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An image of an archeologist adventurer who wears a hat and uses a bullwhip

(theaiunderwriter.substack.com)
1503 points participant3 | 5 comments | 03 Apr 25 17:55 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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mlsu ◴[03 Apr 25 21:55 UTC] No.43575950[source]▶
I was really hoping that the conversation around AI art would at least be partially centered on the perhaps now dated "2008 pirate party" idea that intellectual property, the royalty system, the draconian copyright laws that we have today are deeply silly, rooted in a fiction, and used over and over again, primarily by the rich and powerful, to stifle original ideas and hold back cultural innovation.

Unfortunately, it's just the opposite. It seems most people have fully assimilated the idea that information itself must be entirely subsumed into an oppressive, proprietary, commercial apparatus. That Disney Corp can prevent you from viewing some collection of pixels, because THEY own it, and they know better than you do about the culture and communication that you are and are not allowed to experience.

It's just baffling. If they could, Disney would scan your brain to charge you a nickel every time you thought of Mickey Mouse.

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eaglelamp ◴[03 Apr 25 23:24 UTC] No.43576663[source]▶
If we are going to have a general discussion about copyright reform at a national level, I'm all for it. If we are going to let billion dollar corporations break the law to make even more money and invent legal fictions after the fact to protect them, I'm completely against it.

Training a model is not equivalent to training a human. Freedom of information for a mountain of graphics cards in a privately owned data center is not the same as freedom of information for flesh and blood human beings.

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r3trohack3r ◴[03 Apr 25 23:51 UTC] No.43576850[source]▶
You’re setting court precedent that will apply equally to OpenAI as it does to the llama.cpp and stable diffusion models running on your own graphics card.
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munificent ◴[04 Apr 25 00:27 UTC] No.43577064[source]▶
SGTM.

Honestly, seriously. Imagine some weird Thanos showed up, snapped his fingers and every single bit of generative AI software/models/papers/etc. were wiped from the Earth forever.

Would that world be measurably worse in any way in terms of meaningful satisfying lives for people? Yes, you might have to hand draw (poorly) your D&D character.

But if you wanted to read a story, or look at an image, you'd have to actually connect with a human who made that thing. That human would in turn have an audience for people to experience the thing they made.

Was that world so bad?

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dcow ◴[04 Apr 25 00:36 UTC] No.43577131[source]▶
Obviously the former status quo wasn’t that bad. But the opposite is also true, AI democratizes access to pop culture. So now when I connect with a human it’s not to share memes, it’s higher order. IOW we can spend more time playing D&D because we didn't have to draw our characters.
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munificent ◴[04 Apr 25 00:40 UTC] No.43577165{3}[source]▶
> AI democratizes access to pop culture.

Pop culture was already democratized. That's literally what makes it popular culture.

> So now when I connect with a human it’s not to share memes, it’s higher order.

I suspect that improving the image quality of the memes does not measurably improve the quality of the human connection here.

> IOW we can spend more time playing D&D because we didn't have to draw our characters.

You never had to draw your characters. You can just play and use your imagination. Why would we let LLMs do our dreaming for us?

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dcow ◴[04 Apr 25 00:51 UTC] No.43577219{4}[source]▶
It's a rhetorical example. Suppose you need to create an avatar of your character. Why does it follow that it's not beneficial to have an AI help generate the avatar?

You're responding to the specific example, not the general argument. Unless your counter is that whatever humanity is doing that AI is helping is probably stupid and shouldn't be done anyway.

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1. munificent ◴[04 Apr 25 01:10 UTC] No.43577325{5}[source]▶
> Unless your counter is that whatever humanity is doing that AI is helping is probably stupid and shouldn't be done anyway.

No, my counter is that whatever generative AI is doing is worth doing by humans but not worth doing by machines.

As the joke comic says: We thought technology was going to automate running errands so that we had time to make art, but instead it automates making art while we all have to be gig workers running errands.

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2. satvikpendem ◴[05 Apr 25 04:13 UTC] No.43590664[source]▶
> No, my counter is that whatever generative AI is doing is worth doing by humans but not worth doing by machines.

There is no basis to this claim, why is one worth doing by a biological machine but not a silicon one? People cling too highly to biological exceptionalism not understanding that one arose due to certain processes in the world and universe where somewhere else we might have been silicon beings all along. That is to say, people have huge amounts of cognitive dissonance thinking that they are actually simply machines of a biological variety.

> As the joke comic says: We thought technology was going to automate running errands so that we had time to make art, but instead it automates making art while we all have to be gig workers running errands.

Hardware is harder than software. Soon gig workers will be automated by AI too. I have heard this refrain a thousand times but it never ceases to make me think that it's in a specific time and place of the early 21 century. In the 22nd century, given such progress, we might talk of these discussions the same way artists and weavers did in (and of) the early 20th.

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3. munificent ◴[07 Apr 25 17:37 UTC] No.43613952[source]▶
> There is no basis to this claim, why is one worth doing by a biological machine but not a silicon one?

You're entitled to your own value system, but in mine, humans are worth infinitely more than computers.

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4. dcow ◴[07 Apr 25 20:35 UTC] No.43615677{3}[source]▶
Same in mine. But mine isn’t predicated on the irreplaceability of human labor to derive value from human life. If we automated literally everything and we could all just live off UBI and drink wine and look at the stars all day, humans would still be intrinsically valuable. Or, the ability of a machine to generate art good enough to serve as a fun D&D avatar does not devalue a human doing the same. You may be attaching a… market value… to humans by proxy of their capital output. Very capitalist of you. If you look at things that way, the value of a human life has been trending toward zero and will continue. So I prefer not to hold a belief system that only values humans by the value of their labor. Therefore I am not bothered when we invent a new tool that might compete with human labor.
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5. munificent ◴[08 Apr 25 17:32 UTC] No.43624331{4}[source]▶
You are interpreting "labor" in a purely economic sense, but that's choice of framing.

What I'm getting at is that our actions are rewarding and meaningful when we put effort into them and they provide value (in the general, not economic sense) to others.

If I spend a day drawing you a picture, you get a warm fuzzy feeling because of how much I must care to sacrifice one of my finite days on Earth to make a thing just for you. If I spend ten seconds writing a prompt and an AI spits out an objectively prettier picture, it's still less meaningful and less valuable in every sense that matters. I gave up nothing to produce it and you gained little by having it.

> Therefore I am not bothered when we invent a new tool that might compete with human labor.

This is likely a luxury you have by being economically stable enough to not have to worry about how you're going to put food in your stomach today. While it's fun to imagine idyllic post-capitalist societies, artists today need to be able to afford shelter and healthcare. Generative AI will destroy their livelihood.

That may be a sacrifice you are willing to make (since it likely isn't coming to take your job), but I care too much about other people to be delighted by that.