[stolenmerch]

I'm not a fan of this hyper aggressive line-in-the-sand argumentation about AI that pushes it all precariously close to culture war shenanigans. If you don't like a new technology that is perfectly cool and your right to an opinion. Please don't position it so that if I want to use AI I have to defend myself from accusations of exploiting labor and the environment. That is NOT at all clear, settled, or even correct much of the time. I'm open to that conversation and debate, but diatribes like this make it far too black-and-white with "good" people and "bad" people.

[rain_iwakura]

The issue is that without loud declaration like this money men will just soldier on with implementing shittier future.

It's always do something first and then ask for forgiveness. But at the point you ask for it it's too late and too many eggs were broken. And somehow you're richer at the end of it all and thus, protected from any consequences. While everyone else is, forgive my French, fucked.

Has Facebook been a net positive so far? Has twitter? You may make case for you YouTube, but what about Netflix?

It's only been good to us (engineers) and our investor masters, but not for the 90% of the rest, which may I remind you is the distribution that created us in the first place. Sorry for being dramatic, but I do seriously think these things need to be reigned in, and especially people like Altman who while believing themselves to be good-willed (and I have no doubts that he is better man than Musk for example) end up being Robert Moseses' of our generation. That is someone with good intentions who ends up making things worse overall.

[throwaway295729]

Why would YouTube or Netflix be a net negative?

[al_borland]

YouTube was one of the sites where the recommendation engine, trained to increase engagement, was pushing people into conspiracy theories and politically divisive content… and some other darker stuff.

They have done some work to try and mitigate some of that, but it seems like it will be a cat and mouse game between the AI and society, and a lot of damage was already done.

[rain_iwakura]

I said YouTube isn't a net negative. Even then you have to think globally, what about children who grew up consuming AI generated abomination animations made with 0 oversight of even its greedy creators?

Netflix was the cause for current slate of tax writeoff cancellations (no Netflix no overinvestment by Warner etc and no clumsy Zaslav cleanup), terrible shows being greenlit, homogeneity of camerawork, casting, identity-politics pandering that nobody asked for, oversaturation of the market with streaming services that is almost as bad as cable etc. It's basically a cancer overgrowth, good short-term and terrible long-term. Binge-tv model is also not a good thing, in terms of how much time it takes up, how little it brings in terms of pleasure and validates our growing impatience. I could go on and on. Does anyone even remember Mank or The Killer? Imagine Poor Things being Netflix-only release. Nobody would even say a single peep about it outside of niche film twitter accounts.

Generally speaking, if you've read "Seeing Like a State", then you can apply the same logic to companies and the entire industries, or really any aspirations of "man". We crave control and fear uncertainty, so we make environments far more deterministic, which brings more short-term profit but ruins the environment (be it nature or film itself). Look at Disney, Iger created the superhero movie boom (by making it super deterministic and boring: every movie is part of a giant puzzle so that each piece brings money) but in the process killed Star vehicles, killed experimentation (by directors, actors), and now Scorsese and Coppola need to throw around their weight to reverse the course. Sure, A24 exists, but before this all movies were A24 movies essentially. Now a major star being in a horror movie is an "Event". (Who is even a star anymore? DiCaprio, Cruise? These people were around since 80s. You think Chris Evans will have the same longevity?) Yeah, there were similar periods of dominance (80s action movies) but they weren't so precisely fine-tuned and featured greater directorial freedom and less emphasis on being non-offensive.

I guarantee you none of you will quote Avengers (Ultron onwards) in next 20 years. People still quote Terminator 2 or Predator or Lethal Weapon, despite them also being brainless flicks (some not so brainless actually). Look at Dr Strange 2, they forced Raimi to stop being Raimi basically (the first movie has some good moments), and made him fall in line with the "agenda", because the plan™ is too important to compromise on. In reality the plan™ is the money perputuum mobile lol. Sure, these people were always greedy, but stochasticity of the system allowed for good stuff to pass through their Eyes of Sauron lmao.

Tbh I don't even know why I'm responding a "throwaway" account.

[_gabe_]

> terrible shows being greenlit, homogeneity of camerawork, casting, identity-politics pandering that nobody asked for, oversaturation of the market with streaming services that is almost as bad as cable etc. … Binge-tv model is also not a good thing

None of this is unique to Netflix. Terrible shows have been greenlit since the dawn of television. Shows are incredibly homogenous because they’re largely produced by a select few people. If anything, Netflix has broken that homogeneity by allowing more indie film/tv creators to breakthrough (like squid game).

Casting and identity politics shenanigans are definitely not unique to Netflix and started way before Netflix started producing content. The oversaturation problem only became a problem when all the other networks wanted their own slice of the pie. It was actually great for awhile when Netflix was the only big player in town.

And finally, binge-tv has always been possible. My grandmother would sit in front of cable television sun-up to sun-down watching whatever was on. 24 hour marathons of mythbusters and other shows like that were very common. Reruns of all your favorite sitcoms play all night on all major cable channels. Bingeing isn’t a unique problem to Netflix. Netflix just allows you to do it with new shows instead of waiting arbitrary amounts of time.

Also, is binge-reading a novel unhealthy? I’ve had 8 hour reading sessions when I’m gripped by a great book, like the last book in the Wheel of Time series. If that’s acceptable, why isn’t watching a show for 8 hours acceptable? I don’t think the medium really has that much of a tangible effect. Now if you’re bingeing shows everyday, then it’s unhealthy. But once a quarter when a new show you like comes out? Idk, that seems fine to me.

[rain_iwakura]

I'm not sure if you're joking about binge-ing but you have to be delusional to think that someone taping their favorite show on their own or waiting for it until it ends is nearly the same as dropping all episodes at the same time on principle for every show and only offering that as an option for a long time. building your whole UI around it and encouraging this behavior? The point about others jumping on the bandwagon can only happen if Netflix broke down the barrier and over-invested (by going into deep red) to justify accessibility, knowing full well they won't be able to keep up the steam indefinitely. I know you're trying to be smart here, and failing, but are books built to be binged? Do they know when your attention is dipping? Do books have such UI to do this? You can make same inane argument about doing math for 8 hours a day or something.

Also the scale at which Netflix was throwing money around was unprecedented, so much so that other tv shows and writers were making fun of it. That's like saying periods of good investment client are equivalent to a dot com crash or a housing bubble.

[jen20]

Not to comment on AI, or the merits of television as a medium here, but specifically on the drop-releases of entire seasons of shows.

I do not want to retain the context of some show across weeks. If I'm going to watch something, it will be all in one go, over the course of some reasonable time period that _I_ define - that may be a single day (transatlantic flight, for example), or may be a single week.

Typically for the streaming services that don't release all episodes at once, that means I won't even start until the complete season is available, and almost inevitably will get so annoyed by the service that I will just cancel a subscription to it.

[_gabe_]

I’m not joking.

> but you have to be delusional to think that someone taping their favorite show on their own or waiting for it until it ends is nearly the same as dropping all episodes at the same time on principle for every show and only offering that as an option for a long time

What? The only reason cable didn’t release seasons all at once was to maximize profits. They get to run more ads, to force a user to stay subscribed for longer to finish their favorite show, charge studios extra for prime time spots, and more. These big productions are usually done with the whole season by the time it would release on cable. It’s not like they would stagger the release out of the goodness of their hearts to help people avoid bingeing.

What does it matter if you watch 8 hours of the same show or 8 hours of different sitcoms? I never mentioned taping a show and bingeing it all at once. I mentioned the fact that some people will watch large amounts of television regardless of what’s actually on the screen.

> I know you're trying to be smart here, and failing, but are books built to be binged?

And I guess you’re trying to be smart and failing? What’s with the backhanded comment. Why not engage with the argument being made instead of making comments like this?

That’s beside the point. The argument I was making is people for some reason find bingeing a show for 8 hours morally reprehensible. But reading a book is fine. The same thought process has been applied to gaming for long sessions. My argument is why are these different mediums deserving of different moral judgments? What makes reading, doing math, playing video games, or watching tv for long periods of time more or less reprehensible? These all serve one purpose: activities meant to entertain (maybe not math). Why does the medium the entertainment is delivered through make it any better or worse?

It isn’t. I think the thing people have a problem with, rightly so, is the lack of balance. It’s unhealthy to obsessively engage in one activity for long periods of time. But that’s a different argument altogether.

All in all, you didn’t really refute anything I said or try to show how any of these things are unique to Netflix. I agree with you by the way, but you’re framing your argument poorly in my opinion.

[sfn42]

Man i really hate how people absolve themselves of responsibility like this. "It's not my fault I spent all weekend watching Netflix, it's their UI!"

No, it isn't. I love when they release full seasons at a time. I can watch them at whatever pace I please. If some degenerate can't control themselves that's their problem.

"But muh children" parent them. "But irresponsible parents" Netflix is probably the best case scenario there.

[skeaker]

This sounds like a critique of the creators of the AI moreso than the users of it, which TFA is targeting.

[fennecbutt]

They always have done always will do and society has almost never done anything about it and isn't doing anything about it now. AI is just another tool in a the toolbox and as I'll keep repeating, the problem is never with the tool but with the tools using the tool.

How can we justify complaining about AI for these reasons; we've all sat on our asses and now they're are billionaires and soon to be trillionaires. We've already failed, dude.

[skynet305]

Ai/ml will change out world.

It already does.

It's a Paradigma shift and probably the most impactful after the internet.

From human to machine interface to medicine, research, content creation etc.

No one cares about some dude posting some negative rant like that.

[novemp]

"Change the world" and "paradigm shift" are not inherently good.

[skynet305]

It's evolution and our responsibility to make it good.

Doesn't matter though if we like it or not because it's happening.

The only thing preventing this is a total economy collapse so crazy that our society doesn't continue chip production.

[melkor73]

We weren't able to make the internet good, what makes you think we'll do any better with AI?

[MacsHeadroom]

The internet is responsible for longer lifespans and decreased mortality globally. It is, on balance, well beyond "good."

[skynet305]

I can do my bank stuff online, pay and manage bills, can call my parents with video, send pictures etc.

Internet is a huge success.

Internet is connection not private websites.

[al_borland]

To make it good, critics need to point out where it’s going bad.

[archagon]

Clearly somebody cares, or else we would not be in this subthread.

[satisfice]

I care. So, you should recheck the facts that you presumably got from your Bing query.

[akira2501]

> Please don't position it so that if I want to use AI I have to defend myself from accusations of exploiting labor and the environment.

I don't think this article even remote attempts this claim. The closest it gets is suggesting that if these defenses are too much trouble for you, then perhaps your use case for AI wasn't great in the first place.

> but diatribes like this

How is this a diatribe? There's nothing bitter about the writing here, it's entirely couched within the realm of personal opinion, and is an unexpurgated sharing of that opinion.

Please don't position your arguments so that if I want to share my opinion I have to defend myself from accusations that I'm being exceedingly bitter or somehow interfering with what you intend to do.

You're effectively attempting to bully people out of their own opinions for the sake of your convenience.

[handoflixue]

> it's entirely couched within the realm of personal opinion

"AI output is fundamentally derivative and exploitative"

"If you want custom art, pay an artist."

"Human recommendations will always be better."

If you can't argue against any of those stances, what stances are up for debate?

Surely the person you're responding to was just posting their own opinion, and you're as much a bully as they are?

[stolenmerch]

> I don't think this article even remote attempts this claim.

It's in the first sentence, "AI output is fundamentally derivative and exploitative (of content, labor and the environment)."

[Joker_vD]

Any fruit of any manufacturing labour is fundamentally derivative and exploitative: it needs raw materials from the environment, and it needs labour for the intended transformation; if anything, the AI output is less exploitative because the raw inputs don't end up destroyed in the process.

[trashymctrash]

> You're effectively attempting to bully people out of their own opinions for the sake of your convenience.

Maybe it's just me, but "bully" seems like a very exaggerated choice of words here.

[CuriousCosmic]

No you absolutely should have to defend yourself. Like the author, I don't want to touch anything you create that is produced with generative AI.

The ONLY exception is if you can demonstrate that your model was trained solely on datasets of properly licensed works and that those licenses permit or are compatible with training/generation.

But the issue is that overwhelmingly, people who use generative AI do not care about any of that and in practice no models are trained that way so it's not even worth mentioning that exception in this day and age.

[godelski]

I'm with you, but I think it is a bit more complicated. I think a reason for a lot of pushback is because these systems are being over sold. A lot of tech over promises and under delivers. I'm not sure it is just an AI thing rather than the limit in which you can edge forward the amount of acceptable exaggeration.

It definitely is frustrating that many things are presented as binary. But I think we can only resolve this if we dig a little deeper and try to understand the actual frustration that is being attempted to be communicated. Unfortunately a lot of communication breaks down in a global context as we can't be reliant on the many implicit priors that may be generally shared across different groups. Complaining is also the first step to critiquing, but I think you're right that we should encourage criticisms over complaints, but I think we can attempt to elicit critiques from complaints too, and that we should.

[logicprog]

The idea that machine learning like large language models and image generating systems exploit labor might be up for debate, but the fact that they are disproportionately damaging to the environment compared to the alternatives is certainly true in the same way that it's true for Bitcoin mining. And there's more than just those two aspects to consider, it's also very much worth considering how the widespread use of such technologies and the integration of them into our economy might change our political, social, and economic landscape, and whether those changes would be good or bad or worth the downsides. I think it's perfectly valid to decide that an emerging technology is not worth the negative changes it will make in society or the downsides that it will bring with it, and reject its use, technological progress is not necessarily inevitable in the way that every new technology must become widespread.

[handoflixue]

> disproportionately damaging to the environment compared to the alternatives

This is a new one to me. Do you have any source for that? Once a model is trained, it seems pretty obvious that it takes Dall-E vastly less to create an image than a trained artist. I have trouble believing the training costs are really so large as to change the equation back to favoring humans.

[xigoi]

Dall-E is usually not an alternative to a trained artist, but an alternative to downloading a stock image from the internet, which takes way less energy.

[handoflixue]

AI generated images have already won numerous awards. They can easily make assets good enough for an indie video game. Even stock images have to come from somewhere

[batikha]

Jevon's paradox though? Planes are so much more efficient now than the first prototypes, yet usage is so much higher that resource consumption due to airplanes have vastly increased. Same goes with generative models.

[logicprog]

I'm not sure your premise even makes any sense here, because it doesn't take an artist much more resources to produce art then it took them to just exist for the same amount of time. They're still just eating, sleeping, making basic usage of the computer, using heating and light, and so on either way. Whereas someone using dall-e is doing all of that plus relying on the immense training costs of the artificial intelligence. That basic usage of the computer in order to use the machine learning model might be shorter than the basic use of the computer to use procreate or something, but they'll still be using the computer for about the same amount of time anyway, because the time not spent not making art will just be shifted over to other things. So it doesn't seem to me like having machine learning models do something for you instead of learning a skill and doing it yourself will really decrease emissions or energy usage noticeably at all.

Furthermore, even if there is some decrease in emissions using pre-trained machine learning models over using your own skills and labor, the energy costs of training a powerful machine learning model like you're thinking of are way higher than I think you are imagining. The energy and carbon emission cost of training even a 213M parameter transformer for 3.5 days is 626 times the cost of an average human existing for an entire year according to [this study](https://arxiv.org/abs/1906.02243). Does using a pre-trained machine learning model take that much emission out of people's lives? Or a day's worth out of 228,490 lives, perhaps? I doubt it.

But we aren't even using such a small transformers anymore either — they actually aren't that useful. We're using massive models lile GPT-4, and pushing as hard as we can to scale models even further in a cargo cult faith that making them bigger will fundamentally qualitatively shift their capabilities at some point.

So what does the emissions picture look like for GPT-4? The study above found that emissions costs scale linearly with number of parameters and tuning steps as well as training time, so we can make a back of the napkin estimate that GPT-4 is 8,592,480 times more expensive to train than the transformer used in the study, since it is rumored to have 1.76 trillion parameters versus the 213 million of the model in the study, and GPT-3 was said to take 3640 days to train (despite using insane amounts of simultaneous compute to scale the compute up in conjunction with the scale of the model) versus 3.5 days. This in turn means it is 5,378,892,480 times more expensive to train a GPT-4 than it is for a human to live for one year. And again, to reiterate, no matter what work the humans are doing, they're going to be living for around the same amount of time and using roughly the same amount of carbon emissions as long as they're not like taking cross country or transatlantic flights or something. So it's more expensive to train gpt4 then it is for almost 6 billion people to live for a year. I don't think it's taking a year's worth of emissions off of 6 billion people's lives by being slightly more convenient than having to type some things in or draw some art yourself. And there are only 8 billion people on the planet, so I don't think there's enough people to spread smaller gains out across to justify the training of this model (you'd have to take a days worth of emissions off of 1,963,295,755,200 people to offset that training cost!), especially since in my opinion the decrease in emissions of using machine learning models would necessarily be absolutely miniscule.

[philipkglass]

This back of the napkin estimate for GPT-4 emissions costs is too high by orders of magnitude. Your estimate is that training it emitted about as much as CO2 as 5.38 billion average humans living their lives for a year did. With a world population of 8 billion, it would mean that GPT-4 training was equivalent to 0.67 years of total anthropogenic CO2 emissions. Since GPT-4 CO2 emissions all come from manufacturing hardware with fossil fuels or burning fossil fuels for electricity, this is roughly equivalent to 0.67 years of global fossil fuel production.

But OpenAI had neither the money nor the physical footprint to consume 0.67 years' worth of global fossil fuel production! At those gargantuan numbers OpenAI would have consumed more energy than the rest of the world combined while training GPT-4. It would have spent trillions of dollars on training. It would have had to build more data centers than previously existed in the entire world just to soak up that much electricity with GPUs.

[logicprog]

That's a good point, that's what I get for doing a linear extrapolation. This looks like a better estimation, which doesn't look good for my argument: https://towardsdatascience.com/the-carbon-footprint-of-gpt-4...

I still think my point about imagining that using ML models decreases emissions versus a human doing the same task still stands though — humans don't produce that much more or less emissions depending on what task they're doing, and they'll be existing either way, and probably using the computer the same amount either way, just not spending aa much time on that one task, so I don't see how you can argue using an ML model to write or draw something uses less CO2 than a human doing it. You can't count the amount of CO2 the human takes to exist for the amount of time it takes for them to do the task as the CO2 cost of the human doing the task because humans don't stop existing and taking up resources if they're not doing a task unlike programs. And you can't really compare the power used to run the ML model to the power used by the computer the human is using during the time it takes them to do the task either, since the human will need to use the computer to access your ML model, interact with it to define the prompt, edit the results, etc (and also bc again they'll probably just shift any time saved doing that task on the computer to another task on the computer). Additionally of course there's the fact that you can't really use large language models to replace writers or machine learning image generation tools to replace artists if you actually care about the quality of the work.

[handoflixue]

Huge kudos for admitting this changes your reasoning - I don't see people willing to admit that often, especially on the internet.

[handoflixue]

I would argue that most social progress comes from automating a task and freeing humans up to do something else - your logic counts just as solidly against building a car in a factory, or using a sewing machine, or a thousand other socially acceptable things. Surely the "LLM Revolution" isn't worse than the Industrial Revolution was?

[ulbu]

It’s so ironic that you have this stance about the value of other people but you feel so humiliated by OP as to think they’re bullying.

[handoflixue]

I think you replied to the wrong post?

[gremlinsinc]

how's it more damaging to the environment of you can replace 1k people, that's 1k people staying at home instead of commuting, sure that causes pain if we can't figure out ubi or a way to house and feed the masses, also many of the biggest ai users are working to get their energy 100 percent from solar, wind, and geothermal. AI is something we've been heading towards since the dawn of man.

Hell, ancient Rome had automatons. There's no way to stop it. Ideally we merge with the ai to become something else than give it super powers and it decides to destroy us. I'm not sure the benevolent care giver of humanity is something we can hope for.

It's a scary but interesting future, but I mean we've also got major problems like cancer, global warming, etc, and ai is a killer researcher, that did 300k years worth of human research hours in a month to find tons of materials that can possibly be used by industry.

They're doing similar with medicine, etc... there's many pros and negatives, I'm a bit of an accelerationist, rip the band-aid off kind of guy, everyone dies someday I guess, not everyone can say they were killed by a Terminator, well at least not yet lol, tongue in cheek.

[acuozzo]

> I'm a bit of an accelerationist, rip the band-aid off kind of guy, everyone dies someday I guess

Are you volunteering to go first?

[logicprog]

> how's it more damaging to the environment of you can replace 1k people, that's 1k people staying at home instead of commuting,

Check my comment above, where I do some rough back of the napkin calculations around this. Training gpt4 for example produced around 6 billion times the carbon emissions a human emits in total in a year, which probably includes commuting, so unless gpt4 removes the commute time of probably a significant fraction more than 6 billion people (since it wouldn't be eliminating their emissions entirely, just their commuting emissions) it is a net loss. Also, we can eliminate commute emissions by having better public transportation and walkable/bikable cities, we don't need to prostrate ourselves before a dementia addled machine God to get there.

[000ooo000]

>Please don't position it so that if I want to use AI I have to defend myself from accusations of exploiting labor and the environment.

Why should you be free of accountability for the effects of your actions?

[stolenmerch]

Because the effects of my actions in this case have yet to be demonstrated, let alone shown to cause harm. The author claims there is expoititive harm to labor, the environment, and maybe others. That is not at all obvious or provably true yet. As I said, I'm open to the discussion, but I can't defend myself in good faith when people claim some slam dunk moral certitude. Again, don't use generative AI if it makes you feel bad, but there is absolutely nothing clear cut yet about this radically brand new technology.

[000ooo000]

>The author claims there is expoititive harm to labor [...]. That is not at all obvious or provably true yet.

Not at all obvious? These models are trained on vast amounts of content, much of it copyrighted, and basically none of it licensed.

[handoflixue]

Human artists have been training on the same content for decades and no one seemed to complain. You can argue that machines should be held to a different set of legal and ethical standards, but it's certainly not obvious.

Most factories are designed based on vast amounts of prior manual labor, so it's not like "automating a manual process based on analyzing existing methods" is new, either. Why is it okay to automate the knowledge of all those other craftsmen, but not that of painters?

[xigoi]

Human artists are not robotically ingesting terabytes of content.

[LegitShady]

AI are not human artists, so there's no connection to your point and the discussion.

[lesser_value]

you are just making shit up to suit your narrative at this point.

[firebat45]

You could just as easily claim that since AI are not human artists that copyright does not apply to them.

[skeaker]

Correct, not at all obvious. The obvious effect of generating an image of a dog on the moon is that you now have an image of a dog on the moon. If you showed it to 100 artists, some percentage of them might recognize it's AI, but none of them would claim it as their art and ultimately none would be harmed. The harm is non-obvious.

[quickslowdown]

The flip side of that coin is brazen "ingenuity" with complete disregard for the consequences is just as bad as blindly declaring all AI is bad.

We need people like the person writing this article so the starry eyed people who are too excited about AI and pushing it into everything are kept in check.

[davidthewatson]

^^ THIS ^^

The middle road I've taken is that I use various consumer AI tools much the way I used the Macintosh or the Atari ST with MIDI when they showed up while I was in music school, as tools that may be used as augmentative technology to produce broader and deeper artistic output with different effort.

There's something mystical and magical about relinquishing complete control by taking a declarative approach to tools that require all manner of technique and tomfoolery to achieve transcendent results.

The jump from literate programming to metaprogramming to what we have in the autonomous spectrum is fascinating and worth the investment in time, assuming the output is artistic, creative, and philosophical.

AI is not free, but the price being paid comes at the cost of creators trying to create safe technology usable by anyone of any age.

Given the similarity to selling contraband, these AI tools need far more than just conditional guard rails to keep the kids out of the dark web... More like a surgeon general's warning with teeth.

Bard and Bing should be treated as if they were Therac 25, because in the long run we may realize that like social media, the outcome is worse.

[cwillu]

Please don't do “^^ this ^^”, comments are reordered here.

[davidthewatson]

Thanks for the reminder. I won't make that mistake again. I'm guessing the spatial affordance, for lack of a better phrase, of "^^this^^" arose with ephemeral comments on irc, but is clearly dependent on the message list being static, which is not true here; hence, the technique is out-of-place here. Good to know. Thanks again.

[worksonmine]

> Please don't position it so that if I want to use AI I have to defend myself from accusations of exploiting labor and the environment.

Can you please give me access to your private repositories? I'd like to se if there's anything useful there for me to sell. You shouldn't say no, at least I ask politely and use the magic words. It can only benefit humanity right?

I'm not against crowdsourcing LLM models, but copyright is copyright. I say that as someone who pirates heavily, but I'm not a hypocrite about what I do.

[qgin]

There's a version of the future where AI actually takes larger and larger chunks of real work while humans move towards spending more and more of their time and energy on culture war activities.

[boffinAudio]

ALL technology can be weaponized, and what you are sleep-walking into is an era where AI is easily weaponized against not just nation states or groups, but the individual.

Either have this conversation now, or face the consequences when weaponized AI is so prevalent, you will have to dig a hole in the ocean to escape it ..

[StreetChief]

Your name is "stolenmerch"... I wonder if that colors your perspective at all.

[omnimus]

Are We the Baddies?

[ToucanLoucan]

> Please don't position it so that if I want to use AI I have to defend myself from accusations of exploiting labor and the environment.

You, personally, likely are not (apart from electricity use but that's iffy.) But the technology you want to use could not exist, and cannot continue to be improved, without those two things. That's not unclear in the slightest, that's just fact.

> I'm open to that conversation and debate, but diatribes like this make it far too black-and-white with "good" people and "bad" people.

I get that any person's natural response to feeling attacked to defend oneself. That's as natural as natural gets. But if shit tons of people are drawing the same line in the sand, no matter how ridiculous you might think it is, no matter how attacked you might feel, at some point, surely it's worth at least double checking that they don't actually have a point?

If I absolutely steel-man all the pro-AI arguments I have seen, it is, at the very best:

- Using shit tons of content as training data, be it written, visual, or audio/video, for a purpose it was not granted for by it's creators

- Reliant on labor in the developing world that is paid nearly nothing to categorize and filter reams upon reams of data, some of which is the unprocessed bile of some of the worst corners of the Internet imaginable

- Explicitly being created to displace other laborers in the developing and developed world for the financial advantage of people who are already rich

That is, at best, a socially corrosive if extremely cool technology. It stands to benefit people who already benefit everywhere, at the direct and measurable cost of people who are already being exploited.

I don't think you're a bad person for building whatever AI thing you are, for what it's worth. I think you're a person who probably sees cool new shit and wants to play with it, and who doesn't? That's how most of us got into this space. But as empathetic as I am to that, tons of people alongside you who are also championing this technology know exactly what they are doing, they know exactly who they are screwing over in the process, and they have said, to those people's faces, that they don't give a shit. That they will burn their ability to earn a living to the ground, to make themselves rich.

So if you're prepared to stand with them and join them in their quest to do just that, then I don't think anyone is obligated to assuage your feelings about it.

[pseudo0]

Your "steelman" is embarrassingly bad. Why play devil's advocate if you're going to do such a bad job of it? Here's an alternative:

- As a form of fair use, models learn styles of art or writing the same way humans do - by seeing lots of examples. It is possible to create outputs that are very similar to existing works, just as a human painter could copy a famous painting. The issue there lies in the output, not the human/model.

- Provide comfortable office jobs for people in economically underdeveloped countries, categorizing data to minimize harm for content moderators worldwide. One piece of training data for a model to filter harmful content can prevent hundreds/thousands of people from being exposed to similar harmful content in the future.

- Reduces or eliminates unpleasant low-skill jobs in call centers, data entry, etc.

- Creates new creative opportunities in music, video games, writing, and multimedia art by lowering the barriers to entry for creative works. For example, an indie video game developer on a shoestring budget could create their own assets, voice actors, etc.

- Reduces carbon emissions by replacing hours of human labor with seconds of load on a GPU.

[xigoi]

> As a form of fair use, models learn styles of art or writing the same way humans do - by seeing lots of examples.

“a lot” is doing very heavy lifting here. The amount of examples a human artist needs to learn something is negligible in comparison to the humongous amounts of data sucked up by AI training.

[ToucanLoucan]

> As a form of fair use, models learn styles of art or writing the same way humans do - by seeing lots of examples. It is possible to create outputs that are very similar to existing works, just as a human painter could copy a famous painting. The issue there lies in the output, not the human/model.

I've seen this analogy parroted everywhere and it's garbage. Show me a human being that, in an afternoon, can study the art of Rembrandt and from that experience, paint plausibly Rembrandt style paintings in a few minutes each, and I'll swear by AI for the rest of my life.

Absolute bunk.

> Provide comfortable office jobs for people in economically underdeveloped countries, categorizing data to minimize harm for content moderators worldwide.

... who do you think the content moderators are? It's the same people being paid pittance wages to expose themselves to images of incredible violence, child abuse, non-consensual pornography, etc. etc. etc.

No person should have to look at that to earn a GOOD living, let alone a shit one.

> One piece of training data for a model to filter harmful content can prevent hundreds/thousands of people from being exposed to similar harmful content in the future.

Yeah this is the exact nonsense that is spouted every time you criticize this shit. "Oh all we need to do is absolutely obliterate entire swathes of humanity first, and theeeeeen..." with absolutely zero accounting for the job that has to be done first. And again, I don't see any AI scientists stepping up to page through 6,000 jpegs, some of which depict unspeakable things being done to children, oh no. They find people to do that for them, because they know exactly how unbelievably horrible it is and don't want themselves being exposed to it.

If it's so damn important, why don't YOU do it? If you're going to light someone's humanity on fire to further what you deem to be progress for our species, why not at least have the guts to make it your OWN humanity?

> Reduces or eliminates unpleasant low-skill jobs in call centers, data entry, etc.

And where are those people going? Who's paying them after this? Or are you going to suggest they attend a weekend Learn-to-Code camp too? And who's paying their wages in the middle of that transition, when the skills they have become unmarketable? Who's paying for their retraining? Or are we just consigning entire professions worth of people to the poorhouses now without so much as a thought?

> Creates new creative opportunities in music, video games, writing, and multimedia art by lowering the barriers to entry for creative works.

Derivative works. No matter how much you want to hype this up, AI is not creative. It just isn't. It gives you a rounded mean of previous creations that it has been shown, nothing more. AI will never invent something, in a thousand years it will not. This is why people call AI art soulless.

> For example, an indie video game developer on a shoestring budget could create their own assets, voice actors, etc.

Have you seen those games? They're shit. They're lowest common denominator garbage designed to get hyperactive kids on iPads to badger their parents into spending money.

> Reduces carbon emissions by replacing hours of human labor with seconds of load on a GPU.

So like, this just straight up means you know damn well people are going to die from this. They will be displaced, their labor made worthless, and they will perish. That's just like... what you just said there, because otherwise, the statement "reduces carbon emissions" makes no sense, because if someone gets fired and gets a new job, their carbon emissions do not necessarily go down, and they certainly aren't eliminated.*

[handoflixue]

> Show me a human being that, in an afternoon, can study the art of Rembrandt and from that experience, paint plausibly Rembrandt style paintings in a few minutes each, and I'll swear by AI for the rest of my life.

So it's okay to learn, but only if you do it very slowly? I surely don't need to point you to the existence of forgers - you know a human can study the art of Rembrandt and paint plausibly Rembrandt style paintings

> are we just consigning entire professions worth of people to the poorhouses now without so much as a thought?

We have been doing that since the dawn of history - what makes this any different from cars obsoleting the horse drawn carriage? Computers have been automating people's jobs for decades - should we ban programming writ large?

Where, exactly, do you feel the line ought to be drawn?

[ToucanLoucan]

> So it's okay to learn, but only if you do it very slowly?

No, it's a fundamentally different process with different results. An artist learns from previous artists to express things they themselves want to express. An AI digests art to become a viable(ish) tool for people who want to express themselves, as long as that expression resides somewhere in the weighted averages of the art the model has digested. Two fundamentally different things, apples and oranges, and, also not without it's own set of limitations. Despite the rhetoric around this stuff that anyone can create anything, that's just not true: you can create anything that you can find a model that's suitable to create it, that was itself trained on a LOT of similar material to what you want to create. Effectively automated ultra-fine scrap-booking.

Honestly if creativity is your thing, even if you find creating difficult for whatever accessibility reason you feel like pretending you care about, you will find AI more frustrating than anything, and the bounds of your creativity are the model itself, and the safeguards whatever provider has decided are important to put in place. You've just exchanged one set of limitations you probably can't control for another set you definitely can't control.

> I surely don't need to point you to the existence of forgers - you know a human can study the art of Rembrandt and paint plausibly Rembrandt style paintings

Yes and those are worthless once found, just like AI art. And again, you've sidestepped the scale: Adobe Firefly can bash out 3 images in roughly 2 minutes of solid resolution. No human can even dream of getting close to creating Rembrandt forgeries at that rate.

> We have been doing that since the dawn of history - what makes this any different from cars obsoleting the horse drawn carriage?

Because cars costed a fortune when new and were toys for the wealthy, before Henry Ford came along some three decades later to fix that. And then, the former farriers had time to retrain for new work. Not to mention, carriage builders were still employed through many decades with the rise of cars, because originally buying a "car" meant you got a chassis, suspension, engine and the essentials, which you would then take to a coach builder to have a "skin" if you will build around it. Hence the term "coachwork."

> Computers have been automating people's jobs for decades - should we ban programming writ large?

Is this the "debate" you were saying you were open to? Hyperbolic statements with zero substance? I can see why few want to have it with you.

> Where, exactly, do you feel the line ought to be drawn?

Consent. Tons of people's creative output was used to build machines to replace them, without their consent and more often than not, explicitly against their wishes, under the guise of a "research project" and not a monetized tech product. Once again a tech company bungles into the public square, exploits it for money, then makes us live with the consequences. I frankly think that question aught to be reversed: what makes OpenAI entitled to all that content, for a purpose it was never meant for, with zero permission or consent on the part of it's creators?

I'm not opposed to ML as a concept. It has it's uses, even for generating images/writing/what have you. But these models as they exist now are poisoned with reams of unethically sourced material. If any of these orgs gave even the slightest shit about ethics, they'd dump them and re-train them with only material from those who consented to have it used that way. Simple as.

[jayrot]

May I just say, as a third-party simply reading this back and forth from the outside, that the tone of your writing and the implied attitude with which you are engaging in "debate", reads as very aggressive and uninterested in actually having a sincere discussion. To me at least.

I imagine you probably won't like this comment, but perhaps you might use it as an opportunity for reflection and self-awareness. If your interest is actually to potentially change someone's mind, and not just "be right", you might consider approaching it in a different way so that your tone doesn't get in the way of the substance of arguments you wish to make.

Just a suggestion. Take care.

[handoflixue]

> An artist learns from previous artists to express things they themselves want to express.

Ahh yes, that well known human impulse to produce stock artwork for newspapers and to illustrate corporate brochures. I can't imagine what the world would be like if we let cold, soulless processes design our corporate brochures!

I suppose this argument works for Art(TM), but why is it relevant to the soulless, mass produced art? Should it be okay to discard all the artists who merely fill in interstitial frames of an animation? Is "human expression" actually relevant to that?

> And again, you've sidestepped the scale

Pick one: either this is about speed or it isn't. Would you actually be fine with AI art if it was just slower? If not, then stop bringing up distractions like this. If this really is just about scale, it's a very different conversation.

> Because cars costed a fortune when new and were toys for the wealthy, before Henry Ford came along some three decades later to fix that.

Sorry, when did Rembrandt paintings stop being toys for the wealthy?

> And then, the former farriers had time to retrain for new work.

So, again, it's just that progress is moving too fast? If we just slow things down a bit and give the artists time to flee, that makes it okay?

> Hyperbolic statements with zero substance?

We haven't talked before, so I didn't know whether you were someone who was okay with automation putting people out of work. That's hardly zero substance. I'll assume this means you're fine with it, since you don't think it's even worth discussing.

> Consent

Okay, so, bottom line: you're saying that if they spend a few billion to license all that art, and proceed to completely replace human artists with a vastly superior product, you're OK with that outcome? (I'm not saying this is inconsistent, just trying to understand your stance - previously you were talking about the importance of artists expressing themselves and the speed at which AI can do things - what's actually important, here?)

[kbelder]

That's not a steelman. At the very best:

- All content was viewed and learned from, which is ethical (even a good) use of all content that has ever been released content to the public.

- Gave jobs to 3rd world laborers.

- Benefited us, made some of us everymen more productive and able to build and create in ways that we weren't able to before.

I suspect you don't agree with all the above, but that's more like what a steelman argument should be.

[plorg]

This is a bad take, chief. You're not a smol bean. If someone is telling you that the technology you are using is harmful to many people and to society as a whole the least you could do is to make an argument that either those harms are not what is being claimed or that there are significant benefits that outweigh the harms. "Don't say it's bad, that makes me feel bad so we shouldn't talk about it" is both a weak and useless position.

[xigoi]

> I'm not a fan of this hyper aggressive line-in-the-sand argumentation about fossil fuels that pushes it all precariously close to culture war shenanigans. If you don't like a new technology that is perfectly cool and your right to an opinion. Please don't position it so that if I want to use fossil fuels I have to defend myself from accusations of polluting the air and the environment.

[cwillu]

I'm not sure what you think you did here, but juxtaposing climate change with copyright squabbles really brings out how much of a first-world-problem such squabbles really are.

[xigoi]

Are you going to pretend that the emissions caused by the enormous usage of energy by ML training and inference are not a thing?

Also, I wouldn’t morally have a problem with AI companies violating copyright if they weren’t hypocritical about it and open-sourced their software.

Anyways, the main message of the analogy is that you can’t just wave away the moral responsibility for the consequences of your actions. It wasn’t supposed to be a comparison of severity.

[satisfice]

You should have to defend yourself if you are going to use this unreliable, untested, irresponsible technology.

Everyone who wants to do things that completely ignore the reasonable concerns of their fellow citizens should feel some heat, at least.