RedRegard
5d ago
There was a man I spoke to wandering up and down my alley the other day. He was small by nature and shrunken even further by age. He had a walking aid and was somehow managing his stroll even though the entire alley was covered in ice.
Anyway, after he called to me across my backyard, I was engaged by him in a lengthy conversation in which he asked me about the species of pine growing in my yard and told me about how he used to raise dogs for a living when he was younger. He told me that his former best friend at one time killed his favorite pet dog by throwing it down a flight of stairs.
Originally I took him for a homeless person and he seemed a bit off owing to his advanced age, but I still found him an interesting enough person to meet and speak to, and nothing about the experience could have been replicated by AI.
RedRegard
5d ago
My understanding of the gig economy is that it's a progressive step towards the disenfranchisement of workers caused by their weakening bargaining position as demand for unskilled or semi-skilled labor continues to fall. I do not have an in-depth understanding of it, but it seems to me that many of them occupy precarious positions, accept low wages, and lack many of the benefits workers in the past enjoyed, such as union representation, health care plans, etc., and plus have to take on the burden of supplying their own equipment (cars for Uber drivers, for instance). I think app based employment has essentially undercut the collective bargaining position of workers and empowered the huge, centralized corporations which control them.
RedRegard
6d ago
Personally I don't find AIs as fun to talk to as any human. To me, they're like an interactive encyclopedia. It is fun to read and learn about stuff, but they can't stand in for the human element, either on the individual level or the level of an entire society or group (like the motte). Ultimately I find them in some sense desirable in terms of their first order effects (helping with research, etc.), but it's their second and third order effects I'm worried about, where I think, as I explain elsewhere, they will kill off large parts of human culture, remap the class system, and generally work towards all the ongoing, negative trends that already seem apparent. In a sense they are a continuation of capitalism and its logic.
RedRegard
6d ago
Most art was already commodified, and it was commodity artists, not creative artists who got the most brutal axe.
Essentially, contrary to your point about AI having imagination, creativity is the primary skill it lacks. It's basically a machine for producing median outcomes based on its training data, which is about as far away from creativity as you can get.
But for most artists, their jobs were based on providing quotidian, derivative artworks for enterprises that were soulless to begin with. To the extent that creativity was involved in their finished products, it was at a higher level than their own input, i.e. a director or something commissioning preset quotidian assets as a component in their own 'vision', the vision being the creative part of the whole deal.
However, I do believe creative artists will be threatened too. It's a little complicated to get into, but I think creative art depends not just on lone individuals or a consumer market, but on a social and cultural basis of popular enthusiasm and involvement in a given artform. I'm talking about dilettantes, critics, aficionados here. It's a social and cultural pursuit as much as it's an individual or commercial one, and I think that AI will contribute to the withering away of these sorts of underpinnings the same way corporate dominance and other ongoing trends previously have.
So for the artistic field, I envision complete and total commoditized slop produced by machines, once the human spirit has finally been crushed.
RedRegard
6d ago
Who are these people, exactly?
Internet nerds like us who based their lives around forums, intellectualism, in my case, literature, etc. The new AI world of dopamine cattle harnessed by the tech fiends suggests total obsolescence of any sort of life that isn't fully grounded in the concrete or else enslaved for the purpose of dopamine-slop control. Admittedly, some people here have lives which go beyond the abstract.
RedRegard
6d ago
I had a somewhat related idea to this. It's relates to ways that middle class professionals could be screwed. I haven't really hammered it out fully, but here's the gist of it. Basically, the value of automating labor is that it allows human resources to be freed up for other tasks. Rather than having one hundred artisans hand tooling goods, you have one machine operating by one engineer producing the same goods and then ninety nine people who can perform tasks in other areas of the economy.
But with AI, there will be an extinction of an entire class of meaningful work. That which is done by the middle class. There aren't adjacent fields for them to move into once displaced, as those will also be taken by AI. Their only options will be to move up or down, into different classes of the economy, and for the vast, vast majority of them, it will be a downwards spiral.
The area below the middle class economy is called the gig economy. So the value of AI is that there will be a wealth of gig workers, and thus fast food can be delivered more cheaply than ever before.
That is the one benefit of AI we are certain about.
There is a hypothetical scenario, a longstanding dream of science fiction, where with infinite labor afforded by AI there will be infinite opulence. However, some points that contest that are 1) there is only so much demand for consumables and market goods and services, so that economic demand begins to be overshadowed by status concerns and non-economic spheres of life in terms of desired things, 2) many of the inputs that go into supplying those goods and services are finite (i.e. resources) and so their creation can't be infinite, 3) political ramifications suggest reduced power and thus leverage for the displaced, and so their economic needs could easily be ignored by those who retain power.
All in all, there looks to be dark times ahead.
RedRegard
29d ago
An AI that can accurately identify and dismiss slop is 90% of the way towards producing quality content, since you could just build the generative AI with that skill built in (and train them on it)
Not if the process itself is beyond the AI to recreate.
For instance, say that a great movie like A Clockwork Orange was made in part through the theoretical understandings the main actors had developed over their lifetimes for their crafts and used to feed into their decisions of how to act and portray their characters.
Coming up with a similar quality of acting might be impossible through mere observation and mimicry of what works and what doesn't. The AI has an intuition for what sorts of things generally go together, but it doesn't use, among other things, underlying theoretical know-how to construct its outputs.
My current assessment is that there's a low ceiling for how far AI 'thinking' can take the quality of its output, particularly regarding the complexity of what it's attempting to do. Projects that require a layered approach of various theories and techniques seem like they're fundamentally beyond AI. The more systems that need to come together to create a work, the more exponentially difficult it becomes for a pattern-finder to match its quality. The pattern-finder needs to become capable of wielding tools, systems, theories in its thinking in order to up its game past a certain point.
I've heard people say before, in the context of AI art, that humans are essentially just 'pattern finders', too, and so are creatively indistinguishable from AI. But I think this is wrong: it ignores external tools humans use to structure and create their work, such as theories and techniques, which cumulatively take the load off of them having to conceive everything in a fit of genius. I think this is the primary reason AI, despite its 'brilliance' as a search engine or generalist explainer, is so lacking in certain other regards. It's due to the total reliance of its 'cognition' on what, compared to humans, would be more like a single sub-process.
It does claim to be that which it is displacing, though. There generally isn't open acknowledgement that AI goods are made by AI, and many sellers attempt to actively claim otherwise.
In either case, I'd say there's currently an implicit assumption by many buyers that, when they're purchasing a book, say, they're buying something that an intelligent mind constructed using skill and artifice (with plot twists, character arcs, and so forth), and not something that reads beautifully on the first page but never builds up to anything or has anything to say. AI's utility in this regard is its ability to both impersonate more meaningfully crafted human products and to exploit the sort of assumptions that book customers have built up through former habits.
The result will be the death of those 'former habits', as book customers do not gain the same pleasant experiences from their current purchasing habits, insofar as they inadvertently purchase AI products, and so the market will shrink and utility will be destroyed. If AI products were merely inferior, they could simply be ignored and filtered by such customers. It is their ability to mimic which makes them destructive. They can inhabit certain aspects of outer forms but not provide the same deeper experiences.
Maybe the case is less true for AI drawings, which are more of a what-you-see-is-what-you-get affair, in which case, no, it wouldn't count as a counterfeit to my mind. Unless the buyer was hopeful for some sort of engagement with an actual human that they weren't actually getting, or if they thought they were buying a more complex work that could be intensively studied to extract meanings which weren't immediately obvious, only to eventually realize it's an AI gestalt of several other works which only mimics their qualities superficially, say.
Which seems like a probable enough outcome.
RedRegard
29d ago
AI is killing off the lower tier skill tree of this band of creators, and I'm not sure its a bad thing.
It's going to kill off the livelihoods and acclaim for any artist who operates on any site susceptible to AI spam (which includes mainstream ones like Amazon), as the spam will make it impossible for new artists to attract notice and will even make it difficult for established artists to attract new fans. The AI spam doesn't work by creating equal or superior products, it works by simply existing in vast quantities and being hard to distinguish at a casual glance from legitimate products. It's a form of counterfeit goods when used this way.
Furthermore, it kills off a sort of broader cultural enthusiasm for art which exists and accounts for much of our society's interest in it. Fed by AI content mills and their inferior simplistic content, you might be left with satisfied degenerates who don't care about complexity or meaning and are wholly content with endless repetitive images of their favorite anime characters or whatever, but you won't have the kind of cultural underpinnings that sustains either fandoms, forum media discussions, critical appreciations, or anything else that makes art socially engaging.
This will in turn kill off the production of any sort of non-hyper-commodified art. Who wants to put effort into things if no one's A) going to notice or buy it, or B) even possess the cultural capability of caring?
I wonder if they're under pressure from higher ups to make stuff using AI? Their bosses have probably been convinced through AI hysteria that extreme gains are possible using AI, and that if those gains aren't materializing for them, it's a problem with how they handle their prompts, rather than it being impossible owing to the deficiencies of the technology. Not wanting to be left behind, they mandate everyone use AI and increase their output in line with what the hypists say is possible, typically an efficiency boost of twenty to one hundred percent, and thus, pointy-haired bosses lacking technical expertise relevant to their companies products, unable to understand the deficiencies of AI output, tank market viability while boosting investor enthusiasm in the short term by playing into popular biases of the financialized scam economy.
The bosses get rich, as do the tech scammers and their affiliates, but the economy inches closer to its doom once the bubble goes pop.
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