Netflix Made an Anime Using AI Due to a 'Labor Shortage,' and Fans Are Pissed
vice.com
vice.com
Almost the dream technocrats were predicting in the 60s, the only difference is that it's the complete opposite.
As a society our use of social media will one day be looked back on the way we look back on the Romans using lead as a sweetener.
...
"You mean there's a shortage of people willing to work brutal hours for subsistence wages."
Charlie Conservative:
"If your job can be replaced by AI, you deserve to starve, you aren't creating value for investors."
Bertha the Bot-Writer:
"I can replace both of you with generative AI that writes highly viral, low-effort, simplistic and partisan social media posts and comments."
"The new artist jobs will be the people who direct the AIs creating the art."
Gross.
Ironic, when you are on a site that seems mainly dedicated to people who use specialized language to direct computers to do repetitive things at scale.
Programming languages are for the most part deterministic tools that programmers generally understand and can debug. For this audience, the interpreter or compiler is not a "black box" that we only interact with by giving it inputs and seeing what it does.
Although some prompt engineers may have detailed understanding of the AI model and its training corpus, to most people using this kind of AI today the model is a black box, and it's up to them to try things.
Sure, that happens in programming too, but rarely at the level of a programming language, and much more likely at the level of a complex system of poorly documented and buggy interacting parts, such as a long-standing piece of computing infrastructure that has been iterated upon for decades, and now contains a mish-mash of components, many of which were added by people no longer around to explain how they work.
“Consider, for instance, the simple existence of the term “prompt engineering,” which describes the practice of iteratively fine-tuning the prompts you submit to ChatGPT (or whatever) to get your desired output. Prompt engineering is a matter of some identification of what the model responds to, and a lot of guesswork. It’s a matter of treating the natural language of the prompt into a formal language, almost into a programming language, manipulating symbols which lose their human meaning and intuitive structure like some sort of abstract association game. You’re working with the worst programming language imaginable.”
My angle is that using ChatGPT is like using a English as programming language, and it’s a terrible programming language. The reason “prompt engineering” is so irksome to me is that is supposed to be this new advanced mode of expertise, when in reality it’s just shitty programming.
“The Python/C++/whatever-code isn’t some obstacle that we are trying to overcome. The code is the interface that we designed to be able to program the computer, it’s what we want and need. It’s objective, explicit, unambiguous, (relatively) static, internally consistent, and robust. English has none of these properties—it’s subjective, meaning is often implicit, and ambiguous, and it’s always changing, contradictions appear; its structure does not hold up to analysis.”
It's definitely a form of authorship--and authorship (of a book) isn't shitty. Writing well is a craft that people hone--to induce wetware computers (i.e., brains) to "hallucinate" (using a term that seems popular with people who interface with these AI tools) what the author desires them too.
Maybe that's the difference? Programming is when you use a very formally constructed language to induce a computer to execute a desired algorithm precisely. Authorship or artistry is when you use a formally loose language (painting, sculpture, writing) to induce a computer to "hallucinate" a desired meme (in the original sense of the word, "unit of meaning").
Both pursuits are somewhat similar, but the breakpoint is the rigor of the language used, maybe?
https://deprogrammaticaipsum.com/the-english-likeness-monste...
Just add a second button that is "inject happy drugs" and you get a really good scifi novel that we shouldn't want to live in.
People directing AI to create things are not artists.
At best they are art commissioners
What about the Sistine Chapel? Jeff Koons?
http://artandobject.com/news/artist-workshops-their-history-...
I'm not an animator, and I'm sure I don't understand all of the issues. I could see this being terrible for new animators, who expect to get low-visibility work to get experience. Art of any kind has always been a precarious way to make a living, and it would be depressing if studios and audiences settled for something lesser to avoid paying them.
But is this a case where it frees them up to do more work? If fewer animators are involved, does that mean the same animators can produce more films? Studios are desperate for content, which is part of the "labor shortage".
Perhaps it would be an opportunity for more niche animation -- to tell more personal stories with less wide appeal because the overhead is less? There's a ton of such material on Netflix; it seems to be their bread and butter.
I don't want to get all techno-utopia, especially in a domain I don't know. My guesses are not as good as their experience. But I am genuinely curious.
They will choose profits over their own suvival - they sanctionbusted to sell to nazis, choose shirt term profit over long-term growth, etc.
I point that out because maybe some of the outrage is due to misunderstanding/language barrier, since it seems out of proportion for an experimental short? Maybe it was in poor taste for Netflix's tweet to emphasize the "labor shortage", their article [1] is more about experimenting with new ways for animators to work with AI tools.
The kids of the future will get to spot AI deformations, extra digits, missing limbs, non-Euclidean geometry!
Not saying that this needs to apply in any specific example. I'm just trying to advocate for the idea that we can imagine different social constructs as being possible. I like to think that a society can potentially decide to do anything that society agrees they want to do, and that could include valuing people over profits.