Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
"...Perhaps laughter will then have formed an alliance with wisdom; perhaps only 'gay science' will remain."
User ID: 342
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1yr ago
It doesn't seem much more absurd than saying that Mickey Mouse is something that can be owned and be subject to property rights. Which is exactly what existing copyright law does.
Determining whether someone has copied an artist's style would be more difficult than determining whether someone copied the design of Mickey Mouse, but given that "in the style of X artist" prompts are extremely popular with SD users right now, and people can coherently discuss how accurate or not the AI was at reproducing the requested style, it doesn't seem like it's totally impossible.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1yr ago
You see an evolution of expression that will offer infinitely more creative freedoms to people.
That is one thing it certainly does not do. It does not expand creative freedom - it can only offer a kind of pseudo-creativity that further alienates people from authentic creativity and distorts the meaning of what creativity can and should be.
If what you want to create can be packaged into a convenient verbal "prompt", then it's probably not very creative. There are images in my head that I wouldn't even know how to describe to a human artist, because they're barely even images - more like indistinct nexuses of concepts, emotions, and desires, that also include some visual elements. Things like that can only be realized as what they are in the concrete working out of the thing, with all of the surprising contingencies that that process includes. You can't just say to another agent "make it so", regardless of whether that agent's intelligence is artificial or organic.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1yr ago
5 years ago I thought that everyone concerned about AI was crazy. I just didn't think the technology was there. I imagine others felt the same.
DALL-E 2 is the first thing that made me pay attention and acknowledge that there really was something there. Maybe machine language translation should have done that sooner, but it didn't, for whatever reason. DALL-E 2 was the first time where I was truly blown away by a new technology in at least the last 15 years.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1yr ago
it gives people who have no artistic skills the ability to translate their thoughts into images.
No, that's exactly my point. It literally does not do that. It might trick you into thinking it does that, but it doesn't.
If you imagine a sexy large-breasted woman and do a google image search for "sexy large-breasted woman" then it might return images that satisfy your requirements, but none of them will be "your thoughts translated into image form" because none of them will match the exact woman you were imagining. Obviously the problem becomes more pronounced the more unique and complex the request is.
The AI is essentially doing the same thing as a google image search (in terms of how it presents results to you, not at the level of technical implementation). Of course, through the use of Photoshop and img2img you can take the output from multiple AI prompts and start fashioning them into something closer to your original vision, but the more you involve yourself in the process, the more you would just need to rely on traditional artistic skills anyway, rather than the AI.
There is no "pseudo-creativity" and there is no "authentic creativity".
Would you plug yourself into the Matrix and live in a pleasant simulated world, assuming we could alter your memory so you wouldn't be aware it was a simulation? If not, then you recognize a difference in value between authentic experience and pseudo-experience, and it shouldn't be too hard to apply the same concepts to creativity. If you would plug yourself in, then our worldviews are fundamentally irreconcilable and there's probably not much we'll agree on.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1yr ago
I'm aware that existing copyright law doesn't cover style, and I'm not saying it should. I'm just saying it's not as absurd and incoherent as you made it out to be, that's all.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1yr ago
I would certainly find it just as repugnant to be plugged into a simulation I control as one I do not.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1yr ago
What the AI is doing is exactly what I do every time I pick up a pencil: synthesize novel output from a broad collection of previous data.
Well, most of what professional commercial artists do on a day-to-day basis isn't exactly creative either.
The paradigmatic examples of creativity are novel ideas that register on a world-historical scale, such as Cantor's development of set theory and the hierarchy of infinite cardinals. Such ideas are necessarily rare. If a work doesn't fit into this elite class, then I question if it can be called genuinely creative. At times I have wondered (but never seriously believed) if any work of art could ever be novel enough to qualify as genuinely creativity. As Hilbert once quipped, "for a mathematician, he did not have enough imagination, but now he has become a poet, and everything is fine."
I don't want to position myself as the god-emperor of creativity, or pretend that I have a set of hard and fast rules to apply. I just want us to have standards for ourselves, is all. As we descend further down the scale towards ordinariness, from world-historical successes, to works that are widely considered to be of exceptional quality, down to the average things that average professionals produce in their average careers, it becomes less and less clear whether the adjective "creative" continues to apply. I am not proclaiming anything with certainty one way or the other. There is just less clarity.
AI art obscures these questions and pushes them away from the central place that they should occupy in our thought.
"Wheee yippee, now we can all be creative! Thanks, AI!"
I find this to be offensive nonsense.
Ideas can be encapsulated and compressed
How would you compress this into a prompt? Without using explicit identifying terms like "Paul Klee" or "Angelus Novus".
I encourage you to run your prompt by the AI and see how close it can get.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1yr ago
Leftism is not transhumanism
Certainly they're not identical, no. But, this book was published pretty recently:
In Fully Automated Luxury Communism, Aaron Bastani conjures a vision of extraordinary hope, showing how we move to energy abundance, feed a world of 9 billion, overcome work, transcend the limits of biology, and establish meaningful freedom for everyone. Rather than a final destination, such a society merely heralds the real beginning of history.
Sounds like transhumanism to me. Marx speaks positively of the outcomes of increased automation in The Fragment on Machines from the Grundrisse, saying that it will lead to
the general reduction of the necessary labour of society to a minimum, which corresponds to the artistic, scientific etc. development of the individuals in the time set free, and with the means created, for all of them.
Kolakowski's Main Currents of Marxism offers an interesting perspective on this, tracing the intellectual heritage of Marxism from ancient esoteric traditions that taught of the inherent divinity and perfectibility of mankind and the necessity for man to aspire to godhood, down through Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, and ultimately to Marx himself and his faith in humanity's power to radically reshape the "natural" order. I don't know how you can deny that a belief in progress and a belief in the capacity of man's reason to reshape the world and overcome social problems are central to leftism, and I don't know how you can deny the affinity between those same principles and transhumanism.
As I know you are already aware, there are people who are opposed to the whole idea of humans transcending their biological limits - forget whether it's possible, they don't even view it as desirable! To such people, the difference between orthodox Marxism and your preferred brand of transhumanism looks like merely an internal squabble over implementation details, and perhaps also over the scope of the project.
what problem do you think «socially necessary labour time» is supposed to solve in the Marxist framework?
It's a sufficiently generic concept that anything I said about Marx's motivations for developing the concept would just be speculation, absent a more explicit source that discusses the matter.
what is alienation that Vaush has mentioned?
Alienation for Marx is a result of capitalist social relations, not automation qua automation.
Moreover, Orthodox Marxists were always acutely aware that necessary advances will be forged by the engine of capitalism.
Yes, absolutely. Capitalism was always understood to be a necessary stage of development, and that it would furnish the tools of its own destruction, at which point those tools would be appropriated for allegedly more pro-social ends.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1yr ago
I agree that it would probably be pretty difficult to get a current-gen AI to produce an analogue to that painting, without using the prompts you excluded. What do you think this proves, and why?
It shows that people who outsource their artistic production to the AI will be railroaded into established patterns of thought and will be encouraged to produce things that can be expressed in familiar terms, rather than things that can't be.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1yr ago
You asked for repetition, not novelty; you wanted a rework of a specific artist's specific painting.
I'm sorry if this somehow wasn't clear. The point of the experiment wasn't to think about ways the AI can reproduce a known painting that already exists. The point of the experiment was to think about how to get the AI to produce a specific image in your head that doesn't exist at all yet. You have the temporal order of events mixed up.
Suppose I am sitting down to paint the Angelus Novus, and I have an image (and I use that term very loosely - it is half an image as is commonly understood, half just an intuition that it has to be "like that", where that is not really expressible in any concrete form) in my head of what the painting is supposed to look like, but, the painting does not actually exist yet. It does not exist anywhere, no one except me knows what it should look like. I have dreamed up this painting I want to bring into existence.
Obviously I'm going to have a hard time getting the AI to produce anything that's anywhere close to what I'm actually after. If I simply ignore the AI then and draw it myself, or if I just end up giving up entirely and don't create anything, then there's no real harm done. But if I insist on using the AI anyway, and I settle for something less than I originally intended, settle for something the AI produced because it's "good enough", that's where things start to go very wrong. I may even be tricked into thinking I have genuinely created something, that I have genuinely satisfied my original vision when in fact all I have done is abandon it. That's where the real dangers lie.
I have already acknowledged in the comments here that there's a lot of nuance to unpack in this process - the original starting vision can be very indistinct, little more than phantasms, and it is subject to contingency and chance and revision in the concrete unfolding of artistic production. But I also don't doubt that people really do set out to create specific things, and that at the end they can evaluate how close they were to hitting the mark. The AI will never hit the mark in the way you could if you were capable of drawing yourself. Not even another human will.
It will make whatever you want, as much as you want, fine-tuned exactly how you want.
We have already established that this is false. I gave you a specific image and asked you to produce it using the AI and you acknowledged that it could not be done.
In fact it would be easy to pull any number of images from danbooru or a random manga or whatever that could not be satisfactorily be reproduced by currently available models.
It will drive more variety
I place no value whatsoever on variety for variety's sake. It is worse to have 100 failed works of various types than to have one failed work of one type. It is of no comfort to point out that, in the 100 bad works, there is great variety.
Did you pick that Klee painting because it truly spoke to you on a transcendental level, irrespective of who made it or what other people thought about it?
It is one of my favorite paintings, and I find it to be very beautiful and captivating (although I picked it specifically for its unusual qualities, not merely because I find it to be beautiful).
I can't run a perfectly controlled experiment where I could show you what I would think of the painting even if it wasn't produced by a canonical artist, but I like to think of myself as being relatively unbiased. There are canonical paintings that I find to be wholly uninteresting (much of what was produced in the Renaissance), and there are non-mainstream works that I think are of exceptional quality (vaporwave is probably the most profound artistic development so far of the 21st century).
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1yr ago
It's one of the few dreams I'd call universal.
Well...
Certainly I acknowledge that the vast majority of people, of any political persuasion, if asked if they would like to live in Paradise (whatever we ultimately mean by that term), would answer "yes". The main historical debate has been over whether such a condition was possible, and that debate has been quite vociferous. The most forceful exposition of the view that mankind is inherently flawed and incapable of transcending his limitations is of course found in Christianity. Christians too dream of utopia, but of course since we know that the Kingdom of God is fiction, the Christian position is tantamount to the claim that utopia is impossible and not worth striving for in actuality.
Even still, it cannot be called a universal dream. Orwell's Can Socialists Be Happy? provides some hints in this direction:
A book like Brave New World is an expression of the actual fear that modern man feels of the rationalised hedonistic society which it is within his power to create. A Catholic writer said recently that Utopias are now technically feasible and that in consequence how to avoid Utopia had become a serious problem. We cannot write this off as merely a silly remark. For one of the sources of the Fascist movement is the desire to avoid a too-rational and too-comfortable world.
I don't think Nietzsche would have wanted to live in Paradise either. Although, in his typical style, he approaches the issue only obliquely; it's more of an ethos that has to be absorbed from reading his entire corpus, rather than an issue he tackles directly in any one place.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1yr ago
I’m concerned that something that gets lost in these discussions is that there are a lot of psychological traits that are worthwhile besides just intelligence - honesty, conscientiousness, perseverance, a sense for fairness, and so forth.
Just because you’re intelligent doesn’t mean you’re a high-quality individual. One criticism you can’t make of the people who run the current western political establishment is that they’re not intelligent enough. There are many intelligent people who are actively malicious, or they’re lazy, they leech off society, or what have you; conversely, some of the people I admire the most are not very intelligent at all.
A eugenics program that optimized for intelligence above all else would be short-sighted.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1yr ago
Unironically, Pepe memes are this generation’s protest songs.
The same cultural dynamics are there - just not in the places you’re used to looking for them, and not in the same forms.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1yr ago
Your utilitarians may select different 'units of people we care about.' Someone that might be called a 'globalist' might care about the whole world, while a stereotypical NIMBY might care mostly about their own neighborhood.
This isn't really utilitarianism. This is just whatever-I-want-ism.
If I'm free to select which subset of the human race I "care" about, then how do I not have an unlimited license to arbitrarily decide whatever other values I want to follow? In the same way I can decide to only "care" about my own neighborhood, what if I decide to just only "care" about committing bank robberies, to the detriment of all else? It seems like under your definition of utilitarianism, I should just go ahead and do that. But that can hardly be called a systematic moral philosophy.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1yr ago
I notice that a lot of people on this site seem to be both utilitarian and right wing. This makes me confused, as the utilitarian case for a strong welfare state seems extremely strong on its face.
I agree, I think there's a clear tension there. If you're not an EA working tirelessly to uplift the starving masses of Africa, then you implicitly agree that there are moral values that can take precedence over "the greatest good for the greatest number".
Although, I get the impression that the form of "utilitarianism" that most people subscribe to here is not the global moral philosophy that requires you to do the greatest good for the greatest number, but is instead a sort of hedonism where great importance is placed on immediate experiential states of personal pleasure. Which is why we have so many people eager to plug themselves into the experience machine.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1yr ago
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1yr ago
we can't disagree about the things that are forced into the center of our lives
In other words: politics!
I suppose this is what's meant about the distinction between "politics" and "human rights"
That's just a sleight of hand attempt on their part to move properly political questions into a sacred domain where their views will be beyond criticism. In exchange, they'll allow you to haggle over bureaucratic and administrative issues that no one actually cares about.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1yr ago
Humans are vibes-based creatures. Always have been. It’s nothing new.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1yr ago
The outcome of genetic and memetic evolution is that systems fill whatever resource budget is allotted to them.
Yep. Perfectly succinct way of putting it.
I think your prediction of "living in pods and eating bugs" is a very rosy prediction of what will happen to the average man in this new order.
True. If the rich (or whoever develops and gains control of AGI first) can just rely on AGI for all their labor needs, then why should they even bother to keep the peons alive with UBI? They could just as easily let everyone else starve - what motivation would they have besides pure altruism?
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1yr ago
Sorry you’re getting downvoted. There’s nothing wrong per se with what you said; you just need to stretch it out over five paragraphs in order to be in compliance with the etiquette of this forum.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1yr ago
You can say the same about virtually any identity you can imagine though. Any identifiable group of people can be marketed to. Does that mean it’s conceptually impossible to have an identity outside of consumerism? It seems like that argument proves too much.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1yr ago
the midwit trap
Before I studied the Zen, the mountain was just a mountain.
When I was a student of the Zen, the mountain was more than just a mountain.
After I mastered the Zen, the mountain was again just a mountain.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1yr ago
It is very impressive how quickly the furry model has progressed, and it’s much better at showing interactions between two characters than any of the other models.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1yr ago
I literally, unironically support the establishment of white ethnostates. Is that sufficiently opposed to the hegemon for you?
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