Penny Arcade - Comic - Jobophage
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Registered User, Administrator, Vanilla Staff admin
Registered User, Administrator, Vanilla Staff admin
Penny Arcade - Comic - Jobophage
Videogaming-related online strip by Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins. Includes news and commentary.
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It's like painting, but with words! Also the paint is replaced with thousands of pieces of stolen art, so it's more like making a collage by yelling search terms at predictive text
So it's also like making a pyre out of the collected art of the world, burning it down with old growth rainforest and baby pandas as kindling, then drawing anime waifus with shitty hands with the ashes
It is really weird how I've seen interviews where they say this with a straight face and it's like... if your company had 10 artists (or some other AI-replaced position) are you really going to keep 10 "prompt engineers" and/or pay them at the same rate?
Why even have "prompt engineers"?
Just get an AI to do it.
Now they're saying the jobs "maybe" shouldn't have existed.
Why send a Stanley mug to some rando hoping they'll read your press release when you can just generate a bot to say exactly what you want. Just move the Sex/Color/Age sliders to each of your markets.
The difficult part there is that need the "building an audience" function to work. Don't think we're anywhere near that, yet. Companies go to influencers because they've built that audience.
The first fully-fledged AI influencer will have a pretty sizeable audience solely because of the novelty of it being the first AI influencer.
And they'll all be AI
Like the AI pictures on Facebook being liked and commented by AI accounts
Just a snake shitting into its mouth forever
It sucks, but that's kind of what happens in some industries. Accounting firms in the 60's and 70's replaced entire departments of workers with a single mainframe computer. This has all happened before and it will happen again.
Careful what you wish for. This is akin to the argument that AI art will mostly just hurt people who do weird crappy art, and nothing will be lost.
The problem is, even if you don't shed a tear for influencers losing their jobs (I don't), right now those influencers being human keeps the number of influencer videos below critical mass because the chokepoint is the number of humans on earth. There may be way too many human influencers pumping out way too much garbage, but at least there will not be more than 8 billion of them and they won't make more than 24 hours of content a day.
Not so with AI. If you thought it was bad when humans were churning garbage out, wait until the assembly line gets warmed up all the way.
Oh but you can, and we will. And when it happens, the weeping an gnashing of teeth you see now will look like a mild tiff in comparison.
Oh yeah I was being hyperbolic, though only because yes it's all going to burn. I still hate the idea of influencers.
As for audiences, I don't think they'd say it's not a real person. Just plug in a bunch of videos from who they want to copy and output a million videos.
There's a bit of a difference, though. None of what those accounting firm workers were doing was in the least bit creative. It was akin to a robot screwing nails in to replace a bunch of humans screwing nails in. It wasn't, "Okay, let's take the actual creativity of real humans, digest it, and spit it back out in remixes that bring nothing new to the mix and use this simulacrum of creativity instead. And then stop paying them and pay the AI company that ripped off their copyrighted work instead."
Apart from the major moral difference, there's a process problem. The AI only got "good enough" because it was able to digest all this creative work. What happens when there's no new (or very little, because it's been so successful at replacing the vast majority of humans) creative input to be fed into the machine?
Maybe they'll eventually create AI with an actual creative spark, at which point we'll probably be completely doomed in terms of finding meaning in our lives. But that's for Ian Banks novels. For now, I'd just like to avoid the gutting of entire fields based on stealing their work and regurgitating it.
I thought it was obvious that I was making a joke at their expense.
Shouldn't any given artist be able to sue by showing that their work was stolen and used without permission and grind it to an immediate halt?
obviously not some guy with zero money can, but there are artists/estates out there with enough money and clout to hire a good firm.
See, that is one of the reasons I just can't be whipped into a furry about it. Technological innovations have made people's jobs obsolete since humanity began industrializing at scale. And during that time, the "creatives" always had a smug deprecating attitude towards anyone who found themselves on the wrong end of the technological curve. (Less we forget the gleeful calls for coal miner to learn to code) Now that it is their turn to suck the bitter nectar of redundancy, I'm supposed to be think its different and it is morally, socially and ethically imperative that we not sacrifice these particularly special jobs on the alter of innovation?
Honestly, I might be more inclined to side with the creatives on this one had they themselves been doing anything other than digesting, remixing, then regurgitating IP from the last 40 years. (And doing a pretty shitty job of it as well) At least AI can regurgitate unimaginative dross on schedule and under budget.
Yeah, copyright law is a labyrinthine structure and it varies wildly from state to state, not to mention nation to nation. I mean, I'm not allowed to copy Lord of the Rings, word for word, and try to publish it as my own work. But, I'm allowed to read the Lord of the Rings, then write and publish my own novel which is a shameless rip off of Lord of the rings basically following the same story structure, character archetypes, and underlying lore, like what Terry Brooks did when he wrote and published The Sword of Shannara.
edit: in your example, you're using your own words. these programs are using art created by others
I'm not gonna defend that specific firm because of their shitty goals. But this notion that other fields don't involve any creativity is an awful view. Accountants, bureaucrats, etc also use creativity and imagination in their jobs outside of maybe the most basic entry positions in their fields, obtaining the same fulfillment and providing every bit as much value to their world.
Which kinda stinks, 'cause that happened after I read Elfstones, which was not a LOTR clone and actually really entertaining (kinda like the Terminator set loose in a fantasy setting, though it actually came out well before the Terminator movie). Brooks can write reasonably well when he's not poaching :-(
If you think that is an actual representation of what AI derived content is doing, we aren't going to be able to have a meaningful discussion on the matter. The manner in which current generation machine learning analyzes and digests content in order to procedurally create new content is significantly complex and transformative that current laws don't adequately cover it, no matter what kind of reductive simile you attempt to use to define it.
Congress will likely need to take a moment to catch up. Because what AI is doing isn't theft by any legal definition of the term, and it isn't even copyright violation. The most you can argue is that in some cases, where the original content creator has sufficient foresight to create a EULA with a clause, would be violation of a license agreement. And that's not nothing, as a twenty year vet of the IT industry, violations of license agreements can carry some pretty hefty financial repercussions.
Massively simplifying the entire process, what AI is actually doing is running a series of predicate logic algorithms on content it consumed to build its own internal relational database. The more content consumed, the larger the database. These databases are then used to procedurally create new content. Its far more transformative than if I took a dozen comic books, cut them all up and created a collage from the images that I then sold as a new piece of artwork (something I am legally allowed to do under current copyright law)
If I steal some kids lego spaceship and use it to make a sweet Gundam suit, it doesn't matter:
That I rearranged the pieces
That I didn't use all the pieces
That I combined them with other stolen Legos
That the kid wasn't using the Legos
That the Legos were outside where everyone could see them
That I gave the stolen Legos to someone else to build with
all that should matter is that I took someone's property.
I think that's what everyone should be focused on legally. If artist A wants to opt in and have their work used to make poorly imagined chimeras, ok. If artist B doesn't want that, they should be able to say so.
edit: and presumably in your collage example you'd have to give credit to the original artist(s)?
I mean, some of them actually might, at least until the company's house of cards collapses.
There's no shortage of employers out there who think someone with the word "engineer" in their title is automatically a Real Educated Professional Who Solves Real Problems In An Engineerial Manner And Thus Creates Value, as opposed to "creatives" who they see as nothing more than expenses. That kind of mindset's basically why we've got people who call themselves "prompt engineers" for throwing keywords at an artbot in the first place.
Creative accountancy is why I've got a job in the first place
Once again, I feel your metaphor fundamentally misrepresents what AI does. AI does not steal the child's Lego bricks. AI observes the Lego bricks that the child has made viewable to the public. AI makes very detailed measurements of the bricks properties, color, size, ratios, ect, and stores this information in a database. That database is then used to create new bricks which can be used to create other brick sculptures. That is not theft. That is reverse engineering.
yeah I think you're right that we are at an impasse, because what you describes sounds an awful lot like theft to me regardless of the purpose
To be clear, I was taking their example at face value as being one of a purely automatable job being lost: like data entry, calculations, and report creation following a predefined series of steps. (Edit: Oh, and FYI, I've actually done data entry and report generation. I felt like a robot the whole time.)
It would never besmirch the fields as a whole, especially saying they involve no creativity.
Besides which, we have a lot of art automation and tools already and their primary purpose is to help transpose a person's imagination onto a medium in highly controlled and specific ways. "Prompt engineering" doesn't actually have this capability, it is not a mind reading machine and natural language is a terribly poor interface for any sort of creative precision. As an art tool, it's not actually good for much of anything other than replacing people outright. A machine whose only purpose is to impoverish humanity and its culture.
This is what I mean when I make snarky remarks about people being late to the party. The moralizing feels incredibly tone deaf in that context. It doesn't mean that I approve of how AI and automation is being implemented. It just means welcome to the shit-show, you paid the price of admission and here's your cup of tea, it's brewed with the freshest and finest of feces. Congrats, you get to drink it and watch the show with everyone else now. I recommend the Angus '19. It's grassy and redolent with spices.
once the machine begins plagiarizing undeterred, do you think you can somehow justify defending your new products from the same process?
do you think that once the market is flooded with this crap it retains any of the value you stole? that you'll still ultimately profit?
they're all short-sighted idiots.
We're not talking about Intelligence here. We're talking about computer programs that commit vast intellectual theft, repackage everything it's stolen, and spit it back out based on the user prompts.
Every time you see someone use the term "AI" replace it with "computer program". Replace "learn" with "stole'. Then see how the conversation goes.
The "AI" is not "learning" from creative works. The computer program is stealing from creative works.
Oh the entire show is filled with those, audience included. Thought experiment time: Let's just imagine they manage to keep automating things and now the overwhelming majority of the populace is now economically obsoleted. Think the State is going to implement glorious socialism then?
Haha no. The State is going to side with the people that now control the resource production. The proles who foolishly kept buying into automation and digital convenience will simply have their goods and services turned off remotely if they kick up much of a fuss.
Hope you like trying to figure out how to heat your house in the middle of winter now that the control unit is bricked. Going to buy a new one? Too bad, your accounts have been frozen and soon so you will be too.
This is not how generative AI works to my understanding. There's a reason why it's called "generative" -- that means it constructs novel products (text, graphics) out of essentially random data and refines the result over thousands or millions of iterations until it fits into the structure defined by its database of existing work. It doesn't just snip pieces of existing works and paste them together like a collage.
The "learning" part is generating a database of how data and prompts go together. How is that akin to theft?
Powers &8^]
Once again, most of the people you're making snarky remarks to have been at the party at least as long as you have. Just because you weren't tracking them on this forum, other forums, their personal conversations, etc. doesn't mean they weren't happening. You are not special.