I emphatically would never like to be viewed as an artist. Being viewed as an artist sounds like a nightmare to me.
I am quite looking forward to sculpting, printing and painting my own miniatures soon. But that’s just my dorky fun hobby.
Course I’m mostly over here in the camp of “AI is a tool and like all tools it has good uses and bad uses and we as a society need to figure out what we think are and are not acceptable uses of this tool.”
I mean, (not aggressively), that's B.
You want immediate and cheap, but you want it to apply to some things and not other things. Which you have articulated well and consistently! You're doing the honesty thing, which is good! Not knocking it! But it is... Still B.
+1
GustavFriend of GoatsSomewhere in the OzarksRegistered Userregular
I emphatically would never like to be viewed as an artist. Being viewed as an artist sounds like a nightmare to me.
I am quite looking forward to sculpting, printing and painting my own miniatures soon. But that’s just my dorky fun hobby.
Course I’m mostly over here in the camp of “AI is a tool and like all tools it has good uses and bad uses and we as a society need to figure out what we think are and are not acceptable uses of this tool.”
You are 90% of why I included the parentheses if I’m being honest. Don’t know if I’m square with your opinion per say. But I think you‘ve actually done a great job illustrating what these programs entail more than most. Both on like its neat applications while still being fairly sober on the potential threats.
Gustav on
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MaddocI'm Bobbin Threadbare, are you my mother?Registered Userregular
I emphatically would never like to be viewed as an artist. Being viewed as an artist sounds like a nightmare to me.
I am quite looking forward to sculpting, printing and painting my own miniatures soon. But that’s just my dorky fun hobby.
Course I’m mostly over here in the camp of “AI is a tool and like all tools it has good uses and bad uses and we as a society need to figure out what we think are and are not acceptable uses of this tool.”
I mean, (not aggressively), that's B.
You want immediate and cheap, but you want it to apply to some things and not other things. Which you have articulated well and consistently! You're doing the honesty thing, which is good! Not knocking it! But it is... Still B.
I’m not sure if it’s B, to be honest, I don’t see myself actually leveraging AI generated art much (if at all) in my process. Maybe to generate reference art to then sculpt but with how bad it is at consistency and proportions I don’t think it will be worth using over like, actual reference photography.
When I say AI is a tool I mean weak AI in general, not weak AI solely for generating say, painter like art. I know Blender already leverages some weak AI (to speed up rendering time) and I’ll take advantage of that, to be sure. But using MidJourney to generate art doesn’t really seem to be worth the time (or the electricity, for that matter) to me at the moment.
Edit: unless B is like, using any labor saving at all in the process of making stuff because yeah I am saving a ton of labor compared to old methods of sculpting the miniature by hand, casting it, etc
Edit2: or is B like, applying AI in general? Because heck yeah please apply it to things like researching covid vaccines faster, imo.
Sorry if I missed your point, it’s almost my bed time and falling asleep at the keyboard here. Been a long week.
I always remember a drawing professor's look of offense when being called an artist, and telling the class they though of themselves as more of an artisan.
Like calling someone a gamer.
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MaddocI'm Bobbin Threadbare, are you my mother?Registered Userregular
You can't just call someone a gamer, that's fucked up
I am making good faith arguments re: the need for a UBI, and I'm sorry you don't believe that. Nobody in this thread has claimed that AI is our only lasting important legacy, and I criticized @Incenjucar for bring up the discussion point because I knew it would get misrepresented as someone's position here.
I don't support AI Art out of a desire for instant gratification, and I have clearly and repeatedly stated that I think that AI's should only be trained on public domain or licensed artwork, and pointed to a set of millions of pieces of art that are shared by the US Library of Congress. There is no need to steal the artworks.
And even if they did, the cost to redo the work would probably be only in the million dollar range, which is probably less than Disney's laundry budget for a week.
I entered the discussion on AI Art because I see automation only coming to more and more industries and applications. And if we don't start taking care of humanity, then we will fail as a species. It's not like we don't already have existential threats like nukes or climate change that are going to require all humanity to work together to solve.
+1
Lord_AsmodeusgoeticSobriquet:Here is your magical cryptic riddle-tumour: I AM A TIME MACHINERegistered Userregular
Evil Multifarious I appreciate that you've been acting in good faith in both of these threads.
It's an attitude to emulate to be sure
Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if Labor had not first existed. Labor is superior to capital, and deserves much the higher consideration. - Lincoln
So, just to follow up the the removing barriers to artists creating, here's stuff that would make creating for me more accessible as a disabled artist:
Money. (Art supplies)
Better access to mental health resources so I can sort out the brain crap that gets in the way
An Easel (I can draw with my right hand sitting down, but I learned to draw from my shoulder with my left arm, so it's hard to do sitting down)
A house I actually own instead of renting, so i can have a dedicated art room to put the easel in
Money (therapy)
Money (batteries for my tens kit to manage my chronic pain)
Money (various books, non fiction and fiction to build a reference and inspiration library)
Money (so I don't have to get a job and can spend my limited energy and resources on creating instead of surviving)
Things that won't help me make art:
Stealing other artists work! Which, to be clear, is what ai art would be doing.
These days most of my artistic output is done via writing because there's way less barriers to writing for me, and I'm lucky enough to be someone who can both write and draw. (I should actually make a thread here in the writing forum for my messages in a bottle series)
I am really surprised that the apparent need for a UBI isn't a popular concept here.
No one here takes "we just need UBI and itll be fine" seriously when its offered by people who's politics dont differentiate from the Democratic Party in any meaningful way.
No Styro, that's not it at all. You disagree with me on some things and you don't like the Democratic Party, so you lump me in with them as something that you also don't like. My personal beliefs are much, much more progressive than the Democratic Platform on practically any topic that comes to mind.
But you don't care about my position, or any nuances to the conversation at all. You just want to drop one to three sentences into a thread that use vague words to appear to convey a deep meaning without often saying anything at all, but garnering agrees and awesomes from like minded individuals. And when you get called on it, your start shifting goalposts or claiming that others misinterpreted you. Because at your core you are unable to admit that you're wrong.
You called me tedious earlier, and if I'm being tedious, at least I'm with like minded company.
What are you doing to try to make UBI happen?
So now you're gatekeeping my participation in the discussion at all by telling me to prove myself to you?
When you think about it, isn't AI generated art just an infinitely lesser version of Draw A Horse?
There is a prompt given and it takes inputs from many artists and smashes them together, often into nightmares.
But the AI will never be able to appreciate that the very bad drawing is actually very good because it is very bad and its process will never be steeped acts of communal dipshittery.
A fool: "I entered the prompt, I created the constraints that would cause this art to happen! I must be the artist!"
A wise philosopher: "Oh, really? Did Knob draw this horse?"
+3
GustavFriend of GoatsSomewhere in the OzarksRegistered Userregular
I think gatekeeping is in the gaslighting arena of words rendered meaningless by the internet.
And while I trust that you do want UBI like I’d imagine most of us here do, I can’t believe that any of us believe it’s in the American pipeline in any foreseeable future. Or brought to us by the tech sector.
So, just to follow up the the removing barriers to artists creating, here's stuff that would make creating for me more accessible as a disabled artist:
Money. (Art supplies)
Better access to mental health resources so I can sort out the brain crap that gets in the way
An Easel (I can draw with my right hand sitting down, but I learned to draw from my shoulder with my left arm, so it's hard to do sitting down)
A house I actually own instead of renting, so i can have a dedicated art room to put the easel in
Money (therapy)
Money (batteries for my tens kit to manage my chronic pain)
Money (various books, non fiction and fiction to build a reference and inspiration library)
Money (so I don't have to get a job and can spend my limited energy and resources on creating instead of surviving)
Things that won't help me make art:
Stealing other artists work! Which, to be clear, is what ai art would be doing.
These days most of my artistic output is done via writing because there's way less barriers to writing for me, and I'm lucky enough to be someone who can both write and draw. (I should actually make a thread here in the writing forum for my messages in a bottle series)
I am really surprised that the apparent need for a UBI isn't a popular concept here.
No one here takes "we just need UBI and itll be fine" seriously when its offered by people who's politics dont differentiate from the Democratic Party in any meaningful way.
No Styro, that's not it at all. You disagree with me on some things and you don't like the Democratic Party, so you lump me in with them as something that you also don't like. My personal beliefs are much, much more progressive than the Democratic Platform on practically any topic that comes to mind.
But you don't care about my position, or any nuances to the conversation at all. You just want to drop one to three sentences into a thread that use vague words to appear to convey a deep meaning without often saying anything at all, but garnering agrees and awesomes from like minded individuals. And when you get called on it, your start shifting goalposts or claiming that others misinterpreted you. Because at your core you are unable to admit that you're wrong.
You called me tedious earlier, and if I'm being tedious, at least I'm with like minded company.
What are you doing to try to make UBI happen?
So now you're gatekeeping my participation in the discussion at all by telling me to prove myself to you?
Lot of people say "ok so I want X and dont worry about those problems theyll be solved by Y" and then they clearly dont do anything to make Y happen. It makes it seem like Y isnt actually a priority, its a rhetorical escape hatch.
+6
Lord_AsmodeusgoeticSobriquet:Here is your magical cryptic riddle-tumour: I AM A TIME MACHINERegistered Userregular
edited September 2022
Gatekeeping is very much distinct from gaslighting in that gaslighting is a very specific thing that necessarily occurs over a long period of time and takes effort and people just use it synonymously with lying, whereas gatekeeping is easy as piss and people do it all the goddamn time.
Also you might think UBI is unlikely in the near future but that doesn't mean it isn't the real solution to these issues, and if you think achieving UBI is going to be hard, compared to shoving this tech genie back in the bottle I think it's positively inevitable. Like if UBI is outside the realm of practical solutions and you think the best alternative is to ban/stop this technology at this stage all I have to say is fucking lol. lmao.
Lord_Asmodeus on
Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if Labor had not first existed. Labor is superior to capital, and deserves much the higher consideration. - Lincoln
GustavFriend of GoatsSomewhere in the OzarksRegistered Userregular
Oh I think UBI is absolutely the route to solving a lot of issues if not most of them. But if Andrew Yang is the only person who has brought it up in the American political arena I’m not willing to bet on its existence here in my life time.
I’ve also never argued for banning or stopping this software. I agree that’s not how things work. I think that’s as likely as UBI. Which is to say not really at all. At least in the world as it operates currently.
My argument has been and remains that I think generated imagery exists in a similar trajectory as NFTs. Where for a few years people tell us this is the way of the future and that it will blow down the doors of the old world to usher in a redefinition of art and ownership of art. And yet we hear less and less of it every day. Because it’s frankly not that interesting. A convoluted solution for something most people don’t see as a problem. AI Art becoming tantamount to telling a stranger your dream. Where it’s interesting to the person talking, but very rarely to the person listening.
And if it remains the with us for the extended period it’s as a neat piece of tech, but not much more than that. A parlor trick. Cool additions to your DnD sessions. Maybe a brainstorming tool. Not a replacement for artists or art at large.
My frustration with this thread have not been based in Ai Art’s existence or whether or not it’s art. It’s been the few who have declared it as the shining light of the future and as an instrument to end capitalism’s death spiral with art. Or frankly the shrug that computers can just do it better.
I would possibly settle for UBI, but it shouldn’t be the goal. UBI are crumbs from the tablecloth and, given the US’ business ownership and regulatory environment, it’s a given that the income will be gobbled up immediately by utility providers
GustavFriend of GoatsSomewhere in the OzarksRegistered Userregular
edited September 2022
That’s also probably distressingly true. I just think of UBI as so pie in the sky here to basically be fantasy. So my consideration of it allows a lot of impossible things to also prove true for it to come to pass as we generally think of it.
Oh I think UBI is absolutely the route to solving a lot of issues if not most of them. But if Andrew Yang is the only person who has brought it up in the American political arena I’m not willing to bet on its existence here in my life time.
I’ve also never argued for banning or stopping this software. I agree that’s not how things work. I think that’s as likely as UBI. Which is to say not really at all. At least in the world as it operates currently.
My argument has been and remains that I think generated imagery exists in a similar trajectory as NFTs. Where for a few years people tell us this is the way of the future and that it will blow down the doors of the old world to usher in a redefinition of art and ownership of art. And yet we hear less and less of it every day. Because it’s frankly not that interesting. A convoluted solution for something most people don’t see as a problem. AI Art becoming tantamount to telling a stranger your dream. Where it’s interesting to the person talking, but very rarely to the person listening.
And if it remains the with us for the extended period it’s as a neat piece of tech, but not much more than that. A parlor trick. Cool additions to your DnD sessions. Maybe a brainstorming tool. Not a replacement for artists or art at large.
My frustration with this thread have not been based in Ai Art’s existence or whether or not it’s art. It’s been the few who have declared it as the shining light of the future and as an instrument to end capitalism’s death spiral with art. Or frankly the shrug that computers can just do it better.
In that context it mostly just seems like you're disagreeing about how much of an impact it will have/what the near term potential of it is
Lord_Asmodeus on
Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if Labor had not first existed. Labor is superior to capital, and deserves much the higher consideration. - Lincoln
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GustavFriend of GoatsSomewhere in the OzarksRegistered Userregular
I’d say that’s a healthy chunk of it yeah. Not confident I’m right but my gut suggests this isn’t quite the game changer that proponents want to sell.
There are some real characters in the AI space. I don’t know if this is true of the art fair fellow, but there are definitely people in the AI space that basically think “as the single cell organism lead to the multi-cell organism, the true purpose of mankind is to give birth to strong AI and retire from the scene”
Which is, you know, totally bonkers to me. And also the weak AI we have currently is such a far cry from anything approaching a strong AI that the idea is currently laughable, but there are some real doomsday cult folks out and about.
This kind of singularity cult nonsense is very frustrating because it generally comes from people who have no grounding in philosophy, but also actively look at philosophy with contempt, including philosophy of technology and philosophy of science. So they make major conceptual and procedural errors when engaging in these thought experiments about future AIs and simulations and ethical imperatives, and then they go on to work at or build companies that operate on these principles and lobby politicians with tech money
Have you ever had a conversation with someone who thinks Roko's Basilisk is real? It's absolutely surreal. There are people cutting deals with politicians who believe in this garbage.
What’s Roko’s Basilisk?
I want to expand on previous answers:
Roko's Basilisk posits a future AI of immense power and intelligence. Specifically, it is capable of fully simulating the brain and body of a human being, including a full virtual consciousness.
It posits that such a simulated person would have absolutely no way of knowing that they are a simulation.
It posits that an AI of such power would be motivated to punish the people who refused, in the past, to help it come into being, perhaps out of sheer malevolence.
It would therefore simulate all human beings, based on reconstruction from copious records and data, and run them through their lives to see if they ever had the idea that such an AI could exist and refused to help it. If they so refused, the AI would consign them to eternal simulated torture.
This then means that KNOWING about the Basilisk is dangerous — because you don't have any way of knowing if you're one of those test simulations, and if you are, even hearing the concept would doom you unless you immediately worked toward the Basilisk's creation. It's a cognitohazard that condemns you to technoperdition.
As a result, the other possible motivation for this convoluted torture is that the Basilisk knows all this and needs to enforce the mechanism that traps humans who understand it into working toward its genesis, retroactively. In fact, a benevolent AI would do the same to hasten its own existence because it will save more lives the earlier it exists
Obviously this is tremendously stupid and confused, down to the causal, temporal level, or else I have doomed anyone who read this to cyberdamnation.
Posit: Roko’s basilisk cannot be in control of any existence that has a preponderance of JRPGs, as many of them coming to the conclusion that you must literally slay god is an idea too dangerous to the Basilisk to propagate.
No way it allows Digital Devil Saga: Avatar Tuner to exist in the simulation
I would possibly settle for UBI, but it shouldn’t be the goal. UBI are crumbs from the tablecloth and, given the US’ business ownership and regulatory environment, it’s a given that the income will be gobbled up immediately by utility providers
Just as an example of this: Here in new zealand, part of the benefit is the accommodation supplement. strangely enough, whenever the accommodation supplement goes up, so do rents. Landlords here are often the very ones complaining about beneficiaries existing, while also benefiting massively from said existence.
And i'd say it's a fair argument that NZ is vastly closer to implementing a UBI (which is to say, not at all) than the US.
So I gotta ask, why is it that I made similar threads in two subforums and got polar opposite reactions to them? I took a break for most of yesterday from these forums to discuss the topic other places and got reactions that had more of an even mix of opinions.
So I gotta ask, why is it that I made similar threads in two subforums and got polar opposite reactions to them? I took a break for most of yesterday from these forums to discuss the topic other places and got reactions that had more of an even mix of opinions.
There's defintely a divide of some kind between SE and D&D. Dunno why, there just is. My impression is that that D&D is a bit more determined to play with ideas and debate them to the nines, while SE is a bit more willing to go "You're a goose" and shout down things when they're disliked? But that's just my impression from posting in both and... i'm probably wrong!
So I gotta ask, why is it that I made similar threads in two subforums and got polar opposite reactions to them? I took a break for most of yesterday from these forums to discuss the topic other places and got reactions that had more of an even mix of opinions.
Idk man I agree w you on this topic but posts like this just feel salty lmao like oh no some nerds disagreed with you ok that's what nerds do they're very contrarian and have endless time
My advice as your doctor is to not spend 2 hours writing an OP just to get upset when the people don't all fall over themselves to agree with ya
I truly think the only honest stances with AI art are A- wanting accolades without having to do much work and B- wanting immediate satisfaction on the cheap.
I respect any of these opinions more than a maze of thought experiments that bring us to the same results. I don’t agree with them but I can frankly accept the honesty.
I guess I fall into B? And I see no moral issue with that. I think that the world is a better place when if I want a book, I don’t need to have a calf slaughtered, the skin cleaned, bleached, stretched, and scraped, the pages cut and pricked, and then to have scribes letter the work by hand. Instead, I just walk into a bookstore and buy it. Or I go online and download it. Alternatively, if I want a new shelf, I’m probably heading to IKEA first, rather than hiring a craftsperson. At some point, I may very well decide that a given piece is important enough to me that I’d pay someone to build what I want, but in the meantime I can get 90% of what for 1/3 of the price.
If I want an image of a dark tower on Umbrian hills under Shoggoth clouds, I can plug those terms into Midjourney if I can’t find quite what I want on Google image searches. Convenience isn’t a bad thing in my mind.
Civics is not a consumer product that you can ignore because you don’t like the options presented.
I think this topic gets a large variety of responses because there are multiple involved topics (and sub-topics) and a lot of subjectivity around those topics.
How much does one value art? Value artists? Value automation? Value AI (weak or strong)? How has one interacted with art and artists? How does one value work (both in a general way and specific forms of work)? Etc
I think then you combine that with a lot of people not knowing that much about art, artists, and the artistic process. And combine that with a lot of people not knowing that much about AI, ML, model training, etc (which leads to a lot of FUD).
Then you combine that with discourse on a place like a forum that is steered by individuals popularity, clout, rhetoric skills, wit etc (and not some kind of drive towards any kind of “objective correct truth”).
So, yeah, mostly folks are going to come in with preformed opinions already and what becomes the “dominant” talking line in any spot is going to be based on who has talked in that spot the “best” and the “longest”.
I truly think the only honest stances with AI art are A- wanting accolades without having to do much work and B- wanting immediate satisfaction on the cheap.
I respect any of these opinions more than a maze of thought experiments that bring us to the same results. I don’t agree with them but I can frankly accept the honesty.
I guess I fall into B? And I see no moral issue with that. I think that the world is a better place when if I want a book, I don’t need to have a calf slaughtered, the skin cleaned, bleached, stretched, and scraped, the pages cut and pricked, and then to have scribes letter the work by hand. Instead, I just walk into a bookstore and buy it. Or I go online and download it. Alternatively, if I want a new shelf, I’m probably heading to IKEA first, rather than hiring a craftsperson. At some point, I may very well decide that a given piece is important enough to me that I’d pay someone to build what I want, but in the meantime I can get 90% of what for 1/3 of the price.
If I want an image of a dark tower on Umbrian hills under Shoggoth clouds, I can plug those terms into Midjourney if I can’t find quite what I want on Google image searches. Convenience isn’t a bad thing in my mind.
The problem here is (like we keep yelling) convivence has a cost. Just because you're not the one paying it does not change that! It just means you're comfortable letting someone else pay it for you.
@Inquisitor I think you're dead on there. Atr least as someone who's been like artworld adjacent for most of my life (Did art in high school, studied 3d animation, did fine art, studied graphic design etc), these threads have been... Interesting, if not quite a bit blood pressure raising at points for the takes on what being an artist is and what it involves and the value or lacktherof in it. (And i say this as someone who fucking hates the fine art world, and honestly a lot of art spaces because they're vapid pretentious bullshit way too often and do not even get me started on the elitism in them. Heaven forbid you be a *gasp* illustrator)
Yeah but that’s the argument against basically the entire modern era. Basically every moment since 2007 has been the general public trading away their souls and the livelihoods of millions in the name of convenience. Every single app you use is built on the core premise of convenience above all else. There’s not one piece of anything you can touch right now that hasn’t had thousands of jobs sacrificed to its existence. Have you ever used a ride share service, or gone on indeed and found yourself a job instead of going through traditional recruitment processes? Have you streamed media from any streaming media service? Have you used Amazon at all for anything (you have even if you didn’t know it cause AWS)? Do you use online bill pay instead of calling services and paying over the phone or sending a check in by mail? All of those things are convenience at an astounding cost that absolutely no one gave even the slightest shit about or even considered what was being killed on the way.
Our entire society is based in convenience above all. Without any concern for the cost of that convenience. It’s totally unsurprising that same philosophy is coming to art. The surprising part is that someone figured out a tool that can do it.
Hasn’t that philosophy already come to art and been with art for a while?
For example, Hayao Miyazaki has come up in this thread a few times. The convenience of computers has steadily been introduced into animation at Studio Ghibli, first for some technically complicated shots, and then for backgrounds, and then for coloring characters, etc. Now, the technical aspects of animation are definitely beyond my purview but it’s pretty clear that the convenience of computers have crept into the animation space in general, just seeing the changes in anime that have come out from Japan over the decade. And while it does mean (sometimes…) nicer looking shows, it also means less people being hired for “entry” level type animation roles like coloring the cells. So, someone’s job is lost or changed in the name of convenience. (I could be way off base here, if I’m blowing smoke out of my butt, someone let me know).
Now, sure, this AI replacing artists entirely is a different thing. But I also don’t see this technology actually fully replacing artists. As it continues to evolve, it does mean you’ll need less people to create a given output, but… that’s a trend that has been going on for decades now.
I truly think the only honest stances with AI art are A- wanting accolades without having to do much work and B- wanting immediate satisfaction on the cheap.
I respect any of these opinions more than a maze of thought experiments that bring us to the same results. I don’t agree with them but I can frankly accept the honesty.
I guess I fall into B? And I see no moral issue with that. I think that the world is a better place when if I want a book, I don’t need to have a calf slaughtered, the skin cleaned, bleached, stretched, and scraped, the pages cut and pricked, and then to have scribes letter the work by hand. Instead, I just walk into a bookstore and buy it. Or I go online and download it. Alternatively, if I want a new shelf, I’m probably heading to IKEA first, rather than hiring a craftsperson. At some point, I may very well decide that a given piece is important enough to me that I’d pay someone to build what I want, but in the meantime I can get 90% of what for 1/3 of the price.
If I want an image of a dark tower on Umbrian hills under Shoggoth clouds, I can plug those terms into Midjourney if I can’t find quite what I want on Google image searches. Convenience isn’t a bad thing in my mind.
The problem here is (like we keep yelling) convivence has a cost. Just because you're not the one paying it does not change that! It just means you're comfortable letting someone else pay it for you.
Sure. I’m totally comfortable knowing that vellum producers and scribes see less work so that I can get books easier, because while they’re out of work it turns out that the change allows for a lot more books - good, bad, great, terrible - to be published. The introduction of canned and then frozen foods added a lot of convenience for people, at the cost of reducing the amount of home cooking that was happening and the directness of the path from field to table, but plenty of people still cook for personal and commercial reasons, and people still buy fresh produce at farmer’s markets.
I’m pretty comfortable with the idea that the art world will change too. People with ideas but who haven’t developed the artistic skills to put what they want into existence. Does convenience come at some cost? Sure. But the printing press was a good thing for books, canned and frozen foods are ultimately a good thing for feeding people, etc.
Civics is not a consumer product that you can ignore because you don’t like the options presented.
Have you ever used a ride share service, or gone on indeed and found yourself a job instead of going through traditional recruitment processes? Have you streamed media from any streaming media service? Have you used Amazon at all for anything (you have even if you didn’t know it cause AWS)? Do you use online bill pay instead of calling services and paying over the phone or sending a check in by mail? All of those things are convenience at an astounding cost that absolutely no one gave even the slightest shit about or even considered what was being killed on the way.
Some of your examples there are unequivocally good things IMO. When people use ride share services rather than owning cars, it means fewer cars on the road, which is an absolute necessity if we want a sustainable planet. A world where we pay bills electronically is better than one where we generate extra pollution and waste from sending physical documents around, and taking bill payment phone calls in a call centre is one of the most boring and soul-crushing ways there is to make a living - I mourn for the diminishing importance of that job the same way I mourn for how modern plumbing forces night soil collectors to look for new work.
Civics is not a consumer product that you can ignore because you don’t like the options presented.
To use another example of why convenience and lost jobs are not inherently bad things: a government handling health care costs directly rather than people buying health insurance and having to figure out their plans and premiums and such cuts out insurance industry jobs. It means lost jobs for centre agents, IT staff, researchers, analysts, marketing people, sales people, and others. But the increased convenience and lower costs are worth it in my opinion, despite the job losses.
Civics is not a consumer product that you can ignore because you don’t like the options presented.
Posts
I mean, (not aggressively), that's B.
You want immediate and cheap, but you want it to apply to some things and not other things. Which you have articulated well and consistently! You're doing the honesty thing, which is good! Not knocking it! But it is... Still B.
You are 90% of why I included the parentheses if I’m being honest. Don’t know if I’m square with your opinion per say. But I think you‘ve actually done a great job illustrating what these programs entail more than most. Both on like its neat applications while still being fairly sober on the potential threats.
What if I did it really badly
I’m not sure if it’s B, to be honest, I don’t see myself actually leveraging AI generated art much (if at all) in my process. Maybe to generate reference art to then sculpt but with how bad it is at consistency and proportions I don’t think it will be worth using over like, actual reference photography.
When I say AI is a tool I mean weak AI in general, not weak AI solely for generating say, painter like art. I know Blender already leverages some weak AI (to speed up rendering time) and I’ll take advantage of that, to be sure. But using MidJourney to generate art doesn’t really seem to be worth the time (or the electricity, for that matter) to me at the moment.
Edit: unless B is like, using any labor saving at all in the process of making stuff because yeah I am saving a ton of labor compared to old methods of sculpting the miniature by hand, casting it, etc
Edit2: or is B like, applying AI in general? Because heck yeah please apply it to things like researching covid vaccines faster, imo.
Sorry if I missed your point, it’s almost my bed time and falling asleep at the keyboard here. Been a long week.
Nooooo, hoisted by my own petard!
Like calling someone a gamer.
I don't support AI Art out of a desire for instant gratification, and I have clearly and repeatedly stated that I think that AI's should only be trained on public domain or licensed artwork, and pointed to a set of millions of pieces of art that are shared by the US Library of Congress. There is no need to steal the artworks.
And even if they did, the cost to redo the work would probably be only in the million dollar range, which is probably less than Disney's laundry budget for a week.
I entered the discussion on AI Art because I see automation only coming to more and more industries and applications. And if we don't start taking care of humanity, then we will fail as a species. It's not like we don't already have existential threats like nukes or climate change that are going to require all humanity to work together to solve.
It's an attitude to emulate to be sure
So now you're gatekeeping my participation in the discussion at all by telling me to prove myself to you?
There is a prompt given and it takes inputs from many artists and smashes them together, often into nightmares.
But the AI will never be able to appreciate that the very bad drawing is actually very good because it is very bad and its process will never be steeped acts of communal dipshittery.
A fool: "I entered the prompt, I created the constraints that would cause this art to happen! I must be the artist!"
A wise philosopher: "Oh, really? Did Knob draw this horse?"
And while I trust that you do want UBI like I’d imagine most of us here do, I can’t believe that any of us believe it’s in the American pipeline in any foreseeable future. Or brought to us by the tech sector.
Lot of people say "ok so I want X and dont worry about those problems theyll be solved by Y" and then they clearly dont do anything to make Y happen. It makes it seem like Y isnt actually a priority, its a rhetorical escape hatch.
Also you might think UBI is unlikely in the near future but that doesn't mean it isn't the real solution to these issues, and if you think achieving UBI is going to be hard, compared to shoving this tech genie back in the bottle I think it's positively inevitable. Like if UBI is outside the realm of practical solutions and you think the best alternative is to ban/stop this technology at this stage all I have to say is fucking lol. lmao.
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I’ve also never argued for banning or stopping this software. I agree that’s not how things work. I think that’s as likely as UBI. Which is to say not really at all. At least in the world as it operates currently.
My argument has been and remains that I think generated imagery exists in a similar trajectory as NFTs. Where for a few years people tell us this is the way of the future and that it will blow down the doors of the old world to usher in a redefinition of art and ownership of art. And yet we hear less and less of it every day. Because it’s frankly not that interesting. A convoluted solution for something most people don’t see as a problem. AI Art becoming tantamount to telling a stranger your dream. Where it’s interesting to the person talking, but very rarely to the person listening.
And if it remains the with us for the extended period it’s as a neat piece of tech, but not much more than that. A parlor trick. Cool additions to your DnD sessions. Maybe a brainstorming tool. Not a replacement for artists or art at large.
My frustration with this thread have not been based in Ai Art’s existence or whether or not it’s art. It’s been the few who have declared it as the shining light of the future and as an instrument to end capitalism’s death spiral with art. Or frankly the shrug that computers can just do it better.
Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better
bit.ly/2XQM1ke
Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better
bit.ly/2XQM1ke
In that context it mostly just seems like you're disagreeing about how much of an impact it will have/what the near term potential of it is
Posit: Roko’s basilisk cannot be in control of any existence that has a preponderance of JRPGs, as many of them coming to the conclusion that you must literally slay god is an idea too dangerous to the Basilisk to propagate.
No way it allows Digital Devil Saga: Avatar Tuner to exist in the simulation
https://imgur.com/a/I1aqJuX
Just as an example of this: Here in new zealand, part of the benefit is the accommodation supplement. strangely enough, whenever the accommodation supplement goes up, so do rents. Landlords here are often the very ones complaining about beneficiaries existing, while also benefiting massively from said existence.
And i'd say it's a fair argument that NZ is vastly closer to implementing a UBI (which is to say, not at all) than the US.
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There's defintely a divide of some kind between SE and D&D. Dunno why, there just is. My impression is that that D&D is a bit more determined to play with ideas and debate them to the nines, while SE is a bit more willing to go "You're a goose" and shout down things when they're disliked? But that's just my impression from posting in both and... i'm probably wrong!
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Idk man I agree w you on this topic but posts like this just feel salty lmao like oh no some nerds disagreed with you ok that's what nerds do they're very contrarian and have endless time
My advice as your doctor is to not spend 2 hours writing an OP just to get upset when the people don't all fall over themselves to agree with ya
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I guess I fall into B? And I see no moral issue with that. I think that the world is a better place when if I want a book, I don’t need to have a calf slaughtered, the skin cleaned, bleached, stretched, and scraped, the pages cut and pricked, and then to have scribes letter the work by hand. Instead, I just walk into a bookstore and buy it. Or I go online and download it. Alternatively, if I want a new shelf, I’m probably heading to IKEA first, rather than hiring a craftsperson. At some point, I may very well decide that a given piece is important enough to me that I’d pay someone to build what I want, but in the meantime I can get 90% of what for 1/3 of the price.
If I want an image of a dark tower on Umbrian hills under Shoggoth clouds, I can plug those terms into Midjourney if I can’t find quite what I want on Google image searches. Convenience isn’t a bad thing in my mind.
How much does one value art? Value artists? Value automation? Value AI (weak or strong)? How has one interacted with art and artists? How does one value work (both in a general way and specific forms of work)? Etc
I think then you combine that with a lot of people not knowing that much about art, artists, and the artistic process. And combine that with a lot of people not knowing that much about AI, ML, model training, etc (which leads to a lot of FUD).
Then you combine that with discourse on a place like a forum that is steered by individuals popularity, clout, rhetoric skills, wit etc (and not some kind of drive towards any kind of “objective correct truth”).
So, yeah, mostly folks are going to come in with preformed opinions already and what becomes the “dominant” talking line in any spot is going to be based on who has talked in that spot the “best” and the “longest”.
The problem here is (like we keep yelling) convivence has a cost. Just because you're not the one paying it does not change that! It just means you're comfortable letting someone else pay it for you.
@Inquisitor I think you're dead on there. Atr least as someone who's been like artworld adjacent for most of my life (Did art in high school, studied 3d animation, did fine art, studied graphic design etc), these threads have been... Interesting, if not quite a bit blood pressure raising at points for the takes on what being an artist is and what it involves and the value or lacktherof in it. (And i say this as someone who fucking hates the fine art world, and honestly a lot of art spaces because they're vapid pretentious bullshit way too often and do not even get me started on the elitism in them. Heaven forbid you be a *gasp* illustrator)
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Our entire society is based in convenience above all. Without any concern for the cost of that convenience. It’s totally unsurprising that same philosophy is coming to art. The surprising part is that someone figured out a tool that can do it.
For example, Hayao Miyazaki has come up in this thread a few times. The convenience of computers has steadily been introduced into animation at Studio Ghibli, first for some technically complicated shots, and then for backgrounds, and then for coloring characters, etc. Now, the technical aspects of animation are definitely beyond my purview but it’s pretty clear that the convenience of computers have crept into the animation space in general, just seeing the changes in anime that have come out from Japan over the decade. And while it does mean (sometimes…) nicer looking shows, it also means less people being hired for “entry” level type animation roles like coloring the cells. So, someone’s job is lost or changed in the name of convenience. (I could be way off base here, if I’m blowing smoke out of my butt, someone let me know).
Now, sure, this AI replacing artists entirely is a different thing. But I also don’t see this technology actually fully replacing artists. As it continues to evolve, it does mean you’ll need less people to create a given output, but… that’s a trend that has been going on for decades now.
I’m pretty comfortable with the idea that the art world will change too. People with ideas but who haven’t developed the artistic skills to put what they want into existence. Does convenience come at some cost? Sure. But the printing press was a good thing for books, canned and frozen foods are ultimately a good thing for feeding people, etc.
Some of your examples there are unequivocally good things IMO. When people use ride share services rather than owning cars, it means fewer cars on the road, which is an absolute necessity if we want a sustainable planet. A world where we pay bills electronically is better than one where we generate extra pollution and waste from sending physical documents around, and taking bill payment phone calls in a call centre is one of the most boring and soul-crushing ways there is to make a living - I mourn for the diminishing importance of that job the same way I mourn for how modern plumbing forces night soil collectors to look for new work.
To use another example of why convenience and lost jobs are not inherently bad things: a government handling health care costs directly rather than people buying health insurance and having to figure out their plans and premiums and such cuts out insurance industry jobs. It means lost jobs for centre agents, IT staff, researchers, analysts, marketing people, sales people, and others. But the increased convenience and lower costs are worth it in my opinion, despite the job losses.