It’s crazy to watch the insane level of outrage that the existence and growth of AI produced content stirs up in some people when it seems obvious that the development of AI is unstoppable. It’s like watching people get angry at the first steam engines that appeared. I genuinely worry about their mental health over the next few years as they realise that being angry on the internet isn’t going to slow anything down at all.
It’s like watching people get angry at the first steam engines that appeared.
It is nothing of the sort. Steam engines served mostly useful purposes. AI mostly does not (at least not in an open world environment, it has excellent purposes in closed environments like medicine and science). The fact that it is indeed unstoppable does not make the outrage of its infestation of everything on the internet less, quite contrary.
I genuinely worry about their mental health over the next few years
I guess someone with their head in the sand, their fingers in their ears and screaming at the top of their lungs like you, will have an excellent mental health.
Maybe if it wasn’t proliferating into every app and service whether useful or not I wouldn’t hate the living crap out of it. AI has it’s place, I do use it both at work and at home but I don’t need it every where.
Also one of the first victims was customer service pages, and most of them are crap.
It’s a paradigm shift and people always behave in unpredictable ways when those come around. It’ll settle down eventually into just being a part of normal life.
The link you posted is saying exactly what the problem actually, demonstrably is. In fact it’s hard to believe the page was written 25 years ago and not today, how perfectly it predicted the reality.
Did you even read it, or did you ask a computer to summarise the headline for you?
Your strawman has nothing to do with the subject at hand. The fact that you resort to this obfuscation instead of actually facing the problem, suggests that perhaps your personal conviction is not so rational as you initially thought.
The whole reason that the steam engine took off was because they did the opposite. It’s the same reason that you don’t hear people complaining about the AI used to spot cancer or find stars. They changed workflow, but they didn’t negatively disrupt it. They made it easier to do more.
People hate AI the same way that they hate touch screens in cars. They actively make things more difficult. Not only are car manufacturers being required by law to bring back physical controls for things like the A/C because the lack of a physical knob or dial means that you have to take your eyes off the road to change something on a screen, the last time I was buying a car I was talking to the guy at the dealership about how I was limiting the model years I wanted to look at to those before the 16+ inch screens became common, and he said that the vast majority of people coming in had similar sentiments - the screens are just generally unpopular, especially because of how big they’ve become. They’re unwieldy, unintuitive, and require too much concentration to use when actually driving.
Google’s AI has been found to be wrong 60% of the time - even frequently making up “facts” that directly contradict the works that it cites as sources. They hate that trying to find an accurate picture of a penguin or whatever has become so difficult because image search tools are filled with AI generated images that range from slightly off to completely inaccurate. They hate that refrigerators now come with an AI assistant in them. Something like 80% of users in a study either actively disliked the AI features on their phones or said they find them useless.
The current AI trend is a Dutch Tulip bubble, or more accurately, a solution to the problem of people being paid that investors and c suites want crammed into everything in order to justify the money spent.
It’s amazing to watch people like you not get the point at all. It’s like you’re missing some piece of yourself and cannot understand why people appreciate the humanity behind art. And to act like we should just lie down and take it?
Being used as a genuine tool, especially after it stops hallucinating, is fine to a point. We’re already finding that an over-reliance on LLMs and shit is causing issues for people, especially those with developing brains.
What I would use it for is to, eventually, use it to help expand tool libraries in programs or take away tasks that are ultimately just pure labour. I work in architecture(architectural technologist) and being able to use it to help draw plans(not design them for me, just draw them, would be awesome if it could understand proper layer usage, block usage and organization, and all those details. We’re nowhere near that right now, of course, and I would never want to hear myself saying “computer, design a building for me”.
I want to liken it to synchros in a manual transmission, or having ABS. I have full control over my vehicle still and it will never walk away from me just because my foot’s not on the brake pedal but it’s also not a huge fucking pain in the ass to drive because of double clutching. I’m still rev matching to change gears and everything, but there is forgiveness. I still support automatic transmissions for people who physically cannot drive stick but frankly at that point I have to ask why their neighbourhood in so underserved by public transportation.
Do you do anything creative? Like play music or make art? Have you ever noticed a skill within that taking a hit because of access to a new tool? I sure have, and am justifiably worried that when that tool becomes too powerful, especially too quickly, that too many of those skills will go unpracticed. With how people are using it even right now you can see very clearly that no one even has the curiousity to understand the help they’re getting.
AI should be a tool that helps humanity. If all we end doing is letting it take our humanity away then what on earth is the fucking point? Congrats, our meat is alive and uncreative, never being able to truly say “I did that”, just watching some computer make things for them.
I propose you eat less hype about the slop generators. AI doesn’t exist, and there is no reason to believe that we’re closer to understanding if it’s even possible. Machine learning algorithms have their uses and are used already a lot, and nobody is against that, but that’s not AI. LLMs being pushed everywhere, and it’s never useful or particularly liked, and that’s not AI either. My hunch is that this bubble will pop, leaving an unpleasant odour behind, which we will have to deal with for years after, and then tech bros will come up with a new bullshit that revolutionises the world and disrupts the universe, because there is no meritocracy and the world is stupid.
Something that has actual intelligence, or at least significant portion of building blocks of intelligence.
The problem, of course, is that intelligence is a complicated, complex, sprawling phenomenon, with no real ways to measure it as a whole, at least to any degree of reliability.
Learning, reasoning, critical thinking. Creativity, logic, problem solving, abstraction. Self-awareness, self-reflection, general sense of self. You need most of the elements of most of the groups (and probably more that is also important but I am missing right now) in order to even begin to talk about possibility of intelligence. Then somehow we will need to solve the philosophical zombie problem, and I don’t envy the researchers who will have to do that, but that’s way later down the line.
What we have right now very demonstrably doesn’t have almost any of those. What we call machine learning can be called learning in a very specific and reductive way, and whatever emerged phenomenon we observe from that is it’s own beast, but intelligence it is not. All the other boxes are not ticked, and some, like creativity or critical thinking, are the opposite of ticked. It might lead to something in the future (personally I doubt it, but can’t rule out), it might just as likely be something else, or nothing entirely.
I am very unsecure in my speculations on it, but those who have the most robust and optimistic answers right now are actually those who want to sell you something, and most of them are salespeople with the expertise of sales and nothing more.
It doesn’t matter what I (or anyone) “proposes”. You may as well be asking me what I propose to do about the orbit of Jupiter. Arguing about it on the Internet is especially pointless. It’s the new “Old man shouts at clouds” basically…
The way I see it, my comments have prompted an enormous amount of discussion. The most interesting comment, I think, was from PixelProf when they said “Lots of students arbitrarily hating anything AI related”. It’s this blind, herd mentality that I attempted (apparently successfully) to start a discussion about. In fact a lot of what I wrote was driven by the point you were making, which I interpreted as being a funny take on the way people react to AI generated content.
I wasn’t asking you because you know it is inevitable.
I was asking the other user because I do not see what can be done against this genie that is out of the bottle. Just abandoning is never going to happen and regulating isn’t going to fix all the qualms they have with it.
Unless AI became sentient and do things by itself, AI art still have humanity behind it. You not liking the tool the human used for making the art does not invalidate the humanity of the person who used that tool.
If like me going back a couple of centuries and saying that a photograph was not made by a human, but by a soulless machine. And that anyone who enjoys or makes photography is missing their humanity.
You cannot invalidate someone’s humanity. That’s against human rights or something.
You should go face to face with a person who made some image they like and love and put a lot of effort into it using AI tools, and say to them, face to face and looking them in the eyes “I do not consider you a human being”.
Same as people needed to travel and know other cultures to cure racism. The butlerian yihad needs to meet different people to cure something that’s quickly turning into bigotry.
Photographers choose where to point their camera. I’ve used AI generators, they’re like the antithesis of choice. You can’t learn to speak the language of visual mediums if you just let the robot speak it for you.
and say to them, face to face and looking them in the eyes “I do not consider you a human being”.
Is this a challenge? I can knock it out by Friday.
For real though, these people are human beings—of course they are. But they’re removing themselves from their own projects. I want to see more of them in their own work. That’s the whole reason I’m even here; I can generate my own monkey throwing a banana, why would I need to see theirs?
I can generate my own monkey throwing a banana, why would I need to see theirs?
Because theirs is the one they chose out of many options. Theirs is the one they felt came closest to their vision. Theirs is the one they wanted to share with you because it meant something to them.
I know people who takes hours in comfyUI making a workflow, tweaking aspects, choosing different nodes, adding several layers of different diffusion models.
You can use an AI generator just by making a prompt “make me a pretty giraffe” same I can take my phone a snap a quick picture. But same as a professional photographer can take hours chosing composition, camera configuration, then tweaking the result… a person who want to make a good AI image can take hours or days improving and tweaking the workflow.
For instance, this is a workflow example, a easy one, not even the most complex I’ve seen:
That could take a long time to make, because the person had a specific vision on what they want the tool to produce, and can really steer it into producing exactly what they want.
I think a lot of hate, as always, come mostly from ignorance. Once you know the time and effort that someone can put into this, it’s harder to discredit them.
a person who want to make a good AI image can take hours or days improving and tweaking the workflow.
No, no, you’re confusing effort with meaning. This is a literacy problem: I venture to guess you don’t even understand the distinction I’m drawing.
The most complicated comfyUI-whatever is worth less to me than a child’s drawing of their parents because the child’s drawing is communicating love while the generated one is communicating nothing.
I am being a tinge hyperbolic here, but I have yet to see anything made by AI-hornies that was worthy of discussion. The lot of them can’t even explain their own work—at best they can explain their comfyUI workflow because that’s the thing they actually put effort into.
If you want AI art to be taken seriously, you must understand what art is.
You must stop selfishly invading the space other artists inhabit: photography was a paradigm shift, yeah, but it still left room for painters to do their own thing. In the modern day, there is hardly confusion about whether something is or is not a photograph.
You must stop pretending that spectacle is all art aspires to be. So many people complain that they can’t be artists because they can’t draw a professional character portrait—who asked you? Who asked you to do that? Does Minecraft, one of the most beloved games of all time, care that its block textures are all 16x16 color smudges?
One of my favorite youtube channels, Any Austin, has a series where he finds and appreciates the odd, forgotten, unremarkable places in games that players often overlook. Liminal spaces that exist just to fill out the map. A valley between a mountain and a cliff that has nothing in it. The canopy above a forest hallway you’d normally only ever see once because a fast travel point exists just beyond it.
Now, nobody minds that Minecraft is procedurally generated: this is an algorithm in art. But you know what you can’t do in Minecraft? Talk about its liminal spaces. Any spaces like this that it might have can’t be shared unless someone has your world seed, and any questions you might have all have the same answer: “The algorithm just did it like that. I don’t know.” There is no story told in these walls.
This doesn’t mean that Minecraft is bad. This doesn’t mean Minecraft shouldn’t be procedurally generated. But something is lost here.
You must understand this if you want to be taken seriously.
It’s not even a new trope. It had happened forever.
The best indicative for something to be a true art is angry artists saying “that’s not art”.
Once again, your ignorance on how AI art is made is causing the hate. It’s common to hate what we ignore.
You can communicate love with AI art if you want. You can communicate whatever you want, because you can make the art look whatever you want as good as you can do with any other media.
That complex workflow is not for shit and giggles. Is the pencil to make the final image be one way or the other. Same as a photographer would control que exposure or the focus. You can chose what’s on the picture and what’s not. With better accuracy that doing a collage.
Your premise is based on a limitation of the media that it’s not real, thus is a false premise, thus your conclusions are false too.
I get that the hate for AI is mostly an irrational pseudo religious though. So I do not expect to change anyone’s mind. But I will explain things anyway. I have an easy question, is your theory about AI arr falsable? Is there anything that you think could prove you wrong?
The most complicated comfyUI-whatever is worth less to me than a child’s drawing of their parents because the child’s drawing is communicating love while the generated one is communicating nothing.
So, not all art is communicating heartfelt emotion. Is your opposition limited to the encroachment of AI into the space of emotionally communicative art?
What if someone is making art (or maybe you want to use another word) purely for money? Or depraved tentacle porn? If someone is just trying to create a funny comic, is that necessarily art or might it just be a means to the end of getting people to laugh?
You must stop selfishly invading the space other artists inhabit: photography was a paradigm shift, yeah, but it still left room for painters to do their own thing. In the modern day, there is hardly confusion about whether something is or is not a photograph.
Photography completely displaced the segment of visual art whose primary goal was to accurately (what we might now call “photorealistically”) reproduce what could be seen, because it was a better tool for that goal. If you pay a painter for a portrait today, it’s because you want to see the brush-strokes, not because you want the most accurate rendition of your face possible.
I don’t think the displacement of the former kind of portrait painter by photographers is in any way a problem with photography. It was a problem for portrait painters, so I can understand the distress of people who are producing art at risk of being displaced by AI.
So how is it that use of AI is “selfishly invading” but photography was not?
Is your opposition limited to the encroachment of AI into …
My opposition is to demon tech produced by vampires.
If someone is just trying to create a funny comic, is that necessarily art
Yes. Why would you even ask me this.
Depraved tentacle porn is art. —Why are you trying to like debate trick me into recoiling in disgust at what some people spend their time on?
Photography completely displaced the segment of …
None of this is disagreeable, so… uh huh, yup, mhm.
So how is it that use of AI is “selfishly invading” but photography was not?
I’m gonna quote myself here:
Me:
there is hardly confusion about whether something is or is not a photograph.
If it were possible to tell, at a glance, whether something was or was not AI, it would not be causing nearly the social harm that it does. People couldn’t cheat on their essay homework. People couldn’t cheat in art competitions. Any game which used it, you could say “Ah, they took a shortcut there.” Video evidence of a crime could still be trusted.
I mean, there are still big problems with the technology, but being able to tell is like the minimum requirement. I can’t appreciate someone’s brush strokes if there is no way of knowing a brush was struck. It’s socially poisonous.
My opposition is to demon tech produced by vampires.
I’m not going to take you seriously if you don’t discuss this seriously.
Yes. Why would you even ask me this.
Depraved tentacle porn is art. —Why are you trying to like debate trick me into recoiling in disgust at what some people spend their time on?
Because you’ve made a distinction between art and visual media that isn’t art without clarifying it at all - and that’s still the case. Typically pornography is not classified as art. Both these cases describe visual content made (often) not as an emotional expression of the creator, but as a means of making money or sexual gratification. I’m not saying either is evil or disgusting (you’re the one who contends that visual media made without emotion is morally deficient).
I await your clarification on what art is and whether AI images are still immoral if they only displace stuff produced for some other reason than emotional expression.
there is hardly confusion about whether something is or is not a photograph.
There certainly can be - check out people producing photorealistic art today, or the extremely realistic portraits produced before the advent of photography. Photography can be used in the process without being evident in the final image, too.
The fact is that most AI images today can be detected as such by anyone familiar with them. That may not be true forever, and the signs can be covered up by someone with the will, but then, that’s the same as use of photography.
I can’t appreciate someone’s brush strokes if there is no way of knowing a brush was struck.
When I look at brush strokes I’m appreciating it visually because they look nice. If you view two pieces of art on a computer screen (so that you can’t see the 3D aspect) do you respond differently to the brush strokes because one is a photo of an actual oil painting, whereas the other is a piece of digital art made in Krita where the brush strokes are simulated?
If it were possible to tell, at a glance, whether something was or was not AI, it would not be causing nearly the social harm that it does.
It seems like you’re shifting away from the point of discussion, which was whether AI output can be art, and more towards the general dangers of the technology itself, which is a whole other discussion.
My opposition is to demon tech produced by vampires.
It also seems like this discussion is taking a toll on you. If you are interested in continuing it, there’s no harm in taking a step back and coming back later.
there is hardly confusion about whether something is or is not a photograph.
This proposition is refuted by hyperrealistic paintings such as La hora del té by Magda Torres Gurza. You can see that this is not a photography if you pay attention to the reflections. But certainly not at “first glance”.
The most complicated comfyUI-whatever is worth less to me than a child’s drawing of their parents because the child’s drawing is communicating love while the generated one is communicating nothing.
How can you say what the output of that workflow communicates or doesn’t communicate without seeing it?
The lot of them can’t even explain their own work—at best they can explain their comfyUI workflow because that’s the thing they actually put effort into.
That statement is unsubstantiated. Without knowing the creator of that workflow I venture the following proposition: If the creator put in hours of effort into constructing it, so the AI would produce just the right output, then they clearly had a vision of what they were going for. And If they tried to get a detail just right, then that detail must have meaning to them, or else they wouldn’t bother.
I see another issue with the statement “The lot of them can’t even explain their own work”. Do you think every stroke of the brush has a meaning for a painter? Is every note carefully chosen in a piece of music? Or is it rather a case of “doing what feels right at the moment”? I ask that because I don’t see the difference in playing a few chord progressions on the piano and seeing what fits best, and letting AI generate a few outputs and seeing what fits best.
How can you say what the output of that workflow communicates or doesn’t communicate without seeing it?
I’ve seen plenty.
Is every note carefully chosen in a piece of music?
Are you… being serious?
Look, I’ve been a musician longer than I’ve been any other kind of artist, and yes, I pick all of my notes. That’s the fun part, actually. There is a lot of deliberation over where they should go.
This is what I mean about you people not understanding the artistic process. Music is a language. People in a jam session are speaking words and phrases to each other. There are grammar rules to this language that work one way but in way another not.
If you’re using an LLM, then your jam partners aren’t speaking to you, they’re speaking to a robot. You may as well not even be there. And uh… I dunno, that just seems really fucking lonely.
There is a lot of deliberation over where they should go.
If you say that, then I’ll have to believe you. My standpoint on this is more akin to your next statement,
Music is a language. People in a jam session are speaking words and phrases to each other. There are grammar rules
That means that once the piece of music turns out to be in, say G major, then there is little (I even dare say no) deliberation on whether you’re playing a G natural or a G sharp. There may be deliberation in the phrases you play or in the general direction the piece you’re playing will go. There may even be deliberation in not playing a G natural from time to time. But by default you don’t think about these things. You just play.
This is what I’m comparing to using an AI tool. One doesn’t think about every single note every single time, just like one doesn’t think about ever single filler word that’s only there for grammatical purposes in writing prose, and just like one doesn’t think about every single color channel of every single pixel when creating a digital painting. So why does using an AI tool invalidate the art? Because there is no deliberation over every single tiny aspect of the output?
If you’re using an LLM, then your jam partners aren’t speaking to you, they’re speaking to a robot.
This is just plain wrong. It’s like saying you cannot be a musician if your instrument is MIDI. Or you can’t be a singer if you’re using an artificial voicebox. The LLM still produces what its user intends it to produce. The LLM doesn’t produce output on its own. It is operated by the user. Just like a guitar is operated by its player.
“That’s against human rights or something” wow, real strong comeback, bud. For “art” created just using prompts I don’t consider that to have any real humanity but the person is still a person. I did not say otherwise.
I use Heroforge to make extremely high quality D&D minis and make use of the kitbashing feature to do even more custom shit. Even still I understand the difference between that program and pure 3D modelling and don’t go around telling people I’m a 3D modelling artist(I am, somewhat, but that’s using SketchUp and I design buildings). I also know artists who write scripts and do motion capture but have AI programs layer faces on top of that but they still did the lion’s share of the work. Entering in prompts is so many levels below any kind of true art, assisted or not, that it just frankly shouldn’t be considered as such. There needs to be a human element, and when there isn’t it’s hollow and gross.
If someone brought an AI musician to the weekly jam we’d say “cool, but we’re here to play with human beings right now.” If they told us they were a musican “just using tools” that would be a whole other level of insulting, too. The human element is important, especially if all AI is doing is stealing material off the internet anyway. Have you ever seen one of those movies where they try to create life and despite having all the parts there’s just no spark?
“AI” is being used in place of people’s humanity(that they do have, but are not putting into this “art”) and that’s fucked up.
Literally just having a person involved, who has some level of skill(or even lack of skill!). You can look at the dead internet theory for the idea of why things kinda suck when it’s just bots talking to each other using parrotted phrases to talk about nothing.
We’re people. We’re imperfect, and that’s ok. A living thing that had to really work and experience life to produce something, even if it’s kinda bad, is so much more impressive to me than anything an over-hyped algorithm can shit out.
Whenever we create an AI with actual intelligence we can also start getting into what sentience is but for right now these things are just being horribly misused. People have hurt themselves, at least one kid killed himself, because of fucking LMMs that don’t even really know what’s going on. The “AI” tools we have are neat, sure, but when the entire product is created with genAI I mean what is the fucking point?
Your definition on what constitutes putting “humanity” into a piece of art is completely arbitrary. Thus I, and any rational being, reject it.
If a human have a image in his head and put it on any media that’s putting “humanity” into art. You can do it with AI, so the debate is closed for me.
I’ve had images in my head that, after a lot of work, I’ve been able to put into a bitmap. The accuracy in which you can translate the image is a matter of skill as with any art of trade. But it can certainly be done with great accuracy using AI tools.
So there’s no rational argument to say that AI art cannot have “humanity”. Unless you start talking about “souls” or something like that.
I’ve mentioned that using tools is not the end of the world, but slapping together boring prompts that yield stolen, poorly executed jokes is not art. Having AI rip-off other artists it found on the internet is not art. Asking it to write an entire song for you is not art. Most any other time where it’s a tool it’s just a complex algorithm and not really “AI” and it needs to be guided. Being a guide may or may not make someone much of an artist, depending on context.
The pursuit of art is worth more than the end result and I’ll be honest that I have no idea how to explain that to you if you still don’t get it.
Asking it to write an entire song for you is not art.
Please correct me if I misunderstand your point. Are you saying that produce is not art if it is made because someone threw money at the creator and told them “do something for me”?
Cause if that’s your point, then a whole lot of classical music, for instance, is not art, because it was commissioned.
I’m saying that the person commissioning the artwork is not themselves the artist, and even moreso I’m specifically talking about lazy prompters who are asking AI to essentially steal art.
I’m really not sure where you got that idea from, if I’m honest.
Plenty of artists stole other people’s art. Entire genres are based on that. And one can even argue that all art is derivative and that truly original art do no exist.
It’s not just prompts there are hundreds or thousands of different variables, several programs you can join in different positions, you can make it complex to inimaginable level, to writing your own programs to do part of the task, or making your own Lora with your art or training a lors with other people’s art to achieve the result you want, it can get infinitely complex. You not liking or thinking is boring is irrelevant. Is complex enough and you can achieve specific results. It take time and expertise to do it right, as any other technique. And at the end it gives you enough freedom to be able to use it to express yourself which, in my book, is the definition of art.
You don’t need to explain art to me. I’ve been doing artistic work as amateur for several decades now, I can more or less paint, write and play some instruments, I have a few short stories with a few thousands readers, it’s nothing, but I know what the creative process is. And I’ve studied several courses of art history in university. I’m quite knowledge on the topic. I know about AI art because I find it extremely interesting and I’ve played quite a lot with it. But to be true most of the artistic things I still do are all manual, because I like it better, and because I get better results doing it like that. But I’ve seen other people getting very good results with AI tools.
Go search renaissance or baroque Churches and then come back and tell me that “copying other people’s work is not art”. Art being so different artist to artist is a relative recent thing, for most history all artists in a period just keep copying each other blatantly. I remember doing an exam where we had two pictures of two nearly identical renaissance churches and had to be able to differentiate the architects, and it was HARD. Those fuckers didn’t need AI to copy each other’s styles to the last stone. And nowadays are still studied as grand masters of their art.
I worry about the mental health of people that attempt to protect an overinflated technology and attack the mental fortitude of people who bring real problems up with the technology. this is especially true since those same white knights are literally being institutionalized for psychosis and are actively creating cults around specific models.
it’s absurd that people lacking the mental capacity to understand “a machine is not alive” have a seat at the table to discus the dangers presented by AI.
just want to point out that no technology in recorded history is “unstoppable”, though it seems like that was said more to convince yourself than us.
Neither I, nor anyone, can “protect” it or slow it down. You either find a way to work with what’s happening or spiral into greater and greater impotent rage. Better accept this now than slowly go mad no?
It’s tough as a computer science professor from a related perspective. Lots of students arbitrarily hating anything AI related because of this, including all of the traditional techniques from the 60 years prior to the rise of LLMs and diffusion models, and others misconstruing or discounting any AI class that isn’t LLM or diffusion related.
I never like to say technology is inevitable, as the inevitability argument is one of the best marketing tools major companies have to justify their poor ethics and business models (see: the gig economy founders, the “Momentum” mindset). It’s clear, though, that there is quite a paradigm shift occuring.
It’s crazy to watch the insane level of outrage that the existence and growth of AI produced content stirs up in some people when it seems obvious that the development of AI is unstoppable. It’s like watching people get angry at the first steam engines that appeared. I genuinely worry about their mental health over the next few years as they realise that being angry on the internet isn’t going to slow anything down at all.
It is nothing of the sort. Steam engines served mostly useful purposes. AI mostly does not (at least not in an open world environment, it has excellent purposes in closed environments like medicine and science). The fact that it is indeed unstoppable does not make the outrage of its infestation of everything on the internet less, quite contrary.
I guess someone with their head in the sand, their fingers in their ears and screaming at the top of their lungs like you, will have an excellent mental health.
Everyone loved steam engines huh? Do you even history? - Chugging Through Fears & Terror: The Steam Train Phobia of the 19th Century 🚂💨
Maybe if it wasn’t proliferating into every app and service whether useful or not I wouldn’t hate the living crap out of it. AI has it’s place, I do use it both at work and at home but I don’t need it every where.
Also one of the first victims was customer service pages, and most of them are crap.
It’s a paradigm shift and people always behave in unpredictable ways when those come around. It’ll settle down eventually into just being a part of normal life.
There is absolutely nothing that suggests that will be the outcome. Your conclusion rests on a very fallacious use of history.
Tell that to the poor sod who had to run in front of the first motorcars, waving a red flag.
The usage of AI makes people stupider, which is a known fact. And you want it to become part of normal life?
Ai users (like you) ridicule users that don’t want to use it. It’s easier to use than to think.
AI users take what GPT says for truth even though the models continue to degrade.
Ai users don’t care about learning, they just want results.
Yeah no, if that’s supposed to be our future, I will gladly be hostile against it.
“Computers make people stupider” have also been a known fact when personal computers became common.
https://www.theregister.com/2001/02/05/computers_are_making_us_stupid/
I’m sure we can trace back “new thing makes people stupider” arguments back to Aristóteles. It’s a common human trope.
The link you posted is saying exactly what the problem actually, demonstrably is. In fact it’s hard to believe the page was written 25 years ago and not today, how perfectly it predicted the reality.
Did you even read it, or did you ask a computer to summarise the headline for you?
You are using a computer right now. You should stop using any computer ASAP, don’t even use one to reply to this comment.
Edit: used a computer to click downvote, instead of delivering a hand painted arrow pointing down by mail. That must be -3 IQ points minimum.
That’s both not what an article is about, and not what I was agreeing with.
Your strawman has nothing to do with the subject at hand. The fact that you resort to this obfuscation instead of actually facing the problem, suggests that perhaps your personal conviction is not so rational as you initially thought.
You are trying to analyze a joke my dude. Refer to the other, more serious, comment you replied a few minutes ago if you want real conversation.
Are you positive they haven’t? Or are you just balking at the idea that skills your grandfather had are fully lost on you.
Not going to school might make a population stupider. What happens when “using the computer” is kind of like “not going to school”?
Critical thinking is the important part. Being able to criticize thought and results of thing.
Critical thinking is work, though. If the computer can skip the thinking for you, when does it happen?
Despite their size, steam engines do not typically disrupt my workflow.
Sure, but I expect they disrupted the workflow of folks in 1804…
The whole reason that the steam engine took off was because they did the opposite. It’s the same reason that you don’t hear people complaining about the AI used to spot cancer or find stars. They changed workflow, but they didn’t negatively disrupt it. They made it easier to do more.
People hate AI the same way that they hate touch screens in cars. They actively make things more difficult. Not only are car manufacturers being required by law to bring back physical controls for things like the A/C because the lack of a physical knob or dial means that you have to take your eyes off the road to change something on a screen, the last time I was buying a car I was talking to the guy at the dealership about how I was limiting the model years I wanted to look at to those before the 16+ inch screens became common, and he said that the vast majority of people coming in had similar sentiments - the screens are just generally unpopular, especially because of how big they’ve become. They’re unwieldy, unintuitive, and require too much concentration to use when actually driving.
Google’s AI has been found to be wrong 60% of the time - even frequently making up “facts” that directly contradict the works that it cites as sources. They hate that trying to find an accurate picture of a penguin or whatever has become so difficult because image search tools are filled with AI generated images that range from slightly off to completely inaccurate. They hate that refrigerators now come with an AI assistant in them. Something like 80% of users in a study either actively disliked the AI features on their phones or said they find them useless.
The current AI trend is a Dutch Tulip bubble, or more accurately, a solution to the problem of people being paid that investors and c suites want crammed into everything in order to justify the money spent.
It’s amazing to watch people like you not get the point at all. It’s like you’re missing some piece of yourself and cannot understand why people appreciate the humanity behind art. And to act like we should just lie down and take it?
I’m sorry for whatever the fuck happened to you.
So, genuine question.
What do you propose should happen with the advances of AI?
Being used as a genuine tool, especially after it stops hallucinating, is fine to a point. We’re already finding that an over-reliance on LLMs and shit is causing issues for people, especially those with developing brains.
What I would use it for is to, eventually, use it to help expand tool libraries in programs or take away tasks that are ultimately just pure labour. I work in architecture(architectural technologist) and being able to use it to help draw plans(not design them for me, just draw them, would be awesome if it could understand proper layer usage, block usage and organization, and all those details. We’re nowhere near that right now, of course, and I would never want to hear myself saying “computer, design a building for me”.
I want to liken it to synchros in a manual transmission, or having ABS. I have full control over my vehicle still and it will never walk away from me just because my foot’s not on the brake pedal but it’s also not a huge fucking pain in the ass to drive because of double clutching. I’m still rev matching to change gears and everything, but there is forgiveness. I still support automatic transmissions for people who physically cannot drive stick but frankly at that point I have to ask why their neighbourhood in so underserved by public transportation.
Do you do anything creative? Like play music or make art? Have you ever noticed a skill within that taking a hit because of access to a new tool? I sure have, and am justifiably worried that when that tool becomes too powerful, especially too quickly, that too many of those skills will go unpracticed. With how people are using it even right now you can see very clearly that no one even has the curiousity to understand the help they’re getting.
AI should be a tool that helps humanity. If all we end doing is letting it take our humanity away then what on earth is the fucking point? Congrats, our meat is alive and uncreative, never being able to truly say “I did that”, just watching some computer make things for them.
I propose you eat less hype about the slop generators. AI doesn’t exist, and there is no reason to believe that we’re closer to understanding if it’s even possible. Machine learning algorithms have their uses and are used already a lot, and nobody is against that, but that’s not AI. LLMs being pushed everywhere, and it’s never useful or particularly liked, and that’s not AI either. My hunch is that this bubble will pop, leaving an unpleasant odour behind, which we will have to deal with for years after, and then tech bros will come up with a new bullshit that revolutionises the world and disrupts the universe, because there is no meritocracy and the world is stupid.
What constitutes AI by your definition?
Something that has actual intelligence, or at least significant portion of building blocks of intelligence.
The problem, of course, is that intelligence is a complicated, complex, sprawling phenomenon, with no real ways to measure it as a whole, at least to any degree of reliability.
Learning, reasoning, critical thinking. Creativity, logic, problem solving, abstraction. Self-awareness, self-reflection, general sense of self. You need most of the elements of most of the groups (and probably more that is also important but I am missing right now) in order to even begin to talk about possibility of intelligence. Then somehow we will need to solve the philosophical zombie problem, and I don’t envy the researchers who will have to do that, but that’s way later down the line.
What we have right now very demonstrably doesn’t have almost any of those. What we call machine learning can be called learning in a very specific and reductive way, and whatever emerged phenomenon we observe from that is it’s own beast, but intelligence it is not. All the other boxes are not ticked, and some, like creativity or critical thinking, are the opposite of ticked. It might lead to something in the future (personally I doubt it, but can’t rule out), it might just as likely be something else, or nothing entirely.
I am very unsecure in my speculations on it, but those who have the most robust and optimistic answers right now are actually those who want to sell you something, and most of them are salespeople with the expertise of sales and nothing more.
It doesn’t matter what I (or anyone) “proposes”. You may as well be asking me what I propose to do about the orbit of Jupiter. Arguing about it on the Internet is especially pointless. It’s the new “Old man shouts at clouds” basically…
Why did you join a discussion space if you don’t like discussing?
The way I see it, my comments have prompted an enormous amount of discussion. The most interesting comment, I think, was from PixelProf when they said “Lots of students arbitrarily hating anything AI related”. It’s this blind, herd mentality that I attempted (apparently successfully) to start a discussion about. In fact a lot of what I wrote was driven by the point you were making, which I interpreted as being a funny take on the way people react to AI generated content.
I wasn’t asking you because you know it is inevitable.
I was asking the other user because I do not see what can be done against this genie that is out of the bottle. Just abandoning is never going to happen and regulating isn’t going to fix all the qualms they have with it.
Unless AI became sentient and do things by itself, AI art still have humanity behind it. You not liking the tool the human used for making the art does not invalidate the humanity of the person who used that tool.
If like me going back a couple of centuries and saying that a photograph was not made by a human, but by a soulless machine. And that anyone who enjoys or makes photography is missing their humanity.
You cannot invalidate someone’s humanity. That’s against human rights or something.
You should go face to face with a person who made some image they like and love and put a lot of effort into it using AI tools, and say to them, face to face and looking them in the eyes “I do not consider you a human being”.
Same as people needed to travel and know other cultures to cure racism. The butlerian yihad needs to meet different people to cure something that’s quickly turning into bigotry.
Photographers choose where to point their camera. I’ve used AI generators, they’re like the antithesis of choice. You can’t learn to speak the language of visual mediums if you just let the robot speak it for you.
Is this a challenge? I can knock it out by Friday.
For real though, these people are human beings—of course they are. But they’re removing themselves from their own projects. I want to see more of them in their own work. That’s the whole reason I’m even here; I can generate my own monkey throwing a banana, why would I need to see theirs?
Because theirs is the one they chose out of many options. Theirs is the one they felt came closest to their vision. Theirs is the one they wanted to share with you because it meant something to them.
I mean, they can do that, but this is on the level of showing me a cool anime they saw.
I know people who takes hours in comfyUI making a workflow, tweaking aspects, choosing different nodes, adding several layers of different diffusion models.
You can use an AI generator just by making a prompt “make me a pretty giraffe” same I can take my phone a snap a quick picture. But same as a professional photographer can take hours chosing composition, camera configuration, then tweaking the result… a person who want to make a good AI image can take hours or days improving and tweaking the workflow.
For instance, this is a workflow example, a easy one, not even the most complex I’ve seen:
That could take a long time to make, because the person had a specific vision on what they want the tool to produce, and can really steer it into producing exactly what they want.
I think a lot of hate, as always, come mostly from ignorance. Once you know the time and effort that someone can put into this, it’s harder to discredit them.
No, no, you’re confusing effort with meaning. This is a literacy problem: I venture to guess you don’t even understand the distinction I’m drawing.
The most complicated comfyUI-whatever is worth less to me than a child’s drawing of their parents because the child’s drawing is communicating love while the generated one is communicating nothing.
I am being a tinge hyperbolic here, but I have yet to see anything made by AI-hornies that was worthy of discussion. The lot of them can’t even explain their own work—at best they can explain their comfyUI workflow because that’s the thing they actually put effort into.
If you want AI art to be taken seriously, you must understand what art is.
You must stop selfishly invading the space other artists inhabit: photography was a paradigm shift, yeah, but it still left room for painters to do their own thing. In the modern day, there is hardly confusion about whether something is or is not a photograph.
You must stop pretending that spectacle is all art aspires to be. So many people complain that they can’t be artists because they can’t draw a professional character portrait—who asked you? Who asked you to do that? Does Minecraft, one of the most beloved games of all time, care that its block textures are all 16x16 color smudges?
One of my favorite youtube channels, Any Austin, has a series where he finds and appreciates the odd, forgotten, unremarkable places in games that players often overlook. Liminal spaces that exist just to fill out the map. A valley between a mountain and a cliff that has nothing in it. The canopy above a forest hallway you’d normally only ever see once because a fast travel point exists just beyond it.
Now, nobody minds that Minecraft is procedurally generated: this is an algorithm in art. But you know what you can’t do in Minecraft? Talk about its liminal spaces. Any spaces like this that it might have can’t be shared unless someone has your world seed, and any questions you might have all have the same answer: “The algorithm just did it like that. I don’t know.” There is no story told in these walls.
This doesn’t mean that Minecraft is bad. This doesn’t mean Minecraft shouldn’t be procedurally generated. But something is lost here.
You must understand this if you want to be taken seriously.
Artists have always gatekeep art.
It’s not even a new trope. It had happened forever.
The best indicative for something to be a true art is angry artists saying “that’s not art”.
Once again, your ignorance on how AI art is made is causing the hate. It’s common to hate what we ignore.
You can communicate love with AI art if you want. You can communicate whatever you want, because you can make the art look whatever you want as good as you can do with any other media.
That complex workflow is not for shit and giggles. Is the pencil to make the final image be one way or the other. Same as a photographer would control que exposure or the focus. You can chose what’s on the picture and what’s not. With better accuracy that doing a collage.
Your premise is based on a limitation of the media that it’s not real, thus is a false premise, thus your conclusions are false too.
I get that the hate for AI is mostly an irrational pseudo religious though. So I do not expect to change anyone’s mind. But I will explain things anyway. I have an easy question, is your theory about AI arr falsable? Is there anything that you think could prove you wrong?
So, not all art is communicating heartfelt emotion. Is your opposition limited to the encroachment of AI into the space of emotionally communicative art?
What if someone is making art (or maybe you want to use another word) purely for money? Or depraved tentacle porn? If someone is just trying to create a funny comic, is that necessarily art or might it just be a means to the end of getting people to laugh?
Photography completely displaced the segment of visual art whose primary goal was to accurately (what we might now call “photorealistically”) reproduce what could be seen, because it was a better tool for that goal. If you pay a painter for a portrait today, it’s because you want to see the brush-strokes, not because you want the most accurate rendition of your face possible.
I don’t think the displacement of the former kind of portrait painter by photographers is in any way a problem with photography. It was a problem for portrait painters, so I can understand the distress of people who are producing art at risk of being displaced by AI.
So how is it that use of AI is “selfishly invading” but photography was not?
My opposition is to demon tech produced by vampires.
Yes. Why would you even ask me this.
Depraved tentacle porn is art. —Why are you trying to like debate trick me into recoiling in disgust at what some people spend their time on?
None of this is disagreeable, so… uh huh, yup, mhm.
I’m gonna quote myself here:
If it were possible to tell, at a glance, whether something was or was not AI, it would not be causing nearly the social harm that it does. People couldn’t cheat on their essay homework. People couldn’t cheat in art competitions. Any game which used it, you could say “Ah, they took a shortcut there.” Video evidence of a crime could still be trusted.
I mean, there are still big problems with the technology, but being able to tell is like the minimum requirement. I can’t appreciate someone’s brush strokes if there is no way of knowing a brush was struck. It’s socially poisonous.
I’m not going to take you seriously if you don’t discuss this seriously.
Because you’ve made a distinction between art and visual media that isn’t art without clarifying it at all - and that’s still the case. Typically pornography is not classified as art. Both these cases describe visual content made (often) not as an emotional expression of the creator, but as a means of making money or sexual gratification. I’m not saying either is evil or disgusting (you’re the one who contends that visual media made without emotion is morally deficient).
I await your clarification on what art is and whether AI images are still immoral if they only displace stuff produced for some other reason than emotional expression.
There certainly can be - check out people producing photorealistic art today, or the extremely realistic portraits produced before the advent of photography. Photography can be used in the process without being evident in the final image, too.
The fact is that most AI images today can be detected as such by anyone familiar with them. That may not be true forever, and the signs can be covered up by someone with the will, but then, that’s the same as use of photography.
When I look at brush strokes I’m appreciating it visually because they look nice. If you view two pieces of art on a computer screen (so that you can’t see the 3D aspect) do you respond differently to the brush strokes because one is a photo of an actual oil painting, whereas the other is a piece of digital art made in Krita where the brush strokes are simulated?
It seems like you’re shifting away from the point of discussion, which was whether AI output can be art, and more towards the general dangers of the technology itself, which is a whole other discussion.
It also seems like this discussion is taking a toll on you. If you are interested in continuing it, there’s no harm in taking a step back and coming back later.
This proposition is refuted by hyperrealistic paintings such as La hora del té by Magda Torres Gurza. You can see that this is not a photography if you pay attention to the reflections. But certainly not at “first glance”.
How can you say what the output of that workflow communicates or doesn’t communicate without seeing it?
That statement is unsubstantiated. Without knowing the creator of that workflow I venture the following proposition: If the creator put in hours of effort into constructing it, so the AI would produce just the right output, then they clearly had a vision of what they were going for. And If they tried to get a detail just right, then that detail must have meaning to them, or else they wouldn’t bother.
I see another issue with the statement “The lot of them can’t even explain their own work”. Do you think every stroke of the brush has a meaning for a painter? Is every note carefully chosen in a piece of music? Or is it rather a case of “doing what feels right at the moment”? I ask that because I don’t see the difference in playing a few chord progressions on the piano and seeing what fits best, and letting AI generate a few outputs and seeing what fits best.
I’ve seen plenty.
Are you… being serious?
Look, I’ve been a musician longer than I’ve been any other kind of artist, and yes, I pick all of my notes. That’s the fun part, actually. There is a lot of deliberation over where they should go.
This is what I mean about you people not understanding the artistic process. Music is a language. People in a jam session are speaking words and phrases to each other. There are grammar rules to this language that work one way but in way another not.
If you’re using an LLM, then your jam partners aren’t speaking to you, they’re speaking to a robot. You may as well not even be there. And uh… I dunno, that just seems really fucking lonely.
If you say that, then I’ll have to believe you. My standpoint on this is more akin to your next statement,
That means that once the piece of music turns out to be in, say G major, then there is little (I even dare say no) deliberation on whether you’re playing a G natural or a G sharp. There may be deliberation in the phrases you play or in the general direction the piece you’re playing will go. There may even be deliberation in not playing a G natural from time to time. But by default you don’t think about these things. You just play.
This is what I’m comparing to using an AI tool. One doesn’t think about every single note every single time, just like one doesn’t think about ever single filler word that’s only there for grammatical purposes in writing prose, and just like one doesn’t think about every single color channel of every single pixel when creating a digital painting. So why does using an AI tool invalidate the art? Because there is no deliberation over every single tiny aspect of the output?
This is just plain wrong. It’s like saying you cannot be a musician if your instrument is MIDI. Or you can’t be a singer if you’re using an artificial voicebox. The LLM still produces what its user intends it to produce. The LLM doesn’t produce output on its own. It is operated by the user. Just like a guitar is operated by its player.
“That’s against human rights or something” wow, real strong comeback, bud. For “art” created just using prompts I don’t consider that to have any real humanity but the person is still a person. I did not say otherwise.
I use Heroforge to make extremely high quality D&D minis and make use of the kitbashing feature to do even more custom shit. Even still I understand the difference between that program and pure 3D modelling and don’t go around telling people I’m a 3D modelling artist(I am, somewhat, but that’s using SketchUp and I design buildings). I also know artists who write scripts and do motion capture but have AI programs layer faces on top of that but they still did the lion’s share of the work. Entering in prompts is so many levels below any kind of true art, assisted or not, that it just frankly shouldn’t be considered as such. There needs to be a human element, and when there isn’t it’s hollow and gross.
If someone brought an AI musician to the weekly jam we’d say “cool, but we’re here to play with human beings right now.” If they told us they were a musican “just using tools” that would be a whole other level of insulting, too. The human element is important, especially if all AI is doing is stealing material off the internet anyway. Have you ever seen one of those movies where they try to create life and despite having all the parts there’s just no spark?
“AI” is being used in place of people’s humanity(that they do have, but are not putting into this “art”) and that’s fucked up.
Could you define what you mean by “human element”, exactly?
Literally just having a person involved, who has some level of skill(or even lack of skill!). You can look at the dead internet theory for the idea of why things kinda suck when it’s just bots talking to each other using parrotted phrases to talk about nothing.
We’re people. We’re imperfect, and that’s ok. A living thing that had to really work and experience life to produce something, even if it’s kinda bad, is so much more impressive to me than anything an over-hyped algorithm can shit out.
Whenever we create an AI with actual intelligence we can also start getting into what sentience is but for right now these things are just being horribly misused. People have hurt themselves, at least one kid killed himself, because of fucking LMMs that don’t even really know what’s going on. The “AI” tools we have are neat, sure, but when the entire product is created with genAI I mean what is the fucking point?
Your definition on what constitutes putting “humanity” into a piece of art is completely arbitrary. Thus I, and any rational being, reject it.
If a human have a image in his head and put it on any media that’s putting “humanity” into art. You can do it with AI, so the debate is closed for me. I’ve had images in my head that, after a lot of work, I’ve been able to put into a bitmap. The accuracy in which you can translate the image is a matter of skill as with any art of trade. But it can certainly be done with great accuracy using AI tools.
So there’s no rational argument to say that AI art cannot have “humanity”. Unless you start talking about “souls” or something like that.
It’s not arbitrary, you just don’t understand it.
I’ve mentioned that using tools is not the end of the world, but slapping together boring prompts that yield stolen, poorly executed jokes is not art. Having AI rip-off other artists it found on the internet is not art. Asking it to write an entire song for you is not art. Most any other time where it’s a tool it’s just a complex algorithm and not really “AI” and it needs to be guided. Being a guide may or may not make someone much of an artist, depending on context.
The pursuit of art is worth more than the end result and I’ll be honest that I have no idea how to explain that to you if you still don’t get it.
Please correct me if I misunderstand your point. Are you saying that produce is not art if it is made because someone threw money at the creator and told them “do something for me”?
Cause if that’s your point, then a whole lot of classical music, for instance, is not art, because it was commissioned.
I’m saying that the person commissioning the artwork is not themselves the artist, and even moreso I’m specifically talking about lazy prompters who are asking AI to essentially steal art.
I’m really not sure where you got that idea from, if I’m honest.
Plenty of artists stole other people’s art. Entire genres are based on that. And one can even argue that all art is derivative and that truly original art do no exist.
It’s not just prompts there are hundreds or thousands of different variables, several programs you can join in different positions, you can make it complex to inimaginable level, to writing your own programs to do part of the task, or making your own Lora with your art or training a lors with other people’s art to achieve the result you want, it can get infinitely complex. You not liking or thinking is boring is irrelevant. Is complex enough and you can achieve specific results. It take time and expertise to do it right, as any other technique. And at the end it gives you enough freedom to be able to use it to express yourself which, in my book, is the definition of art.
You don’t need to explain art to me. I’ve been doing artistic work as amateur for several decades now, I can more or less paint, write and play some instruments, I have a few short stories with a few thousands readers, it’s nothing, but I know what the creative process is. And I’ve studied several courses of art history in university. I’m quite knowledge on the topic. I know about AI art because I find it extremely interesting and I’ve played quite a lot with it. But to be true most of the artistic things I still do are all manual, because I like it better, and because I get better results doing it like that. But I’ve seen other people getting very good results with AI tools.
Go search renaissance or baroque Churches and then come back and tell me that “copying other people’s work is not art”. Art being so different artist to artist is a relative recent thing, for most history all artists in a period just keep copying each other blatantly. I remember doing an exam where we had two pictures of two nearly identical renaissance churches and had to be able to differentiate the architects, and it was HARD. Those fuckers didn’t need AI to copy each other’s styles to the last stone. And nowadays are still studied as grand masters of their art.
Dammit you’re right. Well, I guess that fixes everything.
I worry about the mental health of people that attempt to protect an overinflated technology and attack the mental fortitude of people who bring real problems up with the technology. this is especially true since those same white knights are literally being institutionalized for psychosis and are actively creating cults around specific models.
it’s absurd that people lacking the mental capacity to understand “a machine is not alive” have a seat at the table to discus the dangers presented by AI.
just want to point out that no technology in recorded history is “unstoppable”, though it seems like that was said more to convince yourself than us.
Neither I, nor anyone, can “protect” it or slow it down. You either find a way to work with what’s happening or spiral into greater and greater impotent rage. Better accept this now than slowly go mad no?
People said the metaverse was inevitable. Bitcoin was at one time inevitable.
Frankly, I think more impotent rage is needed.
It’s tough as a computer science professor from a related perspective. Lots of students arbitrarily hating anything AI related because of this, including all of the traditional techniques from the 60 years prior to the rise of LLMs and diffusion models, and others misconstruing or discounting any AI class that isn’t LLM or diffusion related.
I never like to say technology is inevitable, as the inevitability argument is one of the best marketing tools major companies have to justify their poor ethics and business models (see: the gig economy founders, the “Momentum” mindset). It’s clear, though, that there is quite a paradigm shift occuring.
The paradigm shift toward stupid monthly paying users?
It’s because most of it is utter dross, that’s why.