this post was submitted on 02 Jan 2024

66 points (80.0% liked)

Technology

58115 readers

4097 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

Follow the lemmy.world rules.
Only tech related content.
Be excellent to each another!
Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
Politics threads may be removed.
No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

Pika Labs new generative AI video tool unveiled — and it looks like a big deal (www.tomsguide.com)

submitted 8 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

96 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Pika Labs new generative AI video tool unveiled — and it looks like a big deal::The new Pika 1.0 tool comes after a $55 million funding round for the generative AI company and is a big step up in AI video production.

top 50 comments

sorted by: hot top controversial new old

[–] [email protected] 43 points 8 months ago (5 children)

There's a lot of "AI is theft" comments in this thread, and I'd just like to take a moment to bring up the Luddite movement at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution: the point isn't that 'machines are theft', or 'machines are just a fad', or even 'machines are bad' - the point was that machines were the new and highly efficient way capital owners were undermining the security and material conditions of the working class.

Let's not confuse problems that are created by capitalistic systems for problems created by new technologies - and maybe we can learn something about radical political action from the Luddites.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago

I recommend reading this article by Kit Walsh, a senior staff attorney at the EFF if you haven't already. The EFF is a digital rights group who most recently won a historic case: border guards now need a warrant to search your phone.

AI training isn’t only for mega-corporations. We can already train open source models, and Mozilla and LAION have already commited to training AI anyone can use. We shouldn't put up barriers that only benefit the ultra-wealthy and hand corporations a monopoly of a public technology by making it prohibitively expensive to for regular people to keep up. Mega corporations already own datasets, and have the money to buy more. And that's before they make users sign predatory ToS allowing them exclusive access to user data, effectively selling our own data back to us. Regular people, who could have had access to a competitive, corporate-independent tool for creativity, education, entertainment, and social mobility, would instead be left worse off and with less than where they started.

load more comments (4 replies)

[–] [email protected] 24 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (35 children)

Cool, another step in the ruining art with AI saga

These are all short clips because they look like ass if you get enough time to actually look at them. But even still, can people just stop with this shit?

Let people do the one truely human thing ffs.

Edit: Let me be clear, AI has good uses. My only argument here is that generating art is not one, especially when the training data is stolen and used for profit.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 8 months ago (7 children)

No one is stopping people from making art, lazy people will use this to do things they want, but artists will make art because that's what they do.

[–] [email protected] 34 points 8 months ago (2 children)

I'm more concerned about the fact that shitty companies will use this sort of thing to put graphic designers out of a job.

This isn't good progress. Even soulless corporate bullshit puts food on the table for someone, soon it'll just make another company a bit richer.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 8 months ago (4 children)

Look I'm not supporting mega rich assholes extracting even more from working people, but would you use the same argument for textile weavers and the Jacquard loom? Sure a lot of people lost their jobs at the time, but most, if not all, respecialized and we got computers in the end so would you say it wasn't good progress? 🤷

[–] [email protected] 11 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

Except that this is entirely unecessary, and doesn't create a product we need, and it's certainly not one I want.

I want to support people, I want people to do beautiful incredible things. I don't want a higher production rate of souless art statistically generated by taking the work of thousands of people without their consent, for no good reason.

Replace CEOs with AI, that would be good progress.

I also mentioned in another comment that this technology has some very very good uses, I am convinced creating art is an evil use. I'm a big fan of projects like Talon Voice, you can donate voice samples to help improve their language model to help people who struggle to use a computer with their hands. It's amazing stuff and I love it.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (5 children)

See, that's the crux of the argument I feel. You can't have one without the other, you can't have voice generation for the mute without that technology also displacing voice actors in the process.

That's why I think the Luddite approach doesn't work, we can't forcefully break the machines that are capable of so much good because they're also capable of so much bad.

Instead we should focus on helping those that are most negatively impacted by their existence, while supporting everyone that is already being positively affected by them. (like the UBI mentioned in my other comment)

PS. Totes down for replacing CEOs with AI and distributing their salary among the workers

load more comments (5 replies)

[–] [email protected] 5 points 8 months ago

Like... That was bad too. What we need to do is ditch capitalism before we automate everything.

It doesn't function if nobody has jobs.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

Textile weavers still exist, they just get paid even less and live in third world countries. “AI” is the same - a lot of the training is done by underpaid folks living in Kenya and Tanzania. They have to label the gore and CP so that the “AI” won’t use it. Post traumatic stress disorder is pretty common…

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago

Advancements like the loom usually just affect one industry (yes, there are ripples in the whole economy) and it's not like we got that, the printing press, the internal combustion engine, the computer, and the telephone all at once. AI, if properly trained, can do nearly any task so it's not just artists that are in danger of becoming obsolete.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago

They've already been doing that

[–] [email protected] 11 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Capitalism optimizes for lazy over good. Who's going to be able to pay rent as an artist in your dystopia

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago (2 children)

What artists do you know that make money off their art? The starving artist not being able to make money to survive has been a thing since before Van Gogh's time.

We've automated the food making process, but people still make money off of preparation of food, there's always going to be a market for artists, but that market will be different.

These AI things are great tools to assist artists, but the fear mongering gets in the way.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

What artists do you know that make money off their art?

this is such a bad take, I present to you, society. and the hundreds of thousands if not millions, tens or hundreds of millions of employed (either self or through businesses) artists.

and using the "starving artist" as a goal we should transition to just really sucks in concept. I'm not sure you would say the same if it was your profession.

I know ~~reddit~~ lemmy is full of techbros but geez have some compassion for other people. Oh wooweey i can type words and not have to have someone else do an art, I'm an artist now, everyone else can starve

[–] [email protected] 5 points 8 months ago (3 children)

I'm not sure you would say the same if it was your profession.

I am an artist, who uses AI to assist me...

I know reddit lemmy is full of techbros but geez have some compassion for other people.

So because I don't see AI as a big scary monster coming to devour our souls I'm a Tech Bro and don't have compassion?

But yeah, fear AI all you want, but artists will always be needed even if the bleep Boop machine can do it faster.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago (5 children)

Writing prompts for an image generator doesn't make you an artist, lol

load more comments (5 replies)

load more comments (2 replies)

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago (2 children)

No, this is a tool that does all of the work of an artist. It is absolutely not an assistant.

That's a bad faith argument, and it's actively harmful. Artists are struggling yes, and this just makes that worse, it won't be a separate market that somehow doesn't impact them.

If you think we should actually work to make it harder for artists to do things, that it's actually good that they struggle, then you have some messed up priorities, friend.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago

It doesn't really do all the work of an artist though. It generates pictures, but consider that a camera also generates pictures of things, and yet photography is considered an art form these days, and one's results from doing that can vary quite a bit between someone who understands both artistic principles and how their tools function, versus someone who does not. Having an image generator does not also entail knowing what to ask the generator for, or how to make any adjustments to it's output if it gives you something that is close to what you envision but not quite there. If anything, I personally suspect a more mature version of the technology will get integrated into art tools in some way rather than looking like it currently does, because a text prompt is a somewhat vague and inexact way to describe an image. If you ask it for a spaceship, for example, it'll give you some sort of spaceship, and if you ask it for a specific spaceship from pop culture it may likely give you that, but if you're imagining a specific design for a spaceship, with specific details, that does not already exist in existing art, it would be very hard to completely describe that just through text, versus if you could start sketching out and have it sort of act as a kind of graphical autocomplete that you can steer in given directions.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

Ok so it's absolutely not an assistant right? So say I'm working on a business logo and I'm having a hard time coming up with an idea to branch off of, I use an ai image gen to create a bunch of logos in a bunch of styles, I then use a couple as starting points for a design. How is that not a tool to assist an artist?

Just because you don't see it as a tool to assist an artist's doesn't mean it isn't, people will use any tool for good or evil.

load more comments (1 replies)

[–] [email protected] 5 points 8 months ago (3 children)

All it means is that at art as a career is dead.

Guess we want everyone working in retail or something

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago (1 children)

That's already the system outside of creating what rich people want. An entire team of artists creating boardroom directed art is much less art to me than a single creative using AI to bring their personal vision to life.

Hopefully individual artists can do more with these tools, and we can all hope for a world where artists can be supported to have the ability and freedom to create apart from the whims of the wealthy.

Starving artist is a term for a reason. Technology has never been the real problem.

load more comments (1 replies)

load more comments (2 replies)

load more comments (4 replies)

[–] [email protected] 12 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

AI doesn't generate art. Art is about using media in order to convey a perspective on the world and to illicit emotions from the audience. What AI generates is simply the media itself. It isn't capable of having the point of view or life experiences needed to create actual art.

load more comments (1 replies)

[–] [email protected] 10 points 8 months ago

We were only meant to be wage slaves /s

[–] [email protected] 10 points 8 months ago (1 children)

This is not the way to look at this. Stop thinking this stuff will replace human art. Until we can simulate a human in the machine (not there yet), art will always be by humans because it is a human endeavor recognized and appreciated only by humans.

These things are tools for a human to use. And like any tool that is used in the hands of the casual or the lazy, it will become very banal indeed once the shininess wears off. With your same outlook you could tell Adobe to stop improving the digital brushes in Photoshop, because art is only for humans.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

I think a good analogy is clipart, or those horrible corporate memphis/algeria graphics. They look awful, but they are just good enough at illustrating an idea that many companies will use them rather than hiring an artist. The thing is, corporations almost never want art. They want illustrations.

load more comments (31 replies)

[–] [email protected] 16 points 8 months ago

I've been saying for a year now, generative AI is going to foster a resurgence in stage theater. When movies are all 100% AI with no humans in them, we'll want to see humans act. That and "organic" movie labels.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

This is from over a month ago.

load more comments