None of the examples you’ve given are even remotely the same thing.
> The artist that painted Mona Lisa didn't credit any of the influences and inspirations that they had.
This is not “influence and inspiration”, this is companies feeding other people’s work into a commercial product which they sell access to. The product would be useless without other people’s work, therefore they should be compensated.
> Just as cameras made many artists redundant, so too will every other new tool, and not just artist but pretty much every job.
The camera enabled something that was not possible before, and I wasn’t built by taking the work of sketch artists and painters. It was an entirely new form of art and media.
The only thing this stuff revolutionises is new ways to not pay people. I find the implications deeply depressing.
> This is not “influence and inspiration”, this is companies feeding other people’s work into a commercial product which they sell access to. The product would be useless without other people’s work, therefore they should be compensated.
How else do you get influence and inspiration without feeding other people's work into your own brain? Do you know a single artist, writer, or musician who hasn't seen other artists' paintings, read other writers' books, or listened to other musician's music? Ingesting content is the core of how influence, inspiration, and learning work.
> The camera enabled something that was not possible before… The only thing this stuff revolutionises is new ways to not pay people.
It's never been possible to generate thoughts, writing, and images so quickly and at such a high level. It's made creative pursuits accessible to billions who previously didn't have the skill or time to do them well, or the money to hire others. As a random example, I have friends using ChatGPT to compose creative and personalized poems and notes about each other. Not something they were doing before.
> The only thing this stuff revolutionises is new ways to not pay people.
The camera lessened the need of people to go to plays and pay for tickets to see things in person. Just like records, CDs, and mp3s lessened the need to go to concerts and shows. Technology is always creating and destroying ways to pay people. The ways that people get paid are not suppose to be fixed and unchanging in time.
> How else do you get influence and inspiration without feeding other people's work into your own brain? Do you know a single artist, writer, or musician who hasn't seen other artists' paintings, read other writers' books, or listened to other musician's music? Ingesting content is the core of how influence, inspiration, and learning work
I am a human, alive and sentient. I can be held responsible if my “inspirations” stray into theft. A machine cannot, and it’s increasingly looking like the companies that operate the machines can’t either.
I also can’t churn out my inspired works at a rate that displaces potentially everyone who has ever influenced me.
> It's made creative pursuits accessible to billions who previously didn't have the skill or time to do them well, or the money to hire others. As a random example, I have friends using ChatGPT to compose creative and personalized poems and notes about each other. Not something they were doing before
How on earth is using a machine to spit out a poem a creative pursuit? There’s no more creativity there than watching a movie someone else made. It’s entertaining, yes, but it’s not creativity.
> The camera lessened the need of people to go to plays and pay for tickets to see things in person. Just like records, CDs, and mp3s lessened the need to go to concerts and shows
This doesn’t hold water. Cinema did not eliminate theatre just as records did not eliminate live music. In fact, both are arguably as big now as they have ever been. The technology here filled a new space, it didn’t threaten to throw everyone out of an existing one.
I can't know if you've actually used these tools, but it requires a pretty high level of creative mind to get them to produce the content you're looking for. Maybe you as a user of an LLM you don't need to be creative in the writing of words for example, but you instead need to be creative in how you control the tools and pick the right outputs, feed it back, copy/paste/cut it, change stuff, extend it.. and the same with the image generators. There's a HUGE amount of creative accessories around them to manipulate and steer the process. There might be less creativity needed with the pen, but it's needed in other ways.
I don’t see the advent of generative art any different than when we moved from paper to photoshop.
For those unaware the vast majority of graphic artists start their projects with assets and base images that they themselves don’t create. With generative ai you’re simply going one step further and have another new tool create a more polished version that you can edit to remove extra fingers, etc. It’s simply moving the baseline from 20% done to 60% done, which will result in artists producing even higher fidelity and more detailed art.
For example an artist could generate a bunch of scenes using Sora and create a collage of them for a larger piece of art, something that is prohibitively time consuming right now.
> I also can’t churn out my inspired works at a rate that displaces potentially everyone who has ever influenced me.
I'm with you, man. I'm still trying to find a lawyer who will sue Kubota and John Deere for moving dirt at a rate far superior to me and a shovel, but nobody will take my case.
> How on earth is using a machine to spit out a poem a creative pursuit?
100%, man. Nobody is mentioning the magical fairy dust in human brains that makes us superior to these models. When I really like fantasy novels, and then train my neurons on thousands of hours of reading Tolkien, Terry Brooks, Brandon Sanderson, etc, and then I get the idea to write my own fantasy series, my creative process doesn't draw on my own model's training data at all. It's 100% "creative", and I would produce exactly the same content if I were illiterate. But these goddamned machines, man. They don't have our special human fairy dust.
When we discovered the universal law of gravitation, and realized that the laws of physics are omnipresent in our universe, we put a giant asterisk to note that the laws of physics are different inside humans. The epidermis is a sort of barrier to physics, and within its confines, magic happens, that these pro-AI people conveniently "forget".
To paraphrase the eminent Human Unique Creative Person Roger Penrose: "There's magical quantum shit goin down in the microtubules. It's gotta be the microtubules. I think, right? I can't prove it, but as a scientist, we don't need proof. Making sure we think we are superior is more important."
> I am a human, alive and sentient. I can be held responsible if my “inspirations” stray into theft. A machine cannot, and it’s increasingly looking like the companies that operate the machines can’t either.
150 years ago, Bertha Benz wasn't allowed to own property or patents in her own right, because the law said so.
The specific reason a machine cannot be held responsible today is because the law says so.
Also, dead humans' copyright is respected in law, so "alive" isn't adding value to your argument here.
> I also can’t churn out my inspired works at a rate that displaces potentially everyone who has ever influenced me.
I can't run faster than every athlete who has ever inspired me, this argument does not prevent motor cars.
I can't write notes faster than the world record holder in shorthand, this argument does not prevent the printing press.
I can't play chess or go at even a mediocre level, this argument does not prevent Stockfish or Alpha Go.
I can't hear the tonal differences in Chinese well enough to distinguish "hello" from "mud trench", 这个论点并没有阻止谷歌翻译学习 “你好” 和 “泥壕” 之间的区别。
I can't do arithmetic in my head faster than literally all other humans combined even if they hadn't been trained to the level of the current world record holder, this argument does not prevent the original model of the Raspberry Pi Zero.
"The machine is 'better', in one or more senses of the word, than a human" is, in fact, a reason to use the machine. It's the reason to use a machine. It's why the machine is an economic threat — but you can't just use "my income is threatened by this machine" as a reason to prevent other people using the machine, just as I as a software developer can't use that argument to stop other people using LLMs to write code without hiring me.
> Cinema did not eliminate theatre just as records did not eliminate live music. In fact, both are arguably as big now as they have ever been.
You can argue that, but you'd be wrong.
Shakespeare wrote for normal everyday people, his stuff fit into the category that today would be "TV soap opera", where the audience was everyone rather than just the well-off, where the only other public entertainment was options were bear-baiting and public executions, where the actors have very little time to rehearse, and where "you're ripping off my ideas" was handled by rapidly churning out new content.
Live music, without amplification, used to be the only way to listen to music. Now, even if you see a live performance, you can have 10k people in a single venue listening to a single band… and if you want music in a pub or a dance club, the most likely performance is from a DJ rather than a band, and the "D" stands for "disk" because the actual content is pre-recorded — and that's not to say I would deny that DJ work is "creative", but rather that it makes DJing exactly what critics accuse GenAI of being, remixing of other people's work.
Which, now I think about it, is a description that would also apply to all the modern performances of Shakespeare: simply reusing someone else's creation without paying any compensation to the estate.
But I know that will tickle you the wrong way, I know that art is the peacock's tail of humans: the struggle, the difficulty, is the point, and it has to be because that's how we find people to start families with. Because of that, GenAI is like being caught wearing a fake Rolex watch, and you can't actually defend that with logical reasons such as "real Rolex watches aren't very good at keeping time compared to even a Casio F-91W let alone the atomic clock synchronising with my phone", because logic isn't the point, and never was the point.
Reading your opinion on the subject, I believe you’re struggling to make sense of what is happening. I suspect there is a combination of factors here: you are reinforcing a bias, can’t wrap your head around it, don’t have much experience working with AI, haven’t deeply considered the evolution of the universe.
My recommendation: zoom out a little bit. Every step in history is so brief and nothing is normal for long. Even humanity is a blink.
Comments like: “how is using a machine to spit out a poem creative”. Really? How is using a digital camera creative compared to painting. How is a painting creative compared to etching? And on and on evolution goes..
> Reading your opinion on the subject, I believe you’re struggling to make sense of what is happening. I suspect there is a combination of factors here: you are reinforcing a bias, can’t wrap your head around it, don’t have much experience working with AI, haven’t deeply considered the evolution of the universe.
I agree. I could have expressed my thoughts better in this case. It wasn’t just OP I was considering. I was thinking of a common AI take that I’ve seen when I wrote my comment. Regardless, will do better to express my thoughts and agree that we shouldn’t profile each other here.
- The rate of change that AI forces upon us has never before been experienced.
- The scale of these changes is nothing like we've ever seen before.
The adoptions of the camera, radio, automobile, TV, etc., didn't happen practically overnight. Society had a good decade+ to prepare for them.
Similarly, AI doesn't just change one industry. It fundamentally changes _all_ industries, and brings up some fundamental questions about the meaning of intelligence and our place in the universe.
My fear is that we're not prepared for either of these things. We're not even certain how exactly this will affect us, or where this is actually all taking us, but somehow a very small group of people is inevitably forcing this on all of us.
Because of this I think that being conservative, and maybe putting some strict regulation on these advancements, might not be such a bad idea.
Agree with what you are saying as well. But AI is not displacing at the rate of change that is advancing. True, we hear anecdotes about people losing their jobs in HN, that was happening when those other adoptions happened but we didn't know about it happening real-time.
Humans still need to adapt and we are slow. If singularity is near [it isn't] we can be afraid, until then we are the limiting factor here. Displacement will happen but growth will happen faster with these new tools
Because as I grow older, I find I am less and less equipped to keep up with the rate of change that we are undergoing. It also means a lot of uncertainty for the immediate future. If AI takes over my job, will I still be able to compete in some industry somewhere and provide for myself?
I don't want much out of life, but I do want the ability to influence my own personal situation. If we wind up in the UBI-ified, dense urban housing future where AI does all the work and no one owns anything, how much real influence will I have over my life?
Will I live out my days in a government issued single bedroom apartment, with a monthly "congratulations for being human" allowance from the government? I don't want that. People say it will free us up to pursue whatever we want, but to me it sounds like the worst cage imaginable. All the free time, and no real freedom to enjoy it with.
Because make no mistake. If you live on handouts from your government, you aren't free.
So with that as a potential, maybe even likely outcome, why aren't you afraid of change?
I think the question is more along the lines of "will your government continue to pay your social security if you don't remain living in the country", not "can you deposit it somewhere else"
Also, how about if you get into trouble. If you're arrested for a crime (even if eventually found not guilty), will you continue to receive social security?
Is there any circumstances where your government could refuse to continue paying it?
And most importantly: could your government invent such a circumstance in the future, and then invoke the new circumstance to deny you the payment?
Living on government money reminds me of my cat. She relies on me to feed her and provide for her, and I do happily take good care of her because I love her very much.
1. My government will continue to pay my Social Security if I don't remain living in the country. My father emigrated from the U.S. to Israel after he retired and he continued to receive his Social Security for about 20 years, until the day he died.
2. "Also, how about if you get into trouble. If you're arrested for a crime (even if eventually found not guilty), will you continue to receive social security?"
"If you receive Social Security, we'll suspend your benefits if you're convicted of a criminal offense and sentenced to jail or prison for more than 30 continuous days. We can reinstate your benefits starting with the month following the month of your release." — Social Security Administration
3. "Is there any circumstances where your government could refuse to continue paying it?"
If it goes broke, certainly.
4. And most importantly: could your government invent such a circumstance in the future, and then invoke the new circumstance to deny you the payment?"
> Because as I grow older, I find I am less and less equipped to keep up with the rate of change that we are undergoing. It also means a lot of uncertainty for the immediate future. If AI takes over my job, will I still be able to compete in some industry somewhere and provide for myself?
I understand this fear, and sympathise with it even though I have multiple income streams.
> I don't want much out of life, but I do want the ability to influence my own personal situation. If we wind up in the UBI-ified, dense urban housing future where AI does all the work and no one owns anything, how much real influence will I have over my life?
Why do you fear "dense" urban housing future? I think most people choose relatively dense environments because that's where all the stuff they want is, but rural areas are cheaper[0], and the kind of future where humans must live on UBI due to lack of economic opportunity is necessarily one where robots do the manual labor such as house building and civil engineering, not just the intellectual jobs like architecture and practicing real estate law.
Likewise, while I can see several possible futures where nobody owns stuff, the tech to make it happen is necessarily also good enough that any random philanthropist who owns just one tiny autofac would find it trivial to give everyone their own personal autofac — "my first wish is infinite wishes" except the magic gene doesn't say "no".
[0] The only reason I'm looking to get somewhere a bit more rural is that the sound insulation in my current place is failing, and I'm right by a busy junction with multiple emergency vehicles passing each day — and the more less built-up areas are the cheap ones. Still the biggest city in Europe, but I'll be surrounded by forest and lakes on most sides within 15 minutes' walk.
Because I hated living in Apartments when I lived in them. They are noisy and small, and I like quiet and space. For me, being closer to walk to stuff is not really appealing enough to deal with how awful the experience of living in dense housing is.
I strongly think that dense housing is only positive for people who don't spend much time at home.
> "my first wish is infinite wishes" except the magic gene doesn't say "no"
The problem with this is that we haven't actually solved resource scarcity, and until we do there is still going to be an upper limit to what you will be allowed to buy, controlled by the number printed on your UBI cheque. I am anticipating this number to be much lower than what I currently am capable of achieving in my career.
Of course this is the fear that my career won't exist in the future. Or simply that AI will eat enough jobs that I will be edged out by better human competition. I'm under no illusions that I'm near the top of my field, I am firmly in the middle of the pack at best.
> sound insulation in my current place is failing
The sound insulation in the apartments I've lived in was nonexistent. This is a big part of why I never want to do that again.
> Because I hated living in Apartments when I lived in them.
I meant more along the lines: why do you expect that to be the future, such that you have reason to fear it?
> The problem with this is that we haven't actually solved resource scarcity, and until we do there is still going to be an upper limit to what you will be allowed to buy
Yes, but the AI necessary to make human labour redundant is that tech. In the absence of that tech, humans could still get jobs doing whatever the stuff is that AI can't do.
> why do you expect that to be the future, such that you have reason to fear it?
Because if I don't have an income I don't expect to be able to afford anything bigger.
> In the absence of that tech, humans could still get jobs doing whatever the stuff is that AI can't do
Which will be manual tasks that I am aging out of being able to keep up with, or.. what? Stuff that traditionally doesn't pay as well as knowledge work, right? And may not pay much more than the UBI anyways?
> Because if I don't have an income I don't expect to be able to afford anything bigger.
A big rural place is cheaper than a tiny city place.
> Which will be manual tasks that I am aging out of being able to keep up with, or.. what?
Automation started with the manual stuff, well before computers were invented. Even for humanoid robots, their hardware is better than our bodies, and it's the software which keeps it from replacing specific workers, though telepresence is one way around that.
> I don't want much out of life, but I do want the ability to influence my own personal situation.
We are still animals in the animal kingdom. It’s survival of the fittest as long as resources are not infinite. You can never expect this luxury. You are predator or prey.
>Because make no mistake. If you live on handouts from your government, you aren't free.
This isn't actually the problem since we need and will continue to need UBI for non-AI related reasons
>People say it will free us up to pursue whatever we want, but to me it sounds like the worst cage imaginable.
This is where you missed the bit that "pursue whatever we want" will also be limited by AI, and secondary effect of people growing up consuming and enjoying AI productions that tailored to their interest. At best, you'll have a few people commanding Patreons who have some skill, but generally you'd have to find a domain to pursue that isn't already automated. Luddite subcultures will have to develop. But generally you yourself and most others, particularly children of millennials who'll grow up with this stuff progressing in sophistication, might just spend your time watching your video prompts come alive; and who would wanna. do anything else when you can get straight to what you wanna see.
> we need and will continue to need UBI for non-AI related reasons
This mentality is why bitcoin is going to cruise through 1 million dollars a bitcoin and on and on. Print Monopoly money and people who earn will keep seeking out sound money.
Hint: the money comes from redistribution, not blindly printing more, the latter would obviously be completely insane (which is why you'd rather argue that scenario) whereas the former would keep the economy going, which is obviously in the interest of the capitalist class. No point owning and producing if there's no buyer because everyone is starving.
What you seem to think would devalue money will be the very thing that keeps it going as a concept.
And I hope you understand somewhere deep down that Bitcoin is the epitome of monopoly money.
I see it as the polar opposite, backed by math. A politically controlled money supply with no immutable math-based proof of its release schedule is Monopoly money. Cuck bucks. Look at the 100 year buying power chart.
On your second point, in spirit I agree. You need a stable society to enjoy wealth so it’s in the ruling classes best interest to keep things under control. HOW to keep things under control is the real debate.
That's what makes it bad. A fixed algorithm that soon will spawn pittances would do an utterly miserable job if it ever gained status and usage as actual currency. Deflation is bad. So much worse than inflation. Not having flexibility in the money supply is lunacy.
Mild inflation resulting in 100 year buying power going to fuck-all is good. It forces money to be invested, put to work. If sitting on your stash is its own investment the economy is screwed. Reduced circulation means less business means less value added and generally more friction. Why would you want that?
Crypto does some things well (illegal stuff, escaping currency controls/moving lots of money "with you") but in the end that also requires it is only just big enough for reasonable liquidity, but not so big it has an impact on the actual economy. For what it's being pushed for... it's a negative-sum game only good for taking people for a ride. It should stay in its goddamn lane.
All money is politically controlled, including Bitcoin (although it's debatable if Bitcoin even counts as money). The politics of Bitcoin are one-op-one-vote rather than one-man-one-vote, but it's still there, and it's still mutable if enough of them cast their votes in any given way.
Da Vinci also made money from the painting, and the Louvres continues to do so right now. They didn't credit his influence and inspiration. This is not sad.
The camera did enable painters to pretend they were, for hours, at a scene they painted, but instead they painted photographs from others. Artists are not angels, they do the same "bad" things than OpenAI
In what way does anyone have a monopoly on generated images and video? Last I checked there were several major players and more startups than you can shake a stick at.
It won’t last. There’s a massive incentive to build more GPUs and develop specialized chips and everyone who can is scrambling to meet that demand. The technology is not some trade secret that no one can copy which is why there are so many people and companies diving into this market now. Hardware is a bit slow to ramp up production of but it will get there eventually because there’s money to be made.
Does that matter when the models they generate are given away for free?
You can make your argument validly against DALL•E or Midjourney families, but we've also got the Stable Diffusion family of models that anyone can just grab a copy of.
I’m talking about generative ai VS human artists. But in this case it seems like OpenAI specifically has a massive leap over everyone else with this video generation. So whether they have a monopoly over that remains to be seen.
What does not remain to be seen though is that generative ai is going to put a lot of artists out of work.
You can argue about the good and bad of that but it’s defo happening.
So at what point is a painter too effective to be legal? Should we limit the amount of paintings that a single painter is allowed to produce per month?
Not sure if you’re just being facetious but my point is that individual painters do not need to have limits on them because they have a natural human limit that stops them causing societal problems.
What if da Vinci had been superhuman and could take on 1,000,000 commissions per day and had also taught himself every style of art and would do each commission for 0.001x the cost of anyone else.
Yes society as a whole benefit from a fantastic amount of super high quality art.
But the other artists are not gonna be so happy with the situation are they?
People make decisions based on what society deems valuable. That changes over time and has for the entirety of human history.
Maybe there’s a demand for more customized art. Maybe spite patronage will make a comeback.
Anyone telling you they know how it will shake out is a fraud. But the incentives we’ve set up have a natural push and pull to get people to do what society values.
It's funny all you guys arguing there isn't a right/law to make money from art. What do you think copyright is? The issue is that all these models were trained in blatant violation of copyright. And before you say they just take inspiration, that's the same argument as saying when I copy a movie to my harddrive it's the same remembering. It's not and a computer is not a human.
Da Vinci inspired whole new generations of artists, thinkers and scientists. The net benefit of his existence distributed itself among many others - as it does with any great artist, thinker or scientist. It certainly looks like generative AI has at least in some cases the opposite effect.
> into a commercial product which they sell access to
Within a few mon the or years there will be open source implementations anyway, running locally or in a data center. Most of the technology is published.
Contrary to text and the big piles of "liberated" data hanging around for anyone looking hard enough to grab, the training data for video seems to be harder to access for opensource / research / individuals. Google has Youtube, OpenAI can pay whatever fee any proprietary data bank requires. There's a moat right there that I can't see how to overcome.
Weird to say I guess, but meta might release an open source model too. And they do have plenty of data to feed their models. Arguably more data than openAI should have as they don't really own any social media.
Thing is, anyway, as soon as one model is open there will be copies of it, fine-tune implementations. People don't care that much about ownership of data I would say if they actually have access to the models that are produced by gathering this data.
Ultimately, to me, an open source model for this tool makes a lot of sense. They use publicly available data and the models become publicly available.
I for one am quite excited for this tooling to become better and better so I can make the adaptation of a book I love into a movie I imagine it can be. At least I can have a lot of fun trying.
> This is not “influence and inspiration”, this is companies feeding other people’s work into a commercial product which they sell access to. The product would be useless without other people’s work, therefore they should be compensated.
Sure.
Who do we send the compensation to for Leonardo da Vinci? Or Shakespeare, for a text-based example?
Do you want them to compensate me for the stuff I uploaded to Wikipedia and licensed as public domain, or what I've uploaded to GitHub with an MIT license?
A model trained only on licensed data is still an existential threat to the incomes of people whose works were never included in the model, precisely because they're only useful to the extent that they generalise beyond their own examples.
> The camera enabled something that was not possible before, and I wasn’t built by taking the work of sketch artists and painters. It was an entirely new form of art and media.
A new form of art that was (a) initially decried as "not art", and (b) which almost completely ended the economic value of portraiture.
> Who do we send the compensation to for Leonardo da Vinci? Or Shakespeare, for a text-based example?
Those authors aren't alive and their works are in the public domain. Bringing them up is irrelevant and a diversion from the actual problem, which is that creators alive today whose work is under copyright today and who need to make a living from their art are having it taken with zero compensation and had it fed into AI, stealing their effort.
> A model trained only on licensed data is still an existential threat to the incomes of people whose works were never included in the model, precisely because they're only useful to the extent that they generalise beyond their own examples.
Again, a diversion. We can debate how much AI trained on properly-licensed AI should be controlled, but it's pretty clear that the bare minimum is for all AI training data to require explicit permission from the creator of that data.
Let me clarify - you're not even misinterpreting my comment - you're just making up random things that I never said and which no reasonable person could ever draw from my words.
There's no point to arguing this further because you're clearly not acting in good faith. It is impossible to have a reasonable conversation with someone who randomly (and falsely) claims that others said things that they did not.
Those are not fundamentally different. A group of people coming together to create a company that trains a AI model for profit and an artist studying thousands of pieces to develop a style of their own, and then selling paintings based on that style, are both totally dependent on the body of knowledge that civilization left for them.
Artists do credit their teachers (Verrocchio in the case of da Vinci), schools, sources of inspiration and influences, so I'm confused by this comment.
What kind of acknowledgement did you have in mind?
if the producers of these models weren't incentivized to hide their training data it would be almost trivial to at least retrieve the images most similar to the content produced
some images will be maximally distant from training examples but midjourney repainting frames from "harry potter" could very easily automatically send a check to jk rowling per generation
these AI start ups are just trying to have a free lunch in a very mature industry
"The world doesn't work that way". Quite pessimistic a position to hold here, no? We–in technology especially–are in positions of significant leverage. We should be talking about how we can limit the negatives and bolster the positives from these generative models. The world can work in a different way if we put enough energy into it. We don't have to stand by as subjects of inertia. That is why OpenAI and others are treading carefully, trying to trigger some kind of momentum of reflection instead of letting our base demons run amok.
That's a massively charitable reading on their actions, whenever I see a "thought leader" behind these companies talk about how careful they are being, I just see marketing. Someone desperately trying to impress upon everyone how revolutionary their model and by extension they are, it's kind of sad..
I definitely see it as self-serving too, yes, but I also see it as a convenient temporary alignment of incentives. The world and its regulators definitely need time to adjust and educate themselves, so I'm glad for now that they're exercising restraint.
> The way these models are creative is the same way humans are
We have no idea how human creativity works, but we know with certainty that it doesn't involve a Python program sucking in pixel data and outputting statistical likelihoods.
You know, Ive seen people do amazing things with math equations. Beautiful visualisations.
As these tools improve and it becomes more possible for us to actually take our ideas into images and videos that fit a sort of "yes this is what I want" bill we are going to see amazing things come out.
I mean, a few days ago I saw this clearly AI generated video of some wizards doing snowboard and having a blast in the mountains. It's one of the funniest things I've seen in a while, simply so ridiculous. Obviously someone had the idea "I want to make a video of wizards doing snowboard in a mountain" that's where creativity lies.
So to say "creativity doesn't involve a python program outputting statistical likelihoods" imo is just you saying you're not creative enough to know what to do with the tools you've been given.
Some people when they see a strawberry they see a fruit. Others see endless dishes where the fruit is just an ingredient.
That's a meaningless statement. Any interacting physical system is an "input output" pattern, as long as you're only looking at the inputs and outputs. Behaviorism fell out of favor for a reason. It's whats transforming inputs and creating outputs that matters. For that matter, you need to be able to define what an input and an output is for humans, given that we have bodies.
I don't really want to weave baskets, that's what I'd want a machine to do.
"The world doesn't work that way" - I've seen this so often, but the most incredible thing about humans was the optimism to be able to change how the world worked -- that's the main impetus of most revolutions.
Personifying computer programs also is an error, it's like saying that bombs kill people when there has to be a person dropping them (at least until we get Skynet).
>I don't really want to weave baskets, that's what I'd want a machine to do.
In my free time I like to code games, I don't have money to pay for an artist, nor the time/will to learn how to draw, that's what I'd want a machine to do.
I do agree with you that personifying computer programs is an error. That's also why I avoid calling these AI, because they're FAR from that. But I do believe that there will come a day, where personifying a computer program will be a real question.
>The way these models are creative is the same way humans are. The artist that painted Mona Lisa didn't credit any of the influences and inspirations that they had.
I'm continually amazed at how many people argue against this point on HN, which is largely biased toward logical discourse. What you just said is exactly right, and is the Achilles heel of the legal arguments against generative AI. If what they are doing illegal, then so is the human act of creativity. If human creativity is legal, then so is generative AI trained on existing art.
What has yet to come is the mass realization (or perhaps, admission) that the way AI works is no different from the way we work.
my name is timothy basket -- you're saying people have stolen my weave?!
end sarcasm. but seriously -- claiming you made something you didn't isn't ok. but it happens, regardless of laws or regulations or norms.
i don't have any solutions; the internet helps because you can publish something and point to it. i'm a musician and sometimes i only realize well after the fact how influenced i was by something after the fact for a song i've written.
It is absolutely not the same, and saying so disregards centuries of knowledge stratification.
These machine produce superficial artifacts that lack any layering of meaning of semantic capital (see Luciano Floridi).
They are the byproduct of the engineering extremism and lack of humanities knowledge of the people getting rich through their creation.
Models learn exactly like artists, and also, for some reason, the person that uses those models are artists making art. Wait… Artists learn by passively ingesting many millions pieces of media someone feeds them for the non-specific purpose of “generating art” so some person who wants to take credit for making the end piece can tell them exactly what to make, right?
This reads like a wildly confident statement about art.
While at the same time not mentioning the actual name of "the artist that painted Mona Lisa" (Leonardo Da Vinci), nor knowing that the name of his master is very well known, and even the influence of artists that he seemed to despise (eg Michaelangelo) are very well documented as well.
Maaybe this narrow view of (art) history needs to be fine-tuned on more data :-)
The human world works that way humans make it work. Pretty much what Jody Foster's character in the movie Contact told that asshole trying to steal all the credit from her, and take her place in the mission to go visit alien dad in Pensacola.
“whose existence and names we will never know or acknowledge.”
That’s the problem. We know their names. We know their stories, their contributions. Babbage. Lovelace. Ritchie. Spielberg. Picasso. Rembrandt. This is what giving attribution is all about. So we don’t just stand there asking how we got here.
To the influences that they know. Our brain isn’t an attribution machine. When a musician recreates a chord progression that they’ve heard before without noticing it, is that theft?
If a comedian accidentally retells a joke, is that theft?
The way these models are creative is the same way humans are.
The artist that painted Mona Lisa didn't credit any of the influences and inspirations that they had.
Just as cameras made many artists redundant, so too will every other new tool, and not just artist but pretty much every job.
But there are still people that weave baskets, and people are prepared to pay the premium to get a product that was 'hand-made'.
While receiving the credit that you are deserved is nice and fair. The world doesn't work that way.