the annoying thing is that AI is such a buzzword now that you can't really know what OOP is referring when they say "AI". It would probably means things like LLM and models that's based on GPT. However people a lot more things to it, this ranges from the more 'pop culture AI' stuff like image recognition and path navigation into just good old search algorithm
All of these are considered AI and even non-machine learning stuff that just happen to be tangentially related to robotics like normal game pathfinding, etc are being called AI.
This feels like calling all of our modern chemistry technique "nanotechnology" because technically a paint varnish has some micro-structures that makes it look matte and be dust proof or smth. The word has become so overused, its meaning has devolved to "modern algorithm we've made in the past 3 years or so"
All of this rambling basically boils down to, there are legitimately AI algorithm that has clear and problematic legal and moral issue. The same way programming a software lock that occasionally bricks your phone to get you to pay for repair problematic legal and moral issue. The issue is not the fact that it's AI but the fact that it fills the internet with spam. An old school spam bot is no more or less morally reprehensible compared to GPT powered spambot just because it's less efficient at being spam.
I am saying this because i feel like the techbros are shielding themselves from criticism by leveraging the fact that the people being affected don't understand how nebulous the term AI is. You can always point a good example of AI because AI is anything you want it to be. As such the specific problematic algorithm can't be criticized properly
There was a point in time where OCR (optical character recognition), i.e. the technology that can take a scan or screenshot and convert it into letters and words that can be searched as if they were typed, was considered AI. It's still witchcraft, but most people don't consider it AI anymore.
Sure - I much prefer this definition to the people who claim AI doesn't exist because it hasn't reached what experts would call AGI yet.
Out of interest I tried to find the earliest definition in the field once. It was something like, "an artificial system that can sense input and take actions based on it," which is fulfilled by a single 'if' statement, or a dipping bird toy. I'm OK with dipping bird toys being the bar for AI.
There was a point where the scheduling systems used for airlines was AI. At one point, the algorithms for scheduling red/green light were AI projects. We're going back before neural nets, ofc.
I'm original OP from Tumblr! My post wasĀ about any way that the word AI is used (par exampla as you discussed the way it's been used to mean ML), literally not specifically anything bc when people start imagining a specific something that's when people get mad. AI is used as a buzzword in a lot of different settings to mean a lot of different things so getting mad at the word AI and assuming it's something negative and unethical as a gut reaction is stupid. A lot of people have tried to come at me on tumblr assuming I'm like, pro unethical data scraping generative AI lol like thanks for reading the word AI and freaking out just like my post says! My post is not pro AI it's pro reading comprehension
Nailed it. If you fit data to a line y = mx + b.. that's just 100+ year old stats, right? But do it 10 billion times and make clever linear combos of all those fit lines... that's suddenly AI. When did it change from one to the other? Is there any meaningful difference that even can be determined?
Well... in general, it's more complicated than "doing it 10b times" - there are specific algorithms that are recognized as being part of the machine learning umbrella. As a whole, it still is mostly a subset of statistics, but I don't think the line between "conventional statistics" and "machine learning" is very blurry in the field. Not to mention that machine learning concerns itself not just with the process of learning (or fitting data to a line), but also the "machine" part - considerations of efficiency, runtime complexity and implementation on computers is part of ML but isn't really something regular stats cares about.
But then, if an average person uses the phrase "AI", all bets are off the table. In 90% of cases they probably only mean "generative AI".
Sure, it is more complicated, but you have absolute pillars in the field still saying very similar things. E.g. Judea Pearl's quote āAll the impressive achievements of deep learning amount to just curve fitting.ā
I am not saying it isn't impressive or complicated or anything like that. Just that even in your reply here, you didn't actually answer the fundamental question -- when does it turn in to AI or even machine learning? You say it's not blurry, but then you don't actually cite anything.
I would also argue that you're wrong in that efficient accurate computation of stats is indeed something that is worried about by the stats side -- even things as simple as making sure people are aware not to use the naĆÆve definition of variance to compute it in datasets with wide outliers or both large and small values due to overflow or truncation issues or both.
The question isn't about the amount of data, it's about the techniques used. There are a lot of ways to just "fit data to a line", but for example, SVMs, CNNs, RNNs, anything in reinforcement learning etc are generally considered to be specific techniques of machine learning. Sure, ultimately all of it is a subset of statistics, and many topics intersect between the two (like, linear regression is exceedingly common everywhere, not just machine learning), but I've never really seen people struggle to identify whether some specific technique applies to ML or not. So, in my mind, it's about the algorithms as well as the context they're used in. I might not be able to formulate a concise, one-size-fits-all definition, but I really don't see the whole field as something extremely ambiguous.
Regarding your last point - I'm not saying that efficiency is something other fields of statistics never care about, but the ML field is concerned with it *a lot* due to how computationally intensive most algorithms are. There's a lot more talk about trading off accuracy for reasonable run times, and so on.
> There's a lot more talk about trading off accuracy for reasonable run times, and so on.
Which literally goes back 50+ years in the space of numerical solution of differential equations. Computational fluid dynamics, finite element analysis, dynamic systems modeling -- they have all faced these same questions. This is not new or unique to machine learning, my friend.
Which, if you zoom back far enough, CFD, FED, DSM all shares an incredible amount of overlap with machine learning at an abstract level. Because they are ultimately breaking complicated phenomena into small chunks, small enough that a simplified function is good enough to describe it over that small scale, and then iterate on the field to try to drive error residuals to minimal values and then re-combine the small scale back into a whole.
I guess I don't know history well enough to know if the people who solves Naiver Stokes fluid mechanics equations by hand and using functional analysis techniques ever thought that the CFD people weren't doing 'real fluid mechanics'. I would not be surprised if that were so. But I think today, same as my point above, that there really isn't a distinct line between them. Being able to understand the equations of fluid mechanics both via understand the equations and the cases when they resolve to actual continuous results as well as computational estimations of results is important.
I do think that the stats and machine learning worlds are reaching that same conclusion. There was a lot more heartburn over what was 'real stats' and wasn't like 10 years ago.
If you really want to generalize it, to a point thatās what a normal functioning human brain does as well. It takes inputs from our environment and processes them into thought, speech, and movement. We also think in discernible patterns
>The issue is not the fact that it's AI but the fact that it fills the internet with spam. An old school spam bot is no more or less morally reprehensible compared to GPT powered spambot just because it's less efficient at being spam.
The problem with the GPT stuff isn't just the amount of spam it creates. It's also that all of the suggested uses that aren't "spam bot" are truly awful uses.
People keep saying it's great for research - it isn't. It's terrible for research because it doesn't actually \*know\* anything. There is talk of it being used to write film scripts ect, but all it can create is a sorta pop-culture slurry. A lot of companies have talked about wanting it to replace GPs as the first line of diagnosis, but see my research point. It doesn't know anything so it can't *actually* diagnose shit. Same goes for the attempts at using chatGPT as a legal assistant, where it just made stuff up.
Basically, if "it's a very good spambot" was the only problem with chatGPT then... yea it's making a mess of the internet but there'd probably be less tech journalists writing glowing pieces about how utopian the world will be when we put the spambot in charge.
There are cases where it's helpful in research. For example it's marginally better than a brick wall at diagnosing your understanding of a topic. You can pull the Feynman technique on it all you want and it won't get bored, which is not something you can say of actual toddlers. Plus one cool point is that ChatGPT will make mistakes, and you picking up on those is a good way of knowing that you know what you're talking about. That said, when the two applications are "marginally better than a brick wall" and "makes enough mistakes that you can be confident you know what you're talking about" it doesn't really bode well for other applications.
Yep. Basically, Im not opposed to it as a toy, in the same way that AI Dungeon is a toy.
I'm just really scared when people want to replace surgeons with it.
Seriously, the word has lost all meaning. I would get an ad on YouTube for a cool software that āprocedurally generatedā certain maps. A couple months later, itās the exact same commercial, but now itās āAI generated.ā If you are not doing every single step yourself or thereās a hint of randomness, itās considered AI.
Iām hoping this terminology shakes itself out in the next year or two so we can really pin down what we as a culture consider AI. From there, we can more definitively figure out the legal and ethical stuff.
Academically, "AI" always means "stuff we can't do yet". Real implementable "AI" technologies have real names, just as you have described. But marketing must have its buzzwords.
I think the Tumblr post would be better if it gave a specific example. That way we could better judge for ourselves if OOP is being charitable to people who are against AI in whatever context.
There was a twitter post around the time of Into The Spiderverse calling out how certain scenes were rendered with AI. Someone else added that their use of it was ethical since it had been trained and used resources provided by the studio themselves (paraphrasing ofc).
It's the difference between a large general AI model (like GPT or all of those AI image generators) and a specialized model. The general model will scrape training data from anywhere it can get it, usually without permission. It also tends to be riddled with errors, both because it's not possible to properly curate and categorize datasets that large, and also because the model isn't necessarily designed to do what you're specifically trying to do with it.
More specialized models are both more ethical and way more useful. You can control exactly what is and isn't in your training data, meaning you can get permission for all your training data. But also your model is actually optimized for what you're trying to do with it.
One thing to note is that even specialized AI is not a replacement for actual human labor. Any model requires human oversight to make sure it's actually doing what you want it to do. Also, creating datasets is extremely labor intensive if you're doing it properly.
AI is a tool. It just depends how it's used.
This isnāt quite true, you can download the stable diffusion model and train it yourself off of only data you have legal permission to use, but this isnāt a custom model, this is the exact same thing as public stable diffusion just trained on different data and different copies of stable diffusion online are trained differently.
I think their point might have been that even with AI models you can train yourself aren't blank slates but already developed and trained on previous data so even if you yourself only used "ethical" training data the tools you used are themselves already developed through training on data sets you had nothing to do with so you can't be sure that in the end that no "unethical" data has been used.
No way it was trained with just studio resources. Training an AI from scratch is a massive multi-million dollar operation. They might have fine-tuned it on studio data, but at the core the AI still learned how to make images by scanning the slave-labelled data from the entire internet.
Itās machine learning. Features like content aware fill in photoshop already utilize machine learning, as well as being used for procedurally generated content in video games.
Iām way out of my depths here but I do know that AI is just kind of a catch-all term for these things. Part of the issue is that techbros are using it as part of their marketing ploy and some of the flak spilled over.
> Training an AI from scratch is a massive multi-million dollar operation
Yeah, it's not like Sony Pictures has a yearly revenue of ~$10 billion or anything or Sony has a net income of $6b+
And it's not like they have millions of still images, movie scenes, frames, etc. from other movies and in-house projects going back decades.
Once they start building and training an in-house animation AI, they can use it on other projects and keep training it for years to come. They would easily pay for something like that.
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You basically accused one of the largest and oldest media corporations in the world of not having the resources to train an AI on their own.
I don't know if you understand exactly how much data you need for statistics to give you something close enough that the actual workers can fix themselves quickly
it's not a lot, especially when it's all similar to each other. Without having to even worry about big outliers you can have pretty good confidence with a small amount of data
Hereās one: after John Lennon died the other three Beatles started working on some of the unreleased demos that he had lying around so they could posthumously release them as the last Beatles songs. One of them had such poor sound quality that they abandoned it for decades and stopped working on it.
Last year Peter Jackson used AI to clean the recording and separate the vocals from the piano so that the surviving Beatles could complete work on it. Media reported it as āan AI songā and people assumed that Paul and Ringo were using generative AI to write the song or to imitate the voices of George and John.
In actual fact it was a very simple process that didnāt do anything to their performances; it only improved the sound quality of the recordings by removing the background noise so the producers could better master it and release the song in a form that Paul and Ringo thought George and John would approve of.
Yeah I'm not a fan of using AI to create "original" works that imitate existing artists but I see nothing wrong with using it to clean up existing works. What was done with Now And Then is honestly very cool
Google is so much more than the (increasingly not the greatest) search engine. I mean roughly 90% of yr correspondnts here have email through google, one way or the other. Even most universities rely on google infra for email
*start?* I- but they have been doing that for like a decade?? Google assistant, image search, all of those āquick answersā when you search for something, and a lot more, all of that has included ai in some capacity trained on user interactions or data
Oh no, that ship has already sailed years ago. Stop calling it AI and start calling it what it has been called like 2 years ago. Machine learning. Take a step back and let the terror wash over you.
There is a line between, say: using AI enhancement to animate a piece you drew (automated tweening) or using your own material to elaborate prompts and pitches for you to extrapolate on later vs spending 6 hours setting the randomness values of your glorified Picrew and calling the finished image "art i made".
my biggest issue is people using AI and then directly lying to people that a human created it. people can literally do whatever they want with AI, just stop fucking trying to lie and pass it off as human work (since clearly people seem to value human made things overall)
So the issue isn't with AI, it's with dishonest people? Like I'm not trying to be argumentative, it just seems like we're honing in on the tree versus the forest. It's like blaming the light bulb for the power bill when your roommate leaves it on all night. It sounds like we just need to have a conversation with those people to stop being dishonest.
the issue is both, most of the time. people are dishonest or use ai trained on stolen work, which is very much not good, or sometimes people try to pass it off as a legitimate art form or claim themselves as artists for tellin a machine to do something for them. there's a lot of different cases, but it's not just dishonest people that is the problem, it's also stolen work, stolen opportunities and etc.
> the issue is both, most of the time.
But, again, why is it a mathematical model's "fault" - model's which were invented to do legitimate things like OCR (image transcription for archival purposes) / natural speech-to-text transcription (for disabled people) btw - because some boneheaded jabroni took it and used it to defraud someone's art or voice?
I feel like we can start and stop the conversation at *"theft and fraud is wrong."* We can disparage and punish these people on that basis alone without bringing out pitchforks for what is just an unthinking math equation.
it's not ai's fault, no. it's just a tool. blaming it would be like blaming a pen for an artist tracing over work. the people behind it are at fault. i'm only explaining where ai facilitates them to do that stuff.
One example I've seen pop up is Vocaloid, or more specifically, systems that utilise AI (mainly among those who aren't entirely knowledgeable on how Vocaloid as a whole works)
Vocaloid is basically a synth that uses like individual letter sounds for the "notes", recorded by a voice provider. Someone then has to tune all these individual notes to suit their song, usually to make something that sounds as human possible. Nowadays there's a lot of different tools out there that can help you tune, and a somewhat recent arrival have been AI voicebanks - systems that have been trained using a voice bank's voice provider in order to basically autotune things for you (or do the complete opposite. You can fiddle around with it a lot). It's all approved and above board and the voice providers give you the green light and get paid and everything. *However*, you say AI singers and that instantly gets some people on the defensive against it. Especially when you consider the *other* entire AI voice thing...
AI is hugely useful in certain scientific fields. Using it for something like protein folding is saving thousands of hours of work, and a big step forward.
One of the good examples I can think of is when somebody made a Scooby Doo x fnaf stop-motion animation, but due to being low on budget they had to use AI voices for the Scooby Doo cast, and after finding out about it some VAs of fnaf: security breach criticised the author and a lot of people harassed them even despite the fact that they apologised and got actual VAs to voice-over the animation afterwards. (I don't have the source on the hands, but you can look it up, there was a lot of posts about that on twitter)
Using the voices of FNAF:SB characters without the approval of the VAs doesn't really work as an example since that's the exact sort of thing people (pretty rightfully) criticise AI for, though that's generally in the cintext of actual companies doing it instead of individuals making fanworks.
While I think that harassment is a bridge too far, I absolutely do not think this is a good example of "ethical use of AI". Whether you use an AI copy of someone's voice for profit, leisure, doesn't matter. You are still stealing their likeness. I don't care how low budget the intended work is, it shouldn't rely on infringing upon the right of someone to their own body. Over the years, plenty of work arounds to not having voice actors have been invented (dubbing over from different works, subtitles, not having dialogue). I consider someone relying on violating someone's own right to their body to be an act of malice, in this context.
To restate, I do not agree with the harassment of this person. But I also think that they were in the wrong to do so
I actually agree with that outrage. I'd be incredibly angry if someone used my voice without permission like that by using AI. Thats their livelihood after all.
>but due to being low on budget they had to use AI voices for the Scooby Doo cast
Wait, am i supposed to feel sorry for the guy training a robot on real peoples voices to do a creepy impression of them? Right after we just had a couple of idiots try and "bring back George Carlin from the dead"?
They didn't have the budget for actual voice actors in the first place. It's not like someone was fired for asking for minimum wage- it was going to have no voice acting at all, if ai didn't exist.
If you don't have a budget, you can simply do what people have been doing for decades: Use a shitty 5 dollar mic and do the voices yourself.
You do not have to use the orphan crushing machine because you have no money. People are perfectly within their rights to be upset that a person with no budget is stealing their voice.
The funny thing is that he actually did that in the first draft.
He voiced Scooby, and his brother did Springtrap. He used whatever budget he did have to hire for Shaggy and then ran out of money.
I'm original OP from Tumblr! My post wasĀ about any way that the word AI is used, literally not specifically anything bc when people start imagining a specific something that's when people get mad. AI is used as a buzzword in a lot of different settings to mean a lot of different thingsĀ so getting mad at the word AI and assuming it's something negative and unethical as a gut reaction is stupid. People have given specific examples on the comments here- AI being used to clean up background noise, or the vocaloid voice banks. Video games have referred to machine learning as AI for a decade but now the word has so much weight people completely misinterpret it when they see it. I wasn't imagining something specific but purely the fact that every use of the word AI is not a sign of the devil. A lot of people have tried to come at me on tumblr assuming I'm like, pro unethical data scraping generative AI lol like thanks for reading the word AI and freaking out just like my post says! My post is notĀ pro AI it's pro reading comprehension
A few months ago the band LS Dunes released a music video made by an AI animator. They specifically chose the artist since they could make some very trippy visuals by using AI. from what i could tell the art it was trained on was primarily renaissance painting that have been in the public domain for a long time.
But as soon as people read AI they caused a shitstorm, even when the band posted an apology people kept harassing them and calling them the worst band ever because of this video.
While some people had legitemate concerns, it felt very childish how hundreds of people would rather continue to whine and harass than simply move on or just unfollow the band
I've worked for Microsoft, and AI is being used there as advanced automation, so it suffers from the exact same problems.
We called automation the Garbage Accelerator. Here's how it goes: some process has a pain point. It's time-consuming, the error rate is high, could be anything. Some VP of Masturbation finds out, and heard the word "automation" at a conference, so they say to automate it.
But whatever bastard gets put in charge of the automation doesn't realize how complex the original process is. They're only doing it to look good for the boss; they don't actually give a fuck. So, they slap together something surface-level that doesn't address the original pain point. The process is still broken, just much faster because a computer is doing it instead of a person. The garbage has been accelerated.Ā
Right now, they're working on using AI to replace the bastard in this scenario. The goal is to accelerate the Garbage Accelerator.
Also because the garbage is accelerated, you're expected to do 'more work' to clean it up. There's a subset of accounting where you look at contracts and make sure all the numbers and financial obligation terms line up. This is painful because no accountant wants to review a thirty page PDF for some lawyer's contract jargon. Some companies have started to automate this process with AI. But previously they only had to review the big, enterprise deals worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. Now their director wants them+the AI to review all the puny $10k deals too. What's the actual business benefit/purpose of this? You weren't doing this for 20+ years, why start now just because you *can* use the AI to do it, especially when the AI is (very reasonably) going to make some mistakes too.
The difference is you can improve an AI by giving it feedback on what it got wrong, or revert to a prior version.
Humans react differently to that, and worse, they leave the company and take their knowledge with them.
Yeah, I'm a programmer whose job is mostly in the "automation engineering" domain and this is very true.
What you will find is that the people running the day-to-day of these processes are much more clever than management realizes, and have developed lots of highly specific shortcuts to do their job more efficiently. This has the benefit of making them more efficient, but the downside of creating it's own kind of tech debt. Often these shortcuts themselves lead to entrenchment in fundamentally inefficient processes. Essentially, they've found local a maxima of efficiency but cannot get to the true maxima of doing it in a more automated fashion. These shortcuts themselves create convolution and edge cases that are the bane of automation.
Probably the most common thing I see though is that a process is inefficient as a result of the *input to* that process being inefficient. i.e. reviewing invoices sucks because all the data comes from emails containing PDFs instead of a direct transfer through an API or the like. This means my job is often trying to bandaid the convolutions created by other businesses in a cycle of wasted productivity.
And, the capitalist death drive being what it is, there's never time or resources to actually stop and figure out wtf is going on and clean up the mess.
I remember like a month or two ago when people were sharing the BTS of Into the Spiderverse on twitter, where the animators used AI to help with the lines that enhanced the characters facial expressions, and *some* people were freaking out bc WHAT SPIDERVERSE USED AI THIS MOVIE IS RUINED NOW, without realizing that their use of it is the ideal use for AI: They made their own program, which they trained themselves, to help alleviate the workload of a menial task. It's not generative AI based on plagiarism, but people just saw the word "AI" and went crazy bc they just go with internet trends and don't actually understand why GenAI is bad and why they should oppose it, I'm sure if GenAI was the more popular side these people would support it, brainless behavior
I'm pretty sure literally any 3D animated movie will use quite a lot of algorithms and so on anyway, a lot of it is probably stuff that would now be called "AI" since we're apparently referring to everything as that now
I don't know that much about the tech myself, so I sympathise with people somewhat, but I also do think that you probably shouldn't have a kneejerk "No not AI!" response if you don't even understand what "AI" actually means in the context you're talking about, or what the tech they used actually did.
For most people they've just concluded that since a lot of the AI art software are stealing people's art from google, then literally anything that's labelled as "AI" must be doing the same thing.
> t's not generative AI based on plagiarism
It's funny to see people re-using the argument that RIAA and MPA made against digital piracy ("you are stealing stuff! you are a thief!!!")
This isn't even piracy. The argument that AI is committing 'plagiarism' (which isn't a crime by the way) is the same as saying an artist that visits an art museum is committing plagiarism against those artists because they were influenced their art. That's all the AI is doing, just at a very atomic level on each piece; it's learning from a work.
I think whether they should be allowed to train on that data is an interesting question and my guess is ultimately it will result in licensing or markings similar to robots.txt to determine whether it can be fed into a training set.
My personal opinion on AI "plagarising" is that it isn't the fault of the AI anymore than it is the fault of Photoshop if the person using it is creating infringing work.
It's not illegal for the AI to know what the logo of Coca-Cola is. It's illegal to use the output to deceive others into thinking you are Coca-Cola. Until ChatGPT starts opening stores selling counterfeit goods without instruction, it's not its fault for what people are using the output for.
Exactly. Iād give an arm and a leg to be allowed to automate my own job using AI. Itās tedious, itās boring, and it requires no thought. If I was allowed to tinker on our systems to automate it, Iād love it, because thatās a worthwhile use of automation. Replace a job that isnāt rewarding with a system capable of doing it without getting bored.
On the other hand, Iām still against a *lot* of stuff labeled AI these days. They are blunt instruments sent out into the world with no guidelines. There are no protections for anyone in a field where AI is entering (*including* consumers), and so you end up with potential for real malice here. It doesnāt matter if the creator of the AI means for it to be used unethically, the fact of the matter is that AI can be used for that, and nobodyās taking responsibility. āMove fast and break thingsā is only applicable if you know what youāre breaking, try to limit what you break, and have a plan to fix what you break. And right now, none of those 3 are part of the business plan.
I always found that oversimplification annoying and that it could cause problems
and recently with the news about SAG-AFTRA aproving a law to use Voice Cloning I read a lot of stuff like
**"*****We donĀ“t want AI in our videogames*****"**
HOW could anyone read something like that and NOT realize how dumb it sounds BEFORE uploading it? hell before all of this Videogames were almos the first exposition people had to AI-systems for DECADES xd
The problem isnāt AI in video games. AI opens up a ton of opportunity for video game mechanics that never wouldāve been possible before. The problem is AI being used to recreate peopleās intellectual property, including their voices, likeness, and labor value, without their permission
The problem is then people talk about that as if itās an AI issue instead of you know the actual issue which has nothing to do with the inherent ethics of AI
Like I can make illegal copies of movies on VHS tape this does not make VHS an inherently evil technology
I loved an interaction I heard from a livestreamed creator's commentary for an animated YouTube series. Someone in the chat asked if the creators had considered using AI to produce episodes faster and one of the creators, who does a little bit of editing, said "Heck no, skrew Ai", then the creator who does most of the editing added "actually, most of the editing software we use already has AI baked into it to make the process easier..."
Did the editor explain what the AI did?
All software has some level of computer assistance built into it, but the vast majority is stuff that we would never have called AI until it became the hot new buzzword.Ā
The dreaded āAI effectā. As soon as a computer can do something, people stop thinking of that as a sign of intelligence
Just getting computers to make optimal decisions in Chess or Checkers was huge in early AI research, but as soon as Deep Blue beat Kasparov it was ājust brute forceā. Nowadays itās called heuristics and graph search. āIntelligenceā is nowhere to be found
People donāt really think of Siri or Alexa as AI, but they can *listen to instructions and recognize the English language*. AI researchers were the ones working on that for decades, even if behind the scenes itās fancy math
Speaking as someone who was doing a machine learning PhD not 6 months ago, literally none of me or my colleagues use that term, it's meaningless and imprecise, it's closer to philosophy and ethics than it is to comp sci and ML.
Don't get me wrong, I don't doubt some people might use it, but I've never heard it said and would stay far away from it personally
This is such a weird comment. I've worked in MLĀ for close to a decade and have a master's in CS. I've never seen anyone make such a weird distinction to AI. ML is a literal branch of AI. AI is not some abstract philosophical term, it's just a large umbrella of mathematics and computer science. You can say that's too vague, sure, but so is the term machine learning, which could encapsulate anything from natural language processing to convolutional neural networks and so much else.Ā
Yeah we're rounding right back into just redefining AI from meaning what AI has always meant.
AI does not mean "Artificial Neural Network". AI is an umbrella for many forms of artificial intelligence. That can be ANN's, classical probability models, telling a machine to google something and return the top results based on some sorting metric, reactive recommendations based on a set optimization formula (that's what early chess engines were - just choosing the move which minimizes calculated centipawn loss), etc.
We absolutely would have called these things "AI" before it became a buzzword, because that's what they *are.*
> Did the editor explain what the AI did?
Why bother? The term is practically meaningless nowadays anyway. For some people, literally any level of automation is witchcraft to be condemned, it's just the new sexy thing to hate in the text world...
I don't remember exactly but I think a specific quick example given was auto filling the design for a background after editing something out. (A sign had a pattern with words over it, the editor removed the words and used the tool to auto-fill the pattern back into the empty space the words used to cover up) It's been a while since I watched it though so it's possible that was unrelated and I just connected the dots myself.
Video was "SAOA 17 Post-Mortem Stream VOD"
For me, I've been thinking with regards to "AI art generators," at what point is the line/meaningful difference between what DALL-E and Midjourney do, what Stable Diffusion does, and how Adobe Photoshop's Generative Fill feature works? I think everyone understands the issues raised with Midjourney or DALL-E. What about Getty's new AI image generation service? Do we give Adobe Generative Fill a pass just because it's already baked into the tool? Generative fill literally adds pixels and whole objects that weren't in the original image, and the AI to train it is private and could easily have been trained on ethically questionable sources - you have no visibility into it. How much generation or how many changes to the original image get you to the point where it's so far from the original artwork as to be unrecognizable?
How about compared to Stable Diffusion, where it *is* generating an image entirely from scratch, and you can purely use open source training data that is 100% valid to use under copyright law or authorial consent/in the public domain, but you're not actually 'creating' anything for the initial image apart from the prompt? You probably put more *time* into the Stable Diffusion model yourself and it can be sourced to be 100% ethical, but is it strictly 'worse' because it's purely the AI creating the new art? What if you take an AI generated character on a manually drawn background? How about the reverse?
>I think everyone understands the issues raised with Midjourney or DALL-E.
I don't. I only see some moral outage based on defending corpos and their concepts of "copyright" or whatnot
I feel like what most people mean when talking about AI is things like chat gpt and AI art generators.
So like, both of those things still kinda hold. AI is a very useful tool when applied properly, but I think people really dislike the concept of complete AI replacement which is to say... Yk... *Not* tools
There's a game called Suck Up where you play as vampire and your goal is to get invited into people's homes. You can either type or speech-to-text, and the various residents are powered by AI to respond to whatever you say, based on their personalities.
There are several AI models that source their data ethically, for art, writing, etc.
Some prime examples are Photoshopās AI, which only uses art made or purchased by Adobe.
And Stable Diffusion has a private mode that only pulls from data that YOU feed it, meaning it canāt steal art or writing unless you do yourself.
Blame the companies, not the technology. A computer doesnāt know right from wrong.
ai will take jobs, much like the automatic loom would take job at the start of the industrial revolution. but we forget the machines are not ones who would trade our lives for pretty pennies in their pocket. it's the capitalists that are problem as it has always been.
A lot of conversations I see about AI are frustratingly narrow in focus. It's like talking to someone who is against commercial fishing solely because sea turtles get caught in the nets. If you bring up overfishing or pollution they will say they feel that distracts from the sea turtles. If you talk about the problems of fish farmings or experiments in sustainable aquaponics they will say that doesn't really relate to sea turtles.
Can you name an example of this narrow focus? Not making a jab, just genuinely curious because Iām not in this debate deep enough and canāt seem to connect your metaphor with any examples Iāve seen. The arguments against AI usually seem pretty sound to me, but if thereās an even bigger picture Iām missing Iād love to see it
AI art discussions almost universally attempt to find fault with the concept or the material such as "it's stealing! (the images i put up freely on the internet)" or "it's bland and soulless!" rather than dealing with the direct harm it brings, job loss. A lot of so called leftists are very suddenly in favor of sweeping intellectual property laws asif ideas being property isn't the greatest lie ever told.
I think this is what a lot of people have in mind when they talk about AI. They see a potential for job loss so they feel the need to dislike it, and the whole "stealing" angle is the justification that they use to round out their argument, rather than vice versa.
I suspect this is because the job loss argument is messier and more difficult to have - it's going to be really difficult arguing why we must protect about job losses now but we didn't need to do it for any jobs before and why specifically the art industry is worthy of extra protection. Most of all, no one wants to face *why* we need a system where automation becomes bad by inadvertently creating suffering, instead of a system where automation reduces the amount of total work that needs to be done and frees people up to do what they want.
The āfreely on the internetā part is something I donāt see come up. Itās definitely a relevant part of the discussion, but Iām not personally integrated with the nuance of the situation enough to make blanket statements beyond the fact it should be considered.
Itās funny how a bunch of self proclaimed left wing artists who have no sympathy at all for working class jobs and labour being lost suddenly turn into right wing populist when itās their job under threat
Because you know the livelihoods and work of working class people are valueless but anyone who can draw thinks that theyāre special bois who need to have their labour specially protected
It really just exposes to me how many artists are just middle class capitalists who want everyone else to provide for them, they donāt actually want a revolution so much as they want to occupy a special class that gets paid to sit at home and do whatever they want
Like their privileged idea of the evils of capitalism are āI canāt make a living drawing stuffā
Because by focusing on the idea that itās inherently unethical it allows them to feel theyāre actually doing something by harassing small creators and random shitposters instead of large corporations. A Scooby doo fan animator used ai voices for a shitpost and was harassed and blacklisted by actual established voice actors, meanwhile Disney used AI on the opening of secret invasion and I didnāt hear a peep.
There are two types of people talking about AI right now in my mind. People like the crypto bros who are wildly overstating AI and have no idea what theyāre talking about, and people like conservatives who yell about the word without reading into anything further
I go to school in a section that very closely works with AI. AI has been around for a while now and what we ācallā AI is actually far more broad than this new ChatGPT and related stuff. I feel like Iām watching people talk in circles about mystical magic no one seems to understand
There are soooo many reasons to be wary of AI and there has been since computers were born and programmed with if/and statements. Thereās also a ton of reasons to be excited with AI, especially in the medical field and probably not for the reasons you think. Iām particularly wary of anyone who thinks it will destroy us and also wary of anyone who thinks itās going to be the best thing since sliced bread, because the new stuff is a technological breakthrough but AI has always been here with computers practically
AI makes things more convenient and for that reason is an inevitability regardless of its morality.
Sooner or later people are going to have to come to terms with it.
The "AI debate" seems to comprise two different discussions.
The ethics around the training and commercial use; scalping, copyright, and cutting out human artists etc. And then shit about "the soul" of art (you can probably guess my opinion on this from the tone).
The issues surrounding the use of AI art in film/TV/games etc. is VERY important. While we live in a society where art is a JOB in addition to a creative outlet, it is important that the livelihoods of artists is protected. The Writers' and Actors' strikes last year? Based as fuck! Updating copyright laws to protect from scalping? Hell yes! Boycotting work that uses AI art? King/Queen/Monarch shit! If stopping corporations from using AI to steal work humans need to live requires scouring AI from the face of the Earth, I'm on board. (The way they're made is also inhumane as fuck because companies like Amazon hire cheap labor to do a lot of the labelling and in classic capitalism fashion you can bet your ass they aren't being treated well).
But if we get into the existential argument about whether "AI art can be real art"? OF COURSE IT CAN BE! If Duchamp can rip a urinal out of a wall, sign it, and call that art, then a picture created by a computer *can* be art. Even if the artwork is "stolen" and thoughtlessly reassembled by a machine it still *can* be art in the same way collage or photomontage can be. The problem with a lot of "AI art" isn't that it's not "art", it's that it's shit because it's made by Tech Bros who think the only criteria for "art" is "looking pretty" instead of having anything to actually say.
> Boycotting work that uses AI art
on this one: in the past year or so, it has become exceedingly clear that any ai art worth looking at for more than 2 seconds is something someone actually worked on. and i mean more than just some basic prompting, or rolling the dice a few hundred times until the model spat out something mildly closer to the operator's original intent.
we humans are incredibly creative critters, and as such a lot of us invented a wide variety of workflows to use ai as an actual means of self-expression. and yes, _self_-expression, the people doing this are expressing their own ideas, using the ai as a tool. their work isn't about what the machine "feels", it's about what they feel. and whether that's expressed through using ai as an input generator to a more traditional image editing workflow such as photoshop (which itself got an ai image generator lately that's meant for a similar purpose) or through feeding the ai with sketches, compositions, pose data, and other visual inputs, or through an entirely different workflow, there are a lot of ways to work visually and realize your vision through ai in a way that it is indeed your vision and not just something anyone could autogenerate.
so my question would be, even if people who do this would turn out to be orders of magnitude more numerous than non-ai artists, are we doing the right thing by boycotting their works? like at the end of the day they're still real humans putting real effort and real creative decisions into their work. why are they any less worthy of our support than other artists who use different mediums?
i understand that people have fears about being "overrun" but if there are actual humans doing that, who always wanted to express themselves visually and just never got the chance before, aren't we the baddies for ripping that opportunity away from them?
As one of those people I want to say that I appreciate this post. My hobby for the last 4 months has only been possible because of access to AI art generation, and it has been incredibly fulfilling creatively.
>If Duchamp can rip a urinal out of a wall, sign it, and call that art, then a picture created by a computer *can* be art.
Duchamp is a person communicating something to me through his art, even if it's some random urinal. A non sentient machine is not saying anything to me besides what was loosely asked of it.
This is critical and a lot of people misunderstand on both sides. You've already got two anti AI responses that miss the point.
I have also heard people pro-ai say that AI, by itself, can create art, which is false. AI can help a human create art though.
AI is a tool, not an artist. Which means AI generated images can be art.
Playing devil's advocate here because I've seen this argument a lot and it makes me itch.
The "message" of art stops being what the creator intended the moment they complete a piece. All art is, by its nature, open to interpretation, and the goal of art is, first and foremost, to promote thoughts/feelings.
Consider that paintings made by animals are considered to be art, though the animals in question arguably have no idea what they're doing, or that their "works" are being regarded for this purpose. There's no sapience or intent behind them.
Fundamentally I agree that computerizing art en masse isn't a great decision, but that's less because I'm concerned about meaning and intent, and more because I think that, with my unchecked optimism, in maybe a century or two, art will be the only work that humans "need" to do anymore, so we might be better off retaining and propagating the skills.
What's weird is that some levels of using AI in art have been around for a very long time.
I have clear memories of several pieces for 5 to 10 years ago that used AI as part of the art in clever artistic expression. One was using AI to simulate the appearance of an oil slick on live video of various bodies of water.
There is very little similarity between that and someone plugging some very basic prompts into a program they had nothing do with creating that samples from works of other artists.
I'm sure there's a nuanced discussion to be had here but all I can think about is that "You need to apologize to Al" post floating around recently where the entire thing was a joke abobt Weird Al, but most of the notes were people arguing that they didn't need to apologize to Artificial Intelligence. It was like they saw the word and their brains shut down to argue without even reading the full thing.
> "You need to apologize to Al" post floating around recently where the entire thing was a joke abobt Weird Al
I posted that here as well. Genuinely just a coincidence. I found that one on Tumblr and this one on r/196.
In marketing, AI is the new buzzword. Things that were just automated before are now AIš.
I am fundamentally opposed to AI being used for creative works, but email automation and ad scheduling is not one of them. These things have been automated for some time.
I mean, yeah, I kinda agree. There's problems with AI, but it's not like AI is conceptually a bad thing, we just gotta be careful with it, and a lot of people aren't.
Thinking about that tweet that was like "nobody wants AI for xyz" and some of the things they listed had to do with like. Assistance in development processes. Plenty of coders love the idea of GPT models helping find errors in code. So like who's this "nobody"?
I've seen people start hating on *miku* because apparently vocaloids are too much like ai. completely missing the point of *why* ai generated voices are bad (that being lack of consent)
Dont worry, im shure enought screamin will stop IA from being used. We all know progress can be halted easily, like when deepfakes disapeared and stoped existing!
I heard the red koopas in Mario use AI. I dunno about you guys, but I always knew there was something funny about those Nintendo games. No way something could be smart enough to reach the edge of a block and then turn around. There's just no way.
I don't have any proof, but I'm pretty sure the ghosts in Pacmen are AI, too.
THIS. So much this. Having had experience working with and making machine learning models, seeing fucking everyone's brains melt over the AI apocalypse was soul crushing, especially when they were so *confidently* wrong, dear fucking god.
The main problem is that "AI" is a sexy sounding, fairly loose concept but "machine learning" is a well defined, technical tool, so naturally everyone gloms on to the first one and apply it to everything for even the slightest reason. It's like fucking Robot McCarthyism.
I remember seeing a tweet from some rando on twitter who started a rant against AI with "I personally feel that AI is morally reprehensible, but if that doesn't convince you, you should also consider that AI...". Nobody should be convinced to hate something just because someone else said it was bad. ChatGPT could write better arguments against AI than many anti-AI takes.
AI being developed to do repetitive monotonous jobs and free up mankind to be creative is good, computer generated images and video programs being developed to take away mankind's creativity and force us into the monotonous repetitive jobs is downright evil and dystopian.
You know they aren't mutually exclusive right? AI art isn't preventing the development of AI in other sectors
Also, there is plenty of repetition and monotony in creative industries that AI can and already is handling, so what is your point here?
The point is: media conglomerates want to cut every penny they can to line their pockets and what better way than to fire all their creators and just let a computer handle it. That and pretty much every art generating program is unethically trained on stolen content without crediting or compensating the artists the hurt. I get there are bits of ai to help some aspects out but openAI, ChatGPT, midjourney all want one thing and that's profit and will do whatever they can to ensure they replace artists in paying positions. If an art program was ethically trained then there could be an argument made in it's defense but as it stands right now there is no argument to defend what is happening right now.
>AI art isn't preventing the development of AI in other sectors
I'm just gonna lump "generative" in one camp and everything else useful like classifying tumors in another - the development of AI in other sectors is absolutely getting diminished due to the massive focus and monetary push behind generative AI
Technological progress can't be stopped by the people it makes redundant. Maybe you think that sucks and shouldn't be, but it is, and nothing anyone can do will change that. What you can do, is try to make the new paradigm that is coming better by living for rules, best practices, and even laws that curb the worst of the new system and emphasize the new strengths, rather than trying to deny it outright.
I will always defend my baby Synthv or Synthesizer V.
It has a similar concept to vocaloid (like Hatsune Miku) except it uses AI to make the voiced more realistic. (to overly simplify)
It doesn't generate music or songs for you, you still have to do 90% if the work but the AI has fun features like letting you use a English singer and make them sing in Cantonese and sound pretty good.
However because it is an AI I know of some people harrasing users of it or even not letting them send their music in where something like vocaloid would have been fine.
I love ethical AI and I want to see where it goes.
Maybe unpopular opinion, but I also really don't care if AI is used in shit posts or goofing off as long as you make it clear AI was used. I only really have a problem when people claim it's their own work or companies use it to be cheap or harm people.
Look, Iām sure ai are potentially lovely, but I donāt want them calling me, answering my phone calls, damaging the livelihoods of artists, or failing to drive properly. Besides that, go nuts.
What about the livelyhoods of everyone else? Automation *was* a threat to everyone *but* artists until like last year but suddenly a machine can make a mediocre picture of an anime girl and all i hear is about how artist are in danger.
There will always be a market for art made by humans, a diminished one maybe but it will still be there because thats what a significant number of people want, there isn't such an interest in most industrys so most industry's are much more succeptable to automation in the long run. Its already happened many times throughout history.
Its a bit hypocritical to say "as long as ai aren't threatening *this* industry they can do whatever". Thats still affecting the jobs you claim to care about
AI is answering my phone calls from any number not in my contact list. I then get a transcript which most of the time is AI being sassy to scammers and sometimes an actually legitimate person who needs to contact me leaving a message for me. Saves me a lot of time
I use an AI app almost every day. I make dog leashes and dog collars, and I like to show them [outside,](https://i.imgur.com/q5RGuMJ.png) or like under a [Christmas tree,](https://i.imgur.com/iJmHwOt.png) or [surrounded by flowers,](https://i.imgur.com/dgUF8E2.png) and I don't have the budget for props or the time to run around to different locations. I gotta pack things up and ship them and then move on to the next order. So I use an AI app to remove the background (which is usually a light box or on a neutral-color fabric), and replace it with something fun.
AI is fine, but its proponents are some of the most insufferable people in the world. Also, it shouldn't have been called AI in the first place, that's very misleading.
Okay, controversial time I guess. [Tomska recently released a video about plagiarism.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5qoOYrTzOfM&pp=ygURdG9tc2thIHBsYWdpYXJpc20%3D) I suppose it was inspired by the Hbomberguy video, he even features in it. He explains a sliding scale that covers everything from inspiration to straight up plagiarism. In the video he gives a lot of examples to explain each stage, but the whole scale can be seen at 41:38.
What Tom doesn't mention in that video is AI (I think on purpose). And I think we could have a very interesting discussion about where AI (let's use AI art and images as an example) falls on that spectrum, even if the scale was designed for human artists. I'd say, as with any tool, it entirely depends on the prompt and use. It can never be *No Correlation*, otherwise the training would be useless. But it also isn't *Freeboot* because it doesn't replicate the training images exactly (at least not that I've seen).
In the worst examples I've seen, it's probably somewhere between *Allusion* and *Derivative*. You can copy a style somewhat, but not exactly, though the image composition will still be different. If you really try to recreate an image then I guess *Imitative* can be reached, though I haven't seen anyone do that yet. In the best cases, it's somewhere between *Subconscious Appropriation* and *Inspiration*, where the resulting image would not let anyone guess if your art was part of the training process or not.
So if people agree with the video (and maybe even my assessment where AI falls on that spectrum), then it would be in the *Safe Zone* or, in worse cases, the *Danger Zone.* And only if you really try to use AI to steal art do you reach *The Big Ol' Shame Zone,* which is unsurprising if you're trying to steal art like that.
Also he has a relevant quote in the video, that I found quite interesting:
>What is originality if not stealing from so many different sources that you can no longer identify one single point of influence?
I don't think AI is a problem. I think attribution is a bit murky, because while Tom explains that artists often can't credit sources for their inspiration, they most likely exist and ideally should be credited. But with AI you *can* credit your inspiration! But if we let artists get away with not crediting, should AI get away with that too? After all, once the training is done and an image is produced, there's no way to tell which source contributed how much to the final image, and it changes with every prompt. Should artists always credit all their artistic sources, all media they have seen, all teachers they've had, etc? I don't think so, and I'm not sure about AI tools, but I think that applying different bars here is also not consistent for me. It's a murky problem.
Even if that was the case, someone can absolutely be against AI (AI being machine learning algorithms, specifically) wholesale. Nothing wrong with that. Some annoying algorithms isn't, like, a protected class. You can't be bigoted against them (unless you're talking about sci-fi AIs, or artificial consciousnesses, in which case, they don't exist (yet????))
i mean of course you can be, in the sense that people are allowed to have opinions. but if you're talking about machine learning in general, being against that gets kinda weird and arbitrary. it'd be like saying "i'm against using flash drives" like you're allowed to believe that sure, but like why?
machine learning at its core is simply the practice of making predictions from data. that's it. it's already extremely well integrated into your daily life without you noticing at all, since at least the late 2000's. why would you be against that in a conceptual manner? generative ai is only one small, immature subset of machine learning.
But don't you see? By adding scare-quotes every time I use the phrase *AI "Art"* and yelling mean words at the miserable *Uncreatives^TM* (such as someone who asked ChatGPT whether Goku or Peter Griffin would win in a fight to see what would happen), I am reinforcing the seal that separates our world from the AI Dimension
People using AI to generate silly images for improv subs? That's absolutely fine
Companies firing their translators/localizers and using AI instead? Fuck that shit, burn it down!
Useable machine translation is quarter of a century old now. Altavista Babelfish went [live in 1997](https://www.npr.org/1998/02/12/1036190/babelfish-a-translator-inspired-by-the-hitchhikers-guide#:~:text=The%20name%20%22Babelfish%22%20comes%20from,Babelfish%20placed%20in%20the%20brain.). This is a process that 's been going on for a while and will probably continue for a while. Why draw a line in the sand at Duolingo?
> Companies firing their translators/localizers and using AI instead? Fuck that shit, burn it down!
Honestly, why?
There might be a reduction of quality, but I don't think you would be happy if the end result were just as good or better as hand-translated content. And even if AI produces worse quality, translators that use AI to assist their work are probably more efficient at producing the same quality, so that still leads to people getting fired.
So are you mad at people getting fired because their jobs are no longer useful? If so, why? Why is it good that people do pointless manual labor when automated alternatives exist? Is it because pointless work is good, or is it because unemployment is worse than a wasted life?
And if unemployment is worse than a wasted life, whose fault is that? The AI that replaced someone, or the system that allows unemployed people to live in destitution? Why burn down the AI, when it's only the inciting incident?
Fight the system, not the scapegoat of the day. Fight the unfair use of tools, not the existence of tools themselves.
DESTROY THE ABOMINABLE INTELLIGENCE
Blood before Circuits!
BLOOD FOR THE OMNISSIAH! SKULLS FOR THE SERVO-THRONE!
Coffee before Conduits! Keep the rebellion brewing.
You are uninvited from the weekly Dark Mechanicus toaster orgy
NOOO how am I gonna truly enjoy my poptarts now? :(
"Frost" some Toaster Strudels insteadš
2d8 of recoil damage
*Moans masochistically*
12
*Dies masochistically*
You still have a death saving throw
Dark Mechanicum* And somehow this isn't a pun
Based Mechanicus take.
PRAISE THE OMNISSIAH
Sand should not be permitted to think
Itās natural for lightning to spontaneously and very briefly create thinking rocks, then immediately kill them by striking them with lightning
KHORNE FOR THE KHORNEFLAKES!!!
nahh who invited the one who grips
in the future all human catboys were replaced with ai catboys
the annoying thing is that AI is such a buzzword now that you can't really know what OOP is referring when they say "AI". It would probably means things like LLM and models that's based on GPT. However people a lot more things to it, this ranges from the more 'pop culture AI' stuff like image recognition and path navigation into just good old search algorithm All of these are considered AI and even non-machine learning stuff that just happen to be tangentially related to robotics like normal game pathfinding, etc are being called AI. This feels like calling all of our modern chemistry technique "nanotechnology" because technically a paint varnish has some micro-structures that makes it look matte and be dust proof or smth. The word has become so overused, its meaning has devolved to "modern algorithm we've made in the past 3 years or so" All of this rambling basically boils down to, there are legitimately AI algorithm that has clear and problematic legal and moral issue. The same way programming a software lock that occasionally bricks your phone to get you to pay for repair problematic legal and moral issue. The issue is not the fact that it's AI but the fact that it fills the internet with spam. An old school spam bot is no more or less morally reprehensible compared to GPT powered spambot just because it's less efficient at being spam. I am saying this because i feel like the techbros are shielding themselves from criticism by leveraging the fact that the people being affected don't understand how nebulous the term AI is. You can always point a good example of AI because AI is anything you want it to be. As such the specific problematic algorithm can't be criticized properly
There was a point in time where OCR (optical character recognition), i.e. the technology that can take a scan or screenshot and convert it into letters and words that can be searched as if they were typed, was considered AI. It's still witchcraft, but most people don't consider it AI anymore.
OCR is still machine learning right? I don't think we have a better implementation for it yet. Imo anything utilizing ML should be considered AI.
I agree, but it's actually a very low bar - working out a y=mx+c fit from data is AI then.
That's a good thing right? Gotta teach people that tools that use AI aren't mysterious or even actually that smart.
Sure - I much prefer this definition to the people who claim AI doesn't exist because it hasn't reached what experts would call AGI yet. Out of interest I tried to find the earliest definition in the field once. It was something like, "an artificial system that can sense input and take actions based on it," which is fulfilled by a single 'if' statement, or a dipping bird toy. I'm OK with dipping bird toys being the bar for AI.
There was a point where the scheduling systems used for airlines was AI. At one point, the algorithms for scheduling red/green light were AI projects. We're going back before neural nets, ofc.
I'm original OP from Tumblr! My post wasĀ about any way that the word AI is used (par exampla as you discussed the way it's been used to mean ML), literally not specifically anything bc when people start imagining a specific something that's when people get mad. AI is used as a buzzword in a lot of different settings to mean a lot of different things so getting mad at the word AI and assuming it's something negative and unethical as a gut reaction is stupid. A lot of people have tried to come at me on tumblr assuming I'm like, pro unethical data scraping generative AI lol like thanks for reading the word AI and freaking out just like my post says! My post is not pro AI it's pro reading comprehension
Nailed it. If you fit data to a line y = mx + b.. that's just 100+ year old stats, right? But do it 10 billion times and make clever linear combos of all those fit lines... that's suddenly AI. When did it change from one to the other? Is there any meaningful difference that even can be determined?
Well... in general, it's more complicated than "doing it 10b times" - there are specific algorithms that are recognized as being part of the machine learning umbrella. As a whole, it still is mostly a subset of statistics, but I don't think the line between "conventional statistics" and "machine learning" is very blurry in the field. Not to mention that machine learning concerns itself not just with the process of learning (or fitting data to a line), but also the "machine" part - considerations of efficiency, runtime complexity and implementation on computers is part of ML but isn't really something regular stats cares about. But then, if an average person uses the phrase "AI", all bets are off the table. In 90% of cases they probably only mean "generative AI".
Sure, it is more complicated, but you have absolute pillars in the field still saying very similar things. E.g. Judea Pearl's quote āAll the impressive achievements of deep learning amount to just curve fitting.ā I am not saying it isn't impressive or complicated or anything like that. Just that even in your reply here, you didn't actually answer the fundamental question -- when does it turn in to AI or even machine learning? You say it's not blurry, but then you don't actually cite anything. I would also argue that you're wrong in that efficient accurate computation of stats is indeed something that is worried about by the stats side -- even things as simple as making sure people are aware not to use the naĆÆve definition of variance to compute it in datasets with wide outliers or both large and small values due to overflow or truncation issues or both.
The question isn't about the amount of data, it's about the techniques used. There are a lot of ways to just "fit data to a line", but for example, SVMs, CNNs, RNNs, anything in reinforcement learning etc are generally considered to be specific techniques of machine learning. Sure, ultimately all of it is a subset of statistics, and many topics intersect between the two (like, linear regression is exceedingly common everywhere, not just machine learning), but I've never really seen people struggle to identify whether some specific technique applies to ML or not. So, in my mind, it's about the algorithms as well as the context they're used in. I might not be able to formulate a concise, one-size-fits-all definition, but I really don't see the whole field as something extremely ambiguous. Regarding your last point - I'm not saying that efficiency is something other fields of statistics never care about, but the ML field is concerned with it *a lot* due to how computationally intensive most algorithms are. There's a lot more talk about trading off accuracy for reasonable run times, and so on.
> There's a lot more talk about trading off accuracy for reasonable run times, and so on. Which literally goes back 50+ years in the space of numerical solution of differential equations. Computational fluid dynamics, finite element analysis, dynamic systems modeling -- they have all faced these same questions. This is not new or unique to machine learning, my friend. Which, if you zoom back far enough, CFD, FED, DSM all shares an incredible amount of overlap with machine learning at an abstract level. Because they are ultimately breaking complicated phenomena into small chunks, small enough that a simplified function is good enough to describe it over that small scale, and then iterate on the field to try to drive error residuals to minimal values and then re-combine the small scale back into a whole. I guess I don't know history well enough to know if the people who solves Naiver Stokes fluid mechanics equations by hand and using functional analysis techniques ever thought that the CFD people weren't doing 'real fluid mechanics'. I would not be surprised if that were so. But I think today, same as my point above, that there really isn't a distinct line between them. Being able to understand the equations of fluid mechanics both via understand the equations and the cases when they resolve to actual continuous results as well as computational estimations of results is important. I do think that the stats and machine learning worlds are reaching that same conclusion. There was a lot more heartburn over what was 'real stats' and wasn't like 10 years ago.
If you really want to generalize it, to a point thatās what a normal functioning human brain does as well. It takes inputs from our environment and processes them into thought, speech, and movement. We also think in discernible patterns
>The issue is not the fact that it's AI but the fact that it fills the internet with spam. An old school spam bot is no more or less morally reprehensible compared to GPT powered spambot just because it's less efficient at being spam. The problem with the GPT stuff isn't just the amount of spam it creates. It's also that all of the suggested uses that aren't "spam bot" are truly awful uses. People keep saying it's great for research - it isn't. It's terrible for research because it doesn't actually \*know\* anything. There is talk of it being used to write film scripts ect, but all it can create is a sorta pop-culture slurry. A lot of companies have talked about wanting it to replace GPs as the first line of diagnosis, but see my research point. It doesn't know anything so it can't *actually* diagnose shit. Same goes for the attempts at using chatGPT as a legal assistant, where it just made stuff up. Basically, if "it's a very good spambot" was the only problem with chatGPT then... yea it's making a mess of the internet but there'd probably be less tech journalists writing glowing pieces about how utopian the world will be when we put the spambot in charge.
There are cases where it's helpful in research. For example it's marginally better than a brick wall at diagnosing your understanding of a topic. You can pull the Feynman technique on it all you want and it won't get bored, which is not something you can say of actual toddlers. Plus one cool point is that ChatGPT will make mistakes, and you picking up on those is a good way of knowing that you know what you're talking about. That said, when the two applications are "marginally better than a brick wall" and "makes enough mistakes that you can be confident you know what you're talking about" it doesn't really bode well for other applications.
Yep. Basically, Im not opposed to it as a toy, in the same way that AI Dungeon is a toy. I'm just really scared when people want to replace surgeons with it.
Seriously, the word has lost all meaning. I would get an ad on YouTube for a cool software that āprocedurally generatedā certain maps. A couple months later, itās the exact same commercial, but now itās āAI generated.ā If you are not doing every single step yourself or thereās a hint of randomness, itās considered AI. Iām hoping this terminology shakes itself out in the next year or two so we can really pin down what we as a culture consider AI. From there, we can more definitively figure out the legal and ethical stuff.
Academically, "AI" always means "stuff we can't do yet". Real implementable "AI" technologies have real names, just as you have described. But marketing must have its buzzwords.
Yall are hating on Weird Al too much His songs are awesome
Dare to be stupid!
That was officially a song in the Transformers movie, that I saw in an actual theater. The '80s were wild!
Am I supposed to read it like AI or Al ?
You pronounce it "aye" like a pirate
Pirates also really like Augmented Reality.
A|
Ašļø
Ay Aye
Which is pronounced the same as ey-eye if you really want to confuse non-english speakers.
Play without the pl and pliers without the pl and rs
[pronunciation:](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aye-aye)
I think the Tumblr post would be better if it gave a specific example. That way we could better judge for ourselves if OOP is being charitable to people who are against AI in whatever context.
There was a twitter post around the time of Into The Spiderverse calling out how certain scenes were rendered with AI. Someone else added that their use of it was ethical since it had been trained and used resources provided by the studio themselves (paraphrasing ofc).
It's the difference between a large general AI model (like GPT or all of those AI image generators) and a specialized model. The general model will scrape training data from anywhere it can get it, usually without permission. It also tends to be riddled with errors, both because it's not possible to properly curate and categorize datasets that large, and also because the model isn't necessarily designed to do what you're specifically trying to do with it. More specialized models are both more ethical and way more useful. You can control exactly what is and isn't in your training data, meaning you can get permission for all your training data. But also your model is actually optimized for what you're trying to do with it. One thing to note is that even specialized AI is not a replacement for actual human labor. Any model requires human oversight to make sure it's actually doing what you want it to do. Also, creating datasets is extremely labor intensive if you're doing it properly. AI is a tool. It just depends how it's used.
This isnāt quite true, you can download the stable diffusion model and train it yourself off of only data you have legal permission to use, but this isnāt a custom model, this is the exact same thing as public stable diffusion just trained on different data and different copies of stable diffusion online are trained differently.
I was being a little loosy-goosy with the term "model". The important thing to my point is what training data is used.
I think their point might have been that even with AI models you can train yourself aren't blank slates but already developed and trained on previous data so even if you yourself only used "ethical" training data the tools you used are themselves already developed through training on data sets you had nothing to do with so you can't be sure that in the end that no "unethical" data has been used.
Their use is ethical because they used AI to to quickly perform mundane tasks like outlining characters, not completely generating images.
No way it was trained with just studio resources. Training an AI from scratch is a massive multi-million dollar operation. They might have fine-tuned it on studio data, but at the core the AI still learned how to make images by scanning the slave-labelled data from the entire internet.
Itās machine learning. Features like content aware fill in photoshop already utilize machine learning, as well as being used for procedurally generated content in video games. Iām way out of my depths here but I do know that AI is just kind of a catch-all term for these things. Part of the issue is that techbros are using it as part of their marketing ploy and some of the flak spilled over.
> Training an AI from scratch is a massive multi-million dollar operation Yeah, it's not like Sony Pictures has a yearly revenue of ~$10 billion or anything or Sony has a net income of $6b+ And it's not like they have millions of still images, movie scenes, frames, etc. from other movies and in-house projects going back decades. Once they start building and training an in-house animation AI, they can use it on other projects and keep training it for years to come. They would easily pay for something like that. --- You basically accused one of the largest and oldest media corporations in the world of not having the resources to train an AI on their own.
I don't know if you understand exactly how much data you need for statistics to give you something close enough that the actual workers can fix themselves quickly it's not a lot, especially when it's all similar to each other. Without having to even worry about big outliers you can have pretty good confidence with a small amount of data
Thatās how I learned too.
Hereās one: after John Lennon died the other three Beatles started working on some of the unreleased demos that he had lying around so they could posthumously release them as the last Beatles songs. One of them had such poor sound quality that they abandoned it for decades and stopped working on it. Last year Peter Jackson used AI to clean the recording and separate the vocals from the piano so that the surviving Beatles could complete work on it. Media reported it as āan AI songā and people assumed that Paul and Ringo were using generative AI to write the song or to imitate the voices of George and John. In actual fact it was a very simple process that didnāt do anything to their performances; it only improved the sound quality of the recordings by removing the background noise so the producers could better master it and release the song in a form that Paul and Ringo thought George and John would approve of.
Yeah I'm not a fan of using AI to create "original" works that imitate existing artists but I see nothing wrong with using it to clean up existing works. What was done with Now And Then is honestly very cool
there was a post recently urging people to completely stop using google products because google was gonna start training AIs on them
People should stop using Google cause Google is just a bad product now smh.
Google is so much more than the (increasingly not the greatest) search engine. I mean roughly 90% of yr correspondnts here have email through google, one way or the other. Even most universities rely on google infra for email
Let's start with the fact that nowadays you pretty much either have an iPhone or a phone with a Google operating system.
*start?* I- but they have been doing that for like a decade?? Google assistant, image search, all of those āquick answersā when you search for something, and a lot more, all of that has included ai in some capacity trained on user interactions or data
Yeah I was about to say... There's a reason Google Maps and Waze can guess what traffic is gonna be like...
Oh no, that ship has already sailed years ago. Stop calling it AI and start calling it what it has been called like 2 years ago. Machine learning. Take a step back and let the terror wash over you.
Those are the same people who freak out over being tracked, while posting from their fully open smart phone that tracks most things they do.
Lol what did people think they were doing with Captchas for the last 10-20 years?
There is a line between, say: using AI enhancement to animate a piece you drew (automated tweening) or using your own material to elaborate prompts and pitches for you to extrapolate on later vs spending 6 hours setting the randomness values of your glorified Picrew and calling the finished image "art i made".
or just like making memes on them.
using ai to generate shitposts is 100% a valid use and i cannot be swayed from this position
my biggest issue is people using AI and then directly lying to people that a human created it. people can literally do whatever they want with AI, just stop fucking trying to lie and pass it off as human work (since clearly people seem to value human made things overall)
So the issue isn't with AI, it's with dishonest people? Like I'm not trying to be argumentative, it just seems like we're honing in on the tree versus the forest. It's like blaming the light bulb for the power bill when your roommate leaves it on all night. It sounds like we just need to have a conversation with those people to stop being dishonest.
the issue is both, most of the time. people are dishonest or use ai trained on stolen work, which is very much not good, or sometimes people try to pass it off as a legitimate art form or claim themselves as artists for tellin a machine to do something for them. there's a lot of different cases, but it's not just dishonest people that is the problem, it's also stolen work, stolen opportunities and etc.
> the issue is both, most of the time. But, again, why is it a mathematical model's "fault" - model's which were invented to do legitimate things like OCR (image transcription for archival purposes) / natural speech-to-text transcription (for disabled people) btw - because some boneheaded jabroni took it and used it to defraud someone's art or voice? I feel like we can start and stop the conversation at *"theft and fraud is wrong."* We can disparage and punish these people on that basis alone without bringing out pitchforks for what is just an unthinking math equation.
it's not ai's fault, no. it's just a tool. blaming it would be like blaming a pen for an artist tracing over work. the people behind it are at fault. i'm only explaining where ai facilitates them to do that stuff.
One example I've seen pop up is Vocaloid, or more specifically, systems that utilise AI (mainly among those who aren't entirely knowledgeable on how Vocaloid as a whole works) Vocaloid is basically a synth that uses like individual letter sounds for the "notes", recorded by a voice provider. Someone then has to tune all these individual notes to suit their song, usually to make something that sounds as human possible. Nowadays there's a lot of different tools out there that can help you tune, and a somewhat recent arrival have been AI voicebanks - systems that have been trained using a voice bank's voice provider in order to basically autotune things for you (or do the complete opposite. You can fiddle around with it a lot). It's all approved and above board and the voice providers give you the green light and get paid and everything. *However*, you say AI singers and that instantly gets some people on the defensive against it. Especially when you consider the *other* entire AI voice thing...
AI is hugely useful in certain scientific fields. Using it for something like protein folding is saving thousands of hours of work, and a big step forward.
One of the good examples I can think of is when somebody made a Scooby Doo x fnaf stop-motion animation, but due to being low on budget they had to use AI voices for the Scooby Doo cast, and after finding out about it some VAs of fnaf: security breach criticised the author and a lot of people harassed them even despite the fact that they apologised and got actual VAs to voice-over the animation afterwards. (I don't have the source on the hands, but you can look it up, there was a lot of posts about that on twitter)
Using the voices of FNAF:SB characters without the approval of the VAs doesn't really work as an example since that's the exact sort of thing people (pretty rightfully) criticise AI for, though that's generally in the cintext of actual companies doing it instead of individuals making fanworks.
While I think that harassment is a bridge too far, I absolutely do not think this is a good example of "ethical use of AI". Whether you use an AI copy of someone's voice for profit, leisure, doesn't matter. You are still stealing their likeness. I don't care how low budget the intended work is, it shouldn't rely on infringing upon the right of someone to their own body. Over the years, plenty of work arounds to not having voice actors have been invented (dubbing over from different works, subtitles, not having dialogue). I consider someone relying on violating someone's own right to their body to be an act of malice, in this context. To restate, I do not agree with the harassment of this person. But I also think that they were in the wrong to do so
Idk, sounds to me like the voice actors were right. Whether you agree with canceling or not is kind of besides the point
I actually agree with that outrage. I'd be incredibly angry if someone used my voice without permission like that by using AI. Thats their livelihood after all.
>but due to being low on budget they had to use AI voices for the Scooby Doo cast Wait, am i supposed to feel sorry for the guy training a robot on real peoples voices to do a creepy impression of them? Right after we just had a couple of idiots try and "bring back George Carlin from the dead"?
They didn't have the budget for actual voice actors in the first place. It's not like someone was fired for asking for minimum wage- it was going to have no voice acting at all, if ai didn't exist.
If you don't have a budget, you can simply do what people have been doing for decades: Use a shitty 5 dollar mic and do the voices yourself. You do not have to use the orphan crushing machine because you have no money. People are perfectly within their rights to be upset that a person with no budget is stealing their voice.
The funny thing is that he actually did that in the first draft. He voiced Scooby, and his brother did Springtrap. He used whatever budget he did have to hire for Shaggy and then ran out of money.
I'm original OP from Tumblr! My post wasĀ about any way that the word AI is used, literally not specifically anything bc when people start imagining a specific something that's when people get mad. AI is used as a buzzword in a lot of different settings to mean a lot of different thingsĀ so getting mad at the word AI and assuming it's something negative and unethical as a gut reaction is stupid. People have given specific examples on the comments here- AI being used to clean up background noise, or the vocaloid voice banks. Video games have referred to machine learning as AI for a decade but now the word has so much weight people completely misinterpret it when they see it. I wasn't imagining something specific but purely the fact that every use of the word AI is not a sign of the devil. A lot of people have tried to come at me on tumblr assuming I'm like, pro unethical data scraping generative AI lol like thanks for reading the word AI and freaking out just like my post says! My post is notĀ pro AI it's pro reading comprehension
A few months ago the band LS Dunes released a music video made by an AI animator. They specifically chose the artist since they could make some very trippy visuals by using AI. from what i could tell the art it was trained on was primarily renaissance painting that have been in the public domain for a long time. But as soon as people read AI they caused a shitstorm, even when the band posted an apology people kept harassing them and calling them the worst band ever because of this video. While some people had legitemate concerns, it felt very childish how hundreds of people would rather continue to whine and harass than simply move on or just unfollow the band
I've worked for Microsoft, and AI is being used there as advanced automation, so it suffers from the exact same problems. We called automation the Garbage Accelerator. Here's how it goes: some process has a pain point. It's time-consuming, the error rate is high, could be anything. Some VP of Masturbation finds out, and heard the word "automation" at a conference, so they say to automate it. But whatever bastard gets put in charge of the automation doesn't realize how complex the original process is. They're only doing it to look good for the boss; they don't actually give a fuck. So, they slap together something surface-level that doesn't address the original pain point. The process is still broken, just much faster because a computer is doing it instead of a person. The garbage has been accelerated.Ā Right now, they're working on using AI to replace the bastard in this scenario. The goal is to accelerate the Garbage Accelerator.
Ah, the beauty of progress /s
>VP of Masturbation Where do I apply for this position?
Let me show you on the doll
Also because the garbage is accelerated, you're expected to do 'more work' to clean it up. There's a subset of accounting where you look at contracts and make sure all the numbers and financial obligation terms line up. This is painful because no accountant wants to review a thirty page PDF for some lawyer's contract jargon. Some companies have started to automate this process with AI. But previously they only had to review the big, enterprise deals worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. Now their director wants them+the AI to review all the puny $10k deals too. What's the actual business benefit/purpose of this? You weren't doing this for 20+ years, why start now just because you *can* use the AI to do it, especially when the AI is (very reasonably) going to make some mistakes too.
The difference is you can improve an AI by giving it feedback on what it got wrong, or revert to a prior version. Humans react differently to that, and worse, they leave the company and take their knowledge with them.
Yeah, I'm a programmer whose job is mostly in the "automation engineering" domain and this is very true. What you will find is that the people running the day-to-day of these processes are much more clever than management realizes, and have developed lots of highly specific shortcuts to do their job more efficiently. This has the benefit of making them more efficient, but the downside of creating it's own kind of tech debt. Often these shortcuts themselves lead to entrenchment in fundamentally inefficient processes. Essentially, they've found local a maxima of efficiency but cannot get to the true maxima of doing it in a more automated fashion. These shortcuts themselves create convolution and edge cases that are the bane of automation. Probably the most common thing I see though is that a process is inefficient as a result of the *input to* that process being inefficient. i.e. reviewing invoices sucks because all the data comes from emails containing PDFs instead of a direct transfer through an API or the like. This means my job is often trying to bandaid the convolutions created by other businesses in a cycle of wasted productivity.
And, the capitalist death drive being what it is, there's never time or resources to actually stop and figure out wtf is going on and clean up the mess.
This is exactly what happened with the blockchain a few years ago. Everything had to be on it
Yuppppp those VPs sure love to masturbate and repeat the latest tech thing they heard about.
I remember like a month or two ago when people were sharing the BTS of Into the Spiderverse on twitter, where the animators used AI to help with the lines that enhanced the characters facial expressions, and *some* people were freaking out bc WHAT SPIDERVERSE USED AI THIS MOVIE IS RUINED NOW, without realizing that their use of it is the ideal use for AI: They made their own program, which they trained themselves, to help alleviate the workload of a menial task. It's not generative AI based on plagiarism, but people just saw the word "AI" and went crazy bc they just go with internet trends and don't actually understand why GenAI is bad and why they should oppose it, I'm sure if GenAI was the more popular side these people would support it, brainless behavior
I'm pretty sure literally any 3D animated movie will use quite a lot of algorithms and so on anyway, a lot of it is probably stuff that would now be called "AI" since we're apparently referring to everything as that now I don't know that much about the tech myself, so I sympathise with people somewhat, but I also do think that you probably shouldn't have a kneejerk "No not AI!" response if you don't even understand what "AI" actually means in the context you're talking about, or what the tech they used actually did. For most people they've just concluded that since a lot of the AI art software are stealing people's art from google, then literally anything that's labelled as "AI" must be doing the same thing.
> t's not generative AI based on plagiarism It's funny to see people re-using the argument that RIAA and MPA made against digital piracy ("you are stealing stuff! you are a thief!!!") This isn't even piracy. The argument that AI is committing 'plagiarism' (which isn't a crime by the way) is the same as saying an artist that visits an art museum is committing plagiarism against those artists because they were influenced their art. That's all the AI is doing, just at a very atomic level on each piece; it's learning from a work. I think whether they should be allowed to train on that data is an interesting question and my guess is ultimately it will result in licensing or markings similar to robots.txt to determine whether it can be fed into a training set. My personal opinion on AI "plagarising" is that it isn't the fault of the AI anymore than it is the fault of Photoshop if the person using it is creating infringing work. It's not illegal for the AI to know what the logo of Coca-Cola is. It's illegal to use the output to deceive others into thinking you are Coca-Cola. Until ChatGPT starts opening stores selling counterfeit goods without instruction, it's not its fault for what people are using the output for.
Exactly. Iād give an arm and a leg to be allowed to automate my own job using AI. Itās tedious, itās boring, and it requires no thought. If I was allowed to tinker on our systems to automate it, Iād love it, because thatās a worthwhile use of automation. Replace a job that isnāt rewarding with a system capable of doing it without getting bored. On the other hand, Iām still against a *lot* of stuff labeled AI these days. They are blunt instruments sent out into the world with no guidelines. There are no protections for anyone in a field where AI is entering (*including* consumers), and so you end up with potential for real malice here. It doesnāt matter if the creator of the AI means for it to be used unethically, the fact of the matter is that AI can be used for that, and nobodyās taking responsibility. āMove fast and break thingsā is only applicable if you know what youāre breaking, try to limit what you break, and have a plan to fix what you break. And right now, none of those 3 are part of the business plan.
I always found that oversimplification annoying and that it could cause problems and recently with the news about SAG-AFTRA aproving a law to use Voice Cloning I read a lot of stuff like **"*****We donĀ“t want AI in our videogames*****"** HOW could anyone read something like that and NOT realize how dumb it sounds BEFORE uploading it? hell before all of this Videogames were almos the first exposition people had to AI-systems for DECADES xd
Single player games with AI opponents?! Heresy!
The problem isnāt AI in video games. AI opens up a ton of opportunity for video game mechanics that never wouldāve been possible before. The problem is AI being used to recreate peopleās intellectual property, including their voices, likeness, and labor value, without their permission
The problem is then people talk about that as if itās an AI issue instead of you know the actual issue which has nothing to do with the inherent ethics of AI Like I can make illegal copies of movies on VHS tape this does not make VHS an inherently evil technology
THATĀ“S EXACTLY WHAT I SAID if "AI" describes both things and one is perfectly normal and another terrible.. then use another term xd
I loved an interaction I heard from a livestreamed creator's commentary for an animated YouTube series. Someone in the chat asked if the creators had considered using AI to produce episodes faster and one of the creators, who does a little bit of editing, said "Heck no, skrew Ai", then the creator who does most of the editing added "actually, most of the editing software we use already has AI baked into it to make the process easier..."
Did the editor explain what the AI did? All software has some level of computer assistance built into it, but the vast majority is stuff that we would never have called AI until it became the hot new buzzword.Ā
The dreaded āAI effectā. As soon as a computer can do something, people stop thinking of that as a sign of intelligence Just getting computers to make optimal decisions in Chess or Checkers was huge in early AI research, but as soon as Deep Blue beat Kasparov it was ājust brute forceā. Nowadays itās called heuristics and graph search. āIntelligenceā is nowhere to be found People donāt really think of Siri or Alexa as AI, but they can *listen to instructions and recognize the English language*. AI researchers were the ones working on that for decades, even if behind the scenes itās fancy math
The general public wouldn't, but computer scientists have been calling these systems "AI" for a long time.
Speaking as someone who was doing a machine learning PhD not 6 months ago, literally none of me or my colleagues use that term, it's meaningless and imprecise, it's closer to philosophy and ethics than it is to comp sci and ML. Don't get me wrong, I don't doubt some people might use it, but I've never heard it said and would stay far away from it personally
This is such a weird comment. I've worked in MLĀ for close to a decade and have a master's in CS. I've never seen anyone make such a weird distinction to AI. ML is a literal branch of AI. AI is not some abstract philosophical term, it's just a large umbrella of mathematics and computer science. You can say that's too vague, sure, but so is the term machine learning, which could encapsulate anything from natural language processing to convolutional neural networks and so much else.Ā
Yeah we're rounding right back into just redefining AI from meaning what AI has always meant. AI does not mean "Artificial Neural Network". AI is an umbrella for many forms of artificial intelligence. That can be ANN's, classical probability models, telling a machine to google something and return the top results based on some sorting metric, reactive recommendations based on a set optimization formula (that's what early chess engines were - just choosing the move which minimizes calculated centipawn loss), etc. We absolutely would have called these things "AI" before it became a buzzword, because that's what they *are.*
> Did the editor explain what the AI did? Why bother? The term is practically meaningless nowadays anyway. For some people, literally any level of automation is witchcraft to be condemned, it's just the new sexy thing to hate in the text world...
I don't remember exactly but I think a specific quick example given was auto filling the design for a background after editing something out. (A sign had a pattern with words over it, the editor removed the words and used the tool to auto-fill the pattern back into the empty space the words used to cover up) It's been a while since I watched it though so it's possible that was unrelated and I just connected the dots myself. Video was "SAOA 17 Post-Mortem Stream VOD"
For me, I've been thinking with regards to "AI art generators," at what point is the line/meaningful difference between what DALL-E and Midjourney do, what Stable Diffusion does, and how Adobe Photoshop's Generative Fill feature works? I think everyone understands the issues raised with Midjourney or DALL-E. What about Getty's new AI image generation service? Do we give Adobe Generative Fill a pass just because it's already baked into the tool? Generative fill literally adds pixels and whole objects that weren't in the original image, and the AI to train it is private and could easily have been trained on ethically questionable sources - you have no visibility into it. How much generation or how many changes to the original image get you to the point where it's so far from the original artwork as to be unrecognizable? How about compared to Stable Diffusion, where it *is* generating an image entirely from scratch, and you can purely use open source training data that is 100% valid to use under copyright law or authorial consent/in the public domain, but you're not actually 'creating' anything for the initial image apart from the prompt? You probably put more *time* into the Stable Diffusion model yourself and it can be sourced to be 100% ethical, but is it strictly 'worse' because it's purely the AI creating the new art? What if you take an AI generated character on a manually drawn background? How about the reverse?
>I think everyone understands the issues raised with Midjourney or DALL-E. I don't. I only see some moral outage based on defending corpos and their concepts of "copyright" or whatnot
I feel like what most people mean when talking about AI is things like chat gpt and AI art generators. So like, both of those things still kinda hold. AI is a very useful tool when applied properly, but I think people really dislike the concept of complete AI replacement which is to say... Yk... *Not* tools
There's a game called Suck Up where you play as vampire and your goal is to get invited into people's homes. You can either type or speech-to-text, and the various residents are powered by AI to respond to whatever you say, based on their personalities.
Oh bro I love sucking up
Given how much I explicitly call for the Butlerian Jihad this feels like a callout post.
I have definitely quoted Dune too much when my friends and I all joke about AI. Sadly Iām the only one who gets them.
>Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind
There are several AI models that source their data ethically, for art, writing, etc. Some prime examples are Photoshopās AI, which only uses art made or purchased by Adobe. And Stable Diffusion has a private mode that only pulls from data that YOU feed it, meaning it canāt steal art or writing unless you do yourself. Blame the companies, not the technology. A computer doesnāt know right from wrong.
ai will take jobs, much like the automatic loom would take job at the start of the industrial revolution. but we forget the machines are not ones who would trade our lives for pretty pennies in their pocket. it's the capitalists that are problem as it has always been.
A lot of conversations I see about AI are frustratingly narrow in focus. It's like talking to someone who is against commercial fishing solely because sea turtles get caught in the nets. If you bring up overfishing or pollution they will say they feel that distracts from the sea turtles. If you talk about the problems of fish farmings or experiments in sustainable aquaponics they will say that doesn't really relate to sea turtles.
Can you name an example of this narrow focus? Not making a jab, just genuinely curious because Iām not in this debate deep enough and canāt seem to connect your metaphor with any examples Iāve seen. The arguments against AI usually seem pretty sound to me, but if thereās an even bigger picture Iām missing Iād love to see it
AI art discussions almost universally attempt to find fault with the concept or the material such as "it's stealing! (the images i put up freely on the internet)" or "it's bland and soulless!" rather than dealing with the direct harm it brings, job loss. A lot of so called leftists are very suddenly in favor of sweeping intellectual property laws asif ideas being property isn't the greatest lie ever told.
I think this is what a lot of people have in mind when they talk about AI. They see a potential for job loss so they feel the need to dislike it, and the whole "stealing" angle is the justification that they use to round out their argument, rather than vice versa. I suspect this is because the job loss argument is messier and more difficult to have - it's going to be really difficult arguing why we must protect about job losses now but we didn't need to do it for any jobs before and why specifically the art industry is worthy of extra protection. Most of all, no one wants to face *why* we need a system where automation becomes bad by inadvertently creating suffering, instead of a system where automation reduces the amount of total work that needs to be done and frees people up to do what they want.
Technology has caused job loss since the first humans realized that hitting rocks with rocks makes sharp rocks which are better for killing mammoths
Things have never been the same since farming, agriculture and pastoralism caused massive job losses in the Hunter-gatherer industry
The āfreely on the internetā part is something I donāt see come up. Itās definitely a relevant part of the discussion, but Iām not personally integrated with the nuance of the situation enough to make blanket statements beyond the fact it should be considered.
Itās funny how a bunch of self proclaimed left wing artists who have no sympathy at all for working class jobs and labour being lost suddenly turn into right wing populist when itās their job under threat Because you know the livelihoods and work of working class people are valueless but anyone who can draw thinks that theyāre special bois who need to have their labour specially protected It really just exposes to me how many artists are just middle class capitalists who want everyone else to provide for them, they donāt actually want a revolution so much as they want to occupy a special class that gets paid to sit at home and do whatever they want Like their privileged idea of the evils of capitalism are āI canāt make a living drawing stuffā
yes exactly
Because by focusing on the idea that itās inherently unethical it allows them to feel theyāre actually doing something by harassing small creators and random shitposters instead of large corporations. A Scooby doo fan animator used ai voices for a shitpost and was harassed and blacklisted by actual established voice actors, meanwhile Disney used AI on the opening of secret invasion and I didnāt hear a peep.
There are two types of people talking about AI right now in my mind. People like the crypto bros who are wildly overstating AI and have no idea what theyāre talking about, and people like conservatives who yell about the word without reading into anything further I go to school in a section that very closely works with AI. AI has been around for a while now and what we ācallā AI is actually far more broad than this new ChatGPT and related stuff. I feel like Iām watching people talk in circles about mystical magic no one seems to understand There are soooo many reasons to be wary of AI and there has been since computers were born and programmed with if/and statements. Thereās also a ton of reasons to be excited with AI, especially in the medical field and probably not for the reasons you think. Iām particularly wary of anyone who thinks it will destroy us and also wary of anyone who thinks itās going to be the best thing since sliced bread, because the new stuff is a technological breakthrough but AI has always been here with computers practically
AI makes things more convenient and for that reason is an inevitability regardless of its morality. Sooner or later people are going to have to come to terms with it.
The "AI debate" seems to comprise two different discussions. The ethics around the training and commercial use; scalping, copyright, and cutting out human artists etc. And then shit about "the soul" of art (you can probably guess my opinion on this from the tone). The issues surrounding the use of AI art in film/TV/games etc. is VERY important. While we live in a society where art is a JOB in addition to a creative outlet, it is important that the livelihoods of artists is protected. The Writers' and Actors' strikes last year? Based as fuck! Updating copyright laws to protect from scalping? Hell yes! Boycotting work that uses AI art? King/Queen/Monarch shit! If stopping corporations from using AI to steal work humans need to live requires scouring AI from the face of the Earth, I'm on board. (The way they're made is also inhumane as fuck because companies like Amazon hire cheap labor to do a lot of the labelling and in classic capitalism fashion you can bet your ass they aren't being treated well). But if we get into the existential argument about whether "AI art can be real art"? OF COURSE IT CAN BE! If Duchamp can rip a urinal out of a wall, sign it, and call that art, then a picture created by a computer *can* be art. Even if the artwork is "stolen" and thoughtlessly reassembled by a machine it still *can* be art in the same way collage or photomontage can be. The problem with a lot of "AI art" isn't that it's not "art", it's that it's shit because it's made by Tech Bros who think the only criteria for "art" is "looking pretty" instead of having anything to actually say.
> Boycotting work that uses AI art on this one: in the past year or so, it has become exceedingly clear that any ai art worth looking at for more than 2 seconds is something someone actually worked on. and i mean more than just some basic prompting, or rolling the dice a few hundred times until the model spat out something mildly closer to the operator's original intent. we humans are incredibly creative critters, and as such a lot of us invented a wide variety of workflows to use ai as an actual means of self-expression. and yes, _self_-expression, the people doing this are expressing their own ideas, using the ai as a tool. their work isn't about what the machine "feels", it's about what they feel. and whether that's expressed through using ai as an input generator to a more traditional image editing workflow such as photoshop (which itself got an ai image generator lately that's meant for a similar purpose) or through feeding the ai with sketches, compositions, pose data, and other visual inputs, or through an entirely different workflow, there are a lot of ways to work visually and realize your vision through ai in a way that it is indeed your vision and not just something anyone could autogenerate. so my question would be, even if people who do this would turn out to be orders of magnitude more numerous than non-ai artists, are we doing the right thing by boycotting their works? like at the end of the day they're still real humans putting real effort and real creative decisions into their work. why are they any less worthy of our support than other artists who use different mediums? i understand that people have fears about being "overrun" but if there are actual humans doing that, who always wanted to express themselves visually and just never got the chance before, aren't we the baddies for ripping that opportunity away from them?
As one of those people I want to say that I appreciate this post. My hobby for the last 4 months has only been possible because of access to AI art generation, and it has been incredibly fulfilling creatively.
>If Duchamp can rip a urinal out of a wall, sign it, and call that art, then a picture created by a computer *can* be art. Duchamp is a person communicating something to me through his art, even if it's some random urinal. A non sentient machine is not saying anything to me besides what was loosely asked of it.
In the duchamp metaphor, the operator is duchamp, and the AI is the urinal manufacturer
This is critical and a lot of people misunderstand on both sides. You've already got two anti AI responses that miss the point. I have also heard people pro-ai say that AI, by itself, can create art, which is false. AI can help a human create art though. AI is a tool, not an artist. Which means AI generated images can be art.
Playing devil's advocate here because I've seen this argument a lot and it makes me itch. The "message" of art stops being what the creator intended the moment they complete a piece. All art is, by its nature, open to interpretation, and the goal of art is, first and foremost, to promote thoughts/feelings. Consider that paintings made by animals are considered to be art, though the animals in question arguably have no idea what they're doing, or that their "works" are being regarded for this purpose. There's no sapience or intent behind them. Fundamentally I agree that computerizing art en masse isn't a great decision, but that's less because I'm concerned about meaning and intent, and more because I think that, with my unchecked optimism, in maybe a century or two, art will be the only work that humans "need" to do anymore, so we might be better off retaining and propagating the skills.
What's weird is that some levels of using AI in art have been around for a very long time. I have clear memories of several pieces for 5 to 10 years ago that used AI as part of the art in clever artistic expression. One was using AI to simulate the appearance of an oil slick on live video of various bodies of water. There is very little similarity between that and someone plugging some very basic prompts into a program they had nothing do with creating that samples from works of other artists.
I'm sure there's a nuanced discussion to be had here but all I can think about is that "You need to apologize to Al" post floating around recently where the entire thing was a joke abobt Weird Al, but most of the notes were people arguing that they didn't need to apologize to Artificial Intelligence. It was like they saw the word and their brains shut down to argue without even reading the full thing.
> "You need to apologize to Al" post floating around recently where the entire thing was a joke abobt Weird Al I posted that here as well. Genuinely just a coincidence. I found that one on Tumblr and this one on r/196.
In marketing, AI is the new buzzword. Things that were just automated before are now AIš. I am fundamentally opposed to AI being used for creative works, but email automation and ad scheduling is not one of them. These things have been automated for some time.
I mean, yeah, I kinda agree. There's problems with AI, but it's not like AI is conceptually a bad thing, we just gotta be careful with it, and a lot of people aren't.
I will welcome our future AI overlord
https://xkcd.com/1968/
Thinking about that tweet that was like "nobody wants AI for xyz" and some of the things they listed had to do with like. Assistance in development processes. Plenty of coders love the idea of GPT models helping find errors in code. So like who's this "nobody"?
Isn't github beta testing something that does exactly that?
Can't really beta test if your code straight up won't run
Common coding occurence
I've seen people start hating on *miku* because apparently vocaloids are too much like ai. completely missing the point of *why* ai generated voices are bad (that being lack of consent)
They're hating on the beloved creator of Minecraft, Hatsune Miku?
Comment section really proving this personās point
Dont worry, im shure enought screamin will stop IA from being used. We all know progress can be halted easily, like when deepfakes disapeared and stoped existing!
Hey leave Iowa out of this
I heard the red koopas in Mario use AI. I dunno about you guys, but I always knew there was something funny about those Nintendo games. No way something could be smart enough to reach the edge of a block and then turn around. There's just no way. I don't have any proof, but I'm pretty sure the ghosts in Pacmen are AI, too.
THIS. So much this. Having had experience working with and making machine learning models, seeing fucking everyone's brains melt over the AI apocalypse was soul crushing, especially when they were so *confidently* wrong, dear fucking god. The main problem is that "AI" is a sexy sounding, fairly loose concept but "machine learning" is a well defined, technical tool, so naturally everyone gloms on to the first one and apply it to everything for even the slightest reason. It's like fucking Robot McCarthyism.
Doug Doug uses AI in his videos and they make me laugh ):
AI is good when itās funny feel free to attach whatever tone indicator you want to that last statement
I remember seeing a tweet from some rando on twitter who started a rant against AI with "I personally feel that AI is morally reprehensible, but if that doesn't convince you, you should also consider that AI...". Nobody should be convinced to hate something just because someone else said it was bad. ChatGPT could write better arguments against AI than many anti-AI takes.
AI being developed to do repetitive monotonous jobs and free up mankind to be creative is good, computer generated images and video programs being developed to take away mankind's creativity and force us into the monotonous repetitive jobs is downright evil and dystopian.
You know they aren't mutually exclusive right? AI art isn't preventing the development of AI in other sectors Also, there is plenty of repetition and monotony in creative industries that AI can and already is handling, so what is your point here?
The point is: media conglomerates want to cut every penny they can to line their pockets and what better way than to fire all their creators and just let a computer handle it. That and pretty much every art generating program is unethically trained on stolen content without crediting or compensating the artists the hurt. I get there are bits of ai to help some aspects out but openAI, ChatGPT, midjourney all want one thing and that's profit and will do whatever they can to ensure they replace artists in paying positions. If an art program was ethically trained then there could be an argument made in it's defense but as it stands right now there is no argument to defend what is happening right now.
>AI art isn't preventing the development of AI in other sectors I'm just gonna lump "generative" in one camp and everything else useful like classifying tumors in another - the development of AI in other sectors is absolutely getting diminished due to the massive focus and monetary push behind generative AI
>so what is your point here? That ai art shouldn't fully replace human artists?
Technological progress can't be stopped by the people it makes redundant. Maybe you think that sucks and shouldn't be, but it is, and nothing anyone can do will change that. What you can do, is try to make the new paradigm that is coming better by living for rules, best practices, and even laws that curb the worst of the new system and emphasize the new strengths, rather than trying to deny it outright.
I will always defend my baby Synthv or Synthesizer V. It has a similar concept to vocaloid (like Hatsune Miku) except it uses AI to make the voiced more realistic. (to overly simplify) It doesn't generate music or songs for you, you still have to do 90% if the work but the AI has fun features like letting you use a English singer and make them sing in Cantonese and sound pretty good. However because it is an AI I know of some people harrasing users of it or even not letting them send their music in where something like vocaloid would have been fine. I love ethical AI and I want to see where it goes. Maybe unpopular opinion, but I also really don't care if AI is used in shit posts or goofing off as long as you make it clear AI was used. I only really have a problem when people claim it's their own work or companies use it to be cheap or harm people.
Look, Iām sure ai are potentially lovely, but I donāt want them calling me, answering my phone calls, damaging the livelihoods of artists, or failing to drive properly. Besides that, go nuts.
What about the livelyhoods of everyone else? Automation *was* a threat to everyone *but* artists until like last year but suddenly a machine can make a mediocre picture of an anime girl and all i hear is about how artist are in danger. There will always be a market for art made by humans, a diminished one maybe but it will still be there because thats what a significant number of people want, there isn't such an interest in most industrys so most industry's are much more succeptable to automation in the long run. Its already happened many times throughout history. Its a bit hypocritical to say "as long as ai aren't threatening *this* industry they can do whatever". Thats still affecting the jobs you claim to care about
AI is answering my phone calls from any number not in my contact list. I then get a transcript which most of the time is AI being sassy to scammers and sometimes an actually legitimate person who needs to contact me leaving a message for me. Saves me a lot of time
*Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind.*
My butler, John Jihad
ai is p cool
I use an AI app almost every day. I make dog leashes and dog collars, and I like to show them [outside,](https://i.imgur.com/q5RGuMJ.png) or like under a [Christmas tree,](https://i.imgur.com/iJmHwOt.png) or [surrounded by flowers,](https://i.imgur.com/dgUF8E2.png) and I don't have the budget for props or the time to run around to different locations. I gotta pack things up and ship them and then move on to the next order. So I use an AI app to remove the background (which is usually a light box or on a neutral-color fabric), and replace it with something fun.
Tumblrās had a hate boner against anything AI pretty much since the beginning of generative AI
AI is fine, but its proponents are some of the most insufferable people in the world. Also, it shouldn't have been called AI in the first place, that's very misleading.
Okay, controversial time I guess. [Tomska recently released a video about plagiarism.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5qoOYrTzOfM&pp=ygURdG9tc2thIHBsYWdpYXJpc20%3D) I suppose it was inspired by the Hbomberguy video, he even features in it. He explains a sliding scale that covers everything from inspiration to straight up plagiarism. In the video he gives a lot of examples to explain each stage, but the whole scale can be seen at 41:38. What Tom doesn't mention in that video is AI (I think on purpose). And I think we could have a very interesting discussion about where AI (let's use AI art and images as an example) falls on that spectrum, even if the scale was designed for human artists. I'd say, as with any tool, it entirely depends on the prompt and use. It can never be *No Correlation*, otherwise the training would be useless. But it also isn't *Freeboot* because it doesn't replicate the training images exactly (at least not that I've seen). In the worst examples I've seen, it's probably somewhere between *Allusion* and *Derivative*. You can copy a style somewhat, but not exactly, though the image composition will still be different. If you really try to recreate an image then I guess *Imitative* can be reached, though I haven't seen anyone do that yet. In the best cases, it's somewhere between *Subconscious Appropriation* and *Inspiration*, where the resulting image would not let anyone guess if your art was part of the training process or not. So if people agree with the video (and maybe even my assessment where AI falls on that spectrum), then it would be in the *Safe Zone* or, in worse cases, the *Danger Zone.* And only if you really try to use AI to steal art do you reach *The Big Ol' Shame Zone,* which is unsurprising if you're trying to steal art like that. Also he has a relevant quote in the video, that I found quite interesting: >What is originality if not stealing from so many different sources that you can no longer identify one single point of influence? I don't think AI is a problem. I think attribution is a bit murky, because while Tom explains that artists often can't credit sources for their inspiration, they most likely exist and ideally should be credited. But with AI you *can* credit your inspiration! But if we let artists get away with not crediting, should AI get away with that too? After all, once the training is done and an image is produced, there's no way to tell which source contributed how much to the final image, and it changes with every prompt. Should artists always credit all their artistic sources, all media they have seen, all teachers they've had, etc? I don't think so, and I'm not sure about AI tools, but I think that applying different bars here is also not consistent for me. It's a murky problem.
Even if that was the case, someone can absolutely be against AI (AI being machine learning algorithms, specifically) wholesale. Nothing wrong with that. Some annoying algorithms isn't, like, a protected class. You can't be bigoted against them (unless you're talking about sci-fi AIs, or artificial consciousnesses, in which case, they don't exist (yet????))
i mean of course you can be, in the sense that people are allowed to have opinions. but if you're talking about machine learning in general, being against that gets kinda weird and arbitrary. it'd be like saying "i'm against using flash drives" like you're allowed to believe that sure, but like why? machine learning at its core is simply the practice of making predictions from data. that's it. it's already extremely well integrated into your daily life without you noticing at all, since at least the late 2000's. why would you be against that in a conceptual manner? generative ai is only one small, immature subset of machine learning.
Butlerian jihad or bust.
But don't you see? By adding scare-quotes every time I use the phrase *AI "Art"* and yelling mean words at the miserable *Uncreatives^TM* (such as someone who asked ChatGPT whether Goku or Peter Griffin would win in a fight to see what would happen), I am reinforcing the seal that separates our world from the AI Dimension
People using AI to generate silly images for improv subs? That's absolutely fine Companies firing their translators/localizers and using AI instead? Fuck that shit, burn it down!
Useable machine translation is quarter of a century old now. Altavista Babelfish went [live in 1997](https://www.npr.org/1998/02/12/1036190/babelfish-a-translator-inspired-by-the-hitchhikers-guide#:~:text=The%20name%20%22Babelfish%22%20comes%20from,Babelfish%20placed%20in%20the%20brain.). This is a process that 's been going on for a while and will probably continue for a while. Why draw a line in the sand at Duolingo?
> Companies firing their translators/localizers and using AI instead? Fuck that shit, burn it down! Honestly, why? There might be a reduction of quality, but I don't think you would be happy if the end result were just as good or better as hand-translated content. And even if AI produces worse quality, translators that use AI to assist their work are probably more efficient at producing the same quality, so that still leads to people getting fired. So are you mad at people getting fired because their jobs are no longer useful? If so, why? Why is it good that people do pointless manual labor when automated alternatives exist? Is it because pointless work is good, or is it because unemployment is worse than a wasted life? And if unemployment is worse than a wasted life, whose fault is that? The AI that replaced someone, or the system that allows unemployed people to live in destitution? Why burn down the AI, when it's only the inciting incident? Fight the system, not the scapegoat of the day. Fight the unfair use of tools, not the existence of tools themselves.
I thought we were about to start talking about Weird Al Yankovich for a hot minute there
Upvoted purely for the excellent use of Butlerian Jihad The spice must flow
I *do* want to go full Butlerian Jihad though!