Technology

There's a lot of "AI is theft" comments in this thread, and I'd just like to take a moment to bring up the Luddite movement at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution: the point isn't that 'machines are theft', or 'machines are just a fad', or even 'machines are bad' - the point was that machines were the new and highly efficient way capital owners were undermining the security and material conditions of the working class.

Let's not confuse problems that are created by capitalistic systems for problems created by new technologies - and maybe we can learn something about radical political action from the Luddites.

I've been saying for a year now, generative AI is going to foster a resurgence in stage theater. When movies are all 100% AI with no humans in them, we'll want to see humans act. That and "organic" movie labels.

Cool, another step in the ruining art with AI saga

These are all short clips because they look like ass if you get enough time to actually look at them. But even still, can people just stop with this shit?

Let people do the one truely human thing ffs.

Edit: Let me be clear, AI has good uses. My only argument here is that generating art is not one, especially when the training data is stolen and used for profit.

This is not the death of artists but of studios. When creating movies will become cheap, movie studios will be the ones becoming unnecessary. But artists are the creatives who feed these tools and who now can create content on their own.

This is cool and I refuse to pretend it's not.

'Oh but they used commercial movies to train it,' like I give two shits about copyright. 'Well it's gonna put cartoonists out of work,' like they weren't already getting the shaft. 'The quality of typical shows will get formulaic and lazy,' like streaming and reality television are highbrow. 'Nobody will bother making real art,' like any new medium has ever killed an old medium.

Well-meaning luddites and greedy tech bros are both missing the big picture.

This is a refrigerator.

Hollywood sells ice.

These suits think they're gonna sell a lot more ice, now that anyone can make it locally, without a whole harvesting-shipping-distribution ordeal. But if anyone can make it locally... nobody needs them.

If this technology is as simple and shallow as your worst fears, why would you buy someone else's push-button output? Why bother going online to sort through endless samey crap when you can generate exactly the crap you want in the privacy of your own home?

If this technology isn't that simple - if it still takes creativity and effort to make something worth watching - artists won't need these shitty companies to employ them. They become their own studio.

Yeah, right now it takes a mainframe to churn this out. But the technology is barely a year old. And there's already a whole free-for-all community trading filters and models. Even if big-iron approaches remain the best option, local approaches will remain possible, and they'll only get better and better - especially if that's where the bulk of fascinated ultranerds spend their time.

And none of it will ever prevent you from pointing a camera at real people.

Seeing people go gaga over all this AI trash kind of makes me convinced that most people just… do not see? Not that something is physically wrong with their vision but it’s like most of it doesn’t even register, even more so than what I thought was the normal baseline of inattention to details.

Are people just constantly distracted and not really engaging with media? Only watching or looking at things on small screens? The result of decades of cuts and devaluation of art education? Literally just being happy with whatever garbage is in front of them? It’s a mystery to me.

This is from over a month ago.