AIs gunning for our precious freelancers

[malloc]

Over the past few days, I've been reading that they now have AIs that can produce artwork. That was supposed to be our thing, the one field that computers and robots would leave to us as everything else got automated. People keep telling me not to worry about automation rendering us obsolete, but it gets harder and harder everyday.

[Rounin Ryuuji]

Eh, it seems to be mostly an entertaining curiosity.

[alice]

It's when "they" have AI's that can produce more AI's that you should start to worry.

[Moose-tache]

AI mostly produces the same kind of commercial art you would pay to manufacture. Need a creepy pencil drawing for your short story anthology? Beep boop. This kind of art is already a converyor belt, so I'm not surprised it's being automated. I know a woman whose whole job is recombining simple shapes on Canva to make templates boring people will pay money for. That lass is living on borrowed time, for sure. I place freeing the human race from making monotonous Canva templates right alongside freeing the human race from having to make our own widgets by hand.

The sort of art that people remember centuries later and think "Man, the human race does some wacky things" is mostly inscrutable rat garbage in its own time period. I would guess that if an AI produced whatever is the 2022 equivalent of Pollack or Monet, it would be immediately scrapped as "defective." So you've still got that to look forward to. Art as a respectable career for corporate drones may be doomed, but you can still be an antisocial visionary who dies with one ear and no checking account.

[Rounin Ryuuji]

Is somebody an edgelord this morning?

[linguistcat]

The problem is (for the AI creators) that it's coming out many of them have sampled and trained their AI on a lot of artworks that are under copyright or other licensing without being given permission for the use, to the point that a user can input the names of specific artists from specific sites, and get a good approximation of their art style with the site specific watermarks included. This may turn into a major legal battle between the original artists and the websites they've uploaded art on and the makers of these AIs.

At this point, AI are only intelligent in proportion to the people training them and what they are trained on, and even then they are going to have a very narrow intelligence.

[malloc]

Art as a respectable career for corporate drones may be doomed, but you can still be an antisocial visionary who dies with one ear and no checking account.

Sure, but the vast majority of people need careers for corporate drones to survive and automation stands to eliminate pretty much all of those. It seems hard to imagine anything less than genocidal catastrophe when 90% of the population is unemployable and thus worthless from the perspective of the ruling class. Imagine if cows suddenly became inedible. Would cattle ranchers continue to support vast herds indefinitely out of charity? No, they would eliminate them as quickly and cheaply as possible to cut their losses.

[Rounin Ryuuji]

The problem is (for the AI creators) that it's coming out many of them have sampled and trained their AI on a lot of artworks that are under copyright or other licensing without being given permission for the use...

I didn't actually know this. I kind-of hope some form of legal action shuts it down now — art theft seems to already be a pretty big problem.

[Travis B.]

Art as a respectable career for corporate drones may be doomed, but you can still be an antisocial visionary who dies with one ear and no checking account.

Sure, but the vast majority of people need careers for corporate drones to survive and automation stands to eliminate pretty much all of those. It seems hard to imagine anything less than genocidal catastrophe when 90% of the population is unemployable and thus worthless from the perspective of the ruling class. Imagine if cows suddenly became inedible. Would cattle ranchers continue to support vast herds indefinitely out of charity? No, they would eliminate them as quickly and cheaply as possible to cut their losses.

And that is when the workers turn around and eliminate the ruling class. If the ruling class won't pay the workers en masse, what purpose do the workers have in permitting the ruling class to even exist?

[Rounin Ryuuji]

Really, there's little reason for the working classes to leave them around now, at least in my experience.

[Travis B.]

Really, there's little reason for the working classes to leave them around now, at least in my experience.

The key thing is that in many cases the threshold that needs to be surmounted for popular revolution is just too great - too much of the population, for all their complaints, in the end is sufficiently comfortable that they will not attempt to bring about revolution. But if the ruling class suddenly stops paying much of the working class, leaving them to starve, that suddenly changes, as people facing starvation are going to be far more willing to do away with the ruling class.

[Rounin Ryuuji]

Yes, I didn't mean to dispute that, I was simply (instinctually, not because I thought any one person needed to hear it) pointing out they're already broadly obsolete.

[Moose-tache]

The problem is (for the AI creators) that it's coming out many of them have sampled and trained their AI on a lot of artworks that are under copyright or other licensing without being given permission for the use...

I didn't actually know this. I kind-of hope some form of legal action shuts it down now — art theft seems to already be a pretty big problem.

This seems like an odd thing to be upset about. Live artists get inspiration from copyrighted art without permission all the time. There's nothing illegal about it, even if I charge money for the end result.

Oh, and the proper term is Edgemistress, thank you.

[Rounin Ryuuji]

The problem is (for the AI creators) that it's coming out many of them have sampled and trained their AI on a lot of artworks that are under copyright or other licensing without being given permission for the use...

I didn't actually know this. I kind-of hope some form of legal action shuts it down now — art theft seems to already be a pretty big problem.

This seems like an odd thing to be upset about. Live artists get inspiration from copyrighted art without permission all the time. There's nothing illegal about it, even if I charge money for the end result.

Training an AI on art sounds a lot more like nonconsensual and unpaid use of somebody else's work, and for commercial purposes (a certain violation of copyright law), than a human taking inspiration from something they did not happen to create.

Oh, and the proper term is Edgemistress, thank you.

I've used Edgelord as a gender-neutral term for a long time.

[malloc]

And that is when the workers turn around and eliminate the ruling class. If the ruling class won't pay the workers en masse, what purpose do the workers have in permitting the ruling class to even exist?

But can the workers actually defeat the ruling class? They have the military and police on their side after all, plus all the military advantages that rapidly advancing AI will confer. Imagine facing an AI dedicated to military tactics capable of outwitting any human tactician the way chess computers can defeat any chess master.

[Moose-tache]

I didn't actually know this. I kind-of hope some form of legal action shuts it down now — art theft seems to already be a pretty big problem.

This seems like an odd thing to be upset about. Live artists get inspiration from copyrighted art without permission all the time. There's nothing illegal about it, even if I charge money for the end result.

Training an AI on art sounds a lot more like nonconsensual and unpaid use of somebody else's work, and for commercial purposes (a certain violation of copyright law), than a human taking inspiration from something they did not happen to create.

The key word there being "sounds like." Can you demonstrate that your brain is doing something neurologically distinct from an AI when you look at Disney villains in order to create your own cartoon villain? Does analysis and recombination become some lofty, numenous marvel when it happens inside a three pound hamburger patty?

Also, my objection to the term "edgelord" is not that it isn't pink enough, but whatever. It's better than my usual title of "not allowed in this Waffle House ever again."

[Travis B.]

This seems like an odd thing to be upset about. Live artists get inspiration from copyrighted art without permission all the time. There's nothing illegal about it, even if I charge money for the end result.

Training an AI on art sounds a lot more like nonconsensual and unpaid use of somebody else's work, and for commercial purposes (a certain violation of copyright law), than a human taking inspiration from something they did not happen to create.

The key word there being "sounds like." Can you demonstrate that your brain is doing something neurologically distinct from an AI when you look at Disney villains in order to create your own cartoon villain? Does analysis and recombination become some lofty, numenous marvel when it happens inside a three pound hamburger patty?

Consider cases such as this involving silkscreen prints of Prince created by Andy Warhol allegedly based off of someone else's photo of Prince, though.

[Rounin Ryuuji]

The key word there being "sounds like."

It's just a manner of speaking. No need to read something in it.

Can you demonstrate that your brain is doing something neurologically distinct from an AI when you look at Disney villains in order to create your own cartoon villain? Does analysis and recombination become some lofty, numenous marvel when it happens inside a three pound hamburger patty?

Is it a "numinous marvel"? I do not know if I would necessarily use such hyperbolic language to describe it,though I find the combination of words rather pretty. I do not think everything my human has ever produced is numinously marvelous. I also wouldn't appreciate an AI being trained on stories I'd written, to mechanically produce similar ones with which mine would have to compete for attention, and which would feel like an uncanny distortion of something for which I care a very great deal, whether or not it is marvellous or just me having an overactive imagination and recording the overactive imaginings.

That said, it does look to me like the processes are different. It would appear the human mind can synthesise using a far broader range of influences, and do so consciously and with intention (I have seen no demonstration of artificial intelligence having anything like what we would call human consciousness), though there are also subconscious elements to the creation. That said, the human ability to adapt and synthesise appears to be innate, the capacity of AI to do so has to be deliberately created, and deliberately created using existing creative works that are protected by copyright. The human brain does not have to be taught to do this. Presumably, it evolved this capacity at some point, but it did not evolve it using copyrighted works (or at a time at which there was, to our knowledge, any notion of copyright or a copyright-like system) deliberately taken without consent from the people who created them, and for a purpose they might disapprove.

And does it have to be neurologically different for me to express an opinion that one thing should be allowed and the other not? The basis on which I would make the judgement is not neurological similarity, but rather an artist's right to have a say in whatever derivatives of their work are produced (I actually have very strong views on this point, but they're rather outside the scope of the discussion).

An AI is, as far as can (to the best of my knowledge) be presently demonstrated, nonsentient (if it were sentient, I would instead be arguing that its enslavement is unconscionable and that it ought to be held to the same moral standards, and receive roughly the same rights, as any other sentient and thinking entity), and consequently incapable of creative expression. That it might, using copyrighted works, produce something that instantly passes into the public domain, is at least a little problematic on several levels (not just of consent, but of, as mentioned before, producing more competition for attention). Whether or not the act of human creation is a numinous marvel or not is unrelated to whether this AI was produced in a way that probably violated intellectual property law in a way that could be a direct detriment (taking away paying commissioners, and again, also simply the nonconsensual use of their work, and to an end they may disapprove) to the creators in question.

Also, my objection to the term "edgelord" is not that it isn't pink enough, but whatever. It's better than my usual title of "not allowed in this Waffle House ever again."

I didn't think it was the pinkness, my response was a meant as an equivalent to a simple, "Don't try to tell me how to speak my own language, thank you

It does, however, strike me that you seem to be acting in a deliberately unpleasant fashion, and that I do not understand why. I can't recollect ever being directly unpleasant to you or anything. The original "Edgelord" comment was in reference to how you seem to phrase things in an apparently deliberately grotesque fashion (like calling a human brain "a three pound hamburger patty", or some random creative person who might exist now "an antisocial visionary who dies with one ear and no checking account").

[rotting bones]

This idea floating around recently that AIs store and reproduce their input data is not true. You wouldn't say this if you compared the size of an input, say 5 GB, with the size of a trained model, maybe 2 MB. Furthermore, AIs are explicitly selected for generalizability, which entails that they must avoid overfitting to the input data. See regularization.

Yes, AIs are trained on very large quantities of input, but the human brain was also structured by millions of years of evolution, and then trained on years of sensory input since birth. (BTW, there are evolutionary AI models too.) If you want the correct analogy to AIs here, see pre-trained models. Basically, if you have a neural network that was trained on a large number of pictures, then you need a very small input dataset to train it to distinguish between highly specialized pictures you are interested in. This is true even if none of those specialized pictures were present in dataset that the network was originally trained on. It's almost as if most of the training images are used by the network to learn the concept of interpreting pictures generally.

---

I might have contributed to this misunderstanding by once commenting that contemporary neural nets are as complex as a frog's brain. While this is true, it gives a misleading impression. In general, if a fully connected neural net is more complex, you need more data to train it, and its outputs stick more closely to the training data. In fact, the generalizability of a network can be improved by making it simpler, sometimes by dropping random nodes in the middle of the network. This technique is called dropout. It makes the network more prone to "error" in a strict sense, but sometimes errors in the strict sense can be "creativity" in practice.

At the same time, you can create a more complex network by training smaller modules on specific subsets of the data, and connecting them in a logical architecture, somewhat like the different sections of the brain are responsible for different functions. This is a completely different way to get a competent network that's more complex than a frog's brain without requiring more data or overfitting. Even with the networks we already have, the original AlphaGo had something like distinct logical and "intuitive" components, for example.

(Sorry if I added to the confusion. I was intimidated at the thought of having to explain all these distinctions, and I have no idea if I have succeeded.)

---

I personally make no distinction as to whether AI art counts as "real art". There are only physical states and transitions between them governed by the laws of physics. This is not to say that AI researchers have no social responsibility. We must remember that large-scale social organization has no inherently natural form, but has its source in our desires.

So as for whether human art is rendered "obsolete", well, if the economy is natural and rational, then we would no doubt all be replaced by machines eventually like Robin Hanson suggested. However, this begs the question: Whom are we obsolete for? Remember, practical AIs desire nothing and are not self-driven consumers of art. Instead of looking for the justification of our existence in the sentience of AIs, why shouldn't we, desiring beings, derail the course of nature like we've always done, and take what's ours through the glorious irrationality of democracy?

My understanding is that AIs are usually trained on the vast stores of uncopyrighted data available in the public domain. Researchers are required to ask for permission to use copyrighted data like everyone else. If they have failed to do so, you could hit them with a class action lawsuit. This would make sense under capitalism, where an artist's livelihood depends on selling their art.

(I would hope that under socialism, scientists and artists would be free to explore the outer and inner realms without regard for profit. But so many people have told me they enjoy the suffering capitalism inflicts that I'm basically waiting for death these days.)

[zompist]

Note: I split this topic because obviously people want to talk about it, and that's not what the venting thread is for. Folks, when you have a hot-button topic to discuss, please start a new topic.

FWIW I think the original worry is correct: under our capitalist system, the likelihood is that less money will go to artists who need and deserve it, and who as a class produced the training data, and more money to techbros who don't need or deserve it. It's not the end of the world or the outmoding of humans, it's just a way to make the world a little shittier.

Like most every technology, it could be used for good instead, as a tool for artists rather than against them. Just like modern illustration and 3-D modeling tools allow more people and not just AAA studios to create great video games, AI imagery could allow artists to do even more amazing things.