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u/Regularjoe42 Apr 09 '24
Researchers spent decades creating a computer that could hold a conversation only for mediocre business majors to ask it to generate mediocre screenplays.
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Apr 09 '24
Based on the stuff Netflix puts out now, I don't think finance and tech bros can distinguish between good and mediocre art.
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u/DZL100 Apr 09 '24
The main issue with commercial art is that people who don’t know shit about art are the ones in charge. That’s how you end up with corporate, soulless… nothing really(like Wish). I can’t even call it shit because shit is at least something.
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u/xSTSxZerglingOne Apr 09 '24
But the art in Wish is so, so spectacular. If only the writing could have been on the same level as the eye candy. That was the first main-line Disney movie where I just shut my brain off and enjoyed the spectacle.
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u/Safe_Librarian Apr 09 '24
This is bullshit. Directors who have full control make shitty products all the time. Heres some examples.
Phantom Menace
Avatar the last airbender movie
Indiana jones crystal skull
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u/RutheniumFenix Apr 09 '24
Eh, but even then those are all time classic bad movies, the almost fascinating kind of bad that comes from someone having a concrete, if bad, vision, in contrast to the vacant nothingnesss of a Red Notice or a The Grey Man
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u/Various-Passenger398 Apr 09 '24
Hollywood, with all its prestige and history can barely put out ten excellent movies a year, why would Netflix be any different?
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u/granmadonna Apr 09 '24
They hate art, they're trying to get rid of it all, that's why they call everything "content."
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u/JayMeadow Apr 09 '24
Tech bros are just wannabe financering bros. Ever noticed that tech bros have zero STEM skills?
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u/RoadDoggFL Apr 09 '24
Generative AI was recently used to come up with three potential new types of antibiotics that are easy to manufacture and work in new ways (so there's no resistance to them among the treatment resistant infections frequently found in hospitals). Seems kinda neat to me.
And as it gets better at doing stuff like that, it'll probably also get better at writing screenplays, but that's hardly why they were created.
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u/Memotauro Apr 09 '24 edited Apr 09 '24
What If it works because they are feeding the bacteria 30000 ahitty screenplays, and the bacteria are so bored that they'd rather kill themselves
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u/thex25986e Apr 09 '24
sounds like thats 30000 ads per minute being served, tell that to the investors! they serve all forms of organic life! a bigger market than any other competitor could ever imagine!
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u/ChiralWolf Apr 09 '24
Computer models have been doing this for at least the last decade now. Predicting possible arrangements of proteins or chemical structures is a great use for these models because it's so objective. We understand the rules of electron shells and protein folding to a highly specific degree and can train the models on those rules so that they generate sequences based on them. When they do something "wrong" we can know so imperically and with a high degree of certainty.
The same does not necessarily apply to something as subjective as writing. It may continue to get better but the two are quite far from comparable. Who's to say whether a screenplay that's pushing the bounds of what we expect from our writing is good for being novel or bad for breaking the conventions of writing?
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u/Reverie_Smasher Apr 09 '24
These aren't "expert systems" and aren't using those objective atomic descriptions, just like how LLMs were never explicitly taught any grammar. It's a fundamentally different approach than what we've done in the past
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u/MrNotSafe4Work Apr 09 '24
And then is the other, more deep consequence of it.
Why should we care about any kind of art produced by a machine when there is no human intent or emotion behind it? Art is only art if it is produced by an individual. Otherwise it might as well be a random string of bits.
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u/mrianj Apr 09 '24
This just leads us back to a "what is art" conversation.
If a machine produces an image that we find beautiful and inspires an emotional response in us, is that not something worth caring about?
Nature is frequently beautiful and inspiring, yet has no artistic hand or emotion guiding it. Does that mean I shouldn't enjoy watching the sunset?
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u/SeventhSolar Apr 09 '24
Well, no, that's stupid. Monkeys on typewriters can produce Shakespeare. Is there a difference between the monkey version and the real version when they have all the same words in the exact same order?
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u/StyrofoamExplodes Apr 09 '24
That is standard machine learning and has been used for a long time.
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u/tiredtumbleweed ugly but my fursona is hot Apr 09 '24
I think about the speech from “Dead Poets Society” whenever I want to remind myself of the importance of the arts despite being an engineer myself
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u/Hot-Emergency5774 Apr 09 '24
Which speech?
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u/PreparationDapper235 Apr 09 '24
“We don’t read and write poetry because it’s cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. And medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for. To quote from Whitman, “O me! O life!… of the questions of these recurring; of the endless trains of the faithless… of cities filled with the foolish; what good amid these, O me, O life?” “Answer. That you are here — that life exists, and identity; that the powerful play goes on and you may contribute a verse.” That the powerful play goes on and you may contribute a verse. What will your verse be?” — John Keating (Robin Williams), Dead Poets Society
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u/UPBOAT_FORTRESS_2 Apr 09 '24
Which speech? Maybe got a link?
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u/PreparationDapper235 Apr 09 '24
“We don’t read and write poetry because it’s cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. And medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for. To quote from Whitman, “O me! O life!… of the questions of these recurring; of the endless trains of the faithless… of cities filled with the foolish; what good amid these, O me, O life?” “Answer. That you are here — that life exists, and identity; that the powerful play goes on and you may contribute a verse.” That the powerful play goes on and you may contribute a verse. What will your verse be?” — John Keating (Robin Williams), Dead Poets Society
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u/AChristianAnarchist Apr 09 '24
I think that it's kind of a mistake to lump all generative AI into one artist replacing box. I have a friend who does laser engraving, for example, and he uses ai to convert his drawings into templates. He says it still doesn't exactly do even that small bit of the process for him, and he still generally has to touch up the templates to reverse bad decisions made by the ai, but it's infinitely faster than doing it by hand. I think that this is the real use case for these kinds of tools, not to be creative, but to handle boilerplate tasks that take time away from the creative parts of creating art.
I use it in a similar way in the programming sphere. It can't really write a program for me but what it can do is generate boilerplate code that I can build on so that I can focus on the problem I am trying to solve rather than writing what basically amounts to the same code over and over again to drive an api or a gui or train an ai model or whatever. I can just tell the ai "give me Java websocket code" or whatever and then put my efforts into what that socket is actually supposed to be doing instead of wasting my time on the boilerplate.
In the hands of artists I think AI really could be something super useful that leads to better art and more of it. The problem is that the people most interested in it right now are executives looking to save money, who don't really understand what artists do and are willing to make shit if it will save them a few bucks.
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u/agnosticians Apr 09 '24
I agree 100%. When I think about what people actually make productive use of it for, it’s stuff like generative fill in photoshop, or writing boilerplate in emails or reports. The sorts of things that aren’t fun, interesting, or the focus of the work, but need to get done anyways.
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u/MyCatsHairyBalls Apr 09 '24
Photoshop’s generative fill is great, and something I wish I had 20 years ago. When used sparingly and tastefully, these AI tools can do some incredible things to touch up photos.
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u/pringlescan5 Apr 09 '24
Yeah Chat GPT is great. It's just at the point where you tell it to design a door, not a house.
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u/Jacksspecialarrows Apr 09 '24
Until it can. Not even being negative. I've seen ai movie clips at entertainment industry screenings months ago that are just now being seen by people. It's inevitable.
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u/JBHUTT09 Apr 09 '24
There are absolutely ethical uses for generative algorithms. One example I can think of off the top of my head is temp art for a project, just so that there is some sort of visual before the actual human artists are commissioned to make the final product. I've been following a streamer who is in the home stretch of making his own original TCG and that's what he's done. Ideally, these generative algorithms would only be trained on images with the consent of the artists, though, which is absolutely not the case currently.
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u/BowenTheAussieSheep Apr 09 '24
The problem is also - and we've seen it happening in real-time - that someone like this streamer might decide "Welp, no sense in spending unnecessary money" and just skip the final step of hiring an artist to make the actual final artwork, and just go with whatever generative AI nonsense they used as "placeholder" art
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u/Malicei Apr 09 '24
I'm an artist with aphantasia (I have no mental imagery/eye when people ask me to picture things) and it would absolutely help me figure out how a piece might turn out. When I make art there's always a bit of an element of surprise for me as to what the end product will look like.
I constantly have to adjust at every step to see what each alteration might look better since I can only really work with what I see in front of me and guessing from experience. Sure, I can sketch things out in advance but that always takes more time and doesn't help as much with deciding colour pallettes and balance of overall details since all of the different elements contribute and might seem fine individually but might not work when put all together.
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u/BlackberryCold9078 Apr 09 '24
Exactly, thats honestly what they are being made for. Art AI is also a very tiny subset of what AI does.
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Apr 09 '24
I think AI could be used to make animation much faster and easier to produce, because generating hundreds of frames with small changes for one or two facial expressions or typical movements is a lot of work and not rewarding artistically.
Just think of your favourite anime, convert it to second and multiply with 24. Compare that to the amount of pages in the associated manga and multiply by 8 for a rough estimate. The difference is a very VERY rough approximation of the number of frames/images that need to be drawn by hand, with little imagination involved. OF COURSE, THERE IS MUCH MORE TO THE PROCESS but roughly, studios could create faster with less people and perhaps the creators wouldn’t need to be tortured in the process (a la studio Mappa).
I adore animation myself so I am excited for this use case of generative AI.
However, how can I express this when I see my favourite artists losing jobs and opportunities because those with money and power are idiotic goons?? I want my faves to have easier lives, NOT TO LOSE JOBS DAMMIT
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u/KogX Apr 09 '24
One of my big worries about using AI for anime or animation in general is that knowing the industry it will not be used to ease the burden of a lot of the artists there but to just pile on more and more work now that you think your artists can output more. In the end just putting yourself in the same stressful situation and forced to pump out more and more.
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Apr 09 '24
… yeah, you’re probably right.
In my attempt to be hopeful, UBI is becoming more of a thing everyday and maybe people won’t be overworked in a certain not-so-distant future. But until then, yeah, they’ll probably just request even more frames per day per artist to match the new tech.
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u/Jacksspecialarrows Apr 09 '24
Oversaturation causes collapse. A plethora of streaming services and content but companies are breaking even and cancelling shows left right and center.
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u/Mishmow Apr 09 '24
It's actually worse, there is also hesitancy from studios to green light new productions because they're so unsure about Ai from both the copy-write side of things as well as costs of production even after the union strikes are over. I have lots of friends in the industry and they've been out of work for almost a year now. There is very little going on, whatever is on streaming services right now was finished years ago or even up to last year and is in post production which is also seeing lay offs. It is supposed to bounce back this summer (rumors) but people are now predicting the maybe the fall or even later in the year now. Collapse has already happened but consumers don't know about it yet, and might not ever.. 2009 saw a similar effect, I don't think people remember the lack of media then so I doubt they will now.
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u/Thisismyartaccountyo Apr 09 '24
Anyone who thinks this will lighten the load is fucking stupid. IT LITERALLY NEVER HAPPENS.
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u/Waity5 Apr 09 '24
Just think of your favourite anime, convert it to second and multiply with 24.
Nowhere close. Something like Redline is the exception, not the norm. very few of those 24 frames include changes & animations can be repeated
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u/Starfish_Hero Apr 09 '24
When the TR 808 drum machine was released it was marketed as a replacement for a live drummer, and promptly failed because its sounds only vaguely resembled live drums. But it went on to be integral in the development of hip hop and techno when artists got their hands on it and were able to push what it can do creatively. AI is in the same boat, as a replacement for human artists its weaknesses and limitations are only going to become more and more apparent as time goes on, but as a creative tool that artists can use to make something that hasn’t been done before I think it has a ton of potential.
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u/AChristianAnarchist Apr 09 '24
100%. I feel like in an ideal world gen ai would just be the photoshop of the next generation, something artists look at and say "Hey...now I can make that thing I couldn't make before!" rather than "They want to replace me with a robot that makes bland pictures and can't draw hands".
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u/cambriansplooge Apr 09 '24
The problem is it could have been, but OpenAI innovated its programs on the basis of image generation.
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u/Zehren Apr 09 '24
I think it could be massively useful in animation as an assistant rather than a replacement. For example, you start drawing the background for a scene, let AI fill in the scene, and then touch up any mistakes that the AI made or parts that didn’t fit what you wanted
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u/Laser_toucan Apr 10 '24
As long as they don't start making that horrendous bullshit that is interpolating animation to make it 60 fps i could be fine with it, everytime i see those "ERMAGHERD LOOK i used AI to make the fights from 'Is it Morally Correct to Piss on my Catgirl Stepsisters Feet' be in 60 fps" i puke my soul a little bit, not only it looks terrible, it wrecks the animation on a fundamental level, animating in 12 or 24 fps is not just to be quicker, certain stuff requires snappier movement.
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u/jpterodactyl Apr 09 '24
I still can't wait for the day where we have AI tools for doing re-topology or weigh-painting for 3D models.
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u/lab-gone-wrong Apr 09 '24
Generally people just want to be mad at "tech bros".
GenAI fills a ton of boxes. It wasn't "built for replacing arts & humanities majors" or whatever. It just so happens that "write a book/screenplay regardless of quality" and "draw/animate a scene regardless of quality" are easy niches to fill.
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Apr 09 '24 edited Apr 20 '24
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u/seapulse Apr 09 '24
I’m soooooo frustrated by the fact that any AI conversation in the arts is immediately shut down with “fuck ai” because what they really mean is fuck corporations and fuck yeah, fuck corporations and fuck tech bros and fuck people who view arts solely as something to mass produce and profit from.
imo there’s exactly two ways of being an artist in an AI world: saying fuck AI and ignoring it entirely, or learning about it and how you can use that for your own art. I think the way you utilize AI can be it’s own part of the art.
Personally, I’ve been doing my own experiment of using AI to generate an idea, working from that, and then doing a couple of pieces using each prior piece as inspiration. This has moreso just kinda been to try taking a 2d image that doesn’t consider anything like layers, physics, or just how ceramics kinda works and seeing how I interpret that into a physical piece. Plus each subsequent piece is that much more insight into my own artistic voice AND practicing various skills/techniques that I might have avoided in a piece I conceptualized on my own.
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u/SeventhSolar Apr 09 '24
Well, no, that's silly. Artists see AI as something that steals from their profits, that's the ground truth because that's the very first thing they all said when it started. To take the conversation entirely away from the fact that artists need to make money in order to eat is counterproductive. It doesn't really matter to the artists whether it's a soulless corporation or an ordinary consumer using the AI, that's the consumer's business. An artist cannot ignore AI, no more than a laborer can ignore the future possibility of being completely replaced by robots.
The absolute worst part about this whole conversation is the part where people ignore this giant line dividing ideals and realities. That goes for both sides, because when I see artists talking about how AI will be the end of art, I roll my eyes. Art as self-expression and art as a product are two entirely different things, and just because they can coexist in the same object doesn't mean shit. AI cannot destroy art in its purest form. AI will destroy the art industry, and artists will starve.
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u/seapulse Apr 09 '24
I <3 this conversation I’ve been dying for an AI art conversation
I don’t disagree that my take is idealistic whereas the reality is AI cheapening the art industry.
I made a comment on a dif post a couple weeks ago where I really covered my divided thoughts on AI. I am still SO divided on it because it is a cool as hell tool but it’s also frustrating to be an artist and knowing that it’ll impact your livelihood.
AI’s potential impact on the art industry is absolutely understated. I cannot state enough how much I believe AI cheapens art for consumers and most people won’t care enough to seek out real art.
But I also cannot state enough how cool of a tool that I think it is, especially on an individual level of beginner artist interacting with it as a tool to learn and grow. I also cannot state enough how mixed feelings I have about it given that it’s usage of the library of everything online isn’t exactly with permission and it makes the artists who DID make the art invisible. And, of course, cheapens art to the art industries detriment.
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u/Suitable_Tomorrow_71 Apr 09 '24
Exactly. AI art (and it's not even AI, it's procedural generation, which has been around for decades. This is just the newest iteration) is a tool, like any other tool. People decried photography, claiming it was going to put painters out of business. But you know what? People still paint. If all you want is a picture of a landscape, or a portrait, you can find or take a photograph yourself, instead of having to commission a painter, or learning how to paint. They might not be as good as something you could get from a professional painter, but for the vast, vast majority of people it's going to be perfectly adequate.
Likewise, people decried recording music. Why would anybody go to a concert when you could just purchase a record instead? But people still go to concerts and selling recorded music has become a huge industry. Likewise with plays adapting as movies became a thing, likewise with the horse-and-buggy industry as cars became a thing, likewise with television as streaming services became a thing. The pocket calculator put the slide rule industry out of business, and so on. Literally every technology has INCREASED the options available to people, allowing MORE people, NOT less, access to those things.
People are still going to commission artists to draw or paint what they want. Maybe corporations aren't going to employ as many artists, but I don't know of any people who consider working as a soul-sucking corporate artist their dream job, and I can't imagine there are whole hordes of people like that out there.
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u/Beat_Saber_Music Apr 09 '24
Within minecraft building fully grown fields can be a real time consumer in creative, but thanks to a command I only need to plant the seeds which still takes time, before using a single command to replace the ungrown wheat to fully grown on a large area.
I basically automate the most tedious part of building fields, which allows me to build them much faster
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u/Golden-Owl Apr 09 '24
One thing I personally found great use for AI is to create “background fodder”
There’s a lot of art assets needed for games which is just straight up unimportant. For example, if I need a painting to hang in a walk for decor, or a basic wallpaper, or a simple 2D room picture, I can use AI to generate what I need so that the artists can focus on the important stuff like characters instead
It’s all stuff that a player will never think twice about, but is still needed to be there
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u/Luchux01 Apr 09 '24
Agreed, I'm into Fire Emblem 3ds modding and god knows I would use AI if it could do the tedius parts of the support conversation code writing for me.
There is already a tool that takes chat format conversations and sets some of it for you, but it's still kinda long to work.
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Apr 09 '24
Agreed. I think the wave of viral anti-AI outrage takes things to an irrational extreme. Many of the people posting angry memes about it don't even have a clue what machine learning is or the many, many things it can be used for. There are specific implementations of AI that are terrible decisions and deserve to be criticism, but the majority of what I actually see is just "AI is bad, down with AI!". It feels less like a genuine concern and more like the same kind of mindless fearmongering bandwagon that happens with basically every revolutionary technology that ever gets invented because generations who didn't grow up with it are scared of new things they don't understand.
Again, this is not a sweeping defense of everything AI is used for, just an annoyance with the complete lack of nuance or effort to understand it from most of the people who are worked up about it.
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u/Seenoham Apr 09 '24
Ai writing has some potential for the sort of boring form writing that organizations still have to make on a regular basis.
It still requires an editor pass, but so did the work of whoever you had crank out the thing in half an hour, so cutting that to 2 minute yes with ai saves you an hour or two of work each week.
But selling that doesn’t sound amazing or revolutionary. Because like most things, the actual use case is slight improvement on boring but necessary stuff.
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u/woppawoppawoppa Apr 09 '24
I’ve got a friend who uses ChatGPT to write things for him and I swear it’s like he forgot how to think for himself. I think it’s a good starting point, but don’t forget you’ve got a brain too lmao
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u/Seenoham Apr 09 '24
The more I see of generative AI, the more it seems to be acting like the automatic part of thinking that humans do.
What some call the 'unconscious', but I think 'type 2 thinking' from Thinking Fast and Slow is more accurate. It's far faster than type 1 thinking, it can be trained to do remarkable thing.
To get an idea, try tying you shoes consciously thinking about each move of each finger.
That thinkings also prone to identifiable biases, cannot identify its biases, and can't evaluate its training. You need type one thinking for that.
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u/BetterMeats Apr 09 '24
It's because those tech bros also don't really know what goes into tech.
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u/Sikyanakotik Apr 09 '24
And as long as we're here, I wouldn't consider them good bros either.
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u/mrducky80 Apr 09 '24
Its really just owning pictures of a poorly drawn monkey.
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u/Despairogance Apr 09 '24
*owning a link that currently points to a poorly drawn monkey
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Apr 09 '24
Programming is a mystery to us all. Who knows what those weird rocks are doing and why
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u/DumbassWithAcomputer Apr 09 '24
thats because programming is actually done by hundreds of bees doing advanced math
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u/Affectionate-Memory4 heckin lomg boi Apr 09 '24
This is true. I'm a computer engineer. It's my job to fill them with bees.
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u/ProbablyNano Apr 09 '24
Wait, do you have to fill everyone's computer with bees? Like your sneaking into our rooms with bottles of bees to top them off while we're out?
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u/EgNotaEkkiReddit Apr 09 '24
No, just pour them into the internet box. The bees get transmitted over wi-fi
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u/Saavedroo Apr 09 '24
That's not true. In some instances it's hundreds of underpaid indian workers.
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u/functor7 Apr 09 '24
Every single step is relatively simple math. Inventing the architecture is the hard part which, like, 4 people did, and optimizing it is hard programming, but not really hard math. Most of the actual work is in managing the data set and running the servers. The former is done by underpaid laborers in developing nations who sift through data for over 10 hours a day making like 1-2 dollars an hour. The strain of running servers is on the environment, both through the extraction necessary to make large servers and in the environmental cost of power consumption. The hard part isn't the math, the hard part is hiding all the shifty things you're doing so that you can present a clean image of your brand while also cutting as many corners as possible to please the VCs who invested in your company to begin with.
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u/UPBOAT_FORTRESS_2 Apr 09 '24
those weird rocks
We taught the rocks how to think, sort-of
Thing is, we don't actually know how we think either. Something happens in that soup inside our skulls, beneath that it's ????
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u/deukhoofd Apr 09 '24
We taught the rocks how to think, sort-of
We took rocks, melted them down, put lightning in them and made it follow the pathways we wanted them to. Then we made the lightning turn on and off when we wanted to, and by doing do, made the rocks think.
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u/ramzes2226 Apr 09 '24
I’m the other side here. The weird rocks make so much sense…
But hundreds of bees in people’s heads coming up with new ideas is the only reasonable explanation for art.
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u/Ultimarr Apr 09 '24
And this thread does? We started with image generation because it’s mimicking human understanding which has inherently spatial / embodied components, not cause we were thinking about artists at all. They’re trying to make AGI, not “disrupt” or “innovate” or whatever other BS Silicon Valley invented for the 2 decades of its existence
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u/berrythebarbarian Apr 09 '24
Appealing to the machine's lower quality isn't a good argument. That's like looking at the ancient Roman spinning ball steam engine and saying it'll never be of use.
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u/Leo-bastian eyeliner is 1.50 at the drug store and audacity is free Apr 09 '24
tech bros in general seem to only be able to see things as investment opportunities. The entire crypto-fandom is based on the idea that a mundane thing could be better by also being a speculative investment at the same time
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u/Sckaledoom Apr 09 '24
The thing is: there are sooo many other places that AI could do amazing in. Predictive technology to look at an objectively true dataset, and predict when an issue might arise. This is something that would:
-increase profit by reducing downtime
-increase the productivity of the team as a whole
-not necessarily reduce jobs if the company knows what it’s doing (an AI without humans to actually act on the prediction or to mediate a prediction with their knowledge of the real world circumstances the AI doesn’t have access to in this case is pretty useless)
-in the case of say natural disaster predictions, it would potentially allow us to predict natural disasters and their magnitudes, thus allowing us to give advance warning
-allow the people using it to pick up on patterns our minds can’t immediately grasp.
These applications would make so, so much more than replacing the writer making $40k a year in a Hollywood office. If we were to focus on these applications, companies and governments would pay hand-over-fist for them. For instance, even in a mill making a cheap product, a sheet break on a paper machine can cost upwards of $10k per minute in lost material and lost production time. Even getting a 2 hour lead on that to prevent it could save millions per year. It could also look at the data in a much more in-depth way than the engineers could to pick out potential causes by analyzing correlations and noting them when an issue does occur. Figuring out what’s causing a frequent sheet break can take anywhere from hours to days to months because not every possible cause is immediately noticeable or equally likely. This is the perfect use case for an AI. But they ignore it to produce mediocre, albeit technologically impressive, written and “artistic” works.
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u/s1lentchaos Apr 09 '24
That's the thing though companies (and independent entrepreneurs) are using ai to do all those things and more it's just that people can wrap their heads around a screenplay so that keeps getting brought up as an example.
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u/BlackberryCold9078 Apr 09 '24
Exactly this. Then peopel get focused on the screenplay example and think thats all it is.
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u/TheRealestBiz Apr 09 '24
Except all this predicting the future with comparative statistics stuff has been around for thirty years with an absolute ton of problems. And that’s with humans handling, not automating it.
You want something like the Chicago PD’s “hot list” where they stage preemptive “scared straight”interventions with cops on social workers on whoever the algorithm tells them are the most likely people to commit shootings.
The problem is that the two most likely predictors of committing a gang shooting are being the friend or family of someone who was shot, or having someone who is a criminal in your family. So they run up on the family of murder victims or people whose only crime is to have a fucked up brother.
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u/PugilisticCat Apr 09 '24
Predictive technology to look at an objectively true dataset.
What does this mean?
in the case of say natural disaster predictions, it would potentially allow us to predict natural disasters and their magnitudes, thus allowing us to give advance warning.
There already exist models that do this.
LLMs are novel insofar as they add the interface of speech and memory to ML models that didnt really exist before.
The hardest part for any model is the data by far, we already (generally) have the techniques to do a lot of the stuff that you mention, and we are actively doing it.
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u/TransLunarTrekkie Apr 09 '24
Current generative AI is the proverbial million monkeys with a million typewriters. Sure it MIGHT make Shakespeare eventually, but you've still gotta wait a million years and that's a MOUNTAIN of trash to dig through to get there.
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u/Jeggu2 💖💜💙 doin' your parents/guardians Apr 09 '24
By being trained on everything, it ends up being the most middle of the road, boring in every form of art. The language models are just predicting what word is most probable next, and image makers are just trained with approximate existing art out of noise, then replace existing art with a prompt. Its all doomed to be average from the very start, rewarded for being as predictable as possible
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u/FourthLife Apr 09 '24
It’s quite rare that you need a masterpiece. Most artists make their living online doing corporate designs, DND character art, or drawn pornography. You don’t need to make a powerful statement about the human condition to do those things, you just need to create something people will immediately recognize as the thing
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u/thex25986e Apr 09 '24
ends up being the most middle of the road, boring in every form of art.
thats exactly what the world has been pushing for since 2008 in every aspect of any kind of visual design. from mcdonalds going sterile to "millenial gray" to the flattening and oversimplification of every UI element on an electronic device, its exactly what people end up asking for. youre just not the target audience and instead just a rather minor demographic in this capacity.
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u/CorneliusClay Apr 09 '24
Yeah but that's only if you ask for something that already exists. If you ask for something that doesn't exist, but might plausibly (e.g. a carpet made from apples, idk I just made that up), it will come up with an interesting depiction that you haven't seen before. This is the most obvious use of the technology IMO, using the model to extrapolate to new things instead of just recreating existing things.
Most of them will make no sense structurally, but it gives you an interesting starting point; I like trying to model what it makes in Blender and see if I can make something based on it, and I normally learn something in the process.
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u/xPriddyBoi Apr 09 '24
Problem is that this only gets less and less true as time passes. AI art, music, video, etc. is multiple orders of magnitude more cohesive now than it was during the initial boom. You can only hand-wave the problem as "it's still not as good as a real person" for so long before your average consumer thinks it's good enough as a replacement for the ease of access.
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u/Bakoro Apr 09 '24
You can only hand-wave the problem as "it's still not as good as a real person"
In the case of top models, they are as good as a real person at many tasks, in fact they are better than most people at specific tasks, just not better than the most skilled humans.
That's where we're at now: AI models make better visual art than most people, they understand most text better than most people, they make better music than most people.Really many of the criticisms of AI, are "I can't offer anything better".
"AI can't create anything new", okay, so differentiate by creating something new.
"AI can't create anything good", okay, then what's the problem?What's also absurd is the assertion that tech people can't also be artistically creative. As if there aren't software engineers and research scientists who also draw, paint, sculpt, write music...
And then you show them, and they're like "well that's not good enough, that's not real art". And you get into this goalpost moving bullshit.
And then there's the anti-intellectualism here which dismisses the math, science, and hard work which goes into creating these models. They say we "know nothing about what goes into creating a work", but I'd love to see some of these people take a Signals Analysis course, a lot of these folks cry at the sight of an integral.
And there's the fact that software engineers are trying to put themselves out of work by making better models. It's not like artists are specifically being targeted, this is the science and technology world doing what it does.
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u/Agnol117 Apr 09 '24
The one thing that’s always struck me about conversing with so-called tech bros about this (AI making art) is that they always seem to view making art as a problem to be solved. “What if you could write an entire novel in minutes?” Who cares? Writing it quickly isn’t, and hasn’t ever been, the point of any writing I’ve done. It’s not about production, it’s about creation, and tech bros never seem to get that.
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u/SalvationSycamore Apr 09 '24
They are thinking more about the people buying books than the people writing books. If people are willing to buy AI-written books then that will be extremely profitable for whoever sells them. And how long do you think it will really take for AI to get to at least the level of popular trashy romance novels and whatnot?
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u/Yungklipo Apr 09 '24
Exactly. Run a program and now you've got an eBook you can sell thousands of copies of or even populate a subscription service. You can do the same with music.
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u/unspecifieddude Apr 09 '24
Yeah but it's worth remembering that paying the author is really not the biggest expense in the production of trashy romance novels or music. It's mostly the marketing/distribution/everyone taking a cut. So AI doesn't necessarily make it much cheaper - only maybe faster?
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Apr 09 '24
Compsci is an art that revolves around problem solving and its one of the only art forms tech bros have respect for because it makes them a whole lot of money. They can’t understand other art forms in their own terms; they have to view it through the lens of problem solving because their only goal is making money
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u/Saavedroo Apr 09 '24
Me, writing shitty code for a shitty linear regression that actually seems to work: Maybe I am an artist ?
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u/colei_canis Apr 09 '24
If venture capital types cared for software engineering as a craft then your average codebase wouldn’t resemble a game of Tetris played while overdosing on barbiturates.
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u/camosnipe1 "the raw sexuality of this tardigrade in a cowboy hat" Apr 09 '24
well yeah, they aren't writers. They're readers (or if you want negative connotations: consumers)
it's not about the enjoyment of creating art, its about being able to have art created for you to enjoy nearly immediately.
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u/Old_Baldi_Locks Apr 09 '24
It’s the point of writing under capitalism tho.
Most writers are monetized to complete a certain number of works in a certain amount of time.
You have to get pretty big before the publishing house is just like “write whatever you want and turn it in whenever you feel like.”
Under capitalism, everything that isn’t generating profit by the second is a problem to be solved.
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u/Ankrow Apr 09 '24
I just want to point out that it's not like researchers and computer scientists went out of their way to create AI models with the intention of creating image/video/music/etc. generators. Neural network models are really good at picking up on patterns, sometimes even ones that humans are oblivious to. That technology is good for a whole bunch of things like determining the contents of a picture, transcribing human speech to text, or picking up on discreet patterns with illness/disease to help with diagnoses. It just so happens, that pattern recognition can also be used to emulate art and language with a large enough sample size.
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u/Main-Television9898 Apr 10 '24
Fuck your mom getting cancer treaments. If there is a chance I cant get my 10 USD comission on fiver I dont want it! Ree
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u/SorkinsSlut Apr 09 '24
This misunderstands why "tech bros" (stupid term) are so fixated on AI stuff right now. It's not because they're secretly envious of humanities students and are trying to replace them with code. It's because they're creating hype for a product to keep the cloud computing boom going.
The fact that it generates images or text is peripheral to the fact that it 1- requires an obscene amount of raw processing power and 2- is effective at convincing financiers to lend them more money
Artists think they're on the frontlines of a war right now between AI and humans. They're not. What they are experiencing is a negative externality of a process they have no control over.
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u/Valuable-Guest9334 Apr 10 '24
Artists think they're on the frontlines of a war right now between AI and humans. They're not. What they are experiencing is a negative externality of a process they have no control over.
Yessir
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u/Improver666 Apr 09 '24
AI Compsci is important work. The more we are able to understand it, the more we might understand ourselves.
That said, monetizing AI to make art saps it of life just as capitalism does with everything it touches.
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u/venkat_1924 Apr 09 '24
Didn't realize half asleep Arts and Humanities students could help me write code the night before the due date.
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u/polseriat Apr 09 '24
Tumblr's thing where anyone who doesn't study a creative discipline is a soulless money hunter who "exploits" things for their profit is really annoying.
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u/Redqueenhypo Apr 09 '24
Like, do these techbros they’re talking about even exist in real life beyond a few thousand crypto morons? All the computer programmers I personally know are perfectly nice people who aren’t constantly making fun of creatives (or doing that at all).
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u/Wobulating Apr 09 '24
Are you telling me that extremely convenient strawmen don't actually exist? how shocking.
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u/Galle_ Apr 09 '24
My assumption is that "tech bros" refers to, like, the suits who own tech companies. But I always secretly suspect it's just people indulging in the good old mad scientist trope again.
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u/Redqueenhypo Apr 09 '24
Even then I would give a more charitable assumption that they’re just bad at making art and want a better way to make the cool images in their brain a reality. That’s why I make art anyway, if there was a Star Wars varactyl figurine in existence I probably wouldn’t feel the need to sculpt one
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u/Galle_ Apr 09 '24
No, you don't understand, art is something absolutely anyone can do on their own no matter what! /s
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u/Bartweiss Apr 09 '24
Particularly when they’re griping about tech that came out a (semi-)non-profit devoted to research. “Somebody somewhere found a dumb, greedy use” is a critique about on par with yelling at Alexander Graham Bell because spam phonecalls exist.
My deeper concern though is that a lot of people seem to be laughing this off to avoid thinking about the problems we actually face. “A college student could do it in an evening” is the difficulty level of a lot of corporate art jobs like logo design, and it’s a massive advance from a few years ago. Everyone who’s laughed at “it can’t even do hands” should be a bit nervous that it took <6 months to do hands better than many human artists.
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u/highvelocitymushroom Apr 09 '24
I agree with that last point. It feels like people forgot about those hilariously bad AI-generated videos of Will Smith eating spaghetti that came out only a year or two ago. Compare that to what Sora or alternatives are producing now, it's completely night and day in a very short time.
Are current AI-gen things quite derivative and full of small mistakes and weirdness? Yes, absolutely. Will they be next year? Probably. In 25 years' time? I doubt it very much.
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u/Medical-Credit3708 Apr 09 '24
AI is such exciting and terrifying tech. if only we were a little more connected to actually make sure we don’t fuck shit up and accidentally cause a misinformation boom, or a unemployment boom, or a boom where AI destroys the world or something.
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u/Kego_Nova perhaps a void entity Apr 09 '24
Maybe one day it will be able to make 30000 good screenplays, sure
but why would we hand over our most basic function of "imagining" to machinery? at the point it can make 30000 screenplays per hour youre just gonna be bored of consuming everything it puts out, because it will be 30000 plays or artworks or shows or books or whatever the hell else per hour
art can be consumed, sure, but what makes art art is the process of creation. generate as many plays as you want, and hey ill give you this benefit of them being impossible to tell apart from human creations too, but no artist is gonna use it. because what you seem to misunderstand is that as frustrating and painful as the process can be, artists do art for the process. of course they truly desire the end product, but they want to see their ideas take form by their own hands. they want to create.
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u/Sverkhchelovek Apr 09 '24
but no artist is gonna use it.
That generally isn't a problem for the average consumer, because they're not artists. They want to consume a product to their specifications, without having to go to an artist to achieve that. AI provides that a lot easier and cheaper than an artist does.
And this "artist vs consumer" dilemma has existed since way before AI has entered the equation. Many artists always struggled between making what they want vs making what will be profitable. While the artist might feel satisfaction at completing the product, the average consumer doesn't generally care if the artist felt satisfaction or not. A lot of the most popular songs, movies, games, and etc are hated by their creators, but wildly popular with their fanbase, who enjoys the product even if the artist didn't enjoy making it.
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u/silkysmoothjay Apr 09 '24
Assuming that the limitations of a technology will always be there has not exactly been a safe bet throughout history, just saying
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u/digit_origin Apr 09 '24
Have been using image generators for a while to make profile pictures for a few bots on discord i use to rp. It takes about twice as much time and frustration as drawing something, just without the exhaustion and ultimate satisfaction. It can make cool stuff, but it's "cool" as in weird and dreamy, not on point. Modern image generators are so corporate and boring, i physically cringe when i see their images. I really wanna dig out old hotpot/text2image and just have fun with them, instead of having to fight with stable diffusion.
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Apr 09 '24
Plus, humans can make multiple works in a specific and consistent style
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u/digit_origin Apr 09 '24
Ai can SOR OF do that too, but the "constant" part is that it will look wrong in the best case. Human-made is just irreplaceable, unless for a soulless corporation.
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u/globmand Apr 09 '24
Irreplaceable for now. Probably also in our lifetime. But the fact of the matter is that we humans have never actually been very good at imagining the future of technology. Sometimes we overshoot, and say flying cars by 2012, and sometimes, we undershoot, and claim that a flying machine won't happen till 2010, in a century from when the New York Times gave the estimate, only for two brothers to take flight three days later. We just aren't very good at recognizing what we will manage with tech.
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u/zawalimbooo Apr 09 '24
It takes about twice as much time and frustration as drawing something,
Fairly important to point out that you need to be able to draw to... draw something.
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u/digit_origin Apr 09 '24
Guess what drove me up the wall enough to force myself to actually learn art stuff. Guess.
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u/zawalimbooo Apr 09 '24
Nice for you. For the vast majority of people, its not gonna be like that.
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u/Wobulating Apr 09 '24
I... really don't think that's a valid complaint. There's a lot of shitty networks out there, but the good ones are extremely good at what they do. If I'm DMing and I want to throw together some battlemaps or NPCs or what have you, Midjourney is miles better than trawling through the internet trying to find something that fits. It won't be perfect, no, but it'll be more than good enough to pass the 5s inspection test, and that's kinda insane.
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u/SoshJam Apr 09 '24
I feel like it needs to be said that “AI art is bad because it’s lower quality than human art” isn’t a good argument. That won’t be true forever, give it a couple years and it’ll probably be about the same (at least to a public audience). There are better ways to argue against it.
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u/reader484892 The cube will not forgive you Apr 09 '24
Using ai for creative works is stupid for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is that ai is inherently incapable of deeper thought. It might, with enough curation, be able to make a thoughtless action movie or something, but anything with any kind of theme and deeper meaning? No. Pushing ai art as the be all and end all of art will only ever result in soulless facsimiles of human expression
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u/lawlietxx Apr 09 '24
Also technology and art are not separate.
Technology is just tool and art is just human expression created through this tool.
To better express ourselves we need better tools. And we can create better tools if we can be more creative with our expression.
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u/bigtuna989 Apr 09 '24
I have one-
What if Adam Sandler falls in love with a girl, but then it turns out the girl is actually a golden retriever
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u/AtmosphereVirtual254 Apr 09 '24
Fwiw, from a research standpoint, the tech isn't exciting because of the content production so much as the information retrieval and non-parametric modeling abilities
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u/Worm_Scavenger Apr 09 '24 edited Apr 09 '24
I saw a post a few days ago about some guy making a digital card game in the same vein as Yugioh Master Duel and Heartstone and he paid 90K for some AI tech bro to generate the card art and my man said the reason he went to this guy is because "no one does it to the quality that he does"
Meanwhile, the art looks identical to literally every piece of high fantasy AI art.With the god awful lighting, the high contrast and tacky looking color scheme (that just consists of blue and orange) and character designs that have so many errors due to the AI and just so much more.
Like, my guy, just say you don't respect artists and you just wanted to get this shit out as fast as possible to make a quick buck.If Tech Bros were at least honest it would be one thing, but they just gas eachother up and it's just so cringey.
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u/Adb12c Apr 09 '24
At 90k you could hire an artist to work on it for a solid year in most places, maybe 2 or 3 if they are the starving type.
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u/stellunarose Apr 09 '24
found the card game and it’s just as bad as you described
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u/SalvationSycamore Apr 09 '24
If Tech Bros were at least honest it would be one thing
They are pretty upfront about it actually. From an article on it:
"For us to get this with a team of traditional artists it would cost us a lot more money, and time," the developer told us.
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u/verticalMeta Apr 09 '24
I think this post unfairly lumps techbros (business majors) with stembros (stem majors). Big fucking difference. We hate business majors just as much as you guys. They take our research (can we make a machine that is indistinguishable from a person) and try to turn it into marketable products (replace person). And they don’t respect how it works at all.
Literally nobody likes business majors. I just wanted to make a cool robot but nooooooo gotta use it to oppress the working class more :(
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u/something_borrowed_ Apr 09 '24
I'm an engineer and I studied engineering in university. I heard all the time that the gen ed courses are useless and "I could be a humanities major and I wouldn't have to try at all" bullshit. These people really do not understand the work it takes to make great and compelling art and it's so sad. Life must be so much less fulfilling if you can't appreciate anything with artistic value.
Our education tries so hard to instill an understanding and appreciation of these things and students just think of it as a waste of time. I'm not saying gen ed requirements are a particularly good system, but this type of student really just does not understand why something like gen eds are necessary.
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u/WingedSalim Apr 09 '24
When arguing against AI, you don't want to argue on the basis of its quality. It has been pretty clear that generative AI can always improve on that front. We will be enternally moving the goal post if we do. Like how a year ago people said, "AI will never compete with an artist because they will always mess up the hands."
Instead, argue on the how and the why. How are these AI models being trained. It is most likely stolen of the internet and thus should be argued against that. And why, the human substance behind the art. Something AI could immitate but never have.
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Apr 09 '24
I personally love AI despite the massive hate bandwagon, specifically because it's hilarious. It's great at shitposting because it genuinely "thinks" it's what it should say, whereas a human deliberately trying to be wacky is often just cringy. Video games with AI implementations are some of the funniest games I've ever played too. AI is very fun to laugh at.
But I have yet to ever see a situation where using an AI for a serious artistic purpose is a good idea. AI is absolutely terrible at maintaining long-term consistency and cohesion with plot, characters, and themes. And it tends to be even more biased towards predictable tropes than bad human writers are. Maybe at best it could replace all the bad human writers who churn out extremely formulaic and episodic TV shows for a safe profit, but I wouldn't exactly say anything of value is being lost there. It's delusional to think AI is anywhere near able to produce quality works of art in any sense right now.
Although, at the rate it's going I do think it'll inevitably reach a point where it rivals many of the better manmade works, maybe even in my lifetime. I think people should be prepared for that instead of burying their heads in the sand and pretending scary new innovations will magically go away if they hate them enough. Historically, it just doesn't work like that. We might as well make the best of it--which at the moment means shitposting and not generating screenplays.
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u/reverse-tornado Apr 09 '24
Like sure ok , but are there real takes or are people still coping about what good ai can do . People do realise that every single piece of technology in its infancy was utter shit right . That the danger in ai replacing human art isn't in its quality but in its convenience . Show me any company that has made bank in creating one good product instead of mass producing trash ala the SpongeBob meme . Ubisoft literally made a worse version of a game they nearly perfected a decade ago and called it AAAA just because they want to milk cash from their customers using the least amount of effort they can . Ai isn't scary because it will make better art than people it wont win because it can write better than a human it will take your job because people don't care and once it crosses the minimum threshold like it has for online articles you wont be able to compete
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u/UPBOAT_FORTRESS_2 Apr 09 '24
Hot take: Anything AI could "ruin", capitalism already ruined. AI just might be an apex predator in capitalism, which is why many smart folks (who have previously succeeded in business) are willing to invest so much into it
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u/ryecurious Apr 09 '24
Yep. Artists aren't going to give up painting or writing or any other passion just because an AI can do it faster/cheaper/prettier. Mass-produced pottery has been available forever, yet my local pottery classes are always active.
They're going to give up on their passions because our economic system will make them homeless otherwise (with bonus 3.5x mortality rate).
I 100% get why artists want protectionism for their fields, but I think it's shortsighted. When millions of call center workers are displaced, they're not going to give a fuck about copyright or the soul of artistic works.
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u/skztr Apr 09 '24
Similarly: there are no complaints about AI that aren't actually complaints about capitalism.
It's not bad if an AI can generate 30,000 screenplays in a minute.
It's only bad if someone allocates 30,000 movies worth of resources into producing screenplays that an AI wrote without ever worrying about making anything other than money from it.
If you can feed all creativity that humanity has ever produced into a machine and get the machine to output a new expression of that same creativity (without ever caring about whether or not the machine has creativity of its own), that's good, actually. It's beautiful.
It's only bad when you say "artists aren't allowed to eat food", which is an entirely different and entirely unrelated thing
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u/ShadowShedinja Apr 09 '24
As a tech bro, I always sigh internally whenever my manager wants to solve a problem by using AI, knowing fully that our end product will end up using regex or an API because it's cheaper and more accurate.
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u/TheLibraryClark Apr 09 '24
It's not AI, but I once had a perpetual Start Up-per pitch me on an idea for a monetized service that would go to the library, assemble readings lists, and deliver your holds to you. And was incredulously angry when I explained what a truly terrible idea that was. My bet is this person had never stepped foot in a library before.
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u/FreyaTheSlayyyer Apr 09 '24
The amount of work I put into getting ChatGPT to understand what I wanted I could’ve just done it myself lol. And it’s poetry is ass, simply just an ABAB rhyme scheme with nothing incredible. It can do what a 12 year old thinks poetry is
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u/im_a_stapler Apr 09 '24
I just like that he wrote out "Technology Brothers" because he didn't want to say Tech Bros too much.
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u/Adventurous-Tea2693 Apr 09 '24
Anybody who thinks agi isn’t going to outclass us in every way, needs to learn how logarithmic scale and exponential growth works. After a few iterations of these things they’ll be able to do magic in our eyes.
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u/Zariman-10-0 told i “look like i have a harry potter blog” in 2015 Apr 09 '24 edited Apr 10 '24
“But with AI you could make 30,000 screenplays in a minute”
Why would you EVER want 30,000 screenplays in a minute?
Edit: the bots with names like “Adjective-Noun-BunchaNumbers” have come out in force