Generative AI

[yojoebro82]

Disney is flooding the market with authorless slop and people aren't good enough readers to tell the difference, which is where we're at right now.

I'm doing my best in my small, limited fashion to fight this as a fourth grade teacher. I get 10 year olds at the beginning of the year that can barely read, would never pick up a book if given the option. My main goal is to read as much as possible and discuss and think about and question what is read. So much so that the worksheets and multiple choice quizzes generated by the textbook companies take a back seat. Yeah, it's bad right now. I have to cut this off now because I'm going to get on a soap box saying what parents should be doing. I guess I'll just say read to them. Read to them and start young.

With as little offense to Joe and his brother as possible, we also have to stop blaming corporations as faceless entities for this.
PEOPLE develop these systems. PEOPLE are accepting money to train AI. PEOPLE are selling each other out for a few fucking dollars from the giant corporation that wants all of our creativity to be obsolete. So when large corporations are destroying the arts, let's try not to forget that it was regular people acting as class traitors and corporate simps that even made it possible.

I thought about this this morning when my wife told me about it. If I, as a teacher, was told I have to teach AI how to teach grade school, would I even accept that job, or would I walk away? (And, so we're all on the same page, let's say walking away means you're fired). I want to say I would walk away, but everyone has multiple different circumstances going on in their lives, how can I say for sure?

 

[Damien]

I thought about this this morning when my wife told me about it. If I, as a teacher, was told I have to teach AI how to teach grade school, would I even accept that job, or would I walk away? (And, so we're all on the same page, let's say walking away means you're fired). I want to say I would walk away, but everyone has multiple different circumstances going on in their lives, how can I say for sure?

100%
I mean, if the options are 'feed AI or my kids starve to death' I don't think that's a difficult question at all. For any of us.
If the options are 'take a worse job instead and struggle a bit more.' Well, it gets fuzzier but I understand how some people don't think that's much of a choice depending on their circumstances.

But ultimately, we (regular folks) are going to be responsible for the choices we make. The choices, sometimes, just absolutely suck. I'm also in a very fortunate, privileged position (right now) that my company simply cannot operate without me. I'm in no danger of losing my job or being forced to do things I don't want to do in that sense. I sympathize with those who aren't on as solid footing as I am and can't just say 'no, I'm not going to do that.' At the same time, it's still a choice they're making that they, and we, have to live with.

 

[JakeEkiss]

100%
I mean, if the options are 'feed AI or my kids starve to death' I don't think that's a difficult question at all. For any of us.
If the options are 'take a worse job instead and struggle a bit more.' Well, it gets fuzzier but I understand how some people don't think that's much of a choice depending on their circumstances.

But ultimately, we (regular folks) are going to be responsible for the choices we make. The choices, sometimes, just absolutely suck. I'm also in a very fortunate, privileged position (right now) that my company simply cannot operate without me. I'm in no danger of losing my job or being forced to do things I don't want to do in that sense. I sympathize with those who aren't on as solid footing as I am and can't just say 'no, I'm not going to do that.' At the same time, it's still a choice they're making that they, and we, have to live with.

Something that came up in the latest AI steering meeting at my job was some folks from another campus department came in and were asking questions about ethical use of AI. Specifically, they were asking about the environmental concerns (which is good because that was less of a rant from me than they'd have gotten if it were the plagiarism and worker displacement stuff). And I was like "if that's your primary concern, then the only option is to divest completely, because you as users have no control over how much water or power any of these AI companies use. Most of the resources used are for training anyway, so you on the prompt end of the equation are downstream from all the worst bits. They've already been done once you get there and they are incentivized to continue training to make better models so you'll use it more."

And they were like "Oh."

Yeah. "Oh." It's like fracking or oil production. The end user cannot make it cleaner. Why do people not get this!?

(I know why, I'm just annoyed by it)

 

[Damien]

Most of the time they do get it. They just want permission to throw their hands up and say 'well, it's already happening and there's nothing I can do so drill baby drill.'

 

[JakeEkiss]

Most of the time they do get it. They just want permission to throw their hands up and say 'well, it's already happening and there's nothing I can do so drill baby drill.'

I am running into a bit of that, though thankfully less than I might in some places. Librarians, as a species, are pretty onboard for the human experiment. They don't typically want the robots taking over.

 

[joshsquash729]

I thought about this this morning when my wife told me about it. If I, as a teacher, was told I have to teach AI how to teach grade school, would I even accept that job, or would I walk away? (And, so we're all on the same page, let's say walking away means you're fired). I want to say I would walk away, but everyone has multiple different circumstances going on in their lives, how can I say for sure?

Definitely a double-edged sword. I'd want to think that I'd keep the job, because at least then, in theory, I could at least attempt to provide both sides of the argument. I'd have to let the kids hear the AI explanation, but I could also be there to present the other side of the argument or fill in the blanks and urge critical thinking, which I think AI does not do. Hell, even before AI, so many folks just took whatever answer they got as THE answer, whether it was true or not. People don't like to think critically or try to see different sides of an argument. I've gotten shit from people before for even suggesting that there might be more to a story or that someone who did something shitty may not entirely be the monster they think they are. But I've always been an overthinker, to be fair.

Which is to say nothing of the artistic element of AI. Nobody is gonna know how to write or draw or what have you, because we have a machine to do it for us. Hell, even the fact that the majority of kids in my niblings' class can't read an analogue clock scares the hell out of me. It's so dystopian, and while it does give me hope that so many people seem to be against it, I can't help but feel that it's just gonna be an avalanche of stuff that we're forced to accept eventually.

 

[docsilence]

I thought about this this morning when my wife told me about it. If I, as a teacher, was told I have to teach AI how to teach grade school, would I even accept that job, or would I walk away? (And, so we're all on the same page, let's say walking away means you're fired). I want to say I would walk away, but everyone has multiple different circumstances going on in their lives, how can I say for sure?

I get this. I think in a perfect world we all have the option to say fuck off, I'm not doing it, but we live in a world that doesn't want workers to have that option, so...

The newly elected mayor of the city where one of my writing jobs is posted an AI image for an upcoming event to the city's reddit page and my first thought was "how can I quit this job if the new mayor requires us to use AI?" But four hours later he'd deleted the post and residents were bragging about cyber-bullying the mayor-elect for using AI, they ripped him a new asshole. (The town has a HUGE artist community and has no patience with AI as a general rule, it's kind of inspiring.) He literally deleted his entire post and then slapped a new version of it built with clip art in Canva instead. The thread got UGLY, too. "I didn't vote for this" / "If I'd known he was AI I wouldn't have supported him" / "If this is what we have to look forward to I'll be signing up for anyone who runs against him" and he's not even in office yet.

 

[Red Ogre]

At the beginning of this year the college I work at brought in some people to show us how AI could help us explain concepts to students in terms they might understand better. The best and shiniest example they came up with was relating photosynthesis to football. I read their paragraph twice and understood both less than when I started.

 

[Spectre Two]

I don't know where I stand on AI anymore. I find it equally fascinating and (in terms of environmental and social problems) terrifying. Maybe that's just... age? I'm old enough to remember when Photoshop came around and birthed the first "digital artists.". Digi-art looked like crap at first, and the old guard beat down on anyone using/doing it; "it's not art, it's just tracing/using stuff others made, yadda-yadda". If the word "slop" had been in the conscious mind back then, it would have flown around a lot. Flashforward to today, pretty much everything is done digital now and digital art is the norm. Now the next big paradigm shift is happening and I don't know on which side to stand anymore.

 

[Damien]

I don't know where I stand on AI anymore. I find it equally fascinating and (in terms of environmental and social problems) terrifying. Maybe that's just... age? I'm old enough to remember when Photoshop came around and birthed the first "digital artists.". Digi-art looked like crap at first, and the old guard beat down on anyone using/doing it; "it's not art, it's just tracing/using stuff others made, yadda-yadda". If the word "slop" had been in the conscious mind back then, it would have flown around a lot. Flashforward to today, pretty much everything is done digital now and digital art is the norm. Now the next big paradigm shift is happening and I don't know on which side to stand anymore.

I would say that Photoshop and generative AI are not even both fruit, let alone being apples to oranges.

Definitely a double-edged sword. I'd want to think that I'd keep the job, because at least then, in theory, I could at least attempt to provide both sides of the argument.

If your job is to train AI to do something, there is no 'both sides' to argue. You're assigned to do this specific thing. You're not a consultant, in that case. You get hired, you do the thing you were hired to do and you shut up about it. So I don't think there's value in 'staying involved' against your ethics unless you are going to starve to death if you don't, or unless you intend to sabotage the entire system from the inside. Which, while it would be hilarious, I doubt most people working on training AI are actually doing.

 

[JakeEkiss]

I don't know where I stand on AI anymore. I find it equally fascinating and (in terms of environmental and social problems) terrifying. Maybe that's just... age? I'm old enough to remember when Photoshop came around and birthed the first "digital artists.". Digi-art looked like crap at first, and the old guard beat down on anyone using/doing it; "it's not art, it's just tracing/using stuff others made, yadda-yadda". If the word "slop" had been in the conscious mind back then, it would have flown around a lot. Flashforward to today, pretty much everything is done digital now and digital art is the norm. Now the next big paradigm shift is happening and I don't know on which side to stand anymore.

I'm sorry, but this just isn't the same thing, and I really bristle at the comparison. I'm not assuming malice in your comment, but as somebody who has been here through a lot of that digital transition, this isn't that. It is a paradigm shift, but the framing of it as jus the same as photoshop vs traditional artists is deeply inaccurate. This is a system to aggregate wealth into fewer and fewer hands.

This is not a new medium that executes the same thing faster or in a different format. This is an active removal of human decision making. There is no corollary between the two except one being a newer technology. Digital art did not, regardless of what some companies commissioning art thought, do the work for you at the click of a button. This effectively does. And this does so only because it has literally consumed the work of humans who did the work the hard way first. It cannot function without eating and devaluing the work of those who came before. None of that is true of digital art. Digital art was a toolset, a way of making marks on a new platform, but the marks made were still guided at every step by human hands.

Like, we used to joke about how annoying it was when clients talked to us like we could just click the "black magic" button in photoshop and the art demons would grant us a piece. Now that's basically what we have, only the art demons used all that work we spent ages putting together the hard way to do it.

 

[Spectre Two]

And this does so only because it has literally consumed the work of humans who did the work the hard way first. It cannot function without eating and devaluing the work of those who came before. None of that is true of digital art.

That's... romantic, but not quite what happened? A lot of digital art back then was cobbled together, even traced, and photoshop pictures were also just cobbled together from different sources. They had to be, because photoshop didn't create anything from scratch either.

 

[JakeEkiss]

That's... romantic, but not quite what happened? A lot of digital art back then was cobbled together, even traced, and photoshop pictures were also just cobbled together from different sources. They had to be, because photoshop didn't create anything from scratch either.

Yeah, this is a misunderstanding of what I'm referring to, and I think a wider misunderstanding of commercial art methods. Cobbled together photos are what we'd now call "photobashing" and they have a direct precedent in traditional art, collage (which has it's own deep history of transitions, one of my favorites being its use in comics, especially Jack Kirby's work on stuff like FF). That is a digital recreation of a traditional technique. It is not what AI is doing.

As for tracing, like, tell me you don't know how a lot about illustration and painting is done without telling me. Tracing using projectors, camera obscuras, grids and photographs, and similar methods have been part of art since antiquity, and even in the age of modern art commerce, if tracing was good enough for Norman Rockwell, the original Disney animators, Alex Ross, Drew Struzan, and basically any realist painter you can think of in the last century, and it definitely was, it's good enough for anyone. "Tracing" is an accusation baby artists use because they simply don't know any better. Tracing other people's work without attribution or compensation, that's an actual sin, and one working professionals are very aware of.

Again, those are all methods guided entirely by human hands and actively moderated by human decision making. I have used those methods as well as others that are simple optical rendering. I have done both traditional and digital as a working professional. I know of where I speak on this.

 

[Ru1977]

 

[JakeEkiss]

Don't get me started. I lived with an inker for the better part of a decade.