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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   35417 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 3, 2022

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This week's revolutionary AI advance:

Imagen Video

It's not really revolutionary, as people have been pointing out this is the obvious next step for ages months now. But it still is a milestone worth noting.

As for this:

While our internal testing suggest much of explicit and violent content can be filtered out, there still exists social biases and stereotypes which are challenging to detect and filter. We have decided not to release the Imagen Video model or its source code until these concerns are mitigated.

Google's made a habit of this. They announce an amazing advance, and then say no one can have access to it because it can be used for Evil. No matter: Stable Diffusion will have something comparable out in a couple months.

ETA:

Actually, this out of DeepMind might be the bigger advance today, if less flashy:

Press: Discovering Novel Algorithms with AlphaTensor

Paper: Discovering faster matrix multiplication algorithms with reinforcement learning

My greatest fear for AI content generation is it being dominated by woke megacorps, with independent creators permanently locked out of contributing to culture. It looks like Google is investing heavily in that dystopia.

Novelai and stable diffusion being mostly uncensored has been a big white pill so far, but it feels like the shoe is about to drop.

My greatest fear for AI content generation is it being dominated by woke megacorps, with independent creators permanently locked out of contributing to culture.

I'm confused by this statement. How does it "lock independent creators out of contributing to culture" if only megacorps have AI tools?

Is it because you think it's impossible to produce content without using AI? That's obviously false. People have produced petabytes of content without using AI.

Is it because you think megacorps will flood the world with AI-generated content and independent creators will get drowned out and won't get noticed? That concern also doesn't really make sense. If you're worried about getting drowned out by just a few megacorps, then giving everyone access to the tools will just allow everyone to flood the world with even more content, exacerbating the problem.

EDIT: Not sure why this is getting downvoted. This isn’t supposed to be a gotcha. I really don’t understand the concern here. I mean, I assume the intuitive concern is “the megacorps have all the AI tools and I don’t and that’s not fair”, I just think that under closer examination, you can’t say that you’re “locked out of contributing to culture” in that situation.

The reasoning seems pretty simple to me. AI is an extremely powerful tool by which greatly reduces the effort involved in creating high quality art. Without it, people won't be literally "locked out," but the much higher barrier to entry and costs would mean that it would be immensely harder for independent creators to contribute high quality art at a meaningful level.

An analogy might be if only a select few megacorps had access to cameras. Independent creators could still learn to draw photorealistic drawings or perhaps hack together some sort of crude camera system, but compared to megacorps that can just have their employees snap a 20 Megapixel photo with their DSLRs, the quality and quantity of content independent creators could produce would be lower by a tremendous amount. In such a universe, the culture of photography and more generally photorealistic art would likely be dominated by megacorps.

FYI: I wasn't going to downvote your comment until I got to the EDIT part. Then I did, because any post that makes any references about its (or its author's) downvote status is one that I always downvote, regardless of the rest of the contents.

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