this post was submitted on 19 Nov 2023
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Barack Obama: “For elevator music, AI is going to work fine. Music like Bob Dylan or Stevie Wonder, that's different”::Barack Obama has weighed in on AI’s impact on music creation in a new interview, saying, “For elevator music, AI is going to work fine”.

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[–] [email protected] 31 points 1 year ago (8 children)

But do we really need AI to generate art?

Why can't AI be used to automate useful work nobody wants to do, instead of being a way for capital to automate skilled labor out of high-paying jobs?

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Because AI is unpredictable. Which is not a big issue for art, because you can immediately see any flaws and if you can't, it doesn't matter.

But for actually useful work, you don't want to find out that the AI programmer completely made up a few lines of code that are only causing problems when the airplane is flying with a 32° bank angle on a saturday with a prime number for a date.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

We currently have the same problem with human programmers. That's why good companies always test the shit out of their code.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Was that the Boeing 737 Max issue?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

That was the point. Was not even AI but complex systems are complex.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Pretty much every major airline incident in the modern age is the result of businesses cutting corners to maximize profit.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (2 children)

It's virtually guaranteed that at some point, robots and/or AI will be capable of doing almost every human job. And then there will be a time when they can do every job better than any human.

I wonder how people will react. Will they become lazy? Depressed? Just have sex all the time? Just have sex with robots all the time?

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (2 children)

It depends if the government introduces universal basic income or not. If they do I couldn't care less if I don't have a job. Any reason I have a job is so that I have money. I don't do it so I have some kind of fulfillment in my life because it isn't a fulfilling job.

Just have sex all the time?

I'm confused about how this one tracks. Is the AI going to make me more attractive or is it just going to lower everyone else's standards?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Like all other animals, humans evolved to be more likely to procreate. There is an argument that all of that other stuff we do is just in support of procreation. But in a way, it's also a distraction and an impediment to procreation. It just so happens that we've been unable to avoid doing that other stuff so far.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Even animals do other things though they play and socialise.

Personally if AI makes working irrelevant I'm just going to spend most of my time in Disneyland.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

It'll be funny if we avoid post-scarcity because we want people to keep working for each other.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

You talk like AI I'd a singular entity that can only do one thing?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

AI is an enabler. I have not patience for sitting and drawing for hours on end to make extremely detailed art but I'm a creative individual and would love to have the power to bring my ideas into reality. That's what AI art does.

The problem with that, of course is it means that if I'm really serious about an idea I won't be paying some artist(s) to make it happen. I'll just whip open an AI art prompt (e.g.Stable Diffusion or any online AI art generators) and go to town.

It often takes a lot of iteration and messing with the prompt but eventually you'll get what you want (90% of the time). Right now your need a decent PC to run Stable Diffusion (got 8GB of VRAM? You too can generate all the AI images you want 👍) but eventually people's cell phones in their pockets will be even better at it.

Civitai is having a contest to make a new 404 error page graphic using AI. Go have a look at some of the entries:

https://civitai.com/collections/104601

I made one that's supposed to be like the Scroll of Truth meme:

Scroll of Truth meme 404 error page

I made that on my own PC with my limited art skills using nothing but automatic1111 stable diffusion web UI and Krita. It took me like an hour of trying out various prompts and models before I had all the images I wanted then just a few minutes in Krita to put them into a 4-panel comic format.

If I wanted to make something like that without AI it just would never have happened.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Not that it really matters in this case, but AI art just seems inconsistent in silly ways. That girls shirt changes each frame, her hair gets more braided, and the 3rd frame has 2 left hands. I guess at first glance you don't really notice, but it's not hard to spot and it hurts my brain once I do.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

Also her face expression is so generic it doesn't convey the meaning like the original did.

Honestly if I didn't know the original I wouldn't understand the point of this one.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

I almost immediately noticed the shirts and frame 4s 8 fingered hand

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

But do we really need AI to generate art?

No, but we want it to. It's probably only a matter of time untill AI can do better anything that humans can, including art. Now if there's an option to view great art done by humans or amazing art done by AI I'll go with the latter. It can already generate better photographs than I can capture with my camera but I couldn't care less. Takes zero joy out of my photography hobby. I'm not doing it for money.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Why should we stifle technological progress so people can still do jobs that can be done with a machine?

If they still want to create art, nobody is stopping them. If they want to get paid, then they need to do something useful for society.

[–] [email protected] -3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Nobody's calling to stifle technology or progress here. We could develop AI to do anything. The question is what should that be?

There's a distinction to be drawn between 'things that are profitable to do and thus there isn't any shortage of' and 'things that aren't profitable and so there's a shortage of it' here. Today, the de facto measure of 'is it useful for society?' seems to be the former, and that doesn't mean what's useful for society, it's what's usefuI for people that have money to burn.

Fundamentally, there isn't a shortage of art, or copy writers, or software developers, or the things they do- what there is, that AI promises to change, is the inconvenient need to deal with (and pay) artisans or laborers to do it. If the alternative is for AI vendors to be paid instead of working people, is it really the public interest we're talking about, or the interests of corporate management that would rather pocket the difference in cost between paying labor vs. AI?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I don’t think it’s really helpful to group a bunch of different technologies under the banner of A.I. but most people aren’t knowledgeable enough to make the distinction between software that can analyze a medical scan to tell me if I have cancer and a fancy chat bot.