In a post-scarcity solarpunk future, I could imagine some reasonable uses, but that’s not the world we’re living in yet.
AI art has already poisoned the creative environment. I commissioned an artist for my latest solarpunk novel, and they used AI without telling me. I had to scrap that illustration. Then the next person I tried to hire claimed they could do the work without AI but in fact they could not.
All that is to say, fuck generative AI and fuck capitalism!
So AI is invalidating capitalism because it's showing that people's value shouldn't be tied to what they can produce... And you're mad at that too? It's so weird to me to see people mad that AI is not allowing them to participate in capitalism when they themselves have a dislike for capitalism. Like... I understand the immediate problem is because of AI... but it's highlighting so beautifully the main problem of capitalism. Which is the real problem.
AI is like the climate change of the economy. We all knew automation was coming and would be the death knell for capitalism. But now that it's one or the other, people are choosing capitalism because it's what they know. Even people that are still outspoken anti-capitalist! What we should be fighting for is more open sourced models and AI projects.
To be fair, people are choosing capitalism because they have to make money, buy food, and pay rent.
Graphic designer, writer, commissioned artist, were jobs people could do entirely online. And a lot of highly online people did one or the other, or have friends who did one or the other, and they see AI as the existential threat to their livelihoods that it, in fact, is.
And I feel for them. I really do. If you bought food and paid rent by making art online - especially if you're neurodivergent or disabled or trapped in an abusive relationship and couldn't hold a normal job - AI tools have destroyed your career. And it sucks. There's no getting around that.
But the core of the problem is not AI. The core of the problem is the lack of a safety net. Some of the enormous profits from the AI boom should be funneled back into society to support the people who are put out of business by the AI boom. But they won't. Because capitalism.
especially if you’re neurodivergent or disabled or trapped in an abusive relationship and couldn’t hold a normal job
I was all three and AI would have let me get the capital to escape one of those things. Too bad people were too busy frothing at the mouth over it when it would have helped me the most.
I largely agree, but I will say that it isn't only about a financial safety net. AI corporations are using huge trawling nets to pull in the work of everyone in the world, and then resell it in a convenient box. The fact that the profits will be unevenly distributed is only one negative side effect. Because just like ocean trawling, the other side effect is that it will leave the ecosystem damaged and diminished.
Note that the comic in this case is Penny Arcade. Those guys are part of the first original wave of web-comics. They are pioneers and veterans. Their regular blog posts are a level-headed contemporary commentary of the state of the internet and of games. The website is amusing, but it is also a good historical document. And although their huge success is largely due to luck of their timing, and perseverance; they have used their success to make great contributions well beyond just the comics. (I'm thinking mostly of their charity "Child's play", and the various PAX gaming expos.) So that's the kind of value we risk losing, even if AI profits are shared 'fairly'.
In the comic, (and in a couple of recent blog posts), they are basically concerned that their work is being used without their permission to train AI to mimic their work, and the work of other artists. Partially this is about money, but it is also about clarity of communication. The comics, and their blog have always been a way of communicating their thoughts and chronicling history. And a flood of low-effort AI replicas can dilute this to a level of pointlessness.
And its a similar situation with all artists, with some artists being far more vulnerable than others. Artists generally are not simply drawing stuff to get paid. They are trying to communicate something about the world. So this isn't only about getting paid for art. It's about being able to contribute meaning. With AI being produced at a rate far far higher than human art, the signal-to-noise ratio will drop sharply.
One of the key features of capitalism is that it keeps the masses in service. When we're working to make the CEOs rich we don't have time to rally against them. They make us complicit in the system. It's why they try and pay talent as little as possible. Sometimes the same amount as someone who slacks off all day. Because the longer it takes us to retire the longer we'll be in service to them. Once there's nothing for us to do anymore, my hope is that people will realize that the rich and powerful don't deserve to hold the keys to society. My fear is that corps will slowly transition everyone into mindless drones hitting a "Do my job, AI" button all day and nothing will change.
Wholeheartedly agree! I would love for us to seamlessly transition into a society with automated surplus where people never have to worry about how they'll feed themselves. But I have a feeling that the transition will be a lot more rough than that unfortunately. And we're starting to see that now.
AI is a lot like plastic:
It is versatile and easy to use. There are some cases for which it is the highest quality product for the job; but for most cases it is just a far cheaper alternative, with bit of a quality reduction.
So what we end up with is plastic being used a lot, to reduce costs and maximise profits; but mostly the products it is used for are worse than they would otherwise be. They look worse. They degrade faster. They produce mountains of waste that end up contaminating every food source of every animal in the world. As a species, we want to use it less; but individual companies and people continue to use it for everything because it is cheap and convenient.
I think AI will be the same. It is relatively cheap and convenient. It can be used for a very wide range of things, and does a pretty good job. But in most cases it is not quite as good as what we were doing before. In any case, AI output will dominate everything we consume because of how cheap and easy it is. News, reviews, social media comments, web searches, all sorts of products... a huge proportion will be AI created - and although we'll wish they weren't (because of the unreliable quality), it will be almost impossible to avoid; because its easier to produce 1000 articles with AI than a single one by a human. So people will churn junk and hope to get lucky rather than putting in work to insure high quality.
For individual people creating stuff, the AI makes it easier and faster and cheaper; and can create good results. But for the world as a whole, we'll end up choking on a mountain of rubbish, as we now have to wade through vastly more low-quality works to find what we're looking for. It will contaminate everything we consume, and we won't be able to get rid of it.
It's not even the fact it's cheap and easy, it's just a bunch of idiots overinvested and now they're desperately trying to make it A Thing so they can recoup losses.
Mcdonalds tried to shoehorn it into drive thru orders. The place that popularised a set menu you select a a controlled list of items from. Wtaf.
Someone said something that stuck with me the other day. "I don't want AI to create all of our art and music so we can work more. I want AI to do our work so we have more time to create art and music".
AI is on its way to automate most jobs. The economy is about radically change
Yeah, except we don't have anything even close to ready for everyone who will lose their income. I foresee a lot of hardship coming, especially since those in power tend to horde all resources for themselves, and AI will allow them to horde resources at never before imaginable levels.
That should be at the forefront of our political discourse. We had Andrew Yang bring make some noise back in 2019/2020, but he was the only one to bring AI, automation, and UBI and he kind of faded into irrelevancy. Which is unfortunate because nobody else is talking about any of these things, especially the dinosaurs we have running for president right now.
Funny - I distinctly remember not having any time to recreationally make, and most importantly, actually finish small art pieces. Because our society nowadays demands me to be working on things that aren't quite art for 80% of the time I'm awake. AI assisted tools have caused me to be able to use that 20% to actually make something again in a satisfactory way. At least for me and most people I talk to in a similar situation, it has allowed me to enjoy being creative again.
That's cool. It helps me at work too.
If the AI isn't stealing content, then piracy isn't stealing either.
AI doesn't steal art. It creates new and unique images, it just uses existing art as inspiration... Like what real artist do.
This is a deliberate misunderstanding I have seen repeatedly. They don't mean the AI stole art. They mean the training data used to train the ai stole art and is now being used to lever artists out of the workforce because it's cheaper.
The online scrapers just add whatever can be publicly viewed to their datasets. I fail to see how this is any different from actual artists going on the internet to view art to inspire and influence them. Regardless, what exactly do these artists demand? They can't fight technology and win, this is a futile battle that has been fought and lost many times before. AI art isn't going anywhere, it's here to stay and it'll only get better. No amount of anti-AI posts is going to change this. What exactly is the ultimate goal here?
There was a lot of stuff that could be publicly viewed that was still under copyright or similar. We spent a good 20 years having artists developed and distribute portfolios online to be marketable to firms. And now the firms have essentially taken their work for free, used it in a way that there aren't really any protections against legally speaking, without any warning, and monetized the models to make money. All while cutting those same artists out of jobs because the LLM is cheaper.
The ultimate goal is you don't take something someone made without their knowledge, use it to make profit for you and then tell me to get rekt when I want what I should be entitled to.
These artists aren't a monolith. Most of them aren't even unionised. This tech had a varied history but to most of the public this tech is like a year old. They want protections. They want to continue in the career path they made sacrifices to follow. They want a lot of things but the point is regulation would be a good start.
What is the ultimate goal of Generative AI? Because I don't see a way forward where it's unregulated use will be beneficial with no detriments to the people upon whose work it was built.
When you start getting into the specifics, it becomes way more complicated. How exactly should these AI companies notify people that their content is being used for their model? First of all, they're not actually the ones harvesting the data. That scrapers tend to be independent... so these artists are going after the wrong people, unless you expect the AI company to parse through all the data they use to find the rightful owners of everything and ask for their consent, which isn't really viable, let alone practical. Let's suppose the artists do go after the scrapers, how exactly do they notify people that their content is being used? The content is collected by an algorithm, how are they supposed to reliably identify the rightful owners of content and ask for their consent? Do they just send automatic messages to any email or phone number they find?
How about this, what if an artist is posting their art on a platform, like say for example Reddit, and that platform agrees to allow the data to scraped and used for AI data training? Does the platform company own the data on the platform or the individual artist? If it is the latter, what's stopping platforms from modifying their TOS to just claim ownership of anything posted on their platforms? Again, what is the ultimate goal here?
The point is that while I agree that AI has to be regulated, the criticisms and proposed regulations have to specific and pragmatic for them to mean anything. This general hatred of AI and whining by artists and other groups is just noise. It's just people trying to fight against technology, and as history has shown us before, they will inevitably lose. New technologies have always threatened and displaced well established workers, careers, and industries. For example, lamp lighting used to an actual job, but as the technology improved and light bulbs became a thing, lamplighters became a thing of the past. They tried very hard to resist the change and managed to do so for awhile, but it was a losing battle and they eventually faded away. Economics and technology always win.
That's kind of the key here, these generative AI's are the light bulbs of our era. They've already replaced a bunch of jobs and radically changing entire industries. There's no ultimate goal with them and there's no fighting them. Pandora's box is open and it's not going to close. This new technology is still at it's infancy now, but it's going to rapidly expand, evolve, and adapt to a bunch of different situations. Whle regulations can help guide this freight train of a technology in the right direction, they can't stop something with no brakes. As it gets adopted by more and more people and used in more and more spaces, it's going to alter how we do things kind of like how smartphones or social media did. We have no choice but to evolve with them or else we'll become the new lamplighters.
Receiving stolen property is still a crime. You can't hire an independent contractor to draw you Disney characters and use the IP to make money. That's still illegal.
But that's not what these generative AIs do. They use actual content for training, but all generations are unique... Just like actual art
Penny Arcade is still being made
wow.
In one of their recent-ish comics they made a jab about it taking on a life of its own and refusing to die.
Haven't seen a penny arcade comics in like 15 years. Gotta say, the art style has suffered. Tycho looks like he has hydrocephaly
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