AI isn't unleashing imaginations, it's outsourcing them | Hacker News Reader

AI isn't unleashing imaginations, it's outsourcing them

theguardian.com

25 pointsrntn27 comments

This is the same whine heard from low-end "creative" people since the invention of the player piano, camera, and phonograph. ChatGPT's writing is not very good. Bradley, who is a good novelist, doesn't have to worry yet. ChatGPT is about at the level of most bloggers, political speechwriters, second-tier journalists, and lesser academics. Those used to be good jobs, though.

I can’t tell if you’re saying his position is invalid, or just that he should wait until it’s too late before saying anything about it.

I think he's saying that slop is slop regardless of whether a person or machine made it.

So it’s no problem as long as only the people who make “slop” are complaining, and fortunately AI will only ever be able to make “slop”?

In your mind ChatGPT is about the level of lesser academics? What papers do you think it could get published for example?

>Artificial intelligence doesn’t just incrementally erode the rights of authors and other creators. These technologies are designed to replace creative workers altogether

I doubt I will ever want to read a novel written by AI or watch a movie created by AI.

I agree. If AI gets to the point where it can quickly generate endless amounts of novels, TV shows, movies and whatever, the monetary value of such output quickly approaches zero. I can see people having fun generating their own stories with AI, but not paying for generic stuff done by others. It's not even that different from current situation, where there are way more genuine human content creators than demand. Only few succeed, with AI generated content it's going to be even smaller percentage.

Authenticity will become a selling point itself. People will pay more for TV shows with real actors, just like they pay lots for paintings of famous artists, and very little for printed copies that look just like the original. The interesting question is how something will be certified as "real" so that consumers can verify it.

One problem is that even if it were good, why would I read that one? Countless similar ones just as good could be cranked out. AI generated work is never finished.

Eventually you probably won't have much choice, at least when it comes to new media. Are there any grocery stores near you without self-checkout machines?

Oddly enough, some actually do hold out, like my local Lidl. No idea why, but as I never use them anyway, it doesn't impact me (in fact, having them impacts me, because it invariably means slower regular service).

Of course, there are the chains which are now removing self-scan machines again because the attrition rate (i.e., theft by 'accidentally' not scanning items) exceeded the savings for too long. Dutch variety shop Action did this in a number of their stores.

It might depend on whether you know it has AI in it or not.

So true. like: after creating thousand of media channels, tv, cable, web, streamed, broadcasted... how can be filled with somethin between ads (billions of ads)? ads are the $$, 'contents' are the fill-the-gap, AI (not intelligent, neiter artificial) is the best response now, infinite recicle of our own intelligence, cheaper, easy, at the touch of a button. Pure noise.

This is an opinion piece published to the News section of The Guardian. Interesting.

I don't see any how for-profit AI is a threat to anything but for-profit art.

However, I do know that printing opinion pieces as news is definitely a threat to journalism.

It's an opinion piece posted in the Technology section. Opinion pieces can be part of sections other than the dedicated op/ed section of a newspaper.

Everything about this piece marks it as opinion (most notable the language used), if that's what you're getting at.

Also, noted below the piece:

> This is an edited version of the Australian Society of Authors 2024 Colin Simpson Memorial Keynote lecture, titled ‘Creative Futures: Imagining a place for creativity in a world of artificial intelligence’

I hear what you're saying, but The Guardian does have an opinion section this could have been printed in, but they chose to print it in Tech. The UX in Firefox for me, I could barely tell it was even in the Tech section, because the font is small and only bolded, where the rest of the menu options are in normal style. The News heading, however, is quite large, and has a strong red underline.

I think I was fair to call this out, and the article has been flagged by others.

I checked. Apparently you can find this in the Opinion section of the Australian edition. Makes sense, given that the author of this piece is an Australian novelist.

I really don't like how this looks like regular news, though. Makes me want to write a plugin, using ChatGPT, to show a pop up whenever you're on a news site, the article is classified as an opinion (or is obviously an opinion piece), yet the webpage does not show it as such.

But nonprofit AI threatens both for-profit and nonprofit art.

Sign me up for non-profit AI.

I'm a strong advocate for a united effort to create a training set of the collected works of mankind free to any AI company to use if, for instance, it uses its profits to fund UBI, or some other program to pay us for what they use.

Anything but AGI profits being used to keep score in the Oligarchy Olympics. I agree that is a bridge too far.

"You can use this, except not commercially unless you do such and such" isn't a free license though. Whether it's free matters more than whether it's nonprofit. GNU showed us how software could be for-profit, yet also free.

It sounds like you're advocating a robot tax? https://emerj.com/robot-tax-summary-arguments/

No, no it isn't. AI produces nothing new, and is just aping what it has seen. There is nothing new to be seen, only the echos of humanity tossed back at you.

There's nothing magical about AI, but a forward pass through a transformer is a rather large stochastic computation. During this computation novel results are sometimes produced.

If you'd like an insight of what roughly can happen inside this computation, a short story from Karpathy is not the worst read - http://karpathy.github.io/2021/03/27/forward-pass/

sorry, what part of the article is this reply refuting?

You could be describing a library.

AI is just a stochastic parrot?

just wait.

they are gonna train them on data robots collect. Specifically videos of every day life!

Everything is a remix.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9RYuvPCQUA

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