Technology

I'm not the same person as @[email protected], but it did look like they were replying on my behalf, so I understand the assumption. No worries there.

I agree with what you're saying.

I would just wanna clarify that you're primarily talking about "art as a marketable commodity" and the societal problems with how that interacts with AI development, where I was talking primarily about "art as a cultural message" and the fundamental inability of AI to cross the threshold from "art as a product" to "art as a message" because the model itself has nothing to message about. (With the caveat that a person may use the AI's product as a message, but then the meaning comes from the person, not the AI.) I think we agree with each other here.

Btw, and you probably already know this, Cory Doctorow has some really sharp insights and recommendations when it comes to the past, present, and future of IP law and how we might be able to protect creators going forward.

I do wanna respond to something that wasn't really directed at me, just cuz it overlaps with my original comment and I think it's kind of interesting:

Again, you can say by fiat an AI has the personhood of a toaster, but that doesn’t make the content it creates less quality or less real. And given in the past how often we’ve disparaged art for being made by women, by non-whites, by Jews, we as a social collective have demonstrated our opinion is easily biased to arbitrarily favor those sources we like.

You’re not going to find any way to objectively justify including only human beings as qualified to make art.

You're right that, without an objective measure of what counts as an artistic endeavor, we're permitted to be as discriminatory as we feel like being. Which seems... not great, right?

But I don't think you ever can make an objective measure of what counts as art, because art is like the observable physical effect of something that's going on in our consciousness -- an immaterial world that can't directly map 1:1 with the physical world.

So I think art is always destined to be this amorphous thing that you can't exactly pin down. It's maybe more of a verb than a noun. Like I can't look at an inert object sitting on a table and figure out that it's art. But if someone tells me that this is the last sculpture their aunt made before she died and she started it when she felt fine, but by the end she could barely hold her hands still, and she never finished it... Well, suddenly I catch a glimpse of the conscious experience of that person. And it's not that her conscious experience was baked into the object, but that I can imagine being in her place and I can feel the frustration of the half-finished angles and the resignation of staring at it after touching it for the last time.

Yes, there is a real history of people saying "Those savages aren't conscious", or that they are technically conscious but a "lower" kind of consciousness. And I know it makes us uncomfortable to think we might do that again, and so I think some of us have developed a reflex to say we need to make an objective rational view of the world so that human subjectivity doesn't come into it and poison things... But I don't think it's possible, as long as the nature of consciousness remains a mystery to us.

And I also think if we do come to agree on a rationalist framework for living, we will have lost something. Once you have rules and measures, there's no room for... well, for lack of a better word, "soul". I'm an atheist, but I'm also conscious. And I don't think that the totality of my conscious experience is somehow quantifiable, or especially that if we could replay those exact quantities then it's just as good as consciousness. Like, I am experiencing something here, and there's no good reason to think that matter precedes consciousness and not the other way around.

I'm rambling now, but you get what I mean?

Ultimately the problem is also not whether artist get paid for their work doing art. It’s that the most of us are desperate to get paid for anything and so it’s a right privilege when that anything is doing something arty. The strikes, the lawsuits, these are survival precarity talking. If we didn’t have to worry about that (say in an alternate reality where we had a robust UBI program) AI replacing artists would be a non-issue. People would continue to create for the sake of creation as we saw during the epidemic lockdown of 2020 and the consequential Great Resignation.

This is a perfect framing for this discussion. I think people are pissed that AI disrupts this economic model of compensating creators, but the problem isn't AI it's the economic model.

I think this is also the conversation people like Altman were hoping to have around AI (sorry if that's too much benefit of the doubt for him), I think enthusiasts hope AI can help transition us to a more equitable economy. People are (rightly) concerned that instead of bringing about economic change, AI will further consolidate economic forces and make life even more miserable for everyone. Throwing copyright law at the problem to me seems like a desperate attempt to keep the boat afloat.

I am saying AI won't have biological living experiences, only abstract concepts of biological living experiences that are fed into it.

You are reading way more into my point than my actual point. Another way of saying it is that we can try to understand a dog and explain why dogs do what they do, but we are not actual dogs and cannot use the actual experience of being a dog when creating art. Or how someone will never know the exact experience of someone of a other race even though they can understand the concepts of differences. Experience is different than understanding an abstract.