AIs gunning for our precious freelancers

[Travis B.]

What is the official reason for creating these AIs in the first place? With inventions like antibiotics or air conditioning, one can point to obvious practical benefits and new functionality. Yet these AIs are intruding on a niche that was already adequately filled. Given the profusion of far right extremists in software engineering like Mencius Moldbug, it seems impossible for me to interpret this as anything but an attack on human workers.

AI has given us things such as modern search engines, that simply would be impossible without it. About "the profusion of far right extremists in software engineering", I have seen nothing to indicate that they are anything but a vocal minority at most.

[Linguoboy]

What is the official reason for creating these AIs in the first place? With inventions like antibiotics or air conditioning, one can point to obvious practical benefits and new functionality. Yet these AIs are intruding on a niche that was already adequately filled.

Air conditioning was a niche that was already adequately filled by human workers with fans.

[malloc]

What is the official reason for creating these AIs in the first place? With inventions like antibiotics or air conditioning, one can point to obvious practical benefits and new functionality. Yet these AIs are intruding on a niche that was already adequately filled.

Air conditioning was a niche that was already adequately filled by human workers with fans.

Was it though? Only the upper echelons of society had fan wavers, after all, whereas air conditioning has become widely available to the general public. Furthermore, There is an enormous functional difference between moving hot, muggy air around and the cooling and dehumidifying effects of air conditioning. In any case, fanning was mere drudgery with none of the cultural significance or self-expression of art.

AI has given us things such as modern search engines, that simply would be impossible without it.

But search engines have existed since the 90s and worked well enough from what I can recall. Are modest boosts to convenience really worth the extraordinary downsides and risks?

About "the profusion of far right extremists in software engineering", I have seen nothing to indicate that they are anything but a vocal minority at most.

And yet so many examples come to mind: Peter Thiel, Brendan Eich, Curtis Yarvin, Justine Tunney, Eric Raymond, the entire cryptocurrency/NFT movement and much of libertarianism.

[Travis B.]

AI has given us things such as modern search engines, that simply would be impossible without it.

But search engines have existed since the 90s and worked well enough from what I can recall. Are modest boosts to convenience really worth the extraordinary downsides and risks?

Yes, search engines have existed since the 90's, but they have grown considerably in power and convenience since then. About "extraordinary downsides and risks", I very highly doubt the Google search engine has the capacity to A) gain self-awareness and then B) launch the missiles. If anything, the downsides and risks of modern search engines are their capacity for surveillance and consequent contribution to the public's loss of privacy, but the thing is that this does not require modern AI to be so.

About "the profusion of far right extremists in software engineering", I have seen nothing to indicate that they are anything but a vocal minority at most.

And yet so many examples come to mind: Peter Thiel, Brendan Eich, Curtis Yarvin, Justine Tunney, Eric Raymond, the entire cryptocurrency/NFT movement and much of libertarianism.

You're picking out individual names and claiming that proves that far right extremists dominate software engineering? One could very well point out the people that insist that software projects all need "codes of conduct" and who insist on renaming the master branch in git based on the poorly thought-through assertion that such as based in slavery (as opposed to, say, being like a master copy) to claim the exact opposite, which would be just as untrue.

[Ares Land]

What is the official reason for creating these AIs in the first place? With inventions like antibiotics or air conditioning, one can point to obvious practical benefits and new functionality. Yet these AIs are intruding on a niche that was already adequately filled. Given the profusion of far right extremists in software engineering like Mencius Moldbug, it seems impossible for me to interpret this as anything but an attack on human workers.

There are a number of things AI can help with. At work we use it for OCR and image search. (We have such a volume of data that it would be impossible to handle this by hand.)

That said... Automation in general (not just AI) is clearly being pushed to save on labor costs. Software engineers have a varied political opinions, of course, but in my experience they do tend to be right-wingers. So while they're not attacking directly human workers, they're not terribly worried about their perspective either, or even really aware of potential problems.

[Raphael]

Air conditioning was a niche that was already adequately filled by human workers with fans.

Now you made me think of the "air conditioning repair workers' guild" plot line in Community.

[Linguoboy]

What is the official reason for creating these AIs in the first place? With inventions like antibiotics or air conditioning, one can point to obvious practical benefits and new functionality. Yet these AIs are intruding on a niche that was already adequately filled.

Air conditioning was a niche that was already adequately filled by human workers with fans.

Was it though? Only the upper echelons of society had fan wavers, after all, whereas air conditioning has become widely available to the general public. Furthermore, There is an enormous functional difference between moving hot, muggy air around and the cooling and dehumidifying effects of air conditioning. In any case, fanning was mere drudgery with none of the cultural significance or self-expression of art.

You mean as opposed to reading and inputting hundreds of thousands of texts manually? (As Ares Land points out, OCR is considered an application of AI--or at least it was until it became so routine that we decided it doesn't really require "intelligence".)

This list of AI applications isn't exhaustive and it isn't without its flaws, but it's a place to start at least: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Applicati ... telligence. I'm curious which ones you consider to have "the cultural significance or self-expression of art"? Predicting the ripening times of crops? Reducing musculoskeletal injury? Managing power grids?

[alynnidalar]

Directly with regards to AI creating art... right now, as a person of limited artistic ability and limited access to art supplies, the only way for me to get a custom piece of artwork--with obvious benefits of improving the conditions I live in, holding important personal meaning for myself, etc.--is to pay a large amount of money to have it commissioned. Much like your fan wavers, only the upper echelons realistically can do this.

With AI-generated art, custom art and design becomes accessible to anyone with access to the internet--not even a computer, a smartphone will do just fine! No longer can only the wealthy have access to beautiful custom artwork that suits their tastes and needs, but it is now widely available to the general public. Furthermore, there is an enormous functional difference between the lengthy process of communicating with an artist, refining your vision, etc. compared with the quick response time and direct tuning I can do with an AI artwork generator.

(you might say that having custom art is a bit less pressing of a human need than being able to function in hot weather, and yes, obviously I'm exaggerating and engaging in a dose of devil's advocacy to make my point, but on the other hand if you criticize me for that, I'll retort that the invention of air conditioning was clearly a capitalist plot to extract more work out of ordinary members of society during summer months, and should not our goal be to enable people to enjoy artistic pursuits rather than drudgery for The Man, so what do you think of that)

(seriously though--I don't think there has to be a specific "need" before people are allowed to experiment with things. Many many many useful (and artistic!) things are the result of people playing around, having happy accidents, not specifically pursuing the thing that they ended up with. Penicillin, teflon, Scotchgard, etc..... I don't like this idea that things must be Useful TM before we are allowed to be interested in them)

[Raphael]

With AI-generated art, custom art and design becomes accessible to anyone with access to the internet--not even a computer, a smartphone will do just fine! No longer can only the wealthy have access to beautiful custom artwork that suits their tastes and needs, but it is now widely available to the general public. Furthermore, there is an enormous functional difference between the lengthy process of communicating with an artist, refining your vision, etc. compared with the quick response time and direct tuning I can do with an AI artwork generator.

Sounds great - is AI already at that point, though? Sounds almost like creating a painting more or less the way characters on Star Trek: The Next Generation create holodeck programs, by telling the computer something like "I want a view from a hill overlooking a small town in 18th century France". Are we really there yet?

[malloc]

You mean as opposed to reading and inputting hundreds of thousands of texts manually? (As Ares Land points out, OCR is considered an application of AI--or at least it was until it became so routine that we decided it doesn't really require "intelligence".)

I will grant that there are legitimate applications of AI and certainly few will mourn the lost art of manually typing books into computers. Yet there are genuine dangers to giving so much power to an industry full of far right antihumanists. Given the existential threats posed by AI and similar such technologies, or even the well-known problems caused by social media, we ought to subject the tech industry to the same scrutiny as fossil fuels.

Quite honestly, this whole situation seems like an almost literal case of cultural appropriation. The very substance of culture and an important source of subsistence has been taken from human artists and given to AIs working for wealthy and reactionary techbros. Even aside from the economic hardship involved, this entails an extraordinary cultural loss for the human race.

What makes this especially galling is that defenders of automation assured me that this wouldn't happen the last time I raised the issue. Everyone insisted that robots were only coming for boring drudgery like data entry and trucking while leaving more interesting jobs for humans. Will anyone at least concede that they were wrong?

[Ares Land]

Sounds great - is AI already at that point, though? Sounds almost like creating a painting more or less the way characters on Star Trek: The Next Generation create holodeck programs, by telling the computer something like "I want a view from a hill overlooking a small town in 18th century France". Are we really there yet?

Pretty much, yes. You can test this in Craiyon (which is free, and sort of a dumbed down version of the state-of-the-art tools).

You can also check this for a bit of fun: https://twitter.com/weirddalle

There is a bit of an art in coming up with funny prompts! I'll start worrying when the AI comes up with funny prompts of its own.

I will grant that there are legitimate applications of AI and certainly few will mourn the lost art of manually typing books into computers. Yet there are genuine dangers to giving so much power to an industry full of far right antihumanists. Given the existential threats posed by AI and similar such technologies, or even the well-known problems caused by social media, we ought to subject the tech industry to the same scrutiny as fossil fuels.

Quite honestly, this whole situation seems like an almost literal case of cultural appropriation. The very substance of culture and an important source of subsistence has been taken from human artists and given to AIs working for wealthy and reactionary techbros. Even aside from the economic hardship involved, this entails an extraordinary cultural loss for the human race.

What makes this especially galling is that defenders of automation assured me that this wouldn't happen the last time I raised the issue. Everyone insisted that robots were only coming for boring drudgery like data entry and trucking while leaving more interesting jobs for humans. Will anyone at least concede that they were wrong?

Personally, I think automation is certainly a potential issue. You don't even need AI for that! You can automate plenty of jobs without AI.
I'm not excessively worried about AIs creating arts. As I said earlier, I don't think art is simply generating pictures.

As for your last point... The issue with AI is well-known; it's Schumpeter's creative destruction all over again. Eventually, we'll end up okay, but the 'destruction' part is painful.
(As far as I can tell the worst hit right now are people working in translation, and many jobs in the publishing industry.)

The surprising part is that a lot of what we thought AI could handle easily turns out to be difficult; and jobs we thought would be impossible to automate turn out relatively easy to figure out.
It turns out, for instance, that machine are good at generating images and pretty bad at trucking.
Or for instance, you can train an AI to read a CT scan but we have nothing that can replace a nurse...

So, hey, maybe we've been overvaluing certain jobs and undervaluing others. One point people seldom note is that truckers, nurses, daycare workers and a host of other professions deserve a lot more respect than we've been giving them!

[Raphael]

Pretty much, yes. You can test this in Craiyon (which is free, and sort of a dumbed down version of the state-of-the-art tools).

Sounds interesting. I might check it out.

[Linguoboy]

Given the existential threats posed by AI and similar such technologies, or even the well-known problems caused by social media, we ought to subject the tech industry to the same scrutiny as fossil fuels.

You mean, make them pay lip service to curbing their worst offences while offering them huge subsidies to keep operating?

Quite honestly, this whole situation seems like an almost literal case of cultural appropriation. The very substance of culture and an important source of subsistence has been taken from human artists and given to AIs working for wealthy and reactionary techbros. Even aside from the economic hardship involved, this entails an extraordinary cultural loss for the human race.

Yeah, that's not what that term means.

What makes this especially galling is that defenders of automation assured me that this wouldn't happen the last time I raised the issue. Everyone insisted that robots were only coming for boring drudgery like data entry and trucking while leaving more interesting jobs for humans. Will anyone at least concede that they were wrong?

I know several artists. I've yet to see a single one of them lose their job due to AI. So I think your doomsaying is premature to say the least. (Not to mention that it reminds me a great deal of what the Dadaists where saying, oh 100 years ago almost to the day. They argued that between photography and photoreproduction, there was no need for traditional representational art to continue. Do you concede that their predictions were on the mark?)

[Curlyjimsam]

Directly with regards to AI creating art... right now, as a person of limited artistic ability and limited access to art supplies, the only way for me to get a custom piece of artwork--with obvious benefits of improving the conditions I live in, holding important personal meaning for myself, etc.--is to pay a large amount of money to have it commissioned. Much like your fan wavers, only the upper echelons realistically can do this.

I think, at least to start with, AI art will mostly be restricted to cases where people wouldn't have paid for it anyway. I'm never going to pay someone to create art for my conworld for me - but I'd happily let a computer do it for free (or maybe for a small fee). Nobody actually loses out in that case. The people who can afford to pay for art will probably find, at least in the near future, that human artists still do a better job.

Also computers aren't terribly imaginative. They can only draw pictures in a certain style because they have lots and lots of exemplars of that style drawn by humans. People tend to like new styles quite a lot of the time, and it'll be a while before computers get very good at that, I think. (Not that they can't generate novelty, but so far that sort of thing tends to be rather absurd if not outright nightmarish.)

[Travis B.]

Directly with regards to AI creating art... right now, as a person of limited artistic ability and limited access to art supplies, the only way for me to get a custom piece of artwork--with obvious benefits of improving the conditions I live in, holding important personal meaning for myself, etc.--is to pay a large amount of money to have it commissioned. Much like your fan wavers, only the upper echelons realistically can do this.

I think, at least to start with, AI art will mostly be restricted to cases where people wouldn't have paid for it anyway. I'm never going to pay someone to create art for my conworld for me - but I'd happily let a computer do it for free (or maybe for a small fee). Nobody actually loses out in that case. The people who can afford to pay for art will probably find, at least in the near future, that human artists still do a better job.

Also computers aren't terribly imaginative. They can only draw pictures in a certain style because they have lots and lots of exemplars of that style drawn by humans. People tend to like new styles quite a lot of the time, and it'll be a while before computers get very good at that, I think. (Not that they can't generate novelty, but so far that sort of thing tends to be rather absurd if not outright nightmarish.)

To get a computer to draw, say, pictures of Campbell's soup cans, you'd need to feed in images of Campbell's soup cans to begin with. With our current AI, it is not going to go out of its way to decide one day "hey, let's make art out of Campbell's soup cans!" on its own, considering that the AI probably has no idea of what a Campbell's soup can is in the first place.

[Travis B.]

To get a computer to draw, say, pictures of Campbell's soup cans, you'd need to feed in images of Campbell's soup cans to begin with. With our current AI, it is not going to go out of its way to decide one day "hey, let's make art out of Campbell's soup cans!" on its own, considering that the AI probably has no idea of what a Campbell's soup can is in the first place.

Note that a computer likely has seen a Campbell's soup can is, but that does not mean it really understands the cultural significance of a Campbell's soup can, and thus would decide, of its own accord, to make art out of them. Of course, it is a different story if prompted by a human, especially if art by Andy Warhol has been previously fed into the AI.

[Travis B.]

Here's what I get when I enter "campbell soup cans" into Craiyon:

[malloc]

Given the existential threats posed by AI and similar such technologies, or even the well-known problems caused by social media, we ought to subject the tech industry to the same scrutiny as fossil fuels.

You mean, make them pay lip service to curbing their worst offences while offering them huge subsidies to keep operating?

Well ok, everyone in general needs to take the threat of both far more seriously. I sometimes forget that not everyone is an ardent left-winger like me who worries about the coming climate apocalypse routinely. Again it must be emphasized that everyone assured me that regardless of how many menial jobs automation eliminated, we would still have fun and prestigious jobs like art. This latest development makes it clear to me that the tech industry is launching a blitzkrieg against human workers. They have already blown past the red line of creative professions and I see no reason to assume they will stop.

Quite honestly, this whole situation seems like an almost literal case of cultural appropriation. The very substance of culture and an important source of subsistence has been taken from human artists and given to AIs working for wealthy and reactionary techbros. Even aside from the economic hardship involved, this entails an extraordinary cultural loss for the human race.

Yeah, that's not what that term means.

Technically no, although I do think there are genuine commonalities. The tech industry consists mainly of wealthy cishet men while artists include many queer and neurodivergent people. There is an indisputable power difference between a cishet software engineer making a quarter million every year and a queer disabled furry artist dependent on commissions. What do you call it when the former creates a machine to take over the culture and means of subsistence of the latter if not appropriation?

I know several artists. I've yet to see a single one of them lose their job due to AI. So I think your doomsaying is premature to say the least. (Not to mention that it reminds me a great deal of what the Dadaists where saying, oh 100 years ago almost to the day. They argued that between photography and photoreproduction, there was no need for traditional representational art to continue. Do you concede that their predictions were on the mark?)

Sure but the technology is still incredibly new. I just heard about it several weeks ago. It will take longer than that to put all the artists out of work, just as horse-drawn carriages coexisted with cars for some time. But eventually most of the horses ended up in the glue factory. For that matter, there are already examples of AI beating out artists as we speak despite its extreme novelty.

[Regarding the dadaists, that was an interesting lapse of judgment on their part. There are numerous things that can't be photographed, either because they're fictional like elves or no longer exist like dinosaurs. Presumably they didn't read many fantasy novels or paleontogy textbooks.]

[Travis B.]

Technically no, although I do think there are genuine commonalities. The tech industry consists mainly of wealthy cishet men while artists include many queer and neurodivergent people. There is an indisputable power difference between a cishet software engineer making a quarter million every year and a queer disabled furry artist dependent on commissions.

Um, could you substantiate your assertion that the tech industry is more predominately cisgendered and heterosexual and neurotypical than artists? (Consider the case of people such as Sophie Wilson, for instance...)

[zompist]

I thought it'd be useful to put some numbers on this. This government report, though a few years old, says that 2.6 million Americans are "artists", or 1.6% of the workforce; this however includes architects, directors, actors, writers, dancers, designers, and musicians. The closest competition to the AIs is probably "Art directors, fine artists, and animators", of which there are 247,000.

Probably relatively few of these people will be put out of work. But some will be. It's not a huge disaster, but the late-capitalist ethos of "cheap not good" just keeps making the world worse.

I'd also note: you can get art done much cheaper abroad-- a lot of animation is already done outside the US. Automation alone is not the problem.

And because everything is complicated... were there more or fewer artists two centuries ago? More in that there were a lot more town craftsmen; those people were long ago replaced by industrial designers. On the other hand, visual artists have probably exploded in modern times, because modern media has an endless appetite for visuals. Nobles could only buy so many paintings.

I think, at least to start with, AI art will mostly be restricted to cases where people wouldn't have paid for it anyway. I'm never going to pay someone to create art for my conworld for me - but I'd happily let a computer do it for free (or maybe for a small fee). Nobody actually loses out in that case.

I have some mixed feelings about this. I think it'd be fun to play with myself. On the other hand, I doubt I could get so much as a good picture of an iliu, much less (say) an iliu city. I would still encourage conworlders to do their own visualizations; it's not that hard.

The people who can afford to pay for art will probably find, at least in the near future, that human artists still do a better job.

I think so too, and yet we've already seen magazine articles illustrated by AI images. They tend to be colorful and their very glitches give them an interesting dreamlike quality... plus you can get them in a few hours rather than dealing with a quirky human. I kind of hope editors get tired of the style quick. (Remember the early versions with dog noses everywhere? Those were fun, but I don't want to see them on every paperback cover.)

The use of Google Translate (and similar engines) is probably a warning. On the one hand it's often a huge convenience. On the other hand, I wonder how many corporate types, who don't understand other languages or problems of translation anyway, avail themselves of it on a large scale just to save money, and get terrible translations as a result. There's been complaints about game localization relying on machine translation. It's a disservice to the target population to provide crappy translations, but the company can easily check off 30 languages for low cost.