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Another AI company wrote us and here’s our response

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Re: Another AI company wrote us and here’s our response

#51

Post by not2b »

low_tech_punk wrote: post #31

I'm curious how developers' sentiment towards code generation tools like Copilot compares to artists' sentiment towards art generation tools like MJ/SD/DallE. As a developer myself, I want to see coding as a creative act and feel uneasy about the idea of relying on a tool that makes the code one tab away. But I also recognize most of the coding we do is in a commercial context where artistic expression is less releva…

My main concern about Copilot use is that, unless you're in a race to quickly produce a minimum viable product, it doesn't optimize the hard part. The initial coding is a very small piece of the work.

Code has to be designed, maintained, and extended, and for supportable code we want to have someone on the team that understands it well. If we want the code to be flexible, we want design decisions to appear in as few places as possible, ideally one. Copilot as an auto-complete, where it just helps fill in function names and the like, is fine and helpful (but IDEs do most of that already). But if it's used to write larger code chunks we quickly have the problem that there are code sequences no one on the team understands (it passed the tests though, yay!?) and we wind up with bloat from a lot of copy-paste like code.

Re: Another AI company wrote us and here’s our response

#52

Post by JohnFen »

voidfunc wrote: post #7
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #4

> most artists love their work and do not want to outsource their passion to a machine that does this for them. This was the money quote. I love what I do (which tends to be programming, but I approach it as a craft), and often do things by hand, that others automate, because I love my work, and also the people that use it.

Most artists, like most programmers are working in a commercial capacity. I see no reason why "their passion" should overrule profit-seeking. Do art for the sake of art on your own time. But expecting companies to not embrace AI to do their jobs is foolish just like it's foolish to think corporate programmers will be a thing at some point in the future.

> I see no reason why "their passion" should overrule profit-seeking.

Companies can and will do whatever they want.

However, on the level of the individual, I see no reason why profit-seeking should overrule my passion. I don't code to make money, I code because I love doing it. I make money to allow myself to engage in an activity I find rewarding, I don't engage in that activity to make money.

If that activity is no longer rewarding, there is no amount of money that can compensate for that.

Perhaps you're right, and that the future has no place for people like me. We'll see. Regardless, though, I'm not going to participate (either as a dev or as a customer) with processes that dehumanize people to such a degree.

Re: Another AI company wrote us and here’s our response

#53

Post by Liquix »

indoordin0saur wrote: post #28

I really cannot fathom enjoying any "art" produced by an AI, excepting art that uses it as an assistant for boring tasks like texturing a video game.

but what will happen when "enjoyable art" and "AI art" are virtually impossible to differentiate between without tools?

https://i.imgur.com/XSCN9Aj.png

Re: Another AI company wrote us and here’s our response

#54

Post by floren »

delusional wrote: post #32

It's fucking NFTs again. The vague promise that it somehow creates value for your audience. The promise of "community". The completely empty platitudes about a new and exciting world. And of course the FOMO of "early leg up" on some inevitable future.

It's the same guys, pretty often.

Re: Another AI company wrote us and here’s our response

#56

Post by n4r9 »

bronco21016 wrote: post #44
esafak wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The mantra is "I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes". - Joanna Maciejewska ( https://x.com/AuthorJMac/status/1773679197631701238 )

I think the missing piece is the generative AI being tied to a physical embodiment. My point is, we need the physical machine but we also need to work on this generative AI aspect to manipulate the machine. Unfortunately, making pictures and writing text seems to be the lowest hanging fruit of the Transformer AI era since we have significant datasets already available. Several companies are working on creating datase…

You see generative AI as a stepping stone towards chores like dishes and laundry?

Re: Another AI company wrote us and here’s our response

#57

Post by japhyr »

> Storytelling is personal. It is a connection between the writer and the reader. Without this personal connection, storytelling loses its purpose.

I read a book many years ago called If this is your land, where are your stories? One of the sections described how a group of native people from western Canada successfully reclaimed some of their land by telling stories in court. They lost their case in a lower court, because the court ruled that they were just telling stories. A higher court ruled that their people's stories, while not always factually correct, do lay claim to the land they lived on.

Everyone has a story. It's a confusing world where machine-generated stories can be indistinguishable from actual human stories.

Trust in authenticity is going to be a valuable asset going forward; I appreciate people sharing responses like this. It's easy to be cynical and say this response won't change anything, but if the people at Muse and companies like it keep getting these responses, some of them will realize the emptiness of what they're doing and move on to more meaningful work.

https://www.amazon.com/Where-Stories-Finding-Common-Ground/d...

Re: Another AI company wrote us and here’s our response

#58

Post by chrisBob »

indoordin0saur wrote: post #28

I really cannot fathom enjoying any "art" produced by an AI, excepting art that uses it as an assistant for boring tasks like texturing a video game.

There are different kinds of "art" with different use cases. Sometimes I want to look at something thoughtful and meaningful by an artist making a profound statement about humanity where I can see the emotion and motivation. Sometimes I want something that adds a bit of color to the office. One of those may never be the domain of AI, but if I just want something with a flower and a bird that matches the colors of the rest of the room....?

It is ok if you don't see any value in the second use case. Different people like different "art".

Re: Another AI company wrote us and here’s our response

#59

Post by JohnFen »

throwawaysleep wrote: post #37
buttercraft wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I see no reason why "their passion" should overrule profit-seeking. This viewpoint is what fucked up the world.

No, this viewpoint is the only reason a shirt doesn't cost a month's wages. Weavers once had similar arguments, decrying machinery that made cloth. Imagine how many more video games and movies can be made when we don't need anywhere near as many artists as before. How many more diagrams in textbooks. How many extra illustrations for Wikipedia. There are tremendous benefits to making art something anyone can get for d…

I think the state of things today amply demonstrates that quantity cannot make up for lack of quality.

Re: Another AI company wrote us and here’s our response

#60

Post by its_ethan »

i_am_proteus wrote: post #13
voidfunc wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most artists, like most programmers are working in a commercial capacity. I see no reason why "their passion" should overrule profit-seeking. Do art for the sake of art on your own time. But expecting companies to not embrace AI to do their jobs is foolish just like it's foolish to think corporate programmers will be a thing at some point in the future.

You don't have to see the reason why other people prefer their passions to profit-seeking. There might not even be a reason! That's how passions work.

That's perfectly fine at the individual level (and probably encouraged for most people + their passions), I think the guy above is trying to get at something more like: just because some people are passionate about their thing, doesn't mean other people shouldn't allowed to pursue it for profit-seeking.

As someone else has mentioned, just because weavers were/are passionate about what they do, that doesn't mean people shouldn't have been allowed to invent the loom + mass production techniques for clothing. Everyone on the planet has benefited mightily from this, and there are other similar examples.

Maybe there are restrictions that should be enforced to prevent this in some cases, or curtail it to some degree. There's likely not a one size fits all rule, and a lot of it is determined as net-good or net-bad in hindsight.

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