AIs gunning for our precious freelancers

[zompist]

If you forgive me a little off topic diversion, by the standards of today's art theorists, art is only art if it challenges or questions society's or the viewer's assumptions, so, if you really take that standard seriously, the vast majority of periods in human history didn't produce any art, because the kind of art-like stuff produced during those periods didn't have that intention.

It's not entirely off topic, since by their nature generative AIs, trained on existing works, are best at creating conventional, existing art. One thing humans can do is surprise.

I'd contest the art theorists, precisely because much of history would disagree. Perhaps the classic example is ancient Egyptian art, which was purposely kept almost the same for three thousand years.

Human art is going to continue because humans want to express what it means to be human. AIs can imitate their past work, which means they can only express what it meant to be human. (And FWIW, not in any authentic way. The article I posted is worth reading for the artist Ilzo's excellent response to why the AI guys' favorite AI painting was actually not good at all.)

AI impresses non-artists like malloc because it puts lots of details in. But it doesn't know what the details mean and makes a hash out of them. A little randomness can be good in art, but when everything is random it's not actually well thought out.)

[WeepingElf]

If you forgive me a little off topic diversion, by the standards of today's art theorists, art is only art if it challenges or questions society's or the viewer's assumptions, so, if you really take that standard seriously, the vast majority of periods in human history didn't produce any art, because the kind of art-like stuff produced during those periods didn't have that intention.

It's not entirely off topic, since by their nature generative AIs, trained on existing works, are best at creating conventional, existing art. One thing humans can do is surprise.

I'd contest the art theorists, precisely because much of history would disagree. Perhaps the classic example is ancient Egyptian art, which was purposely kept almost the same for three thousand years.

Human art is going to continue because humans want to express what it means to be human. AIs can imitate their past work, which means they can only express what it meant to be human. (And FWIW, not in any authentic way. The article I posted is worth reading for the artist Ilzo's excellent response to why the AI guys' favorite AI painting was actually not good at all.)

AI impresses non-artists like malloc because it puts lots of details in. But it doesn't know what the details mean and makes a hash out of them. A little randomness can be good in art, but when everything is random it's not actually well thought out.)

AMEN!!!

[malloc]

Sure but all that only holds true if you consider authorial intent important. Many theorists these days subscribe to "death of the author" and consider the intentions and biography of the author utterly unimportant to the meaning or value of a work. Indeed it seems downright passé in many circles to consider the author's life or attitudes in evaluating a text or artwork. If you want to argue that human artists are categorically better than AI because of their intentionality, you must also refute the whole concept of "death of the author" and its attendant philosophical principles.

Putting it another, imagine a human artist draws something and then by coincidence an image generator produces the exact same image in terms of dimensions and pixels and such. Anyone looking at the two pictures would have no way of distinguishing them nor even any idea which came from the human or the computer. Would you really consider the image drawn by the human better even though nothing in the image itself differs from what the AI produced?

I'm still waiting to hear the answer on which part of human history has the best artwork...since Malloc says its been ages since we hit the height of human artistic ability.

My point was not that art had its golden age centuries ago, but rather that human artists mastered the technical side of art in the Renaissance and since then we haven't gotten any better at anatomy and perspective and so forth. More generally, humans as a species have already reached the maximum level of competence their physiology allows whereas AI has plenty of room to improve and will surpass humans if left unchecked.

[Raphael]

I'd contest the art theorists, precisely because much of history would disagree.

Completely agreed. I was indirectly trying to argue against the standards of the art theorists. I'm sorry if that didn't come across.

[keenir]

Sure but

so are you agreeing with Zompist and Raphael?

Would you really consider the image drawn by the human better even though nothing in the image itself differs from what the AI produced?

which would you put on a refrigerator? a finger painting by your child, or a photocopy of that fingerpainting?

I'm still waiting to hear the answer on which part of human history has the best artwork...since Malloc says its been ages since we hit the height of human artistic ability.

My point was not that art had its golden age centuries ago, but rather that human artists mastered the technical side of art in the Renaissance

that recently? but you said it'd been ages!

and since then we haven't gotten any better at anatomy and perspective and so forth. More generally, humans as a species have already reached the maximum level of competence their physiology allows

then its weird that we keep breaking records set years and decades ago.

whereas AI has plenty of room to improve and will surpass humans if left unchecked.

except they have no way to do so, and nothing will happen even if they do.

[malloc]

which would you put on a refrigerator? a finger painting by your child, or a photocopy of that fingerpainting?

That is quite orthogonal to the question of quality, let alone commercial or institutional viability. In the bitter competition for profits and prestige, the cheapest and most productive system has the advantage and will steamroll over alternatives. Callous as that might sound, we must accept that we live in a horrible unforgiving world and base our strategies on that premise, not religious concepts of the soul nor romantic notions of childlike imagination.

except they have no way to do so, and nothing will happen even if they do.

High intelligence has evolved multiple times quite by accident, in everything from apes and elephants to crows and cephalopods. There is nothing in the laws of physics that hinders the evolution of intelligence and it seems quite easy to develop with the right evolutionary pressures. One cannot equate it with truly unfeasible concepts like cold fusion or perpetual energy as some people here have done. Meanwhile there are massive corporations spending billions of dollars every year on AI research with that number only increasing as more venture capitalists get involved. Everyone here asserts that AI will soon hit a wall but nobody can point out the wall.

[alice]

Certainly some professional artists better than image generators but you must concede that plenty of artists are doing nothing that AI could not replicate. If your portfolio consists of fanart drawn in the manga style, then image generators can almost certainly replicate your work. They already have any well-known fictional character in their databases along with how manga style works. I quite enjoy drawings of pretty anime girls but I have no illusions about them requiring exceptional skill or avant-garde vision.

(bolding mine)

We have a test! Somebody needs to collect N human-drawn such pictures and N AI-generated ones, mix them up, and get malloc to identify which are which.

[keenir]

which would you put on a refrigerator? a finger painting by your child, or a photocopy of that fingerpainting?

That is quite orthogonal to the question of quality, let alone commercial or institutional viability.

nope; its the entire point: the child makes something that people want to put on display. the AI makes nothing original.

In the bitter competition for profits and prestige, the cheapest and most productive system has the advantage

no, the one that more people will buy, thats what has the advantage. just because you like paying pennies for pirated merch & cheerleading for cybernazis, doesn't mean everyone does.

except they have no way to do so, and nothing will happen even if they do.

High intelligence has evolved multiple times quite by accident, in everything from apes and elephants to crows and cephalopods. There is nothing in the laws of physics that hinders the evolution of intelligence and it seems quite easy to develop with the right evolutionary pressures.

yes...the right evolutionary pressures. computer programs can be programmed to evolve the best way to do a single task, like folding proteins...but you take that entirely true specialized outcome, and expect it to do everything, including conquering and ruling the world...which is like asking a cheetah to hunt elephants and aircraft carriers.

One cannot equate it with truly unfeasible concepts like cold fusion or perpetual energy as some people here have done. Meanwhile there are massive corporations spending billions of dollars every year on AI research

wow, people wasting money on investments. thats certainly never happened before. oh wait, was it the West Indian Company or South Indian Company that nearly bankrupted England?

Everyone here asserts that AI will soon hit a wall but nobody can point out the wall.

because we know that, as soon we do, you'll start a tantrum and demanding that the techbros dodge the wall like a pricey coyote.

[malloc]

no, the one that more people will buy, thats what has the advantage. just because you like paying pennies for pirated merch & cheerleading for cybernazis, doesn't mean everyone does.

Most people buy clothes made in sweatshops, chocolate harvested by child slaves, and so forth, though. Everyone says they care about high quality and ethical consumption but most people ultimately go for the cheapest option regardless of quality or ethics. When everything from film to pinups made by AI cost far less than human-made equivalents, most people will gravitate toward the AI products.

wow, people wasting money on investments. thats certainly never happened before. oh wait, was it the West Indian Company or South Indian Company that nearly bankrupted England?

Sure but plenty of investments have paid off. There have been numerous examples of remarkable technological innovations that would have seemed incredible only decades beforehand. Everyone likes to laugh at tulip mania but one should also remember the incredible success of aerospace or the internet. Someone living in 1900 might well have balked at the notion of airplanes not only flying but becoming a major industry.

because we know that, as soon we do, you'll start a tantrum and demanding that the techbros dodge the wall like a pricey coyote.

Try me. Show me the wall and why nobody in the tech industry can plausibly scale it.

[keenir]

no, the one that more people will buy, thats what has the advantage. just because you like paying pennies for pirated merch & cheerleading for cybernazis, doesn't mean everyone does.

Most people buy clothes made in sweatshops, chocolate harvested by child slaves, and so forth, though. Everyone says they care about high quality and ethical consumption but most people ultimately go for the cheapest option regardless of quality or ethics.

so you lump the ethical people in with the penny-pinchers...no wonder you see everything as proving you right - you can't distinguish between anything.

When everything from film to pinups made by AI cost far less than human-made equivalents, most people will gravitate toward the AI products.

except they aren't doing that now, when AI-designed things already exist...except for things that are essentially stolen or copied from actual artists.

wow, people wasting money on investments. thats certainly never happened before. oh wait, was it the West Indian Company or South Indian Company that nearly bankrupted England?

Sure but plenty of investments have paid off.

yet again, you aren't bothering to listen.

There have been numerous examples of remarkable technological innovations that would have seemed incredible only decades beforehand. Everyone likes to laugh at tulip mania but one should also remember the incredible success of aerospace or the internet.

phrasing it like that, makes me think you have no idea what tulipmania was.

because we know that, as soon we do, you'll start a tantrum and demanding that the techbros dodge the wall like a pricey coyote.

Try me. Show me the wall and why nobody in the tech industry can plausibly scale it.

every time we do that, you go "nuh-uh! liar! stinkyface!" and words to those effects,

so we have no reason to bother.

[malloc]

so you lump the ethical people in with the penny-pinchers...no wonder you see everything as proving you right - you can't distinguish between anything.

My point was quite the opposite, that most people ultimately side with penny-pinching over ethics. You must have misread my post if you thought I was equating the ethical consumers with the people choosing cheaper options.

---

It seems like we are simply approaching this issue from rather opposing perspectives. I feel like the extraordinary risks inherent to artificial intelligence, however remote one might consider them, make it unacceptably dangerous. We can play it safe with human artists and scientists or we can risk everything with AI taking over intellectual work with dubious benefits to humanity. Meanwhile most people here consider the risks of artificial intelligence fantastically low such that it hardly makes sense to base policy on them. One might as well agonize over vacuum decay or an asteroid strike. Neither of us can see the future obviously and there really is no way of knowing whether it will trend toward my pessimism or your optimism. Thus for now we are stuck at an impasse.

[keenir]

It seems like we are simply approaching this issue from rather opposing perspectives. I feel like the extraordinary risks inherent to artificial intelligence, however remote one might consider them, make it unacceptably dangerous.

...and yet you rejoyce at Trump taking over things, and you seem to celebrate his every victory or claimed victory, and say we shouldn't fight it.

[malloc]

...and yet you rejoyce at Trump taking over things, and you seem to celebrate his every victory or claimed victory, and say we shouldn't fight it.

You are simply wrong. I have said that the odds against us are overwhelming and perhaps suggested that fighting is pointless from a purely practical standpoint. Given his dominance over the obsequious media and heavily armed military and polices forces, the right wing swing of generation Z, and utterly feckless Democratic party opposition, one can hardly dispute that circumstances are historically bleak. That is hardly the same thing as praising Trump or urging surrender.

On a similar note, I should clarify that I don't literally believe the singularity is coming any day now. Nonetheless, I do consider important to take proactive measures against dangerous technological developments instead of resorting to rearguard defenses after catastrophe has already struck. Preventing disaster is way easier and more effective than halting an ongoing disaster and fixing everything it has destroyed.

[keenir]

...and yet you rejoyce at Trump taking over things, and you seem to celebrate his every victory or claimed victory, and say we shouldn't fight it.

You are simply wrong. I have said that the odds against us are overwhelming and perhaps suggested that fighting is pointless from a purely practical standpoint. Given his dominance over the obsequious media and heavily armed military and polices forces, the right wing swing of generation Z, and utterly feckless Democratic party opposition, one can hardly dispute that circumstances are historically bleak. That is hardly the same thing as praising Trump or urging surrender.

...and yet...

On a similar note, I should clarify that I don't literally believe the singularity is coming any day now. Nonetheless, I do consider important to take proactive measures against dangerous technological developments instead of resorting to rearguard defenses after catastrophe has already struck. Preventing disaster is way easier and more effective than halting an ongoing disaster and fixing everything it has destroyed.

Your argument seems to amount to "don't bother fighting the real threat; just make noises against something that miiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight kill us all in three hundred years if ever. Hopefully the mean people will render us moot before that happens."

[Travis B.]

malloc, your attitude towards the real threat, the fascists, smacks of defeatism while you simultaneously overstate the threat from AI. If we all had your view we would just let Trump et al have their way while spending all our time and energy fighting what is in many way a hypothetical threat.

[rotting bones]

Replacing the word "specifics" in my prompt with "findings" removed the research metadata from the output.

[rotting bones]

If you forgive me a little off topic diversion, by the standards of today's art theorists, art is only art if it challenges or questions society's or the viewer's assumptions, so, if you really take that standard seriously, the vast majority of periods in human history didn't produce any art, because the kind of art-like stuff produced during those periods didn't have that intention.

Medieval artists were seen as craftsmen, not creatives. Creativity had a negative connotation in many elite Western social circles even in early modernity. Fabrication is akin to lying, leaving your own mark on the world stinks of the sin of pride, etc. This is different from doing, say, God's work or making a faithful replica of the natural world. This gradually changed around the Enlightenment, but it was common for self-expression to be stifled in bourgeois households even in the 20th century.

[Starbeam]

Medieval artists were seen as craftsmen, not creatives. Creativity had a negative connotation in many elite Western social circles even in early modernity. Fabrication is akin to lying, leaving your own mark on the world stinks of the sin of pride, etc. This is different from doing, say, God's work or making a faithful replica of the natural world. This gradually changed around the Enlightenment, but it was common for self-expression to be stifled in bourgeois households even in the 20th century.

This is really interesting. Thanks for the art history tidbit :]

[WeepingElf]

If you forgive me a little off topic diversion, by the standards of today's art theorists, art is only art if it challenges or questions society's or the viewer's assumptions, so, if you really take that standard seriously, the vast majority of periods in human history didn't produce any art, because the kind of art-like stuff produced during those periods didn't have that intention.

Medieval artists were seen as craftsmen, not creatives. Creativity had a negative connotation in many elite Western social circles even in early modernity. Fabrication is akin to lying, leaving your own mark on the world stinks of the sin of pride, etc. This is different from doing, say, God's work or making a faithful replica of the natural world. This gradually changed around the Enlightenment, but it was common for self-expression to be stifled in bourgeois households even in the 20th century.

Yes - contemporary art theory is mostly vulgar Marxism, and was not the mainstream opinion on art before the mid-20th century. Before that, artists were expected to realistically portray the world, and before that, to glorify God or the ruling classes. Art was not really a niche for social misfits as it is today; artists were expected to be disciplined and obedient just like any profession.

[Raphael]

and was not the mainstream opinion on art before the mid-20th century. Before that, artists were expected to realistically portray the world, and before that, to glorify God or the ruling classes. Art was not really a niche for social misfits as it is today; artists were expected to be disciplined and obedient just like any profession.

I think there was already a bit of an art-as-a-niche-for-social-misfits thing going on in the time from the mid-19th to the mid-20th century, though less than today.

It might depend on the specific art, too. I think poetry was a niche-for-social-misfits thing long before the visual arts, for instance.