Comment by munificent

Comment by munificent a day ago

SGTM.

Honestly, seriously. Imagine some weird Thanos showed up, snapped his fingers and every single bit of generative AI software/models/papers/etc. were wiped from the Earth forever.

Would that world be measurably worse in any way in terms of meaningful satisfying lives for people? Yes, you might have to hand draw (poorly) your D&D character.

But if you wanted to read a story, or look at an image, you'd have to actually connect with a human who made that thing. That human would in turn have an audience for people to experience the thing they made.

Was that world so bad?

autoexec a day ago

Imagine a world where Thanos snapped his fingers and photoshop (along with every digital application like it) was wiped from Earth forever. The world would keep on turning and artists would keep on creating, but creating art would be more difficult and fewer people would be able to do it (or even touch up their own photos).

Would that world be so bad? Was the world really so horrible before photoshop existed?

What if we lost youtube? What if we lost MP3s?

We could lose a lot of things we didn't always have and we'd still survive, but that doesn't mean that those things aren't worth having or that we shouldn't want them.

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FeepingCreature a day ago

That world was worse. It wasn't much worse, because we haven't seen most of the benefit of GenAI yet, but yes I would say that it was worse.

It wasn't "so bad", but any history of improvement can be cut into slices that aren't "so bad" to reverse.

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dcow a day ago

Obviously the former status quo wasn’t that bad. But the opposite is also true, AI democratizes access to pop culture. So now when I connect with a human it’s not to share memes, it’s higher order. IOW we can spend more time playing D&D because we didn't have to draw our characters.

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munificent a day ago

> AI democratizes access to pop culture.
Pop culture was already democratized. That's literally what makes it popular culture.
> So now when I connect with a human it’s not to share memes, it’s higher order.
I suspect that improving the image quality of the memes does not measurably improve the quality of the human connection here.
> IOW we can spend more time playing D&D because we didn't have to draw our characters.
You never had to draw your characters. You can just play and use your imagination. Why would we let LLMs do our dreaming for us?

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- dcow a day ago
  
  It's a rhetorical example. Suppose you need to create an avatar of your character. Why does it follow that it's not beneficial to have an AI help generate the avatar?
  You're responding to the specific example, not the general argument. Unless your counter is that whatever humanity is doing that AI is helping is probably stupid and shouldn't be done anyway.
  
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  munificent a day ago
  
  > Unless your counter is that whatever humanity is doing that AI is helping is probably stupid and shouldn't be done anyway.
  No, my counter is that whatever generative AI is doing is worth doing by humans but not worth doing by machines.
  As the joke comic says: We thought technology was going to automate running errands so that we had time to make art, but instead it automates making art while we all have to be gig workers running errands.
  
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  satvikpendem 6 hours ago
  
  > No, my counter is that whatever generative AI is doing is worth doing by humans but not worth doing by machines.
  There is no basis to this claim, why is one worth doing by a biological machine but not a silicon one? People cling too highly to biological exceptionalism not understanding that one arose due to certain processes in the world and universe where somewhere else we might have been silicon beings all along. That is to say, people have huge amounts of cognitive dissonance thinking that they are actually simply machines of a biological variety.
  > As the joke comic says: We thought technology was going to automate running errands so that we had time to make art, but instead it automates making art while we all have to be gig workers running errands.
  Hardware is harder than software. Soon gig workers will be automated by AI too. I have heard this refrain a thousand times but it never ceases to make me think that it's in a specific time and place of the early 21 century. In the 22nd century, given such progress, we might talk of these discussions the same way artists and weavers did in (and of) the early 20th.
  
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  nradov a day ago
  
  No one needs an avatar. You can draw a stick figure or take a selfie or whatever. This is all so silly and trivial.
  
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