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In a post-scarcity solarpunk future, I could imagine some reasonable uses, but that’s not the world we’re living in yet.
AI art has already poisoned the creative environment. I commissioned an artist for my latest solarpunk novel, and they used AI without telling me. I had to scrap that illustration. Then the next person I tried to hire claimed they could do the work without AI but in fact they could not.
All that is to say, fuck generative AI and fuck capitalism!
It also makes a way for the poor to be able to afford to get art to make comics and other things when they otherwise would have been unable to hire artists. Generative ai also allows poor people to write code they couldn't before because they couldn't afford the help. It also gives poor people the ability to brainstorm new ideas when they can't afford a team of consultants.
It helps the poor, just like search engines and the internet. There were people back in those days scared of change as well. Gen ai is a huge equalizer or wealth and power. The vast majority of people using Gen Ai are using it for things that they never would have considered being able to hire someone to do anyway.
shh. if you can't afford to pay people, then you should just die. /s
you're quite right, and it's a shame that generative AI art is treated like a gun and not a hammer. Both can be used to kill someone. (it's not a great analogy, but hopefully people see my point about it generative AI being more than a weapon to kill artists)
I once heard an American saying, "God created men, but Sam Colt made them equal", so perhaps the comparison to a gun isn't that incorrect?
@RobotToaster @ASeriesOfPoorChoices
The comparison is correct, the logic is not. Sam Colt did not make humans equal. Look at the wealth and political power disparity between the richest and the poorest in Sam Colt's nation. Notice anything?
First of all it concentrates power and wealth on the owners of the models (Microsoft, OpenAI) or the ones that provide the tools (Nvidia).
Yes, there is truth in it, that people who couldn't afford to pay someone to create art, or get consulting, can get this now to a certain extend (if they can afford internet access and pay the AI services they need). But this comes also at the price of lowering the income of the people who provided these services. They now need to compete in the business creation market and not in the market that they trained for. Not everyone can create and maintain a business with or without starting money, just from a skill point of view. Nor does everybody want to.
Umm what?
When I run a checkpoint at home, how do you think the creator of checkpoint is profiting or gaining any power/wealth?
This stuff is ridiculously easily self hosted and run independently of any company.
It might be "ridiculously easy" but there is a reason why linux adoption is around 3ish%.
Its because it isnt the easiest option.
Can’t really run the models in reasonable amounts of time without a reasonable GPU, there’s still a bit of a cost barrier
The concentration of power part is not true unless people keep trying to use copyrights and the legal system to protect themselves from genai, at which point it will be true. Currently there's plenty of self hosted solutions like stable diffusion and services like the ai horde to help even people without gpu for free
You are still reliant on the models trained by these companies. This training is very expensive. And yes there are ioen source models exist (thank god) but there are also closed source models that are very successfully advertised.
And self hosting requires money and skill. This means there is a lot of people who lack both and may then use closed source models.
This is what we've mostly to solved with the AI Horde, where we allow people to rely on self-hosted open models.
This is good news indeed.
But I see the same problems as with email, chat etc. You can selfhost almost everything. But too few people are doing it. You can use Linux as your Desktop and at least 4% are doing it. Still too few if you ask me.
And if most of the people keep using the commercial and closed source options over the self hosted one, then I see this concentration of power. Additionally, there is the risk of regulatory capture, where big companies may try to at least hinder self hosting due to (what I consider) made up risks.
However, its good that there are currently such good open source option. I hope they will grow and become the defacto standard.
The system is explicitly setup so that normal people don't need to set up anything. Experts and enthusiasts are the one doing the complex work, while normies just use a simply client like this and power users can also use more advanced clients.
That's up to all of us to counter by promoting the good solutions instead, not of just despairing and begging politicians to fix this (they won't, they'll promote monopolies instead)
That was always the case. Having said that, I'll appreciate your enthusiasm and that you share this work.
@paw @db0
Exactly, this is just a diversionist argument pretending that just because a theoretical possibility exists the problem can be considered solved in practice - it's like the decrepti old capitalist argument that "everyone can start their own company" if they don't like how they're treated as an employee. No they can't, not in the real world out there. That only works on paper, i.e. if you ignore the current distribution of resources and privileges in the existing society and economy.
This is not theoretical. It already is in place and is already serving people. The only reason it's not growing more is because we don't have any marketing and we don't participate in the capitalist rot economy.
@db0
Yep, like I said: doesn't work as advertised "just because actual reality".
Me: "The system works exactly as advertised for thousands of people"
You, a wise person: "The system doesn't work as advertised because not everyone in the world is using it."
You're a very unserious person, so I won't engage further with this nonsense.
So your gonna solder your own video cards?
In theory sure, but in practice it’s just gonna give more control to MS and NVidia since they are the ones most people would use.
People buy GPUs already for video games and other purposes. We're using the same consumer cards, not enterprise ones.
That still involves you giving lots of money to card manufacturers. Which is rather centralized atm (not many competitors).
You give money to centralized monopolistic capitalists regardless what you do
Not when I’m creating art by hand.
Sure I’m paying for a pencil and paper, but you don’t need massive investment into means of production to create that.
That’s why the Industrial Revolution changed things, you now need big factories for your critical tools.
... now that's a silly take. A nearly $300 billion industry.
Paper creation is one of the worst sources of pollution and water drains on the planet. Far, far, far more than anything dealing with AI lol. Orders of magnitude higher.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulp_and_paper_industry
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1073451/global-market-value-pulp-and-paper/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_effects_of_paper
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2468584419300479
Writing instruments are a $17 billion industry... Get off the internet for a bit. Doomerism is getting to you.
https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/writing-instruments-market
The people who get screwed are the ones who cling to the idea that AI is the enemy and refuse to learn to use it. The jobs will be taken by the flexible and adaptive people who use this new incredible tool. This isn't a new idea, this is how it's been as long as people have had any jobs and found any more efficient way to do them. The issue is that some people are more willing to continue to grow and adapt than others. The ones who are not willing to, maybe because they are old, or just have oversized egos, will be left behind while they shout angrily into the wind that progress is evil.
This is why I focus on distribution rather than training. If you commercialize a model trained on things you don’t own/license, and it generates anything remotely infringing, you should be fully on the hook for every single incident.
But if a model is trained and distributed freely as FOSS, then it’s up to anyone running it to ensure the output is not infringing. This protects fair use while also ensuring that big companies tread more carefully when redistributing models that can violate fair use by competing with those whose work was trained on without permission and are subsequently being emulated without permission.
Who do you care so much about protecting the failed and unethical law of copyright? Are you going to tell me you don't pirate media too?
@JackGreenEarth @Veraxus
Failed and unethical as long as it's used by non-human entities like "companies" to enrich bosses who didn't create the content themselves. Just and ethical when it's used to protect actual named human authors, and only them. Big difference. Big big difference.
Why do you care so much about defending unimaginably wealthy corporations stealing the labor of regular people?
See, now we have both misrepresented each others comments.
We don’t.
We also want to see capitalism gone as well as its copyright laws.
Likewise you weren’t misrepresented, you argued in favour of copyright.
In that case, I didn’t misinterpret you, either. You argued in favor of labor theft.
There's another way for the poor to acquire art for their own comics. Can you guess what it is?
But I will literally die if I don’t get free plagiarized art :(
You would die (or be out on the street and wish you were dead) if your primary source of income relied on having access to filler art for some purpose and you didn't have thousands of dollars to hire an artist.
Do I not have hands in this scenario? If I can't draw why is my livelihood dependent on me making filler art?
Say you're producing an independent film, or a game, or some other work that is multimedia, working on a shoestring budget, and with a limited set of skills.
Barter. Between artists. That kind of collaboration happens all the time and people are deliberately ignoring it so they can justify AI LLM's.
Yeah, I can guess that you think that everyone who wants to make comics should either have to draw it themself or hire someone to draw it. Just like how you probably would have thought that anyone who wants a shirt should weave it themself or hire a hand weaver.
People will always create new and better machines to automate away what they don't want to do. Similarly, there will always be people who are upset about this. It's an age-old story. You can accept the times or try to prevent an avalanche with your body, but that snow doesn't care at all about your favorite little patch of land. It's doing its thing regardless.
Environmentally speaking, people should probably learn to sew and not be overly reliant on unsustainable mechanisation.
Yeah, and they should probably not use cars, or plastics, or make spaceships, or airplanes, or smart phones, or beanie babies. They shouldn't farm or hunt more than they need. They shouldn't make medicines either. They should do none of these things if preserving the environment is the number one concern. The issue is that there are billions of years of evolution driving us to explore and conquer, to learn and manipulate our surroundings, to do anything we can to stay alive and keep our lived ones alive. That couple billion years absolutely annihilates any vague notion of preserving the environment. I'm not saying it's a better idea, just that people are restless by design us all curling up into little balls and having minimal impact on the environment simply isn't going to happen unless something massively limits us.
If only there was some kind of compromise between "drawing comics and sewing clothes" and "burn down the entire amazon rainforest to generate apes"
And it helps the poor perform heart surgery because they couldn’t afford medical school. And it helps the poor build space craft because they couldn’t afford engineering degrees.
There’s a reason some of these things are done by experienced professionals not some AI kludge. If you really want to fix the problem, allow the poor access to education so they can become professionals in these areas if they so wish. The answer isn’t some AI telling them to put glue on their pizza.
I need a cover for my novel. Hold on real quick while I get this 4 year degree and spend $80k to send an fu to the AI overlords and design it myself.
After that I’ll throw my shovels away and use spoons instead.
Or you could pay someone... There's a bunch of starting artists who work for cheap. There, saved you $79.5k Sadly your novel won't sell because it's been buried by an avalanche of ai generated books. (amazon recently limited the number of books you can self publish to only five per day... Your argument works both ways, why should I study and practice for years to learn to write my own novel (or pay you) when Ai can just generate it for me?
I recently commissioned a logo because AI is terrible at it. Once that becomes good enough, I don’t see myself paying another $100 when I can generate it for nearly free. I had submissions for the logo that were clearly AI generated. It’s the same problem with search, you won’t know what’s human unless you dig. It harms artists, but technology improvement always leaves a trail of industries obsoleted. The technology is here, it makes some work more efficient. If you cripple it now to save jobs, you’ll limit the investment and any future gains due to fear of repeat. I think the key is to look at it as a tool, not a replacement. It can certainly help you flush out your ideas and write a better book.
Gains for who? If Ai does all the art and books and all the artists are broke, the only ones left are the corporations making money, and the ones selling AI/hardware. The rest are left with generic art, and ironically, innovation in art will stall because Ai cannot innovate.
And it's not being used as a tool, you yourself said that you'll use it instead of paying an artist. As I said, there's already a ton of Ai books being churned out, flooding the market. Are you fine with yourself being replaced by Ai because it's cheaper?
I think at the point AI can “replace” artists, the individual becomes the artist. A much less exclusionary field if you don’t have the drawing ability. It becomes just another advanced paint brush.
The true creatives will still find a way to stick out. The definition of “art” will change.
So at worst by your logic there is no difference. I have no preference for artist capitalists over chipmaking capitalists.
What means of production do you think artists hold?? It’s absolutely deranged to put artists (who 99 times out of 100 are not wealthy) and CEOs in the same class.
Don't call it gen AI when you mean generative. It also implies artificial general intelligence which we do not have.