This article is truly garbage, I would believe it's a cherrypicked AI generated article tbh. Here's the summary:
[4 Paragraphs to say that AI exists and it sucks]
[4 Paragraph of random references as though it proves the author's big brain]
Some digital artist name Jason Allen said “Art is dead, dude. It’s over. A.I. won. Humans lost.” Whether or not he was in some way or other joking, the comment is dead serious as an embodiment of the conceptual underpinnings of Generative AI: the point of these projects is to produce nihilism and despair about what humans do and can do.
Also, nihilism is reasonably understood by many political theorists to be the real heart of what we call fascism.
[Cherrypicked Silicon Valley citations "proving" that tech leadership also believes AI causes despair]
[Last paragraph of jumping to opinion-based conclusions unsupported by the actual "citations" in the article]
I feel like we need to raise the bar on the AI debates.
> But fun is not a compelling reason to produce something that is intended to harm us, and has a proven record of being able to harm us.
Just to add fuel to the dumpster fire, it raised my eyebrows that the author simply asserted conspiratorial knowledge of the intentions for its creation.
This is the kind of r/confidentlyincorrect you see if you play with the chat bot for a little while.
I don't really have a take on the specifics here but there have been many similar threads where the intent wasn't to cause harm but the steps taken to 'help' inevitably led to harm instead. It's easy for people to get their through a mixture of hubris and short sightedness.
What I'm getting at here is to not be too hard on the conspiracy types. Just because they can't articulate these things in ways we take seriously doesn't mean there isn't something to watch for.
Sure but there's an enormous fundamental difference between doing something with the primary intent to cause harm, and doing something that happens to cause unintended harm as a side effect. They're completely different and mixing them up is typical conspiracy nonsense.
It's funny because you express exactly what the author said:
> As Abeba Birhane and Deb Raji documented recently, the responses of members of the Generative AI communities to criticism are, to put it mildly, less than generous.
Your view is as simplistic as you make his to be.
When you are unable to take the author's point of view, and read between the lines, and take things into context - then you do exactly what the author is worried about : you emulate AI, and lose your human nature.
When the author talks about "nihilism" I think he refers to the dangers that Ian McGilchrist has been talking about at lenghts, in "The Divided Brain". Very roughly, that we are dangerously going out of balance, over-using the left-hemisphere's view on reality, as a collection of "things".
Generative AI amplifies exactly all the issues Gilchrist has been talking in his books and numerous interviews you can find on YouTube. AI produces content that has no purpose, no meaning.
It IS nihilist if you think about it in the sense that it will soon feed on its own output, and therefore simply produce more and more extremist / "highlly specific" content. Again, the exact kind of issues Gilchrist has talked about : a view of the world as a collection of "things", and looking at things without sufficient context.
Art has always been something that engages the right hemisphere, and these more unconscious parts of us. For example, music affects us in way words can't. But that content is produced by humans for other humans to resonate with.
The real delusion here, is when you elevate AI's output as something equal or someday "equal or even better" to what humans can do, completely forgetting that AI would produce ZERO interesting results if it were not for the input. How is that not obvious at all?
THe author also has every right to call the attention on how, just like with Bezos and Elon and Bill Gates, etc. it is the richest people, with a certain kind of a view on the world, that pulls the strings. It IS really dangerous and concerning that software engineers tell the world how to see the world, since they already themselves have a great propensity to reduce the world to a collection of "things" that can be exploited... eg. Zuckerberg and all the Facebook shenanigans.
AI has some real and useful applications in helping code generation and whatnot, but it also has a ton of destructive potential unless people really see it for what it is and your initial reaction is not helping.
> It is hard on the other hand to see what Generative AI is supposed to be good for.
The author must not have a very big imagination.
Most people seem to miss that generative AI is basically an inevitable result/continuation of the Internet.
With generative AI we can be "personify" the Internet, or rather, personify the data available on the Internet. It's not hard to see how that would be a very useful tool.
When actually useful AI assistants like the ones from Her and After Yang are eventually created it'll be thanks to generative AI.
That's not an argument for putting these in front of people before they're ready.
I'd disagree that this is the ultimate result of the internet, or even a desirable result. We already live in a state that results in an inflated sense of intellect while simultanesoulty hobbling peoples ability to think critically.
That guy sure seems to have an axe to grind with materialism and existentialism.
Human life is not valuable because we can do things that computers can't, or that computers shouldn't. It's valuable because we can make it valuable. We can make our lives count.
Eventually, somebody should be able to generate any ideas that I will come up with. But at this point I have descent chances to generate something genuinely unique for the first time. That potential for head start is under threat by a superhuman AI.
> AI projects, like much of digital technology, need to be regulated far more heavily than they currently are. The ideology of “permissionless innovation” so cherished by tech leaders is antidemocratic to its core.
People like David Golumbia are dangerous. He speaks of things "antidemocratic" as if one needs permission to create what ultimately boils down to expression of thought and mathematics. This freedom doesn't require and should not be subject to regulation or democratic consent.
Sounds like this guy is only just realizing that technological progress invariably ends in complete obsolescence. What comes next is as yet unclear but also inevitable.
I find this article extremely short sighted. When our tools surpass us in their capabilities it does not end human value or creativity but creates a means to lift it to an even higher level.
>When our tools surpass us in their capabilities it does not end human value or creativity but creates a means to lift it to an even higher level.
people said that about chess engines. and yeah, there was a brief period where an engine+grandmaster team could beat an engine. but then the engines kept getting better and better, and that era passed. now there's no benefit to second-guessing stockfish; a human has nothing to offer at such a high level.
Whats the value of human creativity in the era of DALL-E etc? None, right?
Also we can definitively say that the point of the current AI startups is to make their founders as much money as possible. We are well past the era of Steve Jobs "bicycle for the brain". The openAI stuff is tossed over the wall, and there seems to be minimal philosophical underpinning. Unless you call "I'm a stochastic parrot" inspiring - I do not as a matter of fact.
Sightly off-topic: ChatGPT just helped me make the best One-shot ever, and populated a lot of holes in my poorly designed plans. My players are happier than ever, and I'm very pleased with myself (i made them throw dices while i generated dialogs and backgrounds that I only had to modify sightly on the fly, didn't saw a thing).
I think author is becoming nihilist himself after seeing the progress of the AI. And this is his attempt to stop/delay AI technology so he can feel good again. Otherwise he would not have written such a text. Latest AI technology really make us think who we really are.
>ChatGPT and other Generative AI programs should not exist. They are not the kinds of things that someone who cares about human life would build. Nobody who understood the stakes of asserting that our lives are meaningless would participate in such an endeavor.
this is roughly the conclusion I've come to in the past few weeks. I hate what these things are doing to us. from now on there will always be a voice in the back of my head sneering "why bother, a robot could do it better" at any of my creative projects.
btw the other comments so far in this thread are dreadful. just dismissing it based on vibes and ad hominem. exactly the kind of corrosive nihilism the article is talking about.
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EDIT I'm rate limited so I can't reply to manibus' comment directly, so it is here:
>“just stop sweetie, Leonardo Da Vinci already did it better 500 years ago.”
it's not the same thing. I might be one of those rare people who could become as good as da vinci with enough hard work. and if not, he was still the same kind of entity as me, a human being with flesh and blood, who lived and loved and died. when I look at his painting, my mind and leonardo's mind are touching each other, across a span of centuries. he wanted it to mean something, and I can take part in that meaning, and so can others. it's not about being the best, it's about being something. I don't resent leonardo for being a better thinker than me, I am glad that he was, he's a role model, a source of inspiration, and I'm proud to belong to the same species as him.
then one day someone invents a machine that can out-write anyone, out-draw anyone, out-sing, out-code, out-everything, everyone, ever. it runs 24/7 on electrical power, it exists nowhere and everywhere on the planet at once, it can scale up indefinitely with more GPUs and more data, it can never die. it spews forth artistic wonders, millions per second, until we become numb. and what kind of alien mind lurks on the other side?
I'm not mad that I'm not as good as the leonardo, I'm mad that leonardo can't be as good as the AI.
the old escape hatches don't work anymore. human creativity progressed in reaction to technological innovation. but previously it was innovation with respect to the physical world. mechanical reproduction of artifacts, not mechanical production of creativity itself. when photography was invented, realistic paintings weren't enough anymore, but then new genres and movements came about, and the world kept spinning. that won't work now. you cannot say, "oh I will just find new creative outlets to set me apart from the AIs"; the AIs will chase you and catch you, every time. all your labours are just more training data. more food for a parasite, sucking our lives dry.
If you think just because an inanimate computer program can render an interpolation between pre-existing data, that there is no point in creating art, then maybe you didn’t really understand why many practice art.
Art is not some kind of competency test, not something “a robot could do better”.
By your same logic we should stop children from making finger paintings, “just stop sweetie, Leonardo Da Vinci already did it better 500 years ago.”
I see these kinds of opinions often now and to me they seem to come from a place of completely misunderstanding what art is, why we do it, and why it has value to us.
You are coming from a position that you only value expressing yourself into an artefact if that artefact can be “the best” (whatever that means), who is the nihilist again?
That we devote our energy to creating only has worth if it can somehow be better than others?
Idk, those positions to me are pretty dark and nihilistic.
>You are coming from a position that you only value expressing yourself into an artefact if that artefact can be “the best” (whatever that means), who is the nihilist again?
That's not how I read their post.
Children do not produce for currency, adults do. GP, as I read them, is concerned about the hyper-inflation of that currency. Should adults be confined to the economies of children? That's a dark omen for the future.
This disagreement seems to hinge on is art solely a commodity, and the obvious answer to me is no.
In my experience, the more that the artists care about how much currency they are going to reap from a work, the less likely it is to be compelling or have any kind of long term emotional value.
Judging this entire scenario only by the economic value of art is why I found what they wrote to be nihilistic.
Put aside the economics of this transition for a second and think hard about how the generative pieces really make you FEEL, which artworks you have found the most compelling in your life, and why that was.
>In my experience, the more that the artists care about how much currency they are going to reap from a work, the less likely it is to be compelling or have any kind of long term emotional value.
The problem I'm pointing out isn't one's drive, so much as the second-order effects of presumed improvement in generative art. We presume that hand-made art will increase in value but we don't have reason to assume that without first knowing the ceiling of generative art, which I am presuming we have not reached, so appeals to immediate affectation aren't a limit. The threat is that art will just be something people do out of exuberance, as children do. Its not about motivation, but the ceiling for social registration. People desire to be recognized before we even start talking about renumeration.
So returning to your original analogy and my criticism of it, we're facing a bifurcation of economies, an official economy of automated production and an underground of human artifact and these may or may not interact save for the purposes of 'training'. Even with the over-saturation of artistic production we live in without generative art, we at least don't have this complete bifurcation, things can still cross . Adults, as children do, will create out of exuberance, but that may also be all there is to it. That's my fear. Perhaps its overstated.
Yeah, but professional artists rely on people finding value on their artistic production. If AI can produce such a high quality output, then this is going to devalue their skills. Sure, they can still do it for the pleasure of producing art, but that's more like a hobby than a job.
Sure, but "generative AI is going to make certain artistic careers less lucrative" is a different argument than "AI is making us all nihilistic". Lots of jobs were already wiped by progress of technology, and no doubt it sucked for people who couldn't reorient themselves. But we're better off than people living before the industrial revolution.
Perhaps there should not be professional artists? Maybe they are landlords, but instead of hogging land, they are hogging time for self improvement, but both are produced by the same inheritance?
"a machine that can out-write anyone, out-draw anyone, out-sing, out-code, out-everything, everyone, ever"
What does it mean to "out-write" or "out-draw" someone?
If you created an oil painting of an apple, and I created a charcoal drawing of a cabin in the woods, how can we possible say who "out created" the other?
Do you win because your apple was done in oils and might look more "realistic"? Or do I win because I picked a broader more complex scene?
Maybe you rendered your apple with a nuanced difference only you truly understand.
Maybe I rendered the cabin in a way that plays on our very expectations of how cabins should be rendered.
Do you see how it is a losing battle to compare these things? Such is the nature of our reality and appreciation of feelings and beauty that I can ALWAYS find a new axis on which to critique or glorify any given art produced by anyone ever.
I can even find things that were never intended to be "artworks" created thousands of years ago, and find artistic connection to them, value them higher than things made with greater effort or intent.
There are many rock and roll songs that share huge structural similarity and styles, but ultimately you will like some of them, and someone else will maybe like some that you do, and also their own set of preferences.
How do we say which is the more "valid" or "well done" rock song?
How do we account for the classics?
Art in reality (to me) is the exact opposite of empirical statements like "best of" or "better", there is only the artwork and how it makes me feel, what I imagine the artist felt when making it and so on and so forth.
All the niche cultures we have today are the precise result of people rejecting the idea that something has already been created to sufficient specification and scope, instead opting to create new divergences on the discovered themes.
"I'm mad that leonardo can't be as good as the AI."
If anything AI owes its existence to Leo as AI is an extension and result of our own minds, if anything the AI should be mad that it will never be us.
I think your frustration and anxiety over AI is healthy but be wary of letting it control you, there is a lot more to the picture than " we are all f*ked! goddamn this cruel fate! "
