Any work made to convey a concept and/or emotion can be art. I’d throw in “intent”, having “deeper meaning”, and the context of its creation to distinguish between an accounting spreadsheet and art.
The problem with AI “art” is it’s produced by something that isn’t sentient and is incapable of original thought. AI doesn’t understand intent, context, emotion, or even the most basic concepts behind the prompt or the end result. Its “art” is merely a mashup of ideas stolen from countless works of actual, original art run through an esoteric logic network.
AI can serve as a tool to create art of course, but the further removed from the process a human is the less the end result can truly be considered “art”.
As a thought experiment let’s say an artist takes a photo of a sunset. Then the artist uses AI to generate a sunset and AI happens to generate the exact same photo. The artist then releases one of the two images with the title “this may or may not be made by AI”. Is the released image art or not?
If you say the image isn’t art, what if it’s revealed that it’s the photo the artist took? Does is magically turn into art because it’s not made by AI? If not does it mean when people “make art” it’s not art?
If you say the image is art, what if it’s revealed it’s made by AI? Does it magically stop being art or does it become less artistic after the fact? Where does value go?
The way I see it is that you’re trying to gatekeep art by arbitrarily claiming AI art isn’t real art. I think since we’re the ones assigning a meaning to art, how it is created doesn’t matter. After all if you’re the artist taking the photo isn’t the original art piece just the natural occurrence of the sun setting. Nobody created it, there is no artistic intention there, it simply exists and we consider it art.
there’s something’s highly suspect about someone not understanding the difference between art made by a human being and some output spit out by a dumb pixel mixer. huge red flag imo.
and yes, the value does go. because we care about origin and intent. that’s the whole point.
if the original Mona Lisa were to be sold for millions of dollars, and then someone reveals that it was not the original Mona Lisa but a replica made last week by some dude… do you think the buyer would just go “eh it looks close enough”? no they would sue the fuck out of the seller and guess what, the painting would not be worth millions anymore. it’s the same painting. the value is changed. ART IS NOT A PRODUCT.
there’s something’s highly suspect about someone not understanding the difference between art made by a human being and some output spit out by a dumb pixel mixer. huge red flag imo.
Translation. I can’t argue your point so I’m going to try characters assassination.
if the original Mona Lisa were to be sold for millions of dollars, and then someone reveals that it was not the original Mona Lisa but a replica made last week by some dude… do you think the buyer would just go “eh it looks close enough”? no they would sue the fuck out of the seller and guess what, the painting would not be worth millions anymore. it’s the same painting. the value is changed. ART IS NOT A PRODUCT.
Pretty ironic to say art is not a product and then argue that its monetary value would decrease, which can happen only if you treat art as a product.
Imagine if instead of a physical painting Mona Lisa was a digital file and free on the internet, would people think Mona Lisa is less impressive as an art piece because anyone could own it? I think it’s artistic value wouldn’t decrease, only its value as a product would decrease because everyone could get it for free.
it’s not a product in the sense that its value does not come from its function, otherwise it would not lose value when it would be revealed to be of a different origin, but otherwise exactly the same. i spoke of the monetary value just because it’s quantifiable; it’s not otherwise relevant.
if Mona Lisa was free and digital it would be as valuable as a digital Mona Lisa could be. being free and digital doesn’t make it pointless, without agency or intent like AI art is.
It seems like you’re agreeing with me on the reasoning why AI art is art, you just refuse to accept AI as art. So let’s try a different way. Who says art has agemcy or intent? Clearly it’s not just “everything made by humans” because if I showed you the toilet paper I used to wipe my ass we can both agree that it’s not art. Neither is the comment I’m writing right now. So there needs to be something more that separates not art and art. The two most common ways would be the intent of the artist and the perceived intent of the viewer.
If it’s what the artist intended the am artist can prompt AI until AI generates the image the artist intended. Since the artist intended the AI generated image to look that way the intent is inherited from the artist.
If it’s what the viewer perceived we can reach the original question I postulated. If an image makes you feel something and you can’t know if it’s made by the artist or by AI, how do you know it’s art or not? If we take by whether you perceive intent of not then you’re attributing intent to art and it doesn’t matter how it was made. If you feel something and after the fact you find out it was AI generated image then it doesn’t invalidate what you felt.
You can come up with whomever to validate intent or agency and I’ll show you how AI wouldn’t play a role in that decision because AI isn’t sentient. It’s a tool like a camera or a paint brush or just chalk. We give the intent by using the tools we have.
Pollock’s paintings are art. a bunch of paint buckets falling on a canvas in an earthquake wouldn’t make art, even if it resembled Pollock’s paintings. there’s no intent behind it. no artist.
AI is a tool used by a human. The human using the tools has an intention, wants to create something with it.
It’s exactly the same as painting digital art. But instead o moving the mouse around, or copying other images into a collage, you use the AI tool, which can be pretty complex to use to create something beautiful.
Do you know what generative art is? It existed before AI. Surely with your gatekeeping you think that’s also no art.
I’m so sick of this. there are scenarios in which so-called “AI” can be used as a tool. for example, resampling. it’s dodgy, but whatever, let’s say the tech is perfected and it truly analyzes data to give a good result rather than stealing other art to match.
but a tool is something that does exactly what you intend for it to do. you can’t say 100 dice are collectively “a tool that outputs 600” because you can sit there and roll them for as long as it takes for all of them to turn up sixes, technically. and if you do call it that, that’s still a shitty tool, and you did nothing worth crediting to get 600. a robot can do it. and it does. and that makes it not art.
So do you not what generative art is. And you pretend to stablish catedra on art.
Generative art, that existed before even computers, is s form of art in which a algorithm created a form of art, and that algorithm can be repeated easily. Humans can replicate that algorithm, but computers can too, and generative art is mostly used with computers because obvious reasons. Those generative algorithms can be deterministic or non deterministic.
And all this before AI, way before.
AI on its essence is just a really complex and large generative algorithm, that some people do not understand and this are afraid of it, like people used to be afraid of eclipses.
Also, you seems not to know that photographs also take hundreds or thousands of pictures with just pressing a button and just select the good ones.
cameras do not make random images. you know exactly what you’re getting with a photograph. the reason you take multiples is mostly for timing and lighting. also, rolling a hundred dice is not the same as painting something 100 times and picking the best one, nor is it like photographing it. the fact that you’re even making this comparison is insane.
If you know how to use an AI you also know how it’s working and what are you going to get, is not random. It’s a complex generative algorithm where you put in the initial variables, nothing more.
the AI itself doesn’t know what it’s doing, neither are you. the fact that you’re putting in words to change the outcome until the dice fall somewhat close to where you want them to fall doesn’t make it yours. you can’t add your own style to it, because you’re not doing it.
Please, do not extend your lack of knowledge to me. Thanks.
Also, most traditional artists never develop a style of their own. If you believe that every single artist has its own unique style… You’d be much incorrect. That does not make it less of an artist.
I remember back in the day when lots of people followed the Bob Ross style to do some nice paintings. Luckily you are here to gatekeep them from doing art.
People said exact same thing about CGI, and photography before. I wouldn’t be surprised if somebody scream “IT’S NOT ART” at Michaelangelo or people carving walls of temples in ancient Egypt.
the “people” you’re talking about were talking about tools. I’m talking about intent. Just because you compare two arguments that use similar words doesn’t mean the arguments are similar.
Intent is not needed for the art, else all the art in history where we can’t say what author wanted to express or the ones misunderstood wouldn’t be considered art. Art is in the eye of the beholder. Note that one of the first regulations of AI art that is always proposed is that AI art be clearly labeled as such, because whomever propose it do know the above.
I get you but it’s really not necessary. In case of (somewhat) realist art you can still recognize AI artifacts, but abstract art is already unrecognizable (and this is the precise reason they want AI art to be marked, so they won’t embarrass themselves with peans over something churned out by computer in few seconds), not to mention there is also art created by animals, and it is considered art but it’s not created with intent, except maybe the intent of people dipping dog’s paw in paint. Thus we again just get to the distinction that art needs to be created just by living things? It’s meaningless.
Anyway, i guess next few years will make this even more muddled and the art scene will get transformed permanently. Hell recently i’ve encountered some AI power metal music which is basically completely indistinguishable from normal, but in this case it mostly serve to show how uninspired and generic entire genre is.
Technology is a cultural creation, not a magic box outside of its circumstances. “The problem isn’t the technology, it’s the creators, users, and perpetuators” is tautological.
And, importantly, the purpose of a system is what it does.
So you’re using a different specific and niche technology (which directly benefits and exists because of) the technology that is the subject of critique, and acting like the subject technology behaves like yours?
“Google is doing a bad with z”
“z can’t be bad, I use y and it doesn’t have those problems that are already things that happened. In the past. Unchangeable by future actions.”
No one wants to ban technology outright. What we’re saying is that the big LLMs are actively harmful to us, humanity. This is not fear mongering. This is just what’s happening. OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, and Meta are stealing from humanity at large and setting the planet on fire to do it. For years they told us stealing intellectual property on an individual level was a harmful form of theft. Now they’re doing the same kind of theft bit its different now because it benefits them instead of us.
What we are arguing is that this is bad. Its especially extra bad because with the death of big search a piece of critical infrastructure to the internet as we know it is now just simply broken. The open source wonks you celebrate are working on fixing this. But just because someone criticizes big tech does not mean they criticize all tech. The truth is the FAANG companies plus OpenAI and Microsoft are killing our planet for it to only benefit their biggest shareholders
I did not believe in Intelectual Property before. I’m not going to start believing now.
The same I think that corporations having a hold on media is bad for humandkind I think that small artists should not have a "not usable by AI"hold on what they post. Sharing knowledge is good for humanity. Limitate who can have access or how they can use that knowledge or culture is bad.
The dead of internet have nothing to do with AI and all to do with leaving internet in hands of a couple big corporations.
As for emissions… are insignificant relative to other sources of CO2 emissions. Do you happen to eat meat, travel abroad for tourism, watch sports, take you car to work, buy products made overseas? Those are much bigger sources of CO2.
You dont think polluting the world is going to have a net negative effect for humanity?
What exactly is there to gain with AI anyways? What’s the great benefit to us as a species? So far its just been used to trivialize multiple artistic disciplines, basic service industries, and programming.
Things have a cost, many people are doing the cost-benefit analysis and seeing there is none for them. Seems most of the incentive to develop this software is if you would like to stop paying people who do the jobs listed above.
What do we get out of burning the planet to the ground? And even if you find an AI thats barely burning it, what’s the point in the first place?
What exactly is there to gain with AI anyways? What’s the great benefit to us as a species? So far its just been used to trivialize multiple artistic disciplines, basic service industries, and programming.
The whole point is that much like industrial automation it reduces the number of hours people need to work. If this leads to people starving then that’s a problem with the economic system, not with AI technology. You’re blaming the wrong field here. In fact everyone here blaming AI/ML and not the capitalists is being a Luddite.
It’s also entirely possible it will start replacing managers and capitalists as well. It’s been theorized by some anti-capitalists and economic reformists that ML/AI and computer algorithms could one day replace current economic systems and institutions.
Things have a cost, many people are doing the cost-benefit analysis and seeing there is none for them. Seems most of the incentive to develop this software is if you would like to stop paying people who do the jobs listed above.
This sadly is probably true of large companies producing big, inefficient ML models as they can afford the server capacity to do so. It’s not true of people tweaking smaller ML models at home, or professors in universities using them for data analysis or to aid their teaching. Much like some programmers are getting fired because of ML, others are using it to increase their productivity or to help them learn more about programming. I’ve seen scientists who otherwise would struggle with data analysis related programming use ChatGPT to help them write code to analyse data.
What do we get out of burning the planet to the ground? And even if you find an AI thats barely burning it, what’s the point in the first place?
As the other guy said there are lots of other things using way more energy and fossil fuels than ML. Machine learning is used in sciences to analyse things like the impacts of climate change. It’s useful enough in data science alone to outweigh the negative impacts. You would know about this if you ever took a modern data science module. Furthermore being that data centres primarily use electricity it’s relatively easy to move them to green sources of energy compared to say farming, or transport. In fact some data centres already use green energy primarily. Data centres will always exist regardless of AI and ML anyway, it’s just a matter of scale.
No. I’m just not fear mongering things I do not understand.
Neither am I. When you’re defending whatabputism, it’s best you at least try to represent the arguments of the person you’re arguing with accurately.
False equivalence is a classic. Biotechnology is not a technology, for example, it’s billions of technologies informed, designed, and implemented, by humans, technology is a cultural feature.
Technology as this thing free from the ethics of its use is tech bro ancap cope to justify technological pursuits with empty ethical value. You can think “banning human progress in any way” is evil. But that would make you wildly uncritical of your own beliefs.
Feel free to take your arguments back to e/acc, where that level of convenience induced niavety is considered rhetorically valid.
Technology is a product of science. The facts science seeks to uncover are fundamental universal truths that aren’t subject to human folly. Only how we use that knowledge is subject to human folly. I don’t think open source or open weights models are a bad usage of that knowledge. Some of the things corporations do are bad or exploitative uses of that knowledge.
You should really try and consider what it means for technology to be a cultural feature. Think, genuinely and critically, about what it means when someone tells you that you shouldn’t judge the ethics and values of their pursuits, because they are simply discovering “universal truths”.
And then, really make sure you ponder what it means when people say the purpose of a system is what it does. Why that might get brought up in discussions about wanton resource spending for venture capitalist hype.
That’s not at all what I am doing, or what scientists and engineers do. We are all trained to think about ethics and seek ethical approval because even if knowledge itself is morally neutral the methods to obtain that knowledge can be truly unhinged.
Scientific facts are not a cultural facet. A device built using scientific knowledge is also a product of the culture that built it. Technology stands between objective science and subjective needs and culture. Technology generally serves some form of purpose.
Here is an example: Heavier than air flight is a possibility because of the laws of physics. A Boeing 737 is a specific product of both those laws of physics and of USA culture. It’s purpose is to get people and things to places, and to make Boeing the company money.
LLMs can be used for good and ill. People have argued they use too much energy for what they do. I would say that depends on where you get your energy from. Ultimately though it doesn’t use as much as people driving cars or mining bitcoin or eating meat. You should be going after those first if you want to persecute people for using energy.
It does not appear to me that you have even humored my request. I’m actually not even confident you read my comment given your response doesn’t actually respond to it. I hope you will.
Think, genuinely and critically, about what it means when someone tells you that you shouldn’t judge the ethics and values of their pursuits, because they are simply discovering “universal truths”.
No scientist or engineer as ever said that as far as I can recall. I was explaining that even for scientific fact which is morally neutral how you get there is important, and that scientists and engineers acknowledge this. What you are asking me to do this based on a false premise and a bad understanding of how science works.
And then, really make sure you ponder what it means when people say the purpose of a system is what it does.
It both is and isn’t. Things often have consequences alongside their intended function, like how a machine gets warm when in use. It getting warm isn’t a deliberate feature, it’s a consequence of the laws of thermodynamics. We actually try to minimise this as it wastes energy. Even things like fossil fuels aren’t intended to ruin the planet, it’s a side effect of how they work.
It’s a very common talking point now to claim technology exists independent of the culture surrounding it. It is a lie to justify morally vacant research which the, normally venture capitalist, is only concerned about the money to be made. But engineers and scientists necessarily go along with it. It’s not not your problem because we are the ones executing cultural wants, we are a part of the broader culture as well.
The purpose of a system is, absolutely, what it does. It doesn’t matter how well intentioned your design and ethics were, once the system is doing things, those things are its purpose. Your waste heat example, yes, it was the design intent to eliminate that, but now that’s what it does, and the engineers damn well understand that its purpose is to generate waste heat in order to do whatever work it’s doing.
This is a systems engineering concept. And it’s inescapable.
The purpose of a system is, absolutely, what it does. It doesn’t matter how well intentioned your design and ethics were, once the system is doing things, those things are its purpose. Your waste heat example, yes, it was the design intent to eliminate that, but now that’s what it does, and the engineers damn well understand that its purpose is to generate waste heat in order to do whatever work it’s doing.
Huh? Then why is so much money spent on computers to minimize energy usage and heat production? This is perhaps the biggest load of bullshit I think I have heard in a long time. Maybe there is some concept similar to this, but if so you clearly haven’t articulated it well.
Anyway I think I am done talking about this with you. You are here to fear-monger over technology you probably don’t even use or understand, and I am sick of lemmings doing it.
This has been going on since big oil popularized the “carbon footprint”. They want us arguing with each other about how useful crypto/AI/whatever are instead of agreeing about pigouvian energy taxes and socialized control of the (already monopolized) grid.
So the problem isn’t the technology. The problem is unethical big corporations.
Same as it ever was…
And the days go by!
depends. for “AI” “art” the problem is both terms are lies. there is no intelligence and there is no art.
Define art.
Any work made to convey a concept and/or emotion can be art. I’d throw in “intent”, having “deeper meaning”, and the context of its creation to distinguish between an accounting spreadsheet and art.
The problem with AI “art” is it’s produced by something that isn’t sentient and is incapable of original thought. AI doesn’t understand intent, context, emotion, or even the most basic concepts behind the prompt or the end result. Its “art” is merely a mashup of ideas stolen from countless works of actual, original art run through an esoteric logic network.
AI can serve as a tool to create art of course, but the further removed from the process a human is the less the end result can truly be considered “art”.
Well said!
As a thought experiment let’s say an artist takes a photo of a sunset. Then the artist uses AI to generate a sunset and AI happens to generate the exact same photo. The artist then releases one of the two images with the title “this may or may not be made by AI”. Is the released image art or not?
If you say the image isn’t art, what if it’s revealed that it’s the photo the artist took? Does is magically turn into art because it’s not made by AI? If not does it mean when people “make art” it’s not art?
If you say the image is art, what if it’s revealed it’s made by AI? Does it magically stop being art or does it become less artistic after the fact? Where does value go?
The way I see it is that you’re trying to gatekeep art by arbitrarily claiming AI art isn’t real art. I think since we’re the ones assigning a meaning to art, how it is created doesn’t matter. After all if you’re the artist taking the photo isn’t the original art piece just the natural occurrence of the sun setting. Nobody created it, there is no artistic intention there, it simply exists and we consider it art.
there’s something’s highly suspect about someone not understanding the difference between art made by a human being and some output spit out by a dumb pixel mixer. huge red flag imo.
and yes, the value does go. because we care about origin and intent. that’s the whole point.
if the original Mona Lisa were to be sold for millions of dollars, and then someone reveals that it was not the original Mona Lisa but a replica made last week by some dude… do you think the buyer would just go “eh it looks close enough”? no they would sue the fuck out of the seller and guess what, the painting would not be worth millions anymore. it’s the same painting. the value is changed. ART IS NOT A PRODUCT.
Translation. I can’t argue your point so I’m going to try characters assassination.
Pretty ironic to say art is not a product and then argue that its monetary value would decrease, which can happen only if you treat art as a product.
Imagine if instead of a physical painting Mona Lisa was a digital file and free on the internet, would people think Mona Lisa is less impressive as an art piece because anyone could own it? I think it’s artistic value wouldn’t decrease, only its value as a product would decrease because everyone could get it for free.
it’s not a product in the sense that its value does not come from its function, otherwise it would not lose value when it would be revealed to be of a different origin, but otherwise exactly the same. i spoke of the monetary value just because it’s quantifiable; it’s not otherwise relevant.
if Mona Lisa was free and digital it would be as valuable as a digital Mona Lisa could be. being free and digital doesn’t make it pointless, without agency or intent like AI art is.
It seems like you’re agreeing with me on the reasoning why AI art is art, you just refuse to accept AI as art. So let’s try a different way. Who says art has agemcy or intent? Clearly it’s not just “everything made by humans” because if I showed you the toilet paper I used to wipe my ass we can both agree that it’s not art. Neither is the comment I’m writing right now. So there needs to be something more that separates not art and art. The two most common ways would be the intent of the artist and the perceived intent of the viewer.
If it’s what the artist intended the am artist can prompt AI until AI generates the image the artist intended. Since the artist intended the AI generated image to look that way the intent is inherited from the artist.
If it’s what the viewer perceived we can reach the original question I postulated. If an image makes you feel something and you can’t know if it’s made by the artist or by AI, how do you know it’s art or not? If we take by whether you perceive intent of not then you’re attributing intent to art and it doesn’t matter how it was made. If you feel something and after the fact you find out it was AI generated image then it doesn’t invalidate what you felt.
You can come up with whomever to validate intent or agency and I’ll show you how AI wouldn’t play a role in that decision because AI isn’t sentient. It’s a tool like a camera or a paint brush or just chalk. We give the intent by using the tools we have.
That’s like saying photoshop doesn’t understand the context and the meaning of art.
“Only physically painted art is art”.
Using AI to achieve an concrete piece of art can be pretty complex and surely the artist can create something with an intended meaning with it.
i won’t, but art has intent. AI doesn’t.
Pollock’s paintings are art. a bunch of paint buckets falling on a canvas in an earthquake wouldn’t make art, even if it resembled Pollock’s paintings. there’s no intent behind it. no artist.
The intent comes from the person who writes the prompt and selects/refines the most fitting image it makes
that’s like me intending for it to rain and when it eventually would, claiming i made it rain because i intended for it.
How can you tell if an entity has intent or not?
comes with having a brain and knowing what intent means.
Yes, but where do you draw a line in AI of having an intent. Surely AGI has intent but you say current AIs do not.
yes because there is no intelligence. AI is a misnomer. intent needs intelligence.
How can you tell there is no intelligence? If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck and quacks like a duck, why is it not a duck?
AI is a tool used by a human. The human using the tools has an intention, wants to create something with it.
It’s exactly the same as painting digital art. But instead o moving the mouse around, or copying other images into a collage, you use the AI tool, which can be pretty complex to use to create something beautiful.
Do you know what generative art is? It existed before AI. Surely with your gatekeeping you think that’s also no art.
I’m so sick of this. there are scenarios in which so-called “AI” can be used as a tool. for example, resampling. it’s dodgy, but whatever, let’s say the tech is perfected and it truly analyzes data to give a good result rather than stealing other art to match.
but a tool is something that does exactly what you intend for it to do. you can’t say 100 dice are collectively “a tool that outputs 600” because you can sit there and roll them for as long as it takes for all of them to turn up sixes, technically. and if you do call it that, that’s still a shitty tool, and you did nothing worth crediting to get 600. a robot can do it. and it does. and that makes it not art.
So do you not what generative art is. And you pretend to stablish catedra on art.
Generative art, that existed before even computers, is s form of art in which a algorithm created a form of art, and that algorithm can be repeated easily. Humans can replicate that algorithm, but computers can too, and generative art is mostly used with computers because obvious reasons. Those generative algorithms can be deterministic or non deterministic.
And all this before AI, way before.
AI on its essence is just a really complex and large generative algorithm, that some people do not understand and this are afraid of it, like people used to be afraid of eclipses.
Also, you seems not to know that photographs also take hundreds or thousands of pictures with just pressing a button and just select the good ones.
cameras do not make random images. you know exactly what you’re getting with a photograph. the reason you take multiples is mostly for timing and lighting. also, rolling a hundred dice is not the same as painting something 100 times and picking the best one, nor is it like photographing it. the fact that you’re even making this comparison is insane.
If you know how to use an AI you also know how it’s working and what are you going to get, is not random. It’s a complex generative algorithm where you put in the initial variables, nothing more.
the AI itself doesn’t know what it’s doing, neither are you. the fact that you’re putting in words to change the outcome until the dice fall somewhat close to where you want them to fall doesn’t make it yours. you can’t add your own style to it, because you’re not doing it.
Please, do not extend your lack of knowledge to me. Thanks.
Also, most traditional artists never develop a style of their own. If you believe that every single artist has its own unique style… You’d be much incorrect. That does not make it less of an artist.
I remember back in the day when lots of people followed the Bob Ross style to do some nice paintings. Luckily you are here to gatekeep them from doing art.
People said exact same thing about CGI, and photography before. I wouldn’t be surprised if somebody scream “IT’S NOT ART” at Michaelangelo or people carving walls of temples in ancient Egypt.
the “people” you’re talking about were talking about tools. I’m talking about intent. Just because you compare two arguments that use similar words doesn’t mean the arguments are similar.
Intent is not needed for the art, else all the art in history where we can’t say what author wanted to express or the ones misunderstood wouldn’t be considered art. Art is in the eye of the beholder. Note that one of the first regulations of AI art that is always proposed is that AI art be clearly labeled as such, because whomever propose it do know the above.
i didn’t say knowing the intent is needed. i believe in death of the author, so that isn’t relevant.
the intent to create art is, however, needed. the fountain is art, but before it became the fountain, the urinal itself wasn’t.
I get you but it’s really not necessary. In case of (somewhat) realist art you can still recognize AI artifacts, but abstract art is already unrecognizable (and this is the precise reason they want AI art to be marked, so they won’t embarrass themselves with peans over something churned out by computer in few seconds), not to mention there is also art created by animals, and it is considered art but it’s not created with intent, except maybe the intent of people dipping dog’s paw in paint. Thus we again just get to the distinction that art needs to be created just by living things? It’s meaningless.
Anyway, i guess next few years will make this even more muddled and the art scene will get transformed permanently. Hell recently i’ve encountered some AI power metal music which is basically completely indistinguishable from normal, but in this case it mostly serve to show how uninspired and generic entire genre is.
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Technology is a cultural creation, not a magic box outside of its circumstances. “The problem isn’t the technology, it’s the creators, users, and perpetuators” is tautological.
And, importantly, the purpose of a system is what it does.
But not al users of AI are malignant or causing environment damage.
Saying the contrary would be a bad generalization.
I have LLM models running on a n100 chip that have less consumption that the lemmy servers we are writing on right now.
So you’re using a different specific and niche technology (which directly benefits and exists because of) the technology that is the subject of critique, and acting like the subject technology behaves like yours?
“Google is doing a bad with z”
“z can’t be bad, I use y and it doesn’t have those problems that are already things that happened. In the past. Unchangeable by future actions.”
??
No. I’m just not fear mongering things I do not understand.
Technology is technology. Most famously nuclear technology can be used both for bombs or giving people the basic need that electricity is.
Rockets can be used as weapons or to deliver spacecraft and do science in space.
Biotechnology can be used both to create and to cure diseases.
A technology is just an applied form of human knowledge. Wanting to ban human progress in any way is the true evilness from my point of view.
No one wants to ban technology outright. What we’re saying is that the big LLMs are actively harmful to us, humanity. This is not fear mongering. This is just what’s happening. OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, and Meta are stealing from humanity at large and setting the planet on fire to do it. For years they told us stealing intellectual property on an individual level was a harmful form of theft. Now they’re doing the same kind of theft bit its different now because it benefits them instead of us.
What we are arguing is that this is bad. Its especially extra bad because with the death of big search a piece of critical infrastructure to the internet as we know it is now just simply broken. The open source wonks you celebrate are working on fixing this. But just because someone criticizes big tech does not mean they criticize all tech. The truth is the FAANG companies plus OpenAI and Microsoft are killing our planet for it to only benefit their biggest shareholders
I did not believe in Intelectual Property before. I’m not going to start believing now.
The same I think that corporations having a hold on media is bad for humandkind I think that small artists should not have a "not usable by AI"hold on what they post. Sharing knowledge is good for humanity. Limitate who can have access or how they can use that knowledge or culture is bad.
The dead of internet have nothing to do with AI and all to do with leaving internet in hands of a couple big corporations.
As for emissions… are insignificant relative to other sources of CO2 emissions. Do you happen to eat meat, travel abroad for tourism, watch sports, take you car to work, buy products made overseas? Those are much bigger sources of CO2.
You dont think polluting the world is going to have a net negative effect for humanity?
What exactly is there to gain with AI anyways? What’s the great benefit to us as a species? So far its just been used to trivialize multiple artistic disciplines, basic service industries, and programming.
Things have a cost, many people are doing the cost-benefit analysis and seeing there is none for them. Seems most of the incentive to develop this software is if you would like to stop paying people who do the jobs listed above.
What do we get out of burning the planet to the ground? And even if you find an AI thats barely burning it, what’s the point in the first place?
The whole point is that much like industrial automation it reduces the number of hours people need to work. If this leads to people starving then that’s a problem with the economic system, not with AI technology. You’re blaming the wrong field here. In fact everyone here blaming AI/ML and not the capitalists is being a Luddite.
It’s also entirely possible it will start replacing managers and capitalists as well. It’s been theorized by some anti-capitalists and economic reformists that ML/AI and computer algorithms could one day replace current economic systems and institutions.
This sadly is probably true of large companies producing big, inefficient ML models as they can afford the server capacity to do so. It’s not true of people tweaking smaller ML models at home, or professors in universities using them for data analysis or to aid their teaching. Much like some programmers are getting fired because of ML, others are using it to increase their productivity or to help them learn more about programming. I’ve seen scientists who otherwise would struggle with data analysis related programming use ChatGPT to help them write code to analyse data.
As the other guy said there are lots of other things using way more energy and fossil fuels than ML. Machine learning is used in sciences to analyse things like the impacts of climate change. It’s useful enough in data science alone to outweigh the negative impacts. You would know about this if you ever took a modern data science module. Furthermore being that data centres primarily use electricity it’s relatively easy to move them to green sources of energy compared to say farming, or transport. In fact some data centres already use green energy primarily. Data centres will always exist regardless of AI and ML anyway, it’s just a matter of scale.
Neither am I. When you’re defending whatabputism, it’s best you at least try to represent the arguments of the person you’re arguing with accurately.
False equivalence is a classic. Biotechnology is not a technology, for example, it’s billions of technologies informed, designed, and implemented, by humans, technology is a cultural feature.
Technology as this thing free from the ethics of its use is tech bro ancap cope to justify technological pursuits with empty ethical value. You can think “banning human progress in any way” is evil. But that would make you wildly uncritical of your own beliefs.
Feel free to take your arguments back to e/acc, where that level of convenience induced niavety is considered rhetorically valid.
Technology is a product of science. The facts science seeks to uncover are fundamental universal truths that aren’t subject to human folly. Only how we use that knowledge is subject to human folly. I don’t think open source or open weights models are a bad usage of that knowledge. Some of the things corporations do are bad or exploitative uses of that knowledge.
You should really try and consider what it means for technology to be a cultural feature. Think, genuinely and critically, about what it means when someone tells you that you shouldn’t judge the ethics and values of their pursuits, because they are simply discovering “universal truths”.
And then, really make sure you ponder what it means when people say the purpose of a system is what it does. Why that might get brought up in discussions about wanton resource spending for venture capitalist hype.
That’s not at all what I am doing, or what scientists and engineers do. We are all trained to think about ethics and seek ethical approval because even if knowledge itself is morally neutral the methods to obtain that knowledge can be truly unhinged.
Scientific facts are not a cultural facet. A device built using scientific knowledge is also a product of the culture that built it. Technology stands between objective science and subjective needs and culture. Technology generally serves some form of purpose.
Here is an example: Heavier than air flight is a possibility because of the laws of physics. A Boeing 737 is a specific product of both those laws of physics and of USA culture. It’s purpose is to get people and things to places, and to make Boeing the company money.
LLMs can be used for good and ill. People have argued they use too much energy for what they do. I would say that depends on where you get your energy from. Ultimately though it doesn’t use as much as people driving cars or mining bitcoin or eating meat. You should be going after those first if you want to persecute people for using energy.
It does not appear to me that you have even humored my request. I’m actually not even confident you read my comment given your response doesn’t actually respond to it. I hope you will.
No scientist or engineer as ever said that as far as I can recall. I was explaining that even for scientific fact which is morally neutral how you get there is important, and that scientists and engineers acknowledge this. What you are asking me to do this based on a false premise and a bad understanding of how science works.
It both is and isn’t. Things often have consequences alongside their intended function, like how a machine gets warm when in use. It getting warm isn’t a deliberate feature, it’s a consequence of the laws of thermodynamics. We actually try to minimise this as it wastes energy. Even things like fossil fuels aren’t intended to ruin the planet, it’s a side effect of how they work.
It’s a very common talking point now to claim technology exists independent of the culture surrounding it. It is a lie to justify morally vacant research which the, normally venture capitalist, is only concerned about the money to be made. But engineers and scientists necessarily go along with it. It’s not not your problem because we are the ones executing cultural wants, we are a part of the broader culture as well.
The purpose of a system is, absolutely, what it does. It doesn’t matter how well intentioned your design and ethics were, once the system is doing things, those things are its purpose. Your waste heat example, yes, it was the design intent to eliminate that, but now that’s what it does, and the engineers damn well understand that its purpose is to generate waste heat in order to do whatever work it’s doing.
This is a systems engineering concept. And it’s inescapable.
Huh? Then why is so much money spent on computers to minimize energy usage and heat production? This is perhaps the biggest load of bullshit I think I have heard in a long time. Maybe there is some concept similar to this, but if so you clearly haven’t articulated it well.
Anyway I think I am done talking about this with you. You are here to fear-monger over technology you probably don’t even use or understand, and I am sick of lemmings doing it.
Always has been
Considering most new technology these days is merely a distilation of the ethos of the big corporations, how do you distinguish?
Not true though.
Current AI generative have its bases in# Frank Rosenblatt and other scientists working mostly in universities.
Big corporations had made an implementation but the science behind it already existed. It was not created by those corporations.
This has been going on since big oil popularized the “carbon footprint”. They want us arguing with each other about how useful crypto/AI/whatever are instead of agreeing about pigouvian energy taxes and socialized control of the (already monopolized) grid.