OK, not to be runde or anything, but why is your banner AI generated
10mon 23d ago by lemmy.world/u/BennyTheExplorer in asklemmy@lemmy.ml
In my opinion, AI just feels like the logical next step for capitalist exploitation and destruction of culture. Generative AI is (in most cases) just a fancy way for cooperations to steal art on a scale, that hasn't been possible before. And then they use AI to fill the internet with slop and misinformation and actual artists are getting fired from their jobs, because the company replaces them with an AI, that was trained on their original art. Because of these reasons and some others, it just feels wrong to me, to be using AI in such a manner, when this community should be about inclusion and kindness. Wouldn't it be much cooler, if we commissioned an actual artist for the banner or find a nice existing artwork (where the licence fits, of course)? I would love to hear your thoughts!
Honestly, it's because it went in early days.
When ML generated art was a novelty, and people hadn't had a chance to sit down and go "wait, actually, no".
And it's an absolute arsepain to replace, because you'll get 1001 prompt engineers defending slop.
feddit.uk banned generative AI content to make this process easier, and still needs to sweep through and commission new art for a few communities.
Yeah, maybey it would be a good idea to have a new community vote. Can I just start that or do I have to ask the mods or something? I am pretty new to Lemmy, so I am not really shure how this works.
Lemmy honestly tends to run on the ideas of "be the change you want to see in the world" and "well volunteered".
Stick a post up, see if people are interested.
You could message the mods. While they don't seem to have posted for a while, there are mod actions happening still.
And if you don't hear anything back, put it as a suggestion to the admins.
While they don't seem to have posted for a while, there are mod actions happening still.
It's worth noting that sometimes people mod with a different alt than they use for commenting. Just because you don't see them participating, doesn't mean they aren't.
This is pretty good for early AI. I'm impressed.
Yeah, I remember it being feverdream sludge when I first tried it
Wouldn’t it be much cooler, if we commissioned an actual artist for the banner
I hate it when AI is used to replace the work an artist would have been paid for. But uh, this is a random open-source forum; there's no funding for artists to make banners. Rejecting AI art -- which was voted for by the community -- just seems like baseless virtue signalling. No artist is going to get paid if we remove it.
But like if you want to commission an artist with your own money, by all means go ahead. You'll still most likely need another community vote to approve it though.
That doesn't change that real artists who made real art will have had their work used without permission or payment to help generate the banner. I'm with OP.
If I drew something myself, those artists would also not be paid. I can understand a deontological argument against using AI trained on people's art, but for me, the utilitarian argument is much stronger -- don't use AI if it puts an artist out of work.
It's not about anyone getting paid, it's about affording basic respect and empathy to people and their work. Using AI sends a certain message of 'I don't care about your consent or opinion towards me using your art", and I don't think, that this is a good thing for anyone.
Well yeah, I don't care about IP rights. Nothing has been materially stolen, and if AI improves, then the result could some day in theory be indistinguishable from a human who was merely "inspired" by an existing piece of art. At the end of the day, the artist is not harmed by AI plagiarism; the artist is harmed by AI taking what could have been their job.
They're harmed by both IMO.
how
By systems positing human creativity as a computational exercise
the human brain follows the laws of physics; it therefore follows that human creativity is already computational.
Three problems with this:
- If computation means "anything that happens in the universe" then the term 'computation' is redundant and meaningless.
- We do not know or understand all of the physical laws of the universe, or if those laws indeed hold universally.
- Our consciousness does not operate at the level of atomic physics; see Daniel Dennett's 'compatibilism' defense of free will vs Robert Sapolsky's determinism. If we're vulgar materialists, then it follows that there is no free will, and thus no reason to advocate for societal change.
- Your argument should not require appealing to desire to have the word computation be less redundant. (I don't really think there's a meaningful difference between computation and physics, we just generally use the term computation to refer to physical processes which result in useful information.) But why don't we define computation as being "anything that can be done on a conventional computer (with sufficient time and memory)" -- i.e. Turing-computable.
- It is not relevant that we may not know all the physical laws of the universe; what matters only is whether there are laws or not. A scientist cannot cause free will to disappear from the universe simply by learning new facts about the laws of physics. (I would argue that if this were apparently true, then there was no free will to begin with.)
- My understanding of compatabilism is that free will and determinism are compatible; in other words, the laws of physics can give arise to free will (consciousness, as you put it). I think there are some additional twists in compatabilism I don't entirely understand, but that's the gist as far as I have seen. In any case, compatabilism seems to me to be compatible with the idea that one can simulate a human brain; since the simulation and the original would produce the same result, then if one has free will, the other must have free will too. (Simulating it multiple times will always result in the same thing, which therefore means that it's the same conscious experience -- the same free will -- each time, and not different instances of free will. In other words, consciousness is fungible with respect to simulation.) Simulation=computation, so therefore human creativity is computable.
Please note that I'm not arguing that current AIs actually are on the level of human creativity, just that there's no law against that eventually being possible.
The fact that we do not know or understand all the laws of physics (and again, if these are even indeed universal!) means that we cannot be certain about equating computation and physics - assuming we define computation as deterministic, as you seem to be doing here.
Can you 'simulate' a human brain? Sure, easy, all you have to do is just build a human brain out of DNA and proteins and lipids and water and hormones etc, and put it in an exact replica of a human body built from that same stuff.
We have no evidence that consciousness can be separated from the material body that gives rise to it!
And even if we try to abstract that away and say "let's just model the entire physical brain & body digitally": that brain & body is not an island; it's constantly interacting with the entirety of the rest of the physical world.
So, you want to 'simulate' a brain with ones and zeroes? You'll need to simulate the entire universe too. That's likely to be difficult, unless you have an extra universe worth of material to build that computational device with.
Okay, I agree that the universe may not be Turing-computable, since we don't know the laws of physics. Indeed, it almost certainly isn't, since Turing machines are discrete and the universe is continuous -- there are integrals, for instance, that have no closed-form, but are physically present in our universe. However, I have no particularly good reason to believe that infinite precision is actually necessary in order to accurately simulate the human brain, since we can get arbitrarily close to an exact simulation of, say, Newtonian physics, or quantum physics minus gravity, using existing computers -- by "arbitrarily close," I mean that for any desired threshold of error, there exists some discretization constant for which the simulation will remain within that error threshold.
Sure, maybe there are more laws of the universe we don't know and those turn out to be necessary for the human brain to work. But it seems quite unlikely, as we already have a working reductionist model of the brain -- it seems like we understand how all the component parts, like neurons and such, work, and we can even model how complex assemblages of neurons can compute interesting things. Like we've trained actual rat neurons to play Doom for some ungodly reason, and they obey according to how our models predict. Yeah, maybe there's some critical missing law of physics, but the current model we have seems sufficient so far as we can tell in order to model the brain.
constantly interacting with the rest of the physical world
I feel like the rest of the world shouldn't actually matter for the purposes of free will. I mean, yes, obviously our free will responds to the environment. But if the environment disappeared, our free will shouldn't disappear along with it. In other words, the free will should be either entirely located in the mind, or if you're not a compatabilist/materialist, it's located in the mind plus some other metaphysical component. So, I don't agree that it requires simulating the whole universe in order to simulate a free will (though I do agree that you can't simulate an actual mind in the real world unless you can simulate all its inputs, e.g. placing the mind in some kind of completely walled-off sensory deprivation environment that has within-epsilon-of-zero interaction with the outside world. Obviously, it's not very practical, but for a thought experiment about free will I don't think this detail really matters.)
So would you agree that people should be locked up for crimes that a sufficiently advanced AI system predicts they will commit?
Or would you agree that these systems cannot calculate human behaviour?
Hahaha, I didn't expect that.
I saw Minority Report, and I think it has a plot hole. If you can see the future then you can change it, meaning that if there is any way to relay information from the oracle to the person who would commit the crime, then that could change whether or not the person will commit the crime.
If we're vulgar materialists, then it follows that there is no free will, and thus no reason to advocate for societal change.
No free will doesn't imply no change. Lifeless systems evolve over time, take rock formation as an example, it was all cosmic dust at some point. So no, even if we do accept that there is no free will that shouldn't mean perfect stasis
I never said that no change would occur. I said there was no season to advocate for it if there is no free will.
I mean how many of us are pirating stuff
Thank you, you can’t both love piracy (which lemmy overwhelmingly does) and hate AI
plenty of examples where piracy harms no one devs get paid no matter what, ppl working on and making shows like south park that have 5 year deals, many devs get fired right after a game gets released they dont benefit if it does well, indie games i never pirate, I use the 2 hour steam window instead to see if I want it
ai on the other hand lol, actively takes away jobs
There would be no job designing a lemmy banner
It's sad that you think that is what I was arguing
I'm glad I don't think like you, thatd be a confusing time
If I saw the artwork myself and it inspired my artwork, would it be any different? Everything is based on everything.
Yeah, but if you drew it yourself then they wouldn't expect to be paid. Unless you plagiarised them to the degree that would trigger a copyright claim, they would (at worst) just see it as a job that they could have had, but didn't. Nothing of theirs was directly used, and at least something original of theirs was created. Whereas AI images are wholly based on other work and include no original ideas at all.
You're posting on lemmy.ml; we don't care much for intellectual property rights here. What we care about is that the working class not be deprived of their ability to make a living.
Agree with that. I don't think the two are mutually exclusive though?
I agree that they are not mutually exclusive, which is why I usually side against AI. On this particular occasion however, there's a palpable difference, since no artist is materially harmed.
Real artists use uncited reference art all the time. That person that drew a picture of Catherine the Great for a video game certainly didn't list the artist of the source art they were looking at when they drew it. No royalties went to that source artist. People stopped buying reference art books for the most part when Google image search became a thing.
A hell, a lot of professional graphic artists right now use AI for inspiration.
This isn't to say that the problem isn't real and a lot of artists stand to lose their livelihood over it, but nobody's paying someone to draw a banner for this forum. The best you're going to get is some artist doing out of the goodness of their heart when they could be spending their time and effort on a paying job.
Real artists may be influenced, but they still put something of themselves into what they make. AI only borrows from others, it creates nothing.
I realise no-one is paying someone to make a banner for this forum, it would need to be someone choosing to do it because they want there to be a banner. But the real artists whose work was used by the AI to make the banner had no choice in the matter, let alone any chance of recompense.
AI only borrows from others, it creates nothing.
This isn't an argument, it's pseudophilosophical nonsense.
But the real artists whose work was used by the AI to make the banner had no choice in the matter, let alone any chance of recompense.
In order to make such a statement you must:
- Know what model was used and;
- Know that it was trained on unlicensed work.
So, what model did the OP use?
I mean, unless you're just ignorantly suggesting that all diffusion models are trained on unlicensed work. Something that is demonstratively untrue: https://helpx.adobe.com/firefly/get-set-up/learn-the-basics/adobe-firefly-faq.html
Your arguments havent been true since the earliest days of diffusion models. AI training techniques are at the point where anybody with a few thousand images, a graphics card and a free weekend can train a high quality diffusion model.
It's simply ignorance to suggest that any generated image is using other artist's work.
Nope, you can't train a good diffusion model from scratch with just a few thousand images, that is just delusion (I am open for examples though). Adobe Firefly is a black box, so we can't verify their claims, obviously they wouldn't admit, if they broke copyright to train their models. We do however have strong evidence, that google, openai and stability AI used tons of images, which they had no licence to use. Also, I still doubt that all of the people, who sold on Adobe Stock either knew, what their photos are gonna be used for or explicitly wanted that or just had to accept it to be able to sell their work.
Great counterargument to my first argument by the way 👏
So, what model did the OOP use?
Adobe has a massive company with a huge amount to lose if they're lying to their customers. They have much more credibility than a random anti-AI troll account. Of course you'd want to dismiss them, it's pretty devastating to your arguments if there are models which are built using artwork freely given by artists.
Firefly was found to use suspect training data too though... It's the best of them in that it's actually making an effort to ethically source the training data, but also almost no one uses it because programs from professional adobe suite are expensive as hell.
https://martech.org/legal-risks-loom-for-firefly-users-after-adobes-ai-image-tool-training-exposed/
So what's the solution for this board, they should just put up a black image? Should they start a crowdfunding to pay an artist?
It's a really bothers an artist enough they could make a banner for the board and ask them to swap out the AI. But, they'll have to make something that more people like than the AI.
The banner could be anything or nothing at all, and as long as it isn't AI generated, I would like it better
Considering AI is really unlikeable, I don't think that'll be too hard.
Proof is when it happens.
But, they’ll have to make something that more people like than the AI.
No, it does not have to be better than the AI image to be preferable.
Okay, we have your vote down now think about the other people that are also here. It needs to be preferable to the majority not just you.
Intellectual property is made up bullshit. You can't "steal" a jpeg by making a copy of it, and the idea that creating something based on or inspired by something else is somehow "stealing" it is quite frankly preposterous.
The sooner we as a society disabuse ourselves of this brainworm the better.
Edit: I have very mixed feelings about so-called generative AI, so please do not take this as a blanket endorsement of the technology - but rather a challenge on the concept of "stealing intellectual property," which I unequivocally do not believe in.
I agree with you. AI is bad for reasons other than that it is stealing IP.
Though this is about Lemmy.world I think sh.itjust.works has a similarly sad story.
We had a vote for the banner when sh.itjust.works started where a bunch of artist came forward with art for the banner and some AI guys came in with art as well. This was clearly stated by the AI guys, with no trickery. The community voted in the agora to reject the art of its users in favour of this stable diffusion slop.
I think you can tell I dispise AI art. The reason for it there though is that the community voted for it over real artists time, dedication, and love for the community.
If someone really wanted to change it though one could create a discussion post in the agora, our community voting community, to have it changed. They'd likely need to provide new art which, as an artist, I'm unwilling to do. The community has shown it cares little for the time, effort, and skill involved so somebody with an hour and stable diffusion would win out over the multi-day process of making something meaningful
The community voted in the agora
Is 'agora' just a metaphor for expressing preferences via commenting, or is it Fediverse polling software I don't know about?
It's a Greek term used by the head mod for their community. Sorry for the confusion
The community has shown it cares little for the time, effort, and skill involved so somebody with an hour and stable diffusion would win out over the multi-day process of making something meaningful
I mean if the end result is shittier than some AI slop then not sure the effort matters much. I could pour hours of work into a painting and it'd still be total shit because I'm a really shitty painter. I wouldn't expect anyone to value my painting just for the work I put in.
Exception being parents when they get their kid's shitty painting they did at school. They have to pretend to think it's good and appreciate it.
There are a lot of talented artists here on lemmy.ml and I think it would be wise to ask them if they were interested in providing a banner image that is not ai generated, surely someone would take up the offer.
If they wanted to do it for free, they would have offered.
Artists do labor for free for the benefit of their communities all the time, myself included, mostly out of the goodness of their hearts. Although maybe Lemmy can offer some compensation if they want to commission something. Tbh, I've never approached someone or an organization and said, "hey, I think you should change your logo/banner/whatever, want me to make a better one?" I think that's a bit forward.
I'm glad you have the privilege of being able to give away your time and work for free.
You don't know anything about me and idk why you say it like that and then totally disengage from the latter half of what I said.
You:
Artists do labor for free all the time **myself included **
I'm glad you've had that privilege. I'm not sure what else you think I might be referring to or how you think this is not 'engaging' with what you said.
I said nothing about the second half of your a message because it's a semantic argument, a.k.a skill issue:
Yeah, go to someone telling them you can do their work better than them, out of the blue, and they're not going to have have a good response.
What if you said: "Hey guys. I love the community! You might have seen me commenting around too. I just wanted to let you know I do art sometimes and if you're ever looking for new assets, like your banner, I'd be happy to collaborate. Cheers!"
Would you be upset at getting a message like that out of the blue? People cold solicit all the time, it's not a bad thing.
But it's not going to work if you present like you know better than everyone else. People disagree with people, not with facts.
My whole point was that being able to give away your time and skill for free is a privilege.
What's the point of clutching pearls at the use of AI, if the result of not using AI is checks notes artists don't get paid for their work anyways because now you can hang the use of AI over their heads to get art for free, with the excuse that doing so 'is not pro free labor, it's anti AI'
Valuing art is giving value to art. No budget for art? Cool, use AI. You get what you pay for. But wait, you're telling me the solution to put more money in artists pockets is instead for artist to give MORE art for FREE? (For the noble cause of avoiding AI of course) See how insane this is?
I have nothing against gifting art. But that is what is it is: a gift. Something of you that has value, with your time as a baseline, that you are choosing to share. Some people are privileged enough to be able to give it away for free. Some are not. The effective reality is that the more art is gifted in the name of moral crusades against AI, the harder it is for artists to live off art in a world where the genie of AI can't be put back inside its bottle.
I hope this makes you happy and engaged lol
Edit: Here's another idea. Want to volunteer for your community? Cool, how about organizing a GoFundme to put together money to commission a banner. Maybe make a post about the possibility of doing that instead.
Bam. You have given to your community for free, you have made a community event of it. And even if all you get is 5 bucks, that's five bucks that some artist got to spend in their gacha addiction thanks to something they created.
That's what I mean when I say valuing art means giving value to art.
We know this is the very famous "starry night", right? Is OP asking to troll, or maybe is there a joke or detail I'm missing, or OP just hasn't yet seen the Van Gogh and marveled at what was encoded into the painting?
I think they're talking about the asklemmy@lemmy.ml community banner. I don't know why they posted starry night as well.
Yeah, it doesn't have to do anything with my point, to be honest, I was just trying to make my post prettier to look at. My complaint is about the banner for this community.
Impressive footgun. I agree with your point though, it's jarring.
If you wanted to make the post look good, why didn't you commission an artist to make your image? Instead you stole the hard work of another artist without their permission, attribution or compensation.
You know that the painter behind a stary night is long dead and this work is public domain, right?
You know that asking a question isn't an answer, right?
then your post is next to useless as it stands
I was trying to figure what the hell you were on about
Now I have used both AI and CC/Libre (where I can find what I want) and I see very little issue if Im not coping a living artist - I'm not about to commission an artist for a banner image in my small (personal) lemmy instance
Yeah, and I don't expect you to. You are still profiting from artwork, that was involuntarily stolen from artists to train this AI. You are not directly copying them, but you are indirectly using their work without their consent. Like I said, I don't expect you to pay any money for the banner, but you can either search for existing artworks on the internet, that is creative commons (like on pixabay), or if you find something else (from an actual artist, that fits, just ask them nicely and I am shire they would be happy to let you use their artwork for such a purpose for free. I would also be happy to search for something like that myself and suggest you one, if that's OK for you. It's not about paying a bunch of money, my point is just, that we should respect artists a bit more.
I have, over the years, done all of the above. I had a site that was adjacent it a minor UK ISP that was even promoted on there forum as a first stop that I asked a photographer if I could use one of their photos that wasn't CC (before CC/libre was mainstream) with attribution for the sine and associated app.
OK, so why do you still have the AI banner then?
Why should I change one?
Well, I guess you don't have to. I just think it's a bit depressing and also pretty disrespectful to artists (I think, I laid out pretty clearly, why I think that). Now, if you don't care about any of that, I can't stop you, I guess, this was just meant to be a friendly proposal.
A couple things. I don't think the attached image makes the entire post "next to useless", and you know you don't have to set a banner image at all, right? Or, if you want one, you can put on a contest in the community, or just make one in paint or Photoshop yourself. You don't need to jump to the slop machine, AI images are usually worse than nothing at all imo. An AI banner is "next to useless".
A couple things. I don’t think the attached image makes the entire post “next to useless”,
well it does, the post as it stands makes little to no scene with the attached image.
I don't have to set a banner, and 4 of the 6 communities I mod/admin that have banner images I own the copyright on, 1 is a photo from my brother and the last is AI. The banner on the instance is CC by a local photographer
I'm not sure weather it is AI or not. It's much easier to tell when the images are ment to look realistic.
I very much agree. Text generation has many valid use cases and I use it on a day to day basis, but image generation as much fewer valid use cases and much more malicious ones.
Wait what? I'm really confused I thought this post was about a different image when I commented that.
I totally agree this is definetly ai and I can tell very easily.
A couple more spots:
The one at the back in the middle with the arrow pointing above its head also has hands emerging directly from its torso
The one at the back squished in between the two signs is missing an ear
Iris/pupil size 2nd from the right are wildly asymmetrical
Also the whole thing looks like shit
Text generation has many valid use cases and I use it on a day to day basis, but image generation as much fewer valid use cases and much more malicious ones.
Do you not extend the same sympathy to writers as you do visual artists?
Yes I do. Although I don't use text generation for writing creative pieces I use it for coding and help in the Linux terminal. It's not like I was going to pay anyone to do that for me.
Fair enough
You wouldn't necessarily even need to comission someone. There are plenty of Creative Commons licensed pieces of art that could be used.
How else would someone have been able to get all those chipmunks in one photo?
Taxidermy
it's just a crappy and lazy image regardless of origins, but the fact it is AI makes it crappier
In my opinion, AI just feels like the logical next step for capitalist exploitation and destruction of culture.
I don't think AI is inherently bad. What's bad is how we (or well, the corpos) use it. SEO, vibe coding, making slop, you name it.
About training material being stealing: hard agree here. Our copyright laws are broken, but they are right about AI - training is strong in a retrieval system, which is infingement. Shame they aren't enforced at all.
What fascinates me is the similarity between AI and photography. That is, both are revolutionary tools in the visual medium. Imagine this thread being an opinion column in an 1800s newspaper, and replace all instances of 'AI' with 'photography'. The arguments all stand, but our perspective to them may change.
Right now, anti-AI rhetoric is taking the same unprincipled rhetoric that the Luddites pushed forward in attacking machinery. They identified a technology linked to their proletarianization and thus a huge source of their new misery, but the technology was not at fault. Capitalism was.
What generative AI is doing is making art less artisinal. The independent artists are under attack, and are being proletarianized. However, that does not mean AI itself is bad. Copyright, for example, is bad as well, but artists depend on it. The same reaction against AI was had against the camera for making things like portraits and still-lifes more accessible, but nowadays we would not think photography to be anything more than another tool.
The real problems with AI are its massive energy consumption, its over-application in areas where it actively harms production and usefulness, and its application under capitalism where artists are being punished while corporations are flourishing.
In this case, there's no profit to be had. People do not need to hire artists to make a banner for a niche online community. Hell, this could have been made using green energy. These are not the same instances that make AI harmful in capitalist society.
Correct analysis of how technologies are used, how they can be used in our interests vs the interests of capital, and correct identification of legitimate vs illegitimate use-cases are where we can succeed and learn from the mistakes our predecessors made. Correct identification of something linked to deteriorating conditions combined with misanalyzing the nature of how they are related means we come to incorrect conclusions, like when the Luddites initially started attacking machinery, rather than organizing against the capitalists.
Hand-created art as a medium of human expression will not go away. AI can't replace that. What it can do is make it easier to create images that don't necessarily need to have that purpose, as an expression of the human experience, like niche online forum banners or conveying a concept visually. Not all images need to be created in artisinal fashion, just like we don't need to hand-draw images of real life when a photo would do. Neither photos nor AI can replace art. Not to mention, but there is an art to photography as well, each human use of any given medium to express the human experience can be artisinal.
The Luddites weren't simply "attacking machinery" though, they were attacking the specific machinery owned by specific people exploiting them and changing those production relations.
And due to the scale of these projects and the amount of existing work they require in their construction, there are no non-exploitative GenAI systems
Yes, I'm aware that the Luddites weren't stupid and purely anti-tech. However, labor movements became far more successful when they didn't attack machinery, but directly organized against capital.
GenAI exists. We can download models and run them locally, and use green energy. We can either let capitalists have full control, or we can try to see if we can use these tools to our advantage too. We don't have the luxury of just letting the ruling class have all of the tools.
These systems are premised on the idea that human thought and creativity are matters of calculation. This is a deeply anti-human notion.
https://aeon.co/essays/can-computers-think-no-they-cant-actually-do-anything
Human thought is what allows us to change our environment. Just as our environment shapes us, and creates our thoughts, so too do we then reshape our environment, which then reshapes us. This endless spiral is the human experience. Art plays a beautiful part in that expression.
I'm a Marxist-Leninist. That means I am a materialist, not an idealist. Ideas are not beamed into people's heads, they aren't the primary mover. Matter is. I'm a dialectical materialist, a framework and worldview first really brought about by Karl Marx. Communism is a deeply human ideology. As Marx loved to quote, "nothing human is alien to me."
I don't appreciate your evaluation of me, or my viewpoint. Fundamentally, it is capitalism that is the issue at hand, not whatever technology is caught up in it. Opposing the technology whole-cloth, rather than the system that uses it in the most nefarious ways, is an error in strategy. We must use the tools we can, in the ways we need to. AI has use cases, it also is certainly overused and overapplied. Rejecting it entirely and totally on a matter of idealist principles alone is wrong, and cedes the tools purely to the ruling class to use in its own favor, as it sees fit.
Matter being the primary mover does not mean that ideas and ideals don't have consequences. What is the reason we want the redistribution of material wealth? To simply make evenly sized piles of things? No, it's because we understand something about the human experience and human dignity. Why would Marx write down his thoughts, if not to try to change the world?
I never for one second suggested that thoughts had no purpose or utility, or that we shouldn't want to change the world. This is, again, another time you've misinterpreted me.
All I am saying is that, baked into the design and function of these material GenAI systems, is a model of human thought and creativity that justifies subjugation and exploitation.
Ali Alkhatib wrote a really nice (short) essay that, while it's not saying exactly what I'm saying, outlines ways to approach a definition of AI that allows the kind of critique that I think both of us can appreciate: https://ali-alkhatib.com/blog/defining-ai
I'm saying capitalism is the issue, not the tool. Art should be liberated from the profit motive, like all labor. Art has meaning for people because it's a deeply human expression, but not all images are "art" in the traditional sense. If I want to make a video game, and I need a texture of wood, I can either make it by hand, have AI generate it, or take a picture. The end result is similar in all cases even if the effort expended is vastly different. This lowers the barrier for me to participate in game making, makes it more time-effective, while being potentially unnoticable on the user end.
If I just put some prompts into genAI, though, and post the output devoid of context, it isn't going to be seen as art at all, really. Just like a photograph randomly snapped isn't art, but photos with intention in message and form are art. The fact that meaning can be taken from something is a dialogue between creator and viewer, and AI cannot replace that.
AI has use-cases. Opposing it in any and all circumstances based on a metaphysical conception of intrinsic value in something produced artisinally vs being mass produced is the wrong way to look at it. AI cannot replicate the aspects of what we consider to be art in the traditional sense, and not every image created needs to be artisinal. What makes the utility of a stock image any different from an AI generated image of the same concept, assuming equivalent quality?
The bottom line is that art needs to be liberated from capitalism, and technology should not be opposed whole-cloth due to its use under capitalism.
At the risk of misinterpreting you, it seems like you're arguing against the labour theory of value
In what way?
Are you not implying that human effort is not valuable?
Not intrinsically. A mud pie that someone spent 10 hours making does not have 10 hours of value. For equivalent use-values, their value is regulated around the average time it takes to reproduce them across all of industry. A chair that someone spent 15 hours making and a mass produced chair that someone spent 5 hours making, if equivalent use-values, would each be worth 10 hours (if this was the standard in the economy and both firms produced equal quantities).
Labor-power and raw materials are the source of all new value proper. Use-value, on the other hand, is distinct. AI art fundamentally cannot take the place of human art, as human art's use-value is derived from what the artist is saying and how they choose to say it. The process becomes the use. However, something like a texture in a video game is only useful inasmuch as the end user sees a texture and experiences it as a texture, the manner in which the texture was produced does not matter whether it was painted pixel by pixel, distilled from a photo, or was AI generated.
I'm not trying to use the "I read theory" card as some thought-terminating cliché, but I have actually read Capital volume 1, and am about a third of the way through volume 2. What you are describing is closer to the LTV of Smith or Ricardo, not of Marx.
I appreciate you describing the LTV distinctions between the thinkers, thank you, sincerely!
I think the problem I have with AI - and it sounds like you agree at least partially - is that it positions human creative work, and human labour in general, as only a means to an end, rather than also as an end in itself.
(I think this holds true even with something like a video game texture, which I would argue is indeed part of a greater whole of creative expression and should not be so readily discounted.)
This makes AI something more along the lines of what Ursula Franklin called a 'prescriptive technology', as opposed to a 'holistic technology'.
In other words, the way a technology defines how we work implies a kind of political relation: if humans are equivalent to machines, then what is the appropriate way to treat workers?
Is it impossible that there are technologies that are capitalist through and through?
Tools are different in different modes of production. A hammer is capital in the hands of a capitalist whose workers use it to drive nails, but is just a tool in the hands of a yeoman who uses it to fix up their homestead. My driving point is that art and AI images have intrinsically different use-values, and thus AI cannot take the place of art. It can pretty much occupy a similar space as stock images, but it cannot take the place of what we appreciate art for.
Humans will never be equivalent to machines, but products of labor and products of machinery can be equal. However, what makes art "useful" is not something a machine can replicate, a machine is not a human and cannot represent a human expression of the human experience. A human can use AI as a part of their art, but simply prompting art and churning something out has as little artistic value as a napkin doodle by an untrained artist.
The products of artisanal labour and factory labour might indeed be able to be equivalent in terms of the end product's use value, but they are not equivalent as far as the worker is concerned; the same loss of autonomy, the loss of opportunity for thought and problem-solving and learning and growing, these are part of the problem with capitalist social relations.
I'm trying to say that AI has this social relation baked in, because its entire purpose is to have the user cede autonomy to the system.
I'm sorry, but that doesn't make any sense. AI is not intrinsically capitalist, it isn't about cedeing autonomy. AI is trained on a bunch of inputs, and spits out an output based on nudging. It isn't intrinsically capital, it's just a tool that can do some things and can't do others. I think the way you view capitalism is fundamentally different from the way Marxists view capitalism, and this is the crux of the miscommunication here.
Literally the only thing AI does is cause its users to cede autonomy. Its only function is to act as a (poor) facsimile of human cognitive processing and resultant output (edit: perhaps more accurate to say its function is to replace decision-making). This isn't a hammer, it's a political artifact, as Ali Alkhatib's essay 'Defining AI' describes.
AI is, quite literally, a tool that approximates an output based on its training and prompting. It isn't a political artifact or anything metaphysical.
AI is a process, a way of producing, it is not a tool. The assumptions baked into that process are political in nature.
I really don't follow, something like Deepseek is quite literally a program trained on inputs that spits out an output depending on prompts. It isn't inherently political, in that its relation to production depends on the social role it plays. Again, a hammer isn't always capital, it is if that's the role it plays.
And that social role is, at least in part, to advance the idea that communication and cognition can be replicated by statistically analyzing an enormous amount of input text, while ignoring the human and social context and conditions that actual communication takes place in. How can that not be considered political?
The social role of a tool depends on its relation to the overarching mode of production, it isn't a static thing intrinsic to a tool. AI doesn't care about advancing any ideas, it's just a thing that exists, and its use is up to how humans use it. This seems to be all very idealist and not materialist of you.
If I made a tool which literally said to you, out loud in a tinny computerised voice, "cognitive effort isn't worth it, why are you bothering to try", would it be fair to say it was putting forward the idea that cognitive effort isn't worth it and why bother trying?
If so, what's the difference when that statement is implied by the functioning of the AI system?
The existence of AI itself does not imply anything. It's a tool. The social function of AI is determined by the mode of production.
Want to know how I know that it does?
Because the result is the same over and over and over and over and over again. Every single time!
The AI is not suggesting anything ny virtue of being itself. The social consequences of a given tool depend on the way society is structured, based on the mode of production.
I dunno what to tell you other than that I have been consistently pointing out that AI is a process, not a tool.
If the result of that process is the same wherever it's introduced, then your model of the world has to be able account for that.
You're ascribing metaphysical messages to objects, which I reject the notion of. AI is just a program, a type of one. The social interpretations of its use depend on the mode of production of society.
I reject metaphysics and idealism in general outright.
And due to the scale of these projects and the amount of existing work they require in their construction, there are no non-exploitative GenAI systems
That hasn't been true for years now.
AI training techniques have rapidly improved to the point where they allow people to train completely new diffusion models from scratch with a few thousand images on consumer hardware.
In addition, and due to these training advancements, some commercial providers have trained larger models using artwork specifically licensed to train generative models. Adobe Firefly, for example.
It isn't the case, and hasn't been for years, that you can simply say that any generative work is built on """stolen""" work.
Unless you know what model the person used, it's just ignorance to accuse them of using "exploitative" generative AI.
Can you provide a few real-life examples of images made with a model trained on just "a few thousand images on consumer hardware", along with stats on how many images, where those images were from, and the computing hardware & power expended (including in the making of the training program)? Because I flat out do not believe that one of those was capable of producing the banner image in question.
You are probably confusing fine tuning with training. You can fine tune an existing model to produce more output in line with sample images, essentially embedding a default "style" into every thing it produces afterwards (Eg. LoRAs). That can be done with such a small image size, but it still requires the full model that was trained on likely billions of images.
Is it AI? It's been the banner since at least the Reddit API thing and I don't see common AI artifacts. All the eyes and whiskers look fairly consistent for example, so do the paws. Especially with the relatively primitive AI models back then it would actually be impressive if they generated this image. I think it's just a generic looking CGI image with the same off shelf 3D model posed in different ways.
Someone else has highlighted spots on it
These kind of posts always have the feeling of UFO or cryptid people dissecting a grainy 3 second clip of video and coming to the conclusion that Bigfooted Aliens exist.
They already have their conclusion before they even start.
These kind of posts always have the feeling
They already have their conclusion before they even start.
🤔
"It's not AI, also even if it is (and honestly why are you looking at something critically for more than 3 seconds to even determine this, you should just let the slop wash over you in perpetuity and never think about it) then it is good actually and the people criticizing it are just cranks"
You should definitely support artists! You know how good it feels to support someone you know? I'm personally going to give my music away for free. I think intellectual property is meant to be shared, but I do recognize that we gotta eat in this parasitic system, yo. How about this? We support artists with our commonwealth? It's fucking important, man. Culture matters. No need to shift the blame to the individual when it's the system that's rotten. Two more ideas, then I'll fuck off. Guaranteed dignity in death, and defensive, non-coercive, no entanglements protection of holy sites. I'm a deterministic atheist through and through, but man, we gotta heal our fucking souls.
I mean is it really a problem if the only problem is that it's AI
Uhm, yeah... That was the whole point, I was making.
I think your point was AI is bad.
Mine was does it matter if it's bad.
Yes it does, for the reasons I mentioned
I mean if you want to commission an artist to make a banner and replace the one we got I'm all for it. Idrc what the banner is. I think a quick, cheap and cute slapped together picture that is somewhat related to the topic of the community is serviceable.
AI is also bad because it uses basically slave labor; people in 3rd world countries have to look at horrible shit all day to filter it out of the training data. using it endorses this, along with environmental damage, the intellectual property isn't the only issue with it
That applies to all of capitalism, though, we shouldn't oppose smartphones just because of the same reasons, but oppose capitalism and imperialism.
I agree actually! No ethical consumtion and all that, no need to be engaging in easily available AI art usage because "well other things are also unethical". two wrongs dont make a right
The point of "no ethical consumption under capitalism" isn't that we should focus our efforts on being as moral and upright within capitalism as possible, but on actually overthrowing capitalism.
good plan, while we do that we can avoid using ai slop, especially because it's so easy. and i absolutely do think we should put in our best efforts to live ethically, within reason ofcourse
We can do our best to live ethically, sure, but being ethical does not mean rejecting technology whole-cloth that is simply used to its worst extent and fashion in capitalism. Not every image that exists needs to be painstakingly made in artisinal fashion, like stock images, and at the same time AI art will never be able to replace art as a human expression.
AI has use cases, and cannot replace art, but it can make some more tedious tasks that don't need artistry faster and more accessible, like this banner. If I quickly jotted down a sketch of the banner, it would not have any more artistic value just because a human drew it. Photography also has use-cases, but has not eliminated the use of sketching or traditional art forms.
I mostly agree, but I'd honestly prefer you sketch of a similar image of the banner than the AI image.
Why?
personal preference, I like the human touch
Your phone was made with basically slave labour. Your clothes probably too. Chances are even the food you eat employs workers with less than acceptable standard of living. Are you gonna stop using any of those?
I'm already profiting from unethical labor practices, might as well add to it? That's not very sound logic ngl
Every comment you make is being stored on hundreds of hard drives, I bet you can guess how ethical the entire process of creating those was.
Better not continue, otherwise you might continue participating in unethical consumption.
The contribution made is done, its not like every time the image is loaded it gets remade in the AI data centre.
Yes, bad things are bad
Your phone was made by underpaid workers in developing countries, are you gonna stop using it? My feelings on the banner are the same.
If that's what it seems to you, you might want to reread their comment. You're way off base.
That's your opinion. I disagree with it. Keep the banner as it is. Someone surely took the time to make that image. As it's pretty good even more for the time it was created. You are just dishing that person's work. I respect that person work, so the banner should stay.
It would be fine if it was possible to ask the person who made the banner how did they made it and how long it took.
Your complain seems to be mostly based on AI being able to do things faster. At that point why stop there.. don't hire digital artist. They took jobs away from traditional artists. Pretty sure the only good thing we could do I commission the banner to a full crew of sculptors to do the 3d mesh on granite and then a full tome oil painter for a year to capture the image into canvas. That would make sure that not technological advances would steal anyone's job.
Edit: It's fucking ironic that anti-AI people use downvote/ upvote bots. But I catched it. Fucking ironic.
Yeah fuckin bombardio crocodillo is art, come at me
I generated it, actually, and I put no time into it whatsoever.
Can you share the model, the input parameters and the seed?
What part of "I put no time into it" do you not understand?
Do you respect the truth?
Or you think that lying is justified when defending a cause you believe worth?
The CIA will not allow me to answer this question.
However, I do have complementary Skittles.
actual artists are getting fired from their jobs, because the company replaces them with an AI, that was trained on their original art.
Are you sure that's happening? Under the previous mode of capitalism, what kind of companies were hiring artists?
As I understand it, that isn't the actual gripe from the general perspective of the artist. Instead it's about copyright, a concept I fundamentally disagree with. I don't think it's necessary, and that the artist's capacity for prosperity being tied to copyright is a symptom of a bigger problem than being usurped by software.
I think there is good art and bad art. I think there is good AI art (tbh I can't think of any examples, I just think in principle AI art has the capacity to be good) and bad AI art. I think the relative ease of access skews people's exposure towards slop. I use the term slop as a descriptor for AI art that is sloppy or wholly derivative; not to prejudge it.
I think perspectives like yours haven't compelled me to think they are meaningfully different from that of the Luddites, or those opposed to implementing computers in the workplace, etc. I genuinely sympathise with those groups, but ultimately wouldn't have us go back.
Are you sure that's happening? Under the previous mode of capitalism, what kind of companies were hiring artists?
Movie studios, VFX houses, advertisement agencies, should I keep going? It's not that all of these people will or can be replaced, but the studios are already hollowing out their staff and the abstract threat of AI gives studios much more power in negotiations with artists. Since AI, much less people are willing to contract artists online, which many young and alternative artists depend on to survive. Why do you think, the Hollywood strikes are happening?
I agree, that copyright shouldn't have to exist in an ideal society, but we still live under capitalism. Imagnine, if Disney could just scoop up all the good indie movies, and redistribute them under their own name with massive marketing budgets, taking all the profit and pretending, it's their own work. The original creator would go bankrupt and not be able to make another great movie.
In my opinion, generative AI is doing exactly the same thing, but indirectly. If Disney were to release a fully AI generated movie, they would still have profited from the work of a bunch of unconsenting and uncredited independent artists.
AI "art" is also not art, because real art requires a concios and self aware being to observe the world in a unique way and get inspired to express a new idea in their art. AI is not conscious and therefore cannot observe the world or get any new ideas. There will never be good AI-"Art", because AI can only recreate and recombine the existing (and yeah, I know, that AI images are technically unique, but they are still only derived from what the AI was trained on). The best, an AI could do, is imitate a human as well as possible. It cab only succeed in decieving us, letting us think, there is some person behind this art, but there will never be anyone behind it.
I don't think my earlier reply came through. I'll try rewriting it.
AI can add, remove, change or refine input, either text or image-based, either wholly or partially, which may or may not itself be AI-generated. That feature set certainly allows room for genuine, inspired artistic expression. The way you describe AI art is as though it is all created by asking ChatGPT to draw you something. This isn't the case, and neglects to consider the litany of AI model types that are fundamentally different to LLM's. Models which are operated by humans directly interacting with them in a range of ways.
Let's say you're a concept artist for a movie. After replacing you with AI, how does the company instruct the model in the concept to be represented? If they're just asking ChatGPT to come up with something itself, then sure - your description applies. And the output will be shitty concept art, and the movie will shittier than it otherwise would be. People might consume it, but it would be a slippery slope towards failure either because a) people don't like it, or don't like it enough for it to reach the critical mass required to spread, or b) someone else does the same uninspired and easy job more cheaply or effectively. If you're an AI-slop consumer, why watch AI slop movies when you can just watch AI slop Tiktoks?
Good art resonates with people not because humans are easily entertained by pretty flashing lights or whatever an AI can churn out, but because of their relationship to a piece of art which is derived from their human experience. Companies have tried to broaden appeal and lower costs by appealing to the lowest common denominator for centuries, but beyond a certain point it is a failing business model. In my opinion, if some companies want to try, let them find out why there are 1000s of AI-generated movie trailers but no movies.
I think that AI can be used for the concept art in a way that maintains artistic integrity and capacity for artistic expression by having someone skilled in representing visual concepts operate the AI tool. That someone would be for all intents and purposes an artist. In essence the artist position would not be redundant; the way their job is done would have changed.
Not the OP but I'll put my PoV.
AI allows to cut junior and entry level artists. Companies only need to retain top 1% talent orchestrating hordes of AI.
While it is still a craft, commercial art is not about being genuine; it is to deliver product and meeting deadline while passing QA. AI's output rate outpaces human labor, and the top 1% can certainly identify what aspect makes AI output slop. Which means they can cherry pick "OK" part of AI, review, iterate, tweak to deliver product while keeping quality. The process previously involved comunication between senior and junior artits. Now companies don't need the rest of the 99% anymore as workforce.
What will happen in the long run? Who knows. Companies are known for only keen on immediate profit.
This tendency is widespread and not limited to art field, nor related to the argument of intrinsic value of art. I can argue this is more of labor (and capitalism) issue, on top of people whose art stolen not getting enough compensation for their work. While I'm not against AI technology itself, its effect on peoples livelihood and climate impact makes current AI landscape hard to defend.
Thanks for your input. I agree with you that it is a labour and capitalism issue. This seems to be where your perspective differs from the OP.
I guess my fundamental disagreement is that we should deny ourselves technological advancement because we live under capitalism. Yes, that is the system we will live under for the foreseeable future. I don't like it and don't like how capital takes advantage of technology. The way capital takes advantage of AI isn't unique. Generally, significant advancement will bring change and the biggest impact of that change will be felt by the proletariat. That sucks and we shouldn't have to put up with it.
Circling back to the topic of the post, OP uses this negative impact as justification to disagree with the apparent use of AI in the community banner art. This is non-sequitur. No one is making a living off of designing Lemmy community banners. The people that run the community simply decided not to arbitrarily deny themselves what they felt to be the best tool for the task. What I'm defending isn't necessarily the current AI landscape as such, just the technology part I'm interested in.
AI bad. Upvotes please.
The AI sector is not pushed by consumer money. A consumer strike won't alter at all the macro-dynamics happening at the moment. If you want to resist AI, go blow up some data center or unionize some tech workers.
You're making a moralistic point, blaming consumers instead of corporations, which leaves not much room for action.
None of that means that what OP is proposing wouldn't still be the right thing to do. A drop in the ocean, sure, but still preferable to the alternative.
Performative politics have been proven to have a paralyzing effect on people. If you feel you're doing something and it has no impact, you just disengage from meaningful politics because you already absolved yourself.
Ok, well in that case I guess we should just keep looking at those ugly as shit pixar-ish chipmunks. Maybe their cutesy faces will motivate someone of the 5k monthly visitors here to become the next unabomber who finally defeats Peter Thiel.
It's just a single png. If somebody kicks up their feet and stops caring after getting the mods to change it, then do you honestly think that they could've gotten anything significant done in the first place?
I'm one of them. I went from thinking naively that consumer politics matter to leaving my career to fight big tech, unionize tech workers, and for a year or so I've also worked on limiting the harm of generative AI specifically.
If I thought this petty stuff would do anything, I would have probably wasted a lot of time in the wrong hole.
The use of AI images without critique communicates to people that these things are normal and fine and inevitable and non-harmful. This isn't about staging a 'consumer boycott' in terms of harming profits as much as it's about not normalizing this kind of stuff culturally. The less acceptable this stuff is, the more likely people will be willing to push back against big tech more generally. It's part of the same movement.
And it's additive, not zero-sum. No one is saying "don't bother unionizing" because they're too busy pushing back on the use of AI images in an online community. In fact, I'd reckon, the broad societal pushback makes it more likely that people will be inspired to unionize!
In my experience it is the total opposite: the habit of individual, culturally-oriented actions cultivates a normalization of symbolic, small-scale actions and prevents people to develop a taster for collective action. Once they hit the limit of what they can do alone in the cultural sphere, instead of asking themselves how to overcome these limits, they just ignore collective forms of action to keep repeating the same individualistic and symbolic actions. Most people who show up and take initiative in collective efforts almost always have no history of engaging with symbolic actions and emancipating themselves from that mindset. There are a few, but it's by far the exception.
Who cares? Who makes a new account just to ask this sort of leading question?
Well, obviusly I care. I joined Lenny today, yes. I joined this sub and was immediately a bit disgusted by the banner. So I made a post about it. Why do you care if I care then?
You care too much over something that is so significantly unimpactful.
So you're here for less than a day and you're already judging? First rule of the fediverse, you can go make your own community
how many days until we're allowed to judge you exactly?
Feel free to go ahead. I think it's presumptuous to show up on your first day and rather than look around and get a vibe for something, immediately call out things you dislike. Call me old fashioned, but that's rude.
ok, again you mention the first day. what is the acceptable number of days at which it becomes not presumptuous?
Let's start at 2 and go from there
damn they were so close
Maybe you should make your own instance and ban anyone asking questions you dont like?
Is this a joke?
A less than 24 hour old account, who's entire comment history is this post which is pushing rehashed anti-AI nonsense in the guise of a concerned community member.
Ladies and gentleman, this is an excellent example of a concern troll:
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Concern_troll
A concern troll is someone who disingenuously visits sites of an opposing ideology to disrupt conversation by offering unwanted advice on how to solve problems which do not really exist.
Topics of "concern" usually involve tactical use of rhetoric, site rules, or with more philosophical consistency. The concern troll's posts are almost exclusively intended to derail the normal functions of their targeted website.
With a little prep time and some VPNs the OP could have enough alts available to ensure that anyone arguing against them receives enough down votes to make the OP's position seem reasonable.
If you examined the population of people who contributed down votes, you'd likely find a bunch of new or low comment history accounts who seem to exclusively vote in anti-AI threads.
Yeah because these comments are totally getting buried /s You have to make a first post at some point, and it's gonna be something you're passionate about.
Well, but you are not of an opposing ideology, your sub is called "ask Lemmy", not "ask AI obsessed people", so your definition doesn't even make sense. I honestly don't understand why you people insist on painting me in such a negative light, just because I am new. That is called bullying by the way. I didn't even intend this thread to blow up in such a way, I guess a lot of people seem to care.
Notice how the community is also not called "ask Anti-AI obsessed people". I'm sure that name is free, you may like to create such space, and stop trying to discriminate other people.
post with a score of 181 currently ... kinda difficult to argue that someone asking a question as politely as possible, and getting a lot of agreement that the question is worth asking, is simply trolling.
Well, of course everyone that disagrees with these people is a bot, lol
Someone in this thread is using bots to support an anti-ai statement. I don't know if you or other person, that I don't know. But I'm almost sure about bot usage.
Using bots to oppose AI is hilarious btw.
How would you know that?
Voting patters. screw up relations between votes and comments. Buch of votes coming in at particular points in time. Comments that were being upvoted for hours suddenly getting 30 downvotes at once. It's pretty obvious.
I've been on the lookout as it's not the first time this happen with anti-AI gang. I have been suspicious about bot usage by some user on this topics for some time. So I've been comparing post where people talk about AI and other posts and the voting patterns are all different.
This could as well be just old classic brigading. But with brigading you usually get more one line comments, when it's just the votes it's usually bots.
I honestly don’t understand why you people insist on painting me in such a negative light, just because I am new. That is called bullying by the way.
"ask AI obsessed people"
This you? You use bad faith arguments and ad hominem and you'll get the same back.
I guess a lot of people seem to care.
Yes, who knew AI was such a hot button issue on social media? /s
It seems incredibly unlikely that you could be unaware of the the volatility of the topic while also parroting all of the anti-ai talking points. Your mask is slipping.
*whose
🤔, fair
FauxLiving: na na na! I don't like their opinion so this must be nonsense! stupid silly forum users cannot even have real values like me..
on another note, I would be interested in how did you amass 1400 comments in mere 5 months!
Ah, I see we're being mature now.
FauxLiving: na na na! I don’t like their opinion so this must be nonsense! stupid silly forum users cannot even have real values like me…
WhyJiffie: blah blah blah, I don't have opinions of my own so I follow the downvoting winds to sling shit and ask dumb questions.
I would be interested in how did you amass 1400 comments in mere 5 months!
In Lemmy, if you type words into the text field and press the reply button it creates a comment. If you do it 2 times, then you have 2 comments. I'll leave the rest of the exercise to the reader.
your condemning tone is really not needed. However it's always somewhat suspicious when someone posts so many comments as if that was their day job, with easily half dozen detailed comments in an hour. in 5 months, your 1400 comments is basically 9 comments a day every day, on average.
I'll just add "troll" to your label besides "AI apologist".
It's a condescending tone, actually.
I'm sorry if you think typing a few paragraphs is some herculean effort. I know it's painful to have to step away from TikTok for so many seconds but keep at it and maybe one day you too can string more than two thoughts together in the same comment.
"You talk a lot" isn't quite the burn you think it is but maybe if you keep rephrasing it a few more times it'll land.
It's a condescending tone, actually.
something I can agree with finally.
I'm sorry if you think typing a few paragraphs is some herculean effort. I know it's painful to have to step away from TikTok for so many seconds
no no, you misunderstand me. but lets start with your assumption. I don't use tiktok, and I condemn (now this is correct use I believe) its users. its even blocked at the home network, by me, mainly for 3rd party tracking.
its not the few paragraphs I was meaning. when I was looking at your comment history one of the latest comments was spanning the screen with several code examples (or were they commands? I don't remember). and there were several similar length comments of yours posted within an hour.
my point is not that "you talk a lot". but whether your opinions are actually yours.
Terminal commands, maybe some Python, I don't remember all of my comments.
I'm a system administrator. I write technical articles for non-technical people and am primarily paid to sit around and keep things from exploding.
I have plenty of free time to get into slap fights on social media and I can probably type faster than I speak, so it isn't a huge time investment to write a paragraph or two.
The insinuation that I'm a bot is a nice pivot, at least it's more direct than a vague reference to my comment count. Though, you probably should have went with implying that I have no life or some other personal failing.
Implying that a bot can produce a large volume of coherent text will get you kicked out of the Luddite club...
Upvoting and downvoting patterns in this thread are weird. Votes come and go in blocks that happen at precise points.
I'm almost sure that some anti-AI guy is using bots to try to influence opinion, which os hilarious if you ask me.
Everyone understands that social media is the primary vector of disinformation, but if you ever try to point out this process in actual practice people act like you're talking nonsense.
Here we have a post started by some random account less than a day old which is suddenly rocketed to the top of the community.
-
The OP lives in the thread full time for the entire day, not commenting anywhere else on Lemmy, and then disappears.
-
This person simultaneously knows all of the anti-AI arguments by rote and also seems clueless as to why anti-AI posts get a lot of traction.
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The post is brigaded/botted, the vote:comment ratio is off, the downvoters are primarily accounts with no comment/post history (you can see upvotes and downvotes with moderation tools, they're not private).
I would bet money that if a site admin were to look into the primary participants of this thread, you'd find that they're all using VPNs. None of this on its own is suspicious, but taken all together it makes the thread very suspect.
I could be wrong, this isn't exactly an easy thing to prove even when you have server admin tools. But I participate in the community quite heavily and am a moderator of a fairly populated instance (so I can see the server logs for our instance) and this post is giving off a lot of red flags.
"This community should be about inclusion and kindness" - as you tell us our banner sucks and whoever made it. You can spot a .world user a mile away. -edit: and you joined two hours ago?
Well, you didn't even make it or anyone, an AI made it. Kindness towards artists and not kindness towards people using their art without consent.
If you want to get philosophical, all art is plagiarism, derived from the inspiration of others.
Meta gets to pirate books to train on and I don't? That's bull honkey
"whoever made it" oh nooooo, I'm sure the AI is super offended.
I'm with you. It's akin to walking into a bar, seeing everyone peacefully drinking, and yelling that they're all assholes because the beer they're drinking Budweiser instead of something more ethical.
Like you aren't wrong, but who the hell are you to barge in and complain without even bothering to settle in? Can't just hang out for a bit, get to know us first, then bring it up later? It had to be the first thing we hear from you?
No, to me that's incredibly rude, and if it was my bad I'd say there's the door, go find one you like more.
People are so dramatic over AI
For good fucking reason. AI wastes fresh water and ruins our climate while being terrible at what it does
It seems to do simple illustration images just fine
Not correct if ran locally
It was still trained in a datacenter
Damage is already done and it's free. They can't monetize you using it. If anything, downloading it costs them money.
Also some models weren't trained with an obscene amount of compute, like deepseek, which used one data center for only 3.7 days.
I don't think it's fair to think of model training as a one-and-done situation. It's not like deepseek was designed and trained in one attempt. Every iteration of these models will require retraining until we have better continual learning implementations. Even when models are run locally, downloads signify demand, and demand calls for improved models, which means more training and testing is required.
Doesn't that mean the damage is already done?
Not all of it, but the majority, yes.
Global fresh water demand will exceed supply by 40% by 2030
AI's projected water usage could hit 6.6 billion m³ by 2027
Drought and famine are going to kill billions in this century.
The artist you would have paid would have consumed more water than a query
I wouldn't have paid an artist to make my furry porn fetish video tho'
Who do you think makes it then? God?
It was a glib joke that I wouldn't have paid a creator to make $someRandomContentThatIWpuldntHaveSoughtOutAnyway. Honestly don't care for AI art on aesthetic or ethical grounds tbqh, just a throwaway comment on the internet.
I wonder how many people died because someone generated a silly banner.
Some people probably think that thousands will die because of that, while deciding to which exotic country they will travel by plane next month.
The whole crusade just seems so out of proportion
Ah, whataboutism, how refreshing.
A cool glass of 'this is no worse than that', with a little ice cube that represents the stability of our ecosystems. Very cool, very mindful
X being bad is no argument against doing something (even a little) about a different bad thing Y. Fuck excessive flight travel and fuck generative AI. There's no need to only pick one thing to hate.
Yep very true. I actually intended my comment as an agreement but I guess something got lost in translation, lol