Matthew Lyon
apparently there's a thing going around about how "the media is pushing anti-AI so that leftists don't use it to build their own drones"
and "why should we care about all these data centers? who's using all that water anywaym
and my partner was telling me about how an acquaintance is falling for this stuff and taking classes by someone pushing it and my immediate thought is:
this is an op. they're falling for a fucking op.
Matthew Lyon
My partner considers herself non-technical (favoring nerding out on physical things over electronics, basically) and she had a lot of questions for me while trying to understand the AI rabbit hole our acquaintance went down; it spanned a whole bunch of topics but the one that stuck out most was “finding one's artistic voice" and "making things accessible to those who couldn't afford art school” because that's often a highly subjective thing
And – I mean, I think that our brains (but mine in particular) understand things through metaphor and simile, but the one that stuck for me is – it's like hiring a ghost writer, or commissioning something. You wouldn't do that and claim it's your creativity. GenAI tech — even if you were to train your own model in an attempted ethical manner on public domain works — is *at best* worse than hiring someone else's vision and voice, because the machine isn't capable of having a vision or voice, it just averages things, just blends them up, and not in the good kind of way that results in things like Weird Al Yankovic's Polka medleys
As for the “can't afford art school" argument – that is white people entitlement at its fucking finest. Most people who actually *went* to art school couldn't afford it either. Maybe they were fortunate enough to get in on scholarship, maybe they were fortunate enough to have parents to pay for it, but most people who go through art school do it for the love of it, and pay dearly for that for years or decades to come. You want to use that as an excuse for shitty ethics and general laziness? Fuck you
Regardless, there is a difference between "wanting to have made something" and "wanting to make something”, and in that difference is where you will find an artist's voice, for it is borne from the struggle of making hundreds or thousands of decisions of such minute detail that no amount of prompt tweaking could possibly capture the nuance. Using GenAI isn't "making something", it's commissioning it, often from stolen goods
Timothy Clark
@mattly Your average "executive" only understands creativity in terms of commissioning it, so of course they're all in on cutting out the human in the middle. These are the folks that do the circle jerk circuit and give each other big awards. For most of that crowd it's not even "wanting to have made" anything, they just want to get a trophy from the trophy store, so long as whoever sees it thinks they earned it.
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