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Hi, I think I should weigh in as a student who is currently trapped in some bizarre hell where every week someone comes in and tells us about how great AI is and how we shouldn’t be afraid to use it. I don’t think we need to have this argument again, but on the off chance you are not wilfully ignorant…
It may be illuminating for you to hear that the reason we students are so passionate about rejecting AI is not because we lack curiosity or that we’re afraid of its rapidly-developing featureset or even that we think it isn’t any good (though it isn’t). I think everybody would be pleased to have a cool new tool that doesn’t cost the earth to run! But unfortunately that just isn’t the case. [1]
When you pitch AI tools to a room full of artists, you are telling us that we have no future under capitalism. You are telling us that all the work we put into our creative endeavours is worth just as little as what a machine can generate from a prompt - in fact, even less, because the machine is cheaper (?) and faster. It doesn’t matter that it could be a creative tool; the people who would employ us see it as a way to replace human labour - no, worse, to use our labour in its datasets without paying us! We object to this because we would like to have a future where we can make our art, where we can have food and shelter and community, where we can live on a planet that isn’t flooded and burned and polluted to feed these hungry machines. All in service of what? Faster advertising?
Consider this question: if you removed the AI elements from your program, wouldn’t it still do all the things it needs to do? What could be offered instead that better suits the needs of the community who would like to use your program?
I for one am far more curious about what possibilities could exist if we reject this futureless future.
I mean, are you running everything 100% locally on your personal computer? Because it says on your page you’re using an external service which doesn’t appear to make any claims about sustainability. ↩︎
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The fact that this was completely missing from tintwotin’s anecdote tells me that either they weren’t listening to the students, or they were strongly leading their conversation with the students.
Or the conversation never happened, and we were presented with a strawman, but I’m giving tintwotin the benefit of the doubt here.
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So it’s fine for you to argue about AI, but we’re not allowed to argue back?
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Interesting.
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Are you suggesting I don’t excel in all the ways AI can’t? I’d love to read your reviews of mine and others’ work, I’m always looking to improve my craft!
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I’m afraid your pro-AI arguments are have also been done to death.
If you want to start another argument about AI use, other people are allowed to respond to it in kind. That’s the point of a forum as opposed to something like a blog.
If someone is being aggressive or hostile in their responses, please flag it instead of responding in kind. But I’ve seen nothing inappropriate in Coral, svlin, or Joey’s responses. You’re taking a very hostile tone towards people who are raising legitimate concerns, and that’s not a good way to get your point across. Making people defensive will never, as a rule, convince them.
If you want to actually discuss this topic, I’m sure there are people who would be happy to! And the people who are tired of this argument coming up can mute the thread, as I imagine many have already done. I’m currently teaching a college course on the effects of technology on society across history, and have given lectures where I explicitly argue against an uninformed rejection of new technology. But you aren’t giving the impression that you actually want to discuss anything—rather, that you want to dismiss any opposing arguments before they’re made.
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I’m okay with there being no dialogue about AI, actually. I think we’ve had enough dialogue about AI to last us for the next ten years or so.
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Sorry, I can’t hear the “presence of the artist” over the presence of all the artists whose work was plagiarized to make theirs, and the set of unthinking, unfeeling algorithms that made all the actual decisions on how to select and place those cannibalized elements.
As things stand, AI “artists” are really more like patrons making very detailed and particular commissions, only no one gets paid for them, they then frequently try to milk that unpaid work for their own profit and attention from others, and suddenly a bunch of drinking water is gone, oops.
I would love one day without someone making the same disingenuous arguments in favor of that state of affairs, but you know, wishes and horses.
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You’re right; if you can accept no disagreement, then there can be no dialogue.
If we’re in agreement there, I’m going to move all these posts to another thread and close it. You’re welcome to continue to use this one [EDIT: the one this was forked from] to discuss Kinexus on its own merits.
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Probably the one if the few reasonable AI objections—and, to be clear, it’s a very good objection. The increase in power generation is hardly worth it for something l capable of producing only slop.
I think any human artist has the should be able to use other artists’ artworks as a component in their artworks without paying the original artist—intellectual property ought not to exist and functions as a monopoly to protect the very same corporations most likely to use AI to mass replace jobs.
AI sucks because it’s wasting energy to produce slop, not because something something intellectual property something something.
Art’s worth doesn’t come from the work put into it, though. The value of art comes from the subjective value the beholder finds in it. Given that unprocessed AI output can only produce slop and seems to plateauing there, it’s unlikely to be able to reach beyond that without hand post-processing of output; this itself by definition is turning the AI output into material for a human creative process, so wouldn’t count as just a machine generating from a prompt.
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