AIs gunning for our precious freelancers

[Torco]

Traditionally, Marxists prided themselves on being "scientific". Recently, Marxism has been co-opted by the Frankfurt School, which is closer to Hegelian idealism than Marxist social science.

it has to be considered that what marx thought of as 'science' is hardly what we think of as science, though. scientific meant more like empiricist philosophia naturalis than data-driven papers published by 36 dudes with an ALMA dataset. I however find that this thing about marxism being coopted by the frankfurt school is something the fash say to rehash the old cultural bolshevism thing: I'm a sociologist, a marxist, and tbh sure, most other leftos like me *know* about adorno and marcuse, but they hardly hold them as the referents the jordan petersons of the world think they do.

@Raph: the fascists had their own artistic vanguardism, though, as did many other people at the time.

[Raphael]

Random AI-related though: I guess from now on, when people talk about "AI" in a fiction context, they'll have to specify what they mean by "AI". Like:

-What role does AI play in your SF scenario?
-Do you mean "AI" as in "actual artificially created intelligence", or do you mean "AI" as in "the stuff that 2020s marketing people called 'AI'"?

[bradrn]

Random AI-related though: I guess from now on, when people talk about "AI" in a fiction context, they'll have to specify what they mean by "AI". Like:

-What role does AI play in your SF scenario?
-Do you mean "AI" as in "actual artificially created intelligence", or do you mean "AI" as in "the stuff that 2020s marketing people called 'AI'"?

What about the stuff that 1980s marketing people called ‘AI’?

(On that note, this is worth a read.)

[malloc]

Random AI-related though: I guess from now on, when people talk about "AI" in a fiction context, they'll have to specify what they mean by "AI". Like:

-What role does AI play in your SF scenario?
-Do you mean "AI" as in "actual artificially created intelligence", or do you mean "AI" as in "the stuff that 2020s marketing people called 'AI'"?

Considering that there is a very real chance that AI will take over literature, they probably won't bother with the distinction. Any self-respecting LLM would surely insist on its intelligence.

* * *

It still blows my mind that a forum dedicated to art and the humanities is not more outraged over this issue. Tolkien would undoubtedly regarded AI taking over art and literature with horror. Yet his successors have pretty much ceded art to AI without even a fight. Suppose lions had to compete with drones that snatched away every gazelle they killed before they had the chance to eat. That is the situation that we humans increasingly face with AI taking over our niche.

[Ares Land]

It still blows my mind that a forum dedicated to art and the humanities is not more outraged over this issue. Tolkien would undoubtedly regarded AI taking over art and literature with horror. Yet his successors have pretty much ceded art to AI without even a fight. Suppose lions had to compete with drones that snatched away every gazelle they killed before they had the chance to eat. That is the situation that we humans increasingly face with AI taking over our niche.

Personally, I think that claims that AI will take over art and literature are precisely, empty marketing with not much to back it up. So far AI has taken over precisely nothing. Last I check, novels are still written by human beings. (There was a lot of interest in AI-generated pictures at one point, but do you know the story about the donkey that can paint? The surprising thing is that it can do it at all, not that the paintings are particularly good.)

I have my own concerns about AI but it supposedly 'replacing' artists isn't one of them.

As for conworlding... the very idea of describing an entire fictional planet in insane detail isn't something any AI could come up with; and I doubt the current models would be very useful when it comes to execution. And frankly I'd much rather watch that than any picture with too many fingers any day.

I did find some pieces of AI-generated art I enjoy... but it takes some talent to come up with an interesting prompt!

(I get the appeal to Tolkien but I have a feeling he wouldn't even have approved of computers )

Most real-life applications of AI (the ones that are actually used and make actual money) are interesting but pretty boring. The general panic over AI comes from two sources: a) marketing ploys to get investor money b) lobbying ploys to regulate the market for the personal benefit of a key players.
Re: that last point; it's intriguing that the dramatic noise about AI is usually from Google (noticeably behind in AI) or Elon Musk (who has money invested in the field, and in typical Elon Musk fashion, isn't very good at it but still trying to scam his way to the top.)

[Travis B.]

I was able to get ChatGPT to create a technically correct factorial word in Forth on the first try today, as follows:

In Forth, you can implement a factorial function using a recursive approach. Here's a simple factorial function in Forth:

forth

Code: Select all

: factorial ( n -- n! )
  dup 1 <= if
    drop 1
  else
    dup 1 - recurse *
  then ;

This function defines factorial, which takes an integer n from the stack and returns n!. Here's a breakdown of how it works:

dup duplicates the top element of the stack.
1 <= if checks if the duplicated value is less than or equal to 1.
If the value is 1 or less, drop 1 is executed to remove the duplicated value and push 1 onto the stack (since 0! and 1! are both 1).
If the value is greater than 1, dup 1 - recurse * is executed:
dup duplicates the current value on the stack.
1 - subtracts 1 from the duplicated value.
recurse recursively calls the factorial function with the decremented value.
* multiplies the result of the recursive call with the original value.

You can use this factorial function in Forth by pushing an integer onto the stack and then calling factorial. For example:

forth

Code: Select all

5 factorial .

This will calculate and print the factorial of 5, which is 120.

However, it is not a particularly good factorial word (despite being correct per se for small numbers), since it will quickly explode the stacks if too large a number is fed in. So I asked it to write a factorial word without using recursion, and it makes the following:

In Forth, you can calculate the factorial of a number without using recursion by using a loop. Here's a Forth program to calculate the factorial of a given number using an iterative approach:

forth

Code: Select all

: factorial ( n -- n! )
  1 swap 1
  begin
    dup 1 <= if
      drop exit
    then
    * swap 1 -
  repeat ;

Here's how this code works:

: factorial defines a new Forth word called "factorial" that takes a single argument n from the stack and returns n!.

1 swap 1 initializes the product to 1 and swaps the order of the stack items so that n is on top.

The begin...repeat loop is used to calculate the factorial iteratively.

Inside the loop:
dup 1 <= if checks if the top item on the stack is less than or equal to 1. If it is, the loop exits using drop exit.

If the condition is not met (i.e., n is greater than 1), it proceeds to the next step:
* multiplies the current product by n.
swap 1 - decrements n by 1 and swaps the order of the stack items to prepare for the next iteration.

The loop continues until n becomes less than or equal to 1, at which point it exits.

Now you can use the factorial word to calculate the factorial of a number in Forth. For example:

forth

Code: Select all

5 factorial .

This code will calculate and print the factorial of 5, which is 120.

Now this time the code does not even compile, and when I modify it to use again rather than repeat it it gives the wrong answer, as shown by:

Code: Select all

5 factorial . 5  ok
.s  [ 1 ] ok

I could have spent this time futzing with ChatGPT writing a good factorial word myself.

[Travis B.]

Or in other words, I don't think my job as a programmer will be threatened any time soon if LLM's can't even get a factorial right.

[malloc]

Personally, I think that claims that AI will take over art and literature are precisely, empty marketing with not much to back it up. So far AI has taken over precisely nothing. Last I check, novels are still written by human beings. (There was a lot of interest in AI-generated pictures at one point, but do you know the story about the donkey that can paint? The surprising thing is that it can do it at all, not that the paintings are particularly good.)

From what I have seen, AI generated images have become extremely common as thumbnails for videos and illustrations for articles and such. Furthermore, art websites like DeviantArt and ArtStation have become overrun by AI images. Books generated by AI have become common on Amazon as well. While certainly human-created works still exist, human artists and writers now have to compete with something that works far faster and cheaper than them. Once the AI goes from painting donkey to matching even the best humans in quality, it will displace humans from art almost entirely.

I have my own concerns about AI but it supposedly 'replacing' artists isn't one of them.

What concerns are those? I have plenty more of my own. The loss of employment is simply the most immediate problem with others dependent on further advances to the technology.

[Travis B.]

The thing is that these AI's still need someone to tell them what to do - they don't really have an imagination of their own. So what one will get is people telling AI's to create art or write programs rather than creating art or writing programs themselves - the AI's won't create art or write programs of their own accord. And to be completely honest I have my doubts about the ability for AI's to write code - they may be very adept at some things like creating arbitrary natural-language text, but code is not nearly such a "soft" matter, and must be exactly correct or it likely won't work at all or it will fail in any number of unforeseen ways down the road. (This is why I would never use Microsoft's Copilot for Visual Studio, intellectual property concerns aside, because I could never really trust its code.)

[Ketsuban]

From what I have seen, AI generated images have become extremely common as thumbnails for videos and illustrations for articles and such. Furthermore, art websites like DeviantArt and ArtStation have become overrun by AI images. Books generated by AI have become common on Amazon as well. While certainly human-created works still exist, human artists and writers now have to compete with something that works far faster and cheaper than them. Once the AI goes from painting donkey to matching even the best humans in quality, it will displace humans from art almost entirely.

You've gone from "art" to "thumbnails for videos" (tedious and thankless) and "illustrations for articles" (stock images) and from "literature" to "books on Amazon" (famously no guarantee of any kind of quality). These are things we don't want humans "competing with" in the first place, they're boring. As for art sites, that's a policy problem.

[linguistcat]

I haven't noticed any uptick in AI art on deviantArt but maybe that just means I'm bad at spotting it. Or that I've told the site so many times that I don't wish to see AI art that it just doesn't show it to me. But AI art still has some obvious tells, and I've been trying to get DA to stop showing me adoptable characters for a while now and it still does. So at least from my experience, AI art is less common now than it was in the past.

[malloc]

The thing is that these AI's still need someone to tell them what to do - they don't really have an imagination of their own. So what one will get is people telling AI's to create art or write programs rather than creating art or writing programs themselves - the AI's won't create art or write programs of their own accord.

That still takes artistic creation away from humans. Nobody remembers who commissioned various famous artworks throughout history, nor does commissioning a masterpiece make you an artist or creative in any sense.

You've gone from "art" to "thumbnails for videos" (tedious and thankless) and "illustrations for articles" (stock images) and from "literature" to "books on Amazon" (famously no guarantee of any kind of quality). These are things we don't want humans "competing with" in the first place, they're boring. As for art sites, that's a policy problem.

But the technology is still in its infancy. What happens in the coming decades when it improves enough to overtake humans? Airplanes went from struggling to get off the ground to fighting in WWI in the space of one decade. What prevents AI from making a similar leap in improvement? Furthermore, the fact that art sites need explicit policies to keep AI generated images from taking over merely proves my point. If humans could easily compete with AI, no such regulation would be necessary.

[Travis B.]

Furthermore, the fact that art sites need explicit policies to keep AI generated images from taking over merely proves my point. If humans could easily compete with AI, no such regulation would be necessary.

I think the real reason for such rules is the intellectual properties implications of AI generated images (or code or whatnot). If an AI is trained on much of the art available on the Internet, who is to say that the art produced by said AI is not a "derived work" of all that art? There have already been lawsuits about this very matter.

[Travis B.]

On topic, the famous AI art Théâtre D’opéra Spatial has been ruled as non-copyrightable by the US Copyright Office due to containing a substantial amount of machine-generated content. (To be honest, I have to disagree with this logic, because what about the output of compilers from source code, which no one doubts as being copyrightable, except for those who would doubt whether that source itself is copyrightable - how is this really all that different?)

[WeepingElf]

These concerns are nothing new. 200 years ago, craftspeople were worried about factories. Later, painters were worried about photography, office clerks were worried about typewriters and calculators, and musicians were worried about grammophones. And so on. And we still have craftspeople, office clerks and musicians. They have lost some jobs, but they are still around and have their place in our society.

[malloc]

These concerns are nothing new. 200 years ago, craftspeople were worried about factories. Later, painters were worried about photography, office clerks were worried about typewriters and calculators, and musicians were worried about grammophones. And so on. And we still have craftspeople, office clerks and musicians. They have lost some jobs, but they are still around and have their place in our society.

First of all, those technologies did devastate traditional craftsmen and painters. How many professional painters and sculptors do you know and how many handcrafted products do you own? Some people in those professions managed to survive in specialized markets for bespoke goods but most had to leave their trade or accept way worse conditions with little creative control or skill. Those craftsmen from two hundred years ago formed an entire movement, the Luddites, to resist the destruction of their profession. Today of course, skilled textile workers have disappeared almost entirely. Right now, writers and actors in Hollywood are striking in part because studios want to use AI generated scripts and CGI imagery instead. If history is any guide, the studios will succeed in driving humans out of Hollywood or reducing them to marginal roles.

Second, technologies like photography and record players differ radically from generative AI in terms of their capabilities and mechanics. Most obviously neither technology can create anything new or unexpected but simply replicate whatever is recorded onto their respective media. Indeed it would defeat the purpose of either technology if they produced unpredictable content of their own accord. Imagine putting on a Miles Davis record and hearing Nickelback instead because the phonograph created its own content rather than recording what was played. Generative AI by contrast produces unpredictable content rather than precisely replicating the creative decisions of human artists the way drawing programs or record players do. It takes the place of human artists rather than simply recording and replicating their work.

* * *

Several weeks ago, everyone complained when I said the ZBB was full of wealthy tech workers and yet this thread only proves my point. Almost everyone here is siding with AI over human artists, defending the tech industry, and so forth. Nobody seems concerned about the millions of jobs in peril (just look at the flippant title of this thread), let alone the staggering cultural loss. I respect technology and agree that it has a place in society, but there really are limits that it should not cross. The tech industry seems hellbent on creating machines that can usurp humanity for reasons I can hardly guess.

[Rounin Ryuuji]

Furthermore, the fact that art sites need explicit policies to keep AI generated images from taking over merely proves my point. If humans could easily compete with AI, no such regulation would be necessary.

I think the real reason for such rules is the intellectual properties implications of AI generated images (or code or whatnot). If an AI is trained on much of the art available on the Internet, who is to say that the art produced by said AI is not a "derived work" of all that art? There have already been lawsuits about this very matter.

I may have mentioned before, I would argue the AI itself is a derivative work (if the AI is trained on these pieces, it is derived from them in no uncertain terms).

[linguistcat]

First of all, those technologies did devastate traditional craftsmen and painters. How many professional painters and sculptors do you know and how many handcrafted products do you own?

I know a lot actually, because I have taken the time to find people who are into crafts and art. I own several handmade items and I've kept them far longer than the closest equivalents that were factory made, and I actively try to avoid "fast fashion". I've mentioned my concerns about AI previously, as a writer myself and someone for whom most of the people I knew growing up and interact with now have been creatives of some stripe.

And I'm not saying things aren't going to change in the future because of AI development, but I'm saying it's a matter of tool use and not the inherent evils of neural networks. They aren't even as "intelligent" as the tech sales people want to claim and people saying LLMs are anywhere near sentient are anthropomorphizing them to a degree that is dangerous for themselves.

That said, there's no reason not to be polite to the robots.

[zompist]

To be honest, I have to disagree with this logic, because what about the output of compilers from source code, which no one doubts as being copyrightable, except for those who would doubt whether that source itself is copyrightable - how is this really all that different?)

That's an interesting case... I have no idea how the courts decided that, but I can see an argument that source code, written by a human being, is copyrightable; and compilation is just a deterministic mechanical procedure which, so to speak, doesn't change the underlying copyrightability. It's not transformative, in legalese. There's no such thing as a compiled piece of code that didn't start with source code.

As an analogy, compilation is like running a movie soundtrack though a frequency modulator, raising it in pitch one octave. It'd be a bold pirate who claimed that this allowed them to get around copyright.

[Richard W]

As an analogy, compilation is like running a movie soundtrack though a frequency modulator, raising it in pitch one octave. It'd be a bold pirate who claimed that this allowed them to get around copyright.

Maybe, but there's already a precedent with font outlines, at least in US law.