1dry

Trump and his acute destabilizing actions are the symptoms of the chronic, broad, deep destabilization of our society in the form of differing perceived realities, caused by....the internet and its exploitation by sick, greedy social media founders, investors/owners, and, yes, employees.

Expressing frustration at the pervasive tendency of technologists to look at everything, including art which is a reflection of peoples' subjective realities, with an "at-scale" lens, e.g., "let's collect ALL of it, and categorize it, and develop technologies to mash it all together and vomit out derivative averages with no compelling humanist point of view"

I hope readers will feel our frustration.

updated - thank you commenters for making it clear that my sentiment was not clear

Thank god we are taking care of the “researchers working on things like music classification and generation” ! As long as we can convince ourselves we have a sound analysis of it, no need to support and defend people making actual art right. So much already made, who needs more?

This is not to defend Spotify (death to it), but to state that opening all of this data for even MORE garbage generation is a step in the wrong direction. The right direction would be to heavily legislate around / regulate companies like Spotify to more fairly compensate the musicians who create the works they train their slop generators with.

Yuck. Just to make it easier to train slop machines. The point of art is not to have completionist archives of EVERYthing that’s ever been made! Let it die. Death is the most natural part of life. Art is about the human experience, not “for researchers”.

The point is human connection. Art is a living reflection and record of human experience. Art will persevere- the kinds of folks who prioritize what they like based on popularity were never the supporters artists (contrast with craftspeople trying to make a buck) counted on in the first place. Enjoy your derivative slop - we’ll continue on our imperfect, messy, individual, human artistic lives.

What is wrong with that, especially as it facilitates the creator's being able to earn income from their irreplaceable work?

That's great of you to buy the book as well, major kudos. I would bet most are not as altruistic as you.

Do not traditional libraries and their ebook lending systems, however inconvenient, provide the same service? All one needs to do is be patient until the book you are interested in becomes available. In the meantime, maybe you can check out a different book that is available that you might not have discovered otherwise!

So you optimize text spamming?

> I'm honestly not sure if I'm capable of working in tech anymore at this point and that's doing quite a number of any selfesteem I had.

You know, as Mr. Rogers said, "Not your toys, they're just beside you, but it's you I like" Your value isn't dependent on being able to work in tech or what you have. Go out, grab a coffee, wonder at the autumn leaves, do something nice for someone, see where that leads.

Right, yet we do track all kinds of well-being related metrics, there are happiness indices and the like, yet it seems no one optimizes for them.

I think what's selfish is romanticizing "so many more [hypothetical] lives" while real lives now are smothered for the sake of malignant capitalism. Perhaps the fact the the former takes no self sacrifice makes it an appealing viewpoint.

I disagree wholeheartedly with the sentiment that "traveling the stars" is a worthy goal, even more worthy than stewardship of the paradise we already have. We are living in heaven. We have a wonderful planet that nurtures us yet we continue to sabotage our favorable situation for the sake of growing worthless numbers like GDP, all while some people starve or are forced into lives of misery. And yes, I have read Parable of the {Sower|Talents}, who's primary lesson I take to be, we should prevent that terrible situation in the first place.

Totally agree. I think the issue here though is not with regulation itself, but with corrupting influence that we as constituents allow to infiltrate our regulatory bodies. I'd hope campaign finance would help solve this issue too – harder to pull a " Greg and Co. gave me $x so I'll appoint Greg jr. to this sweet regulatory position where he will inevitably act in his self-interest" kind of thing if the public has full view of Greg and Co.'s campaign contributions in the first place...

It's definitely a political problem more than any other, yes. What would give politicians more incentive to operate this way would be real campaign finance reform. Check out represent.us

Unspoken and underlying the author's entire worldview seems to be, "the more new things, the better," a not uncommon tunnel view in the engineering world. The purpose of regulation, ideally, is to ensure that whatever activity/process is being regulated is worth the cost(s) for the majority of people. Defining those terms and making that decision is precisely the job of regulators, who are ideally accountable to a democratic base. In the worldview where all that matters is "growth," people suffer. Running water is a huge quality of life win for EVERYONE. If you ask most people what would really help make their lives better, it's not gonna be colonizing mars, building tunnels under LA, whatever, it's gonna be access to resources we already have. Healthcare, clean water, clean air...perhaps we should think more about engineering as it can be applied to expanding access, and not so much to "making new things," which most people don't need or care at all about.

That's an interesting idea dogcomplex, I'd be very curious to see the output of that process. Still ... who or what will choose what is too "average-y," what should be replaced with something more clear? Will some larger-scope model be responsible for that? Is there then any way to stop that recursion in an artistic way or does ultimately a human artist need to get involved?

So, what matters?

preach

Well, the author says they keep up on "the latest papers" and whatnot, which leaves me as yet unconvinced of the artistic quality of the future output from these models. We will see.

While I'm still rambling on about this – the author states: “In a strictly mechanical sense, yes, an artist can still create, knowing that the art could be done faster and better by AI.” The art cannot necessarily be done better by an AI, and the speed with which art is created does not matter, artistically.

Every one of the MidJourney images featured in this article is obviously derived from averaging. The model is trained to correlate the average look of this or that with whatever keywords. For example, the "artist at work" – okay from afar with no real examination/consideration, it looks like something, kind of. As soon as you actually begin to look at it, it becomes glaringly uninspired. Hmm, what's he working on there...is that a hand? what even is going on in front of the artist? How about the front and center desk – nothing is actually definitive, I can't recognize a single thing on that desk! Etc etc, and similar observations can be made about all of the other images.

Not that art should necessarily be a clear depiction of real things, far from that. Good art (read: art I feel a connection with and inspired by) is the presentation of a SUBJECTIVE POINT OF VIEW. In these images, all I see is the averaging of many points of view (the actual artworks the model was trained on, I presume), resulting in no point of view at all.

This technology will take jobs like designing 3-star hotel lobby wallpaper, not the places of human artists. Without a human point of view, "art" like this is flavorless jello.