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Not by AI

notbyai.fyi

141–150 of 456 posts

Re: Not by AI

#141

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…

> In the end, a hammer is a hammer. If it hammers well, what difference does it make how it got that precise shape?

"Hand made" has been a selling point since things were first made by things other than hands. Example: "The factory, known as the Ateller, [...] it is the place where our craftspeople assemble each BUGATTI by hand."

Re: Not by AI

#142
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…

There are many rational reasons for a person to see these questions differently to you and plenty of explanations of those reasons around. You may disagree with them, but to claim that differing views must spring from phobias or other irrational mental states rather from a different assessment of the evidence is baseless ad-hominem. I would strongly recommend avoiding statements of that form in general as they achiev…

Hear me out. In the most basic sense, to believe the mind a box that can output things not based on input is inherently to believe it "irrational" in the truest sense of the word.

It is to believe the mind to be non-functionally pure[1] in the programmatic sense. Output based somehow other than purely on input.

And if that's the case, the question is where does that irrationality come from? A random number generator? Any developer knows there's no such thing as actual random. It's all either list based or based environmental aspects.

I don't see room for an argument to be made that the human mind isn't just mixing ideas/the environment that doesn't rely on some form of magical thinking.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pure_function

Re: Not by AI

#143

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…

There's two variations, one stupid one not. The stupid one is "novelty no longer exists and maybe never did". You've covered it. The not stupid one is this question about the closure under creativity in the same sense that numbers are closed under multiplication and addition. Sure you can make infinite numbers, but you can never multiply and add your way to a cat, because a cat isn't a number. Is everything we do rea…

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Re: Not by AI

#144
post #35

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…

There's a GIGANTIC difference between a hammer and a button that when clicked builds a cathedral.

Re: Not by AI

#146
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Art will continue to evolve with AI. Another argument I keep hearing (most recently from pg), is that we'll always need non-AI training data. That, too, doesn't follow. Training new models on synthetic data does not mean we get stuck in a particular mode or style. We'll continue moving, improving, and trying wildly new things. Bootstrapping with synthetic data doesn't block evolution - it enables faster evolution, ev…

I think the same. Many artists hate because they feel threatened. I think the opposite: creating art (e.g. Drawing) was only for the ones who had drawing skills. Now, it's being democratized and everyone, regardless of being talented in drawing or not, can freely express their feelings and creativity. I think it's a great thing.

In the US, your livelihood essentially justifies your existence. Disdainfully reducing someone to being a 'hater' when they react to that being threatened is exactly the reason many, if not most people find SV culture disgusting. They're not wrong.

Beyond that, if you think AI algorithms will replace art, you don't understand art. It replaces much of the commercial utility of many artists and creating many types of images, but the idea that it threatens art, generally, is preposterous. People who think art school is only about learning to physically make art are like people who think computer science degrees are only about coding. Most of what you learn in art school is conceptual thinking, communication, really deeply seeing things in a way that most people don't, and stuff like that.

Factories didn't replace potters when they started making pots and dishes or sculptors when they started making cheap home decorations-- it just meant the artisans no longer made money creating a commodity because most people were satisfied buying chintzy shit cheap. Many potters who lived through that change probably died in poverty because of it. Talk big numbers about the way industry shifts all you want, but not everybody can switch to an entirely different category of employment just because someone taught a computer to do it.

Re: Not by AI

#147
Seems silly, I care about the quality of the content. I don't care who, created it, just if it is good, and if I can use it, learn from it etc.

Re: Not by AI

#148
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…

I think some of it comes from the smug disdain that generative art fans throw at traditional artists.

Re: Not by AI

#149
post #35

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…

> minimum amount of skill to produce something passable

Look at the history of woodworking for inspiration.

It used to take human sweat to make flat straight surfaces. Something like a walmart flatpack bookshelf would have been VERY expensive to make 1000 years ago. Industrial tech made that cheap and ... now its seen as tacky and out of style and only for poors.

The result culturally this century is an avoidance of "plastic wood" finish, faux finishes and faux surface prep that look old and worn and hand scuffed, and a strange hipster fetish for "live edge" raw bark on finished product. Sure, in 1875 one might have predicted based on mass production trends that furniture in 2020s would be all right angles, smooth as glass mirror, photographic "ideal" woodgrain instead of real woodgrain, plastic-y lifetime thick film finish. But thats only for poor people who shop at walmart, nobody with money buys that stuff.

I suspect what AI can cheaply produce will rapidly culturally be considered lower class and trashy. Oh, sure, completely AI generated movies look very nice and sound very nice and are ever so trendy and well written, but special effects and yesterdays memes on todays big screen generated entirely by computer algorithm is only for poors. Now, us rich cognitive elites only attend live theater plays. Aspirational middle class types watch recordings of theater plays (admittedly maybe some AI generated). You wouldn't show off your 'wealth' and 'class' by taking a date to an AI generated movie, that would be insulting, you might take her to a live theater play... I'm sure there will be some AI incursion, maybe the lights will be run by AI or AI painted backdrops or some actors will lipsync their lines to AI, or roughly every 5 years we have to tediously suffer thru a new generation of rewritten modernized classics and it'll be worse in the future with AI... but in general human will be the status symbol because it'll be expensive.

I suspect being able to ask an AI to generate non-copyrighted commercial quality music will mean massive noise pollution (much like every room required 15 digital clocks in the 80s and every room required 15 super bright blue power LEDs in the 00s) followed by the only people making money in music will be live humans playing physical instruments.

Poor people try to get by and don't spend money and when they do it'll be on infinitely cheap AI commodities. Rich people spend money on unique stuff, not mass produced AI shovelware. Aspirational people spend money trying to look rich so they will spend all their money on non-AI stuff.

Re: Not by AI

#150

funnily enough, it think this is a good development for our species. In the 2000s, if you were talking on the internet, you were pretty sure that you were talking to other humans. This will quickly reverse as in being sure that one is talking to AI most of the time on anything remote (internet, phone, email, ...) Which in turn will massively strengthen personal (like non-remote) face-to-face interactions.

Or more likely, end them entirely.
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