I cheekily posted a screenshot from Colossus: The Forbin Project above, but the things being discussed aren’t what most concern me about AI.
It’s this:
It’s not even a ‘we better not give them control of our weapons’ situation. It’s a ‘we better hope a human doesn’t listen to them and think it’s a good idea’ situation.
I’m fine with people using AI as long as nobody ever ever again says Hip Hop “isn’t real music” because of sampling. Happy Black History Month.
It is not and there have been court cases where the AI companies straight up said that if they didn’t steal references, they wouldn’t have enough data to work.
That sort of thing is infuriating.
Once, rock wasn’t “real music.” Before that, jazz wasn’t “real music.”
I can’t imagine what the connection between those three genres might be when it comes to popular acceptability.
Are people still saying that? I thought we’d graduated at least a quarter century ago to older Hip Hop fans saying that the new Hip Hop wasn’t real music.
Coming Soon: Shirt My Annoying Jackass Parents Said about every bit of music that I ever liked. Pack a lunch.
Sometimes I’m terrified at AI replacing talented professionals and other times I’m like “better hope AI doesn’t end your career because automation already replaced your next job at the checkout counter” but beyond that I don’t think its a force I can fight against 
Yeah. None of the people I’m talking are fans. And none of them have graduated in their thinking.
I don’t think AI can be stopped, and there’s always going to be a market for the output. Even if people can tell the difference, there will be enough who will be like “I know it’s fake, but I still buy it.”
If we get really sophisticated in our perception, there will end up being a pricing tier. Let’s say a human work sells for $10 and a robot work sells for $1. And everyone might prefer but not all can afford human work, so robot work still sells. (To see this in action in a pre-AI world: knock off products, gourmet vs fast food, etc.)
True, robot work in the example earns only 10% of human work, but it can be generated infinitely faster, making it profitable at even the lowest sales rates. This is also how spam email works; they send out so many messages that it doesn’t matter if less than 1% bring in money - that 1% adds up especially when the cost of sending the messages is effectively zero.
I don’t have a solution for this. As long as there is money to be made, the output of the greedy relying entirely on AI will overwhelm the output of the pure artists or those using AI as a tool. (Well I guess I could propose abolishing money but that seems like a lot of work. I wonder if I can get a robot to do it for me.)
“You call that art?!?! My two-year-old energy-sucker of a prompt-taker (sponsored by Mer-Coffee™) could do better than that!!”
The most likely result is that humans will evolve to have a random number of fingers, so as to match all of our art.
Yes, AI doesn’t get hands right and blatantly rips off artists, but the same can be said about Rob Liefeld!
I wrote a novel a while back that I’m still deciding what to do with it. So I took the main setting of the story and went to an AI image generator and typed in a description of what it looked like to see what would come out. Honestly, while the images generated were good, they’re not creating what I typed in. I’m guessing that if I stuck with it, I could find the exact right combo of words that would teach the AI what I mean, but it’s certainly not there. Yet.
This is coming. AI can already make short videos that look almost real. Instead of saying no, what needs to happen is that we face it head-on. “We have this tool. How are we going to use it? How are we not going to use it? What are the limits?” If we don’t have those conversations at the beginning, then, we’ll be left with whatever comes out of this willy-nilly usage now and I have no idea how that will pan out. (My general view of social media is that it has made society worse overall. So I’m not particularly optimistic about AI doing any better.)
There has not been enough discussion about the applications of AI in the field of Godzilla imagery.
I’d argue the problem isn’t with the technology per-say, it’s with society as a whole. Current society(in general, not just Ameicran/Western society) has barely adjusted to the telecommunication revolution of the 20th century, we aren’t quite ready for AI yet. We are trending way to close to Blade Runner and too far from Star Trek, currently, imho.
There’s no “we” here when powerful people already swimming in millions or billions have already decided that I have to have it, and only on their terms, whether or not I want it.
Why would I try to argue philosophy or practical applications with people who can’t even see or hear me? It’s like Horton Hears A Who but without the humane finish.
As some have said, AI is here, and it’s not going away. At least not until the inevitable collapse of Modern Civilization, quite possibly brought on by rogue AIs, but you can’t stuff that genie back into the bottle at this point without doing away with distributed computing.
I have had brushes with AI in both my professional and personal capacity. As a Software Engineer, I have been exposed to AI in a couple of different capacities. The first was using OpenAI for background replacement on video chat app. This is a use for which I think AI is extremely capable, and without which you very likely could not accomplish the task. Simply put, without AI, you would not be able to even blur your background in a Zoom meeting. I think it is a pretty beneficial use of the tech.
The other capacity is one in which AI is designed to help you code. I have not used it myself, but paired with a teammate who was using it. From that experience, it seemed the AI in question really just automated googling things for you, although it was doing it behind the scenes. It could find answers to help you with your coding more quickly than googling, but not more accurately. Before our employer banned using AI for coding, we did a few tests, and I was often able to come to the preferred answer before the AI, although it always had an answer more quickly than I.
That was about a year ago, so I am sure advances have been made, and I have one friend who is also a programmer and is pretty smug about using AI all the time. He is also an unbearable know-it-all at times, and better taken in small doses. When he brings up AI, it is time for me to move on. Anyway, I have mixed feelings about this usage of AI, as it could eventually mean I am out of a job, and already seems to be impacting the industry. Hopefully I can make it through the next 10 years to retirement, we will see.
On the personal front, over in our Pathfinder thread, we have made use of image generation AI. I am not good at writing prompts to get good results, so after several tests with different AIs I gave up, but several players have been able to use it to good effect to make portraits of their characters (and others), as well as NPCs and mosters.
In the past, and when we started the first thread, I would have (and still do) use(d) random images sourced from Google, or images sourced from published products I already own (and have sometimes purchased multiple times). With tabletop games, I sometimes see players make their own art to depict their characters, but I have never known anyone to purchase images from artists for this purpose. Since these are not professional, or commercial endeavors, I think AI enhances the experience a bit, but is not otherwise taking money from the pocket of an artist that I can tell. If there is an RPG character portrait industry that I am unaware of feeling the hit, then I apologize for my ignorance. Regardless, it is not a service I would ever consider using. If not for AI, I think most of those players using AI now would do what I still do, spend several hours scouring the internet for the right image, or just use an image of an Negan from The Walking Dead because the player is using a nasty looking morning star.
Okay, rant over, but to sum up: AI is here, it’s not going away. Some uses are good, some are bad, most are indifferent. We have to figure out how to deal with it, at least until it figures out how to deal with us.
An example of AI writing code. AI “invented” the game, then wrote the code for the game. I think it’s kind of nifty. But is it good code? I have no idea. I’ll leave that call to someone smarter about such things than I am.
From a cursory look the code seems pretty simple, using HTML, PHP, and eventually CSS. I used PHP 20 years ago, but have not touched it since then. It certainly isn’t cutting edge tech, but it can get the job done without much infrastructure to support it. With the CSS styling, I do see it used Flexbox, which is what I would prefer for styling.
Without taking a deep dive into the code, I would say it did a good job, very quickly, but reached for tech that may be a bit dated, so is likely not optimal.
