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Not by AI

notbyai.fyi

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Re: Not by AI

#131

Post by nerdponx »

mjr00 wrote: post #35
transitivebs wrote: post #2

A quote I heard recently that really resonated with me: "Soon, asking a writer if they use AI will be like asking a photographer if they use Photoshop" – e.g., it's a foregone conclusion, and the best artists will generally adapt to using the best tools available

Exactly, it's a tool. The skill floor, as in the minimum amount of skill to produce something passable, has been lowered -- dramatically lowered -- but the skill ceiling is now higher than ever as a result. It's similar to music. DAWs and samples didn't kill off music; instead, it made it easier than ever for a teenager with a computer and a passing interest in music to create a song and share it with a world. As a c…

The skill ceiling isn't higher. It's just in a different building next door to the current one. The same thing happened with the film to digital transition. The skill range didn't change, the set of skills itself changed.

Re: Not by AI

#132

Post by dale_glass »

version_five wrote: post #118
dale_glass wrote: post #77

I get the concerns with AI, but this kind of thing has always looked odd to me. Like imagine a label on a thing that says "Made without CNC machinery". So instead of finishing the thing on a CNC mill, they instead stuck it on a Bridgeport manual mill, and finished by hand. Or somebody finished the cast with a file. Okay, and so? In the end, a hammer is a hammer. If it hammers well, what difference does it make how it…

I can see a difference for creative works. I'd be more interested to know that I'm looking at something an artist did intentionally than something sampled from a manifold of similar works. Just like I'd rather (all things being equal) have a real drawing or painting than a print. You can make analogies in other art forms too. And if someone is going to send me a sales pitch or email that GPT wrote, I'd rather they do…

External help is not at all unusual in artwork. Eg, many artists just look for reference pictures online when they want to depict a tricky pose. Apparently the infamous Captain America picture happened because of a bad usage of a reference.

Or manga artists use things like screentones: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2U4EfKCfjI

I think AI will go down that road. Yeah, lots of people will mess around with prompts, but artists able to retouch the output, and to mix and match stuff will get much better results.

Re: Not by AI

#133

Post by chii »

version_five wrote: post #118
dale_glass wrote: post #77

I get the concerns with AI, but this kind of thing has always looked odd to me. Like imagine a label on a thing that says "Made without CNC machinery". So instead of finishing the thing on a CNC mill, they instead stuck it on a Bridgeport manual mill, and finished by hand. Or somebody finished the cast with a file. Okay, and so? In the end, a hammer is a hammer. If it hammers well, what difference does it make how it…

I can see a difference for creative works. I'd be more interested to know that I'm looking at something an artist did intentionally than something sampled from a manifold of similar works. Just like I'd rather (all things being equal) have a real drawing or painting than a print. You can make analogies in other art forms too. And if someone is going to send me a sales pitch or email that GPT wrote, I'd rather they do…

> I'd rather they don't insult me and just send me the prompt.

and the prompt makes no sense to you, because you are not able to interpret it the way you would interpret the generated output of said prompt. The information isn't in the prompt, and never was.

Re: Not by AI

#134

Post by raincole »

fsflover wrote: post #123
raincole wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whole idea of "there is no such thing as an original idea" is utterly stupid. It's just a hyperbole and some people are taking it literally. Of course there are original ideas. "C is not an original idea, because it's just mixing A and B..." ok so there are only two possbilities: 1. Someone else did mixing A and B before. Okay then we can recursively find the first person who mixed A and B. 2. No one else did mix…

> 2. No one else did mixing A and B before. The "Mixing A and B" is a new idea. With such definition, GPT-4 can create new ideas.

It definitely can. GPT-3 can too. You know the joke about "idea guy"? Who has "idea" but no programming/design skill and no connection to bring funding? New ideas aren't always very valuable.

At least GPT brings funding sometimes.

Re: Not by AI

#135

Post by underyx »

gspencley wrote: post #50
underyx wrote: post #17

> If humans rely solely on AI to generate content moving forward, any new content generated by AI may just be recycled content from the past. To be honest, I’d struggle to find any human content that is not recycled from the past. I guess we are still better than AI at remixing sufficiently novel combinations of concepts but I think much of this AI content aversion comes from some kind of phobia, or an unwillingness…

Philosophical food for thought: if all content is recycled / mixed from the past, when did innovation and creativity stop? In other words, if there is truly no such thing as an "original idea", then how did the ideas that we are pulling from, deriving from and combining come into existence? If all we are saying is that existing ideas inspire new ones, or that most human generated content is derivative, then I complet…

I'd say it's possible that there have truly not been any original ideas, and the earliest human ideas might've been just remixing observed natural phenomena. What would muddy the waters there is that humans are complex organisms that in turn exhibit naturally complex behaviors both on an individual and a societal level. And there's even emotions that we feel due to our biology. But if you define all these as phenomena we observed about ourselves, I think my initial assertion still makes sense.

Re: Not by AI

#138

Post by SkyMarshal »

underyx wrote: post #17

> If humans rely solely on AI to generate content moving forward, any new content generated by AI may just be recycled content from the past. To be honest, I’d struggle to find any human content that is not recycled from the past. I guess we are still better than AI at remixing sufficiently novel combinations of concepts but I think much of this AI content aversion comes from some kind of phobia, or an unwillingness…

That’s basically the thesis of Beaudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation, that in the postmodern world everything is a signifier, simulation, or remix of something else, nothing is truly original anymore.

It’s probably not completely accurate to say there’s nothing truly original anymore, but also probably true that the rate of discovery of truly novel and original concepts and ideas has slowed to the point it may seem that way. Possibly b/c all the low-hanging fruit as been taken, and only the more difficult discoveries remain.

Re: Not by AI

#139

Post by cyrialize »

brookst wrote: post #82
giraffe_lady wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know about other people but I don't "fault" the AI anything, nor am I even particularly bothered by AI-generated content per se. What fills me with dread is the obvious glee over removing human work from sellable products, when there is no viable alternative to working for most people. We've created a world where a lot of jobs can be automated, and that is somehow a bad thing , and it's going to be used to cr…

Would you be happier if your car / bicycle / city bus was produced entirely by hand, with no tools or automation? Labor will shift. Bemoaning new efficiencies and new empowerment because they reduce the need for meaningless labor consumption is backwards. We should be sensitive to those whose lives will take an unexpected turn (I may be one of them!), but we should do so in the context of celebrating greater individu…

I think a big issue I take with the removal of humans from art creation, or at least discussions around it, is that art is always talked about as being separate from the creator. As a product the person makes.

For many pieces of art, and what draws me to art, is knowing that the creator put a piece of themselves into it. (I'm going to avoid talking about the 'separating art from the artist' discussion, that's separate than what I'm discussing here).

An example I've talked about in the past on HN is Raymond Carver. Carver's short stories are often centered around blue-collar men in the mid west. This is because Carver was a blue-collar man from the mid west. I find that interesting. I enjoy reading about Carver's life, and reading about what people had to say about him.

Essentially, write what you know.

Art made by AI is missing that - and I think the frustrating part for me is that I don't think it's that hard to bring it back.

Show me the prompts used for the art. Tell me why you used those specific prompts. What did those prompts mean to you? I want to know all of those things.

I also think people stop too soon. Why not take what the AI has made, do something to it yourself, and then feed it back into the AI to see what happens?

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