And the sad thing is that these models are most likely trained upon most of these stock photos to begin with. I can understand the frustration of the industry.
I took pictures of a much wider variety of things than I looked at pictures of. Instagram and other sources of millions of pictures did not exist and I was perfectly capable of taking a picture without that “training”.
You’re missing the forest for the trees here. The point is that a photographer doesn’t learn how to produce pictures of a screwdriver by looking at pictures of a screwdriver. A photographer learns how to take pictures generally and then can instantly be capable of producing pictures of far more objects than he/she has ever observed.
Generative AI is not capable of that because it’s not operating a camera in reality.
We need to find a way to distribute the benefits of such developments.
Seriously though, I used to think this was mostly a done deal that's being occasionally brought up by people fascinated with socialism or something. But the longer I live, the more I realize that the issue has not meaningfully improved at all - we've only been distracted from it. And it's much, much older than Marx and co. too. This, and not some general fear of technology, was the whole point of the Luddite movement (very relevant in context of AI). And you can probably find examples stretching back way before industrial revolution too.
I don't know if OpenAI has actually confirmed what hardware they use or if the press and bloggers did citeogenesis on each other, but the claim is they're using A100 GPUs, and the bigger models have to use several in parallel. I've seen detached houses in Eastern Europe going for the price of two of those cards.
The DGX-2 is (was?) priced more like a detached house in Western Europe; the GH200 they just announced appears to be "if you have to ask, you can't afford it".
This is similar to how, despite that lathes, kilns, and chainsaws can be bought in supermarkets as impulse purchases, industrial versions of each are rather more expensive.
Until then, some sabotage may be in order.
Market disruption due to technology/innovation/progress is nothing new. There have always been winners and losers but the aggregate wealth/value continues to climb. Devising ways to mitigate the loses seems like a more feasible approach than pretending that we can prevent these sorts of changes through regulation or legislation.
It’s called free software and making models at various ‘weight classes’ to support many GPUs. Basically don’t let companies like OpenAI/Google/Microsoft run the show and, ironically, support companies like Facebook who open source their models.
And yes, I know OpenAI has open sourced models in the past, but the fact that they won’t open source ChatGPT, GPT-4, and select other models like DALL-E 1/2 make me wary of them.
That’s the natural end of capitalism, as has been noted literally since the word “capitalism” waa coined for it (largely, for that reason.)
It is end to which every tool and technology is put under that system, and has nothing to do with the particular technology and everything to do with the system.
The rate of return on capital is what dictates the concentration of wealth, or conversely, the dispersal of wealth.
The conceptual systems introduced by Marx and others is that only workers can own capital and are based on a set of assumptions about Capital returns versus labor power.
In the same sense that the US electoral system doesn’t preclude more than two viable parties. The system of property rights that defines capitalism doesn’t specify any limit, but the structure it creates promotes it in function.
> The conceptual systems introduced by Marx and others is that only workers can own capital
No, the conceptual system introduced by Marx rejects the concept of ownership as applied to capital [0], though it favors workers exercising control of the capital to which their labor is applied. Different variants derived from this and related ideas have different specific mechanism for this exercise of control.
[0] When Marxists talk about rejecting/abolishing “private property”, it refers to this, because in the Marxists terminology “private property” refers not to property of non-state individuals and entities in general as it does in current common use, but specifically to property rights in the means of production, i.e., capital.
That said, I don't see you the distinction between controlling the means of production use for one's labor and owning it, when controlling the means of production also includes allocation of the additional value created using them.
It also is also worth noting how far current thoughts on socialism and communism have come from Marxist theories. contemporary sentiment seem to advocate that individuals (working or not) are entitled share of the labor value created by others, even if they are in another workplace.
All this is really an aside from what I thought my greater point was about the underpinning assumptions or conditions that lead to the "expected" systemic outcomes. The US federal electoral system currently favors two parties, but this could change with different conditions. For example, ranked choice voting, and proportion state electoral allocation could impact this without overturning the entire governmental system.
Similarly, the concentration of capital is based on an number of conditional assumptions. For example, if the real rate of return on capital is less than the rate of capital creation, you would not expect the concentration of wealth to increase. under this condition, capital investment could only serve to slow the losses due to inflation.
Conditional control while you are a laborer whose labor is applied to particular capital (which, to be fair, is one of many patterns advocated within Marxist-influenced socialism, not the only operationalization of the concept) is distinct from ownership which persists until the owner chooses to alienate the property.
> It also is also worth noting how far current thoughts on socialism and communism have come from Marxist theories. contemporary sentiment seem to advocate that individuals (working or not) are entitled share of the labor value created by others, even if they are in another workplace.
Yeah, its not like Marx said anything like: “In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labor, has vanished; after labor has become not only a means of life but life's prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly—only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!” [0]
[0] Except, of course, that he did, in Critique of the Gotha Programme, 1875.
No evidence of that.
This is just an accentuation and further acceleration thereof.
So there is precedence for this scenario.
You can rent the hardware from someone else, but that's a matter of convenience, not affordability.
Hello post-industrial/ai/ml capitalism.
This development will do to designers, programmers, support what the industrial revolution did to cobblers and weavers ...
Which made cheap shoes and clothes available to everybody.
If you want to buy a tailor made shirt, it'll cost you at least $500. And that's still with machine made cloth. What do you think it would cost if the cloth was made by hand by a weaver?
I'd argue the efficiency in production led to lower prices - while the concentration in wealth mostly kept buying power/living standards lower for the workers (or; capitalist class reaped an unfair share of productivity gains).
I believe commodisation of "knowledge" work will lead to lower prices (and unfair distribution) too.
Go take a look at Fort Williams, and at the clothes in it they preserved. They look like kids' clothes. The same for Civil War uniforms. Larger than the FW clothes, but still looking like kid clothes.
I flipped through a high school history book a few years ago, and it insisted that the middle class in America didn't emerge until FDR. This is laughably wrong. It was there from the beginning.
The notion that creativity lies beyond what is systemetizable (or otoh, the value in creativity is to defy that which can be computed), seems more in line with my sense of it.
Surely you agree that we care more to prove the affirmative of whether a machine is conscious rather than prove that it isn't. If not, I don't think we can proceed.
The issue is that the AI Effect you linked is often actually used in the reverse, including by yourself, where the burden of proof should be to prove a machine is NOT conscious. However, like we've agreed, we care for proof in the affirmative.
Thus, the paradox lies in that the "AI Effect" concept is critical of those demanding the proof which is more valuable.
And you're incorrect - you cannot "empirically prove creativity". As a professional artist I don't think you quite understand that the type of creativity we are interested in is not just "permutation", there is clearly a human component.
I'm trying to show you that you are falling into the reverse of the AI effect by assuming that permutation is creativity.
Do humans even have creativity at this point or do you require a formal proof even for that? Ahah
>As a professional artist
Now I understand where the friction against accepting that even machines show signs of creativity comes from, I imagine you're an illustrator, so the feeling of becoming obsolete is the bias against machines.
Your assumption is IMO unfounded, it actually seems like you have the burden of proof given what I said above. Just because it seems more in line with your sense of it doesn't make it true, seems like you think creativity is some mystical nonphysical force (because if it were physical, it would be able to be modeled and computed, as the parent says).
Edit, I see, you're an artist so it's likely why you believe in creativity as a nonphysical force. I've noticed that many artists say this, with no evidence, while most engineers say the opposite, that it's systematized, likely that's why we're in our respective fields.
Creativity: producing what is novel + valuable
Systematizable: can be enumerated via algorithmic operations
"As others have mentioned": that is not an argument
"not everyone else who already knows": also not an argument
Now, my point is that creativity as defined above requires a burden of proof to be defined as systemetizable. For instance, mathematical leaps are often achieved by a spark of "creativity" which breaks existing structures in a way which is difficult to grasp, and to call this systemetizable is a leap that requires a complex argument calling upon deep notions of computational theory and computational neuroscience (like producing a topological map of the creative structure of the brain and proving that it can be mimicked by a listable process).
Now, to apply this to art in a convincing way would surely be even harder. Do you at least understand my point? Or is "brain = physics = creative" satisfactory enough for you still? Thanks for reading in good faith this time. :)
Also, gun-to-my-head I would not bet on creativity being systemetizable, so I completely disagree.
Where you're going wrong is what society will go for. Given the choice between reality and fantasy ... society will choose fantasy. AI will "win" fantasy, hands down.
Not to mention, you are already wrong because art communities around human art are thriving now more than ever for the simple fact that the result of AI itself is non-communal (does not produce thriving community) and cannot compete at the bleeding edge of style.
Again, this is already happening regardless of your armchair hypothesis.
The creative generation part - adding some randomness to the process - is trivial with machines. Much easier than with humans adults, who often have to learn to allow more randomness and in their thinking/feeling, in order to make some creative work. But the selection functions are deeply social, which is something we're instinctively good at, and had little luck teaching the machines so far.
Well, with the possible exception of GPT-4, which may have learned just enough about what humans like, that it could do a passing job at discriminating art/innovation from noise. I say may - it feels possible, but we won't know until someone properly tests for it.
I've tried giving GPT4 some axes to rank writing on, and feed it some paragraphs. It's not perfect at it, but it's a far better critic than writer.
E.g. a while back I had it write something "in the style of Douglas Adams" and then had it critique it in another chat, and it recognised the imitation and proceeded to quite harshly judge its own writing for being flat and lacking direction and purpose. It was quite entertaining (more so than its superficially amusing Douglas Adams imitation).
And absolutely, however creativity is the tip of the spear which pushes beyond constraints to develop novel AND meaningful style (like Beksinski, Kopera, Kostetsky, Moebius, etc).
Nice try.
Proving that we can reliably simulate human brains requires showing that nowhere in any human brains does such signals ever emanate. We can get close if we one day have the capacity to run a simulated brain for long enough to show it appears to function like a human, but when the counter hypothesises a violation of known physics that may well be intermittent and extremely limited, we can't realistically absolutely prove its absence.
As such, the former is tractable if such signals can occur, the latter is not, and so I think my comparison of it elsewhere to a claim of Russell's proverbial orbiting teapot is reasonable - people will always be able to claim that there is some so far unobserved difference, and given it postulates highly localised violations of known physics and this seems like an absolutely extraordinary claim, the burden must be theirs.
My point is that to make the claim "human creativity" can be simulated surely would have the burden.
Just one measurement that doesn't fit would be enough to shift the burden. Absent that, any suggestion we can't is no more than a religious belief.
I guess my last response was too hard for you to understand since you respond with this. Perhaps you are new to things like "reading between the lines".
You are the one who made this claim:
> That is an incredibly strong assertion that evidence does not seem to support currently.
To avoid loosing more time, I'll write what you failed to understand: "That evidence does not seem to support currently" is your claim, something you can prove, shows the evidence you are talking about.
You still didn't send any link to the evidence you were talking about.
Note that the same can be said about the negation: show me a proof that it can't.
It'd take a truly extraordinary find that'd upend both physics and areas of logic for that assertion to be false.
The definition of creativity itself should include the ability to subvert a system through abstraction. AI is a system so it cannot subvert itself (or, it hasn't yet). As humans, we subvert systems in mathematics by creating higher dimensional abstraction and shattering previous understanding of the fields. Often, mathematicians achieve this with a "lightening bolt-like realization" that they do not attribute to systematic thinking.
Please reconsider whether systematizability should be so quickly assumed through napkin philosophy. If you want, prove with a topological map of the creative apparatus in the brain that it produces results in a systematic way. That would at least scratch the itch and get the conversation going somewhere interesting.
What you call "systematizability" is irrelevant. Only whether or not a function can be computed matter, and if a function can be computed by a brain restricted to known physics, there is no reasonable theory under which it can compute anything which can't be computed by any universal turing machine. Given the absence of even any real hypothesis for any category of functions which can't, it'd be an absolutely extraordinary claim to suggest such a function exist.
Where you'd get a Nobel in physics if you could show unknown physics in the brain, you'd secure a Nobel in mathematics if you could come up with a class of functions the brain can compute which can't be computed by a computer, because it'd fundamentally break basic assumptions in any number of subfields of both maths and computer science.
What you describe as "subverting itself" does not require anything as drastic. It merely requires thought processes unobservable by the person in question, and processes to complex to casually understand and/or randomness. Given a large proportion of people don't even have an inner voice they can "listen to" in order to observe their thought processes other than via outputs, and we know e.g. from split-brain experiments that the conscious part of human reasoning often outright invents knowledge and observation of thought processes, we have no reliable way of analysing the extent to which thinking is "systematic", and plenty of evidence to suggest we can not trust any such notion.
Delineate? Diffusion models can't be further away for delineating. They literally work by throwing random shit at the wall.
Input set? There is no input set once training is complete.
Human creativity? In stock photo industry? What next? "How I write while loop instead of for loop and I have achieved the nirvana?"
You seem emotional, "you sound stupid and nothing what you said makes sense", I wonder, why are you so triggered by a challenging idea?
The very point of computation is to evaluate clear, distinct, mathematical expressions (like reading a list of algorithmic steps to produce an NN).
Hmmm. Did I threaten your religious belief in the power of AI? :)
The proper analogy to ML is that the owners of the latter train a slave, and then use that training process as justification for owning everything[1] the slave ever produces.
How can freemen compete with that?
[1] Which also happens to be a perversion of copyright law, since AI can't enter into a contract that can assign rights to creative output to it's owner.
Painters are trained by copying the Masters. Shredding guitar players are trained on violin caprices. Martha Stewart was trained by watching Julia Child.
AI art is more like what would happen if you took Baroque art and applied it to modern styles. For a human artist the effort is not worth it.