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Total Members Voted: 20

[Strongpoint]

I saw a screenshot today of someone saying something like "I want AI to do laundry and wash dishes so I can make art. I don't want AI to make art so I can do do laundry and dishes."

I thought this was pretty insightful... the things for which people are doing AI today are the "fun" things... why aren't we using AI for the "tedious" things?

We already partially automated laundry and dishes with machines.

Also, this is silly. People didn't stop playing chess because we created machines that not only play chess, they play chess so much better that the best of us can't compete.



I actually love what AI made to visual art. It showed true value of low-level artists who have no true creativity or talent only skills of drawing. And that value is not high. Drawing, minus the creativity part, is not different than any other profession that requires fine motor skills and some basic knowledge and can be easily replaced with a math model.

Going back to the chess analogy. We are at the point where we have AIs that can beat people who barely know how pieces move. AI does perform basic task of "draw me a cute puppy in Pixar style" better than unskilled artists (and faster) but it can't compete with skilled people. Yet. And I am very skeptical that it will be any time soon. but it is already a cool tool for those skilled people allowing them to do more in less time - like every automation.

[lemon10]

I would say its more like photography. People still paint, but there is a reason the line of the old masters stopped once photography was invented.

LLM's will be the same for writing. Some people will still write for fun (and will continue to do so, even if AI writing improves to superhuman levels), but most people will stop taking the energy to learn how to write and won't try to pursue it as a career or skill. I have no doubt that as a direct result of AI there will be less human writers, and the quality of human writing in general will go significantly down.

Art is a bit of a different story since as of now AI art is fundamentally and obviously lacking compared to highly skilled humans. But if AI does actually catch up to skilled humans then the same thing will happen to art and artists as well.

and then I manually reworded a few sentences to fool those AI detectors, the professor didn't suspect a thing!)

The new way for teachers to check if you had an AI write your essay is to force you to send it as word file or google doc then check the document history, which makes it completely obvious if you had an AI generate the whole thing since actually mimicking the way a human writes word by word is impossible for current AI.
---
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VGhcSupkNs8
Speaking of artists I cannot recommend Bobby Fingers highly enough. Watch the video above, he is a true artist. AI and robotics has quite a ways to go before they can hope to reach him.

[Starver]

I suppose I should mention this, as I had to deal with it today, and it probably has a bearing.

One of my utility suppliers has switched to a ChatBot interface (which doesn't work on my prefered browser, just "spins and loads" nothing[1]... but switching over elsewhere gets it going) for the "Pay your bill" section. It used to go to the bit to put payment details in, but now it goes through a speech-bubbly-like chat interface[2] that tries to determine what you actually want to do. (Not even with Natural Language Programming, the stages I had to go through, just multichoice option selection. Maybe if I'd have gotten out to "No, something else..." options, then it'd have offered freetext as a prelude to resorting to pestering a spare human logged in and waiting on the other side of the system's cloud-based intermediary.

After several steps, I'm at pretty much the same actual payment screen as previously I'd been sent straight to by this system (one of the things I've not yet switched to Direct Debit) and its "It is now time to pay" reminders.

In my case, a lot of that was pointless. I suppose I'm funelled into a processing system that is clearly shzuzhed up to "look modern and bling" that may be designed well enough to then send everyone into the appropriate call-handling substacks relevent to them, and keep service humans out of the loop until strictly necessary. But the immediate predecessor to this system had me just go straight to where the relevent email wanted me to go[3]. Though also not perfect, to this cynical old hand with data security, it didn't have so many opportunities to be too opaque for its own good.


Caveat: pretty much nothing of the above was probably "proper" AI, although I suspect NLP/LLM modules were sitting there awaiting any input from me beyond the trivial. And it's technically easier to audit the ability for a computer to keep secure any passing private details it gets told about than you might with a human call-handler (assuming you've secured the communications system across to whichever). But it seems to me to be more Bandwagon plus Competitive Tender plus "because we can" rather than a properly considered solution.

(And remember the line from Demolition Man, along the lines of "Greetings and salutations. Welcome to the emergency line of the San Angeles Police Department. If you'd prefer an automated response, press 1 now." As much a mockery of the current situation as it was with phone-tree systems of the era. And today, still, though often prefixed by the long intro that often includes "go to www.OurCompany.com slash Chat, or use the OurCompany app, for instant assistance".)



Back to AI (full and proper), though, also adding that a wiki that I edit has started getting contributions either apparently or informed as being what someone got when they asked some ChatGPT/equivalent to summarise something. Not (so far as I know) ever completely automated, but definitely of the form not far off "please write my essay for me". Not even a school essay that had to be submitted but the person couldn't be bothered (or just couldn't?) write themselves, so they cheat, but someone having the option to contribute a paragraph or two, doesn't do anything significant about it themselves but does go off to a tame LLM and exorts it to write something that (perhaps after cursory checks and tweaks) they copypaste over. What's the point of that, then?

Ther is always the possibility of sufficient perfection of the method that it's either no worse or better than the humans (who do have time, but maybe not the right idea), and be happily undetectable. But we're probably not there, yet, in any reliable way. As the copious examples that haven't sneaked under the radar have pretty much proven.


[1] Doesn't even have the good grace to say "I'm sorry, we've arbitrarily decided that, because you don't support SVG version 3001.zeta and/or JavaScriptPremium with the 'import antigravity' module, we can't continue. Please upgrade your browser by waving your sonic screwdriver at it whilst saying 'I believe in faeries'...".

[2] Very wasteful of screen space, sitting there in the middle of a perfectly good wide monitor, but of course it's geared towards the 'phone experience'.

[3] Yes, all kinds of problems with random "Click here and pay" links. But the change from the recent way to this newer one barely helps. Fraudsters design fake interfaces all the time[4], and actually checked the chatbot's URL the first time I encountered it l, due to it resolving into a cloud-servery subdomain of one of the suppliers different domain domains[5]. Given it's unlikely to be an entirely inhouse project, but a service bought from a ChatBot B2B provider that gets tweaked to be slightly branded as appropriate for their end-clients, of course you're going to get "the same kind of look", anyway. The 'old click' was actually far more trustworthy than this 'new click'.

[4] Witness all the "Hi, this is YourISP. You need to revalidate your email account before we close it, so please click Here..." that link to random wordpress domains, SurveyMonkey pages or who-knows-what-but-it-has-a-Guatamalean-TLD-in-the-URL. Which I imagine leads to a page that is a rough facsimile of the kind of thing that anyone falling for the email's MyISP-branding would think is gospel.

[5] Depending upon what you want to check, you might end up at domains like MySupplier.co.uk or MySupplierLtd.net or MSServices.info, so ending up at something as esoteric as an address of the form cloud0xFB.MySupplier.ai/customerForm?CID=6hGi6DdkZ&SID=000005938536192&opt=foobarbaz is not totally unexpected!

[Eric Blank]

I get why were linking to xkcd comics frequently, but I think a four paragraph long link is a bit much.

[Starver]

I get why were linking to xkcd comics frequently, but I think a four paragraph long link is a bit much.

Typoed tag!

On the other hand, whenever have I said anything important and not needed at least four separate paragraphs to do so.

This post might be an exception.

Or maybe not.

[MaxTheFox]

I would say its more like photography. People still paint, but there is a reason the line of the old masters stopped once photography was invented.

LLM's will be the same for writing. Some people will still write for fun (and will continue to do so, even if AI writing improves to superhuman levels), but most people will stop taking the energy to learn how to write and won't try to pursue it as a career or skill. I have no doubt that as a direct result of AI there will be less human writers, and the quality of human writing in general will go significantly down.

Art is a bit of a different story since as of now AI art is fundamentally and obviously lacking compared to highly skilled humans. But if AI does actually catch up to skilled humans then the same thing will happen to art and artists as well.

Honestly from what I have seen of AI writing, it's exactly like decent AI art. It's passable but feels just off in a je ne sans quois way, and often feels unimaginative or generic. It's better than most amateur writers, but same can be said for image AI. It's good for filler, I suppose. Really I want a model specialized on text reprocessing rather than synthesis, it'd be more useful to me as a writer and would feel less cheaty.

[Maximum Spin]

Honestly from what I have seen of AI writing, it's exactly like decent AI art. It's passable but feels just off in a je ne sans quois way, and often feels unimaginative or generic. It's better than most amateur writers, but same can be said for image AI. It's good for filler, I suppose. Really I want a model specialized on text reprocessing rather than synthesis, it'd be more useful to me as a writer and would feel less cheaty.

Yeah, this is ultimately just the thing that the AI doomers and AI optimists both can't see. AI is mediocre at everything and can only replace people who are mediocre. This isn't something that can be fixed by adding more parameters, it's inherent to the current model. A totally novel AI design would have to be developed to change that.

Incidentally, you also notice this with the people who are worried about AI stealing their art... they're honestly never very good.

[MaxTheFox]

It's like the old adage for small business restaurant owners. If you can't offer something that McDonald's doesn't, you're not making it. And that something, by the nature of McD's, can't be sheer volume or affordability, it has to be an unique concept or cozy ambience or some kind of gimmick. Then you can thrive.

AI won't kill the arts in the same way fast food didn't kill chefs. There will always be a demand for something non-generic and non-mass-produced.

[Strongpoint]

We needed decades to come from chess-playing software that can beat beginners to one that can compete with master-level players. Then a decade more to reach the level of narrowly beating the world champion. Then one decade more to clearly superhuman level.


ChatGPT and others can beat only absolute novices. Whatever chatGPT can do - reasonably competent human can do better even if WAY slower.   

[King Zultan]

I wonder when the novice artists and writers will start complaining that an AI stole their jobs.

[Strongpoint]

I wonder when the novice artists and writers will start complaining that an AI stole their jobs.

Start complaining? You aren't regular on Twitter, are you?)

Wanna-be-artists who, by some miracle, manage to sell a commission or two per year now have a perfect excuse of why they can't enter the pro scene - copyright-breaking AIs that stole their work.

[King Zultan]

You aren't regular on Twitter, are you?)

Nope, this place is as close as I've gotten to social media.

[MaxTheFox]

Am on Mastodon which is like non-corporate Twitter. Overall it's slightly more civil but yes there's still lots of AI arguments-- though overall it's mostly calmed down and the big target right now is Microsoft Recall (which deserves all the hate really). But I try and avoid the whinier parts of AI discourse for mental health reasons.

We needed decades to come from chess-playing software that can beat beginners to one that can compete with master-level players. Then a decade more to reach the level of narrowly beating the world champion. Then one decade more to clearly superhuman level.


ChatGPT and others can beat only absolute novices. Whatever chatGPT can do - reasonably competent human can do better even if WAY slower.   

The thing with chess is that there's an objective best way to play chess, and style becomes more and more irrelevant as strength rises, while the role of memory and raw calculation keeps increasing. With writing, style and flair stays relevant at all levels, and there's not all that much technical prowess involved (not in the same way as chess). Also there's no objective best way to write a book. It's all about finding the right vibe. Which AI is better at than just normal algorithms but I'm not sure if it can ever be above average at it.

[Rolan7]

In short?  Neofascists hate artists so they're using AI to steal art from artists and pass it off as brutal efficiency.
They have/want mommy-wives for that other shit.
It's more complicated than that... but not really.

Wow and here I thought I was describing a phenomenon elsewhere.

Yeah totally y'all, AI art is good because it's punishing those lazy bad artists.  It's good that they're scared, we didn't want their services anyway.  We WERE still buying their art... for some reason... but now we don't have to do that anymore.  We can have it scraped up and delivered to us for free.  Hooray, the market!

Now only good artists will thrive, the ones who don't waste so much time sketching.  The ones whose work has broad market appeal.  Only the artistic ubermensch, the Great Artists, the uniquely talented who arrived on the scene making masterpieces- they (probably) won't be harmed by this.

As long as they follow market demand.  They're still (ugh) artists, you know how they are.  This'll keep them in line.

[MaxTheFox]

In short?  Neofascists hate artists so they're using AI to steal art from artists and pass it off as brutal efficiency.
They have/want mommy-wives for that other shit.
It's more complicated than that... but not really.

Wow and here I thought I was describing a phenomenon elsewhere.

Yeah totally y'all, AI art is good because it's punishing those lazy bad artists.  It's good that they're scared, we didn't want their services anyway.  We WERE still buying their art... for some reason... but now we don't have to do that anymore.  We can have it scraped up and delivered to us for free.  Hooray, the market!

Now only good artists will thrive, the ones who don't waste so much time sketching.  The ones whose work has broad market appeal.  Only the artistic ubermensch, the Great Artists, the uniquely talented who arrived on the scene making masterpieces- they (probably) won't be harmed by this.

As long as they follow market demand.  They're still (ugh) artists, you know how they are.  This'll keep them in line.

For the record I was specifically referring to what doesn't have mass market appeal being able to thrive regardless. Because AI can mostly make generic and frankly soulless output, i.e the artistic equivalent of McDonald's. The real job displacement by AI art would be in advertising. Which does suck. But for small artists, one commissions them because one likes their style. AI isn't actually good at replicating specific vibes of artists, especially obscure ones.

I'm not an artist and I have no intent of ever learning to draw, but my writing for example is fairly niche, I can't really imagine AI ever muscling in in that field, unlike for example generic romance novels.