And I think this is key. It's stupid to argue these problems won't be fixed. Give it a year and it'll pull off handsome faces without string cheese anatomy. But who's using that You're using it for atmosphere and ambience around something where you would have simply done without. You weren't about to pay a human to draw those characters. This is very much like my own use of AI - "Hey Midjourney give me a picture of 'Fear and Loathing in Enumclaw' to share with five friends." One of those friends tried to get Microsoft Copilot to give him a logo for his studio; they were all awful. Three or four of us pointed out that he could get up on Fiverr and do infinitely better. Is that the argument, ultimately? That AI will do a better job than Fiverr? ...cuz... it's more expensive than Fiverr. It should. And also everyone on Fiverr is going to be hella better at using AI to get you what you want than you are. The tools are always going to have shortcomings, all tools do. Professionals learn how to work around those shortcomings to do a better job faster. To me? Much of this discussion is "ZOMG nail guns are going to put framing carpenters out of business."Like, I tried to make some character art for my game, and it can pull off some handsome faces, for sure more detailed than I'd have patience to draw,
I'm not arguing those problems won't go away, or that it's any more or less than a tool. You can give me that much I hope. And you're right that I wouldn't pay a human for those, at least unless those would be recurring NPCs or something like that. I do commission background sets regularly because 1) the free/cheap/generated ones are usually on par with what I can make, 2) what I can make suffers a severe pizazz deficiency. Lotsa bang for a buck, too.
Yeah the best advice in nearly any endeavor is "hire the best expert you can afford and do what they tell you" and if you are paying artists for a campaign that is fuckin' awesome. No shade intended. The business model of all these AI companies, on the other hand, is "get people who would never pay experts to pay us because they don't believe in expertise."
If it's like a nail gun, then it's still problematic, because almost every new piece of tech disproportionately benefits the capitalists. Maybe the number of framing carpenters stays the same, but they're upping output, building houses quicker, and a proportionate rise in wage is doubtful, or at least atypical. The builders and real estate investors profit even more, hurrah! Even if this all never becomes a Thing, I think it'd be cool to have a university or public-funded LLM unleashed on everything public domain and voluntarily (lawfully) donated libraries and content. Do you think it'd be worth it? lol now I'm imagining a Trump admin. procedure for "expertise codebase corrections", governing what is allowed to be input when like the executive branch LLM is allowed to assimilate feedback from expert-level critique. -- FORECASTING -- EDUCATION -- GLOBAL WARMING INTEGRATION -- DR. NAKITOSHA, TOKYO UNIV. -- BILL ACKMAN, BILL ACKMAN -- SAM ALTMAN, MULTI-TRILLIONAIRE -- DONALD TRUMP, LORD -- VIRTUAL SHARPIE, DONALD TRUMP -- NUCLEAR BOMB, U.S./DONALD TRUMP k back to reality. If something good gets put on iPhone, that could be the push towards mass adoption that'd matter. People would get used to using it. Apple's, of course, already way in deep with it financially, too, but hasn't deployed much of anything yet. Self-driving cars? Too hard of a problem to solve, especially without privatizing infrastructure. NFTs? Right-click "save as" for the digital, seek state-enforceable means of ownership for the physical. Crypto? I have a debit card. This? The only issue I can see is what you've already NAILED, mr. framing carpenter, the legal field. But I still think big parts of this stuff are going to make it into our lives. (Already has, to a degree. The TikTok algo is probably the most successful implementation so far, financially.) Obviously I don't mean only Sora or images, but stuff like accruing or building any type of content hyper-shaped to your tastes, learning a new language, making it code for you, or, apparently, for some people, falling in love with an algorithm and feeling devastated when you're locked out of your profile or your hard drive crashes. Oof, hey, if you wanna watch it fail, you could try to have it teach you how to play an instrument. That would be content. "LLM, please write a story about a man who asked an LLM to teach him how to play an instrument, but was met with extreme failure." This was pretty good, even without the twist, but my wife called it about halfway into the thing: "They probably made ChatGPT write the ChatGPT episode". Yup. They did. I really do think people will use this on a massive scale, and pretty quickly. Some jobs will be lost, and some jobs will be created. Not terribly sure how much of each. PURPOSE OF CODEBASE CORRECTIONS
-- TO ASSIST PROGRAM WITH TOP-LEVEL ASSESSMENTS OF HURRICANE SCIENCE AND PREDICTIONS APPLICATION -- EMERGENCY ALERT INSTRUCTION PARTICIPANTS -- DR. WILLIAMSON, UNIV. FL
and there it is. Fundamentally, everyone in a capitalist society is a capitalist, either voluntarily or involuntarily. I agree fully - tools can definitely be used to the advantage of one social class over another. We have no newspapers, for example (middle class) because of the annihiliation of classified ads (lower class). Farming is concentrated (upper class) because of the mechanization of individual agriculture (lower class). But going "this tool is the problem" is an utter and total waste of time if what you're trying to do is protect society. Are LLMs plagiarism machines? Mos def. Are they useful without plagiarism? Prolly not. Do we have mechanisms in place to protect against plagiarism? Hell yeah all that has to happen is for the techbros to learn they're not above the law. yet when I say "it's all plagiarism" what I get, EVERYWHERE, is "no no man it's fuckkn eldritch magic that will doom us all."If it's like a nail gun, then it's still problematic, because almost every new piece of tech disproportionately benefits the capitalists.