Comment by r3trohack3r
3 years ago
The number of people who are going to be able to produce high fidelity art with off the shelf tools in the near future is unbelievable.
It’s pretty exciting.
Being able to find a mix of styles you like and apply them to new subjects to make your own unique, personalized, artwork sounds like a wickedly cool power to give to billions of people.
In terms of art, population tends to put value not on the result, but origin and process. People will just look down on any art that’s AI generated in a couple of years when it becomes ubiquitous.
> population tends to put value not on the result, but origin and process
I think population tends to value "looks pretty", and it's other artists, connoisseurs, and art critics who value origin and process. Exit Through the Gift Shop sums this up nicely
I disagree. I definitely value modern digital art more than most historical art, because it just looks better. If AI art looks better (and in some cases it does) then I'll prefer that.
That’s totally fine, everyone’s definition of art is subjective. But general value of an art as a piece will just still be zero for AI generated ones, just like any IKEA / Amazon print piece. You just pay for the “looks pretty”, frame and paper.
2 replies →
This is already the case. Art is a process, a form of human expression, not an end result.
I'm sure OpenAI's models can shit out an approximation of a new Terry Pratchett or Douglas Adams novel, but nobody with any level of literary appreciation would give a damn unless fraud was committed to trick readers into buying it. It's not the author's work, and there's no human message behind it.
Thing is there are way more good books written, than any single person can consume in their lifetimes. An average person like me, reading a mixed diet of classics, obscure recommendations and what's popular right now, I still don't feel like I'm making a dent in the pile of high quality written content.
Given all that, the purpose of LLMs should be to create tailor made content to everyone's tastes. However, it seems the hardcore guardrails put into GPT4 and Claude prevent it from generating anything enjoyable. It seems, even the plot of the average Star Wars movie is too spicy for modern LLM sensibilities, never mind something like Stephen King.
1 reply →
Novels aren't about a message. They're entertainment. If the novel is entertaining then it's irrelevant whether there is or isn't a message in it. Besides, literature enthusiasts will invent a message for a popular story even if there never was one.
Also, I'm sure that you can eventually just prompt the model with the message you want to put into the story, if you can't already do that.
2 replies →
I haven’t read anything “shit out” by any LLM that even nearly approaches the level of quality by the authors you named — would very much like to see something like that - do you have any evidence for your claims?
AFAICT current text generation is something approaching bad mimicry at best and downright abysmal in general. I think you still need a very skilled author and meaty brain with a story to tell to make use of an LLM for storytelling. Sure it’s a useful tool that will make authors more effective but we are far from the point where you tell the LLM “write a story set in Pratchetts Discworld” and something acceptable or even entertaining will be spit out - if such a thing can even be achieved.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_theory_of_value
According to Marx, value is only created with human labour. This is not just a Marxist theory, it is an observation.
There may be lots of over-priced junk that makes you want to question this idea. But let's not nit-pick on that.
In two years time people will not see any value in AI art, quite correctly because there is not much human labour in creating it.
In two years time, no one will know what was created with AI, what was created by humans, or what was created by both.
> According to Marx, value is only created with human labour. This is not just a Marxist theory, it is an observation.
And yet it's completely and absolutely wrong. Value is created by the subjective utility offered to the consumer, irrespective of what inputs created the thing conveying that utility.
2 replies →
Labor theory of value is quite controversial, many economists call it tautological or even metaphysical. I also don't really see what LTV has to say about AI art, if anything, except that the economic value generated by AI art should be distributed to everybody and not just funneled to a few capitalists at the top. I would agree with that. It's true that more jobs get created even as jobs are destroyed, but it's also true that just as our ancestors fought for a 40 hour work week and a social safety net, we should be able to ask for more as computers become ever so productive.
In Marx's time, you needed humans to perform any kind of labor. Even machines needed operators. But there's nothing about LTV that would make it a hard requirement. The point of Marx's claim is that without someone performing labor using capital, there wouldn't be any value for the owner of said capital to pocket. This is just as true if you replace workers with AI.
> This is not just a Marxist theory, it is an observation.
Yeah? Well, you know, that's just like uh, your opinion, man
Nope, but I already look down on artists who refuse to integrate generative AI into their processes.
Can you share some of the art you’ve made with generative AI?
Cool, who are you?
People who use generative AI in their processes are not artists.
13 replies →
> Being able to find a mix of styles you like and apply them to new subjects to make your own unique, personalized, artwork sounds like a wickedly cool power to give to billions of people.
And in the process, they will obviate the need for Nightshade and similar tools.
AI models ingesting AI generated content does the work of destroying the models all by itself. Have a look at "Model Collapse" in relation to generative AI.
It'll be about as wickedly tool as the ability to get on the internet, e.g. commoditized, transactional, and boring.
I know this is an unpopular thing to say these days, but I still think the internet is amazing.
I have more access to information now than the most powerful people in the world did 40 years ago. I can learn about quantum field theory, about which pop star is allegedly fucking which other pop star, etc.
If I don't care about the law I can read any of 25 million books or 100 million scientific papers all available on Anna's Archive for free in seconds.
As Jeff Bezos recently said on the Lex podcast: one of the greatest compliments you can give an inventor is that they’re invention will be taken for granted by future generations.
“It won’t be any more wickedly cool than the internet” - saying something won’t be any more wickedly cool than the most profound and impactful pieces of infrastructure human civilization has erected is a pretty high compliment.
And we only had to alienate millions of people from their labor to do it.
Absolutely agree we should allow people to accumulate equity through effective allocation of their labor.
And I also agree that we shouldn’t build systems that alienate people from that accumulated equity.
Yeah, sadly those millions of people don’t matter in the grand scheme of things and were never going to profit off their work long term
Where the "grand scheme of things" are the quarter reports of a few AI-invested companies?
What a bummer of a thing to say.
Those millions/billions of people matter a great deal.
3 replies →
Is this utilitarianism?
Worth it.
Not really. There is a reason why we find realistic painting to be more fascinating than a photo and why some still practice it. The effort put in by another artist does affect our enjoyment.
For me it doesn’t. I’m generating images, realistic, 2.5d, 2d and I like them as much. I don’t feel (or miss) what you described. Or what any other arts guy describes, for that matter. Arts people are different, because they were trained to feel something a normal person wouldn’t. And that’s okay, a normal person without training wouldn’t see how much beauty and effort there is in an algorithm or a legal contract as well.
The word "we" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. A large majority of consumers can't even tell apart AI-generated from handmade, let alone care who or what made the thing.
Yeah, that's just information you made up on the spot.