> I don’t really see a trend of AI generated content getting better
You see that second link as the endpoint? That there's nowhere to go from there? How about you can have a holodeck type experience with Apple Vision Pro? Literally generate any scenario you want? Download generated scenarios and customize it however you want in real time?
Entire animation workflows changed from animating models to using voice and text to describe scenes and actions.
Lowering the barrier of digital film making to the same level and ease of use as photo editing apps today -- even easier.
You really think that the second link is the peak of gen AI? You really think that nothing else and no more major industry shifts are going to happen when gen AI gets cheaper, faster, algorithms get better, and hardware gets more powerful?
Holodecks were full sensory experiences: touch, taste, smell. Apple Vision Pro isn't ever going to let you spar with Worf, or get a massage on Risa -- not without several very different kinds of advancements.
People are burned by crypto, metaverse, web3, and all the other stuff the tech industry came out with over the last few years that crashed and burned. Optimism is great and underrated, but you can't sum up the same enthusiasm for everything.
And this is coming from someone thoroughly bullish on AI!
I think there's a distinction here because there's very tangible output from gen AI (content) and we can see it getting better, more advanced, more capable, and more realistic.
The applications are obvious: film making, content creation, teaching, etc. This is in contrast to crypto which was/is quite abstract (as is money in the first place) and the metaverse which required investing hundreds of dollars in specialized hardware.
In contrast, our world is surrounded by visual content so the applications and utility of gen AI seems far more obvious for the layperson.
And what we do see is terrible; bland art, more spam and political astroturfing than ever in human history, bad code, and ignorant lessons, all to the tune of a PR campaign to shift the Overton window towards praising incompetence and denigrating hard work.
The only real accomplishments of LLMs were how good the proposed use-cases sound on paper under competent implementation, and a theoretical solution to unstructured data parsing that's still too heavy to be worth a tiny bump in performance.
Do you want to live in a future where all human thought has been replaced by its surface level reproductions, made by big tech stuffing copyrighted works into a GPU farm with near-zero human labor? We both know it won't benefit you and me, our role is merely transitory in bootstrapping their self-improvement under the guise of a paid product, nor had the relationship between us and these tools been in any shape collaborative in the first place.
This fantasy targets the owner class, which can finally dream of labor decoupled from the laborer, the work simply costing no more than the price of electricity, all without the demands for livable compensation or following best practice. Even if the LLMs gained above-human performance in all domains of knowledge shortly followed by institution of a universal basic income, their invention will still have only been a force of stagnation, learned intellectual helpless, and overconsumption.
Ironically, all of this means that we're not at the apex and there's still a long ways to go both in terms of algorithms and the hardware to run them.
> Do you want to live in a future where all human thought has been replaced by its surface level reproductions, made by big tech stuffing copyrighted works into a GPU farm with near-zero human labor?
Whether we want to or not, it's the apparent path that will unfold; there's no putting AI back into the box. The race is already on.
Sure, in the way that technically this is a computable problem, but maybe not a simple one. Any exponential in the real world is a sigmoid and given all major AI labs, having spent years and incomprehensible sums of cache, have arrived at about GPT-4 performance, including OpenAI's latest release being a smaller model, should tell us something. Be the limiting factor corpus size, model parameters, or an architectural defect, we're clearly loosing momentum, at least until it's to be diagnosed and solved. Deferring to hypothetical futures without meeting the burden of evidence seems ill-advised, especially when it comes to incompetent use today.
> there's no putting AI back into the box
There's also no complete undoing of an oil spill, nor the practical possibility of unilateral nuclear disarmament. The weights are public, the corps is as well, as much as it had broken the open web to gather it, the architecture is known, ergo today's open-weight models are the baseline of capability for all future models. Still, seeing that LLMs form a natural monopoly given the required compute power to enter the field, we can enforce policies like mandatory statistical fingerprinting on all outputs of proprietary models beyond a certain size. LLM detection is also getting quite good; my hope is that adversarial fine-tuning will work out like Bayesian poisoning for email spammers, only giving the discriminator new stable patterns to look for. We as consumers do have power, however small and unconcentrated, to vote with our wallets, which a study posted here shown many are beginning to do [0]. The copyright question also gives quite a nice kill switch if our society decides this whole industry isn't that beneficial, removing the commercial incentive for training new models while providing some for detection.
There's great value from transformer networks, such as state-of-the-art speech recognition, that will make its way into consumer products and will be here to stay. As for the FADs like useless chatbots in every product, that may come under question.
A huge issue with film is we went through this with audio 20 years ago.
Recording time use to cost a huge amount of money and then DAWs put that in the hands of basically everyone with a PC.
We got an infinite amount more of half finished demos that no one listened to. I would have a hard time saying with a straight face that music as a whole has got better. The sheer volume crowds out a lot the fringe from being worth the effort of creating.
AI Art is really a better example though. I just resubscribed to midjourney this weekend on the web. I could see the thousands of images I made on discord. I think some are cool but what use are they? Millions of synthetic photo realistic selfies that no one but the creator bothers to look at.
The arts ultimately need a network of people appreciating the art form or you have nothing. Just an infinite amount of board classroom notebook doodles that no one ever sees. It doesn't matter if it is Picasso doing bored doodling if there is no audience. You can't have all artists with no audience. Really good chance with no audience Picasso just does something else too.
I mean has the art world really been disrupted by midjourney? It is an absurd idea. What is most curious is how little disruption any of this seems to be having.
If you look back in history, there was a point in time when only the rich and wealthy could afford to have artists create paintings for them. A portrait was reserved for the aristocratic and nobility.
Now, anyone can go into TJ Maxx or Home Goods and pick up cheap printed artwork from China. Want a portrait? Snap a picture with your phone and print it out. No skill required.
It was once the case that if you wanted a bespoke sculpture, you either needed to have the skill or the wealth to pay an artist to create one. Now anyone can 3D print one or use a CNC machine or injection molding to create one.
Is there something inherently wrong with that? Does that mean that award winning photographers and acclaimed modern painters are degraded to the same level as anyone with a phone? Are world renowned sculptors and artists no longer a thing because of 3D printing and cheap access to injection molding?
> Really good chance with no audience Picasso just does something else too.
The people that want to be really good at their craft will continue to do so. The people that appreciate the effort, artistry, and skill will continue to do so. The presence of cheap mass produced wine doesn't degrade expensive wine; the presence of cheap mass produced whisky doesn't obviate the market for expensive small batch whisky. It's the opposite; in fact, it elevates it onto a pedestal.
But more than that, the power of generative AI is to create an experience that otherwise doesn't exist because no game or visual experience can be tailored exactly to my tastes, preferences, and style. What gen AI promises is that every person can get exactly the experience that they are seeking by simply tweaking the input.
> What is most curious is how little disruption any of this seems to be having.
It’s because the people impressed by AI are impressed because we weren’t able to do it 5 years ago.
It’s novel. It makes unskilled artists feel like they have skill. It makes for easy, specific, good looking images. They can get quick images that are more specific than ever before very very quickly.
But that isn’t what making art or doing graphic design is. Making the image is the easy part most of the time.
Same with code. Rarely is writing the code the hard part. Solving problems within the constraints of a system are.
Entire animation workflows changed from animating models to using voice and text to describe scenes and actions.
Lowering the barrier of digital film making to the same level and ease of use as photo editing apps today -- even easier.
You really think that the second link is the peak of gen AI? You really think that nothing else and no more major industry shifts are going to happen when gen AI gets cheaper, faster, algorithms get better, and hardware gets more powerful?