OpenAI's latest image-generation update has taken social media by storm, as users are flooding X, Instagram, and Reddit with Studio Ghibli-style images
The bigger problem here is the loss of jobs and we are talking about a huge loss of employment that will affect economies really hard. The future looks more and more bleak.
The bigger problem here is the loss of jobs and we are talking about a huge loss of employment that will affect economies really hard.
I would say that’s a tangential problem. Because, you know, in theory…
But the deeper problem is ultimately in expertise as a learned skill developed over time and through practice. If you’re de-skilling work, you’re dismantling the tools by which we train the next generation of artists and production crews. If we were just replacing humans with machines for some route manual labor (like Pixar replaced Disney’s old hand drawn animations with a newer CGI look), the result would be a new style and perhaps less tendentious from route reproductions.
But we’re gutting the whole process of development which means you’re losing the pool of skilled professionals who know how to create CGI (or even flip-book style 60s animation) from first principles. That means sacrificing whole fields of specialized expertise for… what? This?
Reminds me of how millennials and generations onward have learned less and less maintainence skills to the point where most of us can’t sow or fix shit if it’s broken because we grew up in a consumer culture where you just buy a new one when the old one breaks. The quality of products have decreased too so they break quicker which gives people incentive to buy a new one instead of fixing.
My parents generation hold on to old items and they patch up their clothes and know how to fix shit around the house but they didn’t teach me any of that because the culture shifted and it wasn’t really needed.
We are not only losing skills and tactile learning and understanding, we are also rapidly torpedoing out planet into a massive trash heap. Which is a bit of a duh, I know, but still.
I for one have noticed the insane decline in the quality of clothes after covid. It is shockingly shitty now and tears faster than ever. Shirts and leggings I bought ten years ago still hold up while similar shirts and leggings from a few years ago already tear or unravel. It is shocking.
I guess this is what will eventually happen to art too.
millennials and generations onward have learned less and less maintainence skills to the point where most of us can’t sow or fix shit if it’s broken because we grew up in a consumer culture where you just buy a new one when the old one breaks
Planned Obselecence means a lot of modern consumer goods are deliberately designed to be difficult to repair.
More cheap plastic used for buckles and clasps. More glue used in place of screws or latches. More electronics soddered or otherwise made irreplaceable/inaccessible to an amateur. Shoes, in particular, leap to mind. Shoe repair used to be a standard dry cleaning service. It’s practically extinct today. Very few good ways to repair a modem sneaker.
My parents generation hold on to old items and they patch up their clothes and know how to fix shit around the house but they didn’t teach me any of that because the culture shifted and it wasn’t really needed.
There’s a time cost to repair and maintenance that’s often frustrating. I don’t blame folks for opting towards convenience. But I feel horrible every time I take out the trash, knowing how much plastic waste I accrue every month.
That will only happen if a society completely is reorganized to get rid of money or if they introduce universal basic income (at a rate that actually allows people to live).
Realistically I can’t see either of those things happening.
Just shifting the tax burden from salaries toward capital should make it less of a problem. When capital income is taxed less than salaries wealth concentration gets worse as workers are replaced.
But hey, GDP line goes up, so it must be good right?
Or, more broadly, when individuals are recognized as valued participants in the community rather than obsolete expenses to try and scratch off the books.
Realistically I can’t see either of those things happening.
Not under current business and political leadership, no. But with a strong union movement leading a next generation of working class people… maybe.
Because this will take time to happen, and the thing about not eating because you have literally no money, is it’s a rather immediate concern. You can’t just wait a decade or so for everyone to sort it out.
I’ve seen pretty much the same thing happening in the programming space. In another 10 years there’s going to be a massive shortage of senior programmers who are capable of doing anything more complicated than the AI, and able to sort out the messes everyone’s creating with it.
All the companies not wanting to hire entry level programmers right now is also a big problem for those starting now. I can only hope companies realize AI is not a replacement for a human’s learning ability.
I think it’s intentional. Where you had to think to do something, you’d inevitably learn to think. Where you had to put soul and wisdom and aesthetic feeling into your work, you’d inevitably touch those things for other parts of your life.
There are people higher in the society, who think lower castes shouldn’t have that and will be fine with knowledge and expertise just sufficient to do their jobs.
They wouldn’t be so hellbent on this particular technology, if they didn’t see how relatively recent progress changed that curve of expertise for radio, electric engineering, all engineering, computer science, automobiles, home appliances, and what not. So they see this consistently works for 25+ years.
So they work to deprive us of practice that allows to do more in all those directions. There’s a moat that could as well be an abyss between what we know and what we’d need to know to make relevant things. That moat wasn’t there 25 years ago. The path from a novice computer user to someone knowing all DOS interrupts and what DMA and IRQ are was less than the path from a novice computer user today to making a simple GUI application.
(I’ve got executive dysfunction, so feel these things more, but I’m certain they are true.)
All these job people are just barking up the wrong tree. Oh no my 9-5 is gone instead of oh wow now we collectively have less work load and should focus on resource redistribution.
Uh huh, so your going to grow and hunt your own nutrients then I guess? Build your own shelter?
I guess you could do all that if you had the money to buy the required land for it, but then again if you had that kind of money you didn’t need a job in the first place.
I mean technically you are correct, but more in the “it’s not the fall that kills me, but the landing” kind of way.
My body doesn’t shut down because I don’t clock in, it shuts down because I don’t have any food due to not clocking in.
And yes, the only reason I need to work is because how our society’s are set up. But guess what? I’m living in that society bottomtext so I can’t exactly get away from it. Unless I have loads of, you guessed it, money.
Not to mention that in a society based on trading goods for goods we still need to work to actually get our hands on those goods.
We could go farther back of course reaching the hunter&gatherer time period, but I somehow doubt you want to go that far.
Well it kind of does because if I don’t have a job then I don’t get money, And I need that to buy things like food and shelter. And yes that’s because of the way society is set up but since it’s the way every single society on Earth is set up, I think we have a problem.
There has never been a culture on Earth at any point in history that didn’t have some version of money.
With big asses being one of them. Obesity and it’s complications are getting out of control. I’m in favor of free glp-1 clinics and then free antidote clinics for whatever terrible blight the free glp-1 clinics unleash upon us in 5-10 years.
What if it allows other creative people to create newer works rather than these few people. Could spell a new Renaissance of creativity that didn’t exist before. Lots of people have great stories to tell but lacked artistic ability or resources.
One of my favorite things is when people mash up two popular songs and shared it on Napster. Can’t get anywhere close to that today without risking account bans on most sites. I say open the flood gates.
One of my favorite things is when people mash up two popular songs and shared it on Napster. Can’t get anywhere close to that today without risking account bans on most sites. I say open the flood gates.
Ever hear of Avalanches? Their music is incredible and it’s made entirely from samples, including some from well known artists such as the Beatles.
Though they are kind of the exception as their second album took 16 years to complete, in no small part due to asking permission for every sample.
But there’s entire genres of music that either utilize samples, or are literally constructed completely from them.
Girl Talk is another one that comes to mind. It’s pretty much entire albums full of mashups.
DJ Shadow is a legend who, I believe, only uses vinyl for sampling.
Hip hop would not have survived without sampling. Listen to Madlib and J Dilla. Check out Wu-Tang Clan and listen to some of RZA’s beats.
Check out MF DOOM’s producer alter ego (Metal Fingers). Dude put out an entire series of instrumental tracks made using samples called “Special Herbs,” that both he and other hip hop artists have used for backing tracks.
Beastie Boys were one of the first to do it with Paul’s Boutique.
I would bet that the majority of music that’s out there that is sample-based has not been approved by the original owners of the pieces. They only really get targeted if it becomes popular, which is why Avalanches chose to go the route of getting approvals.
Say what you will about the soulessnes of AI imagery (I find it very dissapointing), but this new technology is going to take our jobs argument is incredibly tired boomer-speak that shows a lack of understanding of history and a lack of imagination.
As a tool, it should be highly useful to artists to help them create things. However, the fact that these algorithms (I don’t care to call them AI because they aren’t) are stealing people’s work and then shitting out mediocre garbage and the people in the creative industry who tend to finance such things start thinking that “these machines can just do what an artist can so why pay for an artist” is the problem.
The bigger problem here is the loss of jobs and we are talking about a huge loss of employment that will affect economies really hard. The future looks more and more bleak.
I would say that’s a tangential problem. Because, you know, in theory…
But the deeper problem is ultimately in expertise as a learned skill developed over time and through practice. If you’re de-skilling work, you’re dismantling the tools by which we train the next generation of artists and production crews. If we were just replacing humans with machines for some route manual labor (like Pixar replaced Disney’s old hand drawn animations with a newer CGI look), the result would be a new style and perhaps less tendentious from route reproductions.
But we’re gutting the whole process of development which means you’re losing the pool of skilled professionals who know how to create CGI (or even flip-book style 60s animation) from first principles. That means sacrificing whole fields of specialized expertise for… what? This?
“A real labor of love”
Christ. It’s like people cosplaying as real artists.
I’m not sure Sam Altman even knows what labor is.
Oh God I just thought that was some random “AI artist.” It’s so much more cringe now that you’ve brought my attention to who posted it.
Reminds me of how millennials and generations onward have learned less and less maintainence skills to the point where most of us can’t sow or fix shit if it’s broken because we grew up in a consumer culture where you just buy a new one when the old one breaks. The quality of products have decreased too so they break quicker which gives people incentive to buy a new one instead of fixing.
My parents generation hold on to old items and they patch up their clothes and know how to fix shit around the house but they didn’t teach me any of that because the culture shifted and it wasn’t really needed.
We are not only losing skills and tactile learning and understanding, we are also rapidly torpedoing out planet into a massive trash heap. Which is a bit of a duh, I know, but still.
I for one have noticed the insane decline in the quality of clothes after covid. It is shockingly shitty now and tears faster than ever. Shirts and leggings I bought ten years ago still hold up while similar shirts and leggings from a few years ago already tear or unravel. It is shocking. I guess this is what will eventually happen to art too.
Planned Obselecence means a lot of modern consumer goods are deliberately designed to be difficult to repair.
More cheap plastic used for buckles and clasps. More glue used in place of screws or latches. More electronics soddered or otherwise made irreplaceable/inaccessible to an amateur. Shoes, in particular, leap to mind. Shoe repair used to be a standard dry cleaning service. It’s practically extinct today. Very few good ways to repair a modem sneaker.
There’s a time cost to repair and maintenance that’s often frustrating. I don’t blame folks for opting towards convenience. But I feel horrible every time I take out the trash, knowing how much plastic waste I accrue every month.
That will only happen if a society completely is reorganized to get rid of money or if they introduce universal basic income (at a rate that actually allows people to live).
Realistically I can’t see either of those things happening.
Just shifting the tax burden from salaries toward capital should make it less of a problem. When capital income is taxed less than salaries wealth concentration gets worse as workers are replaced.
But hey, GDP line goes up, so it must be good right?
Or, more broadly, when individuals are recognized as valued participants in the community rather than obsolete expenses to try and scratch off the books.
Not under current business and political leadership, no. But with a strong union movement leading a next generation of working class people… maybe.
What about the transition.
Because this will take time to happen, and the thing about not eating because you have literally no money, is it’s a rather immediate concern. You can’t just wait a decade or so for everyone to sort it out.
It’ll likely be a bloodsoaked mess, given the history of these things.
I’ve seen pretty much the same thing happening in the programming space. In another 10 years there’s going to be a massive shortage of senior programmers who are capable of doing anything more complicated than the AI, and able to sort out the messes everyone’s creating with it.
All the companies not wanting to hire entry level programmers right now is also a big problem for those starting now. I can only hope companies realize AI is not a replacement for a human’s learning ability.
I think it’s intentional. Where you had to think to do something, you’d inevitably learn to think. Where you had to put soul and wisdom and aesthetic feeling into your work, you’d inevitably touch those things for other parts of your life.
There are people higher in the society, who think lower castes shouldn’t have that and will be fine with knowledge and expertise just sufficient to do their jobs.
They wouldn’t be so hellbent on this particular technology, if they didn’t see how relatively recent progress changed that curve of expertise for radio, electric engineering, all engineering, computer science, automobiles, home appliances, and what not. So they see this consistently works for 25+ years.
So they work to deprive us of practice that allows to do more in all those directions. There’s a moat that could as well be an abyss between what we know and what we’d need to know to make relevant things. That moat wasn’t there 25 years ago. The path from a novice computer user to someone knowing all DOS interrupts and what DMA and IRQ are was less than the path from a novice computer user today to making a simple GUI application.
(I’ve got executive dysfunction, so feel these things more, but I’m certain they are true.)
I don’t know about you, but I don’t absolutely require job for my life. I do require nutrients and shelter though…
All these job people are just barking up the wrong tree. Oh no my 9-5 is gone instead of oh wow now we collectively have less work load and should focus on resource redistribution.
Uh huh, so your going to grow and hunt your own nutrients then I guess? Build your own shelter?
I guess you could do all that if you had the money to buy the required land for it, but then again if you had that kind of money you didn’t need a job in the first place.
Zoom out man. They were being sardonic.
Do you really not see the difference between food/shelter, things that you WILL die without, and employment?
The only reason you need the latter for the former (and I mean, no you don’t but whatever) is because of how society is set up.
Your body doesn’t shut down if you don’t clock in to your job for X days.
I mean technically you are correct, but more in the “it’s not the fall that kills me, but the landing” kind of way.
My body doesn’t shut down because I don’t clock in, it shuts down because I don’t have any food due to not clocking in.
And yes, the only reason I need to work is because how our society’s are set up. But guess what? I’m living in that society bottomtext so I can’t exactly get away from it. Unless I have loads of, you guessed it, money.
Not to mention that in a society based on trading goods for goods we still need to work to actually get our hands on those goods.
We could go farther back of course reaching the hunter&gatherer time period, but I somehow doubt you want to go that far.
Why do we have to go backwards? We’re the most technologically advanced that we’ve ever been.
Your brain has just been rotted by capitalism.
Hah. you can be as “technologically advanced” as can be, if your society still lags behind significantly it doesn’t matter.
It’s not that my brain has been rotted by capitalism, it’s that I absolutely have no faith that we will ever reach beyond tribe mentality.
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Well it kind of does because if I don’t have a job then I don’t get money, And I need that to buy things like food and shelter. And yes that’s because of the way society is set up but since it’s the way every single society on Earth is set up, I think we have a problem.
There has never been a culture on Earth at any point in history that didn’t have some version of money.
I know what you were saying, but you’ve missed the point.
What? Of course there has. Money isn’t something that has just existed forever. It’s an entirely man-made concept.
Hopefully Soylent Green comes fast to save us.
Not an AI problem though. Perhaps AI will help some people understand that there are some big ass problems in our society.
Time for TheLuigiAI.
With big asses being one of them. Obesity and it’s complications are getting out of control. I’m in favor of free glp-1 clinics and then free antidote clinics for whatever terrible blight the free glp-1 clinics unleash upon us in 5-10 years.
I’ve never read or enjoyed any AI works so far, tbh.
This is why I still have a coal furnace to heat my house. So many people just use furnaces without thinking of the displaced economic value.
What if it allows other creative people to create newer works rather than these few people. Could spell a new Renaissance of creativity that didn’t exist before. Lots of people have great stories to tell but lacked artistic ability or resources.
One of my favorite things is when people mash up two popular songs and shared it on Napster. Can’t get anywhere close to that today without risking account bans on most sites. I say open the flood gates.
Eh? Of course you could.
You think you could?
I think the minute it gets popular the lawyers start getting paid
Ever hear of Avalanches? Their music is incredible and it’s made entirely from samples, including some from well known artists such as the Beatles.
Though they are kind of the exception as their second album took 16 years to complete, in no small part due to asking permission for every sample.
But there’s entire genres of music that either utilize samples, or are literally constructed completely from them.
Girl Talk is another one that comes to mind. It’s pretty much entire albums full of mashups.
DJ Shadow is a legend who, I believe, only uses vinyl for sampling.
Hip hop would not have survived without sampling. Listen to Madlib and J Dilla. Check out Wu-Tang Clan and listen to some of RZA’s beats.
Check out MF DOOM’s producer alter ego (Metal Fingers). Dude put out an entire series of instrumental tracks made using samples called “Special Herbs,” that both he and other hip hop artists have used for backing tracks.
Beastie Boys were one of the first to do it with Paul’s Boutique.
I would bet that the majority of music that’s out there that is sample-based has not been approved by the original owners of the pieces. They only really get targeted if it becomes popular, which is why Avalanches chose to go the route of getting approvals.
Say what you will about the soulessnes of AI imagery (I find it very dissapointing), but this new technology is going to take our jobs argument is incredibly tired boomer-speak that shows a lack of understanding of history and a lack of imagination.
As a tool, it should be highly useful to artists to help them create things. However, the fact that these algorithms (I don’t care to call them AI because they aren’t) are stealing people’s work and then shitting out mediocre garbage and the people in the creative industry who tend to finance such things start thinking that “these machines can just do what an artist can so why pay for an artist” is the problem.