this post was submitted on 05 Jul 2024
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So the problem isn't the technology. The problem is unethical big corporations.
Same as it ever was...
And the days go by!
Disagree. The technology will never yield AGI as all it does is remix a huge field of data without even knowing what that data functionally says.
All it can do now and ever will do is destroy the environment by using oodles of energy, just so some fucker can generate a boring big titty goth pinup with weird hands and weirder feet. Feeding it exponentially more energy will do what? Reduce the amount of fingers and the foot weirdness? Great. That is so worth squandering our dwindling resources to.
We definitely don't need AGI for AI technologies to be useful. AI, particularly reinforcement learning, is great for teaching robots to do complex tasks for example. LLMs have shocking ability relative to other approaches (if limited compared to humans) to generalize to "nearby but different, enough" tasks. And once they're trained (and possibly quantized), they (LLMs and reinforcement learning policies) don't require that much more power to implement compared to traditional algorithms. So IMO, the question should be "is it worthwhile to spend the energy to train X thing?" Unfortunately, the capitalists have been the ones answering that question because they can do so at our expense.
For a person without access to big computing resources (me lol), there's also the fact that transfer learning is possible for both LLMs and reinforcement learning. Easiest way to explain transfer learning is this: imagine that I want to learn Engineering, Physics, Chemistry, and Computer Science. What should I learn first so that each subject is easy for me to pick up? My answer would be Math. So in AI speak, if we spend a ton of energy to train an AI to do math and then fine-tune agents to do Physics, Engineering, etc., we can avoid training all the agents from scratch. Fine-tuning can typically be done on "normal" computers with FOSS tools.
IMO that can be an incredibly useful approach for solving problems whose dynamics are too complex to reasonably model, with the understanding that the obtained solution is a crude approximation to the underlying dynamics.
IMO I'm waiting for the bubble to burst so that AI can be just another tool in my engineering toolkit instead of the capitalists' newest plaything.
Sorry about the essay, but I really think that AI tools have a huge potential to make life better for us all, but obviously a much greater potential for capitalists to destroy us all so long as we don't understand these tools and use them against the powerful.
Since I don't feel like arguing, I will grant you that you are correct in what you say AI can do. I am not really but whatever, say it can:
How will these reasonable AI tools emerge out of this under capitalism? And how is it not all still just theft with extra steps that is imoral to use?
I'll try to keep this short then.
How does any technology ever see use outside of oppressive structures? By understanding it and putting to work on liberatory goals.
I think that crucial to working with AI is that, as it stands, the need for expensive hardware to train it makes it currently a centralizing technology. However, there are things we can do to combat that. For example, the AI Horde offers distributed computing for AI applications.
We gotta find datasets that are ethically collected. As a practitioner, that means not using data for training unless you are certain it wasn't stolen. To be completely honest, I am quite skeptical of the ethics of the datasets that the popular AI products were trained on. Hence why I refuse to use those products.
Personally, I'm a lot more interested in the applications to robotics and industrial automation than generating anime tiddies and building chat bots. Like I'm not looking to convince you that these tools are "intelligent", merely useful. In a similar vein, PID controllers are not "smart" at all, but they are the backbone of industrial automation. (Actually, a proven use for "AI" algorithms is to make an adaptive PID controller so that's it can respond to changes in the plant over time.)
These datasets do not exist, you got that right.
I highly doubt there is much AI deep learning needed to keep a robot arms PIDs accurate. That seems like something a regular old algorithm can do.
Idk. I find it a great coding help. IMO AI tech have legitimate good uses.
Image generation have algo great uses without falling into porn. It ables to people who don't know how to paint to do some art.
depends. for "AI" "art" the problem is both terms are lies. there is no intelligence and there is no art.
Define art.
Any work made to convey a concept and/or emotion can be art. I'd throw in "intent", having "deeper meaning", and the context of its creation to distinguish between an accounting spreadsheet and art.
The problem with AI "art" is it's produced by something that isn't sentient and is incapable of original thought. AI doesn't understand intent, context, emotion, or even the most basic concepts behind the prompt or the end result. Its "art" is merely a mashup of ideas stolen from countless works of actual, original art run through an esoteric logic network.
AI can serve as a tool to create art of course, but the further removed from the process a human is the less the end result can truly be considered "art".
Well said!
As a thought experiment let's say an artist takes a photo of a sunset. Then the artist uses AI to generate a sunset and AI happens to generate the exact same photo. The artist then releases one of the two images with the title "this may or may not be made by AI". Is the released image art or not?
If you say the image isn't art, what if it's revealed that it's the photo the artist took? Does is magically turn into art because it's not made by AI? If not does it mean when people "make art" it's not art?
If you say the image is art, what if it's revealed it's made by AI? Does it magically stop being art or does it become less artistic after the fact? Where does value go?
The way I see it is that you're trying to gatekeep art by arbitrarily claiming AI art isn't real art. I think since we're the ones assigning a meaning to art, how it is created doesn't matter. After all if you're the artist taking the photo isn't the original art piece just the natural occurrence of the sun setting. Nobody created it, there is no artistic intention there, it simply exists and we consider it art.
there's something's highly suspect about someone not understanding the difference between art made by a human being and some output spit out by a dumb pixel mixer. huge red flag imo.
and yes, the value does go. because we care about origin and intent. that's the whole point.
if the original Mona Lisa were to be sold for millions of dollars, and then someone reveals that it was not the original Mona Lisa but a replica made last week by some dude... do you think the buyer would just go "eh it looks close enough"? no they would sue the fuck out of the seller and guess what, the painting would not be worth millions anymore. it's the same painting. the value is changed. ART IS NOT A PRODUCT.
Translation. I can't argue your point so I'm going to try characters assassination.
Pretty ironic to say art is not a product and then argue that its monetary value would decrease, which can happen only if you treat art as a product.
Imagine if instead of a physical painting Mona Lisa was a digital file and free on the internet, would people think Mona Lisa is less impressive as an art piece because anyone could own it? I think it's artistic value wouldn't decrease, only its value as a product would decrease because everyone could get it for free.
it's not a product in the sense that its value does not come from its function, otherwise it would not lose value when it would be revealed to be of a different origin, but otherwise exactly the same. i spoke of the monetary value just because it's quantifiable; it's not otherwise relevant.
if Mona Lisa was free and digital it would be as valuable as a digital Mona Lisa could be. being free and digital doesn't make it pointless, without agency or intent like AI art is.
i won't, but art has intent. AI doesn't.
Pollock's paintings are art. a bunch of paint buckets falling on a canvas in an earthquake wouldn't make art, even if it resembled Pollock's paintings. there's no intent behind it. no artist.
The intent comes from the person who writes the prompt and selects/refines the most fitting image it makes
that's like me intending for it to rain and when it eventually would, claiming i made it rain because i intended for it.
People said exact same thing about CGI, and photography before. I wouldn't be surprised if somebody scream "IT'S NOT ART" at Michaelangelo or people carving walls of temples in ancient Egypt.
the "people" you're talking about were talking about tools. I'm talking about intent. Just because you compare two arguments that use similar words doesn't mean the arguments are similar.
Intent is not needed for the art, else all the art in history where we can't say what author wanted to express or the ones misunderstood wouldn't be considered art. Art is in the eye of the beholder. Note that one of the first regulations of AI art that is always proposed is that AI art be clearly labeled as such, because whomever propose it do know the above.
i didn't say knowing the intent is needed. i believe in death of the author, so that isn't relevant.
the intent to create art is, however, needed. the fountain is art, but before it became the fountain, the urinal itself wasn't.
I get you but it's really not necessary. In case of (somewhat) realist art you can still recognize AI artifacts, but abstract art is already unrecognizable (and this is the precise reason they want AI art to be marked, so they won't embarrass themselves with peans over something churned out by computer in few seconds), not to mention there is also art created by animals, and it is considered art but it's not created with intent, except maybe the intent of people dipping dog's paw in paint. Thus we again just get to the distinction that art needs to be created just by living things? It's meaningless.
Anyway, i guess next few years will make this even more muddled and the art scene will get transformed permanently. Hell recently i've encountered some AI power metal music which is basically completely indistinguishable from normal, but in this case it mostly serve to show how uninspired and generic entire genre is.
AI is a tool used by a human. The human using the tools has an intention, wants to create something with it.
It's exactly the same as painting digital art. But instead o moving the mouse around, or copying other images into a collage, you use the AI tool, which can be pretty complex to use to create something beautiful.
Do you know what generative art is? It existed before AI. Surely with your gatekeeping you think that's also no art.
Always has been
This has been going on since big oil popularized the "carbon footprint". They want us arguing with each other about how useful crypto/AI/whatever are instead of agreeing about pigouvian energy taxes and socialized control of the (already monopolized) grid.
Considering most new technology these days is merely a distilation of the ethos of the big corporations, how do you distinguish?
Not true though.
Current AI generative have its bases in# Frank Rosenblatt and other scientists working mostly in universities.
Big corporations had made an implementation but the science behind it already existed. It was not created by those corporations.