"We did it, Patrick! We made a technological breakthrough!"
A place for all those who loathe AI to discuss things, post articles, and ridicule the AI hype. Proud supporter of working people. And proud booer of SXSW 2024.
cross-posted from: https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/33936586
Completely untrue.
The environmental impact would still be as bad, it would still spout out misinformation, it would still scrape for art against people's will, the images would still be shit and not art anyway, and would still make an intellectual sinkhole.
If society isn't built around competition and exploitation, the usage of AI can be limited to renewable energy. Whereas now, every gram of hydrocarbon and uranium will be burned to win the race for global domination.
Great you ignored my other issues with that, but also you don't think people would collectively be using those resources? Also the water used for those ai servers isn't great.
I agree with your other points.
It depends on the type of society if people use all those resources. With AI they will use them much, much faster.
Water doesn't have to be a problem in places where there is enough water.
Can you tell me the time of the relevant argument, please.
Otherwise I would think that global warming leads to warmer oceans which should cause more evaporation and rain.
Ok, let me explain it simply then.
You remember the water cycle from elementary school? You just described it. Well, there isn't an infinite amount of water on earth. So when you take water out of the water cycle and lock it away, like in jugs of water or in cooling systems for massive computers, it doesn't get evaporated and return to the environment. It stays in its jug.
So the more people store water away, the less water we have to use elsewhere.
As for the timeline, this is already happening now.
They go into more detail in the video. It's long but it is funny.
Sorry but that humor is not my style. I would be glad if you could tell me the relevant moments.
Locking all water away, how is that possible? Have you seen the size of the Pacific?
I'd suggest watching the video if you want more details, but the amount of freshwater we can use is much smaller than the oceans.
Of course, but with more rain there must be more freshwater.
I mean building out renewable energy still has a negative impact on the environment, whether it be silicon for solar panels or concrete for hydro electric dams. Not to mention all the water that gets used to cool the massive data centers or the materials needed to create the computer components used in the data center. So sure you could lessen the environmental impact by shifting to renewables but it would definitely still be there. Reducing usage will always be the best way to help the environment, there's a reason it comes first in Reduce, Reuse, Recycle.
I really disagree with this meme. For just one example, capitalism isnt why people are using ai to generate nudes of unwilling people and children. Without capitalism I do very much doubt AI would be where it is right now, but the cats out of the bag and it isnt going away if we didnt have capitalism.
That is unfortunately just human nature. The tool here is not to blame, but the person using it. People were making drawings of people unconsentually well before ai, then with the addition of photoshop the issue became even worse. Now AI is just the next step in allowing humans to follow their darker interests.
But the tool is so much more valuable than that.
If people think the big risk of AI is fake nudes... man, I wish that was the worst that could happen.
Ai is pretty much like as any other tool. Knife is an extremely useful tool. It can either help you cook a delicious dinner or kill a man. It all comes down to what you are going to use it for.
It is not just Capitalism…is is centralization in all its forms. Too much power in the hands of the few always leads to poor outcomes for the many. This is bigger than Capitalism.
What market structure is a good model for decentralization? Socialism generally involves a central authority deciding on resource allocation, and most other approaches also have an emphasis on centralization.
I think you have to pick the low hanging fruit and go from there. For instance, we are here and already have made a small, but measurable dent to Reddit traffic. Imagine if everyone came over here, Reddit would no longer be viable as a profit company. Google would collapse if we all supported Peer Tube. Of course these are not going to change the world, but I am convinced if/when decentralization gets traction, we will find ways to implement it everywhere it makes sense. It is about balance as there are benefits to centralization and I am not suggesting everyone is decentralized, but right now the scales are out of balance and we have some tools to start to rebalance. We just have to want it. Well maybe need it which seems to be coming.
There is nothing in socialism that requires central planning. There are specific branches that do, but market socialism would, if anything, use it less than the current system.
It doesn't solve the energy and emissions crisis we are facing but sure.
Nor does it resolve the inherent biases introduced by humans working on it
(the energy and emissions crisis are also byproducts of capitalism)
The Aral Sea is essentially gone and it was killed by poor Soviet planning. Capitalism was not the driving factor rather ignorance was and ignorance is held equally by all sides.
Capitalism isn’t the only thing driving environmental collapse. It’s industrialization
Central planners in the Soviet Union didn't even have computers and they lacked the level of scientific understanding we have today of the environment, of our resources, and of the limits to growth. We've all heard about Mao killing the sparrows in China.
This isn't a reason to never try central planning again.
I remember sitting in an art class where the teacher proclaimed using premixed black paint was improper: a true artist must mix their own black paint. I thought a lot about that when I first started using Photoshop and viewing digital art. I think about it now with AI.
Right now AI is a tool of MBAs who see it as a way to extract money from budgets by cutting costs on artists and writers. AI's only proper use is as a tool by artists and writers.
I disagreed with that teacher then, and still kinda do, but I understand them completely: they were focused on fostering the artistic drive of the creator and eschewing shortcuts. I just think the artistic drive includes so called shortcuts as there is no predefined or 'true' path to being an artist.
There are some really good quotes from famous painters in the late 19th and early 20th centuries saying that photography is devoid of all artistic merit, and that it should never and will never be taken seriously as an art form. Every time a new tool comes along, the art community freaks out. It happened with the invention of the camera, it happened with the invention of digital art software, and we are currently watching it happen with AI. Eventually, it'll just be another tool in an artists toolbox.
To avoid panting with black is a common truism for traditional painters that will save your saturation in the lower values of your painting. When painting a naturalistic scene in a traditional medium, you are in a loosing war against the cost of saturation. (saturated pigments tend to be more expensive.) Ivory black and lamp black are very cheap pigments, hence the mixture of black paints tends to have more pigment vs medium. Also, Pigments lose saturation over time. so vibrant paintings you made 10 years ago can start to become grey.
The area of your painting where the saturation loss will become more daunting is the shadows. They tend to be a cool temperature and have a lower value and saturation. This is one of the reasons why it's dangerous , especially for a student to use black; And this is the reason why a lot of traditional painters plot their shadows with washes of earth pigments: Burnt sienna, burn umber etc.
The other reason is convenience: Leaving you some space at the bottom and top of the value structure for final touches. Once you reach the floor value of pure black it's hard to go back up, especially if the rest of the values are down with that black. Same for white. If the key of your painting is too high, it's hard to add any detail without just burning the rest of your picture. So keeping some floor and headspace for the final details can save you a lot of headaches! And this is especially true for black paints since they tend to have so much pigment in their mixtures
In digital media it can also be beneficial to avoid blacks, or at least clip-mask them into a black with a little temperature in them at a early stage of coloring. I can't really explain the reason for this exactly, but neutrals and especially black and white have a lot of visual pull in a monitor that displays thousands or millions of colors. Just adding a hint of temperature to your blacks and whites can make them gentler on the eye and keep the colors from becoming muddy*.
(*Muddy colors are a result from disorganized value and temperature structure between your lights and shadows.)
So your teacher was right, he was just either too lazy of busy to explain all that shit!
Edit: I remember my very cruel first semester painting teacher gave us an assignment of making value swatches for 15 hue-degrees of the color wheel. We had to make 10 swatches of low saturation greys (grey mixed with a hint of color pigment) From the lightest we could manage to the blackest. He would make us repeat the whole set if one swatch was "too saturated" or if a value scale was off. IT WAS HELL. I am not sure if that exercise was intended to make us despise black and white tubes or give us an idea of how different the proportion of pigment and value is between painting tubes. I developed an irrational fear of adding black to lower values.
Companies are the original AI. They turn humans into a machine that does whatever the owner wants. Kind of like the dreaming humans in the Matrix movie.
Unironically any good argument against AI boils down to an argument against capitalism. Every other one is horribly misinformed.
Crazy how my socialist world view gets proven right time after time. Reality really does have a left wing bias, huh?
Problem is that AI is going to be used to make it harder to overthrow capitalism. It’d be interesting to see the uses of AI in a world where it wasn’t being used to chip away at some of the last occupations where talent and skill mean anything.
Machine Learning is especially useful for many different kinds of research as an advanced mode of statistical analysis.
Text and image generation is not especially useful in any field other than to cut corners on paying human artists and writers and programmers to do the job properly.
Text and image generation are the ones that upset me. C-suite types (and their pettier, aspirational counterparts) don’t care about “art” - why publish a few good novels that you have to pay royalties on, when you can generate thousands? Even if they’re shit, there was zero effort on your part.
If you lack aesthetic appreciation - why would you bother hiring an artist for anything?
The wealthy of this era don’t seem to value art. Midjourney can make Kinkade knock offs faster than even Kinkade himself could. There’s not room in their world for Twombly’s and Motherwell’s - except perhaps as investment schemes.