Great job đ [Twonks]
Twonks | Bluesky
::: spoiler Transcript
TWđ¶NKS
A comic in four panels:
Panel 1. White text on black
AI Design Logic
Panel 2. A guy sits in a restaurant at a table with a checkered table cloth. A waiter stands near, hands behind back waiting attentively.
Guy: Get me a cheese pizza
Panel 3. The waiter returns with a pizza in hand.
Panel 4. The guy gestures proudly at the pizza. The waiter looks less than amused.
Guy: Wow, look what I made! :::
154 replies
the best part is that the waiter stole it from another restaurant
*from the dumpsters of several other restaurants
Mmmmm mmmmm steamed hams
Rich people think this way for everything
That's one of the core injustices of capitalism.
Rich person says "Build a thing"
Workers design, research, and build the thing.
Rich person keeps the profits.
Reminds me of when I heard someone talk about a recent experience when they "built houses". I thought that sounded unlikely, as I could not picture this person wearing a toolbelt and hardhat and actually swinging a hammer. I asked for clarification, and they explained how they managed a construction company or something, and that in English, saying "I build houses" covers the management side as well, not just the people actually doing the building.
It's not that hard to say they're a manager, they just wanted to feel included
As someone who has actually physically built houses (i.e. nailing walls together, putting up the siding, hanging and mudding sheetrock, installing doors and windows etc.) this mindset pisses me off more than anything. "Management" does stuff like buying already-built houses, trucking them to our site and placing them on foundations, discovering the houses were built in the 1960s with 2x3s instead of 2x4s and thus needed to be torn down to the floors because they're no longer up to code, necessitating us rebuilding the houses entirely from the floors up, and then discovering the houses were placed two feet too close to the property line so we have to literally chop two feet off of them and rebuild the walls.
True fucking story. And I forgot to mention that the floors were 3/4 rotten so we had to rebuild most of them, too.
the amount of resources that must have gone into that whole process, and the fact that they [management] were apparently fine with is appalling to me. wouldn't they at least have financial incentives to do it right the first time?
Well, the organization was kind of like Habitat for Humanity, just smaller. They mainly existed on charity donations. Looking back on it (forty years later), I suspect that the guy running it was embezzling a lot of the money.
How about building houses the right way like in the EU: Out of cellular concrete
"The Life and Times of Thomas Edison"
...or swallows the loss.
The laid off workers also suffer the loss, typically.
Furthermore, I don't think "he gambled" compellingly makes this system fair or good.
Or benefits when they got employed. Point is, that you aren't rising much with just working. You earn your wage whether the owner did right or wrong decision. Unlike them you don't have to bear the risk of losing your savings
The owner also gets a wage and benefits while the process is running.
And much of the time, they're spending VC money. Minimal personal risk.
And even so, that doesn't justify the owner keeping almost all of the proceeds. I don't care if they put their life savings into it. Labor built it.
Wage paid out of your own money to youself isn't a benefit.
VC funding.
Also why are you so invested in defending capitalists?
Thatâs why they donât see any problem with replacing workers with AI. They think AI will do X better than humans do just like machines could build X better than humans could at the beginning of the industrial revolution.
But the cost benefit analysis often proves to be quite the opposite in the long-term, despite deceptive short-term gains. But a short-term gains seem to be all that businesses seem to care about.
They like AI because it doesn't provide feedback about their ideas being less than perfect.
You're absolutely right!
And hereâs the thing
You're not crazy!
You can just tell AI to provide feedback and not be a kiss ass.... Hell most of the good models well"good" models do provide feedback by default. The whole AI is a kiss ass thing is almost entirely a byproduct of free cheap low-end models or outdated ones.
So this particular criticism hasn't really been valid for a hot second anymore. Honestly, 99% of everything everyone thinks AI is in this entire thread is either flat out wrong at this point as things have already changed. Or they're conflating the business problems with the actual tool.
Mean hell Claude will straight up. Tell you you're dumb. You'll do so professionally and in corpo speak and it's awful. But it will tell you you're dumb.
It will also totally throw shade at you while taking the blame for your f****** which is pretty funny.
Mean to be fair, most people who hate AI aren't going to go spend a bunch of money to actually learn what good models do and how good models actually operate. They're just going to look at the s*** on their phone that's free. That sucks and go it all sucks.
Mean to be fair. Those models do suck. The company's running them suck. Those companies did a bunch of illegal s*** and are ruining the environment and that sucks.
There's a lot to hate about AI.
But the actual tool in and of itself isn't actually that bad and it doesn't need to be bad. The open models trained on data that's actually freely given in license appropriately while not as good as those big giant multi-trillion dollar ones.
Aren't ruining the environment, aren't displacing people out of a job, aren't full of stolen information, and can still genuinely be useful for small tasks.
A tool is a tool and it's only as bad or good as we make it.
AI sucks bcz it hallucinates (a fundamental flaw of all LLMs), increase electricity costs, water usage, and their overall environmental footprint. Pick your favorite bcz there's a lot of reasons to hate AI other than, the "free models aren't good".
on a slight tangent: that's why I tend to prefer Claude (when I have to use AI), because it does actually provide push-back and doesn't get all kiss-ass with me like ChatGPT
It's how our finance systems evolved to be, no one got time to wait for long term gains anymore. It's all about playing the hot potato.
And because of that, unfortnately, a lot of regular people also think the entire point of technology and wealth is to never have to do anything substantive.
How is this different from what anybody who hires or employs people do?
This reads like a rebuttal but I'm not seeing it a contradiction.
If you don't provide the ideas, manage the logistics, supply the labor, test for quality, etc., then I wouldn't say that you were a part of making it. You're an investor, certainly, but that's not a maker.
Fun question.
I think most people leading a team would say "we built this". Personally, if I hire someone to build something for me, I'd say something like "I had this built" intead of saying I built it myself.
I think there should be a short form for "I had AI do this for me"... "I prompted" maybe?
People very comfortably say "Company made this", or "we made this" regarding a place they work even if not on the team if talking to someone external.
When people get houses built they often say they're building a new house, even if it's actually someone else doing every part of it.
There's a part of our language that lends itself to having the cause of a thing be responsible for the thing.
The closer it gets to being something you could have personally done every part of and another person is involved the more we tend to draw back, which is why the AI art language grates a bit.
My coworker said he's building a cabin up north: I have no uncertainty at all that he's approving a design and someone else is doing it.
I wouldn't say I put up a handrail on my stairs: it's plausible I could have, but I didn't (it's an awkward space with weird stud spacing, and I have older family I want to be able to rely on it, so I paid someone with licensing to do it right in 20 minutes). I don't want to take credit for what I didn't do.
With the art, only one person actually caused it to be made. But it also feels like taking credit for something more difficult than it was.
If I drop a bucket of paint off a balcony, I wouldn't say "I caused a giant mess to be made", but "I made a giant mess".
If I pointed at it and said "I have made art", people would assume I was joking, despite a surface similarity to some art. The amount of effort is disproportional to the claim.
I believe the "part of our language that lends itself to having the cause of a thing be responsible for the thing" (in the contexts you give examples for) is just the human desire to be included in what's happening, even if you shouldn't be. If we were honest, we would callout these inaccurate claims. But it is a component of social lubrication that we ignore minor inaccuracies. We allow white lies because the cost of pursuing them is greater than the value of uncovering them.
That is not the case with people falsely claiming ownership of things genAI has made for them. Presumably because we understand that the person "building their house" is not building their own house from scratch. And so it doesn't erode the foundation of architecture to allow that inaccuracy. Carpentry as a profession won't be written off because Business Chett heard someone say "anyone can build a home (by having someone else do it for them)."
People will say "we won the game", even if they've never even attended a match or bought official merch.
If you drop a paint bucket you made high class modern art worth tens of millions. If you bullshit hard enough. But in all seriousness.
There is to a point a matter of art being entirely "valid" only to the eye of a beholder. Ai "art" is by all reasonable arguments art and made by who ever is piloting the bot. That is how it is. With out the willful intent of a human the bot is innert and can not create anything. So even the most slop or slop is still a willful human creation. A tool can not act on its own.
The problem is people saying it's not real art or that the person piloting the bot isn't an artist are doing so based on a personal belief. Not a hard fact. Which because of the nature of art is entirely valid. People have argued what isn't and is real art for decades. People argued digital art was fake for a decade. People argued photography was fake art for decades. And the further back you go you can find endless examples.
Some of the "best" art work in history range from extremely hard and demand decades of skill and dedication. While others took a few mins and no real skill at all.
Intent, reason and personal subjectivity are the defining facets of what is or is not art. If someone lazily has an ai generate something and takes the first pass then that's on them for making low effort art. No different then if I draw a stick man and call it a day.
Someone who uses a bit to draft, create and literate over and over and pushes a bot to its absolute limit. Is vastly different.
Sometimes the art is in the process and not the result as well. So even if the bot shits out something mediocre, the ability to get something that actually passes for acceptable instead of slop is in and of it self an art.
AI art to me personally is a problem of quantity letting everything because of ease of access to Creation. Never before. Has humanity had the ability to create faster or more efficiently. And people are taking advantage of that to simply not try to not push the tool and to not see what can be done with the tool.
And to be very clear this is entirely aside to the legal issues around how early models were trained as well as the copyright problems, which is an entirely separate issue to all of this. It's related but it is very much its own problem and a solvable one. We just got to convince the multi-trillion dollar companies to stop being assholes...
Well see that's the thing about patent/copyright/trademark/etc laws that don't make sense to me. If it's illegal to copy someone's idea and sell it as your own how is it viable to ask AI to do something where it pulls all of the data from someone else's work and gives it to you and you sell it as your own. (Or use it to make something you sell) In general it would make sense that you would have to pay the person who's idea it was you used for each sale... Or that no one can own any idea, and patents/copyrights shouldn't exist at all.
AI eliminates software copyright.
Look at malice.sh
Not sure what malice.sh is, the link goes no where for me.
That said, as far as I knew a fully AI created work couldn't be copyrighted, but that doesn't mean someone who uses AI to make something and sell it can be used legally without purchasing it. I assume you probably could even make a copyrighted work that you used AI to make, so long as it wasn't fully AI created
Presumably this:
The problem is that AI actually can do useful work, unlike what the fuckais want people to believe. It can do that. Except you don't get any updates or support, or help with fixing bugs. So not even sure how useful this is. But oh look how evil lol
All this shows is how stupid intellectual property, patents and copyright is. We're not talking about "high art" or ingenious inventions or stuff, it's all capital sucking up the work of workers and turning it into a commodity. A commodity that fundamentally is easy to copy. And copying isn't theft, it doesn't take anything away except the potential profit the capitalists are dreaming of. If you are taking away my copy, my ability to learn or enjoy culture, then you are the thief. Because most of the time there is no profit, only potential profit that would never materialize. We have a 1000 textbook variations about the same topic, because every one has their own copyright instead of collaboration and free resources. Pulp.
There are no artists posting on reddit, they are no genius comments or novels posted. Millions of books from an industry that produces slop. And LLMs managed to turn all that into something resembling intelligence which might be useful for quite a few things. And they don't even copy, they use machine learning to turn it into a model of the thing.
And suddenly everybody looses their fucking mind and pleads for more stringent copyright laws lol.
Fuck the AI bubble and environmental BS and do address the avalanche of societal problems coming our way, but copyright law is not the fucking answer. It's an oppressive and imperialist tool to collect rent. And it will make things much worse long term if there are no legal open source/weight AI models.
These guys sound like a bunch of assholes.
I mean yeah totally, it sounds comically evil lol. But I don't think this will even work out for them.
If it could work out to really cleanroom create new standard library stuff, then the "value of programming labour" has actually gone down very much. At least for these kinds of "solved problems". That would be the moral there, that we have solved certain problems and now have machine intelligence who can create infinite variations and adaptations to this. Which would be awesome, being able to rewrite much of the IT stack in more safe or more performant languages, or automatically optimize and improve. If that was possible already it would be a cause to celebrate. On to code bigger and better things.
But we're not even there yet, they'd have plenty of problems, bugs, issues and downsides with their "malus alternative". So I don't see a huge issue with this.
Obviously never used AI. How it really goes is that you ask for a cheese pizza and after you spend hours and a bunch of money on tokens, you get an onion and peanut butter pizza with no cheese and you go, "Fuck it. Close enough."
You forgot the part where they steal the pizzas from other parlors to sell them as thier own.
Hey, now that's just the multi-trillion dollar companies trying to save a buck!
Some people have some level of ethics! Their product just unfortunately is the one that will give you a peanut butter and squash pizza when you ask for a Hawaiian...
Well the multi-trillion dollar company. When you ask for Hawaiian pizza it just gives you pepperoni and smacks you and tells you you violated its rules and ethics.
All that while using enough resources to create tons of pizzas
Then FBI strums in
you know, i've tried to defend some usage in the past, explaining my processes and the many steps of manual refinement, masking, and layerwork i put in to things, how i only run local models with open weights, how all my power comes from hydro etc etc
but as the tools keep evolving i've realised nobody else seems to actually care about the process. the pro-people just want as much slop as possible. someone likened it to a slot machine, where you keep pulling just because. that's where we are now.
I fully get where youâre coming from. I fully believe that you canât vibe code correctly unless you already know how to code correctly. Iâm against the shifting paradigm of âwho cares what the code looks like aa long as it works properly and the LLM can read it quicklyâ bullshit thatâs coming out of it. I want to read the code and understand it too. I want it to be object oriented and not just dumb ad hoc methods everywhere thatâs 1,000 lines when it couldâve been 100 lines.
Now anecdotally, as someone who uses it for my main work and side project, I am still getting a lot of use out of it. Iâm learning new things at a faster rate than I would have before. For my side project, I am trying to optimize gear sets for a game and thereâs hundreds of millions of different configurations. The LLM Iâm using knows about my code and the project and what I need and is able to suggest other algorithms, like I was able to learn about Dinkelbachâs algorithm. I have it write up design docs with formulas and pseudocode implementation and I review that and it takes my comments into account. I treat it like a junior developer and ask for questions to make sure I understand what itâs doing. I think a lot of people arenât treating it like a junior developer or intern and thatâs where problems come from.
Now, I wouldnât be using it if it wasnât free with my company, as this is more of âlearning/researchâ for my job.
And for my job, we have semantic memory and a ton of MCP servers setup that guide it through the right code and can do internal documentation search so itâs way more powerful than just using base Claude Code or whatever. It has helped me stay more on track with my projects as an ADHD person (even though Iâm medicated) by documenting what it does after it does it in a shared doc rather than me forgetting to do that because I run a command and log off for the day or something.
I do hate the water usage and energy usage thoughâŠ
As a min maxer in a lot of games, I used to make spreadsheets in little tiny janky python programs do all sorts of crazy s*** to optimize stuff.
Would spend hours on it! A little local model has basically reduced my effort. 10. Fold and saved me hours upon hours of work.
Probably the single best thing is I can just yell at it to tell me what's on the f****** to-do list and it will just tell me. And it helps my ADHD ass actually decide on what to start working on for the day and actually get something done instead of doing 20 things at once.
Fantastic little tool.
Now I have more time to play my games and I have something to yell at me so I don't get distracted
Same, but you forgot, the massive stealing of intellectual property that no government fights against because they are scared to be left behind by big tech, the impact on learning (especially students), and the impact on little hands that had to moderate the NSFL content.
i refuse to use ml models for code. the copyright issues alone should be enough to keep them away from every public code base until the matter is settled. but also because local tooling is, frankly, shit. i have a bit of hope for text diffusion models, but i have a hard time seeing the situation improving because everyote is full in on cloud models now.
Imagine if you put that much time into a useful skill.
i do. i experiment with transformer and diffusion models like a few hours a month, tops. the result isn't interesting enough. the process of bending and breaking the models is the fun part.
Sounds like it's a very rewarding hobby lol.
yeah, it's a great way to see the limitations of these systems. just like ctf and ioccc.
I was being sarcastic, man. That sounds like a tremendous waste of time.
i will always take the time to explain things i find interesting to people. the benefit here is that i can now much more efficiently break large models as well when i come across them. helps me add anti-ai clauses to websites, cv's, and repos i publish.
Don't bother explaining to them. Their name is a misnomer, and they're an acerbic moron.
Thanks for taking one for the team then, I guess!
But the pizza was stolen from the store down the street
Family recipe
This, but you don't get a pizza, you get a wheel of iron, colored in brown with glue on top of it.
Somebody on the other app said that Cheese Pizza stands for CP and the AI thing becomes even more accurate
Yeah I was surprised no other comments here picked that up, I thought that had to be on purpose.
The sad part it did try.... and wasted electricity and water
I prefer the term âbuiltâ when I share my vibe coded slop, thanks
*sarcasm
"Give me a cheese pizza in the style of a famous italian restaurant pizza kitchen. Use lots of cheese, tomato sauce, and bread. Cook it in an oven at a very high temperature. The cheese should be hot to the touch. The crust should be thin when the cooking is complete and have a few tiny black spots on it to show that it is crispy. Put the pizza on a metal tray and deliver it to my table within the next thirty minutes. Make no mistakes."
You forgot to specify Italian DOP cheese, now you have a pizza oozing with shitty Kraft/Lactalis pseudo-cheese.
This is why no one wants to go to Altoona.
Also you'll get framed for murder there
Receives pizza
"Why is it covered with pineapple?!?"
I mean I get the point, but people will actually say "I made pizza for dinner" when they just heated up a frozen pizza which is the same.
Do they? Because when this come up what I usually hear is more apologetic - something along the lines of "oh, I didn't actually make it". They certainly won't try to defend it when pushed.
In my 35 years of life I've never once heard anyone not say yeah. I made a pizza when they just heated one up in the oven.
The very act of heating it up in the oven is the cooking of the pizza. As far as I've been able to tell from everyone I've ever interacted with in my life.
Heating things up in the oven is generally speaking, considered cooking.
Even more egregious never heard anyone say anything other than I made x when all they did was put something in the microwave.
Hell if I'm just boiling some hot dogs and throwing them in the bun I'm going to say I made some hot dogs. I didn't raise the pig slaughter them stuff the sausage. But I sure the f*** cooked them. I made those hot dogs.
That's because of our colloquial use of "made" in this context. Certainly "making" dinner is a different use of "made" than the one in this comic strip where all he did is "ask", right?
And AI would hand you a salad calling it a pizza.
I take pride in my cooking
I would say "I reheated a pizza" if I lowered myself to doing that
When I say that I make something, I made it from scratch
If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe
Don't be obtuse
AI would bring you a big cheese wheel with salami on it, and temu Ratatouille in the background, in the wrong scale. Because that shit is DUMB!
I definitely get the sentiment. But in my opinion it's closer to somebody going to the pizza shop, ordering and picking up a pizza and bringing it home to fam and saying "hey I got us a pizza"
"That's a good looking pizza, look at that cheese"
"... Thanks! White glue is commonly used in the industry to get a picture perfect cheese pull"
Thatâs if you use AI at work. But instead of the fam, itâs your boss.
As someone who builds things from scratch, this is how I feel about people who 3D print things
Where do you draw the line? I'm a hobbyist woodworker, but I don't cut, mill, or dry the wood myself. I didn't even plant the tree - it likely came from another country entirely.
I also didn't make most of my tools and I use prefabricated fasteners and screws, whereas my grandfather, a professional woodworker, made many of his own tools and primarily used joinery.
Does that mean I'm not a true woodworker?
I find that quite dismissive as someone who spends ages in CAD designing 3D printable mechanisms. There are more design constraints with making a 3D printable design.
They didn't make this distinction but I think there is a clean line separating 3D printing like "I'm printing a mini for my TTRPG" and 3D printing like "I'm printing 15,000 discrete armor plates to assemble my mech cosplay."
Basically, if you are printing parts to assemble something than you are still assembling something. If you print out a thing that you're immediately "using", eh...you just had something delivered.
If you design and print the thing though, that is still creating something, just using different tools to construct the thing that you visualised in your mind.
Oh, well, yeah. You made the design.
I hold no exclusionary love for handmade crafts. I just know I've downloaded things off the internet that got printed, but I would never claim I made those things.
Architects to engineers? Engineers to construction workers?
I sometimes have LLMs make and spin up single us UIs for things. It's not uncommon for me to prompt "make it pretty" or " can you make it" pop " more" which makes me laugh quite a bit.
Eyes should have stayed the same imo.. robots ;)
Little bit fun little bit stupid and devaluating to human employees or is the waiter a probability robot?
Every food channel showing the food they purchased on instagram, youtube or other
It reminds me of what painters said about photography early on. While they toiled for hundreds of hours to paint a realistic image a dude with a box and zero skill beyond maybe some chemistry could snap an even more realistic image. Photography was not considered art for a very long time by the formal art community.
Your analogy doesnât work. Anyone could take a photograph, just like anyone could paint something, but making it art, eliciting a human reaction, requires skill.
And by the way, not every moment in history when a technological breakthrough threatened a well established craft, can or should be compared to the current state of AI, if anything because it paints a picture where anyone opposing change is some sort of luddite. âChangeâ is not always a good thing, and there are more than a handful of inconvenient examples: atomic vs conventional weapons, cigarettes vs herbal treatments for anxiety, leaded vs unleaded gasoline for increased engine performance, glass and paper vs plastic in food containers, etc. For each one, incessant marketing campaigns were launched, touting their advantages and how they would improve the world as we knew it. World Expos were organized around these things. People were legitimately excited.
The truth wasnât quite that. The US found itself in a tight spot when they lost the monopoly on nuclear weapons, which triggered a histeria across the country that lasted for decades, and even nowadays, ânuclear deterrenceâ conditions geopolitics to the maximum degree. Cigarettes, turned out, werenât as good to calm nerves as they were killing people. Leaded gasoline, which was the answer given by refineries to the question âwhat if we stop improving refining processes and start adding literal poison as an additiveâ. And microplastics are the latest in all the ways humans have found to screw the food chain.
His analogy works perfectly fine and is actually incredibly apt. Photography did threaten a large number of painters livelihoods.
After the grand scale AI is. But that's more a matter of how things are just on a grander scale as we have become more connected in more optimized as time has gone on.
Technological improvements tend to be larger than those that preceded them when it comes to replacement and displacement.
And if you're going to put the bar of art as simply eliciting a human emotion reaction or feeling. Then by your own definition AI generated art is art.
It generates all sorts of emotions, reactions, feelings, Thoughts, Arguments, considerations and philosophizing all across the world.
Ai art has probably been one of the largest points in the last couple hundred years in which this many people have genuinely stopped and considered. What is art.
I'm not a big fan of AI art at all, but I'm also not a big fan of trying to discredit something just because you don't emotionally agree with it. I would wholeheartedly agree that 99.99% of all AI art is low effort slop and absolute trash. But I wouldn't discredit anyone who actually attempts to do something legitimate with it.
Functionally the entire argument against AI art being art is the same one against photography or modern art not being art.
No, it did not. The story is missing a critical component: anyone who had the money to commission a paint would still do it. Anyone who didnât, wouldnât. If anything, photography expanded the portrait market to those people who couldnât afford a painting.
I didnât say that. I said that art requires skill as well, and skill in art, in order to elicit a human emotion necessarily involves a purpose that is worthwhile. Otherwise everything, from trolling to taking a dump, could be considered art, and it is not.
You could argue that prompting a LLM is a skill and it could carry a purpose, but I fundamentally disagree with that and I havenât seen any AI creation that would lead me to change my mind just yet. Letâs put it this way: if I commission a paint, describe in the highest detail what I want in it, the painter does exactly what I asked them to do, and it turns out great, I wouldnât be an artist, I would be a patron. Now, if the painter decides to just copy and rehash bits and pieces from other paintings with no purpose other than to hide their own inability to create, they would be a plagiarist, not an artist.
Going back to photography, it honestly sounds like your baseline is the skill required to capture something with the highest fidelity possible. Then yeah, painters would be thoroughly fucked. But photography as an art is way more than that, itâs about capturing a moment in the photographerâs own terms. And in that regard, it doesnât differ from painting at all, unless you wanted to argue that Manet or Dali were trying to portrait the world as everyone sees it.
But AI art? Come on man, most people can barely verbalize what they want for dinner, how are they going to prompt a LLM to create art? âPaint the unbearable lightness of being, make no mistakesâ?
Not every art piece is even physical or tangible in any sense. The art is in the conception or the idea. There is indeed a skill in constructing models as well as using them but ignoring all of that there's still the artistic touch in creating thought provoking or impassioned concepts irrespective of the tangible form they've been given. Although one can most definitely use a medium to impart meaning.
It was never my argument that people who have issues with new technology are necessarily luddites or that AI or really any technology whatsoever is absolutely problem free. Everything has its pros and cons, for example nuclear gave us access to functionally limitless clean (compared to coal and gas) energy as well as more powerful weapons. One unavoidable rule or law of reality is we don't get something for nothing.
Ultimately what is and is not art was, is, and will be an open question each individual has to answer for themselves. Even today an individual is free to view photography not as a legitimate art form or digital art or CGI and so on.
We werenât talking about constructing models. And whereâs the skill in âusingâ them in this context, when the user is eventually given the exact end product they asked for, and it is as original as rehashing the training set can be?
I see that you went with the nuclear example, because all of the others seem straight up indefensible in comparison.
Problem is, I wasnât talking about nuclear energy. Even if I did, development of nuclear energy didnât require creating nuclear weapons at all. Yet they did, and itâs a great example of how technological achievements arenât always a good thing.
I mean if two painters make similar enough strokes with similar enough paint you get two essentially identical paintings. Hunting the solution space for an NN can be like working through all orderings of a card deck, that's to say very far from as trivial as you're making it sound and about as silly as the example I gave above.
I'm not sure exploring just a few examples in the ocean of essentially infinite examples or analogies does much for us both beyond picking something and arguing which is more accurate. Obviously you're arguing the more useless examples are more accurate and I'm arguing NN have real world use and vakue as shown at least by alpha fold. I would say your basis of argument is more incorrect from the reality we're sharing and I'm well aware of the pros and cons of what we're dealing with.
Neural networks are a valuable technology for humanity, to say otherwise is to be blind to reality. That said there's plenty of actually legitimate arguments one could wage about their current development and use.
Tldr: you be hating too hard, chill my friend.
Who are you responding to?
I mean I don't know who you are personally. . . Like what details about yourself do you expect a stranger to know?
You didnât address a single one of the points I made. I wrote a philosophical argument about technological adoption not resulting in a net benefit for humanity , historically speaking, and you chose to meander about solution spaces in neural networks and how useful these NNs are in protein folding problems? What?!
This interaction is just⊠weird. Assuming that you actually read my comments, you donât seem to be able to synthesize ideas from them and formulate related answers. This last comment of yours is just odd and completely disconnected from the thread as a whole. To be honest with you, it sounds like a bot wrote it.
AI slop is AI slop, but if you compare it to a film director explaining to a concept artist or director of photography what he wants, then selecting and refining examples and concept art and sketching out a storyboard, there is little difference to someone using AI to make some film. Just that the latter will typically be much worse because anyone can do it now, they won't have studied film making, and AI isn't very good at it so far. But either can be art, or it can be garbage.
Also with advances in hardware and better tools and software and models, we could see a new type of art form or medium. Something like the holodeck in star trek. Like a movie that is more interactive, like a role playing session in VR. Told to you by a narrator but you can interject and steer or derail the narrative. So the "directors" become more like world builders or campaign designers.
The sheer endless tsunami of this dreck makes it meaningless.
I'm not sure more people having more access means things are now worse. Like more people have more means to create art today than 500 years ago and yeah there's a lot of uninspired or derivative content but also there's a lot more legitimate artists making passionate and thought provoking work.
Yeah I imagine what you're saying will come to pass although I think it'll look more like parlor walls from Fahrenheit 451 for the majority. I think my main issue is when a human is totally uninvolved in the process. So far it seems pretty noticeable when there's someone with an actual idea they're trying to create vs there's no mind behind it.
Haha love the reference to Fahrenheit 451. There is also a good illustration in the horror story from _9MOTHER9HORSE9EYES9 with people sinking into some kind of experience stream, similar to wireheading. Or in "Systema Delenda Est" about postbiological life there is the concept of "Elysium" virtual worlds where people go in and never want to come out again, because they live in a narrative that is always perfect for them. Instead of slop you have perfection that is irresistible. Star Trek had Barkley becoming holo-addicted. Cheese Pizza is really bad for you too lol.
You could argue that something like computer games the story is ultimately told by the player and his decisions and actions, and the world should just react. There is a fundamental limit to storytelling in computer games, which only tabletop role playing games solve with an intelligent narrator or game master. I do think LLMs can fill that role but not very well. But better than what open world games offer today. Not better than a well written movie.
I think ultimately the will or mind should be unbounded sans the ability to willfully cause harm to other minds. It's purely due to limitations of technology that we are in our current predicament. The famous prosthetic engineer Hugh Herr made the argument it was not him who was disabled but our technology that was disabled. Now what minds do when they are unbounded by the reality around them is their own responsibility. If you've seen the show pantheon then things could turn out similarly aka minds in multiple embodiments exploring physical and simulated realities or otherwise experiencing whatever they desire without limitations beyond the limitation of willfully causing harm to others.
Ideally minds unchained from limitations wouldn't desire to cause harm anyways, but there's some real jerks out there.
You forget that early photographers were almost exclusively painters.
Funny eh.
Arguably more so chemists but yeah I'm aware. Most / all of their paints were made by hand themselves as well, part of the reason it was a sensible transition to film production and manipulation.
Well painters at that time were definitely chemists.
That is a good argument.
It's more so historical fact. It was denounced for like nearly a century if not longer depending how you're measuring. It's similar to AI in that it decreases the mechanical effort one needs to create content but also itself imposes new required skills to develop that content. There's definitely a hierarchy in AI content and so far at least to myself it's very clear when there is a person actively trying to create something vs a completely automated content pipeline. I would challenge anyone who thinks all AI creations are nothing but slop to create something themselves equal to or better than some of the better works I've seen. Similar to a challenge of a traditional painter to create a compelling photographic composition.
Maybe to add to this I think it's worth noting the creative demand of designing and training a model. It's not without inspired thought. I'm curious to see the code as well. Amongst people who program there can most definitely be beautiful and ugly code in the same way there can be a pleasing or unpleasant movie scene or painting.
I get that you mean this from the perspective of the user, but you can't ignore they are fixing to restart disused nuclear power plants to sustain the required computational power and the datacenters creating drinkingwater supply problems left and right.
Photography never had anywhere near the societarial cost that AI has.
There'll always be a massive difference to me looking at something that comes from a logic machine and something that comes from a human. It's not always about details and graphical fidelity. It's why I have my 4 year old niece's doodles on my fridge, instead of asking an AI to improve them and hang those instead.
I think we're having two discussions. There is the discussion about whether or not media created using a neural network with a human prompting it can be considered art. Hypothetically an individual could design, train, and prompt a NN including creating the dataset themselves it was trained on. Would that also be discredited just for the fact part of their process used a NN? What if one also used all clean carbon neutral energy to run and train their NN?
The other discussion is about the issues surrounding people's current choices on how to develop neural networks. I guess you could link them together and say because of these issues anything created using these tools is not art. It would beg the hypothetical of if it would be art if these issues were not there.
I want to be clear that don't feel qualified at all to classify things as art or not (outside of my personal opinion), but you're still letting a logic machine make artistic choices and thusly letting your art (partly) be the result of calculations. Even if it's trained on only your art and your way of working and way of thinking somehow, the process in which it generates output is unaffected.
The only difference between clean and dirty energy is how it affects life on earth. Wastefulness should be avoided either way.
You could argue if you own a windmill you could just burn it's output as it's only wind and this windmill is yours, but it's still better to have a smaller windmill or no windmill at all.
I read this several times but I was unfortunately unable to distill where you're going with this particular paragraph. I think it ties into your first point?
You know this argument would apply to any digital tool used to make art right? Like Photoshop is using logic and algorithms to create image manipulations and similarly for vector art and video editing. Many effects one doesn't know the actual outcome until it's rendered and you have to go in and skillfully play with the software to get the desired result from the logic manipulations you're not performing by hand. It's not unlike crafting a prompt to get a desired result. An analogy to photography may be how people played chemically with film to get desired results. In an abstract sense one is twisting and dialing knobs of their tool to create art, not cognitively different than one playing with paint, brushes, and canvas to get a desired result.
I'm not inclined to conclude algorithms in blender, lightroom, Krita , after effects or Photoshop are intrinsically different from algorithms used for NN. Like hypothetically one could run through all of these algorithms with a pencil and paper, it would just take a really really long time.
There's a bit of subjectivity in that argument, for instance someone who dislikes rock music could argue the energy used to play or produce it was wasteful.
A large portion of your argument up to now dealt with choices individuals and companies have made in their attempt to develop and power NN and not about the nature of NN's themselves, particularly in contrast to other algorithms we already use to make what most people consider art.
It seemed the argument you were building was anything generated by NN was not art because of those issues. It's maybe a more valid argument if one is speaking about a particular model whose development or use is mired in copyright and environmental controversy but it's not useful to apply that to all NN full stop which is why I posed the hypothetical.
If you use things like generative fill in packages like photoshop I will agree. But tweaking variables in a package like Blender to get a specific outcome for your shader is not the same as having AI generate what is not there at all.
You'd have to come up with exact algorithms you're talking about if you want me to react to that because it's a rather broad term.
I mean, sure. If we entirely ignore total energy used and all the rest of the hubub like employment and sales that these concerts generate.
No I really did mean it as simple as I said it. If the image comes from a logic machine, i'm not interested in it. I'm cirtainly not interested in spending any money on it. Just as i'm not interested in being sold a painting that is a copy of another painting. Or a painting from someone who in fact didn't paint it at all.
Out of curiosity, have you ever actually played around with an AI to generate pictures? Spin up a local model and give it a try. It's a lot more involved than I think you realize.
It's not hard by any means and you can let it just s*** out the first thing and take that and run with it.
But the actual process of generating something coherent and to your intent. Takes a good deal of skill, understanding how the model works, of the English language and how to construct it appropriately, as well as potentially hours upon hours of corrections, edits and manipulations.
You're moving the mechanical skill of being an artist to a more literary skill of English.
I've noticed most people seem to have never actually attempted to use an ai beyond The really low end free offerings. And thus don't actually realize how complex they can get in usage.
Again, to be clear, it's not hard to generate just a random picture and take it and run. But it's also not hard to draw a stick man.
I use AI regularly and routinely for practical stuff and automation, it's just in the art department where I really start to take issue with it's use, because if the nature of what art is to me.
I have used it for graphical stuff and I feel getting from an AI exactly what you want is about comprable to getting from another human what you want.
At least in the way you interact with it.
I understand it can be extremely complex once you need to generate really specific stuff that for example also fits a cirtain style and not just "a guy in a cyberpunk city leaning against a car" or something like that, but all the same you stop being an actual artist and you start becoming more of a manager.
So I'm not trying to say prompting isn't a skill, I just don't think it (the output) will every qualify as an artistic work.
To be fair, if we could get more nuclear power plants up and running that would be a good thing. If the AI bubble can push governments to actually get us going nuclear, and then the bubble pops. Those plants won't just get shut down. They're once they're up and running. They're too efficient and the money's already sunk into them.
Good things can happen because of bad reasons. Let's take our wins where we can get them
Photographs: đ€š
That server didnât make the pizza.
A thought experiment you could take further.
The chef didnât even make the dough. That came from a Cisco truck, from a factory maintained by a team of maintenance workers. The base was good, but made better because the chef added some flour and oil to it.
Pointless observation, butâŠmany people contribute to most things we only associate to one âmakerâ.
I feel delighted by the implication that the pizza dough came from Cisco, and not Sysco. It's a $300,000 pizza, with a $15,000/mo support contract. You only get that discount if you're buying it as part of an 8+ figure contract though. It can handle 20 billion pepperoni per second though, and if you figure out how to eat it you can get a degree in it that pays pretty well.
You also get the best waiting music known to man while you wait.
I used to work for Cisco as a programmer, and when I got laid off by them I found out that my mom thought I had been working for Sysco the whole time. She had never understood why I was working for a food services company, although I expect they employ a large number of programmers too.
Did working for Cisco suck? I can't say as I never did a lick of actual work for them. They acquired my original company and then we all sat around for a fucking year doing nothing until they laid most of us off. Weirdly, everybody who got laid off was childless -- the only people from my original company who were kept on had one or more children. I don't know what to make of that.
My only regret is not saying that my work macbook had been stolen. That's what all of my coworkers did and they all ended up with free macbooks.
They have good hold music? Can you elaborate?
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=N7xn5zeJ4D4
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_on_hold#Cisco's_Opus_Number_One
Cisco also sells phone systems, and one of their phone engineers wrote a song with a friend once and used it as the default on what went on to become a very common phone system.
It's not the best song ever, but it's definitely the best hold music. Can elicit a proper, heartfelt "not bad" from most people.
It's also common enough that there's a decent chance any random person has heard it and had no idea where this song came from.
I attribute it's quality to it being an authentic piece of music, and not a corporate design creation, that was created on lower fidelity hardware, because that's what they had to muck around with, and so it had some actual creative feeling to it and it coincidentally didn't lose much being piped over a 90s voip phone system to a household landline handset.
https://m.youtube.com/shorts/xed4d7-OauM
Peaches come from a can. They were put there by a man. In a factory downtown.
Ahh shit I guess game engine designers should get a cut of the games too?
The engineers of the AI should get a cut I guess
Who claimed that they did?
The server never presented a list of credits for the pizza, so I assume they made it.
So you assumed they made it but also in your first comment said that they didnât make it. So which is it?
Yes
They can still be offended on behalf of their coworkers who did.