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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   35349 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 3, 2022

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I think over the last few months we've established that AI issues are on topic for the culture war thread, at least when they intersect with explicitly cultural domains like art. So I hope it's ok that I write this here. Feel free to delete if not.

NovelAI's anime model was released today, and it's pretty god damned impressive. If you haven't seen what it can do yet, feel free to check out the /hdg/ threads on /h/ for some NSFW examples.

Not everyone is happy though; AI art has attracted the attention of at least one member of congress, among several other public and private entities:

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Today, U.S. Rep. Anna G. Eshoo (D-CA) urged the National Security Advisor (NSA) and the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) to address the release of unsafe AI models that do not moderate content made on their platforms, specifically the Stable Diffusion model released by Stability AI on August 22, 2022. Stable Diffusion allows users to generate unfiltered imagery of a violent or sexual nature, depicting real people. It has already been used to create photos of violently beaten Asian women and pornography depicting real people.

I don't really bet on there being any serious legal liability for Stability.AI or anyone else, but, you never know.

I've tried several times to articulate here why I find AI art to be so upsetting. I get the feeling that many people here haven't been very receptive to my views. Partially that's my fault for being a bad rhetorician, but partially I think it's because I'm arguing from the standpoint of a certain set of terminal values which are not widely shared. I'd like to try laying out my case one more time, using some hopefully more down-to-earth considerations which will be easier to appreciate. If you already disagree with me, I certainly don't expect you to be moved by my views - I just hope that you'll find them to be coherent, that it seems like the sort of thing that a reasonable person could believe.

Essentially the crux of the matter is, to borrow a phrase from crypto, "proof of work". There are many activities and products that are valuable, partially or in whole, due to the amount of time and effort that goes into them. I don't think it's hard to generate examples. Consider weight lifting competitions - certainly there's nothing useful about repeatedly lifting a pile of metal bricks, nor does the activity itself have any real aesthetic or social value. The value that participants and spectators derive from the activity is purely a function of the amount of human effort and exertion that goes into the activity. Having a machine lift the weights instead would be quite beside the point, and it would impress no one.

For me personally, AI art has brought into sharp relief just how much I value the effort and exertion that goes into the production of art. Works of art are rather convenient (and beautiful) proof of work tokens. First someone had to learn how to draw, and then they had to take time out of their day and say, I'm going to draw this thing in particular, I'm going to dedicate my finite time and energy to this activity and this particular subject matter rather than anything else. I like that. I like when people dedicate themselves to something, even at significant personal cost. I like having my environment filled with little monuments to struggle and self-sacrifice, just like how people enjoy the fact that someone out there has climbed Mt. Everest, even though it serves no real purpose. Every work of art is like a miniature Mt. Everest.

Or at least it was. AI art changes the equation in a way that's impossible to ignore - it affects my perception of all works of art because now I am much less certain of the provenance of each work*. There is now a fast and convenient way of cheating the proof of work system. I look at a lot of anime art - a lot of it is admittedly very derivative and repetitive, and it tends to all blend together after a while. But in the pre-AI era, I could at least find value in each individual illustration in the fact that it represented the concrete results of someone's time and effort. There are of course edge cases - we have always had tracing, photobashing, and other ways of "cheating". But you could still assume that the average illustration you saw was the result of a concrete investment of time and effort. Now that is no longer the case. Any illustration I see could just as easily be one from the infinite sea of AI art - why should I spend any time looking at it, pondering it, wondering about the story behind it? I am now very uncertain as to whether it has any value at all.

It's a bit like discovering that every video game speedrun video you see has a 50% chance of being a deepfake. Would you be as likely to watch speedrunning videos? I wouldn't. They only have value if they're the result of an actual investment of time by a human player - otherwise, they're worthless. Or, to take another very timely example, the Carlsen-Niemann cheating scandal currently rocking the world of chess. Chess is an illustrative example to look at, because it's a domain where everyone is acutely aware of the dangers of a situation where you can't tell the difference between an unaided human and a human using AI assistance. Many people have remarked that chess is "dead" if they can't find a way to implement effective anti-cheating measures that will prevent people from consulting engines during a game. People want to see two humans play against each other, not two computers.

To be clear, I'm not saying that the effort that went into a work of art is the only thing that matters. I also place great value on the intrinsic and perceptual properties of a work of art. I see myself as having a holistic view where I value both the intrinsic properties of the work, and the extrinsic, context-dependent properties related to the work's provenance, production, intention, etc.

TL;DR - I used to be able to look at every work of art and go "damn someone made that, that's really cool", now I can't do that, which makes every interaction I have with art that much worse, and by extension it makes my life worse.

*(I'm speaking for convenience here as if AI had already supplanted human artists. As I write this post, it still has limitations, and there are still many illustrations that are unmistakably of human origin. But frankly, given how fast the new image models are advancing, I don't know how much longer that will be the case.)

EDIT: Unfortunately, this dropped the day after I wrote my post, so I didn't get a chance to comment on it originally. Based on continually accumulating evidence, I may have to retract my original prediction that opposition to AI art was going to be a more right-coded position. Perhaps there are not as many aesthetes in the dissident right as I thought.

First, I agree there is some value in putting in effort into something. It demonstrates a virtue in the person, the ability to delay gratification, to work towards a purpose. The reason we like this is probably evolutionarily determined, as such people are useful allies in bad times. Admiring people for the effort they put into climbing a mountain etc. is alright, it pushes us to become better and apply effort in smaller scale things. It's a symbolic distillation of our everyday struggles and shortcomings. That's all fine.

What I don't see as virtuous though is the other half of the attitude you show, namely that you want to feel that the stuff around you was done with a lot of human effort. Essentially this is the opposite of striving for efficiency, which we have been doing as humans since time immemorial. It would take more effort to swim to the other shore, but instead we build ships. It would take more effort to walk, but at some point people decided to ride horses instead and then invented cars.

Things that are made in an inefficient way for the purpose of demonstrating extra human effort are luxuries. Probably it would feel nice to be carried around town in a litter but why do that if there are cars? Understandably, it is a way to signal status if you can get many people to do inefficient work for you. Essentially it's a way for you to show that you can boss people around, having amassed (perhaps over generations) enough effort-tokens (presumably through some efficient method, using leverage, not by the sweat of your brow) to do this. It makes one feel important. I, however, think that the enjoyment of other people's senseless labor for showing off one's own status is a vice.

We should continue to use our brainpower to achieve more with less effort. This is not an argument to be lazy, but to work smart and get more done. Putting up artificial constraints makes no sense in general. Now if the constraints allow for the exploration of something interesting, that's another things. For example it could be a way to hone one's wits, eg the limitation of size in demo scene demos etc., to see novel ideas and creative solutions. That's all fine. It's also all fine if the actual hand made product is better. Furniture made of solid wood, designed to fit your rooms is better than the cheap stuff you buy at IKEA. But the reason to want it is that it's better. Also if you want lots of stuff done for you manually, how do you justify that? What makes you think that you deserve the fruits of all that effort? And independent of the answer, can you understand that many people can't afford having so many people jump around to their whim, and for them increases in efficiency can bring more improvement in quality of life?

Essentially this is the opposite of striving for efficiency

It most certainly is!

So I sat there and smoked my cigar until I fell into a reverie. Among others I recall these thoughts. You are getting on, I said to myself, and are becoming an old man without being anything, and without really taking on anything. Wherever you look about you on the other hand, in literature or in life, you see the names and figures of the celebrities, the prized and acclaimed making their appearances or being talked about, the many benefactors of the age who know how to do favours to mankind by making life more and more easy, some with railways, others with omnibuses and steamships, others with the telegraph, others through easily grasped surveys and brief reports on everything worth knowing, and finally the true benefactors of the age, who by virtue of thought make spiritual existence systematically easier and yet more and more important. And what are you doing? Here my soliloquy was interrupted, for my cigar was finished and a new one had to be lit. So I smoked again, and then suddenly this thought flashed through my mind: You must do something, but since with your limited abilities it will be impossible to make anything easier than it has become, you must, with the same humanitarian enthusiasm as the others, take it upon yourself to make something more difficult. This notion pleased me immensely, and at the same time it flattered me to think that I would be loved and esteemed for this effort by the whole community, as well as any. For when all join together in making everything easier in every way, there remains only one possible danger, namely, that the ease becomes so great that it becomes altogether too easy; then there will be only one lack remaining, if not yet felt, when people come to miss the difficulty. Out of love for humankind, and from despair over my embarrassing situation, having accomplished nothing, and being unable to make anything easier than it had already been made, and out of a genuine interest in those who make everything easy, I conceived it as my task everywhere to create difficulties. I was also especially struck by the curious reflection as to whether it was not really my indolence I had to thank for the fact that this task became mine. For far from having found it like an Aladdin, by a stroke of luck, I must rather suppose that by preventing me from intervening in good time to make things easy, my indolence has thrust on me the only thing that was left.

-- Søren Kierkegaard, "Concluding Unscientific Postscript"

"It's too difficult to meaningfully contribute to this society" vs "there is no difficulty any more, we must artificially make things difficult"?

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