The reason content creators worry about ChatGPT
jayacunzo.com
jayacunzo.com
The increased use of generative AI tools like ChatGPT has brought to a head the problem that creators have been facing for some time. They worry that these tools are greater masters of their craft than they are. According to a recent article, the explanation is simple: creators have overemphasized one part of the craft, posture. This refers to how creators see themselves and the world, which creates a unique creative “fingerprint”. Creators are not focusing enough on the other two parts, the process, which is how the work is directed, and practice, which involves honing creative skills. Instead, they are relying on techniques, workflows, and tools to direct them. By learning and focusing on the process and practice, creators can improve their skills and not worry about being replaced by AI tools.
Nobody wants to read your stupid chatGPT summarizes! If we want we all can do it ourselves. Congratulations you turned long and rambling into short and incoherent. Please spend some time finding a skim reading technique that works for you to get through long texts. I suggest starting with the conclusion, and skimming up from the bottom reading the first few words of each paragraph or whatever catches your eye.. this skips rambling starts and help you know if the article is worth the effort. Hey here’s a Chatgpt prompt for you.
Hey ChatGPT I find some articles long and boring, please give me some strategies and specific instructions on how to skim read a text to find the important information
And
Hey Chatgpt I shared your summary of an article on a forum news.ycombinator.com and some user gave me a negative response. please give me some possible reasons he could have been annoyed by that.
Creators are overemphasizing their unique perspective and not focusing enough on the process and practice of their craft, leading to concerns about AI tools replacing them.
Yikes that really hits home. Since the dawn of computers, people have been handing over more and more of their thinking to processes and machines, becoming more robotic. Or like how the factory line changes the way people think, reduces their creativity. Maybe now that the robots are getting scarily good, I can hope that humans will go back to acting like humans again.
> 1960's Futurists: Automation will free mankind from meaningless tedium to focus on creative pursuits only human beings can master.
> 2020's Techbros: We're building AI to write all your books, music, and TV so you can focus on the meaningless tedium of your cubicle job.
Except instead of "cubicle job" it's also "algorithm-pleasing #content drudgery".
I remember it was something absurd and kafkesque, I returned a product, and they could only return the money on the card I used to pay for it, but that card has expired.
I was exasperated "Here is my ID, its the same bank account, by the same bank. Use y common sence!"
"But there is message sating it has to be the same card"
"it no longer exists, so how do I get the money back now?"
"There is no button for that"
At that moment, I thought, this person can only do what the computer says. The Developer didn't program the computer.
The develiper programmed the person that will use the computer.
I think more accurately the developer constrained the end user of the system.
By comparison, some years later after that company had gone out of business, I was in a big box version of the same service and we ran into a problem that was the equivalent of "accidentally closed this ticket, need to re-open". The cashier could see that it was a problem, and needed to be fixed. The supervisor could see it was a problem and needed to be fixed. The store manager could see it was a problem and needed to be fixed. And it was unfixable because there was no way to do it in the system and no system developers reachable by mere mortals.
When creation is having a idea and then flesh it with some procedural, repetitive work, then you are not doing a lot more of what this kind of tools might be able to do, just hand it the idea and let it produce the fleshed out product.
You can still chop a tree with an axe for the joy of it, but we have a cheap chainsaw available for use too.
One of the major motifs of Chaplin's Modern Times.
It was released in 1936.
It's also, um, kinda something Karl Marx was concerned about. So.
Here's a famous sequence from the film, in which Chaplin's character is volun-told to try out a new efficiency-improving worker lunch machine:
And then you see people on Reddit talking about how they created a picture book using stable diffusion for the pictures, and chat GPT for the story with the Reddit post titled "I wrote a book". It's almost as if people fundamentally misunderstand the concept of craftsmanship altogether.
But current AI tools do not seem analogous to the progression of tools that came before, and I don’t think we should treat them as such.
I think it’s more like buying a paintbrush that also paints the painting for you. And I’d also have the same opinion about that.
"It took a lot more effort than it needed to" isn't what defines whether something is able to have good craftsmanship put in.
Shooting a movie on an iphone pro can be as artistically involved as shooting one in black and white on 8mm film.
If you delegate video production to some perfect Stable Diffusion equivalent…
If the first one harms motor skill, which we can pretend doesn’t affect the mind much, what does the second one harm?
Try doing that. Getting a good result isn't as easy as you make it out to be.
I suppose I could have written “Garden castle, Many flowers, A few roses, clouds, dramatic clouds above, pink, dreamy ultra wide shot, atmospheric, hyper realistic, 8k, epic composition, cinematic, octane render, artstation landscape vista photography by Carr Clifton & Galen Rowell, 16K resolution, Landscape veduta photo by Dustin Lefevre & tdraw, 8k resolution, detailed landscape painting by Ivan Shishkin, DeviantArt, Flickr, rendered in Enscape, Miyazaki, Nausicaa Ghibli, Breath of The Wild, 4k detailed post processing, artstation, rendering by octane, unreal engine --iw 10 --ar 9:16 --no blue”, but it would have ruined the flow of my comment.
Haha, ew, gross, looks like real work, must be for the plebs.
> and pasting “landscape painting ultra-detailed 4K artstation” into midjourney and getting an immediate result?
Now you're talking. That's a producer credit! Welcome to really being someone!
I'm not trolling either. I'm quite bothered by the common argument that "art is effort". Art is not defined by the effort it takes to create and anytime it gets easier (even to a trivial degree) there are always pundits and naysayers.
I’m more concerned with how in love people are with the idea of suddenly being able to paint a picture without needing to learn how to paint a picture. I’d feel the same way about someone who was excited that they could replicate IKB 79 by opening MS Paint, filling the canvas with IK Blue and sending it off to the printers.
E: I misread you so largely removed my post as it delved into the history of what is "art" which isn't really what you were talking about as made clear by your 2nd paragraph. But I feel the point of photography::paintings and what one excitingly sends off to be printed still holds true.
I find a distinction between paying to CNC your own design and purchasing a product designed and CNC’d by someone else.
In both cases you have a finished product, but in the second case you didn’t make it — you bought it.
I think online they perhaps want to experience the validation of creation over anything else. Increasingly, the "creation" is in service of what "scores".
I think it’s fine for them to say they wrote a book. The book didn’t exist. Then they took an action and the book existed. It’s like saying “I wrote a book” if you paid somebody to ghostwrite a book that you outlined.
Reminds me of people gatekeeping audiobooks as not reading.
It’s kind of like the difference between the facts and the truth.
(a) ChatGPT is not just ChatGPT, it's an initial stage on a massive operation that will generate content on all levels and in much more advanced ways
(b) Content creation by AI does not have to be as good as human content creation. It does not have to be as good as human content creation to become more successful; instead it only has to vastly outpace it in volume.
(c) AI content will succeed not because it is better. Right now it's worse. But even if it stays worse and content creators change their modus operandi as in the article, AI will still be much better at optimizing revenue from content because ultimately, the reason why content creators get paid is because people buy shit they don't need, and AI will amplify this much more easily than humans
Ultimately, it is utterly useless to examine ChatGPT vs. content creators inside a bubble. One needs to understand ChatGPT as part of a larger iterative process, in which there is a mutual evolution of algorithms to deliver content and algorithms to make content. Humans currently are at the forefront of making content, but they will not be for long.
And before long, there will be more and more positions taken over by AI algorithms. Writing may have been one of the first because writing is so old and we understand it so well. But at some point, we will understand medicine so well that doctors will be replaced too. Finally, we will understand every task so well so that what we have done as humans to advance a body of knowledge will merely be used to bootstrap and even "better" system where AI does everything.
In once sense, it sounds like a utopia -- us not having to do anything. But I think it will be very far from that. It will be more like a dystopia where nobody knows the value of another person because they do not have to rely on each other any more. We are already part-way there.
I admonish anyone who contributes a line of code to OpenAI, ChatGPT, Bard, and other systems. Shame on you.
Eh, I think this may be undervaluing the human part of content creation. People spend thousands of dollars for single seats at concerts because they've decided (or been told by taste-makers) that "this is what is good." I don't see that paradigm of consumption changing. I think it will vary by medium but some artistic mediums seem to really maintain a strong "creator connection." That is, a lot of the appreciation of the art seems to stem from some form of adoration for its creator. Sure, sure, "death of the artist" and all, but as you said, we need take into account the current form, not the "content creators inside a bubble."
As a Hatsune Miku fan... I can say... Yes?
People have been using AI generated vocals for well over a decade. The Hatsune Miku community differentiates songs and can tell who the composers or artists are even if they're all using the same voice.
There's a pretty big difference between say... "Karakuri Pierrot" and "Senbonzakura"
2 producers, same vocal software, distinctive sounds between them.
Not with AI but with low-cost content farms eg Demand Media, Associated Content, Mahalo. Most of these died. A few survive (eg Wikihow). People recognize it for what it is: noise. Ultimately, search enginees do as well and this SEO-optimized drivel gets downranked into non-existence.
ChatGPT can write as many articles as you like but they have to have a point, over overarching narrative. A lot of people at content farms will get replaced by AI but that's just automation. AI tools like this will magnify the abilities of a person to be able to produce more content just like any other form of automation.
As for content creators, 95%+ of these already earn little to nothing from their activities. They're hoping to get their big break. AI won't really change that making a living as a content creator has always been a low-probability endeavour.
A rise in automated content is going to be countered by the development of AI explorers who's sole role is to establish data provenance (this is what Google should be doing but isn't). No one wants a ChatGPT which blindly trusts the internet, they want one which will backtrack sources during it's training to determine if they're true - this is likely to be the next innovation from OpenAI anyway, since ChatGPTs value as an assistant is based on it's ability to provide accurate information to start with (and not be self-trained on it's own ideas).
it's just closing the loop.
i only hope the machine ouroboros generates enough heat to keep me warm and grow some plants to eat while it spins.
What I'll be annoyed by is the amount of it that will exist, which will make finding high quality content made by humans much more difficult. Audio and video content will become spam infested as text has been on the web for decades now. We'll be flooded by SEO'd to hell garbage, propaganda and deep fakes, and curation will be crucial to find the signal within the noise. I guess we'll come up with new AIs and new platforms to help us with that as well.
I can hardly wait. /s
the web is already almost completely corrupted by SEO'd to hell garbage.
That's the problem, the capability of generating low quality content good enough to fool anyone non the wiser. I mean, we're already seeing this.
I prefer to think of it as “how can I use this tech to advance my craft and expand my options?”
Hard no for me. Actually, this "automation" frenzy is motivated me clearly to learn more in a classical way. Without an "assistance".
Yes, I prefer to become less effective and more proficient.
I think that most artists would agree that these tools can be used to create art. But that’s not what is concerning- it’s that the tools will ultimately be used by people who don’t value art to further devalue it.