I don’t count productivity or coding as a net good for what it’s worth. Fun, sure, but it’s truly incredible how the influx of AI hasn’t been used to create a more efficient way to distribute resources irl
Tech bros are a scourge on humanity and I truly wish for nothing but the worst for them
it has practical applications but like 90% of them are not in the fields it is being used in. we could train lumberjack robots and automated mining drones with this shit but that's hard so we just decided to steal art and automate one of the few things almost all humans actually enjoy doing (yes there are people who enjoy cutting wood and mining but at least they're not the majority of humanity)
honestly im not sure if automating labor in general is worth it. something about labor metabolizing human's relationship with nature or something. and i say this as someone who hates work.
it would be great as a way to basically "cover" for disabled people though, allowing us to be a primarily non-automated society that also doesn't have to make decisions about what sick or disabled people to care for (we could care for all of them)
edit: i changed my mind again (though the thing about getting resources to take care of all disabled people is still true ofc), I think automation is good but it needs to be designed by and controlled by the people who enjoy doing the things it's automating.
This way it would function as an extension of people, like IRL qol mods, rather than a replacement, so instead of getting rid of labor which many people actively find fulfillment in, we just remove the parts people don't like doing, and what those parts are would be decided democratically (and in many places not even universally, so what would be considered reasonable to automate would change from place to place etc, allowing people who want to do those things to just move somewhere else to a community that vibes with them more).
The way actual AI art functions now is as an extension of human artists, not a replacement. You can't just wind up the algo and watch it go, not only does it require curation and inpainting and touch ups, but it also requires an artistic vision that can only come from an artist. Without an artist it just churns out bland content, inherently derivative and filled with errors.
My only problem with AI-assisted art is that people who don't have any artistic taste, like managers, think that it's good enough to replace artists. That's not the technology's fault, though.
The way actual AI art functions now is as an extension of human artists, not a replacement. You can't just wind up the algo and watch it go, not only does it require curation and inpainting and touch ups, but it also requires an artistic vision that can only come from an artist. Without an artist it just churns out bland content, inherently derivative and filled with errors.
Yeah except… the latter thing you mentioned is what companies want, because they care more about profit than producing things.
Plus the “always just a recreation of existing cultural perspectives” thing is true too. There isn’t really a way around that in it’s current form. I think any tech nerds who are lefty should have the goal to implement more ways for artists to reinterpret and include their own views in what the AI is creating
I don't see why an AI couldn't be trained on specifically non-Western/counter-cultural/marginalized art. It seems trivial?
The bigger problem I see is that it can never make anything truly new, which is why it's important for artists to keep making new art. I just think that AI, as a tool used carefully by artists to enhance their work or to take shortcuts on repetitive work, is fine.
As you said, companies are happy with AI goop that's "good enough" and do not care about art, but that's not the technologies fault.
EDIT Well wait, no, actually the way the plagiarism machine seeks to reduce all artwork into data points is also kind of bad since there's no mechanism to force these AI companies to actually compensate artists.
Lol I just realized you said exactly what I said with less words, RIP me. Sorry comrade
I don't see why an AI couldn't be trained on specifically non-Western/counter-cultural/marginalized art. It seems trivial?
Sorry, let me clarify. The issue isn’t the art it’s being trained on, but the fact that the artist can’t (currently) input their own personal opinions and thoughts. You can train it on countercultural art, but you can’t, like, specifically depict every aspect of how you personally view that art’s depiction of, say, a cat, so it sort of stays “stuck” on the level of simply depicting the average cat in the art it was trained on. It can’t actually go through the art cycle of interpretation -> reinterpretation -> etc etc on the granular level traditional art can, instead being limited on only doing this on the abstract level of the prompts (which aren’t the end product anyways, so doing reinterpretations of them based on your own opinion is counterintuitive at best and at worst will not result in any sort of reinterpretation in the final product at best).
This is all a way for me to overexplain the fact that it cannot accept granular input based on the user’s subjective experience. This a huge limitation for it and, I would be willing to bet that if we fixed it, it would stop looking as much like art generators and more like how custom music synthesizer creation works or something. The AI would stop being an artist and start being a brush, basically.
it would be great as a way to basically "cover" for disabled people though, allowing us to be a primarily non-automated society that also doesn't have to make decisions about what sick or disabled people to care for (we could care for all of them)
we've always been able to do that, we don't need the power of A.I. to automate even more labor
They need this shit to take off and become a growth industry, they're running out of places to put their money. Blockchain hype is dead and this is the new hotness, so everyone is getting on board and selling their bored apes to invest.
Crypto is back lmao, I think Bitcoin reached all time highs a few months ago
Bitcoin is 'back' but no one will ever buy into it the way they did back in 2020, people understand it works like a stock now. I can see it doubling in the next decade, so maybe a better ROI than the market, but I don't see it, but there is no way we are going to see it going to million like people were talking about back in 2020. I could be wrong about that, but the vibes are not there.
Ironically I am not sure bitcoin ever went anywhere, it's all the bitcoin-likes or whatever that crashed and burned. Remember doge coin? lol
I'm sure alt coins constantly cycle in and out of popularity like unprofitable tech stocks lol
Honestly I think it can and will be a revolutionary technology once certain enabling breakthroughs are made that allow it to interact more meaningfully with other systems without human intervention, and creating learning data sets that work for each use case with as minimal error chance as possible.
As always though, it's capitalism that's the real problem not the technology itself. Under socialism, we could be automating absolutely everything, saving up our labour power to deal with other problems and correcting the AI's occasional mistakes, but under capitalism any use case will only be implemented because it's profitable, and all the labour power saved will be wasted in the standing army of the unemployed working class.
Also under capitalism making sure that the AI is safe is very costly so the few of us that have to be sacrificed will be worth it for them to rack in the profits.
LLMs dont help productivity or coding, all it does is make it easier to generate spam. If anything it hinders productivity as good hours are spent making dumb powerpoints bc some McKinney vampires convinced management to "get out in front of this AI thing"
It's funny how AI's top priority is to do all the creative jobs, but no one seems to be in any rush to replace CEOs with AI. CEOs and shareholders alike are super expensive, why not them?
AI CEOs might actually be better, they might look at the reserve army of labor and calculate "let's put these people to work".
Never ever listen to tech bros on anything even tech. First we got cryptocurrency, then we get rideshare and food delivery economy, now AI.
None of it meaningfully benefits people's lives
my own opinion is that even to the average person it smells, tastes and looks like another crypto-like scam will guarantee it's going to implode on itself pretty soonish
all the scammy companies will get shaken out, hopefully some shitty rules will be put in place protecting artists, a lot of the bad will will blow over once it's out of sight and it will just become another editing tool for small indie game studios and creators.
the key being people better learn to use it in a subtle manner with the ability to edit outputs by hand or else you will get crucified by anyone that smells lazy unfiltered AI bullshit in art
They're already trying to push copyrights and IP on AI. For the regular consumer this will have no meaningful impact.
I can only see AI applications in oppressing workers and surveillance
yeah that's already here in it's infancy. can't wait for some "AI algo" to be analyzing all the surveillance footage at my job in real time, especially since they upgraded to HD resolution, and for it to make judgements about who's working consistently and building metrics that we all know will be skewed and also just evil
the only comfort i have is knowing the sheer amount of compute that will be required by even something like that in just the one store i work at and i doubt anyone in the U.S. is going to build a new massive data center for like every 100 workers
but hearing how "AI" is being deployed in europe to criminalize welfare recipients without question makes me think they won't need the compute after all just an excuse to do the ghoul shit and AI is nothing but a great excuse
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cnbc.com/amp/2023/09/08/employers-using-ai-to-monitor-workers-has-negative-impact-on-employees.html
It's already being used, rumors are going around about surveillance tech development with AI in China (?)
i guess white collar work is easier to monitor so it doesn't surprise me it's first
public facing, physical labor i'm assuming will be a bigger challenge because the AI will have to analyze every second of video recorded. they have rolled out more and more digital hardware supposedly to make our work "easier" but it's just vectors for monitoring us but so far at least the work i do nothing is strapped onto my body quite yet
once the digital tool becomes mandatory and cannot leave your person I assume they can pull all kinds of data from whatever sensors are embedded (like Amazon already does)
Key stroke monitors, I believe that's what they call them. They "measure" the work a person is doing.
we'll have company neighborhoods with company stores and schools, and company hospitals and clinics, etc.
With AI surveillance to monitor us in our daily lives to make sure we are working. If the algorithm determines a necessary downsize then people get kicked out of the company town.
Truly incredible how this ______ bullshit is being forced on everyone despite it doing nothing to meaningfully improve people’s lives
evergreen sentence right here
Any long-winded complaint I have on this website can come down to capitalism bad tbh
Stack Exchange, of which the corporate section is going nuts over AI right now in a bad way, just published a blog article discussing how 15% of AI applications actually make it to the public. In other words, 85% of attempts to make generative AI do anything productive fail so bad they can't be released. We, consumers, are only seeing the top 15% of attempts and those are still so bad.
I don’t count productivity or coding as a net good for what it’s worth
I wouldn't say it's improved this hugely either.
Pretty sure the last invention to meaningfully improve peoples life was like the washing machine or penicillin
Looks like in the last year AI means "ChatGPT". Which, for me, is just a bit better spell checker and search engine.
People are surprised that they can "communicate" with it, but it is not something that will change the world.
On the other hand Machine Learning and AI are being used all the time and are making jobs more efficient. Examples are computer vision for sorting apples, or machine learning for detecting frauds, counting anything on the drone or satellite images, detecting fires, finding ships illegally hunting wales.
Every industry is using it more and more and is making peoples jobs better, it is not replacing people, but it is doing something we couldn't do before. Example plant count in agriculture, no one was doing it before, but is easy now and helping everyone involved from farmers to sales and helps in optimisation.
All this happens because of hardware improvement, nothing else.
a bit better spell checker and search engine.
it's like a search engine except it completely makes up nonsense instead of showing you real things
and it came about just after real search engines stopped getting better and started getting worse lol. a real search engine, indexing solely content created by humans, is leagues better than a vibes based search engine that is often feeding on the outputs of other automation and "AI" systems.
So far in the workplace I've mostly heard of it making things worse not better too but I'm sure some people are liking it. Whenever someone I work with breaks out chatgpt they end up with something they don't understand but sounds good on first blush, often revealing deeper flaws only later.
But, if you count non-LLM/GPT machine learning then fine, that stuff has found useful applications, though some of it is more flawed than anyone would like to admit, and I do not think it should be solely trusted to do a lot of important tasks (screening resumes, detecting fraud/plagiarism, etc.) without at least having a lot of failsafes and human oversight where needed.
Just by some of these comments, I can honestly see AI being where I split with leftists. Because I could truly give less of a fuck “if it’s here to say whether like it or not” when it seems like most critics/contrarians are purposefully missing the point. It’s just going to further atomize people and that should be enough to oppose it at all costs
We’re seeing the results of what happens when you carefully construct a surveillance state and consequently make revolution a near impossibility. All the AI in the world isn’t going to improve broken infrastructure, inequality, environmental degradation or bigotry so I’m cheering so hard for nature to win out at this point.
Doomerism is honestly the only option lmao
