Creativity being automated while humans are forced to perform menial tasks for minimum wage doesn't seem like a great future and the geriatric political class has absolutely no clue how to manage the situation.
The way these models are creative is the same way humans are.
The artist that painted Mona Lisa didn't credit any of the influences and inspirations that they had.
Just as cameras made many artists redundant, so too will every other new tool, and not just artist but pretty much every job.
But there are still people that weave baskets, and people are prepared to pay the premium to get a product that was 'hand-made'.
While receiving the credit that you are deserved is nice and fair. The world doesn't work that way.
> The artist that painted Mona Lisa didn't credit any of the influences and inspirations that they had.
This is not “influence and inspiration”, this is companies feeding other people’s work into a commercial product which they sell access to. The product would be useless without other people’s work, therefore they should be compensated.
> Just as cameras made many artists redundant, so too will every other new tool, and not just artist but pretty much every job.
The camera enabled something that was not possible before, and I wasn’t built by taking the work of sketch artists and painters. It was an entirely new form of art and media.
The only thing this stuff revolutionises is new ways to not pay people. I find the implications deeply depressing.
How else do you get influence and inspiration without feeding other people's work into your own brain? Do you know a single artist, writer, or musician who hasn't seen other artists' paintings, read other writers' books, or listened to other musician's music? Ingesting content is the core of how influence, inspiration, and learning work.
> The camera enabled something that was not possible before… The only thing this stuff revolutionises is new ways to not pay people.
It's never been possible to generate thoughts, writing, and images so quickly and at such a high level. It's made creative pursuits accessible to billions who previously didn't have the skill or time to do them well, or the money to hire others. As a random example, I have friends using ChatGPT to compose creative and personalized poems and notes about each other. Not something they were doing before.
> The only thing this stuff revolutionises is new ways to not pay people.
The camera lessened the need of people to go to plays and pay for tickets to see things in person. Just like records, CDs, and mp3s lessened the need to go to concerts and shows. Technology is always creating and destroying ways to pay people. The ways that people get paid are not suppose to be fixed and unchanging in time.
I am a human, alive and sentient. I can be held responsible if my “inspirations” stray into theft. A machine cannot, and it’s increasingly looking like the companies that operate the machines can’t either.
I also can’t churn out my inspired works at a rate that displaces potentially everyone who has ever influenced me.
> It's made creative pursuits accessible to billions who previously didn't have the skill or time to do them well, or the money to hire others. As a random example, I have friends using ChatGPT to compose creative and personalized poems and notes about each other. Not something they were doing before
How on earth is using a machine to spit out a poem a creative pursuit? There’s no more creativity there than watching a movie someone else made. It’s entertaining, yes, but it’s not creativity.
> The camera lessened the need of people to go to plays and pay for tickets to see things in person. Just like records, CDs, and mp3s lessened the need to go to concerts and shows
This doesn’t hold water. Cinema did not eliminate theatre just as records did not eliminate live music. In fact, both are arguably as big now as they have ever been. The technology here filled a new space, it didn’t threaten to throw everyone out of an existing one.
For those unaware the vast majority of graphic artists start their projects with assets and base images that they themselves don’t create. With generative ai you’re simply going one step further and have another new tool create a more polished version that you can edit to remove extra fingers, etc. It’s simply moving the baseline from 20% done to 60% done, which will result in artists producing even higher fidelity and more detailed art.
For example an artist could generate a bunch of scenes using Sora and create a collage of them for a larger piece of art, something that is prohibitively time consuming right now.
I'm with you, man. I'm still trying to find a lawyer who will sue Kubota and John Deere for moving dirt at a rate far superior to me and a shovel, but nobody will take my case.
> How on earth is using a machine to spit out a poem a creative pursuit?
100%, man. Nobody is mentioning the magical fairy dust in human brains that makes us superior to these models. When I really like fantasy novels, and then train my neurons on thousands of hours of reading Tolkien, Terry Brooks, Brandon Sanderson, etc, and then I get the idea to write my own fantasy series, my creative process doesn't draw on my own model's training data at all. It's 100% "creative", and I would produce exactly the same content if I were illiterate. But these goddamned machines, man. They don't have our special human fairy dust.
When we discovered the universal law of gravitation, and realized that the laws of physics are omnipresent in our universe, we put a giant asterisk to note that the laws of physics are different inside humans. The epidermis is a sort of barrier to physics, and within its confines, magic happens, that these pro-AI people conveniently "forget".
To paraphrase the eminent Human Unique Creative Person Roger Penrose: "There's magical quantum shit goin down in the microtubules. It's gotta be the microtubules. I think, right? I can't prove it, but as a scientist, we don't need proof. Making sure we think we are superior is more important."
150 years ago, Bertha Benz wasn't allowed to own property or patents in her own right, because the law said so.
The specific reason a machine cannot be held responsible today is because the law says so.
Also, dead humans' copyright is respected in law, so "alive" isn't adding value to your argument here.
> I also can’t churn out my inspired works at a rate that displaces potentially everyone who has ever influenced me.
I can't run faster than every athlete who has ever inspired me, this argument does not prevent motor cars.
I can't write notes faster than the world record holder in shorthand, this argument does not prevent the printing press.
I can't play chess or go at even a mediocre level, this argument does not prevent Stockfish or Alpha Go.
I can't hear the tonal differences in Chinese well enough to distinguish "hello" from "mud trench", 这个论点并没有阻止谷歌翻译学习 “你好” 和 “泥壕” 之间的区别。
I can't do arithmetic in my head faster than literally all other humans combined even if they hadn't been trained to the level of the current world record holder, this argument does not prevent the original model of the Raspberry Pi Zero.
"The machine is 'better', in one or more senses of the word, than a human" is, in fact, a reason to use the machine. It's the reason to use a machine. It's why the machine is an economic threat — but you can't just use "my income is threatened by this machine" as a reason to prevent other people using the machine, just as I as a software developer can't use that argument to stop other people using LLMs to write code without hiring me.
> Cinema did not eliminate theatre just as records did not eliminate live music. In fact, both are arguably as big now as they have ever been.
You can argue that, but you'd be wrong.
Shakespeare wrote for normal everyday people, his stuff fit into the category that today would be "TV soap opera", where the audience was everyone rather than just the well-off, where the only other public entertainment was options were bear-baiting and public executions, where the actors have very little time to rehearse, and where "you're ripping off my ideas" was handled by rapidly churning out new content.
Live music, without amplification, used to be the only way to listen to music. Now, even if you see a live performance, you can have 10k people in a single venue listening to a single band… and if you want music in a pub or a dance club, the most likely performance is from a DJ rather than a band, and the "D" stands for "disk" because the actual content is pre-recorded — and that's not to say I would deny that DJ work is "creative", but rather that it makes DJing exactly what critics accuse GenAI of being, remixing of other people's work.
Which, now I think about it, is a description that would also apply to all the modern performances of Shakespeare: simply reusing someone else's creation without paying any compensation to the estate.
But I know that will tickle you the wrong way, I know that art is the peacock's tail of humans: the struggle, the difficulty, is the point, and it has to be because that's how we find people to start families with. Because of that, GenAI is like being caught wearing a fake Rolex watch, and you can't actually defend that with logical reasons such as "real Rolex watches aren't very good at keeping time compared to even a Casio F-91W let alone the atomic clock synchronising with my phone", because logic isn't the point, and never was the point.
My recommendation: zoom out a little bit. Every step in history is so brief and nothing is normal for long. Even humanity is a blink.
Comments like: “how is using a machine to spit out a poem creative”. Really? How is using a digital camera creative compared to painting. How is a painting creative compared to etching? And on and on evolution goes..
Please don't try to profile other HN users.
I would just add two points:
- The rate of change that AI forces upon us has never before been experienced.
- The scale of these changes is nothing like we've ever seen before.
The adoptions of the camera, radio, automobile, TV, etc., didn't happen practically overnight. Society had a good decade+ to prepare for them.
Similarly, AI doesn't just change one industry. It fundamentally changes _all_ industries, and brings up some fundamental questions about the meaning of intelligence and our place in the universe.
My fear is that we're not prepared for either of these things. We're not even certain how exactly this will affect us, or where this is actually all taking us, but somehow a very small group of people is inevitably forcing this on all of us.
Because of this I think that being conservative, and maybe putting some strict regulation on these advancements, might not be such a bad idea.
Humans still need to adapt and we are slow. If singularity is near [it isn't] we can be afraid, until then we are the limiting factor here. Displacement will happen but growth will happen faster with these new tools
Sure, but I'd reckon on average, the rate of change at time T has never before been experienced at any time < T.
On what timeline?
I don't want much out of life, but I do want the ability to influence my own personal situation. If we wind up in the UBI-ified, dense urban housing future where AI does all the work and no one owns anything, how much real influence will I have over my life?
Will I live out my days in a government issued single bedroom apartment, with a monthly "congratulations for being human" allowance from the government? I don't want that. People say it will free us up to pursue whatever we want, but to me it sounds like the worst cage imaginable. All the free time, and no real freedom to enjoy it with.
Because make no mistake. If you live on handouts from your government, you aren't free.
So with that as a potential, maybe even likely outcome, why aren't you afraid of change?
So my monthly Social Security check makes me a prisoner? I don't think so.
Also, how about if you get into trouble. If you're arrested for a crime (even if eventually found not guilty), will you continue to receive social security?
Is there any circumstances where your government could refuse to continue paying it?
And most importantly: could your government invent such a circumstance in the future, and then invoke the new circumstance to deny you the payment?
Living on government money reminds me of my cat. She relies on me to feed her and provide for her, and I do happily take good care of her because I love her very much.
Does the government love you very much?
I don't feel mine does.
2. "Also, how about if you get into trouble. If you're arrested for a crime (even if eventually found not guilty), will you continue to receive social security?"
"If you receive Social Security, we'll suspend your benefits if you're convicted of a criminal offense and sentenced to jail or prison for more than 30 continuous days. We can reinstate your benefits starting with the month following the month of your release." — Social Security Administration
3. "Is there any circumstances where your government could refuse to continue paying it?"
If it goes broke, certainly.
4. And most importantly: could your government invent such a circumstance in the future, and then invoke the new circumstance to deny you the payment?"
Of course!
It's about money — not love.
I understand this fear, and sympathise with it even though I have multiple income streams.
> I don't want much out of life, but I do want the ability to influence my own personal situation. If we wind up in the UBI-ified, dense urban housing future where AI does all the work and no one owns anything, how much real influence will I have over my life?
Why do you fear "dense" urban housing future? I think most people choose relatively dense environments because that's where all the stuff they want is, but rural areas are cheaper[0], and the kind of future where humans must live on UBI due to lack of economic opportunity is necessarily one where robots do the manual labor such as house building and civil engineering, not just the intellectual jobs like architecture and practicing real estate law.
Likewise, while I can see several possible futures where nobody owns stuff, the tech to make it happen is necessarily also good enough that any random philanthropist who owns just one tiny autofac would find it trivial to give everyone their own personal autofac — "my first wish is infinite wishes" except the magic gene doesn't say "no".
[0] The only reason I'm looking to get somewhere a bit more rural is that the sound insulation in my current place is failing, and I'm right by a busy junction with multiple emergency vehicles passing each day — and the more less built-up areas are the cheap ones. Still the biggest city in Europe, but I'll be surrounded by forest and lakes on most sides within 15 minutes' walk.
Because I hated living in Apartments when I lived in them. They are noisy and small, and I like quiet and space. For me, being closer to walk to stuff is not really appealing enough to deal with how awful the experience of living in dense housing is.
I strongly think that dense housing is only positive for people who don't spend much time at home.
> "my first wish is infinite wishes" except the magic gene doesn't say "no"
The problem with this is that we haven't actually solved resource scarcity, and until we do there is still going to be an upper limit to what you will be allowed to buy, controlled by the number printed on your UBI cheque. I am anticipating this number to be much lower than what I currently am capable of achieving in my career.
Of course this is the fear that my career won't exist in the future. Or simply that AI will eat enough jobs that I will be edged out by better human competition. I'm under no illusions that I'm near the top of my field, I am firmly in the middle of the pack at best.
> sound insulation in my current place is failing
The sound insulation in the apartments I've lived in was nonexistent. This is a big part of why I never want to do that again.
I meant more along the lines: why do you expect that to be the future, such that you have reason to fear it?
> The problem with this is that we haven't actually solved resource scarcity, and until we do there is still going to be an upper limit to what you will be allowed to buy
Yes, but the AI necessary to make human labour redundant is that tech. In the absence of that tech, humans could still get jobs doing whatever the stuff is that AI can't do.
Because if I don't have an income I don't expect to be able to afford anything bigger.
> In the absence of that tech, humans could still get jobs doing whatever the stuff is that AI can't do
Which will be manual tasks that I am aging out of being able to keep up with, or.. what? Stuff that traditionally doesn't pay as well as knowledge work, right? And may not pay much more than the UBI anyways?
A big rural place is cheaper than a tiny city place.
> Which will be manual tasks that I am aging out of being able to keep up with, or.. what?
Automation started with the manual stuff, well before computers were invented. Even for humanoid robots, their hardware is better than our bodies, and it's the software which keeps it from replacing specific workers, though telepresence is one way around that.
We are still animals in the animal kingdom. It’s survival of the fittest as long as resources are not infinite. You can never expect this luxury. You are predator or prey.
Nah, we're cells in a distributed super-organism, or possibly a holobiont.
That has never worked out
This isn't actually the problem since we need and will continue to need UBI for non-AI related reasons
>People say it will free us up to pursue whatever we want, but to me it sounds like the worst cage imaginable.
This is where you missed the bit that "pursue whatever we want" will also be limited by AI, and secondary effect of people growing up consuming and enjoying AI productions that tailored to their interest. At best, you'll have a few people commanding Patreons who have some skill, but generally you'd have to find a domain to pursue that isn't already automated. Luddite subcultures will have to develop. But generally you yourself and most others, particularly children of millennials who'll grow up with this stuff progressing in sophistication, might just spend your time watching your video prompts come alive; and who would wanna. do anything else when you can get straight to what you wanna see.
This mentality is why bitcoin is going to cruise through 1 million dollars a bitcoin and on and on. Print Monopoly money and people who earn will keep seeking out sound money.
What you seem to think would devalue money will be the very thing that keeps it going as a concept.
And I hope you understand somewhere deep down that Bitcoin is the epitome of monopoly money.
I see it as the polar opposite, backed by math. A politically controlled money supply with no immutable math-based proof of its release schedule is Monopoly money. Cuck bucks. Look at the 100 year buying power chart.
On your second point, in spirit I agree. You need a stable society to enjoy wealth so it’s in the ruling classes best interest to keep things under control. HOW to keep things under control is the real debate.
Crypto does some things well (illegal stuff, escaping currency controls/moving lots of money "with you") but in the end that also requires it is only just big enough for reasonable liquidity, but not so big it has an impact on the actual economy. For what it's being pushed for... it's a negative-sum game only good for taking people for a ride. It should stay in its goddamn lane.
All money is politically controlled, including Bitcoin (although it's debatable if Bitcoin even counts as money). The politics of Bitcoin are one-op-one-vote rather than one-man-one-vote, but it's still there, and it's still mutable if enough of them cast their votes in any given way.
The camera did enable painters to pretend they were, for hours, at a scene they painted, but instead they painted photographs from others. Artists are not angels, they do the same "bad" things than OpenAI
He was not able to create a monopoly on the creation of paintings across the entire world and undercut the price and ability of all other painters.
It’s not a sensible comparisons.
You can make your argument validly against DALL•E or Midjourney families, but we've also got the Stable Diffusion family of models that anyone can just grab a copy of.
What does not remain to be seen though is that generative ai is going to put a lot of artists out of work.
You can argue about the good and bad of that but it’s defo happening.
What if da Vinci had been superhuman and could take on 1,000,000 commissions per day and had also taught himself every style of art and would do each commission for 0.001x the cost of anyone else.
Yes society as a whole benefit from a fantastic amount of super high quality art.
But the other artists are not gonna be so happy with the situation are they?
There isn’t a human right to make money from art.
People make decisions based on what society deems valuable. That changes over time and has for the entirety of human history.
Maybe there’s a demand for more customized art. Maybe spite patronage will make a comeback.
Anyone telling you they know how it will shake out is a fraud. But the incentives we’ve set up have a natural push and pull to get people to do what society values.
Within a few mon the or years there will be open source implementations anyway, running locally or in a data center. Most of the technology is published.
Thing is, anyway, as soon as one model is open there will be copies of it, fine-tune implementations. People don't care that much about ownership of data I would say if they actually have access to the models that are produced by gathering this data.
Ultimately, to me, an open source model for this tool makes a lot of sense. They use publicly available data and the models become publicly available.
I for one am quite excited for this tooling to become better and better so I can make the adaptation of a book I love into a movie I imagine it can be. At least I can have a lot of fun trying.
Sure.
Who do we send the compensation to for Leonardo da Vinci? Or Shakespeare, for a text-based example?
Do you want them to compensate me for the stuff I uploaded to Wikipedia and licensed as public domain, or what I've uploaded to GitHub with an MIT license?
A model trained only on licensed data is still an existential threat to the incomes of people whose works were never included in the model, precisely because they're only useful to the extent that they generalise beyond their own examples.
> The camera enabled something that was not possible before, and I wasn’t built by taking the work of sketch artists and painters. It was an entirely new form of art and media.
A new form of art that was (a) initially decried as "not art", and (b) which almost completely ended the economic value of portraiture.
Those authors aren't alive and their works are in the public domain. Bringing them up is irrelevant and a diversion from the actual problem, which is that creators alive today whose work is under copyright today and who need to make a living from their art are having it taken with zero compensation and had it fed into AI, stealing their effort.
> A model trained only on licensed data is still an existential threat to the incomes of people whose works were never included in the model, precisely because they're only useful to the extent that they generalise beyond their own examples.
Again, a diversion. We can debate how much AI trained on properly-licensed AI should be controlled, but it's pretty clear that the bare minimum is for all AI training data to require explicit permission from the creator of that data.
What kind of acknowledgement did you have in mind?
some images will be maximally distant from training examples but midjourney repainting frames from "harry potter" could very easily automatically send a check to jk rowling per generation
these AI start ups are just trying to have a free lunch in a very mature industry
We have no idea how human creativity works, but we know with certainty that it doesn't involve a Python program sucking in pixel data and outputting statistical likelihoods.
(I still have on my to-do list "learn more about why Hebbian learning is different from gradient descent and how much those differences matter").
As these tools improve and it becomes more possible for us to actually take our ideas into images and videos that fit a sort of "yes this is what I want" bill we are going to see amazing things come out.
I mean, a few days ago I saw this clearly AI generated video of some wizards doing snowboard and having a blast in the mountains. It's one of the funniest things I've seen in a while, simply so ridiculous. Obviously someone had the idea "I want to make a video of wizards doing snowboard in a mountain" that's where creativity lies.
So to say "creativity doesn't involve a python program outputting statistical likelihoods" imo is just you saying you're not creative enough to know what to do with the tools you've been given.
Some people when they see a strawberry they see a fruit. Others see endless dishes where the fruit is just an ingredient.
obviously you can use python to create works of art
whether a python script can itself be creative is the question posed by OP, but you went with "you're just not creative enough to get it"
"The world doesn't work that way" - I've seen this so often, but the most incredible thing about humans was the optimism to be able to change how the world worked -- that's the main impetus of most revolutions.
Personifying computer programs also is an error, it's like saying that bombs kill people when there has to be a person dropping them (at least until we get Skynet).
In my free time I like to code games, I don't have money to pay for an artist, nor the time/will to learn how to draw, that's what I'd want a machine to do.
I do agree with you that personifying computer programs is an error. That's also why I avoid calling these AI, because they're FAR from that. But I do believe that there will come a day, where personifying a computer program will be a real question.
I'm continually amazed at how many people argue against this point on HN, which is largely biased toward logical discourse. What you just said is exactly right, and is the Achilles heel of the legal arguments against generative AI. If what they are doing illegal, then so is the human act of creativity. If human creativity is legal, then so is generative AI trained on existing art.
What has yet to come is the mass realization (or perhaps, admission) that the way AI works is no different from the way we work.
end sarcasm. but seriously -- claiming you made something you didn't isn't ok. but it happens, regardless of laws or regulations or norms.
i don't have any solutions; the internet helps because you can publish something and point to it. i'm a musician and sometimes i only realize well after the fact how influenced i was by something after the fact for a song i've written.
and of course, my precious baskets.
However the mass produced semi-superficial artifact creators that were being created before AI will adapt or suffer.
While at the same time not mentioning the actual name of "the artist that painted Mona Lisa" (Leonardo Da Vinci), nor knowing that the name of his master is very well known, and even the influence of artists that he seemed to despise (eg Michaelangelo) are very well documented as well.
Maaybe this narrow view of (art) history needs to be fine-tuned on more data :-)
The human world works that way humans make it work. Pretty much what Jody Foster's character in the movie Contact told that asshole trying to steal all the credit from her, and take her place in the mission to go visit alien dad in Pensacola.
This is more like the invention of weaving machines. Yes we still have weavers but no where near as many.
That’s the problem. We know their names. We know their stories, their contributions. Babbage. Lovelace. Ritchie. Spielberg. Picasso. Rembrandt. This is what giving attribution is all about. So we don’t just stand there asking how we got here.
If a comedian accidentally retells a joke, is that theft?
Our influences are subtle and often inscrutable.
This is just a point in our overall evolution. It's an exciting time. We are here to learn and adapt.
Humans can still be creative all they want. There's still the stamp of "created by a human" that will never go away. You can choose to respect it or ignore it.
It reminds me: centaurs (human+AI) in chess/go were better than either humans or AI just for a short time.
People still play chess but they are outclassed by modern AI.
I was having a conversation about this with a friend last weekend, and we'd assumed that centaurs were still better than either top humans or top computers. I'm unable to easily find this info on google, could you share where you saw that centaurs are no longer better than top computers?
Nothing is forever. It’s unlikely unmodified Homo sapiens are dominant on earth 1,000 years from now.
To me, human activities from which we can earn a living wage feels like nomadism as the edge of an ever expanding region of agriculture (technological automation in this case). When you lose some activities to automation, we've always found new ones until now. In the end though, there were no more pastures for nomads to move, and there will be no more new activities from which humans can earn a wage (not to mention the satisfaction of accomplishing something hard). And, while there might be a future with UBI for everyone, the transition seems rough and exploitative.
My one hope is that the price of goods becomes so low due to AGI/automation, that the uselessness of labor in the economy won't matter. People can still be materially prosperous even with a meagre UBI (and it will be meagre because people have no political power in a post-labor society where the only thing that matters is capital).
Agreed. My concern isn’t really remotely about any of the accomplishments of generative AI. Frankly in my daily life I’d welcome readily available access. As it stands now it’s sort of a mixture of analytics and creativity without consciousness as we best understand it, so GPT itself isn’t going to murder me and take over the world.
The real issue is who owns these things, how you access them, how effects will ripple through a labor based economy, and how we’ll adapt (or not) our current economic system. As it stands for awhile we’ve been catering to the capital ownership group. If that doesn’t have a change in direction then I fear the implications of much of this in daily life. There’s still a fair bit of specialization and domain knowledge needed to leverage these tools to understand the questions to ask (I.e prompts to generate both around LLMs and the context of information fed to them) but they can certainly in many cases behave as multipliers that could reduce the amount of staff needed in some creative roles or eliminate some all together.
This isnt a new dilemma as arguably technology has been shifting the labor market for centuries, the question is how and if it can reshape well this time or if we need to fundamentally rethink these concepts of labor and capital ownership. That’s my major concern.
We're discussing a hypothetical post-labor future in 5-40 years. We probably shouldn't predict the economic theory of this future by looking at recent trends. Recent trends are driven by business-as-usual things like supply chain disruptions. But we're still near full employment, so we're not on the gradient to realized post-labor just yet. Post-labor economics (and politics) will probably be radically different, all the economic assumptions we take for granted go out the window.
It doesn’t look the opposite, it looks it automated even what we all couldn’t think of, and did that first.
When video became an affordable medium, would people say "this is the end of art, live performances are art. Now the people will just watch the same recordings over and over?" Maybe, if the internet existed. But it's had the effect of creating and introducing new art forms.
AI generated content won't replace art. It will evolve it to a new creative.
So I don't see AI art as changing careers much. Even if AI fully replaces human artists, all that means is the 0.1% of people who make a career off their art will have to join the rest of us 99.9% who only do art for the fun of it.
[0] Unless you're doing furry art, but that's only because furries are "suspiciously wealthy".
I think this is less true than it's been in centuries or perhaps all of history. Artistry is widespread, anyone can do it, and many choose to pursue it even though the pay isn't going to be great; in preindustrial times even having access to the ability to create art was quite limited as were the media types that existed.
I have come to terms with the fact, that I'm just a spit of sand, just as irrelevant to my own creation, as I am to the cells and bacteria that create me.
I for one do feel really special, as for every human there are about as many bacteria as there are stars in the universe (give or take a bit).
1) Errors in art programs messing up is less worrisome than a physical robot. One going wrong makes extra fingers in a picture, the other potentially maims or kills you.
2) Moravec's Paradox. Reasoning requires little computation versus sensorimotor and perception.
3) Despite 1 and 2, we are constantly automating menial jobs!
People kill other people is a statement so simple as to be devoid of any positive meaning. What are you actually trying to say? Don't justice systems almost universally contain notions of incitement of crime, criminal negligence to prevent a crime, and other accessory considerations to the actual act?
Don't justice systems almost universally have several levels of responsibility in relation to intent, which at its most basic level can be established by predictable outcomes?
If, for example, you are a leader of armed forces, and also a leader of organizations capable of creating propaganda. Let's say you create and distribute some propaganda (maybe using some AI tools), and a predictable outcome of that is that soldiers will be more lenient in their consideration of the rules of engagement and international law. In that case, one could at the very least establish that you were negligent in your creation and distribution of propaganda. The actual crime would have been the people killing people, namely your soldiers, but you would certainly be given some responsibility for that.
You can similarly take a small next step after that and consider that a company producing, distributing, and profiting from a dual use technology capable of creating propaganda and disinformation that can be responsible for crimes could be held at the very least morally accountable for those crimes, if not criminally.
Responsibility, accountability, moral and criminal, are not black and white notions. They are heaviest and easiest to attribute around physical acts of damage, but they stretch far and wide. To think otherwise is to allow the people with the most power to rampage unaccounted.
It depends on the basis form which you derive your (universal) moral values. Maximalist liberty as a universal moral value can be derived from the dual axioms of universal moral equality and a lack of moral oracle. If you accept these axioms, it follows that there is no source of moral authority that can legitimately constrain the non-infringing actions of another (eg. your right to wave your fists around ends where my nose begins). These ideas were first laid out in The Declaration of the Rights of Man, and expanded on in the Declaration of Independence.
> What are you actually trying to say?
That the causal chain of an action is completely interrupted at the first agent/actor in the system, who bears full responsibility for their actions.
> justice systems almost universally
It very much depends on the justice system. If you look at US/British/Roman law, a guilty mind (mens rea) and a guilty action (actus reus) are core facts that must be established in order to prove a crime has been committed. These still apply in cases of eg. criminal negligence, where a reasonable person ought to have known that their actions will result in harm. Mens rea is quite challenging to prove in cases of incitement, and legal precedents vary.
In combination with the above causal thesis, I hold that restricting incitement is in all cases an overstep of federal authority and an infringement of fundamental liberty. Incitement as a crime seems to have been established to make policing easier, not because telling someone to do something makes you responsible for their actions.
> you were negligent in your creation and distribution of propaganda
People are not inanimate objects. They are decision-making agents. The world is not a Rube-Goldberg machine. The soldiers who do the killing are responsible for their own moral attitude, and their own actions. You cannot be reasonably expected to know how your ideas will impact the minds of others, since every mind is a black box. Everything that contradicts this does so with generalizations too broad to be predictively useful.
> You can similarly take a small next step
This is where everything goes insane. Where does the responsibility end? You're trying to piece the butterfly effect back together.
Are people who make and sell bullets responsible for shootings? What about those that refine brass and lead? What about those that mine for ore? Creating economic demand, or promoting an idea, are morally neutral actions. People buying goods are in no way responsible for the conditions of their manufacture. People promoting ideas are in no way responsible for the actions a listener may take. Responsibility is zero-sum. Don't allow slavers and murderers to dispense with even a tiny portion of the sum responsibility for their actions. They must bear it all.
An AI model has no "unique self" to add to creation, at least not as we've understood so far.
I don't think this position will lead to good outcomes in terms of progress for civilization.
I'm not ideological about this, I wish for a future with self-driving cars for instance.
The current situation is simply too rapidly evolving and can cause significant economic destruction, for instance if many middle-class jobs are lost without anything to replace them.
Change is inevitable, but reckless speed is not, that's a choice we make as a group.
The concept of art as exclusive property is very new. Throughout history, artists have built on one another’s works with no attribution or provenance. It’s really just the past 100 years — Disney, specifically - that have created the cultural mindset that the first person to express something owns it forever and everyone else has to pay them for the privilege of building that next work.
BTW I’m old enough to remember people decrying the rise of desktop publishing (“WYSIWYG”) as the automation of creativity.
I share your disdain for the geriatric political class, but I strongly disagree that this is a situation that needs to be managed. I say we let the arts return to the free for all they were for the fist 80,000 years or whatever.
Certainly not for every individual idea, but good musicians do a lot of attribution. I got to know a lot of music I love now after following a mention on the liner notes of another musician’s album, or having them mentioned in an interview.
People seem to be asking for much more direct attribution: the pixels in this image are 0.02% from artist X, and 0.006% from artist Y, etc.
It is very rare for a song to include a breakdown of all of the influences that the artist is exercising in that particular piece.
Great many, if you care to read a bit more of the biographies, autographies, history of music books, interviews, blogs, etc.
Is it because people are violating copyrights to train these AIs?
They are sure, however, that it is a kind of infringement. Citing "fair use" is an admission of infringement - just a specific kind of infringement that is allowed.
also no, disney did not invent the notion of authorship nor royalties. having enough honor not to take credit for someone else's work goes back millennia. attribution goes back millennia, otherwise we wouldn't know the names Sophocles, Aeschylus, Euripides.
Don't get me started on the pharaohs, mother fuckers loved carving their names into things.
It is the same as what every human being is doing. We consume and we create. Sometimes creations are very good, but most of the time they are just mediocre. If the machines can create better average results, it will be due to the genius of the humans who invented those machines.
So we can be happy, that we have such beings among us and should cherish, that we will have better content to consume in the future. When you look at the world, you will see, that there are still plenty of problems to be solved for humans.
People invest in stories. They also invest in other people. This is why people love seeing Tom Cruise over and over again in movies. Or why I'm going to go see the next Scorsese movie.
Reality television is designed to be addicting, and engaging, and it is very successful at that. I get pulled into The storylines whenever I watch. But I quickly turn it off. I don't watch it not because it is not enjoyable, but because I realize it is a cotton candy: empty trash that is not worth my time.
Artists are already often criticized for being "corporate." I think we'll see a similar effect for AI generated content. The hoi polloi and normies will slurp it up.
The true fans and passionate ones who give a shit aren't going to be fooled.
Edit: for length
The main obstacle to this is the pride and ego of the people who've "made it" up until now. Let go. Let society have nice things, even if you have to reinvent yourself. I don't think that creativity is endangered; art, uh, finds a way.
Let's muse on the notion that creativity, as we've known and cherished it, can be bottled up and dispensed by machines, up to a certain whimsical point. Beyond that? We stumble upon creations like these, novel tools that beckon us, the flesh-and-blood creators, to mold unforeseen "creativities." It's one spectacle to mechanize the known realms of artistic endeavor, quite another to boldly claim that machines shall inherit the mantle of creativity, henceforth dictating the contours of all future artistic landscapes.
History, that grand tapestry, is peppered with instances where the mechanical muses have dared to tread upon the sacred grounds of creativity. Take photography, for instance, a marvel of the 19th century that promised to capture reality with an accuracy that scoffed at the painter's brush. Or consider the digital revolution, which flung open the doors to realms of visual and auditory experiences previously consigned to the realm of dreams. The synthesizer, not merely an instrument but a portal, has ushered us into a new era of musical exploration, challenging the supremacy of the acoustic tradition.
Each of these milestones, while distinctly modern, echoes the age-old dance between creator and tool, where each step forward is both a continuation and a departure from the past. In this light, the question isn't whether creativity can be automated, but rather how our definition of creativity evolves as we, hand in hand with our mechanical counterparts, stride into the unknown.
a few examples
Plutarch's Lives
Holinshed's Chronicles
Ovid's Metamorphoses
good artist copy, great artist steal
so on and worth
i, for one, welcome these creative machines slurping all that was created!
https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/436482
I suspect you will struggle. The economics for that sort of work don't exist anymore.
Speak for yourself.
OK, well, you walked right into this one:
You must know the answer: How do you manage it?
Some twisted the story as if the underlying issue was the religion but economic concerns were the real reason.
I welcome its fall.
May I introduce you to the entire history of humanity between 7 millennia before the invention of writing to approximately 50 years after the invention of communism? :P
More seriously: yes, we have no clue how to manage the situation. The best guess right now is UBI, which looks cool, but then at a first glance so does communism and laissez-faire capitalism.
Time for, ironically because humans are surprisingly bad at this, a creative idea for how to manage all this.
Imho. it's just really hard to reason that average non-educational entertainment has a positive net effect on global society.
Seeing it this way makes it way less surprising that "art" and "creative entertainment" is one of the first things that gets hit by automation.
However, there's a line somewhere. I've spent most of my life around drab midwestern utilitarian/corporate/commercial buildings, and it has been noticeably depressing. In the periods where I've spent time in beautiful buildings, I have felt much better. Based on anecdata, I'm not the only one. There's something important & essential for humans about ornamentation & beauty. It's more than entertainment.
Humans can live on rice and kidney beans, but if one must do so without hope for more tasty options[0] it is demoralizing.
[0] lots of people are happy with spartan diets, but most often those people are doing so by choice.
H
Anecdote: My grandma retired and started painting and has since passed. The market value of these paintings is 0, nobody would buy them as they are just average. But I will never get rid of them because she created it. They have value to me only.