This has been my experience the last 2 years as well
In my local area’s subreddit, people are entirely dismissive of AI and will keep moving the goalpost about why you cant use it. It hallucinates! (But you can fact check it and I wrote that disclaimer) It warms the planet more than other research! (…. you’re not distinguishing between self hosted and data centers….)
But its Los Angeles and writers and actors and VFX are all getting replaced, so they have to keep saying ignorant stuff to sound relevant
No. You have to ask yourself why it hasn’t been used in this capacity more, and why so many billions are spent on pursuing crushing the arts and crafts into oblivion.
Given the published and (and currently expressing) philosophies of the primary investors and shareholders of those companies, it is no longer any mystery why!
AI does best in places where there is plenty of data for training and where messing up when used is only a mild problem (and where the problem is quick and low cost to identify). Art fits both of these categories.
Healthcare data does not. What data does exist is much more private and extracting data from research papers is much harder than extracting data from images. When something goes wrong, the impact is much more negative if it is being used in any serious capacity.
This is also why AI is just beginning to crack into short video and does nothing for long form videos yet, and even less on games, despite these falling in arts and crafts.
And so many tech bros misunderstand. Its not a problem with the tools and its not the money. Artists have extensive experience going hungry. So have I. I doubt many tech bros and technocrats know what starving feels like. Real hunger. But I digress.
Its how the tech is being wielded. Its not just: can the robot imitate a nice picture. Its: artists are deprecated.
And it mistakes artifice and artifact for art as a practice, and so conveniently cannot process any information about the subject beyond that final conclusion.
None of this is hidden or arcane stuff, but effort has to be made to learn new perspectives… kind of like how the world has readily adopted new technology.
What should be a reciprocal exchange is rapidly turning one sided and tyrannical.
Woe be the future where any such single-minded ignorance takes absolute control (as is the current missive emerging out of SV at present)
> See Yarvin’s missive as adopted by so many VC’s in the current political plays. The way the tech is being wielded is all about power. Forced power over others.
What do you mean it's no longer a mystery? I don't understand. Wouldn't the investors and shareholders want more usage of their products, almost regardless of the subject matter?
Can you elaborate? I haven’t seen any of these philosophies that are apparently about crushing art.
As a part time artist, AI has been great for me. I’m creating more, and spending less time on scaffolding (I am a middling-at-best programmer). I’m feeling empowered, not crushed.
This happens every cycle. I helped build deviantart, I went as cohort 1 to the first pure digital film program in Canada 20 years ago now, I have 3 emmy awards. I've heard this so many times, it's the continuation of humans clinging to the tooling aspect of the work. I'm grateful my father always taught me "a maker never blames their tools" - and I think that is what this at the end boils down to, the analogue people were so tied to the tool they couldn't imagine their art without it, so instead the new digital film tools made the art less art somehow. Heck for some period of time the film societies when we had salons would not accept digital work, even into the more creative categories.
Thanks for articulating that. “Mistaking the tools for the art” is exactly what’s going on. I’m old, so for me it echos the days when “real musicians” had contempt for those kids with their synthesizers and sequencers.
How can you say something like this as Meta steals 82gb of text from the worlds writers and producers of knowledge without compensation, on the sly, to build their system?
Its the thieving and the disrespect!
This does not bode well for the future. If you think it stops at the artists you have so much contempt for, think again.
When I was in art school I walked into the studio and this dude was doing his thing... his thing was re-creating this image he found in some book. I thought "what a fucking cheater" and shook my head. Well I came second to him on that assignment, so I went to the dean of our art school and I said "Chris committed plagiarism and his work should be removed from the salon" and explained - Dean looked at me like I was crazy and said "the most creative things simply hide the source of their creativity, good artists know that, get out of my office". I don't know what your definition of art is, but after art school I realized it's simply "anything that isn't science"
This is exactly about tools, tools and the fact that people with no artistic ability have relied on them heavily, it's not my problem or the problem of OpenAI that people are just bad at art, but people are indeed bad at art, and it's always people who blabber on about the tools.
Oh yeah, and while I'm at it, I don't believe in copyright, so there is that too.
But doesn't economics matter somewhat? You don't seem to acknowledge supply/demand; just talented and untalented craftsmen which you assume exist in eternal ratio that cannot fluctaute with supply and demand or market forces. Reality encompases both money and art.
The reality is that most artists need to engage with economic situations to survive and continue making art. I would say I think it's important to recognize "art" is wide and means lots of things to lots of people. For example I would put gfx in a "creative science" more than a "creative art" - for example. Never the less, the reality is that most artists need to engage with economic realities to survive and continue making art, if you blame the tool, you're not a very good artist. you raise a good point about supply and demand, it's something I've seen reshape creative fields multiple times over my career, I've consistently found that the artists who thrive are the ones who adapt their tools while maintaining their creative vision, rather than letting the tools define their art.
I actually specifically did well-ish in art also because I invented my own tools, if you look at the Cinevate Brevis, those ideas came out of my program. The image was soft, it leaked light, you got CA like crazy, awful tool, but I managed to create some amazing images with it and people really loved my art, I never cared that the existing tools didn't cater to my art, I didn't care my tool sucked, my art was my art, it's art! I sold a lot of commercial work too using that tool, but to me that wasn't my art, maybe I'm an artist doing that work, but that wasn't my art. Jeff didn't say well I can't make my art fuck the existing tools, he made his own. But I was never going to be economically comfortable doing art, I was never a good enough artist, hence I switched to tech. Being an artist is hard, and just because someone fancy themself an artist, doesn't mean they are.
Stipulating that Meta are terrible people, etc, etc… so what? What bearing does their character have on whether AI in general — not theirs — can be a tool for creating art? Or whether their “philosophy” is about “crushing art”?
Are you over-generalizing, something like “meta did something wrong to build AI, therefore AI is bad, therefore nobody can ever do anything good with AI”?
The reason for both things is that the best models perform, at best, on the level of a recent graduate.
When would you hire a recent graduate in either role, if you could afford better?
These models are essentially the same models for both science and art, and it was a surprise to everyone that GPT-3 was able to turn into ChatGPT, or that Stable Diffusion was able to generalise so well with relatively few issues (even despite the occasional Cronenberg anatomy study). The flaws with the LLMs that prevent accurate science are the same flaws that cause object impermanence in written stories; the flaws that prevent image and video models from being physically plausible are the same flaws — incorrect world model — that cause them to be wrong about weather forecasts, chemistry, etc.
In both cases, increasing quality of AI raises the metaphorical water level, and in this example rising tides don't lift all boats, but instead drown (the careers of) people who can't swim. I don't have a fix for that, and I'm deeply skeptical that any of the suggestions from the AI firms will work — they're not economists, and even if they were (or even if they hired loads), if the AI companies are right, this change will be at least as big as the industrial revolution, which upended old economic models.
Unfortunately sometimes even experienced people make mistakes that a recent graduate should not do (but in practice sometimes does). AI models can help avoid mistakes that in hindsight were obvious and should never have happened.
Blah blah. Don't group me with you. You're the type of person who would support making self fueling illegal because what will the fuel boy do then...
I welcome the day ai can take my job.
In my local area’s subreddit, people are entirely dismissive of AI and will keep moving the goalpost about why you cant use it. It hallucinates! (But you can fact check it and I wrote that disclaimer) It warms the planet more than other research! (…. you’re not distinguishing between self hosted and data centers….)
But its Los Angeles and writers and actors and VFX are all getting replaced, so they have to keep saying ignorant stuff to sound relevant