Fake It 'Til You Fake It
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Then again, it's always true that the world we'll die in will be different than the world we were born in, and we might not like it. Maybe that's how it goes.
reminds me of a meme I saw yesterday - "Before Auto-Tune there was talent", with a picture of Steve Perry back in the Journey days.
For some people music is an art form to express themselves, the skill/talent part is just an obstacle.
There is still much work to do on the rest of the song writing and production.
Not using computers to assist with your artistic creations is largely foolish but measurable things aren't opinions. Somebody can be a better artist but also a worse singer.
It's really damning when you look back how technically good 80s pop singers were, compared to 90s. Even artists obviously promoted by the music industry as eye candy for teenagers - think Samantha Fox and Morten Harket - had really solid vocal skills. The Spice Girls, not so much...
That is the true measure of an artist's skill - to make the unreal seem real.
Untrue.
You might be looking back at this as someone who lived in a era when photography was for documentaries and painting was for art.
Are you autistic? I do not mean to be offensive. I'm an aspie.
Secular painting became a thing only very recently, two or three hundred years ago. And even then, it was always used to whitewash or vilify something or someone. Bias was (and is!) its primary purpose.
There was a time (most of human history) when painting was the most realistic way we had of conveying images.
Your avatar is your personality, appearance. We are close to simulating all our experiences.
The only thing real will be a climate-controlled-with-plumbing 20 x 20 room and the food we eat. (We still haven't digitized taste, smell and some forms of touch).
Given this scenario, Reality is over-rated. Why do you need "truth" anyway?
Who cares if someone believes the earth is flat? or Trump is still the President or some esoteric grammar rules? As long as there is one another person (or even an AI assistant) who believes the story that's all that matters for our social well-being
Come on. 2B people don't have access to basic hygiene, a third of the world population has food insecurity.
I mean ones that would matter for the society.
That says more about the marketing power of controversy than it does about actual core beliefs of backyard engineers.
I think you’re having a hysterical episode.
I don't think it's been true throughout history, things usually didn't change that much over the span of a single lifetime before the industrial revolution. The scale is dramatically different now, and we're kind of addicted to it.
After the war, people would go back to tilling land with the same oxen and plough and go fishing in the same kinds of boats their parents and grandparents did.
The meals didn’t change, the beer didn’t change, the routine didn’t change. They didn’t get better ploughs or better boats, or better oxen. It was still about an acre per day before a war and after a war. Medicines and cures remained constant.
That’s not to say occasional improvements didn’t happen, they did, but there were long breaks between improvements.
We’ve only been domesticating animals and plants for maybe 25,000 years, and that’s if you assume Gobleki Tepe means we have missed the actual cradle of civilization this whole time.
There are certainly going to be times when transportation improvements accelerate this process, from ships to Roman roads to steam power, but every generation will be different, and most of our livestock have fairly short childhoods. For a single human to witness twenty generations of goat or pig is not unreasonable. Or fifty generations of grains. Add in all of their neighbors, and the odds of seeing something special in their lifetime jump considerably. You would probably see several.
But today, over my lifetime, genetically modified crops are everywhere. Yields are up by ~25% and pesticide use is down by 33%. Had exponential growth been happening at that rate for a thousand generations, then if our paleolithic ancestors got 1 bushel of grain, we'd harvest something like 10^18 times the mass of the entire observable universe.
Technology accelerates the rate of change. That rate is not consistent.
We don’t have a monopoly on innovation and the history of it is not uniformly distributed.
We talk about innovation in terms of evolutionary versus revolutionary, but quality of life changes from a friendlier pig or a better hunting dog affect individual lives quite a bit. And if those are quiet lives, those changes may matter as much as the things historians tell us are important. If you weren’t there for the rise of Julius Caesar or the Fall of Rome then whether your son marries the neighbor girl and the family farm thereby gets access to a better water source, matters a lot more than what Galileo has been up to in his lab.
Yes, introduction of corn and cassava to Africa had massive impacts to world politics and especially human rights (for the worse). But those same crops already revolutionized South America millennia before that.
Couple that to the average lifetime being much shorter and you get the feeling that everything is always changing
[1] https://www.metmuseum.org/press/exhibitions/2012/faking-it
But I think ease of use matters, in part because trivial (in the sense of "easy" / "taking little time") deceptive acts are easier to justify for otherwise-ethical actors. It's also easier to get into murky waters if step 1 isn't "get my fraud on" but rather "oh what's this new feature?" or "hmm, what would ChatGPT say about Descartes?"
Deception is a blurry line, but these are all technological steps that make it easier to approach that line -- and then, perhaps in a thoughtless moment, cross it.
We cannot blame stuff for things people do. You can use a knife to cut your dinner or you can use it to kill someone. The knife and the knife maker are not to blame for your wrong doings.
You can choose to lie or not. Don't blame ChatGPT if it is misused by someone. Don't blame Adobe if Photoshop is misused by someone.
You can use guns for target shooting, you can use guns as a detterent when your life is in danger, you can use guns for hunting.
That’s also the same argument countries use for nuclear weapons.
Target shooting? No absolute need for real guns
Self defence -- if someone is threatening you with a gun or knife, are you going to try to draw faster?
What else would you use for target shooting?
Yes.
What else for target shooting: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biathlon_rifle
I assume you have never been hunting.
Thompson Center makes the Contender handgun specifically for hunting.
Every hunter should carry a handgun for self defense if the critters do not cooperate and fall over quickly. Hog hunts can get dicey even if you are experienced and prepared.
AR-type rifles are favorites for hunting, but not usually in .223.
And of course the reason for an armed and trained population has nothing to do with hunting. It's about stopping predators who prey on good people.
> stopping predators who prey on good people
(You're in the US or somewhere else?)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nTpTIVlC7Ho
that's a licence class of it's own just as a passenger vehicle drivers licence doesn't qualify you to drive an articulated vehicle, heavy vehicle, or vehicle for more than 9 passangers.
Ok, yes, makes sense, I think, with its own license class, for those who work with / need to do that. (Looks like otherwise dangerous weapons, if anyone could get their hands on them)
> (You're in the US or somewhere else?)
Texas, USA
You can use guns for target shooting, you can use guns as a detterent [sic] when your life is in danger, you can use guns for hunting.
Of these three things you listed, two of them are killing. A gun wouldn't be useful as a deterrent if the threat of its application wasn't present—you can't brandish a feather and get the same effect because a feather offers no threat and does not have a reputation of lethal harm. And hunting is literally killing, although it may have a legit purpose, such as sustenance.
There are good people who want to be left alone and there are predators.
Predators can do a lot of damage over time.
I want the good people to stop the predators. In an ideal world, the predators would die the first time they tried to prey on the innocent. That is the purpose of the killing: to stop predators who prey on good people.
0: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guns_Don%27t_Kill_People,_Ra...
What is its primary purpose?
The primary purposes of generative AI are to educate humans and to enhance the productivity of humans.
While I cannot argue that this statement is wrong it does make me wish some things would never have been invented in the first place because of how much harm they can cause and the fact that there will always be a huge chunk of population who will surely abuse those things for bad. Such as nuclear weapons, AI, etc. Sometimes I even wish internet wouldn’t exist so that we could continue living simpler lives.
I was very careful not to. I’m merely pointing out that availability matters.
People’s actions sit in all sorts of levels of gray. Of course it’s up to the person, but that doesn’t mean access/opportunity/circumstance don’t matter.
On the other hand, the tools to do this have been easily accessible for years. Sure, you had to buy Photoshop and spend 15 minutes on YouTube, but this is not a major hurdle. Having the tools universally available just increases the awareness and makes fraud less likely, as people are more inclined to not blindly trust them.
No rephrasing to do now though.
Rights to a photography done in 1851? Come on!
The artist pays the bills by selling the (commercial) rights to their work. Those rights will be more valuable, if they last longer. That calculation is independent of the vagaries of the artist's longevity. (And in fact, it might make more sense to give rights a flat x years since creation, instead of tying it to whether the artist eats her vegetables and exercises.)
In this case, Baldus died in 1889, so any of his works would have entered the public domain in 1939, in accordance with French law at the time -- the Literary and Artistic Property Act of 1793 established a copyright term of lifetime + 10 years, which was then extended to 50 years by the Literary and Artistic Property Act of 1866. The next extension to lifetime + 70 for general works* in 1992 came well beyond the point Baldus's work would have entered the public domain.
* Copyright term was previously extended in the 1950s to lifetime + 70 years specifically for musical compositions.
A copyright-ineligible work, however, can sometimes be protected by contract. Here, the restriction on the web page may be because the web site agreed with the scanning entity not to distribute a high-resolution version online.
For journalism thats given away as a side effect, rather than the main business, they don't have the same time and money to verify anything
In the past we assumed photographs were “real” although they never were objective (no pun intended.) Even if not retouched, a photograph shows you a subjectively selected and framed moment and asks you to trust that it’s an accurate representation of a topic.
The picture then evokes an emotional response and you walk around all day or more with a certain feeling based on what you perceive is an objective piece of data that you perceived but in reality was a carefully selected piece of input to trigger the output that it does.
So from that perspective, moving into the world where we recognize that a picture doesn’t mean anything is better.
Photography with all its perceived technological requirements is wrongly treated as a separate art, one that is more scientific and therefore more objective. These fallacies are what is getting undermined now with the broader availability of powerful AI tools.
You can't win, for losing.
If you don’t know in advance which app to get, it’s quite daunting trying to find anything useful on the App Store (either directly or via google)
I predict that we will eventually only trust the internet as we know it today for fabricated stories (port 443 and 80 anyway), and will value live interactions more as a result.
And of course a child will say “and what’s dubious, that’s how it is” and so I become old and don’t understand anything anymore.
A death spiral of misplaced trust. Ie - this is actually closer to truth.
Knowing how to make a good photography is a skill AI doesn't have. Just by removing something or adding something to it, it doesn't make a bad photo good.
If average Joe wants to make good photographs he has a long path of learning and working.
I did photography for 9 years now and still I find lots of thing to learn and exercise. I am afraid this process never stops.
Your second sentence might be true, but that doesn't have any bearing on the first sentence.
Why wouldn't AI learn principles of composition, framing and lighting etc?
To me, what makes a photo or painting "good" is the story it tells and the emotional connections it makes. This is subjective, and depends on the individual experience. Even the most advanced generative AI will be hit or miss at connecting with your individual experience, no different than the great painters and photographers over the centuries.
Or at least they won't stay for long.
Yet.
What matters in the end is whether the photo is aesthetically pleasing to the viewer, or has some meaning to them. If AI tools becomes hyper realistic, the average Joe can just roll the dice enough times until they create something that works for them.