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I Am An AI Hater

anthonymoser.github.io

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Re: I Am An AI Hater

#281

Post by _DeadFred_ »

petralithic wrote: post #230
jacquesm wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it is mimicking human input. Effectively you are getting a mixture of many pieces of artwork that humans made distilled down into some sloppy new one that was made without feeling, purpose or skill and that can be described by its prompt, a few kilobytes at best. Original human art can only be approximated but never captured with 100% fidelity regardless of the bitrate, that is what makes it unique to begin w…

Haven't these arguments been the same since Stable Diffusion came out? Someone (A) will say what you said, then someone else (B) will say, well humans remix as well, A: no that's different because we're humans not machines, B: there is no need to prefer a biological substrate over a silicon one; A: AI will produce the same result over and over, B: not if you change the temperature and randomize the seed. It's tiresom…

There is no intention in either case. Just a machine doing machine things.

Re: I Am An AI Hater

#282

Post by jacquesm »

petralithic wrote: post #230
jacquesm wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it is mimicking human input. Effectively you are getting a mixture of many pieces of artwork that humans made distilled down into some sloppy new one that was made without feeling, purpose or skill and that can be described by its prompt, a few kilobytes at best. Original human art can only be approximated but never captured with 100% fidelity regardless of the bitrate, that is what makes it unique to begin w…

Haven't these arguments been the same since Stable Diffusion came out? Someone (A) will say what you said, then someone else (B) will say, well humans remix as well, A: no that's different because we're humans not machines, B: there is no need to prefer a biological substrate over a silicon one; A: AI will produce the same result over and over, B: not if you change the temperature and randomize the seed. It's tiresom…

The day I see AI generated art and it moves me in the same way that human generated art does I will concede the point. So far all I've seen is more, not novel.

Art never was about productivity, even though there have been some incredibly productive artists.

Some of the artists that I've known were capable of capturing the essence of the subject they were drawing or painting in a few very crude lines and I highly doubt that an AI given a view would be able to do that in a way that it resonated. And that resonance is what it is all about for me, the fact that briefly there is an emotional channel between the artist and you, the receiver. With AI generated content there is no emotion on the sending side, so how could you experience that feeling in a genuine way?

To me AI art is distortion of art, not new art. It's like listening to multiple pieces of music at the same time, each with a different level of presence, out of tune and without any overarching message. It can even look skilled (skill is easy to imitate, emotion is not).

Re: I Am An AI Hater

#283

Post by petralithic »

brabel wrote: post #57
notfed wrote: post #4

"I strongly feel that AI is an insult to life itself." - Hayao Miyazaki I'm going to start using this quote.

You should see the context in which he said that. It was 2016. It was no ChatGPT he was talking about. It was some truly bizarre art that was going on back then, like a sort of humanoid form trying to learn how to walk without being given instructions... it would do disturbing things like us its head as if it was a limb and move in completely unnatural ways... that's what he, and most who watch that video, found so d…

Genetic programming. It's actually quite an interesting method of creating programs, certainly not like LLMs but cool nonetheless.

Re: I Am An AI Hater

#284

Post by perching_aix »

petralithic wrote: post #230
jacquesm wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it is mimicking human input. Effectively you are getting a mixture of many pieces of artwork that humans made distilled down into some sloppy new one that was made without feeling, purpose or skill and that can be described by its prompt, a few kilobytes at best. Original human art can only be approximated but never captured with 100% fidelity regardless of the bitrate, that is what makes it unique to begin w…

Haven't these arguments been the same since Stable Diffusion came out? Someone (A) will say what you said, then someone else (B) will say, well humans remix as well, A: no that's different because we're humans not machines, B: there is no need to prefer a biological substrate over a silicon one; A: AI will produce the same result over and over, B: not if you change the temperature and randomize the seed. It's tiresom…

Ironically, for the first time, I think I found some perspective to the remix argument here.

Normally it's just like you say: I don't find the remixing argument persuasive, because I consider it to be a point of commonality. This time however, my focus shifted a bit. I considered the difference in "source set".

To be more specific, it kind of dawned on me how peculiar it is to engage in creating art as a human given how a human life looks like. How different the "setup" is between a baby just kind of existing and taking in everything, which for the most part means supremely mundane, not at all artful or aesthetic experiences, and between an AI model being trained on things people uploaded. It will also have a lot of dull, irrelevant stuff, but not nearly in the same way or in the same amount, hitting at the same registers.

I still think it's a bit of a bird vs plane comparison, but then that is also what they are saying in a way. That it is a bird and a plane, not a bird and a bird. I do still take issue with refusing to call the result flight though, I think.

Re: I Am An AI Hater

#285

Post by Palomides »

petralithic wrote: post #277
Palomides wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

so here's the thing, artists like making the art, skipping the making leaves you with nothing most artists I know are against AI because they feel it is anti-human, devaluing and alienating both the viewer and the creator some can tolerate it as a tool, and some (as is long art tradition) will use it to offend or be contrarian, but these are not the common position if I were a spherical cow in a vacuum with infinite…

They don't have to use AI though, they can leave people who do alone. But that's not what I see, I see artists getting mad at the latter and when I dig deep, it turns out they're scared it'll take their digital commission work. This has primarily been my experience talking with artists I commission as well as people online on Twitter and reddit for example.

sure, it's hard for an artist to compete on price with AI, and the ones who depend on this kind of ultra low budget work will have a hard time (and have a direct economic self-interest in advocating against)

but again, that's not what I see in the people around me

Re: I Am An AI Hater

#286

Post by TeMPOraL »

codyb wrote: post #171
StopDisinfo910 wrote: post #20

Amusingly things are going with AI like with any complex topics nowadays. It’s easier to hold a strong position than a nuanced one. So you see a lot of vapid articles either for or against, even - or especially actually - if you don’t really know for or against what exactly, and very few insightful ones. Plague of our ages I guess. Ironically AI might even make it worse.

I suspect we're in a bubble... and when it pops, the useful, profitable work will stay around. A bunch of things will also disappear. And then we'll wait till the next bubble. Gains seem to have leveled off tremendously. As far as I can tell folk were saying "Wow, look at this, I can get it to generate code... it does really well at tests, and small well defined tasks" And a year or a year and a half later we're at l…

My personal view is that there are broadly two groups of people, and thus two perspectives, related to the AI hype. I call them the Beneficiaries, and the Investors.

Beneficiaries are the ones who care about the actual tech and what it can do for them. Investors are the ones who care about making money off the tech. For the Beneficiaries, AI hype is about right where it should be, given the demonstrable power of the tech itself. For Investors, it may be a dangerous bubble - but then I myself am a Beneficiary, not an Investor, so I don't care.

I don't care which companies get burned on this, which investors will lose everything - businesses come and gone, but foundational inventions remain. The bubble will burst, and then the second wave of companies will recycle what the first wave left; the tech will continue to be developed and become even more useful.

Or put another way: I don't care which of the contestants wins a tunnel-digging race. I only care about the tunnels being dug.

See e.g. history of rail lines, and arguably many more big infrastructure projects: people who fronted the initial capital did not see much of a return, but the actual infrastructure they left behind as they folded was taken over and built upon by subsequent waves of companies.

Re: I Am An AI Hater

#287

Post by bonoboTP »

aspaviento wrote: post #112
petralithic wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A human might generate a piece of media using AI (either via a slot machine spin or with more advanced workflows like ComfyUI) and once they deem it looks good enough for their purpose, they might display it to represent what they want it to represent. If Guernica was AI generated but still displayed by Picasso as a statement about war, it would still be art. Tools do not dictate what art is and isn't, it is about th…

And let's not forget that people call "art" to more things than the popular masterpieces. A guy sold an invisible sculpture¹ clamming it was art. If things like this can be called art, whatever AI makes can be called art too. 1: https://news.artnet.com/art-world/italian-artist-auctioned-o...

"What is or isn't art" didn't simply become a topic because people like to philosophize about the meaning of words. Over the 20th century the art world took fascination with the subversive, transgressive, the postmodern, rejecting authority and standards of beauty that were deemed limiting and oppressive etc. One direct contributing component was photography. Skill of realistic depiction became deemphasized, with mass production, plastic etc., the focus became abstract ideas. It was also a protest against the system that brought the two world wars.

It was considered "anti-art" at the time, but basically took over the elite art world itself and the overall movement had huge impact on what is considered art today, on performance art, sculptures, architecture that looks intentionally upsetting etc.

It's not useful to try to think of the sides as "expansive definitionists" who consider pretty much anything art just because, and "restrictive definitionists" who only consider classic masterpieces art. The divide is much more specific and has intellectual foundation and history to it.

The same motivations that led to the expansive definition in the personally transgressive, radical and subversive sense today logically and coherently oppose the pictures and texts generated in huge centralized profit-oriented companies via mechanization. Presumably if AI was more of a distributed hacker-ethos-driven thing that shows the middle finger to Disney copyrightism, they may be pro-AI.

Re: I Am An AI Hater

#288

Post by petralithic »

tzumaoli wrote: post #248

It's interesting to see the trend of the attitude towards GenAI in Hacker News through out the years. This is totally vibe based and I don't have numbers to back it up, but back in 2022-2023, the site was dominantly people who mostly treat GenAI as a curious technology without too much attachment, and some non-trivial amount of folks who are very skeptical of the tech. More recently I see a lot more people who see th…

Curious technology? People were foaming at the mouth about "license concerns" when GitHub Copilot was first announced, saying they're going to boycott Microsoft. But just like all things, over time people realize they're not as good or bad as initially thought. I noticed this too with media generation, people on Twitter were very mad about it and now many of them use Photoshop's AI features.

Re: I Am An AI Hater

#289

Post by jacquesm »

petralithic wrote: post #153
perching_aix wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But then why wouldn't AI generated art be able to stir me? Why is a human being in the loop so important as to be supposedly essential?

It's not. If one takes the fact that art is in the eye of the beholder [0], then yes, even AI art may stir you, especially as a human is the one generating at the end of the day, for a specific purpose and statement about what they want to convey. There is a good part of the series Remembrance of Earth's Past (of which The Three Body Problem is the first book) where the aliens are creating art and it shocks people to…

> it's still a human at the end of the day picking what to prompt

I think that 'dutch people skating on a lake' or 'girl with a pearl earring' or 'dutch religious couple in front of their barn' without having an AI trained on various works will produce just noise. And if those particular works (you know the ones, right?) were not part of the input then the AI would never produce anything looking like the original, no matter how specific you made the prompt. It takes human input to animate it, and even then what it produces to me does not look original whereas any five year old is able to produce entirely original works of art, none of which can be reduced to a prompt.

Prompts are instructions, they are settings on a mixer, they are not the music produced by the artists at the microphones.

Re: I Am An AI Hater

#290

Post by brian-armstrong »

ginko wrote: post #87
iLoveOncall wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are plenty of things that are useful and that have gone away. As long as GenAI stays unprofitable, it has every chance of disappearing if it stays as useless as it is right now.

There's people running stable diffusion locally on their systems for their own amusement. Do you think that will go away?

100% yes, at least down to a rounding error. If people stop pushing billions into training new versions, then the novelty will wear off very quickly. There are still many constraints on what it can do and people will generally lose motivation when they start finding those invisible boundaries on its capabilities. It'll be effectively a dead pursuit.
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