A.I is here and it will make the world worse.

[unclevlad]

That is a brilliant assignment.  It's SO easy to just fall into the acceptance trap.

[Bazza]

Al-art, putting the ‘art’ in ‘artificial’. 

[Christopher R Taylor]

Like everything, "AI" (again, its not artificial intelligence by any definition, its a very advanced search engine that builds information over time) will have good and bad.  It will have an impact on the economy and jobs.  Some of that impact will be detrimental to certain fields.

 

However, as an author and an illustrator I am not especially worried at this point for several reasons.

1) it takes real skill and ability to get a good image out of the programs with multiple trial and error.  

2) They have a feel; you can tell you're looking at one of their products and not a real artist's inspiration and talent.  The images can look nice, but you know when you see one.

3) They are entirely derivative; they cannot create new, only splice together other peoples' work, which does not create good stuff.

 

Now, its not impossible that, like autotune where a generation grew up only hearing that and thinks that's how music is supposed to sound, people might come to prefer the stilted copies of "AI" generated art.  But I'm skeptical.  And even if it does, that's not going to last. I'm an illustrator that works with pen and ink, and sometimes coloring with a computer.  I like line art, but its very unpopular these days in most contexts.  That will probably change in the future.

 

 

 

Oh, and we're already seeing a degradation in critical thinking, because it has to be taught, it is not innate in us or a natural state of humanity.  And it requires people have certain basic presuppositions about life, such as that there is absolute, objective truth.  Students are very rarely if ever taught rhetoric or logic, and even those that are, are usually taught from the perspective of having "their" truth or that truth is subjective.

Edited July 30, 2023 by Christopher R Taylor

[LoneWolf]

AI is simply a new tool.  It has the potential to allow people to easily create things that previously took much more effort.   In some cases that will mean that people are going to lose their jobs.  But it also means that new jobs are going to open up.   The new jobs will require a different skill set; so many people may not be able to transition to the new jobs.  It is also will probably mean there are not as many jobs in those fields as their use to be.  This has been happening for centuries.     The luddites of 19th century England had a similar fear of sewing machines. The same panic I am seeing here occurred then.   

[Cygnia]

https://www.eater.com/23814463/ai-image-generator-food-photography-unappetizing

[Old Man]

In my experience, over the last few months, AI image generation is gradually getting better, while AI text generation is getting significantly worse.  My early experiments with ChatGPT gave uncannily good results, but now the output is repetitive and borderline nonsensical. 

[Logan D. Hurricanes]

I watched a video recently about AI text generation that neatly summarized the problem for me. He asked it to write a murder mystery, and he was genuinely engrossed in the story until the ending. He didn't know who the murderer was, but neither did the AI. It was just following the paths laid out for it on a sentence-by-sentence basis, but it wasn't reading what it wrote and had no context for what was going on. It was a mystery without a solution. 

[L. Marcus]

How very lifelike.

[Cygnia]

Tech experts are starting to doubt that ChatGPT and A.I. ‘hallucinations’ will ever go away: ‘This isn’t fixable’

Quote

Spend enough time with ChatGPT and other artificial intelligence chatbots and it doesn’t take long for them to spout falsehoods.

 

 

Described as hallucination, confabulation or just plain making things up, it’s now a problem for every business, organization and high school student trying to get a generative AI system to compose documents and get work done. Some are using it on tasks with the potential for high-stakes consequences, from psychotherapy to researching and writing legal briefs.

“I don’t think that there’s any model today that doesn’t suffer from some hallucination,” said Daniela Amodei, co-founder and president of Anthropic, maker of the chatbot Claude 2.

“They’re really just sort of designed to predict the next word,” Amodei said. “And so there will be some rate at which the model does that inaccurately.”

Anthropic, ChatGPT-maker OpenAI and other major developers of AI systems known as large language models say they’re working to make them more truthful.

How long that will take — and whether they will ever be good enough to, say, safely dole out medical advice — remains to be seen.

 

[Cygnia]

Asian MIT grad asks AI to make her photo more ‘professional,’ gets turned into white woman

[Christopher R Taylor]

I'm just amazed MIT accepted an Asian woman to begin with

[Michael Hopcroft]

 

Add to that the ability in the near future to use AI actors to appear in video files and you know why the SAG-AFTRA (?) and Writer's Guild strikes are not inconveniences for audiences, but a struggle for the very soul of all entertainment. If studios decide they no longer need to make art, but can let their cleverly-crafter AIs do it for them, then we have landed in the world of 1984's "Prolefeed" and there will be no going back. Humans might as well no longer be humans if all our forms of creativity are replaced by greedy megacorporations and the idiotic AIs they control.

[Ragitsu]

Will we see the establishment of a cottage-industry for human creativity?

[Bazza]

Seems like the appropriate thread to post this:

 

 

What Computers Still Can't Do 

A Critique of Artificial Reason

By Hubert L. Dreyfus

 

$45.00 Paperback

408 pp., 5 x 8 in, 

ISBN 9780262540674

Published: October 30, 1992

Publisher: The MIT Press

 

Description 

When it was first published in 1972, Hubert Dreyfus's manifesto on the inherent inability of disembodied machines to mimic higher mental functions caused an uproar in the artificial intelligence community. The world has changed since then. Today it is clear that "good old-fashioned AI," based on the idea of using symbolic representations to produce general intelligence, is in decline (although several believers still pursue its pot of gold), and the focus of the Al community has shifted to more complex models of the mind. It has also become more common for AI researchers to seek out and study philosophy. For this edition of his now classic book, Dreyfus has added a lengthy new introduction outlining these changes and assessing the paradigms of connectionism and neural networks that have transformed the field.
 

At a time when researchers were proposing grand plans for general problem solvers and automatic translation machines, Dreyfus predicted that they would fail because their conception of mental functioning was naive, and he suggested that they would do well to acquaint themselves with modern philosophical approaches to human beings. What Computers Can't Do was widely attacked but quietly studied. Dreyfus's arguments are still provocative and focus our attention once again on what it is that makes human beings unique.

Hubert Dreyfus's views on artificial intelligence & monograph: "Alchemy and AI"
 

Dreyfus’s proteges include philosophers [...] and Eric Kaplan, a writer and producer on such comedy TV series asThe Big Bang Theory , The Simpsons and Futurama , who named the quirky Futurama character “Professor Hubert Farnsworth” after Dreyfus.

 

[Lord Liaden]

On 7/30/2023 at 12:42 AM, Christopher R Taylor said:

Now, its not impossible that, like autotune where a generation grew up only hearing that and thinks that's how music is supposed to sound, people might come to prefer the stilted copies of "AI" generated art.  But I'm skeptical.  And even if it does, that's not going to last. I'm an illustrator that works with pen and ink, and sometimes coloring with a computer.  I like line art, but its very unpopular these days in most contexts.  That will probably change in the future.

 

 

I've spent what may be an inappropriate amount of time watching young "reactors" on YouTube responding to recordings of music and performances from the 1950s through the 1980s. In nearly every case they act like they've been given a revelation. Not just of the authenticity and sheer talent behind the singing and orchestration, but of its beauty and genuine emotion, the heart and soul within it, that's lacking in the music from their generation. People will eat garbage if that's all they're given and all they know, but nowadays with so much access, it's getting hard to avoid exposure to the artistic equivalent of gourmet food.

 

I see this in film and television as well. More and more often today the general public are denouncing mediocrity. More importantly, they're refusing to pay for it. OTOH when a work of genuine quality that means something appears, they flock to it. It's why I believe soulless AI art may find a niche, but it will never wholly supplant human creations.

[Ragitsu]

1 hour ago, Lord Liaden said:

 

I've spent what may be an inappropriate amount of time watching young "reactors" on YouTube responding to recordings of music and performances from the 1950s through the 1980s.

 

Remember that anyone successful is going to modify their reaction towards that which is profitable (i.e., popular); some will be more honest than others, but "the observer effect" is a real phenomenon.

[Michael Hopcroft]

8 hours ago, Ragitsu said:

Will we see the establishment of a cottage-industry for human creativity?

Now.

 

Ironically, Amazon is making quite a stir with their investment in self-publishing, and as a self-published author I appreciate the efforts. Things are being done on Youtube that have never been done before -- there are innumerable videos of covers, spoofs, and the like of classic music, for example. Scott Bradlee has already become a legitimate celebrity with the brilliant Postmodern Jukebox . So have artists like Puddle's Pity Party ("The Sad Clown with the Golden Voice"). 

 

None of these people are getting rich, at least not yet, but they show they still belong, whether by their virtuosity or their willingness to go in new directions. Now we just need to find a way to make these viable without megacorp support.

 

(I am reminded of the story of an NFL player who decided after his retirement to go to someplace like Atlanta and become an actor. His reasoning was that you can become a star in New York or LA, if you can bet the enormous odds, but an actor can live and work at his craft anywhere. Of course, it helps to have a side job and support -- Portland is a solid theater town, but some of the best actors ever to work here have found themselves living out of their cars because they can't afford Portland's notorious rents).

[Lord Liaden]

5 hours ago, Ragitsu said:

 

Remember that anyone successful is going to modify their reaction towards that which is profitable (i.e., popular); some will be more honest than others, but "the observer effect" is a real phenomenon.

 

Which is why I think the combination of increasing observation of classic entertainment, and increasing rejection of garbage entertainment, will motivate the creation of new content toward the former.

[Logan D. Hurricanes]

This is a scam I didn't think of. 

 

[Ternaugh]

15 minutes ago, Logan D. Hurricanes said:

This is a scam I didn't think of. 

 

If has been fairly common on music streamers to have songs show up that are attributed to an artist, but have no real ties. Amazon music has a song right now in the Genesis listing that's obviously there for accidental clicks. 

[Christopher R Taylor]

I have a book on my Amazon profile that's not by me.  Its in Spanish, a language I don't speak with even conversational fluency.  I have tried and tried to get Amazon to remove it and they not only won't but they won't explain how I am supposed to do it.

[Ragitsu]

7 hours ago, Lord Liaden said:

 

Which is why I think the combination of increasing observation of classic entertainment, and increasing rejection of garbage entertainment, will motivate the creation of new content toward the former.

 

By the way, "watching young reactors" put a cheeky grin on my face; that sounds like the sort of activity physics nerds would be all over.

 

"The power output just increased!"

 

But, uh...back to the thrust of your statement. I hesitate to put any money towards folks who bring home the bacon with exaggerated gaping mouths and wild gesticulation. At least with a film, a fiction novel, a video game, et cetera, I know that I am paying for manufactured creativity...deliberate performances, if you will. Whether an individual is consciously or subconsciously altering their expressions/opinions doesn't matter.

[Logan D. Hurricanes]

[Cygnia]

21 hours ago, Christopher R Taylor said:

I have a book on my Amazon profile that's not by me.  Its in Spanish, a language I don't speak with even conversational fluency.  I have tried and tried to get Amazon to remove it and they not only won't but they won't explain how I am supposed to do it.

You're not the only victim of this apparently...

 

[Old Man]

Thought I was stuck in a time loop for a second there.