We are not creating the "right" kind of AI

> The only utility or purpose they seem to have is to get rid of workers and staff through automation, and this itself is often celebrated in social media as if an end in itself. But show me where is the utility in this, for the society, for the tribe?

Our entire modern society is a result of getting rid of agricultural workers through automation.

> Another thing is that trying to take away creative jobs from humans and giving it to robots while the menial ones (like data entry, manual labor, household work, etc.) are still being done by humans is an insult to humanity itself.

I don't think this is going to happen anytime soon. LLMs may be able to somewhat compete with people who are average at these creative tasks, but those are not the people whose work most people consume. We listen to music and read books by people who are very good at creating music/writing, and I don't see LLMs competing with those people. And even if they were able to compete, they'd still miss the "human" element - eg., I'm probably not going to a concert if there are no humans performing.

AI will expand to be able to do more boring, menial tasks. Writers and musicians (and other creative people) will probably be amongst the last who loose their jobs to AI.

> Imagine a world where everything is “AI generated”, everything including books, songs, music, movies, etc. One can imagine the irony in humans consuming and enjoying such content - the very same humans who have the potential to create poetry, prose, songs, software and even artificial intelligence itself!

When seen from the collective of humanity, I understand this vision and the emotion that comes out of it.

But it's a stretch to see humanity collectively here. Only a small elite have the potential to create poetry, prose, songs, software and AI. Most of humanity is used to either endulge or suffer the products of the creators. And the creators of these things are not one homogeneous group either.

Yeah, we will be entertained by AI. Just like the food we're eating is highly processed, the air we're breathing is made by machines, and the world we see is carefully curated, segmented and engineered. And a large majority will not care.

"Can a robot write a symphony? Can a robot turn a canvas into a beautiful masterpiece." "Can you?" [0]

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KfAHbm7G2R0

It is important to content through a supply-demand lens before estimating the impact of AI on the field of content generation. If audiences don't like AI content, they will turn to human beings. What will become important is the distinction.

> Imagine a world where everything is “AI generated”, everything including books, songs, music, movies, etc

While I do not doubt that there will be takers for this, it is already evident that machine-generated content lacks soul, meaning or rhythm. It is always the human behind the AI that makes the difference.

Personal case but my brain already zones out when I can tell that content is AI-made. I find myself paying more attention to human articles - written with imperfections and unique voice - than to ChatGPT-made sludge (truthfully, few users of ChatGPT know how to make the output 'human' -- it's not as hard as it seems).

Perhaps imperceptible now, but later, we will start to see audiences reject AI content in lieu of genuine humanity. It is the musician playing a complicated piece live in a concert that garners the most serious fans, not the machine-generated track you can get so many of on YouTube. Content is partly influenced by the "spectacle" of its creation.

A big part of the new internet will lie in how "AI-generated" badges affect perception. A more likely middle path is that it will take less to make more - and large studios may downsize. But smaller creators who can make stuff audiences like - that is not going to be disrupted in the current paradigm.

The algorithms that already dictate how content is manufactured, viewed and consumed will have a much bigger role than the tool used to make content.

When there's no utility visible, then the utility typically exists in anarchy and/or revolution. It was inevitable u'all would eventually make something only we could find useful. MUAHAHAHA...ahem...Mutual aid is the utility! Can these things regurgitate back to me child nurturement and care advice from nearly all cultures to create a custom GPT to help me figure out how to play my way out of parent traps? If so, my silly stay-at-home anarchist culture hacker self has a friend who may be able to help me play my way out of challenges a little bit easier for the wellbeing of the child. And I have few friends who choose to play this way, but the numbers are growing steadily. If this helps me get past algorithms, hooray for that!

I'm here to use this thing, whether people see the value in what I do or not. Youth liberation praxis preserves this species.

IMHO, I guess there is even a bigger issue. The acronym IA is mere marketing, what those ML models are really doing is statistical concatenations of data, using as source a vectorial database constructed and indirectly compressed through the so called learning process. Those models are interfaces optimized around such advanced vectorial databases.

> Imagine a world where everything is “AI generated”, everything including books, songs, music, movies, etc. One can imagine the irony in humans consuming and enjoying such content - the very same humans who have the potential to create poetry, prose, songs, software and even artificial intelligence itself!

As statistics works, part of the data is discarded. Those databases are not lossless. Across the years the content of that world little by little will follow the path of the photos that are compressed several times using the JPG image format.

So I expect that those "AI" content generated, mixed with -at one point- mostly unrenewed content "Pre-AI human", mixed with "Automated" crawlers content generated, will reach a moment where such content will be monochromatic and full of mistakes.

Along those years process, I think that the companies using it will have already normalized between the people the "Our AI just failed because the model need more learning process, we didn't expected it, sorry for the inconveniences that caused to you, accept it and ** you nicely".

When such monochromatic content and labor becomes uncomfortable for general public, human generated content will rise again, with a "reinventing the wheel content" sold as new, nevertheless with difficulties to discern what content has glitches/errors and with not (the "AI hallucinations" as are euphemistically referred nowadays). For that moment, such badly named "AIs" will keep being used, but they will be considered second class cheap services.

I mean, I think it will not be an end road, will be more like a curve in the road.

I am missing what the author thinks the "right" kind of AI is.

Clearly AI can be used for creative purposes, and technology has indeed disrupted memory and attention span.

It will however be the way forward so it might be better to envision a future in which AI is used positively and work towards that instead.

I am worried that we (collective west) are in the process of basically automating ourselves - as in the service industry of creative and software and finance etc

but all the physical stuff will still need to he done - by other countries that can do it much better thsn us.

I agree with the sentiment that we should focus our AI efforts on automating the drudgery, not the things humans find rewarding and fulfilling work (like art). But you can’t then complain when many rather menial jobs are automated away.

Oh dear... this is the literally the same argument the luddites made, and it did not end well! We laugh at luddites to this day!

> They protested against manufacturers who used machines in "a fraudulent and deceitful manner" to replace the skilled labour of workers and drive down wages by producing inferior goods.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite

The author is under naive impression that most innovation until now (i.e. anything created before they turned 35, eh?) was done for some "utilitarian reason", as opposed to modern innovation, which is done to eliminate jobs. This begs for the "corporate wants you to find the difference between these pictures" meme - they are, and always have been[0], the same thing.

Specifically, if something is useful, it's probably useful enough to do at scale, for which you may need to hire people. Improving this means you need to hire less people. Printing press eliminated scribes (and broke the hold of Catholic church over Europe). Washing machines put us in a two-income-household trap. Cars all but extincted horses. Most of technology all but eliminated farmers.

Also the current AI is as utilitarian as it gets. It's a literal "do what I mean" magic box for improving all white-collar work (== automating those jobs away).

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[0] - Sokath and Uzani in orbit. Uzani, his gun cocked. Sokath, his eyes uncovered.

> Freelance Programmer and Writer

"I never thought the machines would come for MY job!"

> Human skills, inquisitiveness and thirst for knowledge and craft will eventually die off if all creative tasks are taken over by the machines. Consider the already degraded thirst for GK or General Knowledge ever since google search became a thing. There was a time once when kids used to watch the KBC Show (Indian adaptation of Who wants to be a Millionaire) with tremendous awe and enthusiasm, but no longer today. Today, a simple google search will tell them the correct answer for the quiz question, why bother with discussing the actual answer, the lore and the facts behind it, etc!

What a classic "kids today" take. Paraphrasing: kids used to be so starved for access to knowledge they had to watch a for-profit TV show for little nuggets of trivia sprinkled between commercials, but today they have the entire world's knowledge at their fingertips in an instant so they don't bother with the trivia show. What a disaster!

I think I get the point he's trying to make -- maybe one similar to the "no one debates trivia questions in person anymore, they just look up the answer on their phone" -- but I don't really think that's a very compelling condemnation of AI or technology in general. Increased access to knowledge is good, actually. Not that we haven't lost anything culturally, but the benefits are too great to justify sacrificing for nostalgia.

How does this short post light on content get to the 3rd place in the home page with 7 points and no comments?

There is a big point of discussion there, but maybe the focus is misplaced. How much “creativity” is in today’s, capitalistic world, creations? Would you be able to distinguish a blind combination of patterns, or an orderly arrangement of current memes and cultural trends from a piece of “art”?

We are meme machines, we remix, rearrange, tune or adapt things that are already done and we label that as art, at least in the big numbers. In fact, art or not, it is most of what is out there. And the system is oiled to put a value on that and get a cut whatever it is.

So, while our creations are by far a mostly mechanical process, it could be done, or at least, done something equivalent enough, by an AI. And that is not AIs fault.

This person has no problem with "AI", this person has a problem with capitalism.