(no subject)

[brin_bellway]

[cw: discourse, (arguably) apocalypse]


[part 1; part 2; Wayback part 1; Wayback part 2] (by Alexander Wales)


I don't have the guts to say this to his face, but I think he's full of shit.

It's like...he never actually seems to consider the readers' perspective. Here, most notably:

>>I think that in modern times, this is already a huge problem, and AI art is going to make it so much worse. I walk into a library or a bookstore sometimes and see how many of these things are on display, and I feel that same feeling, that there’s so much content you could drown in it all. It makes that howling feeling more intense, as my own contributions to the culture are rendered insignificant.

There's a flipside to that drowning: he *claims* AI art is going to make it so much worse, but from the readers' perspective *the book market is already at full saturation, and so it cannot become meaningfully more so*. We've all heard the jokes about Infinite TBR Lists, right? Why bother having an AI write you something--once the novelty's worn off, anyway--when it's just going to make your TBR list infinity+1?

To deal with the overwhelming possibility-space of books they *could* read, readers in my experience resort to *recommendations*: the social aspect of reading has become more important than ever. Reading a book knowing that nobody else is ever going to read it is *less* lonely than writing something knowing that nobody else is ever going to read it, but it's still lonely: the relationship isn't just between writers and readers, it's between readers and other readers. Please, dude, think for five seconds about the number of times you've read or watched or occasionally listened to something *primarily* because its associated community looked fun, because you wanted to participate in conversations about it with your friends. Or are you telling me your answer is zero?

I was willing to believe him that the visual-art market will look insane after this, because the visual-art market *already* looks completely insane to me: I know I don't understand how [people who think it's possible for visual art to be worth $100] think, so I'll defer to others on predicting how such people will react to AI art being available for pennies.

(although I have to say, a post about technology disrupting the market for paintings that *never talks about the invention of photography* feels...off)

But, as a reader, this doesn't feel true to me at all. I could see myself using this for pornography, but even then only because I have very narrow tastes. For everything else, I have plenty enough to read already, and people to share it with. Why pay more for less?

Comments

[brin_bellway]

One of us is going to look laughably wrong in a decade, and it'll be interesting to see which.

[epistemic status: joking but also not joking] (Or civilisation will collapse before we get the chance to find out, and FTR if that happens I want it counted as a point for me.)

[ilzolende]

I thought you were going to link "The End of Creative Scarcity", not an Alexander Wales piece. The former is I think more interesting.

[brin_bellway]

Yeah, I've read that one and I probably should have come up with a way to integrate it. It's certainly more nuanced, and oddly enough it does a better job of arguing for why AI-generated art would be appealing, perhaps because it doesn't take that appeal for granted.

I think it matters just how big a leap the bowls are over what was available before, though. All of a sudden, society goes from crappy implied-to-be-around-2010s-tech-level AI artists to having AI artists that know individual authors better than those authors know themselves. A big part of the problem of bowl art is that you can ask a bowl for a particular author's *future* output *and get the correct answer*. I don't get the impression that that's a near-term problem we're facing: it seems like the software currently coming down the pipeline won't even give *consistent* answers to that question, let alone correct ones. (Where would it even get the data for that accurate of a simulation?)

(I do find it odd that the characters seem to take for granted that bowl simulations aren't sapient, instead of being uncertain and being deeply concerned by that uncertainty.)

((*looks through that page I pulled off a search engine as an example of the concept (because I'm not sure exactly which page about it I read)*

"Literally nobody outside of MIRI or FHI ever talks about this problem."

Yeah, okay, maybe that's why the characters didn't think of it.))

[contrarianarchon]

Firstly yeah that society is mainly messed up by the absurdly-perfect art mimicry rendering everything pointless, also just in general the vague sense that they're being passively manipulated by aliens towards utopia.

Also, uh, personally: How do people manage to have tastes which the bowls can't satisfy better (esp since they apparently considered and rejected being deliberately contrarian just to prove their human worth)? I'm sure the bowls can do shitty soup (as someone who has occasionally eaten string and bits of orange plastic in real life, you can do better) better than that dude and if you want socialisation they can do the phone number of your soulmate and three books you'll want to spend the next week reading and then the next week discussing with them (drools at own fantasy :P). If your desires no longer align with the output of the desire-fulfilling machine, it will start outputting something else.

[grayestofghosts]

There seems to be a huge problem in these conversations that AI is regurgitating, and that, well, capitalists and readers view regurgitation extremely differently.

Capitalists love the concept of art-as-regurgitory but the thing is, they’ve already done it with Save The Cat et al, and if you listen to stuff like the PRH and S&S publisher hearings the top brass have NO IDEA what makes things popular and all but admit to throwing around money randomly. The book market only takes on books that can be “comp(ared)” to similar books published in the last 3-5 years, ensuring an eternal present of sales. The Marvel Cinematic Universe takes up more and more of all visual media, etc. There is more and more money being pushed into homogeneous slopifying of media, and AI art is just another push in that direction, not a “change”.

Also I’m not sure if this guy is familiar with those who commission DnD character art, either. People who are satisfied with “good enough” are already trawling Pinterest and using picrews for images. The point of commissioning is getting an amount of specificity and art direction you can’t get elsewhere, and I’m not sure if AI as a super advanced doll maker will take much of that away, considering those already exist.

[grayestofghosts]

Anyway... I wrote a little about the elephant in the room when it comes to these generators, the matter of copyright and intellectual property.

[contrarianarchon]

"Man in the 1% of the 1% in both desire to write and success as an author complains that AI writing will have negative impacts on humanity as a whole", sure buddy. I've always thought it deeply deeply concerning that we get all our opinions on the value of art from artists writing about how much they love their work, it seems almost ... incestuous? Recursive? Dangerous, in that we hear songs about the power of music and books about the power of storytelling and I think that just slices something valuable out of the set of human experience which can be communicated by art in a way I'm not sure how to think or talk about. Maybe I should become an anchorite, that seems ... really unpleasant in specific, but they were maybe also working on this problem, not that any one lifetime can make the progress of a thousand compounding works of art in the other domain.

Esp the short story he wrote, I think, exposes how much of this is like, him trying to rationalise his fear of not being read to his readers, who, as you say, have always been and always will be, so opportunity-saturated for mediocre-to-good things to read that generating more shit does nothing except when it comes to filling out tiny niches (which are the thing the generators are most singularly bad at, as it happens, though "I want these ten variables in a well-expressed space to be set how I like them" is somewhat more likely to work than genuinely alien contortions)

but mostly, yeah, exactly, wrt community and like, the power of art to communicate (and the power of humans to curate). He says that art can't express things when it's AI made - I'd rather expect the opposite, that AI would be a more powerful tool for expression and communication (because it's a more powerful tool in general). For every artist I know who is marching along expressing their vision well, I know three who're doing it awfully and thirty who just don't have the skills or spoons at all. Prompt-generated writing might, just, might (but maybe not, see, specificity), be able to decouple the right to express yourself with art from the technical demands of being able to do art. (or you can just take up carpentry, like my father. Very good art-form carpentry, because tables are very specific. My father is a very good carpenter and I like my table a lot!)

The art-as-industry thing is a trashfire. Never do anything for a living which teenagers will do for free. Certainly I'm in the same bin as Alexander Wales of "oh I will probably try and use these tools to illustrate books/media which realistically otherwise would have gone un-illustrated, which will probably increase their quality". Makes the idea of a Fallen Tower publication that much more realistic, since it's not ever going to be high-budget (read: Not ever going to have a budget other than the skill and labour of my and my coplayers) and it needs illustrations but only generic fantasy ones.

My main worry is that I suspect a prompt-generator well-tuned to my personal taste in compelling-but-trash could produce something destructively addictive once it gets up the scale to be coherent at a million words rather than a thousand words, but also yeah, these systems are profoundly generic in nature. See that link Izolende posted [thoughts specific to that link moved to that thread.]

... that sure was like, five different comments all sort of loaded up together. Sorry?

[contrarianarchon]

Just after this, I switched over to discord, to see a conversation where people were in fact discussing specifically how they felt they never needed to pay for art (or writing of any form) because they were so utterly saturated on quality free media of whatever form they desired already, to unanimous agreement. (but also the agreement that paying to support artists you liked was basically virtuous, even if it was the sort of thing you did out of pure desire to support them).