Not that optimistically (And realistically, not common sense either apparently), but yes, it's a potential path. And a peaceful one, among a multitude of bloody ones.
ClamDrinker
joined 1 year ago
I'm not expecting anything, And I never said they had to do anything. Who would be expecting any kind of logical reasoning from US voters after this result. I said "If you want to" = "In order to get a desirable outcome, this is potentially the only way to do so.", not "Everyone must do this because I say so"
You can blame both, honestly. The US has always had the same political game as ever, people should be wise enough to understand how to play it. If you ever want to get to a more stable democracy that no longer has the stupid two party system that prevents any form of real representative democracy where you can actually have a selection of parties that represent you perfectly, the choice should be obvious.
At least with Harris they could try to work with her and convince them to change their views for the future as they ruled. Trump will call you a left wing lunatic and slam the door in your face. Zero influence and no chance for progress (and even regression) vs some influence and some chance to progress.
Definitely not just you, I instantly said "holy shit this is one ancient meme". I remember it too from the early 2000's.
First of all, I understand your point of view. And I've been looking at artists being undervalued like your potential client for decades, before AI was even a thing. So I definitely feel you on that point, and I wish it would be different. That said, here's my response. (It's a bit long, so I put it in spoiler tags)
I told him he wasn’t looking for a composer, but rather a programmer or something
spoiler
Yes, but maybe also no. Do you use computer software to compose or assist you in composing?
Like FL Studio, Audacity? Or maybe you use a microphone to record the played version of your composition?
I know maybe one or two composers, and they wouldn't go without that while I worked with them. But I'm sure you can agree using those things does not make you a programmer. It just takes a composer with a more technical mindset and experience with those tools. I don't deny there are composers that do without it, and maybe you are one of them. If so, rock on, but I'm sure you can see using computer tools does not stop you from being a composer, it just enhances it. Now if you were to never learn anything about composing and just use AI blindly, then I would agree with you.
But AI in that manner is no different, and like those other pieces of software it still requires expertise to make something actually good. However, judging from the manner your client spoke to you, I think the issue wasn't that you weren't making good music, it's that you were making too expensive music for the value he wanted to derive from it. That's sadly how the free market goes, and I agree that it has disproportionately screwed over artists because their work gets systematically undervalued. However, AI is not the cause of that, it merely made it more apparent, and it will not stop with the next thing after AI, unless we tackle it at the root cause by giving artists better protections that don't end up empowering the same people that undervalue them, which is really quite nuanced to get right and the current system we have already makes it worse than it is. This is what I fight for instead. _
I could also tell you about the written assignments that students hand in, and for which I can identify in less than 30 seconds which ones have been produced by AI (students overreact to their writing skills, it’s often laughable).
_spoiler
Students are probably the worst example of this though. Because that's basically what students are known for before AI was even a thing. The average student has no conception or feeling yet of what has artistic value or not, and most will not go into creative fields. Students used to hand in fully plagiarized works they just downloaded or took from other students, and it is indeed laughable for anyone that actually wants to make it somewhere in their field. So yes, if that's the majority of AI produced works you've encountered I can totally understand your point of view, but I implore you to broaden your horizon to people that actually work in the field. Those that already have built up the artistic mindset.
As I tell them, those who have used chatgpt have “learned” to use AI, those who have done the work have learned to carry out research, to synthesize their ideas and to structure, articulate and present them.
spoiler
But these people have not learned how to proficiently use AI, just very shallowly. They have learned how to be lazy. Which mind you, is the same laziness that you learn from plagiarizing directly. This has literally been the reality of people growing up for the entirety of human existence. You're right that the ones that did go through the effort learned more, but that does not mean they could not also value from enhancing that process with other tools. And you wouldn't even know the ones that did. Because they will not hand in something that looks like it came directly out of ChatGPT. They might have only used it for brainstorming, or proof reading, or to make a boring passage more entertaining. Someone who understands why their own effort and sense of ownership matters would never just hand in something they had zero say in, that's what lazy people do. And we have no shortage of those.
A small subset of your students will go the extra mile, and realize that they need to get better themselves to produce things with more artistic value. They too will see what AI can help them with, and what it can't. Some students that are lazy now will eventually see the light too, and realize that they're lacking behind. That's life - maturity takes time to develop.
But just because lazy people can play the guitar by randomly stroking the strings, doesn't mean a competent guitar player can't create an incredibly intricate banger with the same guitar. AI is no different. _
One last thing. As far as innovation is concerned, AI can endlessly produce pieces that sound like Bach, but it took Bach to exist in the first place, and Glenn Gould to revolutionize the interpretation of his scores for this to be possible.
spoiler
You're right that AI requires existing material. But you said it yourself. Glenn Gould would not be able to make his work without Bach. And just like that Bach has inspirations that would mean Bach as we know him would not exist without those. And if paper did not exist, Bach could not write down his pieces for us to remember now and learn from. In the same way, an artists of any kind in the future will not exist without their influences and tools, of which AI could be one.
AI can indeed produce endless pieces that sound like Bach, but only a human could use AI to produce a piece that has evokes feelings, passion, thoughts - anything to be considered to be real art. A machine cannot produce the true definition of art on it's own, but it can be invoked by an artists to do work in furtherance of their art. Because it takes a creative mind to be able to spot, transform, extend, and also know when to discard, what an AI has produced. Just like we discard sources we perceive as low in value, and sources that are high in value we take as inspiration. _
EDIT: Just want to add to this:
I have no interest in replacing this practice by entering prompts into an algorithm, even if I could make easy money from it.
That's not something anyone should do. Because that's not using it as a tool. That's making it the entire process. That's not the kind of AI usage I'm advocating for either. And you're free to forego AI completely. Just like there are probably some instruments you never use, or some genre you never visit. I don't like taking the easy way either, that's why I make creative stuff as a living too. If I just wanted money I would go elsewhere too.
If you think that's depressing, wait until you find out that it's basically nothing in the grand scheme of things.
spoiler
Most sources agree that we use about 4 trillion cubic meters of water every year worldwide (Although, this stat is from 2015 most likely, and so it will be bigger now). In 2022, using the stats here Microsoft used 1.7 billion gallons per year, and Google 5.56 billion gallons per year. In cubic meters that's only 23.69 million cubic meters. That's only 0.00059% of the worldwide water usage. Meanwhile agriculture uses on average 70% of a country's daily fresh water.
Even if we just look at the US, since that's where Google and Microsoft are based, they use 322 billion gallons of water every day, resulting in about 445 billion cubic meters per year, that's still 0.00532%. So you can have 187 more Googles and Microsofts before you even top a single percentage. _
And as others have pointed out the water isn't gone, there's some cyclicality in how the water is used.
Most things produced by AI and assisted by AI are still human creation, as it requires a human to guide it to what it's making. Human innovation is also very much based on mixing materials it's seen before in new creative manners. Almost no material is truly innovative. Ask any honest artists about their inspirations and they can tell you what parts of their creations were inspired by what. Our world has explored the depths of most art forms so there is more than a lifetime's worth of art to mix and match. Often the real reason things feel fresh and new is because they are fresh and new to us, but already existed in some form out there before it came to our attention.
That AI can match this is easily proven by fact AI can create material that no human would realistically make (like AI generated QR codes, or 'cursed' AI), very proficient style mixing that would take a human extensive study of both styles to pull off (eg. Pokemon and real life), or real looking images that could not realistically, financially, conscionably, be made using normal methods (eg. A bus full of greek marble statues).
Nobody is saying you have to like AI art, and depending on your perspective, some or most of it will still be really low effort and not worth paying attention to, but that was already the state of art before AI. Lifetimes of art are being uploaded every day, but nobody has the time to view it all. So I would really keep an open mind that good AI art and AI assisted art exists out there, and you might one day come to like it but not realize you're seeing it, because good AI usage is indistinguishable from normal art.
This kind of AI approaches art in a way that finally kinda makes sense for my brain, so it’s frustrating seeing it shot down by people who don’t actually understand it. Stop using this stuff for tasks it wasn’t meant for (unless it’s a novelty “because we could” kind of way) and it becomes a lot more palatable.
Preach! I'm surprised to hear it works for people with aphantasia too, and that's awesome. I personally have a very vivid mind's eye and I can often already imagine what I want something to look like, but could never put it to paper in a satisfying way that didn't cost excruciating amount of time. GenAI allows me to do that with still a decent amount of touch up work, but in a much more reasonable timeframe. I'm making more creative work than I've ever been because of it.
It's crazy to me that some people at times completely refuse to even acknowledge such positives about the technology, refuse to interact with it in a way that would reveal those positives, refuse to look at more nuanced opinions of people that did interact with it, refuse even simple facts about how we learn and interact with other art and material, refusing legal realities like the freedom to analyze that allow this technology to exist (sometimes even actively fighting to restrict those legal freedoms, which would hurt more artists and creatives than it would help, and give even more more power to corporations and those with enough capital to self sustain AI model creation).
It's tiring, but luckily it seems to be mostly an issue on the internet. Talking to people (including artists) in real life about it shows that it's a very tiny fraction that holds that opinion. Keep creating 👍
Totally second the latter part - it's the self destructive nature of being blindly anti-AI. Pretty much everyone would support giving more rights and benefits to people displaced by AI, but only a fraction of that group would support an anti-AI mentality. If you want to work against the negative effects of AI in a way that can actually change things, the solution is not to push against the wall closing in on you, but to find the escape.
Yeah and honestly, this is largely a reasonable standard for anyone running an email server. If you don't have SPF, DKIM and DMARC, basically anyone can spoof your emails and you'd be none the wiser. It also makes spam much harder to send without well, sacrificing IP addresses to the many spam lists. I wouldn't be surprised if some people setting up their own mail server were made aware of these things because of being blocked.
There is so much wrong with this...
AI is a range of technologies. So yes, you can make surveillance with it, just like you can with a computer program like a virus. But obviously not all computer programs are viruses nor exist for surveillance. What a weird generalization. AI is used extensively in medical research, so your life might literally be saved by it one day.
You're most likely talking about "Chat Control", which is a controversial EU proposal to scan either on people's devices or from provider's ends for dangerous and illegal content like CSAM. This is obviously a dystopian way to achieve that as it sacrifices literally everyone's privacy to do it, and there is plenty to be said about that without randomly dragging AI into that. You can do this scanning without AI as well, and it doesn't change anything about how dystopian it would be.
You should be using end to end regardless, and a VPN is a good investment for making your traffic harder to discern, but if Chat Control is passed to operate on the device level you are kind of boned without circumventing this software, which would potentially be outlawed or made very difficult. It's clear on it's own that Chat Control is a bad thing, you don't need some kind of conspiracy theory about 'the true purpose of AI' to see that.
view more: next ›
Stop trying to force your interpretation on my words, it's not what I said, period. I'm not limiting my scope to two choices. The US constitution does that for the matter of what party is in office. There are very obvious other choices, and most of them call for massive human suffering like civil war or political violence, which I'm not going to iterate on for obvious reasons. Nowhere do I deny the existence of those choices, I'm just presenting the obvious conclusion of trying to change the system in a peaceful manner.