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This is not the future

blog.mathieui.net

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Re: This is not the future

#381

Post by keeda »

munificent wrote: post #159
terminalshort wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you consider the inputs, human art uses much more electricity than the bit of inference that AI art takes.

Yes, but that electricity consumption benefits an actual person . I'm so surprised that I often find myself having to explain this to AI boosters but people have more value than computers . If you throw a computer in a trash compactor, that's a trivial amount of e-waste. If you throw a living person in a trash compactor, that's a moral tragedy.

> I'm so surprised that I often find myself having to explain this to AI boosters but people have more value than computers.

That is true, but it does not survive contact with Capitalism. Let's zoom out and look at the larger picture of this simple scenario of "a creator creates art, another person enjoys art":

The creator probably spends hours or days painstakingly creating a work of art, consuming a certain amounts of electricity, water and other resources. The person enjoying that derives a certain amount of appreciation, say, N "enjoyment units". If payment is exchanged, it would reasonably be some function of N.

Now an AI pops up and, prompted by another human produces another similar piece of art in minutes, consuming a teeny, teeny fraction of what the human creator would. This Nature study about text generation finds LLMs are 40 - 150x more efficient in term of resource consumption, dropping to 4 - 16 for humans in India: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-76682-6 -- I would suspect the ratio is even higher for something as time-consuming as art. Note that the time taken for the human prompter is probably even less, just the time taken to imagine and type out the prompt and maybe refine it a bit.

So even if the other person derives only 0.1N "enjoyment" units out of AI art, in purely economic terms AI is a much, much better deal for everyone involved... including for the environment! And unfortunately, AI is getting so good that it may soon exceed N, so the argument that "humans can create something AI never could" will apply to an exceptionally small fraction of artists.

There are many, many moral arguments that could be made against this scenario, but as has been shown time and again, the definition of Capitalism makes no mention of morality.

Re: This is not the future

#382

Post by jobs_throwaway »

daveguy wrote: post #280
jobs_throwaway wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

But without regulation they clearly devolve into scam and fraud vehicles. Crypto just isn't worth the time or effort for regular folks. I'm not sure what's going to happen first -- abandonment or bank run, but crypto like all unregulated banking systems, are destined to fail. I guess it could end up being regulated but at this point, with such pervasive scam/fraud use, that will probably just accelerate the bank run.…

What have I said that indicates worship? I am simply pointing out that what you claimed was objectively false, and in response you moved the goalposts.

Re: This is not the future

#383

Post by matthewdgreen »

terminalshort wrote: post #183
klysm wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

COVID was in many ways the opposite of a reset. It further solidified massive wealth disparity and power concentration. The positive feedback loop doesn’t appear to have a good off-ramp.

The off ramp to the loop was always a crisis like a recession or war. Covid could have been such an example. If the government hadn't bailed everyone out, the pandemic would have been a mass casualty event for companies and their owners. The financial crisis of 2008 also would have been such an event if not for the bailouts. The natural state of the economy is boom and bust, with wealth concentration increasing durin…

This works until it doesn't.

Re: This is not the future

#384

Post by wiether »

ajkjk wrote: post #369
wiether wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm genuinely curious about the changes you are talking about? Keep in mind, thirty years ago, I was a kid. I thought that fast food was awesome. My parents would allow me a fast food meal at best once a month, and my "privileged" friends had a fast food meal a week. Now, I'd rather starve than eat something coming from a fast food. But around me, normies at eating at least once a day from a fast food. We have at lea…

In the interim America got obsessed with fitness and being out of shape much less obese became dramatically less popular in the middle / upper class. Like now it's possible to go days in some cities without seeing a single obese person. It's still a big problem. Outside of the cities and in lower class areas, but... I think the changes are trickling down / propagating? That's been my impression at least. Surprised by…

Since you talked about "the west", I applied your comment to my situation also (France).

But it seems that some things were and are still different.

Related to fitness, sure, there's millions of people who "go to the gym" at least one a week and buy food supplements and protein powders...

But they'll happily eat fast foot several times a week.

And if we talk about ultra-processed food, it's even worse.

> But a corner kebab or taco place seems like an unequivocal positive for society, I have no complaints about their existence at all.

That's probably a big difference, because nobody here will dare say that those place serves actual food. Not because of the cultural aspect, but just because it's the case. They use the lowest quality in every ingredients, use lots of bad oils to cook, put tons of salt and other additives... And don't get me started on the hygiene side. People are perfectly aware of that and they'll even joke about it while eating their 50% fat kebab.

At least McDonald's have the hygiene on their side!

We don't have the same obesity epidemic, partly due to portion sizing and mobility, but almost half the population is overweight and figures are still going up.

https://www.obesitefrance.fr/lobesite-cest-quoi/les-chiffres...

Re: This is not the future

#385

Post by voidhorse »

empressplay wrote: post #147
_heimdall wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Game theory is not inevitable, neither is math. Both are attempts to understand the world around us and predict what is likely to happen next given a certain context. Weather predictions are just math, for example, and they are always wrong to some degree.

Because the models aren't sophisticated enough (yet). There's no voodoo here. I'm always surprised how many 'logical' tech people shy away from simple determinism, given how obvious a deterministic universe becomes the more time you spend in computer science, and seem to insist there's some sort of metaphysical influence out there somewhere we'll never understand. There's not. Math is almost the definition of inevita…

Welcome to the 1600s.

If you start studying basically any field that isn't computer science you will in fact discover that the world is rife with randomness, and that the dreams of a Laplace or Bentham are probably unrealizable, even if we can get extremely close (but of course, if you constrain behavior in advance through laws and restraints, you've already made the job significantly easier).

Thinking that reality runs like a clock is literally a centuries outdated view of reality.

Re: This is not the future

#386

Post by _heimdall »

empressplay wrote: post #147
_heimdall wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Game theory is not inevitable, neither is math. Both are attempts to understand the world around us and predict what is likely to happen next given a certain context. Weather predictions are just math, for example, and they are always wrong to some degree.

Because the models aren't sophisticated enough (yet). There's no voodoo here. I'm always surprised how many 'logical' tech people shy away from simple determinism, given how obvious a deterministic universe becomes the more time you spend in computer science, and seem to insist there's some sort of metaphysical influence out there somewhere we'll never understand. There's not. Math is almost the definition of inevita…

Modeling will never be sophisticated enough to model the entire system.

The question here isn't about determinism, the question is whether the universe could ever be modelled completely enough to understand and predict what may or may not be predetermined.

Short of that level of modelling and understanding, determinism is based on belief or faith just like any other religion. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that, but you must recognized it is only belief that can make one view any unproven understanding of the universe to be the true explanation for it.

Re: This is not the future

#387

Post by nunez »

BloondAndDoom wrote: post #119

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…

> However tech people who thinks AI is bad, or not inevitable is really hard to understand.

I disagree. It's really not. Popular AI is extremely powerful and capable of a lot of things. It's also being used for nefarious purposes at the cost of our privacy and, in many cases, livelihoods.

> 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?

We don't live in a vacuum.

Every work that someone mostly generated from a prompt is a work results in work that another person (or people) couldn't generate. This was "fine" when the scope of the automation was small, as it gave people time to re-skill or apply their skills elsewhere. This is not fine when those with capital are talking about using this for EVERY POSSIBLE skill. This is even less fine when you consider how the systems that learned how to produce these works were literally trained on stolen data!

Yes, there are plenty of jobs that are safe from today's AI. That doesn't stop the threat of possibility, however.

I also disagree that the crop of AI art that exists today is "good." Some of what's out there is pretty novel, but a vast, vast majority of it looks extremely same-y. Same color hues, same styles (see also: the pervasive Studio Ghibli look), DEFINITELY same fonts, etc. It's also kind-of low res, so it always looks sloppy when printed on large format media. That's before the garbled text that gets left in. Horrible look IMO.

AI-generated audio is worse. Soundstage is super compressed and the output sounds low-bandwidth. This works great for lo-fi (I'm sure lo-fi artists will disagree though), however.

I'm sure all of this will get better as time goes on and more GPUs are sacrificed for better training.

Re: This is not the future

#388

Post by phreezie »

wccrawford wrote: post #223
phreezie wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Does it matter? Like how does it matter? Yes, it matters to me because art is something deeply human, and I don't want to consume art made by a machine. It doesn't matter if it's fun and beautiful, it's just that I don't want to. It's like other things in life I try to avoid, like buying sneakers made by children, or sign-up to anything Meta-owned.

That's pretty much what they said about photographs at first. I don't think you'll find a lot of people who argue that there's no art in photography now. Asking a machine to draw a picture and then making no changes? It's still art. There was a human designing the original input. There was human intention. And that's before they continue to use the AI tools to modify the art to better match their intention and vision…

I would argue that with photography, only the tooling changed but the craft remained, while with AI the craft completely transforms in something else, in which I'm just not interested in.

Re: This is not the future

#389

Post by immibis »

vegadw wrote: post #95
titzer wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's been driving me nuts for at least a decade. I can't remember which MacOS update it was, but when they reorganized the settings to better align with iOS, it absolutely infuriated me. Nothing will hit my thunder button like taking my skills and knowledge away. I thought I might swear off Mac forever. I've been avoiding upgrading from 13 now. In the past couple of updates, the settings for displays is completely di…

... Did you just complain about modern technology taking power away from users only to post an AI generated song about it? You know, the thing taking away power from musicians and filling up all modern digital music libraries with garbage? There's some cognitive dissonance on display there that I'm actually finding it hard to wrap my head around.

I believe musicians and users are two different groups.

"You say you want to bring power to the user, but you recommend free software which takes away power from corporate programmers. What hypocrisy!"

Re: This is not the future

#390

Post by immibis »

jjice wrote: post #55
tolerance wrote: post #16

This is high quality blog post! I’m all for a good argument that appears to challenge the notion of technological determinism. > Every choice is both a political statement and a tradeoff based on the energy we can spend on the consequences of that choice. Frequently I’ve been opposed to this sort of sentiment. Maybe it’s me, the author’s argument, or a combination of both, but I’m beginning to better understand how t…

I really don't like the "everything is political" sentiment. Sure, lots of things are or can be, but whenever I see this idea, it usually comes from people who have a very specific mindset that's leaning further in one direction on a political spectrum and is pushing their ideology. To clarify, I don't think pushing an ideology you believe in by posting a blog post is a bad thing. That's your right! I just think I ha…

What?
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