AI Not My Problem Good - AI Is My Problem Bad
Recently a Hive user posted about some AI images they had generated, and then mused they could have used ChatGPT to write the content, but of course they wouldn't do that, because it would be unconscionable.
They used AI "art" as part of the content. Why not go the whole way with the text content?
All of my Instagram feed was artists bent out of shape with giant memes with the words, “AI”, crossed out.
Is there a point not being comprehended here?
I imagine there will be some kind of commitment that as a contributor, you’ll be known as a genuine, “human”, blogger.
On one hand they appear to belittle human artists facing a tsunami of automated machine generated images, yet on the other, seem to champion human created text content.
All content creation is under threat from prompt monkeys who will flood the online and offline world with uninspired, automated, formulaic, meaningless, noise. It will shutdown creative industries (and more). The process is already happening.
Clarksworld, a prominent science fiction and fantasy magazine announced it would pause submissions after a flood of AI spam. It’s not the only publisher inundated with AI-generated stories.
Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine, at time of writing, reported that 30% of their monthly submissions are now AI generated, and they only expect it to increase.
Sheila Williams, Asimov's editor, said, “That’s like the tip of the iceberg,” that have been overwhelming small publishers in recent months.
Clarksworld editor, Neil Clark believes "influencers" are selling people on the idea of AI get rich quick schemes.
More and faster does not translate to quality, value or meaning, rather the death of it.
[Ammaar Reshi used ChatGPT and Midjourney to manufacture an illustrated children's book in 72 hours]. He said,
I was just getting a ton of hate for it... I was just shocked, and honestly I didn't really know how to deal with it.
The incredulity of his statement demonstrates the ignorance and thoughtlessness of many AI users. They treat it as some magic box that generates content out of nothing.
I wanted a story showing the magic of AI to children.
The "magic" is that the AI developers have, without permission, put the creative content of living breathing humans, through an industrial shredder, and squeezed out gleaming plastic corpse on the other end.
Magic? It is cold soulless disposable machine generated product, without an ounce of human feeling in it. Is the content we want to feed to developing children?
Here in lies one of the major problems with AI, us. Technology is not always to our benefit, and more often purely for our convenience. Convenience frequently translates to laziness. Just as in our body atrophies when we rely upon conveniences and don't exercise it, so too do our creative and mental abilities.
If we start spoon feeding young developing children with such cerebral crutches, they will not develop their own creative or critical thinking which will lead us to a stagnant dead end future, or worse, one of decay.
But AI will take care of everything, it will be the meta-cognition that will overcome our limitations.
AI has no, and will not ever, have any volition of its own. It is software, that uses an iterative, self modifying logic model derived from a dataset. It is reliant upon humans to create data for said dataset.
Here in lies the crux. The AI is only ever as good as the dataset it is trained on.
What happens when humanity becomes so degenerate in it's creative and innovative output because it has given it over to machine learning? There will be no innovation because any new dataset input will be a cannibalization of previous AI output and ultimately, the last point where humanity actually used its own brains.
AI could become a negative feedback loop.
There is a glib smugness lacking any sense of self-awareness from the emerging cult of AI devotees. They state that many jobs, businesses or simply human centric activities will be under threat from AI, so best adopt or die.
It's not my problem because I am using AI and benefiting from it (at the expense of others).
But how long before their own AI output cannot be distinguished amongst the noise of AI content and product generated by the AI flood? By using and promoting it, they are contributing to their own obsolescence.
When AI takes from them, then, AI will have become a problem, but then it will be too late.
I understand your apprehension, and maybe I lack of it, as I'm pretty optimistic about these technologies -while I have many reservations about new technologies in general- but I immediately saw the possibility field.
Yes, like all major new technological advances, there will be people who will lose their jobs, but what is often forgotten is the number of it will create : they are a lot of people that want to create something, have scenaristics idea for example, but do not have painting talent or money to hire someone.
With IA they will be able to bring their idea to life. Also, IA are really useful for researches, inspirations, for artists at the beginning of a project ; it's a kind of infinite Pinterest, with a much more intuitive search engine.
About people that use both Midjourney and ChatGPT to create an entire artificial content, yes, it looks really unreasonable, and unethical to sell that as it is their own creation. -But- as it doesn't make sense to consider this work for its artistic value, it can be useful for utilitarian work: for example, when a technical document need to be illustrated.
In fact, I think the biggest problem with IA is not about the IA itself : it's about society. Capitalism ask to work for work, it generate competition and too often requires us to forget the artistic side behind the art.
So, legitimately, artists feel aggrieved by this technology. If we had a less productivist view of work and saw it all simply as passion, we would react differently. Just look at the difference in enthusiasm for AI among artists who are concerned about it, compared to the general public.
Secondly, the problem is about the growing intellectual laziness. People want to see everything, get everything, with less and less effort, and less and less value (or spirituality), behind things.
If we doesn't have this intellectual laziness, we could insteed consider IA as a tool for further work and reflection. For example, ChatGPT can be a very good tool for learning languages, as we could talk to him and that he can correct our sentences.
So... I understand people that are afraid or are defeatists about IA.
But it's very interesting to see all their possibilities.
And always think about the fact that things evolve, when photography appeared, painters were very pessimistic about it, and did not consider it as art. But today there are still painters, but there are also still photographers.