Comment by soulofmischief | Hacker News Reader

Comment by soulofmischief | Hacker News Reader

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Regarding crypto, IC[0] for example is an incredible experiment to make decentralized cloud compute viable, using WASM runtimes. Lots of neat crypto projects like this. People forget the whole point was decentralization and trustless systems. While the grifters settled on centralized systems and gaslighting users, real crypto projects continue to explore the possibilities of decentralization.

With AI, I don't even know where to start. Have you used the internet recently? We have multimodal transformer models which can input and output images, video and text. We can create music and images using diffusion techniques. We have world-class text generation systems, which of course still need a lot of infrastructural support, but the viability is already being proven. We have cutting-edge translation tools which blow anything previous out the water. We have code generation and introspection tools, which work well enough to majorly augment my engineering workflow. We are developing ways to "speak" with your data, turning natural language into advance query, analysis and synthesis tasks. We have neural radiance fields. Lip syncing and voice translation tech to automate localization in powerful new ways.

And we have open models! Anyone can dive in, fine-tune a model and get viable results today. We can already start creating new pipelines today, so that we aren't wasting our time doing that once models get better at not hallucinating. The individuals and organizations who wait for this new technology to be perfectly reliable will get left in the dust by those who took the chance and did the pioneering work.

This is still barely scratching the surface. It seems like there's at least one ground-breaking paper a month, often more than that. It's certainly easier to bash these technologies and communities from afar, but that attitude will only hinder you in the future once the tech has caught up. What we have already created through experimentation just since 2015 is stuff that I grew up reading about in science fiction.

Could we hit an AI winter instead? Will decentralization ultimately be a dead end? Maybe. But it would be considerate to not bash those who are spending time and money to find out, and to not let grifters whom they cannot control co-opt the space and the narrative around it.

[0] https://internetcomputer.org/

>Experience full stack decentralization: from DAOs and crypto cloud services to games, NFTs, and social media, the Internet Computer has something for everyone.

hysterical. exact same shit as always, folks

Would you mind elaborating your criticism into a substantial argument?

You're the one copying and pasting 10 year old pitches.

I can't meaningfully engage with substanceless arguments, and I'm not interested in exchanging snarky pot-shots that don't actually address anything being said.

Image generation with stable diffusion was useless, most of the time it makes images that don't even make any sense, like driving a car and driver is sitting in air outside of the car.

Music generation is just mangled music from some popular band with custom lyrics, how can you think that you are creating something here?

> most of the time it makes images that don't even make any sense

This is good enough for 90% of image use cases, which is mildly relevant filler between and next to text.

You can have that opinion. But for a creative person, any tool can be viable, and constraints often aid the creative decision-making process. Many artists are making use of these tools already across many mediums in order to create new sounds, imagery, 3d models from text, all sorts of things, and the people consuming it consciously are enjoying it.

If an artist enjoys using a tool to make something, and their patron enjoys the creative output, do you or I have any right to judge or admonish their process? Visionaries see what is possible, they don't spend their time critiquing things that aren't perfect and instead recognize and engage with novel, paradigm-shifting tools. I understand not wanting to interact with low-effort VC-driven bullshit, but there's a lot of amazing work being done in the open by scientists and enthusiasts.

The endgame, after these tools are developed and ironed out, will be a wealth of highly creative content like we've never experienced. We can shit on these tools or grab a shovel and try to improve them, which is what a huge community of people is doing right now despite the criticism.

The vast majority of artists hate generative models with a passion. Many have stopped publicly sharing their work because they feel violated by their work being used to train them

[Citation Needed]

It is my understanding that artists up in arms over AI are merely a noisy minority.

Artists who couldn't be chuffed or who like AI and perhaps even use it as a tool are not per capita likely to scream quite as loudly about their positions or try as hard to dominate the narrative.

Reading the headlines 200+ years ago it would have been easy to assume that all weavers hated Jacquard looms, as well. Especially in light of the fuming Luddites that had a tendency to break into shops and smash them up.

But at the end of the day, a person really has to pick a side: Is AI imagery worthless slop or is it a dangerous force that will replace human artists? I'd suggest that anyone legitimately unable to compete against worthless slop must be vastly overestimating the quality of their own work.

According to this survey [1] of 1000 visual artists, 95% believe they should have a say in whether their art is used for training. That much should be obvious. As for hating it with a passion: that's an anecdote from my circle and the discussions I've seen online outside of tech bubbles.

You say it's more efficient but I think if artists were fairly compensated for their work, or at the very least had a say in the process, it would be too expensive or not have good enough output to compete. On top of that, it uses A LOT more energy - which should be enough to exclude it as an option considering the current trajectory of climate change.

Aside from that we need to consider the more philosophical question of whether we want to make creative dream jobs even more impossible to find. Should we degrade the public space even more with an avalanche of "good enough" imagery simply to improve margins for the executive class? Computers have already made every level of developed economies significantly more productive and yet individuals are worse off financially than they were in the 90s. All this pipedream of replacing workers with AI will do is relegate them to manual labour or lock them into some barely-enough universal basic income scheme.

[1] https://www.dacs.org.uk/news-events/artificial-intelligence-...

The anti-compute pro-climate argument is so tiresome and it ignores that compute requirements decay non-linearly over time.

Additionally, as an artist myself I don't really much care what "the majority" of artists I think, I didn't become an artist to follow trends and outsource my own critical thinking. As a software engineer, I have a level of understanding behind these models that far surpasses the average artist. As a technological visionary, I understand where the technology will lead, as well as its inevitability. The cat's out of the bag. So I don't very much value the average uninformed opinion.

> Aside from that we need to consider the more philosophical question of whether we want to make creative dream jobs even more impossible to find

Technological progress always leads to the destruction and creation of jobs. People similarly bashed the loom, the printing press, calculators, computers, the internet, cars, planes, you name it. There's no benefit in being a Luddite. Intelligent and aware engineers and artists are incorporating these tools into their workflows today, or at least staying informed, so that they find themselves still employed in whatever future is ahead of us.

It is a fact that the majority didn't consent to this, not an opinion. The foundation of these tools is, in my opinion, copyright violation. Building a product by transforming a collection of works cannot be fair use by any stretch of the imagination. The artists aren't being compensated because it would cause the business model to collapse.

This isn't ludditism. Ethical ML artistic tools do exist but none of these prompt-based generators fall into that category. None of the tools you mentioned are directly equivalent because they don't depend on a collection of existing work to produce derivatives.

All I will say about the climate is that emissions have to peak next year, and be halved by 2030 to meet the Paris Agreement goal. I have to assume from your casual dismissal that you're not aware of the consequences of missing it.

> Building a product by transforming a collection of works cannot be fair use by any stretch of the imagination.

A) The courts are deciding this now, and B) we already live in a sick reality distorted by the DMCA and we need a major copyright reform.

> I have to assume from your casual dismissal that you're not aware of the consequences of missing it.

You managed to completely ignore what I said about diminishing energy requirements for compute. You're arguing disingenuously and now you're attempting to insult my intelligence instead of focusing on the argument.

It's really telling that this is the typical fashion in which these argument play out. I have no interest in continuing a conversation like this if you can't make good-faith assumptions in your argument as per the Hacker News guidelines.

The reason we hate them is we rarely reveal our true secrets and methods. These stacks of creative building blocks (digital and physical) serve an artist well. Now anyone can be almost as good as a resourceful artist with a little effort.

The reason we love them is the same reason we love art… To create something out of nothing with the resources at hand.

Most artist love and hate, xor love to hate while simultaneously hating to love ai.

> Talking with our data

Beautifully put, thanks for writing my thoughts out.

It's something we'll take for granted one day and wonder how anyone ever got anything done without it.

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