Théåtre D'opéra Spatial
August 31, 2022 4:48 PM Subscribe
AI wins state fair art contest, annoys humans. Want to try generating images at home? Stable Diffusion, an AI image-gen model like DALL-E 2 and Midjourney, was publicly released last week, and can be run on any computer with a decent GPU, a google collab, or run through their own servers.
- A very active subreddit collects submissions and tools to use it.
- Someone made a search engine to search for prompts and their results.
- This github repository has all sorts of research about Stable Diffusion and how to generate images.
I'm really happy about this! Serious questions about AI "art" need to be asked and answered as soon as possible. What better way to force the issue than to do just this.
posted by seanmpuckett at 5:06 PM on August 31, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by seanmpuckett at 5:06 PM on August 31, 2022 [1 favorite]
Please note, he won in the Digital Arts/Digitally Manipulated Photography category. It's not like he was trying to pass this off as an oil painting or anything.
Still, these are huge issues that are we're going to be dealing with for years to come. It's a transformative technology.
posted by gwint at 5:21 PM on August 31, 2022 [6 favorites]
Still, these are huge issues that are we're going to be dealing with for years to come. It's a transformative technology.
posted by gwint at 5:21 PM on August 31, 2022 [6 favorites]
It has a sort of Duchamp submitting Fountain vibe, only in reverse. Instead of the proposition being that the jury would wrongly fail recognize something trivial and as art, now we have the proposition that the jury would wrongly fail to recognize that the art is something trivial.
posted by surlyben at 5:23 PM on August 31, 2022 [5 favorites]
posted by surlyben at 5:23 PM on August 31, 2022 [5 favorites]
I just realized that I linked the wrong article, I meant to link the vice article (which is linked in the arstechnica page) since it includes more details about the person who won and their submission, like:
Allen said he had clearly labeled his submission to the state fair as “Jason Allen via Midjourney,” and once again noted the human element required to produce the work. “I generate images with MJ, do passes with photoshop, and upscale with Gigapixel.”
posted by simmering octagon at 5:26 PM on August 31, 2022 [1 favorite]
Allen said he had clearly labeled his submission to the state fair as “Jason Allen via Midjourney,” and once again noted the human element required to produce the work. “I generate images with MJ, do passes with photoshop, and upscale with Gigapixel.”
posted by simmering octagon at 5:26 PM on August 31, 2022 [1 favorite]
I need something for above my couch. It has to include sunset,horses,a rose arbor, and a pretty cowgirl.
posted by Czjewel at 5:31 PM on August 31, 2022 [4 favorites]
posted by Czjewel at 5:31 PM on August 31, 2022 [4 favorites]
I need something for above my couch. It has to include sunset,horses,a rose arbor, and a pretty cowgirl.
Here ya go, best I could do in the time I have. I used basically the same workflow as the artist, the resolution is 8192 x 8192 pixels and so should hold up to about 40 inches by 40 inches square with no artifacts/compression. Not sure how big your couch is tho.
posted by jeremias at 5:54 PM on August 31, 2022 [21 favorites]
Here ya go, best I could do in the time I have. I used basically the same workflow as the artist, the resolution is 8192 x 8192 pixels and so should hold up to about 40 inches by 40 inches square with no artifacts/compression. Not sure how big your couch is tho.
posted by jeremias at 5:54 PM on August 31, 2022 [21 favorites]
(The "through their own servers" link is the one you want if you want to quickly try playing with Stable Diffusion yourself)
posted by BungaDunga at 5:58 PM on August 31, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by BungaDunga at 5:58 PM on August 31, 2022 [1 favorite]
Thank you jeremias! It's perfection. Very talented!
posted by Czjewel at 6:09 PM on August 31, 2022 [3 favorites]
posted by Czjewel at 6:09 PM on August 31, 2022 [3 favorites]
SMBC's take: The pictures look good at first glance, but they have no sense of reality. I mean look at the way they draw hands.
A more serious take: 4.2 gigabytes of floating points that somehow encode so much of what we know.
posted by pwnguin at 6:30 PM on August 31, 2022 [6 favorites]
A more serious take: 4.2 gigabytes of floating points that somehow encode so much of what we know.
posted by pwnguin at 6:30 PM on August 31, 2022 [6 favorites]
Seems like it wasn't the AI that entered the competition or created/curated the final product, but a human being. No?
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 6:31 PM on August 31, 2022
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 6:31 PM on August 31, 2022
I think the bigger accomplishment here is that the the AI was able to generate a whole "Jason Allen" persona and fool a bunch of meatbags, including a Vice reporter, into thinking that a human being was behind the submission.
posted by whir at 6:57 PM on August 31, 2022 [3 favorites]
posted by whir at 6:57 PM on August 31, 2022 [3 favorites]
Last Week Tonight covers AI artwork, and John Oliver marries a cabbage. Bonus: Steve Buscemi.
posted by adept256 at 6:58 PM on August 31, 2022 [2 favorites]
posted by adept256 at 6:58 PM on August 31, 2022 [2 favorites]
I honestly can’t wait till they have a pipeline that works natively on Apple’s architecture. I bought a 64GB Mac Studio M1Max in anticipation of running this shit. With the neural core in there it should run like woah.
posted by seanmpuckett at 7:06 PM on August 31, 2022 [3 favorites]
posted by seanmpuckett at 7:06 PM on August 31, 2022 [3 favorites]
I’ve started to get a sense of what’s possible here beyond just replacing low cost work with even lower cost work … the second link penguin posted above starts to get at it as does this Reddit post showing off stable diffusion integrated in a photoshop plugin. Very cool stuff.
posted by wemayfreeze at 7:36 PM on August 31, 2022
posted by wemayfreeze at 7:36 PM on August 31, 2022
Butlerian jihad go go go / pay DeviantArt users a billion dollars
posted by Going To Maine at 8:18 PM on August 31, 2022
posted by Going To Maine at 8:18 PM on August 31, 2022
There's definitely an interesting debate to be had. The guy in this case seems to be kind of a jerk, but hey. I'm looking forward to where we take it from here - like people say, the genie is out of the bottle. Little point talking about pre-genie times. What are we going to do NOW?
posted by BlackLeotardFront at 8:43 PM on August 31, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by BlackLeotardFront at 8:43 PM on August 31, 2022 [1 favorite]
There was a post on r/StableDiffusion yesterday from a guy who said he felt guilty passing off SD art as his own. Then he spent the entire thread ardently defending the practice. By his reckoning, the effort he put into crafting good prompts and picking the best results was enough to qualify him as an artist—one who can claim sole credit for the picture. It's a depressing read, particularly because so many of the replies agree with him.
I'm utterly obsessed with these new AI's. I think they're going to be transformative for visual art. But I also worry it's going to devalue/replace legitimate artists and create an entire generation of short-cutters and cheaters. How do you even recognize human-made art (and reward the hard work and talent involved) when anyone can create something equivalent with a few clicks?
posted by dephlogisticated at 9:30 PM on August 31, 2022 [1 favorite]
I'm utterly obsessed with these new AI's. I think they're going to be transformative for visual art. But I also worry it's going to devalue/replace legitimate artists and create an entire generation of short-cutters and cheaters. How do you even recognize human-made art (and reward the hard work and talent involved) when anyone can create something equivalent with a few clicks?
posted by dephlogisticated at 9:30 PM on August 31, 2022 [1 favorite]
I wonder when the first entire TV show will be able to be prompted out of AI
posted by NoThisIsPatrick at 10:17 PM on August 31, 2022
posted by NoThisIsPatrick at 10:17 PM on August 31, 2022
But I also worry it's going to devalue/replace legitimate artists and create an entire generation of short-cutters and cheaters.
Going to? It's already happening.
posted by NoxAeternum at 10:20 PM on August 31, 2022 [1 favorite]
Going to? It's already happening.
posted by NoxAeternum at 10:20 PM on August 31, 2022 [1 favorite]
My go to request for these AI image things is "Donald Trump meets the Devil" - almost every one of them, this one included, just produce mostly pics of 2 Trumps
posted by mbo at 10:44 PM on August 31, 2022 [3 favorites]
posted by mbo at 10:44 PM on August 31, 2022 [3 favorites]
Just tried a few well known New Zealand indigenous artists and it appears to dream very much of white european painters - perhaps the people who brought this poor stunted child into the world knew nothing else
posted by mbo at 10:55 PM on August 31, 2022 [5 favorites]
posted by mbo at 10:55 PM on August 31, 2022 [5 favorites]
By his reckoning, the effort he put into crafting good prompts and picking the best results was enough to qualify him as an artist—one who can claim sole credit for the picture.
This makes sense to me. You get to claim it as your music even if you use your keyboard's existing drum machine patterns and auto-chord features. You get performance rights with something played on an instrument (or just programmed!) even if it's ultimately generated entirely from sample libraries (or your own sampling of others' instruments/playing if it's too make a keyboard patch rather than a traditional in-track sample - legal grey area!)
There is no analogy I can think of that suggests that operating the AI tool to make images should not be seen as equivalent in terms of authorship to using any other tool to generate images.
posted by Dysk at 12:52 AM on September 1, 2022 [2 favorites]
This makes sense to me. You get to claim it as your music even if you use your keyboard's existing drum machine patterns and auto-chord features. You get performance rights with something played on an instrument (or just programmed!) even if it's ultimately generated entirely from sample libraries (or your own sampling of others' instruments/playing if it's too make a keyboard patch rather than a traditional in-track sample - legal grey area!)
There is no analogy I can think of that suggests that operating the AI tool to make images should not be seen as equivalent in terms of authorship to using any other tool to generate images.
posted by Dysk at 12:52 AM on September 1, 2022 [2 favorites]
(Also the rhetoric around shortcuts and cheating reminds me a lot of early reactions to electronic and computer music too!)
posted by Dysk at 12:54 AM on September 1, 2022 [3 favorites]
posted by Dysk at 12:54 AM on September 1, 2022 [3 favorites]
Not AI, no AI involved.
posted by GallonOfAlan at 2:29 AM on September 1, 2022
posted by GallonOfAlan at 2:29 AM on September 1, 2022
What we need now is plugins that coerce the size of every object in every piece of art to be exactly the Golden Ratio times the size of the next biggest object, because as every real artist knows, it's much more aesthetically perfect that way.
posted by flabdablet at 8:10 AM on September 1, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by flabdablet at 8:10 AM on September 1, 2022 [1 favorite]
There is no analogy I can think of that suggests that operating the AI tool to make images should not be seen as equivalent in terms of authorship to using any other tool to generate images.
The best analogy I’ve seen is one of commissioning artwork. Let’s say you go to a painter and describe the picture you want, and they paint it for you. Who is the artist in that scenario? Who deserves credit for that picture? I think most people would say the painter, because the painter put in nearly all of the work. The commissioner had a specific vision, and I won’t say there’s zero skill involved in that, but having an idea for a piece of artwork is not the same thing as creating it.
These AI’s do 99% of the work for you. They make nearly all of the aesthetic decisions. You provide only the broad concept, literally a sentence worth of input. It’s not at all comparable to using Photoshop or Ableton to remix existing media (which I have no problem with, provide one is upfront about what they’re doing).
Which brings me to the issue of honesty. If someone is selling or displaying commissioned artwork and telling people they created it, that’s dishonest. Even if they never outright say “I painted that”, and are careful only to use more general terms, other people will make the assumption. That’s what really grossed me out about the thread I linked. The poster knew on some level that he was misleading others, and rightfully felt guilty for it. He knew his friends and family would be far less impressed with his artwork if they knew it was made by an AI. But he could not bear to part with that praise, or the notion of himself as an artist, and so twisted himself into logical knots trying to justify withholding that information. When I say I’m concerned AI will create a generation of cheaters, that's what I’m talking about, not people who play with AI-generated art in an forthright way. I’m loving the forums of people sharing the incredible art they’re generating with these systems—it's hugely fun and exciting. I just think it’s disingenuous for someone to claim that art as their own, when virtually no skill or effort is required to make it.
posted by dephlogisticated at 9:03 AM on September 1, 2022 [1 favorite]
The best analogy I’ve seen is one of commissioning artwork. Let’s say you go to a painter and describe the picture you want, and they paint it for you. Who is the artist in that scenario? Who deserves credit for that picture? I think most people would say the painter, because the painter put in nearly all of the work. The commissioner had a specific vision, and I won’t say there’s zero skill involved in that, but having an idea for a piece of artwork is not the same thing as creating it.
These AI’s do 99% of the work for you. They make nearly all of the aesthetic decisions. You provide only the broad concept, literally a sentence worth of input. It’s not at all comparable to using Photoshop or Ableton to remix existing media (which I have no problem with, provide one is upfront about what they’re doing).
Which brings me to the issue of honesty. If someone is selling or displaying commissioned artwork and telling people they created it, that’s dishonest. Even if they never outright say “I painted that”, and are careful only to use more general terms, other people will make the assumption. That’s what really grossed me out about the thread I linked. The poster knew on some level that he was misleading others, and rightfully felt guilty for it. He knew his friends and family would be far less impressed with his artwork if they knew it was made by an AI. But he could not bear to part with that praise, or the notion of himself as an artist, and so twisted himself into logical knots trying to justify withholding that information. When I say I’m concerned AI will create a generation of cheaters, that's what I’m talking about, not people who play with AI-generated art in an forthright way. I’m loving the forums of people sharing the incredible art they’re generating with these systems—it's hugely fun and exciting. I just think it’s disingenuous for someone to claim that art as their own, when virtually no skill or effort is required to make it.
posted by dephlogisticated at 9:03 AM on September 1, 2022 [1 favorite]
> These AI’s do 99% of the work for you. They make nearly all of the aesthetic decisions. You provide only the broad concept, literally a sentence worth of input. It’s not at all comparable to using Photoshop or Ableton to remix existing media (which I have no problem with, provide one is upfront about what they’re doing).
This isn't entirely accurate either. Well, I mean, it kinda is -- you can absolutely just type a few words into DALL-E or StableDiffusion and see what pops up -- but the most compelling results, the ones you tend to see when people are talking about AI-generated-art, require a fair bit of human steering. This example (posted upthread too) is a good one: it involves several layers, a few steps, and multiple passes through Stable Diffusion's "img2img" mode, which re-draws an input image you've provided.
I'm not trying to say that "you're wrong"; I'm trying to point out that it's a lot more complex than a binary "the person is the artist" / "the computer is the artist". The artist is certainly doing something here; omitting the person isn't any more correct than omitting the algorithm. It's not like comissioning a painting. It's not like drawing something yourself. The thing that's so head-exploding about this current generation of tools is that it's not like anything else. The analogies don't work. It's its own thing. For better, and for worse.
posted by dorothy hawk at 9:39 AM on September 1, 2022 [4 favorites]
This isn't entirely accurate either. Well, I mean, it kinda is -- you can absolutely just type a few words into DALL-E or StableDiffusion and see what pops up -- but the most compelling results, the ones you tend to see when people are talking about AI-generated-art, require a fair bit of human steering. This example (posted upthread too) is a good one: it involves several layers, a few steps, and multiple passes through Stable Diffusion's "img2img" mode, which re-draws an input image you've provided.
I'm not trying to say that "you're wrong"; I'm trying to point out that it's a lot more complex than a binary "the person is the artist" / "the computer is the artist". The artist is certainly doing something here; omitting the person isn't any more correct than omitting the algorithm. It's not like comissioning a painting. It's not like drawing something yourself. The thing that's so head-exploding about this current generation of tools is that it's not like anything else. The analogies don't work. It's its own thing. For better, and for worse.
posted by dorothy hawk at 9:39 AM on September 1, 2022 [4 favorites]
Wikipedia has this to say about Dale Chihuly:
Those people actually doing Chihuly's glass blowing might even, when they're not working for hire, aspire to be glass artists in their own right, and skills and techniques would be gained and used in both contexts: when they are the artist, and when they are the hired team.
Software generated art, on the other hand, is never creative on its own, never gains skills and techniques as it creates the outputs you request. These characteristics make it a lot more like a very sophisticated paint brush than like a glass blower hired to work on a Chihuly piece.
On the other hand, at least a lot of computer-generated images are dreary and uninspired art. Somewhere along the spectrum of artistry we have the creation of "Michelangelo's David" and at another point we have "arranging magnetic clothing on a print of Michelangelo's David" hanging on the fridge". Somewhere in there, well it becomes bad art or maybe not even art at all. AI generated art is like this (except that you can't arrange the pieces of clothing with the same precision, and sometimes a pair of boxers has 3 leg-holes), while superficially looking a lot more impressive than "David with magnetic boxers on the fridge".
posted by the antecedent of that pronoun at 9:43 AM on September 1, 2022 [3 favorites]
In 1983, Chihuly returned to his native Pacific Northwest where he continued to develop his own work at the Pilchuck Glass School, which he had helped to found in 1971. No longer able to hold the glassblowing pipe, he hired others to do the work. Chihuly explained the change in a 2006 interview, saying "Once I stepped back, I liked the view", and said that it allowed him to see the work from more perspectives, enabling him to anticipate problems earlier. Chihuly's role has been described as "more choreographer than dancer, more supervisor than participant, more director than actor".Even when the tools the artist uses are other people we seem ready to attribute the whole work to one person. I don't have a deep knowledge of the art world but it seems like many artists who create larger works (I'm thinking of Christo & Jean Claude, for example) work in similar ways, with teams of people to complete their works. But we accept a clear narrative of "who the artist is", and it's not the never-named people on the 'team'.
Those people actually doing Chihuly's glass blowing might even, when they're not working for hire, aspire to be glass artists in their own right, and skills and techniques would be gained and used in both contexts: when they are the artist, and when they are the hired team.
Software generated art, on the other hand, is never creative on its own, never gains skills and techniques as it creates the outputs you request. These characteristics make it a lot more like a very sophisticated paint brush than like a glass blower hired to work on a Chihuly piece.
On the other hand, at least a lot of computer-generated images are dreary and uninspired art. Somewhere along the spectrum of artistry we have the creation of "Michelangelo's David" and at another point we have "arranging magnetic clothing on a print of Michelangelo's David" hanging on the fridge". Somewhere in there, well it becomes bad art or maybe not even art at all. AI generated art is like this (except that you can't arrange the pieces of clothing with the same precision, and sometimes a pair of boxers has 3 leg-holes), while superficially looking a lot more impressive than "David with magnetic boxers on the fridge".
posted by the antecedent of that pronoun at 9:43 AM on September 1, 2022 [3 favorites]
These AI’s do 99% of the work for you.
Reminds me of this wonderful work of art by Leica Rangefinder (with 1% input from Henri Cartier-Bresson)
posted by gwint at 10:58 AM on September 1, 2022 [7 favorites]
Reminds me of this wonderful work of art by Leica Rangefinder (with 1% input from Henri Cartier-Bresson)
posted by gwint at 10:58 AM on September 1, 2022 [7 favorites]
It might be cheating to bring up Cartier-Bresson in discussions like these.
Less sarcastically, I can say from experience that getting Dall-e or Midjourney to produce a reasonably good image from a prompt is far, far easier than getting a reasonably good image out of a film camera. Cartier-Bresson is famous for a reason.
posted by surlyben at 11:34 AM on September 1, 2022 [1 favorite]
Less sarcastically, I can say from experience that getting Dall-e or Midjourney to produce a reasonably good image from a prompt is far, far easier than getting a reasonably good image out of a film camera. Cartier-Bresson is famous for a reason.
posted by surlyben at 11:34 AM on September 1, 2022 [1 favorite]
Define "reasonably good image" My iPhone camera is exceptionally good at photorealism.
I guess my non-sarcastic point is that we don't really know how far these new tools will go. Right now they are similar to cameras in the sense that they remove an enormous barrier of technical skill, and make (for lack of a better term) "aesthetic taste" paramount (well, that and whatever "prompt engineering" shakes out to be) But in a year or ten, will these tools learn taste and narrative as well? When you don't even need a human eye to say "This shot has something special" then we're in truly new ground.
posted by gwint at 11:45 AM on September 1, 2022 [1 favorite]
I guess my non-sarcastic point is that we don't really know how far these new tools will go. Right now they are similar to cameras in the sense that they remove an enormous barrier of technical skill, and make (for lack of a better term) "aesthetic taste" paramount (well, that and whatever "prompt engineering" shakes out to be) But in a year or ten, will these tools learn taste and narrative as well? When you don't even need a human eye to say "This shot has something special" then we're in truly new ground.
posted by gwint at 11:45 AM on September 1, 2022 [1 favorite]
When all that crypto currency horse puckey crashes those suddenly idle GPUs are going to get snapped up for this right quick I tell you.
posted by seanmpuckett at 11:51 AM on September 1, 2022 [2 favorites]
posted by seanmpuckett at 11:51 AM on September 1, 2022 [2 favorites]
I won't lie, I've been contemplating buying a $3xx GPU to run stable diffusion better.
posted by the antecedent of that pronoun at 12:32 PM on September 1, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by the antecedent of that pronoun at 12:32 PM on September 1, 2022 [1 favorite]
I'm deeply disturbed and depressed about the sheer volume of pornography involving real people that's going to be generated with this tech and its near future developments with 100% certainty. Even if centrally managed online tools deliberately exclude pornographic material from the training corpus and (presumably) ignore or block related prompts, it won't be long until every pervert with a powerful computer and terabytes of pre-existing "training material" starts doing it. Imagine the burden of someone like Pokimane simply existing in a very near future world where some of her "fans" are able to generate endless amounts of every imaginable type of fetish porn with her in it, very soon practically indistinguishable from reality, with very nearly zero effort compared to what it's required so far.
And don't even get me started about AI generated child porn on the dark web. Just... fuck, I can't even.
posted by jklaiho at 12:35 PM on September 1, 2022 [2 favorites]
And don't even get me started about AI generated child porn on the dark web. Just... fuck, I can't even.
posted by jklaiho at 12:35 PM on September 1, 2022 [2 favorites]
I honestly can’t wait till they have a pipeline that works natively on Apple’s architecture.There are still some kinks being worked out, but this is now possible.
posted by mbrubeck at 12:36 PM on September 1, 2022 [3 favorites]
Artificial. Opinion.
The human curating the many generations is doing the art, the machine is doing the weaving, painting, welding, etc. The machine is the artisan.
posted by abulafa at 2:58 PM on September 1, 2022
The human curating the many generations is doing the art, the machine is doing the weaving, painting, welding, etc. The machine is the artisan.
posted by abulafa at 2:58 PM on September 1, 2022
( I am not taking a position on whether the artisan, often practicing a rare skill at least as challenging as the traditional artist's, deserves more credit, but in our canon we have a pretty clear prior art here.)
posted by abulafa at 2:59 PM on September 1, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by abulafa at 2:59 PM on September 1, 2022 [1 favorite]
A cat wedged into a scanner according to the AI versions (Google Colab) of:
Giotto - Dürer - Hyeronimus Bosch - Vermeer - Rembrandt - Persian miniatures - Hokusai - Toulouse Lautrec - Van Gogh - Picasso - Mondrian - Chagall - Pollock - Hergé - Basquiat - Warhol - Studio Ghibli - Cartier-Bresson
It certainly works best when the AI can "understand" a style. When it does not, the result are more or less random, though occasionally pretty: cats in scanner according to Britney Spears, Ghandi, and Charles de Gaulle. The latter example is interesting as it seems that the AI had no idea how to handle de Gaulle, so all the cats end up in scanners, while for regular artists it tends to prioritize the art style and "forgets" about putting cats in scanners.
posted by elgilito at 5:00 PM on September 1, 2022 [6 favorites]
Giotto - Dürer - Hyeronimus Bosch - Vermeer - Rembrandt - Persian miniatures - Hokusai - Toulouse Lautrec - Van Gogh - Picasso - Mondrian - Chagall - Pollock - Hergé - Basquiat - Warhol - Studio Ghibli - Cartier-Bresson
It certainly works best when the AI can "understand" a style. When it does not, the result are more or less random, though occasionally pretty: cats in scanner according to Britney Spears, Ghandi, and Charles de Gaulle. The latter example is interesting as it seems that the AI had no idea how to handle de Gaulle, so all the cats end up in scanners, while for regular artists it tends to prioritize the art style and "forgets" about putting cats in scanners.
posted by elgilito at 5:00 PM on September 1, 2022 [6 favorites]
Artificial. Opinion.
That one is my personal nightmare.
I am looking forward with a certain degree of fear and trembling to the day when almost all of the opinions being voiced in pubs and enacted as public policy can be traced back to the output of a small clutch of shitty little artificial "intelligence" toys that the Murdoch Death Star replaced all its opinion columnists with a decade before as a cost-saving measure.
The fear and trembling is not really mitigated much by knowing that the results would be largely indistinguishable from what's already being vomited forth on the regular by the likes of Thomas Friedman or Andrews Bolt and Tate.
If there is to be an AI Singularity, it will not come when some self-designing AI iteratively makes itself better until it surpasses the intellectual capacity of the human species; it will happen because humanity, in pursuit of spurious and hitherto uncalled-for conveniences, has dulled its collective discernment until it's exercising less common sense than a cheap GPU.
posted by flabdablet at 8:54 PM on September 1, 2022 [3 favorites]
That one is my personal nightmare.
I am looking forward with a certain degree of fear and trembling to the day when almost all of the opinions being voiced in pubs and enacted as public policy can be traced back to the output of a small clutch of shitty little artificial "intelligence" toys that the Murdoch Death Star replaced all its opinion columnists with a decade before as a cost-saving measure.
The fear and trembling is not really mitigated much by knowing that the results would be largely indistinguishable from what's already being vomited forth on the regular by the likes of Thomas Friedman or Andrews Bolt and Tate.
If there is to be an AI Singularity, it will not come when some self-designing AI iteratively makes itself better until it surpasses the intellectual capacity of the human species; it will happen because humanity, in pursuit of spurious and hitherto uncalled-for conveniences, has dulled its collective discernment until it's exercising less common sense than a cheap GPU.
posted by flabdablet at 8:54 PM on September 1, 2022 [3 favorites]
I think AI will lead to more value being placed on certain forms of art that are "closer to the human"--oil paintings, ink prints, sculpture, pottery.
It's a tragedy for 99 percent of the visual arts, though--there's going to be a huge drop off in human skill. Why learn to draw or paint when you'll never be as good as the AI's collective memory? Your job as the lowly flesh machine is to do a little tinkering around the edges. Presumably the computer will do better next time, and your "artistic contribution" won't be needed at all!
I'm ready for the firing of every op-ed writer and their replacement by AI, though. Whatever human value those columns had was lost a long time ago.
posted by kingdead at 5:15 AM on September 2, 2022
It's a tragedy for 99 percent of the visual arts, though--there's going to be a huge drop off in human skill. Why learn to draw or paint when you'll never be as good as the AI's collective memory? Your job as the lowly flesh machine is to do a little tinkering around the edges. Presumably the computer will do better next time, and your "artistic contribution" won't be needed at all!
I'm ready for the firing of every op-ed writer and their replacement by AI, though. Whatever human value those columns had was lost a long time ago.
posted by kingdead at 5:15 AM on September 2, 2022
It's a tragedy for 99 percent of the visual arts, though--there's going to be a huge drop off in human skill. Why learn to draw or paint when you'll never be as good as the AI's collective memory?
I dunno, people still learn to play traditional instruments, and even electronic ones, in ways that are never going to be as good as what a well-programmed track with a good sample library can achieve. In music, it's had almost the opposite effect - the impossible standards of computer music, of quantising and fixing drums, of autotune pitch-perfection, have all collectively led to a generation of musicians coming up with a higher baseline of skill in many ways.
Humans fundamentally want to do art. Doesn't matter how good the AIs get, we'll still do it.
posted by Dysk at 8:14 AM on September 2, 2022 [1 favorite]
I dunno, people still learn to play traditional instruments, and even electronic ones, in ways that are never going to be as good as what a well-programmed track with a good sample library can achieve. In music, it's had almost the opposite effect - the impossible standards of computer music, of quantising and fixing drums, of autotune pitch-perfection, have all collectively led to a generation of musicians coming up with a higher baseline of skill in many ways.
Humans fundamentally want to do art. Doesn't matter how good the AIs get, we'll still do it.
posted by Dysk at 8:14 AM on September 2, 2022 [1 favorite]
See also: Chess. The greatest players on the planet can't beat a chess program that can run on your laptop, yet: Chess is more popular now then when Bobby Fischer was playing!
posted by gwint at 8:23 AM on September 2, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by gwint at 8:23 AM on September 2, 2022 [1 favorite]
Humans fundamentally want to do art. Doesn't matter how good the AIs get, we'll still do it.
Humans will do art, but there may no longer be any great (or massively popular) human artists. How much that matters is if course itself debatable.
posted by Going To Maine at 8:44 AM on September 2, 2022
Humans will do art, but there may no longer be any great (or massively popular) human artists. How much that matters is if course itself debatable.
posted by Going To Maine at 8:44 AM on September 2, 2022
Perhaps the cracking point will be when art generation programs and chess playing programs start to enter competitions by their own volition.
posted by Going To Maine at 8:46 AM on September 2, 2022
posted by Going To Maine at 8:46 AM on September 2, 2022
I should be clearer: what we are all calling Artificial Intelligence would more properly be called Artificial Opinion. Not all opinions are good and it's a more developed (and currently human dominated) kind of talent to intelligently select good opinions from bad.
Cherry picking among many generated opinions looks like the machine was intelligent when it was merely opinionated. That's a huge step but it's not the singularity by any measure.
posted by abulafa at 8:56 AM on September 2, 2022
Cherry picking among many generated opinions looks like the machine was intelligent when it was merely opinionated. That's a huge step but it's not the singularity by any measure.
posted by abulafa at 8:56 AM on September 2, 2022
the impossible standards of computer music, of quantising and fixing drums, of autotune pitch-perfection, have all collectively led to a generation of musicians coming up with a higher baseline of skill in many ways
You say a higher baseline of skills, I say a boundless baking hot asphalt car park piled with tumbling drifts of interchangeable plastic waste that genuinely moving art stands apart from ever more starkly. Tomayto, tomahto.
posted by flabdablet at 9:00 AM on September 2, 2022
You say a higher baseline of skills, I say a boundless baking hot asphalt car park piled with tumbling drifts of interchangeable plastic waste that genuinely moving art stands apart from ever more starkly. Tomayto, tomahto.
posted by flabdablet at 9:00 AM on September 2, 2022
Janis Joplin didn't need no fucken pitch "correction".
posted by flabdablet at 9:03 AM on September 2, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by flabdablet at 9:03 AM on September 2, 2022 [1 favorite]
Using the github link, I gave it the prompt "Something that everybody on Metafilter will like. It will get me one million favorites." I will let you judge whether the AI succeeded.
posted by yankeefog at 9:45 AM on September 2, 2022 [3 favorites]
posted by yankeefog at 9:45 AM on September 2, 2022 [3 favorites]
I'm deeply disturbed and depressed about the sheer volume of pornography involving real people that's going to be generated with this tech and its near future developments with 100% certainty.
I hate to say it but... it's already here. I won't link to anything but I took one of my monthly recon missions to 4chan last night and saw a thread on AI generated images of nude celebrities.
posted by charred husk at 10:06 AM on September 2, 2022
I hate to say it but... it's already here. I won't link to anything but I took one of my monthly recon missions to 4chan last night and saw a thread on AI generated images of nude celebrities.
posted by charred husk at 10:06 AM on September 2, 2022
Janis Joplin didn't need no fucken pitch "correction".
I agree, and three music and production trends that inspired it aren't always to my taste, but a generation of young virtuoso musicians who can do that kind of pitch-perfection, to the extent of playing with intonation systems and microtonality (e.g. Jacob Collier) and drummers who can keep steady beats they would have been thought impossible without multitasking, triggers, and Beat Detector in the past, they are awe-inspiring. And those skills aren't always applied in search of a pure reproduction of the sounds that inspired them, but rather are used to chart bees musical territory that was just beyond the scope of humans in generations past. That's amazing.
(But I'll still record my bands all at once in a big room of mics when I can get away with it, and refuse the autotune and beat correction, because I like that rawer aesthetic, not because I'm already perfect, far from it. Imagine getting both though...)
posted by Dysk at 10:50 AM on September 2, 2022
I agree, and three music and production trends that inspired it aren't always to my taste, but a generation of young virtuoso musicians who can do that kind of pitch-perfection, to the extent of playing with intonation systems and microtonality (e.g. Jacob Collier) and drummers who can keep steady beats they would have been thought impossible without multitasking, triggers, and Beat Detector in the past, they are awe-inspiring. And those skills aren't always applied in search of a pure reproduction of the sounds that inspired them, but rather are used to chart bees musical territory that was just beyond the scope of humans in generations past. That's amazing.
(But I'll still record my bands all at once in a big room of mics when I can get away with it, and refuse the autotune and beat correction, because I like that rawer aesthetic, not because I'm already perfect, far from it. Imagine getting both though...)
posted by Dysk at 10:50 AM on September 2, 2022
To Dysk's point, exhibit A: DOMi & JD BECK - WHATUP
posted by gwint at 11:14 AM on September 2, 2022 [2 favorites]
posted by gwint at 11:14 AM on September 2, 2022 [2 favorites]
I'm still not convinced it's healthy for a human soul to screw itself down that tight.
posted by flabdablet at 11:48 AM on September 2, 2022
posted by flabdablet at 11:48 AM on September 2, 2022
Going the other way didn't work out so well for Janis (and those kids seem to be doing alright.) But point taken. Going full on John Henry doesn't help anyone. Gotta find the right balance with The Machines.
posted by gwint at 12:46 PM on September 2, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by gwint at 12:46 PM on September 2, 2022 [1 favorite]
Why bother to learn mediaeval stonemasonry? Though a few decades ago, someone in France set up a project to revive the practice as a historical exercise. Most of the world didn't notice, and the robust bros who use phrases like “underwater basketweaving” to mock things of little market value were busy with other targets, so it continued quietly for a few decades. And then the Notre Dame burned down, and those skills were in demand.
At worst, if a huge database of visual art from Lascaux to Lisa Frank fed into a complex statistical correlation engine replaces most visual art, there'll be handfuls of people who draw, paint, etch and so on for the love of it and/or the love of learning and keeping alive a complex, archaic skill, much as there are people who make chainmail. Perhaps hand-drawn art will be a prestige object, valuable because of the human-hours that went into it in the same way that a Swiss watch that's less accurate than a cheap Casio FW-91 is. Perhaps the more humane societies will channel funding into the practice and preservation of these arts, rather than just leaving it to the handful of wealthy dilettantes and/or people who can scribble a quick sketch in between gig-economy errands.
posted by acb at 6:35 AM on September 3, 2022 [2 favorites]
At worst, if a huge database of visual art from Lascaux to Lisa Frank fed into a complex statistical correlation engine replaces most visual art, there'll be handfuls of people who draw, paint, etch and so on for the love of it and/or the love of learning and keeping alive a complex, archaic skill, much as there are people who make chainmail. Perhaps hand-drawn art will be a prestige object, valuable because of the human-hours that went into it in the same way that a Swiss watch that's less accurate than a cheap Casio FW-91 is. Perhaps the more humane societies will channel funding into the practice and preservation of these arts, rather than just leaving it to the handful of wealthy dilettantes and/or people who can scribble a quick sketch in between gig-economy errands.
posted by acb at 6:35 AM on September 3, 2022 [2 favorites]
« Older [post] with a review of [name of author]'s [title] | How To Beat A Dead Horse (Into Smithereens) Newer »
This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments
posted by NoxAeternum at 5:03 PM on August 31, 2022 [13 favorites]