Class Action Filed Against Stable Diffusion, Midjourney, and DeviantArt

Interesting blog post, his take is spot on.

i feel like the road to the emancipation of the human race from the slavery of forced labour is lined with the gravestones of all our jobs. this is coming for all of us eventually, were gonna go from 95% employment to 5% employment.

its a painful process but at the end of it human beings will be liberated to be artists for the sake of art, will be there to raise their kids, to look after their parents in their old age, will have time for their friends and partners and for themselves. its gonna be a better world.

its also going to be a painful transition before we reach the tipping point where we are forced to accept our current model of asset distribution in society cannot survive our technological advances. and many of those people with the most assets will be the ones who resist the change, because they have 'won' the current game and will not want to give back some of their power, and they own the governments, they own the media, they own the financial institutions, and they will use this power to maintain this current model long after its dead in the water at the expense of, unfortunately, mostly the have nots in society. were looking at struggling artists here, but the trend is right across the spectrum.





its gonna get worse before it gets better but i think ultimately it will get better, and in the long run the idea of credit for something like art is going to change because its not going to be so strongly tied to hard cash profit as we move from a society of professionals to a society of hobbyists. itll be a question of pride rather than livelihood.


unfortunately, if we look at something like macdonalds, even quality is not gonna stop things shifting. society is going to eat itself, because weve designed this model as a means of giving everyone consumer choice, a distribution of resources and an ability to compete but the profit driver we use is going to force through an inferior product that destroys all the jobs in the industry and forms monopolies. no one wants to eat macdonalds rather than a real burger made from real food, no one wants parents trying to support their families to lose their jobs, no one wants megacorps to take control of the world, but as a collective society is going to make the choices that force that direction because its inherent to the rules of the game we have created right?

re ChatGPT -- I think fiction writers are safer than artists, to be fair. We are far less likely to called upon to create something blatantly derivative for a cheaper price, eg a generic book cover. Those lyrics were utterly terrible and it doesn't take a Nick Cave level of creative intellect to see that. Maybe with the right amount of metal behind them they might be okay but otherwise it was high school level shit. And not the high school level shit from a future writer. The high school level shit from someone whose vocabulary and grasp of poetic construction is hopelessly inadequate to express their many, many feelings. I suppose what it means so far is, sure, a million monkeys and a million typewriters might produce Shakespeare, but it'd take thousands of actual humans to find it amongst the drek. Without those humans, you'd just have more monkeys finding things 'close enough' to Shakespeare, and then using those as reference to make more 'close enough'...until, as with the old game of Chinese Whispers, it's not even vaguely like Shakespeare.

And that is true whether it's monkeys at typewriters or incredibly advanced AI figuring out how to remove noise to create simulacra. I'm not even going to touch on Cave's pompous AF discussion of how suffering is behind all art because it isn't. Sometimes it's joy. Sometimes it's curiosity. Sometimes it's boredom. What it always is, always, is an emotional response.

And that's why the only things ChatGPT can really do well so far are dry, emotionless summaries of news (an excellent usage of AI!) and writing ad copy (also excellent: I have writer friends in that field who aren't sure they have much of a soul left).



This is painful because I've been called clever many, many times. When I was younger, even after seeing that episode way back when, I thought 'clever' was a compliment. It can be, but usually isn't. Clever is what smart kids use to conceal their lack of authentic experience and having 'something they want to say' that hasn't already been said before. Repackaging it in a clever way isn't bad, but it's not as effective or affective as unclever earnest writing, especially unclever earnest writing that is also backed by an understanding of why 'words thrown together in a comprehensible fashion' isn't enough either.

It's that last sentence that really applies to this discussion though: AI cannot 'think' and it cannot 'want'.

And ChatGPT is a long way off being clever.

One last thought, one already delved about the place but worth echoing here: if Nick Cave is right, and the only way AI could write in 'the style of Nick Cave' is to suffer and reflect on that suffering, then the only way to teach AI to do it might be to bring it faaaaar too close to a state where it can see humans as an enemy, if only for needlessly teaching it how to suffer just so it can produce art.

All of this has happened before, and all of it will happen again. Frakkin' toasters.

Machines will never take the jobs of creative people because they simply are not creative

Machines just follow a set of commands and ultimetly decides everything on a yes-or-no fashion. They are unable to understand context(one guy in this tread mentioned how they nearly replaced the classic statistic. Rest easy, it will not happen. Every branch of science requires data to be analyzed in context, something computers simply cant do, you cant trust a computer to get anything much more fancy than saying if the p-value is above 0.95, the pc can give the numbers but you need a dude to interpret what the numbers actually mean). And they are just as dumb and uncreative today as they were back on 1820

Yeah, you can program it to put mustaches on the pixels between the nose and the mouth, you can program it to pick any memetic figure and insert on the most different backgrounds, dosent get around the fact you need a guy to program the computer to do these things. A computer cant create a book, it can put together a surprising amount of sentences that might seem make sense, but it still cant get beyond the algorithym that dictates how to arrange those words, nor it can really understand each word. A computer can make associations between words and make connections that makes it seem like it gets the meaning, but it ultimetly dont really understand any of them. A computer cant even write a masterpiece by just making a random string of words like the "1000 trained monkeys" analogy because it is incapable to even make a random string in the first place! It can make a string that SEEM random, but is just following the code of the rng-generator

Computers just follow commands and nothing else. No matter what you read about machine-learning and stuff, its just about creating more elaborate codes(usually to make them really good at detecting patterns), but it will still be limited to those codes and nothing beyond. Artists will just have to learn how to make the computer spit the art they envisioned and claim as theirs, but we will never get to that point where computers will be telling us stories they made on their own
Even replacing humans for dumb labor is not gonna happen anytime soon, stuff like square-cube law is just bitches for those who want human-sized slave-bots

The link is more an issue of copyright than about advance of AI, with the internet, its hard to claim you were the first person who made something, but its not limited to art. Its hard in general to tell what is copyrighted stuff and what is public domain and the line between plagius and parody can be surprisingly tricky to draw. Nothing is ever done with no influence from something, so where exactly you draw the line between "based on" and "copied from" can be tricky. Much of what is being directed against deviantart can also apply to the likes of youtube or google

And then there are the real OG victims of emergent AI: translators.

"

feike wrote:

Machines will never take the jobs of creative people because they simply are not creative

they already are

"

feike wrote:

Even replacing humans for dumb labor is not gonna happen anytime soon

its been happening for decades. youre buying machine line produced goods that have been picked in a warehouse by automated bots and youre paying for them at the self checkout machine.







people thought that artists would be the last to go, but actually when u look at whats happening its gonna force a lot of people to rethink what they thought they knew about human creativity, and maybe even our consciousness as a whole, our 'self'.

how much of it is just seeing 10 things and putting them all together in the combinator? how much of it is random noise?

sure ur gonna have to have a human at the end of the chain who says ya, this is cool art lets use this one out of the 400 the machine spat out. but what will happen is you had 50 paid artists who are now gonna be replaced by 1 guy whos job is basically being an art critic, not even an artist, more like a casting director.

people are losing their jobs to machines already, creative people, labour people, all kinds of people. people have been losing jobs to machines for as long as machines have been a thing, its the whole reason we created machines.

"

Foreverhappychan wrote:

Yea since toasters (industrial bread factory/supermarket bread) exist, our bread sucks and real boulangerie are disappearing. Those modern baguettes taste like shit and kids get allergy eating them.

It became really fucking hard to find a traditional boulangerie even in France or Europe because while the traditional bread maker need to wake up at 3 of the morning and work his ass off, those industrial cheats are just microwaving frozen baguettes.

Sure we have cheaper bread and we have access to a lot of it, we don t need to go walk in city center to only buy bread, we just need to go to the supermarket and we get all of our food. Everything taste blend and it sucks when you lived long enough to taste real fucking bread.

I liked to go to the boulangerie down my little street, it smelled good and the bread maker was to me some sort of magician. Sadly lot of people did not like that and the guy closed his shop. AI will make a lot of guys close their shop.


Fucking toasters indeed.

ya we have a chain in the uk called gregs, theyre shit, their food is utter trash. similar story.

they took over all the small local bakers because big chain, pushed out everyones small bakery in your local area, price wared them or just bought them out directly.


then they stopped baking bread and bakery goods on site and would deliver pre cooked bread full of preservatives and shite because cheaper to centrally cook shit fake bread and deliver that daily than bake on site in 100s of stores.

then half their shops stopped even doing traditional bakery stuff and started just selling coffee and sandwiches.


now a lot of people just dont have any local bakery in the uk at all, not even a shit gregs one because the garbage local gregs that killed their real bakery is now a coffee shop.

Good thread, came to add something fun (hopefully).


The Always Sunny writes had made a pilot that sadly didn't make it - but it's fun as hell (imo). Related, because eventually Robot (the Data of the crew) tries to conspire with the ship's microwave for an uprising.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fR7av02YIAg



:-)