this one goes out to the arts & humanities

AI is going to destroy art the same way Photoshop, or photography, or pre-made tubes of paints, destroyed art. It's a tool, it helps people take the idea in their head and put it in the world. And it lowers the barrier to entry, now you don't need years of practice in drawing technique to bring your ideas to life, you just need ideas.

If AI gets to a point that it can give us creative, original, art that sparks emotion in novel ways...well we probably also made a super intelligent AI and our list of problems is much different than today.

As someone who's absolutely terrible at drawing, but enjoys photography and generally creativity, having AI tools to generate my own art is opening up a whole different avenue for me to scratch my creative itch.
I've got a technical background, so figuring out the tools and modifying them for my purposes has been a lot more fun than practice drawing.
- I've only dabbled a bit with ML art, and I am by no means an artist, but it doesn't scratch that itch for me the same way that drawing or doing stuff in blender does. It doesn't really feel like I'm watching my vision slowly take shape, no matter how precise I make the prompt. It kinda just feels like what it is, a transformer iterating over some random noise.
  I'm also a very technical person, and for years I was stuck in that same mindset of "I'm a technical guy, I'm not cut out for art". I was only able to get out of this slump thanks to some of my art friends, who were really helpful in pointing me in the right direction.
  Learning to draw isn't the easiest thing in the world, and trust me I'm probably as bad at it as you are, but it's fun, and it feels satisfying.
  I agree that AI has a place as another artistic medium, but I also feel like it can become a trap for people like me who think they don't have an artistic bone in their body.
  If you do feel like getting back into drawing, then as a fellow technical person I'd recommend learning blender first. It taught me some of the skills I also use in drawing, like perspective, shading, and splitting complex objects into simpler shapes. It's also just plain fun.
- As someone who’s absolutely terrible at drawing
  Then practice. Nearly no artist was born knowing how to draw or paint, we dedicated countless hours to learn what works and what doesn't.
- This is the perfect use case.
  Photoshop didn't destroy jobs forever, all it did was shift how people worked AND actually created work and different types of work.
i like the idea of AI as a tool artists can use, but that's not a capitalist's viewpoint, unfortunately. they will try to replace people.
And if text-based images remain uninspired and samey... oh well? Congratulations, you will foreverafter be able to spot when someone's extremely timely gag image was cranked out via its description, rather than badly composited from Google Images results. I've done a lot of bad compositing for Something Awful shitpost threads and speed beats effort every time.
Tbh I hate Photoshop for a lot of photography. It is unfortunately necessary for macro photography, which is the only type I do. Which is one of the reasons mine is not nearly as good as it could be because I refuse to use it.
This. AI was never made for the sole purpose of creating art or beating humans in chess. Doing so are just side quests for the real stuff.
- What do you think the "real stuff" is?
I hate this sentiment. It's not a tool like a brush is to a canvas. It's a machine that runs off the fuel of our creative achievements. The sheer amount of pro AI shit I read from this place just makes me that closer to putting a bullet in my fucking skull
- Once you reincarnate in the future, generative models will make even better art than they do today. It'll be a losing battle against time.

Tech bros are not really techie themselves as they are really just Wall Street bros with tech as their product. Most claim they can code, but if they were coders they would be coding. They are not coders, they are businessmen through and through.who just happen to sell tech.

This is 100% correct. It can overlap but honestly as someone going into embedded systems I despise tech bros.
Most claim they can code, but if they were coders they would be coding
I dislike techbros as much as you, but this isn't really a valid statement.
I can code, but I can't sell a crypto scam to millions of rubes.
If I could, why would I waste my time writing code?
Many techbros are likely "good enough" coders who have better marketing skills and used their tech knowledge to leverage into business instead.

I work in AI. LLM's are cool and all, but I think it's all mostly hype at this stage. While some jobs will be lost (voice work, content creation) my true belief is that we'll see two increases:

The release of productivity tools that use LLM's to help automate or guide menial tasks.
The failure of businesses that try to replicate skilled labour using AI.

In order to stop point two, I would love to see people and lawmakers really crack down on AI replacing jobs, and regulating the process of replacing job roles with AI until they can sufficiently replace a person. If, for example, someone cracks self-driving vehicles then it should be the responsibility of owning companies and the government to provide training and compensation to allow everyone being "replaced" to find new work. This isn't just to stop people from suffering, but to stop the idiot companies that'll sack their entire HR department, automate it via AI, and then get sued into oblivion because it discriminated against someone.

I've also heard it's true that as far as we can figure, we've basically reached the limit on certain aspects of LLMs already. Basically, LLMs need a FUCK ton of data to be good. And we've already pumped them full of the entire internet so all we can do now is marginally improve these algorithms that we barely understand how they work. Think about that, the entire Internet isnt enough to successfully train LLMs.
LLMs have taken some jobs already (like audio transcription, basic copyediting, and aspects of programming), we're just waiting for the industries to catch up. But we'll need to wait for a paradigm shift before they start producing pictures and books or doing complex technical jobs with few enough hallucinations that we can successfully replace people.
- The (really, really, really) big problem with the internet is that so much of it is garbage data. The number of false and misleading claims spread endlessly on the internet is huge. To rule those beliefs out of the data set, you need something that can grasp the nuances of published, peer-reviewed data that is deliberately misleading propaganda, and fringe conspiracy nuts that believe the Earth is controlled by lizards with planes, and only a spritz bottle full of vinegar can defeat them, and everything in between.
  There is no person, book, journal, website, newspaper, university, or government that has reliably produced good, consistent help on questions of science, religion, popular lies, unpopular truths, programming, human behavior, economic models, and many, many other things that continuously have an influence on our understanding of the world.
  We can't build an LLM that won't consistently be wrong until we can stop being consistently wrong.
- My own personal belief is very close to what you've said. It's a technology that isn't new, but had been assumed to not be as good as compositional models because it would cost a fuck-ton to build and would result in dangerous hallucinations. It turns out that both are still true, but people don't particularly care. I also believe that one of the reasons why ChatGPT has performed so well compared to other LLM initiatives is because there is a huge amount of stolen data that would get OpenAI in a LOT of trouble.
  IMO, the real breakthroughs will be in academia. Now that LLM's are popular again, we'll see more research into how they can be better utilised.
Nah fuck HR, they're the shield of the companies to discriminate withing margins from behind
I think the proper route is a labor replacement tax to fund retraining and replacement pensions
I sincerely doubt AI voice over will out perform human actors in the next 100 years in any metric, including cost or time savings.
- Not sure why you're downvoted, but this is already happening. There was a story a few days ago of a long-time BBC voice-over artist that lost their gig. There have also been several stories of VA workers being handed contracts that allow the reuse of their voice for AI purposes.
Are you saying that if a company adopts AI to replace a job, they should have to help the replaced workers find new work? Sounds like something one can loophole by cutting the department for totally unrelated reasons before coincidentally realizing that they can have AI do that work, which they totally didn't think of before firing people.
- That's why it would need regulation to work...

There are plenty of things you can shit on AI art for

But it is neither badly approximately, nor can a student produce such work in less than a minute.

This feels like the other end of the extreme of the tech bros

Is English your second language?
- Or was this comment by an AI?

I think approximation is the right word here. It’s pretty cool and all and I’m looking forward how it will develop. But it’s mostly a fun toy.

I’m stoked for the moment the tech bros understand, that an AI is way better at doing their job than it is at creating art.

tech bros jobs is to wrote bad javascript and fall for scam, this AI already beaten
It's bad at anything useful for programming too.
I think one thing you and many other people misunderstand is that the image generation aspect of AI is a sideshow, both in use and in intent.
The ability to generate images from text based prompts is basically a side effect of the ability that they are actually spending billions on, which is object detection.
So you're happy to see AI take someone else's job as long as it isn't taking your job.
- Taking the jobs of the people responsible for creating it seems preferable to taking others' jobs.
- Less work being done by anyone is better. Thinking it's bad that work is done for us by robots is the brain worms talking.
- That comment was very Reddit of you. Don’t do that, please.

Billions were spent inventing and producing the calculator device.

Human calculators are now extinct.

Complex calculations are far more accessible.

This has a secondary effect of making average people incapable of estimation in their heads. Hopefully in the future people won't be incapable of writing and art.
- The entire point behind the much maligned New Math is to teach approximate solutions that you can do quickly in your head. It's the realization that if you want an exact answer, use a calculator, but quick head estimates are still useful.
  It was opposed by generations who were told to memorize multiplication tables because they wouldn't always have a calculator available.
- Average people weren't doing complex math in their head back when human calculators were a thing.

Art itself isn't useless it's just incredibly replicable. There is so much good art out there that people don't need to consume crap.

It's like saying there is no money in being a footballer. Of course there is loads of money in being a footballer. But most people that play football don't make any money.

The gutting of the humanities and other things generally written off as "frivolous" kind of terrified me. There's something that feels distinctly wrong about these attempts at destroying and anyone that even might turn an introspective gaze on society itself. Like multiple parties don't want that sort of thing accessible to the layperson.

Turing Incompleteness is a pathway to many powers the Computer Scientists would consider incalculable.

Is it possible to learn this power?
- No, but it's extremely possible to copy someone else's work on it from stack overflow!
In fact, there's infinite problems that cannot he solved by Turing machnes!
(There are countably many Turing-computable problems and uncountably many non-Turing-computable problems)
- Infinite seems like it's low-balling it, then. 0% of problems can be solved by Turing machines (same way 0% of real numbers are integers)
Except they have convinced themselves that if it can’t be calculated it’s worthless.

That's a pretty shit take. Humankind spent nearly 12 thousand years figuring out the combustion engine. It took 1 million years to figure farming. Compared to that, less than 500 years to create general intelligence will be a blip in time.

i think you're missing the point, which i took as this - what arts and humanities folks do is valuable (as evidenced by efforts to recreate it) despite common narratives to the contrary.
- Of course it's valuable. So is, e.g., soldering components on a circuit board, but we have robots for doing that at scale now.
Humanity didn't spend those times figuring out those things though. Humanity grew that time to make it happen (and AI is younger than 500y IMO).
Also, we are the same persons today than people were then. We just have access to what our parents generation made and so on.
- AI is younger than 500y IMO
  Hence "will be a blip in time"
  we are the same persons today than people were then. We just have access to what our parents generation made and so on.
  Completelly disconnected and irrelevant to anything I wrote.
This is some pretty weird and lowkey racist exposition on humanity.
Humankind isn't a single unified thing. Individual cultures have their own modes of subsistence and transportation that are unique to specific cultural needs.
It's not that it took 1 million years to "figure out" farming. It's that 1 specific culture of modern humans (biologically, humans as we conceive of ourselves today have existed for about 200,000 years, with close relatives existing for in the ballpark of 1M years) started practicing a specific mode of subsistence around 23,000 years ago. Specific groups of indigenous cultures remaining today still don't practice agriculture, because it's not actually advantageous in many ways -- stored foods are less nutritious, agriculture requires a fairly sedentary existence, it takes a shit load of time to cultivate and grow food (especially when compared to foraging and hunting), which leads to less leisure time.
Also where did you come up with the number 12,000 for "figuring out" the combustion engine? Genuinely curious. Like were we "working on it" for 12k years? I don't get it. But this isn't exactly a net positive and has come with some pretty disastrous consequences. I say this because you're proposing a linear path for "humanity" forward, when the reality is that humans are many things, and progress viewed in this way has a tendency toward racism or at least ethnocentrism.
But also yeah, the point of this meme is "artists are valuable."
- This is some pretty weird and lowkey racist exposition on humanity.
  Getting “racism” from that post is a REAL stretch. It’s not even weird, agriculture and mechanization are widely considered good things for humanity as a whole
  Humankind isn't a single unified thing. Individual cultures have their own modes of subsistence and transportation that are unique to specific cultural needs.
  ANY group of humans beyond the individual is purely just a social construct and classing humans into a single group is no less sensible than grouping people by culture, family, tribe, country etc.
  It's not that it took 1 million years to "figure out" farming. It's that 1 specific culture of modern humans (biologically, humans as we conceive of ourselves today have existed for about 200,000 years, with close relatives existing for in the ballpark of 1M years) started practicing a specific mode of subsistence around 23,000 years ago. Specific groups of indigenous cultures remaining today still don't practice agriculture, because it's not actually advantageous in many ways -- stored foods are less nutritious, agriculture requires a fairly sedentary existence, it takes a shit load of time to cultivate and grow food (especially when compared to foraging and hunting), which leads to less leisure time.
  Agriculture is certainly more efficient in terms of nutrition production for a given calorie cost. It’s also much more reliable. Arguing against agriculture as a good thing for humanity as a whole is the thing that’s weird.
- The first heat engines were fire pistons, which go back to prehistory, so 12k to 25k years sounds about right. The next application of steam to make things move happened about 450 BC, about 2.5k years ago. Although not a direct predecessor to the ICE, they all are heat engines.

Honestly people are trying to desperately to automate physical labor to. The problem is the machines don't understand the context of their work which can cause problems. All the work of AI is a result of trying to make a machine that can. The art and humanities is more a side project

Nothing wrong in automating tasks that previously needed human labour. I would much rather sit back and chill, and let automation do my bidding
- If only the people in control of the wealth would let the rest of us chill while the machines do all the labor.
The art and humanities is more a side project
I'll add:
A side project that isn't a life or death situation like most of those physical labor things you're talking about. Art isn't also bound or constrain by rules and regulations like those jobs and if the AI fails at art then there's no problem. Nobody would care.
- if the AI fails at art then there's no problem. Nobody would care.
  https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/art-6
- Besides, if it fails at art it might even create something we never thought
The problem is the machines don’t understand the context of their work which can cause problems. All the work of AI is a result of trying to make a machine that can.
I am deeply confused by this statement.
A robot that assembles cars does not need to "understand" anything about what it's doing. It just needs to make the same motions with its welding torch over and over again for eternity. And it does that job pretty well.
Further, neural networks as they stand cannot truly understand anything. All classification networks know how to do is point at stuff and say "That's a car/traffic light/cancer cell", and all generation networks know how to do is parrot. Any halfway decent teacher will tell you that memorizing and understanding are completely different things.
- No but a robot that does the dishes needs to know how to know what a dish is and how to clean all different types and what's not a dish. The complexity of behavior needed to automate human tasks that cannot be done by a assembly line robot is immense. Most manual labor jobs are still manual labor because they are too full of unknowns and nuances for a simple logic diagram to be of any use. So yes some robots need to understand what's going on
  And as for parroting vs remembering current LLMs are very limited in the capacity of creating new things but they can create novel things bash smashing together their training data. Think about it, that's all humans are too. A result of our training data. If I took away every single one of your sense since the day you where born and removed your ability to remember anything you wouldn't be very intelligent either. With no inputs youcould produce no outputs other than gibberish which an AI can do to. ( And I mean ALL senses you have no form of connection with the outside world )

they're misunderstanding the reasoning for spending billions.

the reason to spend all the money to approximate is so we can remove arts and humanities majors altogether.. after enough approximation yield similar results to present day chess programs which regularly now beat humans and grand masters. their vocation is doomed to the niche, like most of humanity, eventually.

Imagine seeing writing and art as purely functional activities.
- What else can they be seen as other than hobbies or marketing?

I propose that we treat AI as ancillas, companions, muses, or partners in creation and understanding our place in the cosmos.

While there are pitfalls in treating the current generation of LLMs and GANs as sentient, or any AI for that matter, there will be one day where we must admit that an artificial intelligence is self-aware and sentient, practically speaking.

To me, the fundamental question about AI, that will reveal much about humanity, is philosophical as much as it is technical: if a being that is artificially created, has intelligence, and is functionally self-aware and sentient, does it have natural rights?

I just love the idjits who think not showing empathy to people AI bros are trying to put out of work will save them when the algorithms come for their jobs next

When LeopardsEatingFaces becomes your economic philosophy

Matthew Dow Smith, whomever the fuck that is, has a sophisticated delusion about what's actually going on and he's incorporated it into his persecution complex. Not impressed.

Tech bros are idiots who greatly overestimate their own intelligence .

An art major's half asleep doodles can receive copyright protection whereas an image created by a million dollar supercomputer running the most sophisticated AI model possible cannot.

Extremely rare artist x lawyer crossover to dunk on the AI bros.

If you think arts and humanities are useless, you probably lack an imagination.

Like completely.

I won't say you're useless, because simple minded grunts are needed.

Humanity wouldn't exist without the arts.

I am a writer with two novels in progress and I'm into photography.
Arts and humanities are useless.

Run on, sentence.

I'd love to see some data on the people who believe that AI fundamentally can't do art and the people who believe that AI is an existential threat to artists.

Anecdotally, there seems to be a large overlap between the adherents of what seem to be mutually exclusive positions and I wish I understood that better.

The trick is that there are companies/people that would commission an artist but go for AI instead because they don't want/need actual art if it's more expensive
- I'm going to try to paraphrase that position to make sure I understand it. Please correct me if I got it wrong.
  AI produces something not-actual-art. Some people want stuff that's not-actual-art. Before AI they had no choice but to pay a premium to a talented artist even though they didn't actually need it. Now they can get what they actually need but we should remove that so they have to continue paying artists because we had been paying artists for this in the past?
  Is that correct or did I miss or mangle something?
People used to pay lots of money to digital artists for various tasks. Now generative models like stable diffusion can do many of those things, just as graphic design. This is resulting in people paying less to artists.
AI doesn't threaten art as a medium. It threatens art as a job.

Some bad course cope right here don't let the philosophy grads see this

I mean they're kind of succeeding; with AI art, people no longer have to settle with Picasso looking artwork.

yeah instead I have to settle for the two genres of mangled 18 fingered Lovecraft monster or Dreamworks style anime girl. cool

Yeah, no.

First AI right now can create very decent images in seconds for basically free, and it only will get better.

Second, AI can do much more than that: translation, Explaining a text in simpler words, help write code, semantic search... Creating poems about armadillos and talking like a pirate are fun novelties, but not the goals.

What happened to translation in the last 15 years will now happen to creative design.
- So, nothing? Because you still need professional translators for creative works, plenty of writing simply doesn't directly translate as it relies on culture-specific context that readers in other languages and countries don't have. So you need someone who is well versed in both cultures to find an appropriate alternative for the translated work.
Hahaha look how you get downvoted for stating the obvious. Amazing community here.
- Well, it's a classic. Now look at this:
  communism sounds good but it's impossible in practice
  opens umbrella
- There are so many factual errors in their comment tho.

Most of Arts will be automated away. Stable Diffusion is just the beginning.

Right, the only value and purpose of arts and literature, it's creation and enjoyment, is to make a product to sell or consume a story. What a foolish opinion.
- Stable Diffusion is open source and free to be used by anyone. A lot of people have used it for creation and enjoyment. It cuts artists out of the loop and enables a lot of ordinary people to create art. I see this as a huge win.
I would like you to know that if you say this, or other things you said in this thread to my face, I would punch the smug out of you.
Remember this post in a few years when your billion dollar theft machines have shut down for being huge wastes of money and effort and the few survivors, if any, have been sectioned off into expensive subscription models that you are priced out of because they need to make the literal billions of dollars it costs to make and run them back at some point.
This is the same-ass bubble as NFTs and crypto and it will also die.
- why so angry?
the art understander has logged on
Death to America
Spoken like someone who doesn't understand why people engage with art in the first place. AKA a techbro.
- People love Stable Diffusion, and use it a lot. Why do you think is that?
- It has already happened in our lifetime with medical illustration. This is pre-gpt. It will just now spread. Are generated diagrams worse in subtle ways? Yes, but not enough to matter for the difference in first or ease of use.
If AI becomes responsible for producing Disney musicals, then they probably won't have any gay-coded characters anymore. What about Scar? What about Ursula? What about Gaston? What about Shang??
We need human artists because humans are capable of sneaking content that is actually societally beneficial into what would otherwise be soulless corporate products.
- How were Gaston and Shang coded gay?
🤡