goes in a really interesting direction that i didn't expect. i love hyperreality, i love hyperreality
idk how the popular culture and media will react to 'AI' tech exactly, but i already have to pass on 99.9% of media because its predictable procedural crap wtihout a hint of artistic integrity, and i honestly don't think that will change very much due to these new statistical association algorithms. i will see 'AI' media the same way i see trashy reality TV now, something i wish didn't exist and that i will pay not much attention to (in terms of consumption, not criticism).
Haven't watched the video yet, but I will later. But I don't think AI can make us less human. I think it's more like the structures we have would enable further dehumanization as a result of distancing people from understanding material conditions.
Kinda just a product made under capitalism will in general. Like the camera software developed by people who didn't account for Asian and Black people.
That's their primary point, really. It's about how AI could effectively seem "more human" than humans, basically transferring ableism to vastly more people. We already trust synthetic, ai-generated faces more than real ones sometimes.
Ooof I hadn't even thought about that. I mean with a lot of human interactions playing out on screen, it's already setting expectations of what people should be like. Using AI generation to build on an exclusionary body of work makes that even worse.
Yea. This is my primary conceit with anything AI generated, it reproduces the statistical average response of whatever the prompt is. So that means it also reproduces the statistical average attitudes, unless you get lucky and manage to get it to regurgitate Mao or something.
With most art, you can consciously work against even the base reality people assume. With AI art, that “base assumed reality” is now baked in, completely irremovable, unalterable. You can make comments on it, but you cannot actually change the bedrock itself.
The tech has been around in a serious material sense for... two or three years at best? In the midst of climate change, rampant spread of war globally, COVID aftershocks, fascism breaking out all over Europe and East Asia, the next election just being an absolute shitshow...
AI seems like such a non-issue in the grand scheme of things.
People becoming transvestigators for AI will definitely hurt neurodivergent people. If you're constantly on the lookout for unusual communication (especially a flat affect), you'll end up dismissing disabled people.
This is not a non-issue, but of course, like with all things, the actual issue is entirely social and not because of a bazinga robot uprising.
"Computer Says No" as an excuse to deny people social services on an ostensibly meritocratic basis is a real problem, but it is one that already exists.
And while statistical bias is easy to echo with AI, its black box nature is traitorous. For instance, the UK home office inadvertently began flagging passports from Albania, Greece, Romania and Bulgaria as participants in "sham marriages". This created enormous volumes of extra paperwork for no discernible benefit.
Rather than being racist, you mostly just establish yourself as unreliable.
If and when it starts replacing huge swaths of creative, programming, legal and medical jobs it will very suddenly become an issue.
The enshittification will be bad, but it will also inhibit large scale adoption.
Case in point, the guy who tricked Chevy into selling him a Tahoe for $1.
Or the Dallas Judge who prohibited AI generated brief in the Fifth Circuit on the grounds that they hallucinated cases.
If only jobs like this could reliably be automated. But as someone who works in automation, I can tell you a whole litany of reasons why they aren't going to achieve that any time soon.
If nothing else, these industries simply aren't set up to interface with AI in a functional capacity. So much of a creative career is predicted on who you know that guys like Zach Snyder will never be seriously threatened by an AI director. So much of a physician's job is social rather than analytical that no amount of WebMD wish casting will replace them.
