I've been reading/watching about transformer networks, which were only really discovered in 2017, or at least, that's when the main paper ("All You Need is Attention") was published.
Like all things, Capitalism will focus on using ML ("AI") to Perpetuate The Illusion of Infinite Growth, but what could this same technology/techniques be used for on a "toy" scale?
Is there still an art programming scene???
We always risk falling victim to Capitalist Realism, that is in this case, that the that the use cases large businesses are finding are somehow the important or interesting ones.
So we get a magic photo app that can do very mundane things like recompose a badly-composed photo, or make a baby less ugly, delete the only interesting feature in your selfie (the rando barfing behind you), and "enhance" feature that REMOVES noise (why not add it!) that kind of thing.
This is really not interesting.
The technology "wows" us and in a way, rightfully so, but we should really start rejecting the use cases as boring as soon as possible and get to the weird unprofitable art ASAP.
So anyways that is why I'm learning about these things, I find them genuinely startling and exciting and I know that the Corpos are going to use them for at best things that are stupid but at worst, harmful.
Which we all know already.
Like: when I do photography I don't want my bad bird pics fixed up, I want the satisfaction and experience of getting a bird pic that is good only once in awhile. So the "AI enhance" feature is really stupid to me, it only exists because it is marketable.
Capitalist Realism is always depressingly Reductionist, that is in a way its hallmark and the red flag that you have wandered into it's web of dreary, confusing lies.
PsySal