Sora could ruin peoples lives
community.openai.com
community.openai.com
Equally in many areas the end result is a loss of something (often intangible) which we accept as "good enough" and which may take a long time to be recaptured.
The steam engine may well have been a good thing in the long run but I'm sure it did tear apart the fabric of many people's lives and I think it's reasonable to commiserate.
In the jargon of fine arts, "craft" refers "making a thing well / in a particular style" while "art" has something to say, most often challenging a widespread idea.
EG installing a toilet in a room of an art gallery with a plaque stating "this is art" was a bold work of art, but was not an impressive display of craft.
I really appreciate this distinction, because separating those concepts immediately clarifies a lot of the discussion around "AI Art".
AI can imitate _craft_ exceptionally well, but it cannot create _art_ (that is, it can't independently devise a display which challenges a widespread idea).
Working artists are losing out because nearly all of the economic demand for art was actually demand for craft, and they're doubly angry because their past work was needed to create the machine that's now undercutting their income.
An AI-generated work is mainly if not categorically a prompt for "how" questions, as its can-kicking answer to "why" is built right into the first letter of the initialism: because a human wanted it.
The real answer to why is pursued from that point up into its usual unnavigable headwaters, with a few extra twists concerning the question of whether the word artificial itself will turn out to be merely another diguise of the anthropic principle.
How can you even reason that.
Imagine an army of people with AI art makers versing an army of people with steam engines... who do you think will change the world?
AI is nothing compared to the industrial revolution.
So you might lose your manual labor farm job to a newly invented machine, but there will be a lot of openings for factory workers to assemble those machines and miners to obtain the metal to build them.
When AI takes your job it quite likely doesn't involve any new hardware. It might just be a program running on a computer your (now ex) employer already had. This seems fundamentally more disruptive.
You just proved how amazing the industrial and information eras were that they could extend beyond their timeline and into the future.
AI might be disruptive in a similar vein, but it's comparing giants to small achievements.
It used to be that 90%+ of citizens were employed in agriculture.
Your hypothesis is that we switched from replacing all those farmers with "even more" factory workers building farming machines.
This seems like an extraordinary claim. If one tractor replaces 10 farmers, why would you need 10 workers, full-time, to build this one tractor?
It seems much more likely that the slow disappearance of all those farming "jobs" was, kind-of coincidentally, timed with the need for building cars, clothing factories etc.
The Garage Culture is a privilege of few.
Most working-class people are accepting to live into small boxes without space for even a table destined to drawing, reading and studying. Instead, they soon will use virtual desktops inside cheap Chinese Apple Vision Pros clones. Life will get harder and unhealthier.
While designers and some scientists know the importance of physical areas for developing certain activities, most people don't and are subjecting themselves and their children to sad living conditions.
edit: typo ("de" -> "the")
(you didn't imply otherwise, but I know there's a common misconception that space is running out and the world is overcrowded. It's largely not true)
Land is not free, and that plus buy in is a major obstacle for the moment.
Nomadic living is hated by every state on Earth too.
Even if there is, it's probably restricted to the USA.
At relevant parts of the USA, house sizes are being compressed.
Source: The New York Times
Title: The Great Compression
Date: 02/17/2024
Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/17/business/economy/the-grea...
Edit: formating
https://www.ctinsider.com/living/article/column-home-size-am...
“I am 68 years old, on the opposite spectrum of life’s journey. At your age, I had the same passion to be a writer. But when personal computers became available just a few years later, that passion changed to becoming a computer programmer. I’ve been doing that ever since.
My point is:
Don’t lose your passion. Learn everything you can about this new technology and figure out how to use it to make your dream come true.
Be open to life’s changes. It may seem like nothing will ever change your mind, but no one knows the future. People change, the world changes, and as unbelievable as it may sound, you may one day become passionate about something else.
When Sam Altman announced the new GPTs and Assistants technologies, everybody who had been developing RAG applications for the previous year freaked out. I didn’t. I, as a RAG (sometimes called “Wrapper”) developer saw it as a unique opportunity. And so far, I haven’t been wrong.
So, SORA might just be your opportunity. Use it to CREATE and show that love in every piece you create.”
But I'm in my 30s, which means on average I have another 40-50 years of existence to get through.
But that's what we use and it's not getting better. It's getting worse. It's not just OpenAI either, but that's a fairly prominent example that's germane here.
With that attitude, you're sure to live a very long time.
Potentially the future might be great, we don't have jobs... we have hobbies. Think Sisko's dad from DS9, replicators can create anything for everyone... but he runs a restaurant with handmade food because that's his passion.
But we might end up with a dystopia with corporate government, centrally controlled resources probably metered based on a social credit score.
yes, as I see it this will go one of five ways, ordered by probability
0) it's all hype: AI plateaus/fizzles out, maybe minor productivity improvements
1) techno-feudalism: ruling class of AI company trillionaires exercise complete domination of 99.9999% of humanity
2) new dark age: billions of newly unemployed formerly middle class workers riot worldwide targeting DCs and fabs. AI CEOs/VCs suffer the fate of the French kings
3) techno-utopia (Earth in Star Trek)
4) AI takeover
personally I'm hoping for 0
The future contains AIs like SORA and Gemini 1.5. Gripe about it if you want - but that won't change anything. So why be grim about it? There are so many opportunities to use these new tools to make new things that have never existed before. Obviously there's a danger society itself crumbles, but if not - well, what an exciting transition to live through.
I look forward to being an old man and getting to tell the stories of what life was like when movies and software were made entirely by hand. What fun.
where's the hope in that? especially because it could be taken away at any time.
In terms of careers, children have years where they are expected to be unproductive and old people are no longer expected to be productive.
The ones hit hard are those who need to start from the bottom again learning a different skillset, and many have gambled putting off drawing an income for years for what they thought was a moat that AI is chewing through rapidly.
It feels like it's too late to switch plans and careers (and even if I do, what would that be?). At the same time I have another 30-40 years to live, a family, 20 more years of mortgage etc. so the technology has real consequences for a long time of my life, I can't get excited about it.
Comparison with past inventions do not take into account a few things:
1- AI may create new jobs, but it can also do those new jobs especially if they are digital. This is something that never happened before in human history. An easily available machine that can do what a human can do anywhere any time.
2- Cost and capitalism is a huge issue. If the cost of AI is the same as a human, but it can do the job 24/7 with no holidays, no sick days, no unions, and can execute and follow the whims of the prompter, then human will go for AI always.
3- Barrier to entry into any affected job will be low. People with minimal training or expertise will enter industries traditionally reliant on human expertise. This trend may lead to a proliferation of individuals claiming expertise in fields such as visual effects (VFX), which will blur the distinction between skilled professionals and amateur practitioners.
There is nothing like that for AI. The fact that something thematically similar happened in the past does not mean it's applicable here. Now, there are no new supply chains to build, this silicon's getting manufactured one way or another. No new jobs, just replace the department with an individual.
Ignore these hyped claims by AI entrepreneurs. These are made to hustle money from investors. :-)
And we can all be like "noone is owed a job doing traditional art, this happened to millions of people during the industrial revolution too", but in that case we have to be honest and not tell art-folks that they are overreacting.
AI graphic/video art hasn't found its Marley Marl yet, but I believe she's out there and is going to do stuff that will blow our minds.
"Prompt engineering" exercise generally involves a few lines of text. It's hard to see how that's going to result in a new kind of highly skilled artist. AI produce the same level of greatness and/or mediocrity for essentially all of their users.
This thread is like fifty variations of "it will work out (waves hand at past)"
Synthesizer instruments, yes. Sequencers, trackers, and modern DAWs like Ableton, absolutely not. They’re entirely different animals and are very much a musical analogue to “prompt engineering.” They have also enabled some incredible art that would be impossible if musicians were limited only to what they could play into a recorded (or midi) tape.
I suspect that the same will prove to be true of generative AI, and that those artists that embrace it will see a golden age of creativity. But there will also be many artists who see their craft diminished in value, much like what has happened to studio drummers. And I could be completely wrong, but either way the genie is out of the bottle, so we’re going to find out.
These kinds of tools are democratizing visual expression; with that, we should place even more importance on what is being told and expressed. In some ways I see it as a new form of writing. We're in our duchamp readymade era.
It had never entered into my thinking that the code I was writing, the screens I was designing, and the system I deployed would do that. Ever since that project, I think about that. You have to think not just about what the software will do for the people you intend to use it, but what it will do to them as well.
With our headlong rush to deploy more generative capacity, there's zero consideration for this. The reasons we're ignoring this are understandable, if sad. There's too much money to be made being the first or best on the block to deploy this capability. There's too much potential control if you're the winner of this race to stop. The downsides will be felt by others, not the ones deploying the software... until they put some of their friends out of work, and even then, they won't look up and notice until it's too late.
The main thing to do would be to give people a heads up so they can try to get out in front of it. Which is something AI companies are doing at every level.
The message I keep hearing time and time again is "Our aim is not to replace but to empower". The same companies with this message are also saying that their goal is to create a superintelligence that does everything better than humans.
As a junior developer, I have no idea what I should do, where to pivot, and what to expect in the next 6-12 months. I'm confused and lost. I don't know which skills I should be picking up and which ones will be worthless. All I know is that just a few months ago, when I expressed this concern, I was told by seniors that I, a clueless junior, have nothing to worry about, that it's just hype, that I'll never be replaced. Now the general sentiment is that juniors are indeed doomed. The sudden shift in tone felt like a slap in the face.
Learn to use the new tools. And become an expert in the business domain where you work. Developers who understand business issues are far more valuable than those who can only code to detailed specifications written by Product Owners or Business Analysts. Are you reading the trade press articles? Attending non-technical industry webinars? Networking with colleagues outside the engineering team?
It's really hard not to agree with the response above.
I do wish the robots were doing more mundane or labour intensive tasks and leave the art to humans.
We happen to be in a weird little valley right now where some tasks are still impossible for artificial beings to do better than us. This is a very short term aberration.
If we are still here in a couple generations, when artificial beings have surpassed our output in every way that matters, then we’ll have a choice to make about what we produce for fun. Not because we’re better at it or because it is profitable, just because we want to.
Writing stories, making music, making movies, plumbing, carpentry… the only humans who do these things will be the humans who feel like it.
I'd say all tasks when done for money and under pressure (deadlines, people depending on you, etc) become less enjoyable.
I enjoy coding in my free time. Doing it for work - not so much.
Last time I checked it was an algorithm that needs to be run and fed with input to perform calculations. Not a being?
The only thing that is a "being" about it currently is the nature of the beings that "donated" the training data (without being, hem, asked).
Doubt. Explain, for instance, pain. How do you create that algorithmically? Or if you don't like to explain pain, how about love?
You see, that's the problem with being caught up in the "technical person" identity completely. Reducing yourself down to an algorithm is not exactly healthy if you ask me. But it sure explains a lot about where the world is headed and why.
I'm not going to ask you to lift things heavier than you can, or to do math or programming that's beyond your known capabilities.
My goal is going to be to find out what you're best at, then optimize my tasks to be aligned with your training and objectives.
This is pretty much what I do with AI also.
That doesn't explain what pain is. My question was how you would algorithmically create that? If I am as much a being as an algorithm, as you insulted, then sure thing there must be an algorithmic nature underlying my (or anyone's) pain?
I'm not sure what answer would communicate the idea clearest, but:
* If you want the AI version of pain, there are examples of attacks that cause it to bug out and malfunction. It's clearly not operating correctly, and I think someone famously got Bing to say it wants to go on a rampage? Here's blogspam from last year form a quick search: https://nypost.com/2023/02/16/bing-ai-chatbots-destructive-r...
* If you want to know why people or animals experience pain, it's because it's an important sensor to exist in nature. AI has been trained to avoid controversial topics and will push back if you try to get it to talk about something it knows but doesn't want to engage with. That's sort of pain?
* If you want AI with literal neurons that can feel "pain" in a biological sense, there are also organoids, but I don't know much about them.
The world only cares about inputs and outputs.
I meant what I typed. Claiming that a human being "is an algorithm if you abstract enough" is an insult. I hope you can see that?
> If you want the AI version of pain
> If you want to know why people or animals experience pain
> If you want AI with literal neurons that can feel "pain"
Look. I find it fascinating how a simple question can be evaded with so much insistence and gaslighting.
I don't want any of that. I didn't ask for that.
I said an LLM is not a being. It's an algorithm. You claimed that "So are you, if you abstract enough."
If I am to be reduced to an algorithm, then all I want is an explanation of how I am supposed to be that if you can't explain the algorithmic nature of the most fundamental aspects of a (human) being. If you can't, maybe you should consider that your claim is not only wrong, but potentially a sophisticated intellectual form of pseudo-legitimized dehuminization? (And we shouldn't be calling LLMs "artificial beings".)
> The world only cares about inputs and outputs.
This way of thinking is the source of all the issues we are facing right now. It screams "I need more suffering". You have been conditioned into believing that. But it doesn't stand up to the simplest test!
There’s nothing magic about it, other than that we don’t currently understand much about how it works or how to modulate it.
It’s like saying, “if we’re reducible to machines then explain itchiness”.
I think that's a very reductionist view point that differs from the official definition of pain?
> There’s nothing magic about it, other than that we don’t currently understand much about how it works or how to modulate it.
I didn't claim that it's magical. Just that you wouldn't be able to produce the experience of pain algorithmically?
Still waiting for someone to explain how it could be produced algorithmically. I asked GPT. It said it would be immoral to even think about doing so if we could.
> It’s like saying, “if we’re reducible to machines then explain itchiness”.
If you can explain how itchiness is created algorithmically, I would also take that just out of curiosity! Though not the same as pain, it would be a good starting point maybe.
For a system to experience what we describe as pain, it needs to receive sensory input which it predicts signals that something is damaging its internal state, and then model/describe/represent itself as something that has this experience. Such as system would, like you do, believe it is experiencing pain.
Do you have a source to underpin that claim? (Honest question.)
> For a system to experience what we describe as pain, it needs to receive sensory input which it predicts signals that something is damaging its internal state, and then model/describe/represent itself as something that has this experience.
And then the system would feel pain? It doesn't sound convincing. I can model everything I want in my brain, but that certainly doesn't equate experiencing the feeling of pain. What about a headache? Do I describe myself without a headache and the difference to the actual "model" is my pain experience? It sounds a bit too left-brained to me, sorry.
> Such as system would, like you do, believe it is experiencing pain.
How do you know? I think that's a pretty bold claim. Also, pain is not a believe, it's an experience of a feeling?
The system would believe it is experiencing pain. Its model of itself would use the pain concept to describe itself, and it would believe it is experiencing it. And this description would be accurate since it is getting damaged.
I would argue that pain, like any interpretation of sensory input, are believes. "experience of a feeling" is equal to interpreting sensory input in a certain way.
But due to the way we are constructed, we cannot unbelieve certain things. It is like when you see a tree, you cannot decide to not see a tree after you have seen it. Or when you see a 2D projection of a 3D cube. You have to see the cube, even if you know it is not there since it is actually just a bunch of lines on a paper. This makes this type of belief different from other types of beliefs we hold which we easily can change our mind about, like what the weather will be like tomorrow.
It's the same thing with pain. You cannot stop believing in the interpretation of the sensory data that we describe as pain. And this "pain belief" is tied to certain behaviors, like trying to avoid it, since it is built into our reward system that it is negative. The reason we cannot easily "unbelieve" pain is that it would be very dangerous if we could simply ignore it. This is also why we are wired so that love is so hard to unbelieve, reproduction would fail in a species that could easily change their mind on the "love belief" about their offspring or partners.
If you think about phantom limb pain, it is quite clear that it is just a belief/model, and in that case an inaccurate one.
In other words: "Pain isn't real"? Are you serious?
Again, is there any reliable source for that other than a whole book that probably doesn't even talk about what you claim? If it is in the book, can you give a detailed reference where to find it? And if so, does the book provide references to research underpinning those claims?
Or did you just come up with that on your own? It sounds absolutely ridiculous to me. Any attempt to "model" the experience is prone to fail by lack of evidence because pain is, by definition, subjective.
If you just search for the definitions of belief, emotion and pain, you will quickly find that their meanings are distinct. Claiming that pain is a belief is absurd.
Of course it is real. When I feel pain from an injury, the injury is very real, my pain sensor's signals are real and my brain's interpretation of those signals is real, and my behavior of trying to avoid further injury is real.
> Again, is there any reliable source for that other than a whole book that probably doesn't even talk about what you claim? If it is in the book, can you give a detailed reference where to find it? And if so, does the book provide references to research underpinning those claims?
Lisa Barrett is a very famous professor of neuroscience, so sure there is a lot of research in that book :) Here is a short video where she explains it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0QfCvIJRtE0 I also recommend her interviews with Lex Fridman.
She talks more about emotions as predictions, but we mean the same thing.
Here is a highly cited paper where she explains the theory: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27798257/
> Or did you just come up with that on your own? It sounds absolutely ridiculous to me. Any attempt to "model" the experience is prone to fail by lack of evidence because pain is, by definition, subjective.
Your pain is very subjective yes, but that just means that it is created by your internal model of the world and yourself, which has a unique subjective perspective of the world.
> If you just search for the definitions of belief, emotion and pain, you will quickly find that their meanings are distinct. Claiming that pain is a belief is absurd.
These words are normally not used in the way I use them, but the point is that emotions are outputs of our model of ourselves. These outputs you can call beliefs, predictions or interpretations if you like.
Unless you really claim that modeling "pain" as some kind of variable in an algorithm can be equivalent to a biological being feeling pain?
I will certainly have a look at the research, but I still believe it's not even talking about that point?
Edit: Where exactly in the cited paper is the claim that emotions are a belief? Can't find it.
Yes, I do. I guess it all boils down to whether or not you think the hard problem of consciousness is actually a problem or not. I doubt it is, but it is a totally respectable position if you do :)
> Where exactly in the cited paper is the claim that emotions are a belief? Can't find it.
As I wrote in my previous response, you can call it predictions too. Predictions are usually beliefs about the future. In the predictive brain literature, it is also used as predictions about the present. I use belief as the output of some inference algorithm that needs to deal with uncertainty.
Here is a quote from the paper: "The brain continually constructs concepts and creates categories to identify what the sensory inputs are, infers a causal explanation for what caused them, and drives action plans for what to do about them. When the internal model creates an emotion concept, the eventual categorization results in an instance of emotion."
But you are right, the paper talks more about how emotional categories are created, and dodges the question of how the "subjective experience of having an emotion" emerges. In my mind, the step is not far though, and boils down to, as said above, how you view the hard problem or consciousness. That we "feel" stuff is a result of an algorithm/model that describes ourselves as having experiences, which is a good model, since how else would we describe ourselves? My belief is that the progress in AI and neuroscience will prove me right :)
Depends on what constitutes a "problem" in this context. But based on my interpretation of what you probably want to express with this sentence, yes, I think consciousness is a problem (for your theory). Otherwise, all of my previous comments wouldn't have made that much sense.
> Predictions are usually beliefs about the future.
I am not sure if I would agree that predictions and beliefs can simply be declared identical so easily. A belief doesn't need to be based on actual data and it doesn't have to be about the future while a prediction, by definition, is. Certain beliefs also seem to be emergent in humans. Otherwise, it would be difficult to explain the independent emergence of religion and belief in god. Beliefs are not necessarily emotions and that's why I have a hard time with the conflation of the two terms. "Predictions about the present" sounds more like a technical term to me. It doesn't make that much sense in the original meaning of the term "prediction". (I understand that it's used that way in many scientific works. Still, in this context, I think it's important to distinguish otherwise we end up redefining the meaning of words.)
> dodges the question of how the "subjective experience of having an emotion" emerges
Yea, it's convenient, right? But I think these are the central points of my argument that you brush away so swiftly. You won't get around subjective experience and consciousness. And how would you go about proving that an algorithm can have subjective experience and "feel" pain or emotions? And if you really believe that this is possible, how do you make sure that in your research nothing extremely unethical happens? By your definition, the Sims may evolve to something that could be protected by certain rights soon? ;)
I could imagine that in reality all of that isn't needed. Whether the algorithm really feels something or not - it doesn't matter as long as the expression is realistic enough for humans to believe that it feels something. Then you get the consciousness "injected" into your algorithm from the outside. Can you convince someone with a realistic sophisticated simulation that something is conscious even though it isn't? Probably. Still, it won't get you anywhere. Nevertheless, I find that to be a much more likely avenue than that we will ever be able to prove that an algorithm can experience feelings in a way that is equivalent to biological beings. I also don't think this kind of research is all that beneficial to us as humans, especially when mixed with advances in AI. But good luck with all of that and thanks for the references!
The thing is that I can't prove that you or anyone else is conscious either, including myself. With conscious acting AIs it will be the same, and these AIs will believe they are conscious in the same way as we do. So yes, we will have to treat them as if they are conscious.
See, that's the thing. It sounds extremely entitled to say that "you believe you are conscious" (but in reality you aren't). You don't know that. You have no evidence for it. You believe that we believe we are conscious. Your opinion is acceptable to me as long as you keep it limited to your own being and discuss it as an explicit hypothesis. I find it overreaching to put this as a general claim and make it sound as if it was obvious, self evident, and applicable to anyone else. It's not.
There comes a point at which abstraction becomes too general to be useful, and most attempts to equate LLMs with human beings fall into that category for me. Yes, one could describe the intricacies and complexities of human thought and reasoning as equivalent to prompting a stateless stochastic token matching machine but all that proves is how much of a reach the premise is.
If you ask me, no you cannot do that even if you know you're stretching the limits of that "abstraction". It just doesn't fly even in the wildest theory. Even if an LLM has a world model that could be compared to a human one, the whole underlying nature of experience is completely missing, hence rendering even this narrow comparison extremely wonky.
Otherwise, I like the way you've put it into words though!
We have all benefited from mass replication of mediums that before required someone to work for each performance.
I don't see why generation of content should be treated any different. And humans might always keep an edge on this. Well crafted coherent product with decent direction often feels better than a bland one. I really wonder how soon AI can replicate the first one.
Is there still something we can realistically tell kids that they should invest time and effort into learning? Seems that the general idea of getting good at something you are passionate about is going away. Also in particular in the arts, the idea that humans practice for a long time to create art, show it to other people who then enjoy it will disappear. I don't think people have really thought about the deeper consequences of this. Seems that a lot of people like to immediately deflect and deny that this is any different from changes in the past, as you can see in the responses to her post.
I think for now it would be good to develop physical skills in addition to pretending nothing is happening. Robotics seem to lag behind for various reasons.
I used to think that by becoming software engineer I would have good life. Now I'm no longer sure, if I will still have anything in decade or two, because what about debt? What about opportunities for younger people? What about poorer countries?
That is an extremely good question. So I asked Bing:
As a high school student, considering career paths that are less likely to be automated by artificial intelligence (AI) is a wise approach. While no job is entirely immune to technological advancements, some occupations rely heavily on uniquely human skills and are less susceptible to automation. Here are several career options to explore:
Healthcare Professionals:
- Nurses, doctors, therapists, and counselors play critical roles in patient care and emotional support. The human touch and empathy required in healthcare make these professions less likely to be fully automated.
Education:
-Teachers, instructors, and school administrators engage with students, personalize learning experiences, and provide mentorship. The interactive nature of education remains essential, even as technology evolves.
Software Development and IT:
- While AI can assist in coding and software development, human creativity, problem-solving, and understanding user needs are irreplaceable. Careers in software engineering, data science, and cybersecurity continue to thrive.
Creative Industries:
- Musicians, artists, writers, and journalists rely on imagination, emotional expression, and unique perspectives. Creativity is a distinctly human trait that AI struggles to replicate.
Human Resources (HR):
- HR professionals handle employee relations, conflict resolution, and organizational culture. Their ability to understand human dynamics and make informed decisions is crucial.
Law and Legal Services:
-Legal professionals, including lawyers and paralegals, analyze complex information, argue cases, and interpret laws. Legal reasoning and ethical judgment remain human strengths.
Public Relations (PR):
-PR specialists manage communication, reputation, and crisis response. Building relationships, understanding public sentiment, and strategic thinking are key.
Health and Fitness Trainers:
-Personal trainers, coaches, and nutritionists work directly with clients, providing personalized guidance and motivation. Human interaction is central to their roles.
Social Work and Counseling:
-Social workers and counselors support individuals and families facing challenges. Empathy, active listening, and emotional intelligence are essential skills.
Environmental Science and Conservation:
-Careers related to environmental protection, wildlife conservation, and sustainability involve complex decision-making and a deep understanding of ecological systems.
Remember that adaptability and continuous learning are crucial regardless of the career path you choose. As technology evolves, staying informed and developing a growth mindset will help you thrive in any field.
That's out of date already.
Pre-trained generative models have many fewer degrees of freedom. For instance, try asking Bing to create a picture of a man chasing a bear. This can be done. Now ask it to create a picture of a woman chasing a bear. I have been unable to craft a prompt that succeeds. Bing REALLY does not want women chasing bears. Every picture is a bear chasing a woman.
I was able to get it to picture a woman chasing a child, though.
Talk about formulaic movies! The AI will exert a substantial bias. It’s not just a new kind of canvas for artists.
If I have a vision, I cannot pull that out of my head and make it real using generative AI. Maybe I can get someone else's take on my concept, but I don't have the flexibility to build the image in my head. That's the real difference between the new tools of old and the "new tools" of today. You can't actually create with them, just sift and hope with varying degrees of control, but no creativity.
That is at least give them the tools to evaluate if they want to commit to something and what that might mean as normal outcome.
Something that worries me more at the moment is the impact this will have on people's plans.
In this post we have a 16 year old who's passionate about animation but is questioning whether it's a viable industry to join.
I've seen plenty of examples of students who planned to be computer programmers but are now having second thoughts about that career as well.
Twenty years ago there was a similar fear in programming, that all of the jobs were going to be outsourced to lower cost countries. I believe there were people who changed their career plans as a result of that fear back then as well.
I hope we don't see a huge flurry of people making life altering career decisions based on their fear of AI which they later come to regret as this shakes out in a more positive direction.
(I also hope we don't see people who genuinely DO regret their career decisions if AI turns out to have the negative impact that many people fear today.)
When I was 16 I wanted more than anything to be an astronaut, but reality got in the way.
Change is inevitable, so we all have to adapt throughout life. Fortunately, adapting one of humanity's greatest capabilities.
Maybe it's just the internet, but sometimes you have to wonder if there is a thriving neo-luddite community out there.
A good book on the subject is “Blood in the Machine” (2023) by Brian Merchant, which is about what the Luddites actually meant. The 99 Percent Invisible podcast recently interviewed the author: https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/blood-in-the-machine/
For example, researchers are using ML to discover new proteins, leading to new drugs and new construction materials. https://www.cradle.bio/ is doing amazing things in this space.
It's true that if you make a living as a drone operator selling stock footage, you might need to diversify. However, I am not worried for intellectually curious teenage creatives at this time.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2308243-deepmind-uses-a...
I don't like using these tools in my own work and I hope tech companies are somehow held accountable for using everyone's data without permission, but I'm actually pretty optimistic that this won't displace that many professional artists once the money people get a handle on how the attention economy actually responds to this stuff. I'm a lot more worried about people using this stuff to create propaganda, to frame people for crimes, or to create non-consentual porn of people.
The post author is 16, and an aspiring animator. If their attitude is to be scared of tech, instead of being insanely curious about it, they are not on the right path to become a creative, regardless of AI.
This is true, but what followed also led to lifting probably billions of people out of hunger, and saving the lives of billions of children, increasing life expectancy by over 30 years, led to insane leaps of literacy, etc, etc...
> AI will only be a good for the very top of the food chain.
With FUD being spread like this, yeah we're at a risk of exactly this being the case, once draconian regulation is passed by clueless lawmakers.
As it stands right now, open source and locally-running AI is available to nearly all, cheaply (with an incentive of becoming even cheaper). Aside from Sora being leaps and bounds beyond everyone's expectation, the OSS world of local LLMs, Llama, Mistral, Stable Diffusion, and the likes, is very competitive in terms of quality and utility to the big closed services.
The issue is the DISTRIBUTION of the net positives. And closing and gating the progress will only create more imbalance in how the positive impact of this tech is distributed.
Technology can be used for good or ill. IBMs counting machines made accountants lives easier but also made the Nazi death camps more efficient. See also lead in gas, DDT, nerve gas, CFCs PFAS etc etc. You can argue that gaining more knowledge has proved beneficial but not every advancement or advanced product is guaranteed to be a net good. Some developments, like the Nobel Prize winning DDT, were praised as amazing advancements in their day only to have catastrophic unseen effects later.
Might or might not be, but it's not up to you to gatekeep creativity.
So that means? researchers are passionate about their job does that mean that we shouldn't use AI to speed up medical research? material research? so on and so on. It's just someone mad that their job is getting closer to be automated before others.
Go on youtube, you'll find plenty videos of people making intricate pots, brushes, etc by hand. You'll also find people do old school metal working with manual mills and lathes. Those people look like they clearly take pride in their work and often enjoy the activity. Automation came for them as well and the ones you see today are the very few remaining.
No, more because Altman is an even higher form of Silicon Valley creature than we've seen before. This is a segment of society that thinks that you can directly judge something's benefit to humanity based on the IPO it could have, and pretty much nothing else. They create sea changes in society knowing that it's going to be a very rough transition for people who don't have their levels of wealth to deal with the consequences.
Previously, seeing was believing. Sure, there was Photoshop and CGI, but pictures aren't as telling as video, and most people didn't have the capital necessary to cook up anything they wanted using CGI. This, though... anyone could make up anything for any reason, with dire consequences.
Just spitballing here, what if, say, political campaigns started releasing generated video of opponents in compromising positions with minors? Or videos were posted to social media designed to create a casus belli for a country?
It won't matter for the companies making those tools; their stock prices will be fine. Well, at least until the EMP is set off near the data center.
I don't want to be responsible for a human being coming up in what is essentially a 100% post-truth world.
This is a deliberately cynical perspective along the tiresome ‘evil tech MBA overlord’ trope.
So blame Larry.
But the most effective defense remains the same: critical thinking.
Sadly, it's not very popular.
LLMs are not the messiah, they're not the gateway to AGI, they not even that useful given their limitations. They are a very interesting data point on the path to the next data point. The idea that there will be some mass regression due to "AI" is ridiculous. It will only benefit humanity because humanity will learn to harness it for its benefit. (What humans do to other humans with technology is another matter.) Your ancestors made the same specious claims about the horseless carriage, TV, the pill, and countless other creations.
The future is unknowable but there is no reason to think the next generation won't be better of than the current generation, just like it's been for many centuries (modulo various wars and disasters).
You nearly said the same thing I did. Are you just looking for confrontation? Like, what are you trying to get at here? Is Sam Altman himself your personal Lord and Savior and you feel the need to prove it?
These advancements will, from the perspective of adults having kids today, make things harder for their children. Just like it is for us now, which is why our parents think computers are hard to understand and also why they think home ownership is just as attainable for today's young adults as it was for them. But our children won't really mind, or even notice these difficulties as they will be very normal to them.
Our ancestors were right. For them.
Anyway, AI and LLMs will be primarily used to control and manipulate people. But that's not a new concept, it's just going to be more efficient.
(You might not want kids for some other reason, like free time, don't like kids, etc, but if you would otherwise have kids except for the dangers in the world, I'd say rethink your risk tolerance)
Altman's not the only example - our reluctance to tackle things like gun violence in the US or climate change are others - but he and his ilk are a prominent example.
I hear lots of handwringing about all of these, but I've yet to hear workable solutions that don't have significant downsides and/or involve the use of force to stop those that disagree.
This latest one isn’t going anywhere, and humanity will almost certainly find a way to make it ‘work out’.
Also, I’d argue that rock has caused suffering. It’s indirectly responsible for the middle-of-the-road (MOR) genre, and directly responsible for Nickleback Smashmouth.
The entire point of life is to reproduce. Every moment in history has technological changes. Your fear is driving you to make poor decisions. Having children is a biologically good decision.
People tend to think the world needs their DNA walkin' around out there after they're dead. They don't think about what the world that the DNA's walkin' around in will be like.
Then again, their kids are going to be just fine.
[0] https://edition.cnn.com/2023/08/01/health/ai-breast-cancer-d...
The entertainment industry is filled with some of the most insufferable people in the world and now we have technology that will change it forever.
Knocking some of the wind out of the egos that fill the LA basin will go a long way to getting out of the creative dulldrum we've had for the past decade.
Good to hear that Europe and the rest of the world is safe then. Phew!
Bezos' comes in and steals one of the biggest entertainment industry players in the country by making him look like a chump.
It's complex, it's "unpredictable", but it is 100% clear that this is absolutely not something this species is actually ready to utilize.
Believing otherwise is sort of naive to the point of being delusional, now.
Also, we weren’t ready one year ago when all this took off, and the sky still hasn’t fallen yet. It was already incredibly powerful even then, and what obvious adverse effects have come about?
it’s probably a net gain in the long run, but it’s going to cause a lot of damage in the process
Potentially, AIs can be better at management than humans, even if no more intelligent, simply because they can communicate faster and remember more data.
It's true, tailor was a viable profession, but even then most people couldn't afford them. Families toiled to make their own clothes just as they did to grow enough food not to starve, or find enough fuel to heat their hearths not to freeze.
But there was also still a slice of the classes that could afford tailored clothes when tailors were ubiquitous. And now with the advent of automation no longer can.
Clothing automation made "tailor" no longer a viable profession for the masses, and it reduced the access to hand-made clothing for some people while dramatically increasing the access to clothing for the rest.
The point here is that both perspectives are right. People's lives WILL be ruined. A lack of confidence in the professional arts means that for some time the amount of quality human-generated animation and art will reduce. We may have already passed the peak - the early internet decades when people just put up their art for all to see for free access, not behind paywalls, but just to show that they can. The same art that all the image generation AI tools were trained on.
Will it have been worth it? I genuinely don't know. I'm 40, and I feel like I'm just at the intersection where I start to think that I fear what I don't understand and I invariably think that the way things worked in my 20s was better than the way things will work in my 60s. And yet, this is what has always happened with humanity.
And while the end result of this technology today may end up ruining the livelyhood of animators, legal assistants, and app developers, in the long run, these breakthroughs will end up providing access to more information, knowledge, and access to all of humanity.
Progress is not linear, and comes with tradeoffs. Some things go away and are not always replaced with something better.
But on a humanity time scale beyond the life of an individual human, the development of LLMs is moving us in the right direction.
We need to not lose sight of the macro issues - clean energy, pollution, climate change. We can figure out how to still have tailors and animators in the future. But if we kill all the sharks, dolphins, and polar bears, they're not coming back.
Take one short statement ("instead of making art, you can make prompts for the model to make arts"). Bury it deep between the four paragraphs of text. Elaborate why the statement is positive or negative. Provide examples from your personal experience. Finish with a conclusion, expressing your own opinion. People don't talk with each other like that, go check Reddit, HN comments, X/Mastodon and figure!
Before advent of GPT, I've seen this particular style of writing only in IELTS essays (where the rules and tasks are, by design, uncanny close to prompting a GPT model) and in r/LinkedinLunatics.