@AuthorJMac
And that is exactly where this whole "Ai" shit went wrong.
Companies just want to make money and not make our lives easier.
@Uddelhexe @AuthorJMac Absolutely. But that's the same with every business, whether they admit it or not. Almost nobody goes to work because it's fun or helpful, they go because there's money in it.
The "labo(u)r-saving" devices of seventy years ago were invented to free citizens to get out and do stuff they hated with people they didn't like for bosses they despised so that folk they never met could have unearned incomes. AI's no different.
@AuthorJMac @Uddelhexe I'm sure you must be right, but I'm not sure I see it. As I understand it, AI's good at churning out boiler-plate prose and images (likely plagiarised and probably wrong) and spotting anomalies in account-books or X-rays, but none of that sounds much like fun.
The risk, as I see it, is managers will assume AI will boost productivity, and give workers twice the "fun" in half the time, to make them four times as profitable.
But that's a tale as old as time-and-motion men.
@wibble @AuthorJMac @Uddelhexe Well for art, it certainly isn't fun if we would use AI instead of creating our own thing. So yes in that regard it would take away the fun part. Plus people might lose jobs, because companies rather use AI to make pictures. (Even if someone would do those, they might just need one person for it and not more, which they might have needed before.)
That's what we mean with losing the fun jobs.
@wibble @AuthorJMac @Uddelhexe
I don't think people condemn all AI, when they talk about AI. Like the ones used for science to analyze large amount of data, that's sure something useful.
Or things which can upscale a picture or choosing an object when clicking on it, that's also not something people see as bad.
But AI generating pictures, 3D models, text etc. that's something people worry about.
Some already feel their impact and worry it might get worse.
@kanrei @AuthorJMac @Uddelhexe It's definitely a threat, I'm just not sure how much it'll be. For, even if AI does manage to solve the problem of the seven-fingered foot, there's still the question of plagiarism and, if there's a positive aspect to lawyers earning more than artists, that'll be it.
Still, I've seen typists, typesetters and music copyists go extinct in my lifetime, thanks to technology, so it's possible that AI will do for illustrators what, say, photography did for painters.
I hope not, cause the forementioned functions that went extinct were not those producing new art or writing, just doing technics around it. And fotography did not erase painters. They do very much exist and paint. Photography is just an added artform that still uses the human mind to search for the motive, set in in scene, focus...but Ai is for one not producing something new and cannot live out of its own products. It needs human inpact
@Uddelhexe @kanrei @AuthorJMac Indeed, and so it's interesting that music composers seem more intrigued by AI than threatened.
I think that may be the same for those with "fun jobs" - like illustrators and graphic designers - who, if AI is used at all, will still need to guide it. So I don't see them being affected in the way typesetters were.
Then again, I've been wrong about things before...
@wibble @AuthorJMac @Uddelhexe
Oh not sure how it went for painters, but at least they still exist. I actually feel like I should draw more with traditional media again, because of AI.
:/ Either way, I don't want artistic jobs being gone. (Not even knowing an alternative, feels like anything done on a computer would be at risk.)
@kanrei @AuthorJMac @Uddelhexe What happened to painters (very roughly) was impressionism. They reacted to the threat by moving away from realistic painting, and to the novelty by embracing the informal, everyday subjects photography enabled.
It did put some people out of work - e.g. illustrators for books and newspapers (crime-scene illustrators existed, as do court-room artists), but the great ones kept working and the others bought cameras. For even photography can sometimes be fun.
@wibble @AuthorJMac @Uddelhexe
Yeah, I just see for myself, I wouldn't enjoy making AI pictures instead of drawing right away what I had in mind. It is ok to dabble around in it to see what it can do, and I sure want to try it out more. But overall I wouldn't find it very fulfilling.
@wibble @AuthorJMac @Uddelhexe
But it's unlikely anyway that the idea will be that artists have to switch to it, they likely cut out people and it will be a low paying job, because everyone can ask the AI things and AI devs sure will make the AI more in a direction, where one can easily use it. (I mean like compare Stable Diffusion with Bing AI for example.)
@wibble @AuthorJMac @Uddelhexe
About photography, I sure see the fun in there. From what I know, it also started out with trying to imitate what oil paintings did, but sure now it feels like its own thing, serving different purpose than paintings etc. (But ok that's probably because the idea to show reality through paintings got switched over to photography, or at least partially. Like scientific illustration is still a thing. People still buy painted portraits etc.)
@wibble @AuthorJMac @Uddelhexe
With AI it feels kinda hard though to see what is AI and what is not. I sure find it more and more difficult to differentiate. Sure when one uses AI one can actually even see which AI or model might have been used for a picture.
People using AI might even try to give it off as human made picture.
When photography came out, it sure looked different than paintings.Thus not really trying to be the same thing?
@kanrei @AuthorJMac @Uddelhexe Sure. It's something to worry about. But maybe it always has been. Earlier today I was reminded of the poet David Jones, who wrote:
"When the technicians manipulate the dead limbs of our culture as though it yet had life, have mercy on us."
That was 63 years ago. And here we are.
Still, to the original point of why AI seems to rob our lives of fun, that's more a question of who's got the money - they've always robbed our fun, one way or another.
I would suggest reading the Hacker News comments on any AI topic -- you'll find hundreds of programmers enthusing about how great Generative AI is, and scorning anyone who questions its value as a moron. The difference between artists and programmers using this stuff seems to be, the artists see a disaster looming, while the programmers are gleefully chopping off their own legs with an axe.
@AuthorJMac I am not advocating for AI writing or art, but the ability for AI to make it is kind of a stepping stone on the way to a full AI robot that will do your laundry and dishes.
We're seeimg very competent ai-powered machines being built that are powered off of things like OpenAI. Did they have to capitalize on writing and art to get there? Probably not, but imo it did make it faster.
The unfortunate part is we have to try so hard to protect our work while we transition past this part.
@AuthorJMac And you should hold those doubts close you're heart as we make sure our spaces are protected.
Corporations will fund the future, but they'll consume it unless we keep them as honest and ethical as we can.
I don't think we have much of a choice in the matter either.
@AuthorJMac You asked for dishwashing and laundry to be automated. People did. Now you're saying 'not like that'.
People are automating art & writing. But it doesn't replace the whole process. The idea that AI replaces every part of the process is fully false. So your analogy doesn't work. If you look at any production out there actually using AI, they take weeks, months, etc. Why? Because it's just another tool in a process.
If you want tools to free up your time, they probably can already.
@anakin78z No, I said that if we're automating anything with AI, I'd prefer automation of things that people generally don't enjoy than things that people do enjoy. Laundry and dishes were just examples.
And if you think it doesn't replace the whole process, you haven't been paying attention to what's going on in creative industries and those industries who used to employ creative freelancers.
It could have been just a tool. It's been a money-saving and money grabbing replacement which development's ethical side is in question. To me, AI isn't the next step in creativity. It's a tool of greed.
It could have been great. But well, some humans prove over and over again that we can't have nice things.
Nobody will make money from cleaning your dishes.
People can make money from making and selling art.
@AuthorJMac was so proud of my AI powered python script to go thru the terabytes of anonymous family jpgs giving them sensible names and metadata on the off chance we might like to look at th...
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