people preferred the unlimited workflow once they tried it." This bait-and-switch era is tiring.
lbrito 10mo ago
>saying “we are not interested in internet”. This is pretty much being against the internet, industrialization, print press or mobile phones. All of those things had positive as well as negative consequences. It's not entirely unreasonable to argument against any of those, at least in part.
kazinator 10mo ago
> Does it matter? Yes. The work of art should require skills that took years to hone, and innate talent. If it was produced without such, it is a fraud; I've been deceived. But in fact I was not deceived in that sense, because the work is based on talent and skill: that of numerous unnamed, unattributed people. It is simply a low-effort plagiarism, presented as an original work.
underlipton 10mo ago
Contemporary AI is bad in the same way a Walther P.38 is bad: it's a tool designed by an objectively, ontologically evil force specifically for their evil ends. We live in a world where there are no hunting rifles, no pea-shooters for little old women to protect themselves, no sport pistols. Just the AI equivalent or a weapon built for easy murder by people whose express end is taking over the world. ...Okay, now maybe take that and dial it back a few notches of hyperbole, and you'll have a reasonable explanation for why people have issues with AI as it currently exists. People are not wrong to recognize that, just because some people use AI for benign reasons, the people and companies that have formed a cartel for the tech mainly see those benign reasons as incidental to becoming middle men in every single business and personal computing task. Of course, there is certainly a potential future where this is not the case, and AI is truly a prosocial, democratizing technology. But we're not there, and will have a hard time getting there with Zuckerburg, Altman, Nadella, and Musk at the helm.
nunez 10mo ago
> However tech people who thinks AI is bad, or not inevitable is really hard to understand. I disagree. It's really not. Popular AI is extremely powerful and capable of a lot of things. It's also being used for nefarious purposes at the cost of our privacy and, in many cases, livelihoods. > So if I produce something art, product, game, book and if it’s good, and if it’s useful to you, fun to you, beautiful to you and you cannot really determine whether it’s AI. Does it matter? Like how does it matter? We don't live in a vacuum. Every work that someone mostly generated from a prompt is a work results in work that another person (or people) couldn't generate. This was "fine" when the scope of the automation was small, as it gave people time to re-skill or apply their skills elsewhere. This is not fine when those with capital are talking about using this for EVERY POSSIBLE skill. This is even less fine when you consider how the systems that learned how to produce these works were literally trained on stolen data! Yes, there are plenty of jobs that are safe from today's AI. That doesn't stop the threat of possibility, however. I also disagree that the crop of AI art that exists today is "good." Some of what's out there is pretty novel, but a vast, vast majority of it looks extremely same-y. Same color hues, same styles (see also: the pervasive Studio Ghibli look), DEFINITELY same fonts, etc. It's also kind-of low res, so it always looks sloppy when printed on large format media. That's before the garbled text that gets left in. Horrible look IMO. AI-generated audio is worse. Soundstage is super compressed and the output sounds low-bandwidth. This works great for lo-fi (I'm sure lo-fi artists will disagree though), however. I'm sure all of this will get better as time goes on and more GPUs are sacrificed for better training.
frm88 10mo ago
I understand artists etc. Talking about AI in a negative sense, because they don’t really get it completely, or just it’s against their self interest which means they find bad arguments to support their own interest subconsciously Why do you think, depicting artists with a negative sense re. AI as dumb or self-interested and following up with dismissing their arguments as "bad" will foster an open discussion? The fact that you are quoting Gates and not anybody else makes it clear why you don't understand the techies' with anti AI arguments. This is why it matters: LLMs are a tool, currently provided for use by the general population, but it's still a tool owned by massive corporations which means it has to produce revenue and profit at some point. How would you feel, if in every AI art piece you make, a Coca-Cola bottle is auto-integrated and you cannot delete it? Pay the premium service and you get the same bottle, but a lot smaller. AI is first and foremost a software product. Product means marketing. A product, that would not exist, had the owning companies not used human-made art without either consent or compensation to make a profit for themselves. You do not enter in this equation, because you are just a potential consumer. The complete dehumanisation of all of us is why it matters.
ch_fr 10mo ago
> invent the wheel again forever? Yep that's the usual "art is a problem that must be solved, the process is an inconvenience" mindset. The CEO of SUNO AI also said something similar, "people don't enjoy making music". I mean, I understand the CEO of SUNO etc. Talking about self-actualization in a negative sense, because they don’t really get it completely, or just it’s against their business interest which means they find bad arguments to support their own interest openly.

munificent 10mo ago

> Like how does it matter? If I look at a piece of art that was made by a human who earned money for making that art, then it means an actual real human out there was able to put food on their table. If I look at a piece of "art" produced by a generative AI that was trained on billions of works from people in the previous paragraph, then I have wasted some electricity even further enriching a billionaire and encouraging a world where people don't have the time to make art.

terminalshort 10mo ago
When you consider the inputs, human art uses much more electricity than the bit of inference that AI art takes.
- munificent 10mo ago
  Yes, but that electricity consumption benefits an actual person. I'm so surprised that I often find myself having to explain this to AI boosters but people have more value than computers. If you throw a computer in a trash compactor, that's a trivial amount of e-waste. If you throw a living person in a trash compactor, that's a moral tragedy.
  - terminalshort 10mo ago
    The people who build, maintain, and own the datacenters. The people who work at and own the companies that make the hardware in the datacenters. The people who work to build new power plants to power the data centers. The truck drivers that transport all the supplies to build the data centers and power plants. These are all real people.
    - xvector 10mo ago
      One thing I've noticed - artists view their own job as more valuable, more sacred, more important than virtually any other person's job. They canonize themselves, and then act all shocked and offended when the rest of the world doesn't share their belief. Obviously the existence of AI is valuable enough to pay the cost of offsetting a few artists' jobs, it's not even a question to us, but to artists it's shocking and offensive.
      - wasabi991011 10mo ago
        The opposite is also true, the tech world views itself as more sacred that any other part of humanity. You say it's obvious that the existence of AI is valuable to offset a few artists' jobs, but it is far from obvious. The benefits of AI are still unproven (a more hallucinatory google? a tool to help programmers make architectural errors faster? a way to make ads easier to create and sloppier?). The discussion as to whether AI is valuable is common on hackernews even, so I really don't buy the "it's obvious" claim. Furthermore, the idea that it is only offsetting a few artists' jobs is also unproven: the future is uncertain, it may devastate entire industries.
      - ReliantGuyZ 10mo ago
        It's shocking and offensive to artists and to like-minded others because AI labs have based the product that is replacing them off of their existing labor with no compensation. It would be one thing to build a computerized artist that out-competes human artists on merit (arguably happening now), this has happened to dozens of professions over hundreds of years. But the fact that it was built directly off of their past labors with no offer, plan, or even consideration of making them whole for their labor in the corpus is unjust on its face. Certainly there are artists with inflated egos and senses of self-importance (many computer programmers with this condition too), but does this give us moral high ground to freely use their work? How many people is it OK to exploit to create "AI"?

acedTrex 10mo ago

> Does it matter? Like how does it matter? It matters because the amount of influence something has on you is directly attributable to the amount of human effort put into it. When that effort is removed so to is the influence. Influence does not exist independently of effort. All the people yapping about LLM keep fundamentally not grasping that concept. They think that output exists in a pure functional vacuum.

mirekrusin 10mo ago
Maybe they're just trying to say that robo taxis look like the future, not bike taxis?
blastro 10mo ago
the words themselves have influence, regardless of who spoke them.
Cthulhu_ 10mo ago
I don't know if I'm misinterpreting the word "influence", but low-effort internet memes have a lot more cultural impact than a lot of high-effort art. Also there's botnets, which influence political voting behaviour.
- javier123454321 10mo ago
  > low-effort internet memes have a lot more cultural impact than a lot of high-effort art. Memes only have impact in aggregate due to emergent properties in a Mcluhanian sense. An individual meme has little to no impact compared to (some) works of art.
  - 8note 10mo ago
    said works of art dont on their own really have that impact either. its the hype oyher people make for them, fairly typically after the artist has died that makes the impact. stealing the mona lisa is what gave it its impact, rather than than brush strokes
10mo ago

everdrive 10mo ago

I think we're all just sick of having everything upended and forced on us by tech companies. This is true even if it is inevitable. It occurred to me lately that modern tech and the modern internet has sort of turned into something which is evil in the way that advertising is evil. (this is aside from the fact of course that the internet is riddled with ads) Modern tech is 100% about trying to coerce you: you need to buy X, you need to be outraged by X, you must change X in your life or else fall behind. I really don't want any of this, I'm sick of it. Even if it's inevitable I have no positive feelings about the development, and no positive feelings about anyone or any company pushing it. I don't just mean AI. I mean any of this dumb trash that is constantly being pushed on everyone.

terminalshort 10mo ago
> you need to buy X, you need to be outraged by X Well you don't, and no tech company can force you to. > you must change X in your life or else fall behind This is not forced on you by tech companies, but by the rest of society adopting that tech because they want to. Things change as technology advances. Your feeling of entitlement that you should not have to make any change that you don't want to is ridiculous.
fennecfoxy 10mo ago
Well it's not really about AI is it then; it's about Millenia of human evolution and the intrinsically human behaviours we've evolved. Like greed. And apathy. Those are just some of the things that have enabled billionaires and trillionaires. Is it ever gonna change? Well it hasn't for millions of years, so no. As long as we remain human we'll always be assholes to each other.
BloondAndDoom 10mo ago
I honestly cannot agree more with this, while still standing behind what I said on the parent comment. As someone who's been in tech for more than 25 years, I started to hate tech because of all things that you've said. I loved what tech meant, and I hate what it became (to the point I got out of the industry). But majority of these disappear if we talk about offline models, open models. Some of that already happened and we know more of that will happen, just matter of time. In that world how any of us can say "I don't want a good amount of the knowledge in the whole fucking world in my computer, without even having an internet or paying someone, or seeing ads". I respect if your stand is just like a vegetarian says I'm ethically against eating animals", I have no argument to that, it's not my ethical line but I respect it. However behind that point, what's the legitimate argument, shall we make humanity worse just rejecting this paradigm shifting, world changing thing. Do we think about people who's going to able to read any content in the world in their language even if their language is very obscure one, that no one cares or auto translate. I mean the what AI means for humanity is huge. What tech companies and governments do with AI is horrific and scary. However government will do it nonetheless, and tech companies will be supported by these powers nonetheless. Therefore AI is not the enemy, let's aim our criticism and actions to real enemies.

nancyminusone 10mo ago

Art is not just about the physical painting or book itself, and if you think otherwise you have been and are missing the point.

Cthulhu_ 10mo ago
As someone else put it succinctly, there's art and then there's content. AI generated stuff is content. And not to be too dismissive of copywriters, but old Buzzfeed style listicles are content as well. Stuff that people get paid pennies per word for, stuff that a huge amount of people will bid on on a gig job site like Fiverr or what have you is content, stuff that people churn out by rote is content. Creative writing on the other hand is not content. I won't call my shitposting on HN art, but it's not content either because I put (some) thought into it and am typing it out with my real hands. And I don't have someone telling me what I should write. Or paying me for it, for that matter. Meanwhile, AI doesn't do anything on its own. It can be made to simulate doing stuff on its own (by running continuously / unlimited, or by feeding it a regular stream of prompts), but it won't suddenly go "I'm going to shitpost on HN today" unless told to.
- BeFlatXIII 10mo ago
  …and the sting is that the majority of people employed in creative fields are hired to produce content, not art. AI makes this blatantly clear with no fallbacks to ease the mind.
BeFlatXIII 10mo ago
[ citation needed ]

rng-concern 10mo ago

Apologies, but I'm copy/pasting a previous reply of mine to a similar sentiment: Art is an expression of human emotion. When I hear music, I am part of those artists journey, struggles. The emotion in their songs come from their first break-up, an argument they had with someone they loved. I can understand that on a profound, shared level. Way back me and my friends played a lot of starcraft. We only played cooperatively against the AI. Until one day me and a friend decided to play against each other. I can't tell put into words how intense that was. When we were done (we played in different rooms of house), we got together, and laughed. We both knew what the other had gone through. We both said "man, that was intense!". I don't get that feeling from an amalgamation of all human thoughts/emotions/actions. One death is a tragedy. A million deaths is a statistic.

herpdyderp 10mo ago
On the other hand, I prefer playing video games against AI because human skill disparity almost always ruins PvP. Though really I simply prefer co-op.
- hklgny 10mo ago
  I actually think this is the same point as who you’re responding to. If the human vs ai factor didn’t matter, you wouldn’t care if it was the human or ai on your co-op. The differences are subtle but meaningful and will always play a role in how we choose experiences
- ericmcer 10mo ago
  There is also something personally ego-shattering about getting destroyed by another human. If I died 10 times trying to beat a boss in a game I wouldn't care much, but if someone beat me 10 times in a row at a multiplayer game I would be questioning everything.
fennecfoxy 10mo ago
>Art is an expression of human emotion Yet humans are the ones enacting an AI for art (of some kind). Is not therefore not art because even though a human initiated the process, the machine completed it? If you argue that, then what about kinetic sculptures, what about pendulum painting, etc? The artist sets them in motion but the rest of the actions are carried out by something nonhuman. And even in a fully autonomous sense; who are we to define art as being artefacts of human emotion? How typically human (tribalism). What's to say that an alien species doesn't exist, somewhere...out there. If that species produces something akin to art, but they never evolved the chemical reactions that we call emotions...I suppose it's not art by your definition? And what if that alien species is not carbon based? If it therefore much of a stretch to call art that an eventual AGI produces art? My definition of art is a superposition of everything and nothing is art at the same time; because art is art in the eye of the arts beholder. When I look up at the night sky; that's art, but no human emotion produced that.

ActivePattern 10mo ago

> I can only say being against this is either it’s self-interest or not able to grasp it. So we're just waving away the carbon cost, centralization of power, privacy fallout, fraud amplification, and the erosion of trust in information? These are enormous society-level effects (and there are many more to list). Dismissing AI criticism as simply ignorance says more about your own.

deleted 10mo ago
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entaloneralie 10mo ago

I'm paying infrastructure costs for our little art community, chatbot crawling our servers and ignoring robots.txt, mining the work of our users so it can make copies, and being told that I don't get because this is such a paradigm shift, is pretty great..

phreezie 10mo ago

> Does it matter? Like how does it matter? Yes, it matters to me because art is something deeply human, and I don't want to consume art made by a machine. It doesn't matter if it's fun and beautiful, it's just that I don't want to. It's like other things in life I try to avoid, like buying sneakers made by children, or sign-up to anything Meta-owned.

wccrawford 10mo ago
That's pretty much what they said about photographs at first. I don't think you'll find a lot of people who argue that there's no art in photography now. Asking a machine to draw a picture and then making no changes? It's still art. There was a human designing the original input. There was human intention. And that's before they continue to use the AI tools to modify the art to better match their intention and vision.
- deleted 10mo ago
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- phreezie 10mo ago
  I would argue that with photography, only the tooling changed but the craft remained, while with AI the craft completely transforms in something else, in which I'm just not interested in.

baggachipz 10mo ago

The problem is that LLMs are just parrots who swoop into your house and steal everything, then claim it as theirs. That's not art, that's thievery and regurgitation. To resign oneself that this behavior is ok and inevitable is sad and cowardly. To conflate LLMs with a printing press or the internet is dishonest; yes, it's a tool, but one which degrades society in its use.

luke727 10mo ago

> The idea that AI is anything less than paradigm shifting, or even revolutionary is weird to me. Actual AI? Sure. The LLM slop we currently refer to as AI? lol, lmao even

throwmeaway820 10mo ago

> Does it matter? Like how does it matter? To me, it matters because most serious art requires time and effort to study, ponder, and analyze. The more stuff that exists in the world that superficially looks like art but is actually meaningless slop, the more likely it is that your time and effort is wasted on such empty nonsense.

aljgz 10mo ago

Big tech senior software engineer working on a major AI product speaking: I totally agree with the message in the original post. Yes, AI is going to be everywhere, and it's going to create amazing value and serious challenges, but it's essential to make it optional. This is not only for the sake of users' freedom. This is essential for companies creating products. This is minority report, until it is not. AI has many modes of failure, exploitability, and unpredictability. Some are known and many are not. We have fixes for some, and band aids for some other, but many are not even known yet. It is essential to make AI optional, to have a "dumb" alternative to everything delegated to a Gen AI. These options should be given to users, but also, and maybe even more importantly, be baked into the product as an actively maintained and tested plan-b. The general trend of cost cutting will not be aligned with this. Many products will remove, intentionally or not, the non-ai paths, and when the AI fails (not if), they regret this decision. This is not a criticisms of AI or a shift in trends toward it, it's a warning for anyone who does not take seriously, the fundamental unpredictability of generative AI

wasteofelectron 10mo ago

> I understand artists etc. Talking about AI in a negative sense, because they don’t really get it completely, or just it’s against their self interest which means they find bad arguments to support their own interest subconsciously. This is an extremely crude characterisation of what many people feel. Plenty of artists oppose copyright-ignoring generative AI and "get" it perfectly, even use it in art, but in ways that avoid the lazy gold-rush mentality we're seeing now.

BloondAndDoom 10mo ago
I hear you, that's not a problem of AI but a problem of copyright and other stuff. I suppose they'd enrage if an artist replicated their art too closely, rightly or wrongly. Isn't it flattery that your art is literally copied millions of times? I guess not when it doesn't pay you, which is a separate issue than AI in my opinion. Theoretically we can have worse that's only trained on public domain that'd have addressed that concern. Just like you cannot put piracy into the bag in terms of movies, tv shows you cannot put AI into the bag it came from. Bottom line, this is happening (more like happened) now let's think about what that means and find a way forward. Prime example is voice acting, I hear why voice actors are mad, if someone can steal your voice. But why not work on legal framework to sell your voice for royalties or whatever. I mean if we can get that lovely voice of yours without you spending your weeks, and still compensated fairly for it, I don't see how this is a problem. -and I know this is already happening, as it should.

Ritewut 10mo ago

Tech artist here so I hit a middle ground. > I understand artists etc. Talking about AI in a negative sense, because they don’t really get it completely, or just it’s against their self interest which means they find bad arguments to support their own interest subconsciously >But somehow if a person “influenced” by people, ideas, art in less efficient way almost we applaud that because what else, invent the wheel again forever? I understand AI perfectly fine, thanks. I just reject the illegal vacuuming up of everyones' art for corporations while things like sampling in music remain illegal. This idea that everything must be efficient comes from the bowels of Silicon Valley and should die. > However tech people who thinks AI is bad, or not inevitable is really hard to understand. It’s almost like Bill Gates saying “we are not interested in internet”. This is pretty much being against the internet, industrialization, print press or mobile phones. The idea that AI is anything less than paradigm shifting, or even revolutionary is weird to me. I can only say being against this is either it’s self-interest or not able to grasp it. Again, the problem is less the tech itself and the corporations who have control of it. Yes, I'm against corporations gobbling up everyones' data for ads and AI surveillance. I think you might be the one who doesn't understand that not everything is roses and their might be more weeds in the garden than flowers.

BloondAndDoom 10mo ago
It's not corps only though, AI at this point include many open models, and we'll have more of it as we go if needed. Just like how the original hacker culture was born, we have the open source movements, AI will follow it. When LLMs first gotten of, people were talking about how governments will control them, but anyone who knows the history of personal computing and hacker culture knew that's not the way things go in this world. Do I enjoy corpos making money off of anyone's work, including obvious things like literally pirating books and training their models (Meta), absolutely not. However you are blaming the wrong thing in here, it's not technology's fault it's how governments are always corrupted and side with money instead of their people. We should be lashing out to them not each other, not the people who use AI and certainly not the people who innovate and build it.
- Ritewut 10mo ago

bigbuppo 10mo ago

When people talk about AI, they aren't talking about the algorithms and models. They're talking about the business. If you can't honestly stand up and look at the way the AI companies and related business are operating and not feel at least a little unease, you're probably Sam Altman.

dbspin 10mo ago

> I understand artists etc. Talking about AI in a negative sense, because they don’t really get it completely, or just it’s against their self interest which means they find bad arguments to support their own interest subconsciously. Running this paragraph through Gemini, returns a list of the fallacies employed, including - Attacking the Motive - "Even if the artists are motivated by self-interest, this does not automatically make their arguments about AI's negative impacts factually incorrect or "bad." Just as a poor person is more aware through direct observation and experience, of the consequences of corporate capitalism and financialisation; an artist at the coal face of the restructuring of the creative economy by massive 'IP owners' and IP Pirates (i.e.: the companies training on their creative work without permission) is likely far more in touch the the consequences of actually existing AI than a tech worker who is financially incentivised to view them benignly. > The idea that AI is anything less than paradigm shifting, or even revolutionary is weird to me. This is a strange kind of anti-naturalistic fallacy. A paradigm shift (or indeed a revolution) is not in itself a good thing. One paradigm shift that has occurred for example in recent goepolitics is the normalisation of state murder - i.e.: extrajudicial assassination in the drone war or the current US govts use of missile attacks on alleged drug traffickers. One can generate countless other negative paradigm shifts. > if I produce something art, product, game, book and if it’s good, and if it’s useful to you, fun to you, beautiful to you and you cannot really determine whether it’s AI. Does it matter? 1) You haven't produced it. 2) Such a thing - a beautiful product of AI that is not identifiably artificial - does not yet, and may never exist. 3) Scare quotes around intellectual property theft aren't an argument. We can abandon IP rights - in which case hurrah, tech companies have none - or we can in law at least, respect them. Anything else is legally and morally incoherent self justification. 4) Do you actually know anything about the history of art, any genre of it whatsoever? Because suggesting originality is impossible and 'efficiency' of production is the only form of artistic progress suggests otherwise.

deleted 10mo ago
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dtn 10mo ago

> I understand artists etc. Talking about AI in a negative sense, because they don’t really get it completely, or just it’s against their self interest which means they find bad arguments to support their own interest subconsciously. Yeah, no. It's presumptuous to say that these are the only reasons. I don't think you understand at all. > So if I produce something art, product, game, book and if it’s good, and if it’s useful to you, fun to you, beautiful to you and you cannot really determine whether it’s AI. Does it matter? Like how does it matter? Because to me, and many others, art is a form of communication. Artists toil because they want to communicate something to the world- people consume art because they want to be spoken to. It's a two-way street of communication. Every piece created by a human carries a message, one that's sculpted by their unique life experiences and journey. AI-generated content may look nice on the surface, but fundamentally they say nothing at all. There is no message or intent behind a probabilistic algorithm putting pixels onto my screen. When a person encounters AI content masquerading as human-made, it's a betrayal of expectations. There is no two-way communication, the "person" on the other side of the phone line is a spam bot. Think about how you would feel being part of a social group where the only other "people" are LLMs. Do you think that would be fulfilling or engaging after the novelty wears off?

noobermin 10mo ago

This kind of talk I see as an extension of OP's rant. You talk as if mass theft of these LLM growing companies was inevitable. Hogwash and absolutely wrong. It isn't inevitable and it (my opinion) it shouldn't be.

intended 10mo ago

As someone who spends quite a bit of time sketching and drawing for my own satisfaction, it does matter to me when something is created using AI. I can tell whether something is a matte painting, Procreate, watercolor, or some other medium. I have enough taste to distinguish between a neophyte and an expert. I know what it means to be that good. Sure, most people couldn’t care less, and they’re happy with something that’s simply pleasant to look at. But for those people, it wouldn’t matter even if it weren’t AI-generated. So what is the point? You created something without having to get a human to do it. Yaay? Except we already have more content than we know what to do with, so what exactly are we gaining here? Efficiency? Generative AI was fed on the free work and joy of millions, only to mechanically regurgitate content without attribution. To treat creators as middlemen in the process. Yaay, efficient art. This is really what is missing in a world with more content than we have time to consume. The point of markets, of progress, is the improvement of the human condition. That is the whole point of every regulation, every contract, and every innovation. I am personally not invested in a world that is worse for humanity

BloondAndDoom 10mo ago
I mean we have already stopped caring about dump stock photos at the beginning for every blog post, so we already don't care about shit that's meaningless, let's it's still happening because there is an audience for it. Art can be about many things, we have a lot of tech oriented art (think about demo scene). Noe one gives a shit about art that evokes nothing for them, therefore if AI evokes nothing who cares, if it does, is it bad suddenly because it's AI? How? Actually I think AI will force good amount of mediums to logical conclusion if what you do is mediocre, and not original and AI can do same or better, then that's about you. Once you pass that threshold that's how the world cherish you as a recognized artist. Again you can be artist even 99.9% of the world thinks what you produced is absolute garbage, that doesn't change what you do and what that means to you. Again nothing to do with AI.

SkyeCA 10mo ago

>I can only say being against this is either it’s self-interest or not able to grasp it. I'm massively burnt out, what can I say? I can grasp new tech perfectly fine, but I don't want to. I quite honestly can't muster enough energy to care about "revolutionary" things anymore. If anything I resent having to deal with yet more "revolutionary" bullshit.

ike2792 10mo ago

I work at a company trying very hard to incorporate AI into pretty much everything we do. The people pushing it tend to have little understanding of the technology, while the more experienced technical people see a huge mismatch between its advertised benefits and actual results. I have yet to see any evidence that AI is "paradigm shifting" much less "revolutionary." I would be curious to hear any data or examples you have backing those claims up. In regards to why tech people should be skeptical of AI: technology exists solely to benefit humans in some way. Companies that employ technology should use it to benefit at least one human stakeholder group (employees, customers, shareholders, etc). So far what I have seen is that AI has reduced hiring (negatively impacting employees), created a lot of bad user interfaces (bad for customers), and cost way more money to companies than they are making off of it (bad to shareholders, at least in the long run). AI is an interesting and so far mildly useful technology that is being inflated by hype and causing a lot of damage in the process. Whether it becomes revolutionary like the Internet or falls by the wayside like NFTs and 3D TV's is unknowable at this point.

nunez 10mo ago
Case in point: subscription costs for everything going up to justify the "additional value" that AI is bringing _whether you use it or not_. This would have been an additional, more expensive, subscription tier in the past. Anecdote: Literally this morning, krisp.ai (noise cancellation software that succumbed to slop-itis two years ago and added AI notetaker and meeting summarization stuff to their product that's really difficult to turn off, which is insulting seeing how most people purchased this tool JUST FOR NOISE CANCELLING, but I digress) sent an email to their customers (me) announcing that they would no longer offer a free tier and will, instead, offer 14-day trials with all features enabled. Why? "As AI has become central to everyday work, we’ve seen that most people preferred the unlimited workflow once they tried it." This bait-and-switch era is tiring.

lbrito 10mo ago

>saying “we are not interested in internet”. This is pretty much being against the internet, industrialization, print press or mobile phones. All of those things had positive as well as negative consequences. It's not entirely unreasonable to argument against any of those, at least in part.

kazinator 10mo ago

> Does it matter? Yes. The work of art should require skills that took years to hone, and innate talent. If it was produced without such, it is a fraud; I've been deceived. But in fact I was not deceived in that sense, because the work is based on talent and skill: that of numerous unnamed, unattributed people. It is simply a low-effort plagiarism, presented as an original work.

underlipton 10mo ago

Contemporary AI is bad in the same way a Walther P.38 is bad: it's a tool designed by an objectively, ontologically evil force specifically for their evil ends. We live in a world where there are no hunting rifles, no pea-shooters for little old women to protect themselves, no sport pistols. Just the AI equivalent or a weapon built for easy murder by people whose express end is taking over the world. ...Okay, now maybe take that and dial it back a few notches of hyperbole, and you'll have a reasonable explanation for why people have issues with AI as it currently exists. People are not wrong to recognize that, just because some people use AI for benign reasons, the people and companies that have formed a cartel for the tech mainly see those benign reasons as incidental to becoming middle men in every single business and personal computing task. Of course, there is certainly a potential future where this is not the case, and AI is truly a prosocial, democratizing technology. But we're not there, and will have a hard time getting there with Zuckerburg, Altman, Nadella, and Musk at the helm.

nunez 10mo ago

> However tech people who thinks AI is bad, or not inevitable is really hard to understand. I disagree. It's really not. Popular AI is extremely powerful and capable of a lot of things. It's also being used for nefarious purposes at the cost of our privacy and, in many cases, livelihoods. > So if I produce something art, product, game, book and if it’s good, and if it’s useful to you, fun to you, beautiful to you and you cannot really determine whether it’s AI. Does it matter? Like how does it matter? We don't live in a vacuum. Every work that someone mostly generated from a prompt is a work results in work that another person (or people) couldn't generate. This was "fine" when the scope of the automation was small, as it gave people time to re-skill or apply their skills elsewhere. This is not fine when those with capital are talking about using this for EVERY POSSIBLE skill. This is even less fine when you consider how the systems that learned how to produce these works were literally trained on stolen data! Yes, there are plenty of jobs that are safe from today's AI. That doesn't stop the threat of possibility, however. I also disagree that the crop of AI art that exists today is "good." Some of what's out there is pretty novel, but a vast, vast majority of it looks extremely same-y. Same color hues, same styles (see also: the pervasive Studio Ghibli look), DEFINITELY same fonts, etc. It's also kind-of low res, so it always looks sloppy when printed on large format media. That's before the garbled text that gets left in. Horrible look IMO. AI-generated audio is worse. Soundstage is super compressed and the output sounds low-bandwidth. This works great for lo-fi (I'm sure lo-fi artists will disagree though), however. I'm sure all of this will get better as time goes on and more GPUs are sacrificed for better training.

frm88 10mo ago

I understand artists etc. Talking about AI in a negative sense, because they don’t really get it completely, or just it’s against their self interest which means they find bad arguments to support their own interest subconsciously Why do you think, depicting artists with a negative sense re. AI as dumb or self-interested and following up with dismissing their arguments as "bad" will foster an open discussion? The fact that you are quoting Gates and not anybody else makes it clear why you don't understand the techies' with anti AI arguments. This is why it matters: LLMs are a tool, currently provided for use by the general population, but it's still a tool owned by massive corporations which means it has to produce revenue and profit at some point. How would you feel, if in every AI art piece you make, a Coca-Cola bottle is auto-integrated and you cannot delete it? Pay the premium service and you get the same bottle, but a lot smaller. AI is first and foremost a software product. Product means marketing. A product, that would not exist, had the owning companies not used human-made art without either consent or compensation to make a profit for themselves. You do not enter in this equation, because you are just a potential consumer. The complete dehumanisation of all of us is why it matters.

ch_fr 10mo ago

> invent the wheel again forever? Yep that's the usual "art is a problem that must be solved, the process is an inconvenience" mindset. The CEO of SUNO AI also said something similar, "people don't enjoy making music". I mean, I understand the CEO of SUNO etc. Talking about self-actualization in a negative sense, because they don’t really get it completely, or just it’s against their business interest which means they find bad arguments to support their own interest openly.