Eccitaze @ Eccitaze @yiffit.net

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4

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338

Joined

2 yr. ago

I hate it because it's a gigantic waste of time and resources. Big tech has poured hundreds of billions of dollars, caused double digit percentage increases in data center emissions, and fed almost the entire collective output of humanity into these models.

And what did we get for it? We got a toy that is at best mildly amusing, but isn't really all that actually useful for anything; the output provided by generative AI is too unreliable to trust outright and needs to be reviewed and tweaked by hand, so at best you're getting a minor productivity gain, and more likely you're seeing a neutral or negative impact on your productivity (or producing low-quality crap faster and calling it "good enough"). At worst, it's put a massive force multiplier in the hands of the bad actors using disinformation to tear apart modern society for their personal gain. Goldman Sachs released a report in late June where they pointed this out: if tech companies are planning on investing a trillion dollars into AI, what is the trillion dollar problem that AI is going to solve? And so far as I can tell, it seems that the answer to the question is either "it will eliminate millions of jobs and wipe out entire industries without any replacement or safety net, causing untold human suffering" or (more likely to be the case) "there is no trillion dollar problem AI can solve and the entire endeavor is pointless."

Even ignoring the opportunity cost--the money spent could have literally solved the entire homelessness crisis, world hunger, lifted entire countries out of poverty, or otherwise funded solutions for real, intractable, pressing problems for all of humanity--even ignoring that generative AI has single-handedly erased years of progress in reducing our C02 emissions and addressing the climate crisis, even ignoring the logistical difficulty of the scale of build-out being discussed requiring a bigger improvement in our power grid than has been done basically ever, even ignoring the concerns over IP theft and everything else, fundamentally generative AI just isn't worth the hype. It's the crypto craze and NFT craze and metaverse craze (remember Zuckerberg burning 36 billion to make a virtual meeting space featuring avatars without legs?) all over again, except instead of only impacting the suckers who bought into the hype, this time it's getting shoved in everybody's face even if they want nothing to do with it.

But hey, at least it gave us "I Glued My Balls To My Butthole Again." That totally makes the hundred billion investment worth it, right?

Just because something is transformative doesn't mean that it's fair use. There's three other factors, including the nature of the work you copied, the amount of the copyrighted work taken for the use, and the effect on the market. There's no way in hell I believe that anyone can plausibly say with a straight face "I'm taking literally all of the creative works you've ever produced and using them to create a product designed to directly compete with you and put you out of business, and this qualifies as a fair use" and I would be shocked if any judge in any court heard that argument without laughing the poor lawyer making it out of the court.

Good question!

First, that artist will only learn from a few handful of artists instead of every artist's entire field of work all at the same time. They will also eventually develop their own unique style and voice--the art they make will reflect their own views in some fashion, instead of being a poor facsimile of someone else's work.

Second, mimicking the style of other artists is a generally poor way of learning how to draw. Just leaping straight into mimicry doesn't really teach you any of the fundamentals like perspective, color theory, shading, anatomy, etc. Mimicking an artist that draws lots of side profiles of animals in neutral lighting might teach you how to draw a side profile of a rabbit, but you'll be fucked the instant you try to draw that same rabbit from the front, or if you want to draw a rabbit at sunset. There's a reason why artists do so many drawings of random shit like cones casting a shadow, or a mannequin doll doing a ballet pose, and it ain't because they find the subject interesting.

Third, an artist spends anywhere from dozens to hundreds of hours practicing. Even if someone sets out expressly to mimic someone else's style, teaches themselves the fundamentals, it's still months and years of hard work and practice, and a constant cycle of self-improvement, critique, and study. This applies to every artist, regardless of how naturally talented or gifted they are.

Fourth, there's a sort of natural bottleneck in how much art that artist can produce. The quality of a given piece of art scales roughly linearly with the time the artist spends on it, and even artists that specialize in speed painting can only produce maybe a dozen pieces of art a day, and that kind of pace is simply not sustainable for any length of time. So even in the least charitable scenario, where a hypothetical person explicitly sets out to mimic a popular artist's style in order to leech off their success, it's extremely difficult for the mimic to produce enough output to truly threaten their victim's livelihood. In comparison, an AI can churn out dozens or hundreds of images in a day, easily drowning out the artist's output.

And one last, very important point: artists who trace other people's artwork and upload the traced art as their own are almost universally reviled in the art community. Getting caught tracing art is an almost guaranteed way to get yourself blacklisted from every art community and banned from every major art website I know of, especially if you're claiming it's your own original work. The only way it's even mildly acceptable is if the tracer explicitly says "this is traced artwork for practice, here's a link to the original piece, the artist gave full permission for me to post this." Every other creative community writing and music takes a similarly dim views of plagiarism, though it's much harder to prove outright than with art. Given this, why should the art community treat someone differently just because they laundered their plagiarism with some vector multiplication?

But hey, now they can claim that not picking Shapiro was antisemitic! 🙄

Never mind the tiki torches and chants of "Jews will not replace us" in the distance...

The Phoenix Wright trilogy--the first three original GBA games/DS re-releases. They set up and develop so many arcs that pay off both within each game and across the entire trilogy. I would even go so far as to say that Phoenix Wright 3 is one of the best visual novel games of all time.

The used game market is still insane, I'm seeing $20-30 for even shit-tier, obscure, normally worthless nes games. If you bought the console while it was new it's still worth keeping, but absolutely just get a flash cart instead of subjecting yourself to the price gouging retro market.

It's not just "worse" graphics. CRTs have little/no input lag, which is crucial for some older games like Punch-Out!.

I was one of those that thought biden shouldn't drop out, because I was worried about the risk of infighting breaking out over who would replace him, distracting everyone and driving away voters, and I was also concerned about throwing away the incumbent advantage. I still feel the risks of that happening were real and valid, but I'm immensely pleased that those worries didn't come to pass and everyone immediately unified behind Harris.

And the second and third quotes, that were you?

Take the goddamn L, man. You made a statement in ignorance, you were wrong, and you were given evidence showing you were wrong. Accept it, learn from your mistake, and be better in the future.

Or anywhere relatively rural. I just got home from a long weekend in rural Minnesota/Wisconsin, and there's literally no viable way to run public transit out there in a manner that wouldn't either be so restrictive as to be useless, or would lose so much money it would be first on the block for service cuts (and therefore become useless). I'm talking "town of 600 residents, most people live on unincorporated county land on a farmstead, and the only grocery store in a 50 mile radius is a Dollar General" rural. Asking these folks to give up cars is an insane prospect.

Nope. Been there, done that, turned a relatively amicable breakup into a "you're a piece of shit and don't ever speak to me again" situation, ruining another friendship in the process. It's a horrible, horrible idea.

And run red lights, and drive recklessly and...,

People always assume that generative AI (and technology in general) will continue improving at the same pace it always has been. They always assume that there are no limits in the number of parameters, that there's always more useful data to train it on, and that things like physical limits in electricity infrastructure, compute resources, etc., don't exist. In five years generative AI will have roughly the same capability it has today, barring massive breakthroughs that result in a wholesale pivot away from LLMs. (More likely, in five years it'll be regarded similarly to cryptocurrency is today, because once the hype dies down and the VC money runs out the AI companies will have to jack prices to a level where it's economically unviable to use in most commercial environments.)

Yup, and also how to orient yourself and the direction you were going by the progression of the address numbers--for example, if you were on Sunset Blvd SE, you knew address numbers increased as you drove south and east.

Yup, I delivered pizza for the Hut around the same time. Big ol' map of the area divided into sectors, each order listed which sector the address was in. I'd write directions on the back of the order slip, and go off into the night with nothing but a flashlight. First day I got a lecture by the manager on how to navigate by address and tell which side of the street a house was on, I learned more about navigating that day than in the entire rest of my life.

Sometimes I miss those days and wish I could be 19 and driving my tiny Honda Civic through the highlands again, listening to video game songs downloaded from OCRemix on my little MP3 player plugged into the car audio with a tape adapter.

LMAOOOOOOOOOOOOO

I'm personally a little nervous about Harris--I remember the 2020 primary where her only notable accomplishments were accusing Biden of being racist over opposition to federal busing policies, and then flaming out shortly after and shuttering her campaign two months before the first caucus and polling single digits in California. Admittedly, she doesn't have the same headwinds now that she had in 2020--she doesn't have to differentiate herself from over a dozen other candidates and she won't struggle to raise money--but she also made some unforced errors (e.g. coming out for total elimination of private insurance before revealing a plan that included private plans, or admitting her own policy on busing was essentially identical to Biden's).

Hopefully, she'll run a much tighter campaign now since she'll inherit Biden's staff and can focus solely on attacking Trump, but I do have some concerns.

Or they think that the people above their station deserve those benefits--they genuinely think and support the rich getting richer is a good thing, regardless of whether they'll see any benefit themselves. It's the mirror image of the progressive mindset of voting to raise their own taxes to help the needy.

Well, aside from the obvious "make myself my fursona" bit...

I'd get rid of my ADHD, or at the very least get rid of its interaction with food and exercise. It's been such a burden, to the point where it's singlehandedly prevented me from taking up new hobbies (because I know I won't stick to them and can't afford to waste the money), kept me from focusing on new certs (because I suck at self-directed study), and it's the single biggest reason why I'm overweight. I fucking hate it. ADHD superpowers, my ass. This is a fucking debilitating disease, and even with medicine it still sucks.

Ah, so you're a literal 90s-era troll.