[the_af]

> There are people who say that you should use a real artist instead of AI due to AI's water use.

Nobody I know says this. In fact, I've never heard of this ever before, and I read artist and hobby communities pretty hostile to AI, but I never once read this nice strawman you've built.

People say you should use a real artist instead of AI for a multitude of reasons:

- Because they want to enjoy art created by humans.

- Because it provides a living to artists, even artists for minor work like advertising or lesser commercial illustrations.

- Because AI "art" is built by stealing from human artists, and while human art has a history of copying and cloning, never before has tech allowed this in such a massive, soulless scale.

Sam Altman gave a deranged, completely out of touch reply, and he should be called to task for it, not defended. A human being is not some number on a spreadsheet, built over 20 years in order to achieve some "smartness" goal. That's a very stupid thing to say.

[thunky]

> A human being is not some number on a spreadsheet, built over 20 years in order to achieve some "smartness" goal

But from the perspective of the business and capitalism that's exactly what a human is. A tool that consumes resources and hopefully produces more value for the business than it consumes.

Sure we can dance around this and you can pretend your employer gives a shit about you and your family and your childhood stories but they don't.

[Forgeties79]

> Sure we can dance around this and you can pretend your employer gives a shit about you and your family and your childhood stories but they don't.

I don’t get what you’re doing here. They didn’t say anything like that.

[thunky]

> I don’t get what you’re doing here

You said that a CEO was out of bounds for framing employees as numbers on a spreadsheet. To me this suggests that you believe company owners should care about the humanity of their workers. And I'm saying they don't.

[the_af]

I think by "they", Forgeties79 means me, the_af.

I get the general point you're making. Indeed, Altman's take is capitalism taken to 11. There was a lot of that going on before AI or the past few decades, but I don't think it wasn't as extreme and for every company. There's definitely a conversation to be had about modern capitalism (and plenty of people studying it, too). However, not everything is a FAANG or tech startup. Some owners do care about their employees to a higher degree than just numbers on a spreadsheet (not going into the whole "we're a family" bullshit speech, I mean the genuine stuff).

Imagine thinking of people as "resource-hogs before they reach peak smartness"!

What's new here, in my opinion, is people like Sam Altman behaving as if they didn't understand normal human behavior. You cannot simply compare an LLM to a growing human. You cannot say things like "grow a human over 20 years before they achieve smartness". What? That's not how human beings think about human beings, and Altman is detached from real human behavior here. He's saying out loud the thoughts he should keep to himself, a bit like a person with coprolalia. And it's ok for us to dislike him for this, even if he's just voicing the opinions of extreme techno-capitalism.

Sam Altman once joked (?) he wouldn't know how to raise his child without ChatGPT. Maybe he should ask ChatGPT how to behave more like a human? Or at least fake it?

[Forgeties79]

> Sam Altman once joked (?) he wouldn't know how to raise his child without ChatGPT. Maybe he should ask ChatGPT how to behave more like a human? Or at least fake it?

Not to mention that was at a time when all kinds of wild suggestions like glue in pizza were coming out of ChatGPT’s sloppy outputs. There are so many little things that quickly become big things with kids, annd exhausted parents should absolutely not use LLM’s for sussing those things out.

I could easily see well-meaning parents looking for healthy snacks to make their kids accidentally feeding their baby fresh honey, for instance. Or asking how much water to give their infant and not realizing the answer is absolutely none unless they are severely dehydrated from an illness or something.

There are a lot of hazards for kids under 1 in particular that make me incredibly nervous to ever suggest exhausted parents use LLM’s to answer kid related questions. Recommendations also change relatively frequently so who knows if it’s even pulling on the most recent best practices.

[pksebben]

It's that second point. We live in an age of artificial scarcity created by a system of social organization that we've mostly not argued about since the 50s, that's now showing it's stretch marks.

If it weren't for the need to 'earn' a living, I'd say to the other two points: Por que no los dos? Save for the capital argument (which is valid, I'm not saying it isn't. You will starve if you don't make money), why is it necessarily true that the two (AI and people) are in competition?

In fact, I think "actual" artists would benefit incredibly from the use of AI, which they could do if it weren't a shibboleth (like I said, for good reason). You'd no longer have to have an army of underpaid animators from vietnam to bring your OC to life - you could just use your own art and make it move and sing. We'd not need huge lumbering organizations full of people who, let's be honest, work there making other people's dreams come to life in large part because it's a better bet than taking a joe-job at the local denny's (after all, you're doing the thing you love even if it isn't truly "yours").

I've had this discussion with younger folks, who are legitimately shook by the state of things. They're worried that all the work they've done to this point is going to be moot, because they've correctly assessed that the whole capital system isn't going anywhere any time soon, and they've been prepping to try and get a job at netflix, or disney, or paramount - because that's the world we've handed them. They see those positions drying up and what else are you going to do? They have the power financially and politically and without them you're doing "not art" for work, which sucks because you need to work.

I say; eat the rich. General wildcat strikes until UBI. Tax the everloving shit out of capital gains and peel back personal income taxes. We (the millenials) were handed a steaming pile of shit for a world, so at least we know what would constitute not an absolute disaster for Zeds, Alphas, etc. Have I gone totally off the rails for a conversation about AI? Actually, I don't believe so. The cultural pushback is a function of a busted system. After all, it's the economy, stupid.

[charcircuit]

>Nobody I know says this.

>I never once read this nice strawman you've built.

The instance of it I found was in a YouTube comment section.

[the_af]

Ok, let me reframe in a less assertive way: it's not common to say that you should hire human artists "because of water", so uncommon it's not a widely held belief I've seen in artist or hobbyist communities, and therefore using this to justify Altman's deranged remark seems weird to me.

[Forgeties79]

I’ve also seen people assert that the Earth is flat in YouTube comment sections so I wouldn’t let that color your view of what is considered “popular opinion.”