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One of my favorite bands just took a bunch of AI accusations, I guess, and he wrote a somewhat-pissed Substack post. That lead singer doesn't often step into culture war stuff, but this was close enough, I think:
and goes on to say that fighting AI art in this way is fruitless:
I regret that the culture war is poking random people in a new way in the last couple of years, and I can't help but cynically laugh at it. Not to mention how short-sighted it is. In that post, the lead singer details how much of a pain it is to do graphic design for music, and videos, and other art, and he hates it. Imagine if you could get a machine to do it? Also, it actually lifts up people who do not have money and allows them to make art like the people who have money do. Look at this VEO 3 shitpost. Genuinely funny, and the production value would be insane if it was real, for a joke that probably wouldn't be worth it. But now, someone with some Gemini credits can make it. This increases the amount of people making things.
I'm not sure I have any real thesis for this post, but I haven't been very good at directing discussion for my own posts, so, reply to this anecdote in any way you see fit. I thought it was interesting, and a little sad.
I agree that this stuff is becoming more and more difficult to tell apart. We even had one of our own posters get falsely accused by the mods of using AI recently. People are going to claim many things are "obviously AI" when they actually aren't, and the mania of false accusations is going to tick a lot of people off. When you're accused of using AI, not only are people saying you're committing artistic fraud, they're also implying that even if you aren't then your output is still generic trash to some extent.
I wish the Luddites would go away and we could all just judge things by quality rather than trying to read tea leaves on whether AI had a hand in creating something.
This also 100% applies to this forum's rule effectively banning AI. It's a bad rule overall.
If you want to talk to an AI, there's already a place where you can do that.
This rhetorical question actually caused me to have a think. Why do people want to talk to an AI? I mean productivity I can understand, all the usual "as a tool" excuses. But I've felt no compulsion, not even curiosity, to talk to an LLM just to talk. And yet I see people casually mentioning doing that all over the place. It's like something straight out of Her, a film which thoroughly squicked me out. Is there anyone here who just casually socializes with an LLM who can explain why they do it?
I have before, and it's interesting to me as well why people do it. In my experience the AIs of just a few years ago were very clearly robotic (to use a word that might not fit) in that they would seem to "forget" things very quickly, even things you had just told them. Currently I think they're considerably better, but their popularity suggests that they're still overly positive and loath to criticize or call out the user the way a human might. In other words there is a narcissistic element in their use (the link is an internal link to a recent Motte post) where the user is fed a continual stream of affirmations in the self he or she is presenting to the AI. Hell on Reddit people are literally marrying their "AI boy/girlfriend."
I have a friend who is having issues with his wife, and has taken to interaction with AI in ways that I am not completely sure of except to say he's given it a name (feminine) and has various calibrations that he uses (one that is flirty, etc.) I can tell by speaking to him about this that he is engaging in what I'd consider a certain wishful thinking (asking the AI what it means to be real, to be alive, etc.) but it's difficult in such situations to tactfully draw someone back into reality. So I am untactful and say "It's not a She and it's not a real person, bro." This gets a laugh but the behavior continues.
I wouldn't discount the idea that this (treating Ai as a companion, romantic or otherwise) will all become extremely widespread if it hasn't already. How (and how soon) it will then become acceptable to the mainstream will be interesting to see.
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