This morning I decided to compete with ChatGPT on who could write the best short story given my original idea. I assume my story idea is original because I have never heard of a story about this before....
There is absolutely an issue in regards to the art market as I mentioned, and I won’t minimize or dismiss that in any way. I hope for everyone’s sake that the Writers win their strike. I think AI-generated works passing for being written by actual authors and dominating the best seller list says something important about consumer behavior, which I assume is that they don’t actually read what they’re buying. I haven’t seen much interest in AI generated stories in places where people read things and provide feedback.
AI generated plastic “art” certainly has novelty because of the speed in which it can be produced, so I don’t doubt it’s all over the place. It can produce images which look pretty cool as long as you’re scrolling past them. In terms of the chance for exposure for the average artists that could be an issue, but the issue is not that the machine can competently replicate what a person can do. There is a challenge in the plastic arts in general considering the scroll past behavior is much more common than looking at the work and think about what you’re looking at, but I think that says more about the general audience than it does about any threat to art. If a person sees a piece that they want to engage with, actual art has a person behind it and perhaps others in discussion about it while LLM produced has nothing.
I can appreciate this and hadn’t considered the orientation towards philosophical opposition toward the idea of this being done and what that could potentially mean. I don’t personally consider this technology or technology which could be developed from it to be inherently different concerning my web exposure than my comments appearing on a google search (which of course many also take issue with). As you said though, I am only speaking for myself and am interested in discussion which may change my perspective.
This is exactly my point. The machine had no understanding of the prompt or my story but was able to use it as data to algorithmically generate an incompetent summary throwing together first what it referenced from its database concerning text about “reflecting on existence in the universe” and then the text of my story respectively. As far as the themes of the story go, a lot of what is explicitly stated in its infringement came more from its existing database than what I implied with subtext.
I wouldn’t expect a 10-year-old to understand what I wrote or write what I did, but I would expect them to understand something. Allow a 10-year-old to freely write the story they want to write and you’ll get something with more meaning and quality than anything the machine can produce, although likely with worse grammar. If you have a that same 10-year-old write a structured essay for a grade in which they need to repeat what they’ve been taught, they might fall behind the machine in that regard.
I’ve read your post twice and I can’t find where we disagree other than that I would replace your first word “No” with “More Importantly in my opinion.” My final appeal didn’t indicate that someone should ignore art scams, only that I would rather continue to see human art amidst the sea of LLM crap and observe how human art grows to become distinct from what LLMs can produce, because their power as tools are very limited as you explained when compared to people. My purpose was to encourage people not to quit their art because I think human art is fundamentally superior to LLM-produced “art” and is necessary and important.
I suppose where the true difference opinion lies is that I don’t think LLM produced content can possibly be good enough to engage an actual person, and glancing at something for a moment is not engaging with it. Obviously good enough to engage with “art” hasn’t yet been demonstrated despite the deluge of LLM prompt results posted everywhere, but technologically I think we’re a long way from getting there considering the infinite difference between unthinking data processing algorithims and the emergent process of a human mind made up of trillions of non-binary neuron interactions at any given moment which we are far from reproducing or even really understanding. These models contain a lot of quality literature already and have been trained significantly to reproduce some aesthetics, but since it can’t have any kind of understanding of what its doing it’s all hollow.
To go more into detail about commodified art, it’s a huge problem that artistic merit is one of a variety of factors considering sales in a marketplace. The art market has always been driven primarily by perceived economic value and that has always been a major problem as what sells has always displaced everything else regardless of quality or merit in the market. Corporate produced art products like much of what’s on the radio, on tv, or in theaters are less products of artistic expression and more of what market testing has demonstrated the kinds of aesthetic features people are willing to spend money on. That doesn’t require engagement, just enough to drive a purchasing behavior. LLMs being able to make something that’s fine to play in the background or to hang up and never really examine displaces this kind of highly lucrative art (which is still superior human produced art) which has always displaced art which people create with passion. I think that producing art exclusively for economic reasons is a terrible practice. What I’m talking about in my essay is “pure” art which is almost never economically feasible without being born to several generations of aristocrats. I think that producing art on the market’s terms has always been a hindrance to human expression and a wider problem in society, but the state its in is still better than being produced by machines which have literally no understanding of what they’re producing.
The above can probably accurately be interpreted as me undermining the economic value of art, but what I’m really trying to express is that economic drivers poison art. In a better system, anyone and everyone who wanted to fully devote themselves to their art could live comfortably on a stipend and create only what they think is important for them to create and share, and art would be free. Instead of receiving financial awards, they would receive more human rewards from sharing their art. In this fantasy world, labor saving technology would be doing the rote tasks driving the ability for people to live comfortably rather than displacing workers for the benefit of the business owners.
Very much noted. I should say it’s as if it’s making a query to a database when it’s referencing some kind of existing data which it was trained on and can only report rather than interpret one word at a time.
I agree with you totally on the economics of it. When I say economic drivers poison art, I didn’t mean to imply that there is currently a better alternative to be a full time artist for most people. As I mentioned, the only way to be a full time “pure” artist is to have enough wealth to retire on before being born and this is a deeper issue with art than this particular situation. Professional artists are businesspeople participating in a marketplace who have found a niche and everyone needs to respect their right to protect their ability to make an income as a literal matter of survival. A program appropriating their niche and producing thousands of images with the thing their customers like to buy is a harm which should be stopped. Although I don’t like that this is an issue, it is and I won’t deny it.
The reason I titled the post the way I did is that I don’t participate in the market and don’t intend to. My essay is more targeted to people producing non-commodified art for purposes of expression or other non-monetary motivation. This isn’t to diminish art from the marketplace because there is obviously a lot of amazing stuff produced there. This is an appeal to amateurs like myself who have lost the motivation to produce art because they feel like the machine has made what they can make irrelevant. Anyone losing motivation because they are considering competing in a marketplace has a real concern. In my mind I’m distinguishing the abstract idea of art itself as human expression vs a business in which the product is art.
In its submission to the Australian government’s review of the regulatory framework around AI, Google said that copyright law should be altered to allow for generative AI systems to scrape the internet.
This is a tendency I’ve heard that I haven’t been able to understand. What is the new risk of expressing your thoughts, prose, or poetry online that didn’t exist before and currently exists with LLMs scraping them? How would the corporations exploit your work through data scraping that would demotivate you to express it at all? Because I know tone doesn’t come accross well in text, I want to clarify that these are genuine questions because my answers to these questions seem to be very different than many and I’d like to understand where that difference in perspective comes from.
This is very interesting for me to think about, since I have so many issues with proprietary technology in general. An LLM copying the code from thousands of proprietary projects is kind of an interesting loophole considering that it would be difficult for any of the individual businesses to prove that their proprietary code was infringed unless the LLM does copy and paste the code exactly. That could cause major changes in the tech industry which I’m not able to predict. Optimally I would like technological development more in the hands of people than behind legal barriers such as with Open Source code and I am not a programmer, so take my musings with a grain of salt.
A top Moscow official and his colleagues were directly involved in forcibly deporting Ukrainian children, who were then placed in Russian military training programs, it has been reported.
That is not what happened to Germany and Japan, that’s what happened to Iraq and Afganistan. The slate was absolutley not wiped clean in Germany or Japan, as much of the institutions, leadership, and even military leadership remained in place. The US was much more interested in getting these particular powers up and running as quickly and strongly as possible so that they could help deter the USSR. The cultural development of those nations was influenced by enjoying great economic support from the US, but they are respectively responsible for their own development.
Compare this to Iraq, which was a relatively modern and stable state kept under control by a despot who had ups and downs in his relationship with the US. That government and society was eradicated, and the Iraqis are still picking up the pieces. I would not say that they benefitted. The same was attempted in Afganistan, but as they don’t depend as much on formal and informal infrastructure to mainstain their society (which is fundamentally different than how Americans or Europeans would structure or define a society), the Taliban was able to utilize its relationships throughout the country to essentially get it back to how it was before. This is the consequence of a slate wipe and an attempted slate wipe.
If the US did to Russia what they did to Iraq, I think that would cause a more dangerous situation than what exists now. Russian society was already wiped out in living memory and we are living through the consequences of that now. As for a better solution, in war all we can hope for is the least bad thing.
The collapse I was talking about was actually the dissolution of the USSR and the turmoil which resulted from that in the 90s. This is a pretty clear crisis in which the old paradigm was eliminated totally and was replaced chaos and economic depression. This crisis seeded the desire for a strongman to set everything right, which was a position filled by Putin.
Could it be waning opportunities, falling wages, rising prices, the erosion of democratic institutions, and the proliferation of fear-based marketing to maximise gun sales? No, surely social media is to blame. The US never had social problems, desperation, or poverty before the demonic internet.
This article is not even as nuanced as my dismissive comment. This is the closest it comes to nuance:
Criminologists point to a confluence of factors, including the social disruptions caused by COVID‑19, the rise in gun sales early in the pandemic and the uproar following the murder of George Floyd, which, in many cities, led to diminished police activity and further erosion of trust in the police. But in my reporting on the surge, I kept hearing about another accelerant: social media.
Notice that the didn’t mention anything that I mentioned in the above quote or throughout the rest of the article. The article is framed in a way that suggests homicide is primarily the result of interpersonal conflicts within a community its audience probably assumes is predisposed to violence. It only talks about one community, by the way. The premise of the article is that if not for social media, these already violent people would have fewer reasons to bring harm to one another. The article never asks why there would be violence in these communities or any community and it doesn’t investigate why things are different today than they were in the 90s. I wouldn’t have said anything if this was not a trend in American media. The actual cause of these issues can’t be the issue, so we need to scapegoat something else that may as you said be aggravating the issue but is absolutely not the cause of the issue.
To focus exclusively on the incomplete sociological perspective provided by this particular article would be to totally ignore the much more significant and empirically supported factors at play which go unmentioned. This is specifically why I consider this article to be a diversion rather than a reliable critique of a modern issue. If this article were to do any exploration of why the violence was taking place in the first place and how new technology was related to those actual reasons I would consider this an actual analysis. The headline and the framing of the argument in my opinion are extremely misleading considering the reality of these issues. The reason I used the term “scapegoating” is that this article seems to suggest that social media itself is a driver or homicides rather than the context and content of whatever is in these communications which appear on social media that result in violence.
Although I don’t fully agree with the sentiment expressed by this thread, it did get me thinking about leaning even further into contributing to an environment I’d like to participate in. I personally much prefer dedicated discussion threads to discussing news stories myself and reading through the comments it seems like...
I have always wanted to talk to others about their personal philosophy. This is completely distinct from academic philosophy although there may be some bleed-over, especially when someone can specifically name a school of thought which consciously informs their behavior. For a few examples, I’m interested in talking to people about how they personally define ethics for themselves, whether they feel like they are living according to their values and how those values are formed, and the nature of their relationship with “truth” or “Truth.” I have always been very interested in why others do what they do, and this seems like a community which could have many people who have considered these things for themselves.
Sure it makes sense. Chatting about how personal preferences differ is a casual thing which can even get people to try things they otherwise wouldn’t or see them with a new perspective. Attacking someone for something like this is completely childish and unfortunately very reddit. From what I’ve experienced here it seems far less likely that it would be as big of a risk to bring up here.
This can be a tricky conversation in general, so it would have to be approached very carefully and deliberately to foster an actual conversation without triggering defensiveness. You might not get downvoted but also might not be able to get any engagement when your question is framed as an accusation. This is not to tone police you because you are of course free to express your own beliefs with all the passion which you carry for them. This is only offering a strategy if your aim is to get people to feel comfortable enough to honestly answer your question, where you may be able to challenge them and perhaps cause them to really consider their actions if they haven’t. This isn’t general advice of course, because as you stated however you frame something like this on reddit it’s going to drive antipathy. I think you could do it on this platform with some considerations. I know that there have been talks about a vegan community here, so it’s possible when that exists you would be able to ask this there without reservation with non-vegans who choose to go there to offer their perspectives.
If you ask Alexa, Amazon’s voice assistant AI system, whether Amazon is a monopoly, it responds by saying it doesn’t know. It doesn’t take much to make it lambaste the other tech giants, but it’s silent about its own corporate parent’s misdeeds.
"AI researchers such as Timnit Gebru affirm that longtermism is everywhere in Silicon Valley. The current race to create advanced AI by companies like OpenAI and DeepMind is driven in part by the longtermist ideology. Longtermists believe that if we create a “friendly” AI, it will solve all our problems and usher in a utopia, but if the AI is “misaligned”, it will destroy humanity...."
It reminds me of casting a golden calf and then worshipping it as a god. There aren’t even the seeds of the solution to any social problem in LLMs. It’s the classic issue of being knowledgeable about one thing and assuming they are knowledgeable about all things.
I think we agree. LLMs and automation in general have a massive labor saving potential, but because of the way our economic systems are structured this could actually lead in the opposite direction of a Utopia instead of toward one as was suggested by the “longtermists” (weird to type that out). The seeds as you suggest are very different than towards the end of conflict and want.
Employees say they weren’t adequately warned about the brutality of some of the text and images they would be tasked with reviewing, and were offered no or inadequate psychological support. Workers were paid between $1.46 and $3.74 an hour, according to a Sama spokesperson.
The difference between what a human mind does in transforming their nature and experiences through artistic expression and what the machine does by referencing values and expressing them in human language without any kind of understanding is very different. You are right that LLMs don’t literally copy word for word what they find, and they certainly are sophisticated pieces of technology, but what they are expressing is more processed language or images than an act of artistic creation. Less culinary experience and more industrial sausage. They do not have intelligence and are incapable of producing art of any kind. This isn’t to say they aren’t a threat to commodified art in the marketplace because they very much are, but in terms of enrichment or even entertainment the machine is not capable of producing anything worthwhile unless the viewer is looking for something they don’t have to look at for more than a moment or read with any serious interest of the contents. I’m interested in people using LLMs as a tool in their own artistic pursuits, but they have their own limitations as any tool does.
A step closer to approximating the intelligence of a worm, perhaps. I once looked into where the line is on which anamalia were capable of operant conditioning, which I hypothesize may be the first purpose of a brain, and the line on our present taxonomic hierarchy is among worms (jellyfish do not have sufficient faculties for operant conditioning and are on the other side of the line). Sensory input being associated with decider values is still not as sophisticated as learning to be attracted to beneficial things and avoiding dangerous things because the machine does not have needs or desires to base its reactions on which would have to be trained into it by those with intelligence. I’m not saying it’s impossible to artificially create a being like this, but in my estimation we are very far from it considering that we barely grasp how any brain works other than to be aware of their extreme complexity. Considering the degree of difference between a worm and a sentient human, we are much further from what we would consider a human level of intelligence.
Edit: Re-reading this it seems much more snippy than I intended and I’m not sure how to frame it to sound more neutral. I meant this as a neutral continuation of a discussion of an idea.
Bots that spam or “help” > NoNo bot is going to be able to help every individual the way they need to be helped. Same issue with plenty of “convenience” features in Microsoft products which quickly become an annoyance. Spam is self-explanatory.
Bots that entertain > Maybe in some communitiesI have seen some quality use of bots for entertainment purposes, especially on meme subs. My favorite use of bots which I have seen is the old subreddit simulator sub which is populated entirely by bots with each bot trained by a popular sub, leading to some very entertaining interactions. The second use I’ve enjoyed was their use on prequel memes, in which bots would react with certain text with the appropriate meme response. I’m not sure bots exactly like these would fit anywhere on Beehaw, but I wouldn’t mind in some communities like Jokes if there was a good one.
Bots for artistic purposes > I’d like to see them as long as they don’t post too oftenThe main example I can think of is Tumblr’s Haikubot which is amazing. If someone happens to post a message with the same structure as a haiku poem, the bot will reply with that post re-formatted as a haiku poem which can be amusing and occasionally profound. I would be ok with the general use of bots like this as long as their parameters don’t allow them to show up often enough to become tiresome.
I’m reading Demon Copperhead and I’ve only just realised that it’s based on David Copperfield by Charles Dickens. Somehow, I feel cheated. I hated Dickens in school - melodramatic claptrap - but it does explain the ‘serial’ feel of the book. It’s a clever book, the characters are credible, going beyond...
Adapting an old idea your own way isn’t laziness, it’s basically how any new art is made at all. If this author’s transformation of something you didn’t enjoy is something you do enjoy, what really is wrong with it?
As the Northern Hemisphere swelters under a record-breaking summer heat wave, much further south, in the depths of winter, another terrifying climate record is being broken. Antarctic sea ice has fallen to unprecedented lows for this time of year.
The main issue with words like “socialism” and “communism” is that the definition of those words depends entirely on personal political biases, and most people unaware of this assume their personal definition is the same definition used by the person they’re arguing with. The word “socialism” was in use even prior to Marx and has many definitions, and “Communism” is an ideal rather than an explicit governmental structure. That being the case, the word socialism can be understood to mean “the government acts in the interest of average people rather than solely for its ruling class,” “workers themselves own the means of production rather than individuals or institutions,” or “there should be some kind of welfare state.” Communism can be understood to mean “a series of self-governing autonomous communities in the absence of social or economic hierarchy of any kind,” “A marxist-leninist inspired system of state centralization which ostensibly governs on behalf of the people,” or “any authoritarianism of any kind taking place at any point in history.”
All this is to say if you find yourself feeling strongly for or against “socialism” or “communism” and are in conversation with someone with the opposite perspective of that term, try to establish a mutual understanding of what is being disagreed upon before engaging. For example, I agree that any system which lacks checks on leadership (or strongly depends on leadership in general) has fundamental issues but I am still sympathetic to socialism, communism, and anarchism which are ideals which have not yet been achieved sustainably or meaningfully.
I’m all for a materialist perspective of what a brain is physically doing and how that contributes to the emergent process of a mind or awareness generally, but I’m afraid in going over these descriptions that they may be broad enough to be misleading or easily misinterpreted. Can you provide a source for these descriptions? I’m only concerned because I have experience in teaching some simple neurology for dementia care purposes and I often find I need to clarify things for the individual so that the understanding is applicable to care.
Ever since the language puzzle in Tunic that got me to fill up 6 pocket sized pages of notes over multiple days while trying to puzzle it out as I tried to and, eventually, succeeded at translating the in-game “paper” manual, I’ve had a craving for games that force you to pull out a notebook and take notes/puzzle things...
Anti religious was(is?) pretty fundamental to the “New Atheist movement” from the latter aughts and early teens from this century. They don’t represent atheism as a whole but a decade ago they were highly visible and did a lot to screw up the connotation of the word “atheism.” I think it’s possible to argue in good faith that religion is ultimately a net harm (which I wouldn’t), but there is also a bigoted and ignorant way to do that which was far more common. While the “a” in atheism means “without,” there used to be quite a significant presence of those who manifested the belief that it meant “against.” I’m sure they’re still around, but they don’t seem to be as constant an annoyance as they used to be and many of their figureheads moved on to support right-wing politics targeting the religions they hate the most.
Meta’s new text-based social app Threads has quickly gained 100 million users since launching last week, which appears to be negatively impacting traffic on Twitter. According to web analytics, Twitter traffic declined 5-11% over the first two days Threads was available compared to the previous week. Threads was able to grow...
LibsofTiktok is approved there, so I’m not so sure. Not overwhelmingly Nazi, but Nazis are welcome as long as they don’t say slurs kind of thing that centrists like.
Exactly, because that’s the line for centrists. Bigoted and hateful statements are perfectly acceptable in cynical corporate “neutral” spaces if they’re framed “politely.” As long as the bad words aren’t used, they’re permitted. Libsoftiktok wants nothing less than the total elimination of certain populations of people and there’s no way in reality that that should be an acceptable topic of political discussion regardless of word choice.
One of the main factors in me choosing the phone that I now use and have had for the last several years was that it had a headphone jack, and I don’t remember the last time I used it. I thought bluetooth earbuds would be more of a hassle than wired earbuds, but I’ve found the opposite to be true. I don’t have to replace my wireless ones every few months because one or both buds stopped working and I don’t have to untangle them before I use them. I do lose one around the house every now and then but it’s way less of an issue than I expected it to be as someone with an ADHD brain. When this phone becomes unusable I will no longer care if my next phone has a headphone jack.
the details aren’t super important and i’m not going to go into particular depth here but, in summary: i am on break. the burnout is quite bad. the “avalanche analogy” is pretty apt for what i’m dealing with here....
I commented on your chat thread the other day about getting over burnout myself, so I entirely get how quickly things add up and what that can do to you in addition to the context of daily life that keeps happening as well. You absolutely deserve a break and to just enjoy this thing that you have made massive contributions to on only your own terms for as long as you need. You are a huge part of why I am so enthusiastic about this instance because I identify with your passion for this project. I know how it can look when literally all you are interacting with on a daily basis are the problems (because that’s my job in my career as well), but please know that from the user side this is an incredibly well run and respectful space. Your efforts in setting the tone at critical times is a big part of what we can enjoy now. You have accomplished major and important things here already, and you deserve all the time you need for yourself.
“AI” can’t replace people in any way. The most it could possibly do is assist a person in performing a task because it is a tool which does not actually have intelligence or awareness. This may be a debate but I am firmly on the side of punting Wilson the volleyball and cautioning people not to anthropomorphize a program...
I think there are tables in the DM’s manual that you can roll on to generate a basic plot as well. The information that’s generated from either source is about as good as the ink it’s printed with or the pixels it’s composed of on a screen. A human mind applying their own creativity and experience to the inherently meaningless data is what can transform it into a good story. ChatGPT generated idea-sausage should be the beginning of a good story idea, not the end. Hopefully your DM learns to work with it rather than expecting it to work on their behalf.
Especially considering that we don’t even understand the model we’re seeking to reproduce or match. We still know very little about how the brain relates to the emergent process of a mind, and what little we do know indicates a ridiculous level of complexity. Just the fact that there are a number of different neurotransmitters which seem to be “interpreted” differently based of a number of variables we’re aware of is massively more complex than a set of binary switches however large. To achieve actual intelligence we may have to have a fundamentally different method of computing which we haven’t yet invented.
I’ll need to edit my post for clarity, because I’m not actually talking about AI which has never existed and doesn’t exist now. The term “artificial intelligence” is misleading, since no intelligence has ever been artificially created. What I’m specifically referring to is our current human-language equipped database referencers which we mistakenly call “AI” and are known by the misleading name “AI.” An actual AI is a completely different thing, and I share your concerns about it.
While I agree with you in part, I disagree with your categorization of AI as similar to weapons or misinformation which are inherently destructive. Can biological weapons ever be used in a productive way? Can misinformation to promote non-reality based political positions which benefit their propagators at the expense of the communities they scapegoat ever be a good thing? “AI” (which is not AI) is more similar to a knife. Knives can be used to assault and harm, and they can also be used for a variety of constructive purposes including artistic pursuits. Whether they are used for mugging or whittling depends greatly on the system the person using the tool exists in and what that system has provided them and what they have to do to survive in their system. Although I think “AI” could still be abused if not for Capitalism, it is my argument that the only reason it’s widely considered to be problematic is due to its existence in the context of Capitalism. My argument is that without Capitalism “AI” would not be widely seen as threat.
Thanks for giving me the chance to get radically philosophical, because I think we are coming at this thing from fundamentally different perspectives. I completely get addressing this practically considering the way things are in our world currently, but my argument here is more of a total system critique than a critique of one consequence of the system. The negative effect on workers of labor saving technology is not due to the nature of technology which makes things easier, but due to the nature of capitalism which punishes workers because technology makes things easier. To be perfectly clear, this is not due to malice or bad behavior, but people behaving rationally according to the system which they exist in. You are absolutely right that since labor is a huge line item on the P&L it is in the interest of the business to reduce that expense as much as possible in the interest of profit and the interest of the capitalist receiving a return on their investment. What I’m critiquing here is that this is so normalized that it can be seen as completely natural when it very much isn’t in an historical context.
As a point of comparison, I’m going to compare your examples one by one to a rough equivalent of an agricultural village in 5000 BC, long before capitalism but when we as people were the same then as we are now in many ways with less of a system to deal with.
In a modern accounting department, what does an accountant want? Do they want to do accounting for its own sake, do they want the investors of their business to make as much money as possible, or do they want to receive compensation for their labor which can afford them a decent quality of life? If accounting software advances and puts them out of a job, why would they be upset about that according to the answer to the question above? Are they really upset that they have fewer opportunities to do manual accounting?
In our ancient village, the villagers need to keep track of the amount of grain they have on hand so that everyone can be adequately fed, they have grain on hand for weather changes, and they don’t waste their time and effort growing so much grain it goes to waste. One villager keeps track of organizing the status of the grain and since they can’t know everything they assign a number of villagers to keep track of specific trends. One day a villager invents a rudimentary writing system to keep track of the grain, eliminating the need for all but the record keeper to keep track of anything. Who is upset by this intrusive technology?
In the nineteenth century a team of 20 people spend their days digging ditches for a living. Do they love to dig ditches, do they want the boss to make as much money as possible, or do they want to receive compensation for their labor which can afford them a decent quality of life? If the excavator pushes them out of a job, why would they be upset about that according to the answer to the question above? Are they really upset about not being able to do back-breaking manual labor anymore?
Back in the ancient village, they need to dig a deep trench around the village to keep dangerous predators out at night. It’s hard work but necessary so the villagers take time away from their families and farms to contribute. One villager arrives with a contraption that will dig the entire trench themselves easily in half the time. Who is upset by this intrusive technology?
In the advertising department of a golf franchise a writer spends their days wording text so that it is succinct, clear, and emotionally manipulative. Is it their aspiration as a writer to manipulate people into making purchases they don’t need, do they want the investors of their business to make as much money as possible, or do they want to receive compensation for their labor which can afford them a decent quality of life? If a text-generating algorithm designed to prey on peoples’ latent desires pushes them out of a job, why would they be upset about that according to the answer to the question above? Are they really upset about not being able to write ads which few will notice and some will be fooled by?
In the ancient village, the evenings around the fire are the main event for socializing with neighbors. To pass the time some play instruments and sing, some swap rumors, and some come up with stories or re-tell established stories in their own way. One day a traveling group of bards come through and play music and tell stories far better than anything the villagers have seen before and are rewarded with hospitality by the village. After they leave, the music and stories of the village are much different and much more engaging with some of the old less interesting things being dropped or completely remade according to the new performance standards. Who is upset by the bards upending how they perform?
Although you didn’t give a plastic art example, I did in my essay. My artist friend works for themselves but is obligated only to paint what sells so they spend their time producing paintings that conform to the established decorating taste making industry. Do they like to make paintings they find meaningless, do they want to make as much money as possible, or do they want to receive compensation for their labor which can afford them a decent quality of life? If AI can make 1000 “paintings” a second which will work just as well hanging in a layout designed to maximize likes on Instagram for an influencer’s business, why would they be upset according to the answer above? Are they really upset at not being able to make a living selling that which they consider crap?
In the ancient village the people have been very successful and have a lot of time on their hands, so they decide to get into making monuments and sculptures to make the village look nicer. A team of people bang away at hunks of stone with hammers, knocking chunks of rock away at a time at great hardship to try to make something that looks like anything with most of their labor wasted when the material shatters. One day someone comes up with the chisel and is able to make a refined statue by themselves, eliminating the need for a whole team. Who is upset by the single artist making better work than the group of villagers could before?
Commodifying the labor is not what justifies it as having worth. In my opinion it being quality is what justifies it having worth, but in a capitalist market having inherent worth is not as important as maximizing profit which can often be done by using the scale of production and cutting labor expenses to produce a heavily marketed and successful but inferior product. There is quality work outside of market influence being done, especially in the FOSS movement, but this is limited by the nature of capitalism because doing quality work apart from the business world is not something you can survive by doing. For every passion project, there are countless projects being done for business purposes incentivized by maximizing capitalist returns rather than ensuring the highest quality project. Because to survive people necessarily have to sell the majority of their time to Capitalists making compromises necessary to compete in a market, they have less time to work on what they want to work on and to ensure anything in general is as good as it can be. This is a problem with capitalism, not “AI.”
The anxiety is absolutely not without cause. My argument is that the anxiety is misplaced if it’s directed toward technology. The anxiety should be directed at the institution of capitalism itself without which labor saving technology would not be a threat to the well-being of workers.
The three things which you mentioned are related to the fundamental issue of capitalism. My essay was a bit of a brain dump so let me clarify and directly state the relationship:
The fundamental unit of Capitalism, the thing that drives everything, are Capitalists (investors) investing their capital (Money) with the intention of receiving a return on their investment (more money than they invested). The only reason that a capitalist would invest their capital in an enterprise is to maximize the return on their investment and however the enterprise accomplishes providing that return is not as relevant as that it does provide a return. A Capitalist is interested in investing in the enterprises which are most likely to provide them a return on their investment and the highest return possible. For this reason, an enterprise either run by the capitalist themselves or expecting to be funded by capitalist investment must maximize their profit. Since profit is revenue minus expenses, an enterprise must do some combination of minimizing expenses and maximizing revenue to make profit as high as possible. This is the dynamic of a capitalist economy. Capitalists want to maximize the return on their investment, so enterprises are obligated to maximize profit before they are interested in anything else. This is the uncorrupted system working as intended with no bad behavior or malice involved.
People who are not capitalists in capitalism are workers. A capitalist can work themselves (typically as owners which is a different kind of financial interest), but only their investment is necessary for them to be in the capitalist position. A worker is typically not involved in the flow of capital and is traditionally there to sell their time to a capitalist enterprise to have a decent standard of living. The worker in capitalism is considered in the same class as other necessary expenses which are relevant only insofar as they relate to profit (see dynamic above). When a technology is introduced which allows an enterprise to reduce expenses by reducing labor costs, that enterprise is obligated to do that in the interests of profit for the interests of capital. Because under capitalism the only way that a worker can have a decent standard of living is through selling their time to a capitalist enterprise, they being cut off from their way to have a decent standard of living because of the nature of business is an existential threat to them until they find a different enterprise to sell their time to which behaves the same way.
With all that context above, what I am saying is that only due to the nature of capitalism would labor saving technology be a threat. If the primary goal of an economy were something other than maximizing the financial return of Capitalists when most people in the economy are not capitalists and was instead for example quality of life of its inhabitants or other such thing, labor saving technology would cause less labor having to be done by workers. As it stands, less labor needing to be done means less expense, more profit, and more returns for capitalists.
Have you ever had a natural compulsion to leverage your capital assets in a financial vehicle for maximal returns? Political support for capitalism by capitalists may be driven by human nature but capitalism is not a natural force but a system which has only existed for a few centuries. Governmental structure is of course involved as it provides the legal framework for capitalists to be the fundamental unit of the economy. Social programs failing is not the cause of the problem, but the failure of a proposed solution to a fundamental problem which would exist regardless of efforts to mitigate it. It may theoretically be possible under capitalism to have a welfare state so powerful that the insecurity of workers inherent to the system is neutralized. Another issue under capitalism is that tax is another expense to be considered which is involved in profit, so capitalists and capitalist enterprises are interested in minimizing those taxes through a variety of methods limiting the ability of a government to fund such a program.
Edit: I came up with a way to summarize my argument in a sentence: Only in capitalism does better technology mean more profit for capitalists rather than less work for workers.
Edit2: Also I want to clarify that my argument is not against a market economy in general, but a kind of market economy driven primarily by capitalist interest. This is only a criticism of our present system to inspire the criticism of others rather than a vehicle to list my solutions because I think the solutions to these issues require more than what I could personally think of and is a separate discussion.
I was about to write a response to this comment but found that I had already responded to your other comment using much of what I would have stated here. I appreciate your interest in these kinds of discussions. This is not a conversation that I could have had on the old site. It’s extremely refreshing to have a respectful and good faith discussion of ideas like this.
My favorite art movement is Dada. I love the philosophy, the acknowledgment of a chaotic and unpredictable world, the challenge to traditional understanding, the satire of the art economy, and the humor of it. I like taking things from the world and re-contextualizing them....
When I first learned about the sculpture Fountain back in highschool it started my de-constructionist journey in many ways. It is still legitimately my favorite sculpture. Posting an AI generated image here in a creative space was to me similar to submitting a manufactured urinal to a sculpture competition.
I fully agree that AI “art” is being abused in many harmful ways, as the unthinking and unfeeling machine can’t possibly replicate even what a total amateur human could produce in terms of expression and meaning. It may unfortunately be able to replace Kincaid-style corporate art considering the consumers on that scene, but that’s still a shame. It absolutely can never replace what a person can deliberately create in any way. All that being said, I do see it as a potential new medium not to replace that which already exists (it can’t) but to create that which does not exist yet. In my opinion, to be art the AI image (or images, I’m going to play with these at least collage style) must be transformed by a human mind into art.
From my perspective, it has a lot of potential in the Dada tradition. Our times of social upheaval are not totally dissimilar to what existed post WWI, pandemic included. The product of the unthinking and unfeeling machine is fertile soil for social commentary in my view. I find it fascinating, strange, and darkly humorous. I even think some of the trash which has been peddled as art has an unintentional artistic meaning when viewed through a Dada perspective. Compare this crap to this masterpiece . Unintentional vs intentional vulgar vandalism. Both say a lot about the context of their times.
Researchers want the public to test themselves: https://yourmist.streamlit.app/. Selecting true or false against 20 headlines gives the user a set of scores and a "resilience" ranking that compares them to the wider U.S. population. It takes less than two minutes to complete.
I would cheat on this test because I cheat in real life. I've been humbled enough times not to put total faith in my initial impression and would rather have more evidence than whatever I happen to be aware of at the moment to determine whether a claim is true.
Why I Don't Care if My Ideas are Scraped and Appropriated by LLMs
This morning I decided to compete with ChatGPT on who could write the best short story given my original idea. I assume my story idea is original because I have never heard of a story about this before....
Google says AI systems should be able to mine publishers’ work unless companies opt out, turning copyright law on its head (www.theguardian.com)
In its submission to the Australian government’s review of the regulatory framework around AI, Google said that copyright law should be altered to allow for generative AI systems to scrape the internet.
Russia making cadets out of children kidnapped from Ukraine: report (www.newsweek.com)
A top Moscow official and his colleagues were directly involved in forcibly deporting Ukrainian children, who were then placed in Russian military training programs, it has been reported.
How Social Media Apps Could Be Fueling Homicides Among Young Americans (www.propublica.org)
What kind of discussions are y'all interested in having?
Although I don’t fully agree with the sentiment expressed by this thread, it did get me thinking about leaning even further into contributing to an environment I’d like to participate in. I personally much prefer dedicated discussion threads to discussing news stories myself and reading through the comments it seems like...
Can you trust AI? Here's why you shouldn't (theconversation.com)
If you ask Alexa, Amazon’s voice assistant AI system, whether Amazon is a monopoly, it responds by saying it doesn’t know. It doesn’t take much to make it lambaste the other tech giants, but it’s silent about its own corporate parent’s misdeeds.
‘It’s destroyed me completely’: Kenyan moderators decry toll of training of AI models (www.theguardian.com)
Employees say they weren’t adequately warned about the brutality of some of the text and images they would be tasked with reviewing, and were offered no or inadequate psychological support. Workers were paid between $1.46 and $3.74 an hour, according to a Sama spokesperson.
What does everyone think of bots on Beehaw?
How do you all feel about bots?...
Demon Copperhead-thoughts?
I’m reading Demon Copperhead and I’ve only just realised that it’s based on David Copperfield by Charles Dickens. Somehow, I feel cheated. I hated Dickens in school - melodramatic claptrap - but it does explain the ‘serial’ feel of the book. It’s a clever book, the characters are credible, going beyond...
Antarctica is missing an Argentina-sized amount of sea ice -- and scientists are scrambling to figure out why | CNN (www.cnn.com)
As the Northern Hemisphere swelters under a record-breaking summer heat wave, much further south, in the depths of winter, another terrifying climate record is being broken. Antarctic sea ice has fallen to unprecedented lows for this time of year.
Low-Tech Magazine: Human Powered Air Compressor and Energy Storage System (solar.lowtechmagazine.com)
Lenin (programming.dev)
Neurobiology of ADHD: The Crucial Role of Key Brain Areas in Attention (lemmy.dbzer0.com)
cross-posted from: lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/1174435...
What are your favorite video games that force you to pull out the pen and paper?
Ever since the language puzzle in Tunic that got me to fill up 6 pocket sized pages of notes over multiple days while trying to puzzle it out as I tried to and, eventually, succeeded at translating the in-game “paper” manual, I’ve had a craving for games that force you to pull out a notebook and take notes/puzzle things...
minor PSA: we have a Spirituality community now (beehaw.org)
this was made a few days ago when i was off but nobody announced it, so i guess i’m doing that now. the sidebar describes its purpose as follows:...
Twitter traffic is 'tanking' as Meta's Threads hits 100 million users (www.cnbc.com)
Meta’s new text-based social app Threads has quickly gained 100 million users since launching last week, which appears to be negatively impacting traffic on Twitter. According to web analytics, Twitter traffic declined 5-11% over the first two days Threads was available compared to the previous week. Threads was able to grow...
deleted_by_author
informal PSA: i am (and have been) on indefinite break
the details aren’t super important and i’m not going to go into particular depth here but, in summary: i am on break. the burnout is quite bad. the “avalanche analogy” is pretty apt for what i’m dealing with here....
"AI" Is Not a Problem and Is a Good Thing, but Is Being Abused by the Actual Problem
“AI” can’t replace people in any way. The most it could possibly do is assist a person in performing a task because it is a tool which does not actually have intelligence or awareness. This may be a debate but I am firmly on the side of punting Wilson the volleyball and cautioning people not to anthropomorphize a program...
A Little Piece of Trash for your Consideration. (beehaw.org)
My favorite art movement is Dada. I love the philosophy, the acknowledgment of a chaotic and unpredictable world, the challenge to traditional understanding, the satire of the art economy, and the humor of it. I like taking things from the world and re-contextualizing them....
First misinformation susceptibility test finds 'very online' Gen Z and millennials are most vulnerable to fake news (phys.org)
Researchers want the public to test themselves: https://yourmist.streamlit.app/. Selecting true or false against 20 headlines gives the user a set of scores and a "resilience" ranking that compares them to the wider U.S. population. It takes less than two minutes to complete.