Saying "these silly people are obsessed with their economic system, which is pointless!" makes no sense if those same people live or die by that system.

The "G" in "AGI" is "general", as in "can do all things" — Ask not for whose job Bell Labs tolls, it tolls for them all.

(And now I'm reminded of someone, ages ago now, who was boasting about how good he was at matching all the `new`s and `delete`s in his C++ code, or possibly even `malloc`s and `free`s, being completely oblivious to the existence of STL smart pointers…)

GPLv3 is one of the strongest copyleft licenses for software out there, forcing re-sharing of changes while preventing any source closing. CC-BY-NC is the strictest CC license which allows sharing, with credit, with no commercial use and no derivatives.

Hence I tried to aim for "I'm selecting the one of the most strict license for sharing my photos, as I do the same for my software, yet AI systems disregard my license every occasion and just rip what I put out without my consent or consideration of the license I use for these, hence I refuse to use, or support AI models which are fed like this".

Hope this helps.

I'm sure there are people who don't have ambition to ever show others the skills they've been building, even in indirect ways, but I doubt it's common... What do you think the motivation is?

I guess I should worry a bit that important software without worthwhile alternatives might start to do this, but I don't think the blender foundation will as long as Ton is alive, and I bet the same for Krita. Procreate I'm a little less confident about, but only a little, as they know who their main userbase* is and they know how those people feel about AI.

*Arguably there are more people with Procreate that barely know how to draw than people who do. BUT part of Procreate's appeal is that it's software that 'the pros' prefer to use. If the talented artists start publicly dumping on Procreate, the people who can't draw will slowly but surely follow those artists to whatever their preferred software becomes.

AI is none of that.

Yes. It's quite difficult to do so, however. The people capable usually have better things to do with their skills.

You're under selling the difficulty of using a toilet bowl to make a convincing statement.

I'm 50-50 split on thinking I regard that kind of art as a vehicle for tax evasion, vs. thinking the "difficulty" is the money wasted on it (which is still Veblen "look at me I'm rich I can waste money on something pointless").

This is so far from the norm and feels like a television lens version of artists and art galleries. Yes, Duchamp used a toilet bowl in 1917 as art which was over 100 year ago. This is known because no one had done it before and presented an everyday object as art. This is 106 years old but still referred to so you can guess it was a big deal.

My suggestion is to visit a modern art museum in a larger city and you'll see this kind of "easy bullshit art as a statement" doesn't really exist.

https://www.tate.org.uk https://www.hauserwirth.com https://www.moma.org https://www.davidzwirner.com https://gagosian.com

You can look at say, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wedding_at_Cana and quickly get that yup, this took a whole lot of time and effort.

But AI has nothing like that. Some things that look like an awful lot of work it spits out with ease, some things that sound simple can take a whole lot of fiddling.

Like the other day I was playing with DALLE3, and for whatever reason it didn't want to place things on a table.

(However, I think the negative feelings don't come from a discussion of "real vs fake" or "classical vs new", but mostly from the point of view that using artwork as training data is stealing. I don't agree with that view, but I think it's at the core of the argument.)

I refuse to use it from a moral standpoint but I also don't use any digital tools at all in the creation of my work. Even if I worked digitally I don't create art to produce pretty pictures as fast as possible. Typing in a prompt and fiddling with some things back and forth is just that.

But for one-click self-expression, AI tools will certainly come in handy.

UNLIKE other tools, AI makes creative decisions. No other tool has done this, and moreover, its primary purpose is to take away the reliance on artists. The ultimate aim of BIG TECH is to take away this reliance so that they can be the ultimate source of cheap art, just like cheap slave labour is the ultimate source of cheap and unsustainable clothing for most people.

Therefore, AI will NEVER be a tool to create art like other tools. It is is a tool that will outcompete humans on a massive scale so that even if "normal human art" exists, it will never gain much traction or commercial viability.

To be honest, AI is absolutely sickening and companies like Microsoft and OpenAI make me sick.

I'm one of those. I've been programming for a while now and there's no way i'm gonna trust a neural network with my code. Debugging is painful enough without having to deal with subtle bugs hallucinated by ML.

Some machines are really useful to reduce human suffering and augment our collective capabilities. Some machines are just useless, polluting gadgets. I think ML sits in the middleground: if your job is pissing meaningless code all day that's very repetitive it can probably do it for you... but if you have to actually do R&D to develop new tools i don't think ML will be any use.

So yes AI can reduce work, but arguably work that was never required nor beneficial to humanity to begin with. I would be way more interested in society reflecting on "bullshit jobs" and how to actually share the workload so that we can have 1-day work-weeks planet-wide, just as the scientists from the 19th/20th century envisioned. Instead of continuing to destroy the planet so we can run bullshitting neural nets in the cloud that produce arguably little value.

But sure, ML is fun. Let's just pretend we don't see the whole world burning outside the window.

While impressive, the two issues I have with codepilot and other AI tools are:

1. The code is usually the same code I'd get a few web searches away, except then it would have the appropriate copyright. As a FOSS developer (in my free time), I do not want to risk using code I don't have a license for, and thus dirtying up my entire project and putting it in danger of being taken down.

2. I really don't need it. At very few points in a project do I both think "I want to continue this" and also "I want my code written for me". I like autocomplete, I use autocomplete, and I like Visual Studio's suggestions, too. It's only wrong 50% of the time, around about. I have no interest in a tool that writes my code for me, because I have learned everything I know from solving problems myself.

Edit: Clauses in the AI's ToS like "all code generated is yours" or something is akin to a sign on a bar saying "if you hit someone in here it's not assault" -- it doesn't change the facts whatsoever, and the fact is that it's still a crime to hit somebody, even if the bar's ToS say otherwise.

Yes.

I'm a Vim user with 100 WPM typing speed, and I can say with confidence that Copilot isn't that useful to me. Typing boilerplate is not an issue - understanding what I wrote is most of the work. And having an AI spew code that I have to read is more work for me than just writing it myself.

I had my share of auto generation with enterprise Java stacks, and tried as hard as I could to move to stacks where what we write is concise and relevant (rails is the closest I came to this, not perfect but clearly going in the right direction).

I think AI has its place, but I also hope to be lucky enough to not have to use it.

Illustrators might have similar issues, where some of them need to produce boilerplate drawings a lot, but I think they'd also prefer working on project that aren't that.

Giving away code and their rights for free is commonplace. Also it’s not like you can use “by Ryan Dhal” to make the output from copilot better.

But these art AI were trained on. CC, CC-BY, and closed license pieces of art. And you can use “by Greg Rotowski” to get art in that artist’s specific style.

I don’t think comparing the use of AI or the general attitude towards AI between artists and devs makes sense. Very apples and oranges.

Not only does it feel like something that might be dangerous to become reliant on (what happens when it’s not working or I don’t have access to it), I have no idea what material it was trained on which makes it ethically gray. I might be more receptive to a local LLM where I can personally vet what it was trained on (primarily, I’m concerned with if the material was obtained fully consensually or not).

My attitude towards image generators is similar. Adobe’s is totally out of the question for example, because though they claim it’s 100% ethically trained because all material came from their stock image service, I know that’s bullshit because I’ve seen stolen art put up for sale there more times than I can count (and worse, they’re unresponsive when theft is reported).

- Not enough to switch (yet, at least)

- I would have to carefully review the generated code, which is not as fun writing

The license issue is something I expect will be solved in the next few years (a dropdown menu to choose from, maybe).

In both cases you're also risking being accused of plagiarism, when the model literally remembers, or reconstructs, a piece it has seen, and finds it perfectly matching your request.

I think "AI" tools in Krita may have their place: object detection and selection / tracing, upsampling, seamless resizing, cutting and pasting, texture generation, light adjustment, stuff like that. An integrated analog of DALL-E or Midjourney would likely be a poor for.

The main difference is that in development, more of the tedium gets removed-- e.g. interacting with some API or UI boilerplate-- and more of the more satisfying work-- how the program, generally, is going to solve a problem-- remains. In art, the more satisfying part-- conceptualization and forming those ideas into images-- is entirely removed but the tedium remains.

Commissioning a piece of art from an artist entails describing what you want, maybe supplying some inspo images, and then going through a few rounds of drafts or waypoint updates to course-correct before arriving at a final image. Sound familiar? Generative AI art isn't making art: it is commissioning art from a computer program that makes it from an amalgam of other people's art. It reduces the role of the "artist" to making up for the machine artist's shortcomings.

When you're making art, making the details are ingrained in that process-- a requisite step to forming your ideas into images. Details are critical in high-level commercial art, and despite the insistence of many developers who know far less than they realize, current generative AI isn't even close to sufficient.

Economic realities aside, when you're merely editing someone else's images, you've basically transitioned from "writer" to "spell checker" and I don't understand how so many refuse to see how a professional artist would be distraught about that.

Also, there's nothing really stopping you from giving up all your worldly goods and doing this now.

Photography isn't gonna be painting or drawing either, it's still art that affords the artist an enormous amount of control. This is the "meme" I'm talking about. The way you talk about AI art is what's making me go AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

> typing some text and pressing 'generate', iterating, or doing layering and photobashing

It's such a self report, you have no idea what is going on, you are quick to discount it without any understanding. We are still in the infancy of the space and people are fixated with these idiotic reductive arguments. Prompt -> image is the tiniest fraction of what's possible with this technology. I wish I was better at communicating how fucking epic the set of possibilities that this opens up is, I'm sure we will see it eventually. It frustrates me to no end that people are so blind to it.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fully_Automated_Luxury_Commu...

> there's a whole scene about AI producing art (i.e. nobody cares or think it's interesting)

As I recall, this was a conversation between an organic person and a Mind, a specific category of AI that's quite capable of running several billion uploaded human consciousnesses simultaneously in real time, and it was the Mind who was saying that yes, they could make far better music, but they didn't want to.

Not so. Sense of purpose is important.

Your sense of purpose conflicts with the opportunity of everyone else to express themselves as they wish.

How familiar are you with utilitarian ethics, and the "mere addition paradox" criticism of it? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mere_addition_paradox

> Good thing you have a full-time job....

For now. The LLMs will come/are coming for mine, just as diffusion models and GANs eat at the jobs of graphical artists.

> Fully automated luxury communism is a rather bleak future, and it will take us away from being stewards of the environment, and instead consume as many resources as possible.

It's (currently) pure Utopianism, taking on whatever hopes the proponents want it to have no matter how unrealistic. I therefore think you're arguing on the basis of which team it's associated with, without understanding the details of what it is you hate.

> Finally, even if you are doing something relatively harmless with Stable Diffisuion, many other people will use AI for malicious purposes.

Oh absolutely. Whole can of worms there.

Can say the same about basically every tech way back to the wheel, fire, and pointy stick, though unlike most using this analogy I am well aware of the problem of induction (in particular the turkey and the farmer), and don't claim that it will all work out just because it has so far.

AI in general could make us immortal, with lives of leisure and free from all suffering… or it could turn us all into paperclips to maximise shareholder value.

technobabble just doesn't change some fundamentals.

Not doing so would be like going to the gym and not posting your muscle flexing photos on social media. It's just taking away the joy.

What does this comment add to the conversation?

I made my comment because I hope others who are fast typists, and familiar with their tools, do give Copilot a try. I expected to hate it, didn't try it for a long time, and was quite surprised when I did.

> But I haven't personally found a scenario in which I explicitly thought "damn, I know exactly what I need to write, but it's so long - I wish someone would write it for me".

Test case setup comes to mind. Another place it's useful is for writing long function-interface signatures. Or adding a bunch of similar "case" statements to a switch.

Generics still have a ton of limitations.

Of course there will be people just clicking "generate" on a website. But isn't that the difference between consumer and artist? Everyone can press the shutter button on a digital camera to take a snapshot. But the artist knows how to use light, angle and technology to create a photograph with the looks and composition that they intend. (If you compare snapshots from amateur photographers and from professionals, the differences are astounding. And it's not just about the cost of the equipment.)

Certainly, there will be jobs – especially the rather repetitive jobs – that will be replaced by the use of AI, just like stock photos replaced jobs of certain photographers, or just like industrialization and automation replaced the jobs of a lot of craftsmen and artisans. But craftsmen and artisans are still around, and they are paid a lot more than they used to be paid, as long as they provide added value on top of the generic products available on the market!

If you're interested, feel free to reach out to me because I am starting an anti-AI coalition.

There's a lot of "but wait, there's more" in what's happening around AI.

You mean your friends that work to produce generically pleasant looking props in order to maximize player retention and profits?

It seems like artists complaining about AI don't actually work like artists but more like office drones

This is especially important when you consider how unethical the Prime Directive itself is as a principle, and how often Star Trek portrays violating it as the morally superior choice.

The position you're advancing here seems to infantilize people in rural areas and undeveloped nations, and aims to deny them the agency to make their own choices about how to fit modern technology into their lives and communities. It sounds like a modern variation on "noble savage" and "white man's burden" notions -- not exactly a good look.