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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   Edited 1yr ago   38195 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 12, 2022

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A few followups to last week's post on the shifting political alignment of artists:

HN: Online art communities begin banning AI-generated images

The AI Unbundling

Vox: What AI Art means for human artists

FurAffinity was, predictably, not the only site to ban AI content. Digital artists online are in crisis mode, and you can hardly blame them -- their primary income source is about to disappear. A few names for anyone here still paying for commissions: PornPen, Waifu Diffusion, Unstable Diffusion.

But what I really want to focus on is the Vox video. I watched it (and it's accompanying layman explanation of diffusion models) with the expectation it'd be some polemic against the dangers of amoral tech nerds bringing grevious harm to marginalised communities. Instead, what I got was this:

There's hundreds of millions of years of evolution that go into making the human body move through three-dimensional space gracefully and respond to rapidly changing situations. Language -- not hundreds of millions of years of evolution behind that, actually. It's pretty recent. And the same thing is true for creating images. So our idea that like, creative symbolic work will be really hard to automate and that physical labor will be really easy to automate, is based on social distinctions that we draw between different kinds of people. Not based on a really good understanding of actually what's hard.

So, although artists are organising a reactionary/protectionist front against AI art, the media seems to be siding with the techbros for the moment. And I kind of hate this. I'm mostly an AI maximalist, and I'm fully expecting whoever sides with Team AI to gain power in the coming years. To that end, I was hoping the media would make a mistake...

I honestly don't get a lot of concern over AI generated images, you'd think from the all the apocalyptic rhetoric that 90% of the average Mottizens income came from fulfilling online requests for furry porn. Somehow I don't think that's actually the case.

I see it as a herald for things to come. Perhaps you feel that furries are scum and deserve what's coming for them. That's all well and good, but the broader point to be read lies in the topic of job displacement in general.

"AI workers replace humans" used to be a prediction, not an accurate description of current reality. We now have (or are on the brink of having) a successful demonstration of just that. The reactions and policies and changes that arrive from the current ongoing chaos are going to set precedent for future battles involving first-world job replacement, and I am personally very interested in seeing what kind of slogans and parties and perhaps even extremism emerges from our first global experiment.

"Technology displaces workers" is not a new thing or a very controversial prediction that I am aware of anyone on the other side of. The contentious prediction is that AI would create structural persistent unemployment effects across the entire economy which every prior technological paradigm shift has yet failed to do. A few commission artists having to find jobs elsewhere in the service sector won't be evidence for that, nor would they really be the first to be impacted by AI in general (most translation work is now done by deep learning models, for example -- similar to AI art, a human in the loop is only necessary when the requirements are particularly complex or the quality demanded exceeds some nominal bar).

The part that you might not quite appreciate if you weren't monitoring every advance in this field is how quickly things have improved, which is to say how rapidly this disruption occurred.

We passed a point where computers became better at chess than any possible human a couple decades ago. Computers became better at Go about 6 years ago. This year they became better at producing art than 99.9% of humans, and they're certainly faster at it than any human could be. Most of the advances there occurred in the last 2 years.

And now there are models that can be applied to basically any game or task that can be effectively digitized, and can reliably train themselves to [better-than-human levels in a matter of days, maybe weeks.]

That's not to say that we're going to see unprecedented levels of 'hard' unemployment, but it is likely to sweep into unexpected places in very short order.

Completely true. Current advances do not guarantee the "no more jobs" dystopia many predict. My excitement is likely primarily a result of how much I've involved myself in observing this specific little burst of technological displacement.

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