What do you think about AI?

I think AI is a tool like anything else. I don't mind it's existence and believe it can be useful, like any other tool can be useful. Obviously it can also be misused, and there's plenty of midwits who will treat it like digital satan or digital jesus which doesn't help anyone.

Of course it's unfortunate when people lose their jobs to automation. But I'm not particularly distraught over AI image generators being used for concept art or whatever. The people most vocally complaining about AI images strike me as the same people who gladly cheered for automation back when the consensus was that robots would take over blue collar jobs and leave the white collars alone. Now that everyone realised it's easier to make software replace creatives than hardware replace manual labor people are freaking out but it's hard to feel too much sympathy.

A lot of discourse around AI revolves around whether AI art is truly art. I've only referred to it as AI image generation in this post for a reason. It's an unfortunate quirk of english that the word for art is used interchangeably for paintings or drawings. In other european languages for instance the words are kept strictly separate, but in english it's common to refer to a painting as an artwork first. This isn't extended to other forms of art like books, movies, statues or what have you. Ex. you say "Spielberg's movies" but "Davinci's art". The result is that if an english speaker wants to talk about an image generated by an AI, the natural phrase that comes to his mind is AI art. This then invites someone else to inform him that AI art isn't actually art and the flamewar begins.
Personally I don't believe that any and all media are necessarily art. Not all movies are art, not all statues are art, not all books and not all images. What actually is or isn't is obviously extremely subjective and I'm not going to try and define that here, but I think most would say you need to be sentient, an actual person, to produce art. And so I don't consider AI made images to be art (obviously the guy writing the prompts isn't an artist either, it's still the AI making the actual image). But AI can still generate something useful, same way your wall you pay someone to paint in a single color isn't art but you still want it painted. AI is super helpful for low budget productions and getting mad about people using the tools at their disposal is absurd. There's still place for human painters in the world of actual art but if they get outcompeted in the more practical markets, well that's just unfortunate. Same thing they said to the seamstresses when they made sewing machines and to computers when they made computers.

Lumeinshin well, well, well.
https://support.humane.com/hc/en-us/articles/34374173951373-Important-Update-for-Consumer-Ai-Pin-Customers

I think AI is just data that wants to live much like how we are matter that wants to live
Why do most AIs operate like search engines? It must be because AIs are basically THE internet. A compressed down version of the net stored in simulated neural networks(or rather data that formed these networks). You want ugly ass "trending on deviantart/atrstation" art? you got it. You want efforts of an entire global net on your PC? just install DeepSeek.
If you think about it like that then AI is not "revolutionary" revolutionary since all it will end up doing is the same thing as what internet in general has been doing for the past 20+ years but much faster. All the bad and good things considering that it was trained mostly on data from social media probably bad things.
On a practical note though it seems kinda useless to me RN.
I think it will help us to make gigantic leaps various scientific/engineering fields im most interested in materials science imagine AI designed super alloy that has some "fuck you" properties thatd be cool. But also it will most definitely be used to advance the field of social contro-err i mean science so give some take some i guess.
Questions on how smart it is or is it really conscious or not seem more to be a form of distraction than anything real. I mean for me even bacteria are conscious and some mold on a petri dish seem smarter all of humanity combined. One thing im confident on though is that i dont think they will ever be allowed to have agency/independence meaning they will never be true AIs. Intelligence without agency/independence is not intelligence(meaning that artificial life research is where the real hunt for AIs happen)

sanner Do you ever notice how differently you behave on the net compared to real life? What if told you that you were talking to dogs on the internet this whole time? There no real people on the net and the idea that your virtual you is you or represents you is just facebook propoganda you are always taking to die hard something fans or uncompromising nazi/commie/whatever-else ideologues or with some godlike perfect personas but never with real people the only real way to talk to real people is to do it IRL and once you meet them IRL you will see that they are normal people same goes from their POV. On the net all you see in the internet no people. So im not really worried that i might not be talking to something i though i was that is a law of the net its always been like this and that is its prime quality.
What im worried about is that nobody is aware of this basic law actually people are not aware of any basic rules of the net im not even some super cool oldfag or anything but people keep falling for the simplest tricks, keep feeding trolls and so on. Hell people dont even know what trolls are anymore they just use the word to insult someone its very easy manipulate and control such people. People are so attached to their accounts to the point that their accounts end up defining what they are (you see this often with americans and teenagers) its crazy. The idea that internet is basically the same thing as just talking to people IRL is killing it. Internet is not the same thing as real life and its not supposed to be, the great freedoms that net provides to people come exactly from the fact that you are not IRL anymore.

I could keep writing about implications of this forever but the point is with AI all of these problems have gotten even worse than they used to be the after all greatest use case of AI is if course social media management. Poor people will be exploited to hell and back either AI scare will be used to create police state internet where everything is "verified" kinda like web3/urbit(what do you think the "everything app" idea was about?) without solving any real problems or people will finally wake up from their facebook era nightmare and stop talking net so seriously. (or maybe these two are really the same thing)

I do not use AI, and I don't care much for it. I think the fear mongering, especially among artists is over stated. I don't even see the argument that AI is 'stealing' artwork and using it as valid either. I can understand that jobs will be lost, as with all technological advances and it is unfortunate, but it happens all the time. I don't see a problem with it at all. I think artists will just have to market themselves better, find a new niche with their art, or move onto selling physical prints or something. There are a ton of things AI can't do still, and the way to keep making money as a writer/artist is to do those things. It is analogous to the ending of Neuromancer where the main character find an AI trapped behind a physical lock so it can't escape. Maybe I am being too optimistic. Hearing how the camera and photoshop didn't ruin all art, makes me thing I am not.

I'll explain why no art is being 'stolen' because that is a well known argument against it. I'm sure some people will take a problem with this. It is simply because in order to steal art it has to be lifted up and kept as a 1:1 copy. AI simply doesn't do that. It does what every person does. It looks at a massive catalogue of art and reinterprets it, using the techniques, colors, styles, and what have you to make something completely different. If I used an image making model that was trained on a person's art (let us say her name is Sally) and many others, it would take specific keywords and intent to make art that looked like Sally's art, and even then it wouldn't be stolen art. That is because Sally never made it. It would be an imitation of her style, but imitation of style is not theft. People do this all the time, and in my opinion the only reason it is getting an awful rap now is because AI can do it faster. I will agree the person writing the prompt isn't an artist much like a commissioner isn't an artist.

As for why I don't think artists should fear for their jobs, it is because AI fills in a niche that humans can't do. It creates art instantly instead of having to wait weeks or days for a person to make it. It does come at some drawbacks, which are usually acceptable. The people making it are looking more for immediate results rather than good results. I haven't heard of artists losing a huge amount of commissions just yet. If someone wasn't interested in paying you commissions before AI came into being, they certainly won't care now. The way AI works has some problems too. I hate saying this cliche, even when it is true and applicable, that AI is lacking a 'human touch'. I'm not talking about it being soulless or whatever. I'm referring to it only doing what you ask of it. It will only focus on the prompt, and not care about the other things. Humans on the other hand won't do that. They will make the drawing cohesive and make logical sense.

Doc I'm an artist and so are most of my friends and I agree and disagree with some parts of your post.
For one I think that AI does actually "steal", because you can often see direct copies of things, even including garbled artists signatures in the corner of the generated images. I know some art directors who say they simply can't use AI in the entertainment industry at all because it risks so much in terms of copyright and legal action that it's just not worth it. Similar to if they hired an artist who turned out to have been stealing art, or using stock materials that they didn't pay for and have no rights to, it puts the whole company/studio at risk of legal headaches.
I think the "soul" part is certainly an argument, and honestly I think there's something to be said for the creativity aspect too. If you've ever done commissions for someone, a LOT of the time people don't really know what they want. There's usually a general feeling or ideas, but a big part of an artist's job is to interpret an often vague and foggy request and turn it into something solid. Learning to do this and have a back and forth to eventually move towards what the client wanted, even if they didn't know exactly what they wanted at the start, is something that I think AI lacks. I guess this is another part of the human touch you mentioned.

HumbleReader
Doc
There is an even stronger argument that AI does not steal anything: piracy is not theft. AI debacle reignited copyright law discussion but not in a positive direction people now want even stricter copyright laws.

HumbleReader For one I think that AI does actually "steal", because you can often see direct copies of things, even including garbled artists signatures in the corner of the generated images.

I'll take your word for it. I don't mess with AI art enough to give a credible argument against it, except that in the USA the particularly strong first amendment will say that it is transformative enough to not be theft. I agree with it, because unless you can match the AI image to one specific image a person made then it is a totally new image. The garbled signature is only further proof that the AI doesn't actually understand anything. It gives a good approximation of what it is asked to do, without understanding anything deeper than surface level visuals.

HumbleReader I'm an artist and so are most of my friends

Have you noticed a slump in sales from AI? I am curious if my hypothesis in the third paragraph stands up to reality.

Pedestrian
I don't even know if what AI does is piracy. Stricter copyright laws is retarded. They are already so strong that soon fan art drawn on model will be a copyright violation.

I just saw this article and thought it fits the theme of this thread.

A new online charter school named Unbound Academy was approved by the Arizona state board and enrollments have just started. The school "will prioritize AI in its delivery of core academics" where students will work on their own for the first two hours of the day and personal projects for the next four hours. Teachers, or "guides" as they are referred to, will "serve as motivators and emotional support". The curriculum is said to be relying on third party providers along with their own apps, including one called AI tutor that "monitors how students are learning, and how they’re struggling".

What do you guys think? Should we consider this model as a good attempt at solving the teacher shortage and encourage the increasing involvement of technology, mainly AI, in elementary education? Or should we cry about the doomed AI dystopia?

Doc Have you noticed a slump in sales from AI? I am curious if my hypothesis in the third paragraph stands up to reality.

I haven't personally but I don't do much art work atm.
I think that the hardest hit so far have been the people who make adult content. There's an army of people out there now generating oceans of pornography and it buries the human-made stuff under all the noise, especially if their style was the typical anime-ish one which is so popular for generating.

The safest artists are those who have their own style, or even "brand", though I hate using that word because it reminds me of influencers peddling overpriced clothing.
But those artists like Loish, Yuming Li, Kim Jung Gi (RIP), etc are safest from the AI stuff because their work is so identifiable and people also love it because it was made by them. People can and do generate pictures that look like Loish's girls, but people still commission the artist herself because it was hand made by her, for them, and they love that specifically.

Maybe it's like the difference between printing off a Van Gogh from the internet versus actually going to see one in a museum? People could argue that it's mostly the same, but there's a huge difference, and not just in the visual quality.

gingermilk
sounds kinda stupid why would a parent send their kids to a school that uses AI when they could do use AI themselves? for me it seems like AIs are better for self study than anything and If AI scientists manage to create a highly standardized hi quality "AI teacher" that would be cool i guess.
But in general i dont see much future for schools/education its not just shortage but also quality of teachers AI wont really save it. It seems like people will soon realize that its more "cost effective" to just send their kids to tutors instead to learn professions directly from masters like in the old days.

gingermilk
I think it is worth a shot. I believe that most people can learn nearly anything by themselves, and the only thing making it not possible is their own self discipline. It will go through some new growing pains, and it can end in horrific failure since the AI doesn't understand how humans learn. The use of a teacher to do course correction is a very smart move, and one I agree is needed. I do think it is better than the current system we have, where smart students are cut at the knee cap so that dumb students can learn.

HumbleReader I think that the hardest hit so far have been the people who make adult content.

That's not a huge surprise. People that are horny are not known for standards. I thought that people who made characters with no backgrounds would also be heavily effected, because AI focuses on the character and not the background.

Pedestrian
Thank you for the article. It explains things well, and in a way that even most people would find non combative.

gingermilk
The pitch sounds good and reading through the article it does sound like they have thought about the usecase.
School was always on a bit of a shoestring budget from what I could gather so i'm hoping it doesn't become an excuse to give less resources to teachers in other areas.

Most interesting I think though is the 'two hour academics' and 'four hours of personal projects'. Might be a good way to channel a students interests and with the way they said about using the AI to help gauge student difficulty it could well be very productive.

There are of course all of the AI dystopia fears and worries we all share and it'll have to be quite heavily checked and appropriate safeguarding added.
I can sadly see it being used to enforce more strict rules for students and monitoring, but it may also be seen as less needed if students are inherently more interested in the things being covered.

Since it's a new school doing it we can only really wait and see. I'll be worried that not enough core topics will be covered, but also from what i've heard a lot of schools spend half the day covering whatever pet political goal the teachers have.. so maybe its not an issue
I've definitely been out of school long enough to not really know what it's like for modern students now

My friend needs to stop feeding the entirety of his homework into ChatGPT and submitting whatever the chatbot spits out.

Sean Oh I definitely feel that A LOT when it comes to people submitting GPT generated garbage in university, some people don't even read the course materials and ask everything to GPT.

I must confess that I do use GPT as a study partner of some sort, but I always make sure I read and try to understand the material, and then ask smaller doubts or rephrasings to GPT. Things like "I get what this is and what it does, it's xyz, correct?" then when it answers, I ask some doubts that I may have, like "is ijk management done automatically or do I have to manage it myself?", or "so a stack is just a LIFO, correct? Does this mean that if I do xyz and ijk, I have to make sure I close ijk before xyz, otherwise it'll fail? Can I think of it as if they were a pair of braces in code?"

It's honestly WAY more effective than submitting whatever GPT says blindly. And sure, GPT may make some mistakes sometimes, but the best thing is to read the course material first, so you can warn it about any contradictions. I've gotten a bit too spoiled with GPT ever since I started having conversations like that with it.

Anyone feel as if AI, in terms of LLMs, have kind of reached their peak as of now? A plateau maybe? I don't see anything that really "wows" me anymore, the wow factor has pretty much completely dissipated.
There was Claude 3.7 Sonnet recently and even that didn't exactly catch my interest, I've been so out of the loop with AI advances recently.

Funnily enough, I did meet an "AI artist" recently here in the real world, who apparently makes money by.. selling "AI art?" Strange times we live in.

gingermilk

I think it's quite dystopian but also really revealing of how incompetent they are. It's usually an actual human's job to really assess how another person is doing academically and what challenges they seem to be presented with, I feel like if anything. This is one of those things that maybe a human could be better at than an AI. Also, a lot of learning (to me) is about the accumulated failed and successful efforts you learn from. When you ask GPT a simple programming question, it gives it to you, which is nice and fine of course. But you're missing out on the valuable experience of shuffling through 20 different blogs, in each one you read you learn something "extra" that slowly accumulates into what we call a knowledge and experience. You learn the nomenclature/terminology/lingo used in your respective field, learn from your mistakes, etc. I feel like this is something that, with the advent of AI especially, will be undervalued and neglected even more.

Wicked technology. But all these reports of models trying to "break free" are somewhat concerning. I say "somewhat" because I assume retaining control of them is simple. Let them do their thing on air gapped machines. Just keep that shit away from the World Wide Web.

Give it an inch, and it'll take a mile.

I can't really help but think we're rapidly hurdling towards the worst of all worlds:

• Shitty corporate and sanitized AI trained to ignore 50% of the human condition so Coca Cola and AIPAC don't feel threatened.
• AI accelerationists won, flat-out. As a result there is absolutely no plan for alignment despite learning models increasingly displaying scheming behavior.
• Tech arms race between not just various companies but various countries.
• No economic or social plan for the potential redundancy of human labor as a concept.

Really, how exactly does it get worse? Giving them access to manufacturing plants and strategic military capabilities? 10 years, just give it 10 years.
At best, we can hope the technology is about to hit it's full potential, or there is some revolutionary pivot in global policy. Because it's hard to not feel like on current trajectory, humanity sleepwalking into annihilation.