Dr. Holly WaltersDec 12, 2022

AI's aren't sentient. They can't "steal."

Programmers and institutions select the data with which to train the model. They take art and writing from artists and authors without credit or payment. The software then remixes and mimics what it is given.

Displacing agency by attributing intent to the AI is exactly how people and institutions erase human action in the creation of technology. It also leads to further perceptions of technology as acultural, unbiased, and, in essence, magical.

Show threadMatt BlazeDec 12, 2022

@Manigarm This is an interesting point, and certainly correct.

It's also exactly how humans learn to become artists and writers - by studying, mimicking, and eventually adding to the existing body of work. We don't generally consider that theft, unless the copying is exact or deceptive.

Yet AI feels somehow different, much more like plagiarism. Perhaps it's that the ONLY input an ML system has is others' art, with no real-world human experience of its own to contribute.

Show threadMatt BlazeDec 12, 2022
@Manigarm I think part of it is that we expect art and literature to have a creator, an actual person whose work expresses a human point of view, one that encompasses something beyond the literal work itself. By lacking an author who stands behind it, is AI-generated art somehow inherently fraudulent? Maybe.
Show threadPwnallthethingsDec 12, 2022

@mattblaze @Manigarm I think a substantial part of the reason also comes down to market effects.

What makes plagiarism grate for creators (artists, writers etc) is that their work is high-intensity, and they object to plagiarists in part because those plagiarists avoid the costs of developing the creative talent/expertise to produce cheaper alternatives and that impacts the creator's ability to get ROI on their work. AI does that to an *insane* scale, essentially annihilating the whole market.

Show threadMatthew Green
@mattblaze @Pwnallthethings @Manigarm Playing devil’s advocate here: isn’t the whole point of technology to take things that are hard for humans to do, and build machines that make that work effortless?
Dec 13, 2022 at 12:22amWeb
Show threadMatthew GreenDec 13, 2022

@Manigarm @Pwnallthethings @mattblaze I guess what I’m trying to say is that “it’s harder for humans to do this than machines” isn’t enough of an argument.

But trying to define what the missing “this” is, that question’s going to take you straight into the hardest problems of consciousness and computer science. I don’t envy the person trying to win that fight, long term.

Show threadPwnallthethingsDec 13, 2022
@matthew_d_green @Manigarm @mattblaze ah, ok. I see where you're coming from. I'm not saying artists are *right* (that's a subjective argument), but that part of why they are so angry about it that probably not just that it's taking credit for their work, but that its monetizing it in a way that means that the bread-and-butter creative work that used to pay the bills for $100 here, or $1000 there will now go to an AI that can do it for $0.03 each.
Show threadMatthew GreenDec 13, 2022
@mattblaze @Manigarm @Pwnallthethings It’s going to be an absolute catastrophe. I feel for all the students currently attending art institutes. But if it’s any consolation: it’ll come for the rest of us soon enough.
Show threadPwnallthethingsDec 13, 2022
@matthew_d_green @mattblaze @Manigarm As technologists, it is important to remember how many industries technology craters from time to time. And while it's amazing for social efficiency that I can do as much work with Excel in an afternoon as 20 bank clerks used to do in a day, the people who lose their jobs to make that overall efficiency happen have lives and livelihoods absolutely destroyed by it too. It's not a surprise they're extremely, extremely upset and worried, and they're right to be
Show threadChristopher Bauer   Dec 13, 2022
@Pwnallthethings @matthew_d_green @mattblaze @Manigarm undoubtedly there is an economic side to this, though I think that is overly positivist argument in relation to what Dr. Walters was talking about. I suspect her point had more to do with the fact that art is a product of social experience. I don't want to speak for her, but it seems that machine learning replicating what has come before without that lens of experience will necessarily come up short.
Show threadMatthew GreenDec 13, 2022
@mattblaze @Pwnallthethings @anthro_packets @Manigarm And this is the argument I would not want to have to make. It’s going to either involve an extremely subjective standard for “social experience” and novelty. Every time you try to set an objective standard some technological breakthrough will come along and destroy it.
Show threadChristopher Bauer   Dec 13, 2022

@matthew_d_green @mattblaze @Pwnallthethings @Manigarm yes, at a legal or ethical level, trying to draw socially subjective lines around machine learning is problematic, but then, we do that all the time. But I don't have a dog in that fight.

To be clear, I'm not advocating for a standard, but I do agree with Dr. Walters that we should be clear about the arrangements of power behind machine learning products and their socio-economic effects. Whats more, I think the analogies to previous technologies like photography are weak (needs a separate post) but I do think we'll find social practices arise around AI products like this (we already do to some extent). The questions as I saw them are "Is it art?" (where we get into trouble), and "who benefits?" (which I think where Matthew and Dr. Walters have something in common).

Show threadChristopher Bauer   Dec 13, 2022
@matthew_d_green @mattblaze @Pwnallthethings @Manigarm just to add that I suspect machine learning will integrate as socially grounded art but only, if we allow for the photography analogy, along with heavy doses of human ingenuity; that it will require a heavy cost in terms of livlihoods; and that even some decentralization of ownership over machine learning tools will be necessary to reach such a state where machines make our art both easier and a product of our experience.
Show threadMatt BlazeDec 13, 2022

@Pwnallthethings @matthew_d_green @Manigarm

A photographer can, in an hour or so of lighting and posing, produce an excellent quality, inexpensive portrait that a painter would take months to produce (and that would look less realistic).

Show threadJoshDec 13, 2022
@matthew_d_green @Manigarm @Pwnallthethings @mattblaze cultivating artistic talent is not something we should outsource to computers and thereby make harder to monetize. It's already hard enough to make it and real artists do so much to enrich our lives. Tech should be displacing things to allow more artists to thrive, not less.
Show threadMatthew GreenDec 13, 2022

@Manigarm @mattblaze @Pwnallthethings @joshz2012 I attended a music conservatory and my best friend joined the Navy so he could have a paying job playing guitar. You don’t have to convince me.

That does not mean I know what to do about this.

Show threadJoshDec 13, 2022
@matthew_d_green @Manigarm @mattblaze @Pwnallthethings Oh sure, I just mean to say I think your point about tech being implicitly about making things easier is right on, but that's only a positive good when it crowds out things we'd agree aren't expressions of human potential, like... Garbage collection. But I get there's no way to stop it from going in all directions.
Show threadPwnallthethingsDec 13, 2022
@matthew_d_green @mattblaze @Manigarm I guess I would say that the point is more to improve people's lives. Making them more efficient and removing repetitive tasks often aids that, but it will be a cold comfort to artists who enjoy doing art who used to get lots of commissions that get fewer once AI prices them out.
Show threadTindraDec 13, 2022

@Pwnallthethings @matthew_d_green @mattblaze @Manigarm

There’s also a danger to automating tasks away: what happens when no one knows how to do it manually anymore? And the automation fails?

If we look away from art to… all of the other stuff that people do that it would be awesome if I could just get a computer to do. Many tasks absolutely would be improved with automation. Just look at (real) autopilot! There are many tasks the autopilot can do better, more consistently, more accurately than a human.

But what happens when you find yourself in an edge case? Something the autopilot can’t do? Or it starts to do something that is definitely bad? You need a highly skilled pilot to, say, realize that your best choice is to make a water landing on the Hudson River, and then execute that landing.

I’m not saying don’t use automations - I would *hate* to go back to doing laundry by hand! But we need to ensure that we don’t use collective knowledge/skills.

Show threadGarrett WollmanDec 13, 2022
@matthew_d_green @mattblaze @Pwnallthethings @Manigarm I don't want to take the devil's side here, but it's worth thinking about the early Romantic backlash against photography: it was "not proper art", "slavish", "unoriginal", compared to "pictures" which were the sweat-of-the-brow work of a Real Artist. (Never mind how many of those Real Artists had assistants and entire workshops, especially in dimensional art.)
Show threadGarrett WollmanDec 13, 2022
@matthew_d_green @mattblaze @Pwnallthethings @Manigarm I'm no art historian but my recollection is that it took some decades for photography to be recognized as "proper art", at least by the majority. (There are probably some critics who still don't.)