this post was submitted on 18 May 2024
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Honestly I'm so sick and tired of the creative types giving the same shitty takes on AI over and over again
"WhY Is AI MaKiNg aRt iNsTeAd oF RePlAcInG JoBs wE DoN'T WaNt"
Maybe because it's much easier to create a plug in for photoshop than it is to build and program a robot that can identify and unclog your drains?
Like it really seems like these people think AI engineers sit in meetings and go "okay, we can either free the working class from their chains or end world hunger. Which one should we pick?"
"That's boring, can we just automate erotic anime art instead?"
"Mike you're a genius"
As an engineer who works on machine learning for physical systems:
This conversation is happening, it's just not engineers who decide what's getting built. We absolutely can automate shitty jobs nobody wants, and with a better economic system we'll do it. We've been overdue to end involuntary labor for a century.
Also people keep rejecting the drain clog robot idea because they're afraid of pipe robots attacking their butts.
I'd like to say that no matter what direction we go into the future, I am definitely not okay with a pipe robot attacking my butt.
You just gotta open your mind, man
And your butt
We already have the drain clogging robots, though. They are widely used by utility companies to force the payments in places where disconnecting other utilities is illegal.
Lol
Not too long ago, everyone was saying that art was the most difficult thing for an AI to do. That's why everyone had this utopian view of machines doing all the work while humans just spent their days making art.
Art was supposed to be the insanely difficult something that only humans could do.
It still is. It mixes and matches shit together but real art is something it can't do.
Humans are the same though.
All art is derivative, nothing is truly original.
"If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe." ~Carl Sagan
As someone who has tried out a lot of open source image AIs, I would say that 'original art' is something it can't do. It can make a lot of stuff, but if you deviate too far from the topics it knows it just stops giving you what you asked for. In addition to this, most of the originality the generations do have comes only from the prompt.
This is the explanation that artists that don't work with AI use, but it's not actually how generative AI works.
thanks ! phew
No real art
I have been studying/working with AI for 15 years now. And even back then "AI" art was still a thing, just very abstract.
Any person who was talking about art being the most difficult thing for AI to do was either talking very philosophically or was just someone trying to sound smart.
Even with automating shitty jobs that no one wants, you're still getting people out of a job and the only way they have of making money. This is kind of how people reacted when Boston Dynamics showcased its warehouse robot. It seems that we need a universal basic income first, but no politicians are willing to do that at least until unpleasant jobs are automated. There's a bit of a chicken and egg problem there. And, on top of this, companies don't care that much about automating shitty jobs because the people in them get low wages, so they don't cost the company much to employ.
when we invented cars and got rid of horses in NYC, did we weep for the people whose job it was to shovel horse shit off the streets every day?
OH THOSE POOR HORSESHIT SHOVELLERS. REPLACED BY THAT HORRIBLE NEW TECHNOLOGY. Now we're burning fossil fuels and have rubber micro plastics in our food and water! We should never have had ICE cars. They took our jobs!
TOOK ER JERBS!!!
I mean, yes. The wiki page for technological unemployment has some good examples, like the mechanised loom being disastrous for artisan weavers.
The big thing is that the effects of new technology causing mass job loss are felt far more severely when the economy is in a bad state. A particular Australian news outlet bragged last year about producing "thousands" of news articles using generative AI. The outlet in question is garbage, but the journalists who lost their jobs (or were never hired) aren't living in a prosperous economic environment where starting an outlet of their own is in any way feasible.
Sure, the whole industry is far from being replaced, but if you have the misfortune of dedicated a good chunk of your life to learning a particular skill only for it to be made redundant due to new technology, you have every right to be afraid and uncertain about the future as long as the safety nets we have are completely inadequate.
I am still not shedding a tear for those poor out of work shit shovellers.
they also say this like these people wouldn't get incredibly fucked over. You're an artist, you can almost certainly find someone willing to pay for your services. A plumber who has no job? Probably not.
How many artists are you friends with? I know a fair number, and a minority are able to survive off their artwork alone.
i think that's just true of most things for most people at this point.
Regardless, i still think art is one of the few places where people will pay for nice art just to have the human experience portion of the art. Like being able to shit it out of an AI is cool, but it will never compare to a proper commission.
Also, screwing up art has less severe repercussions than, oh... almost anything else.
Edit: I'm not insulting artists, I'm insulting the competence of AI. Fuck-ups with AI art don't kill people.