271–280 of 430 posts
Sure, the technology that real people in your life, including most "normies" who only use tech to get stuff done, are using ChatGPT, but it's not "inevitable".
Your claim that most people (even "normies") are using LLMs is just an offshoot of the inevitability nonsense. Most people _aren't_ using LLMs.
Broadly speaking, I would bin them into two categories. The first category contains things like this:
> Tiktok is not inevitable.
Things like this become widespread without coercion. I don't use TikTok or any short-form video and there's nothing forcing me to. For a while, Facebook fed me reels, and I fell for it once or twice, but recognized how awful it was and quit. However, the Tiktok and junk food are appealing to many people even though they are slop. The dark truth is that many people walking around just like slop, and unless there's any restraint imposed from external actors, they'll consume as much as is shoveled into their troughs.
But, at the end of the day, you can live your life without using Tiktok at all.
The other category would be things that become widespread on the back of coercion, to varying degrees.
> Requiring a smartphone to exist in society is not inevitable.
This is much trickier to do than living without Tiktok. It's harder to get through airports or even rent a parking space now. Your alternative options will be removed by others.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Does it matter? Like how does it matter? It matters because the amount of influence something has on you is directly attributable to the amount of human effort put into it. When that effort is removed so to is the influence. Influence does not exist independently of effort. All the people yapping about LLM keep fundamentally not grasping that concept. They think that output exists in a pure functional vacuum.
I see what you're getting at, but I think a better framing would be: there's an implicit understand amongst humans that, in the case of things ostensibly human-created, a human found it worth creating. If someone put in the effort to write something, it's because they believed it worth reading. It's part of the social contract that makes it seem worth reading a book or listening to a lecture even if you don't receive…
Yep, this is the current understanding that is being hard challenged by LLMs.
I understand artists etc. Talking about AI in a negative sense, because they don’t really get it completely, or just it’s against their self interest which means they find bad arguments to support their own interest subconsciously. However tech people who thinks AI is bad, or not inevitable is really hard to understand. It’s almost like Bill Gates saying “we are not interested in internet”. This is pretty much being…
Running this paragraph through Gemini, returns a list of the fallacies employed, including - Attacking the Motive - "Even if the artists are motivated by self-interest, this does not automatically make their arguments about AI's negative impacts factually incorrect or "bad."
Just as a poor person is more aware through direct observation and experience, of the consequences of corporate capitalism and financialisation; an artist at the coal face of the restructuring of the creative economy by massive 'IP owners' and IP Pirates (i.e.: the companies training on their creative work without permission) is likely far more in touch the the consequences of actually existing AI than a tech worker who is financially incentivised to view them benignly.
> The idea that AI is anything less than paradigm shifting, or even revolutionary is weird to me.
This is a strange kind of anti-naturalistic fallacy. A paradigm shift (or indeed a revolution) is not in itself a good thing. One paradigm shift that has occurred for example in recent goepolitics is the normalisation of state murder - i.e.: extrajudicial assassination in the drone war or the current US govts use of missile attacks on alleged drug traffickers. One can generate countless other negative paradigm shifts.
> if I produce something art, product, game, book and if it’s good, and if it’s useful to you, fun to you, beautiful to you and you cannot really determine whether it’s AI. Does it matter?
1) You haven't produced it.
2) Such a thing - a beautiful product of AI that is not identifiably artificial - does not yet, and may never exist.
3) Scare quotes around intellectual property theft aren't an argument. We can abandon IP rights - in which case hurrah, tech companies have none - or we can in law at least, respect them. Anything else is legally and morally incoherent self justification.
4) Do you actually know anything about the history of art, any genre of it whatsoever? Because suggesting originality is impossible and 'efficiency' of production is the only form of artistic progress suggests otherwise.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The people who build, maintain, and own the datacenters. The people who work at and own the companies that make the hardware in the datacenters. The people who work to build new power plants to power the data centers. The truck drivers that transport all the supplies to build the data centers and power plants. These are all real people.
One thing I've noticed - artists view their own job as more valuable, more sacred, more important than virtually any other person's job. They canonize themselves, and then act all shocked and offended when the rest of the world doesn't share their belief. Obviously the existence of AI is valuable enough to pay the cost of offsetting a few artists' jobs, it's not even a question to us, but to artists it's shocking and…
I understand artists etc. Talking about AI in a negative sense, because they don’t really get it completely, or just it’s against their self interest which means they find bad arguments to support their own interest subconsciously. However tech people who thinks AI is bad, or not inevitable is really hard to understand. It’s almost like Bill Gates saying “we are not interested in internet”. This is pretty much being…
Yeah, no. It's presumptuous to say that these are the only reasons. I don't think you understand at all.
> So if I produce something art, product, game, book and if it’s good, and if it’s useful to you, fun to you, beautiful to you and you cannot really determine whether it’s AI. Does it matter? Like how does it matter?
Because to me, and many others, art is a form of communication. Artists toil because they want to communicate something to the world- people consume art because they want to be spoken to. It's a two-way street of communication. Every piece created by a human carries a message, one that's sculpted by their unique life experiences and journey.
AI-generated content may look nice on the surface, but fundamentally they say nothing at all. There is no message or intent behind a probabilistic algorithm putting pixels onto my screen.
When a person encounters AI content masquerading as human-made, it's a betrayal of expectations. There is no two-way communication, the "person" on the other side of the phone line is a spam bot. Think about how you would feel being part of a social group where the only other "people" are LLMs. Do you think that would be fulfilling or engaging after the novelty wears off?
I understand artists etc. Talking about AI in a negative sense, because they don’t really get it completely, or just it’s against their self interest which means they find bad arguments to support their own interest subconsciously. However tech people who thinks AI is bad, or not inevitable is really hard to understand. It’s almost like Bill Gates saying “we are not interested in internet”. This is pretty much being…
I know what it means to be that good.
Sure, most people couldn’t care less, and they’re happy with something that’s simply pleasant to look at.
But for those people, it wouldn’t matter even if it weren’t AI-generated. So what is the point?
You created something without having to get a human to do it. Yaay?
Except we already have more content than we know what to do with, so what exactly are we gaining here? Efficiency?
Generative AI was fed on the free work and joy of millions, only to mechanically regurgitate content without attribution. To treat creators as middlemen in the process.
Yaay, efficient art. This is really what is missing in a world with more content than we have time to consume.
The point of markets, of progress, is the improvement of the human condition. That is the whole point of every regulation, every contract, and every innovation.
I am personally not invested in a world that is worse for humanity
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've got a hypothesis that the reason short-form video like TikTok became dominant is because of the decline in reading instruction (eg. usage of whole-word instruction over phonics) that started in 1998-2000. The timing largely lines up: the rise of video content started around 2013, just as these kids were entering their teenage years. Media has significant economies of scale and network effects (i.e. it is much mo…
My counter argument is that did not happen in the Austrian school system and people consume short form video just the same
Earlier quoted context omitted.
With a kinetic structure, someone went through the effort to design it to do that. With AI art, sure you ask it to do something but a human isn't involved in the creative process in any capacity beyond that
This is a very reductionist claim about how people use AI in their art process. The truth is that the best artists use AI in a sort of dance between the human and machine. But always, the human is the prime mover through a process of iteration.
The rest of the people using the Studio Ghibli filter ?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Perhaps Bitcoin as proof-of-work productization was not inevitable (for a while), but once we got there, a lot of things were very much inevitable. Explosion of alternatives like with Litecoin, explosion of expressive features, reaching Turing-completeness with Ethereum, "tokens" once we got to Turing-completeness, and then "unique tokens" aka NFTs (but also colored coins in Bitcoin parlance before that). The cultu…
> These things don't have any utility otherwise and no reason to exist outside of those. Lol. Permissionless payments certainly have utility. Making it harder for governments to freeeze/seize your assets has utility. Buying stuff the government disallows, often illegitimately, has value. Currency that can't be inflated has value. Any outside of pure utility, they have tons of ideological reason to exist outside scams…
Shouldn't you have already moved on to AI hype? The fact that you're still worshipping crypto is telling as to your close-mindedness.