Good post by David Golumbia on ChatGPT and how miserable it all is :rat-salute-2:
There are good arguments against the current direction of AI development, but only one of them makes a brief cameo in this piece (AI reifies social inequalities and bigotries and further refines them). Missing is what ought to be obvious: These models are hot garbage. The create product of their “work” is bad. Look at that shitty racism rap - ignore the racist and sexist comment and just look at it from the perspective of writing lyrics. It fucking sucks. It has an at-best-loose understanding of meter, rhyme seems to exist purely to make its phrasing maximally awkward, and it uses no real poetic technique. The only lyrics it could actually replace are the random interjections of European techno producers. Then go look at the “art” these things produce. It’s complete shit. It’s just a reproduction of an idiot’s understanding of what an image is supposed to be. At its absolute best, it isn’t good enough for a coffee-table book of mediocre art.
As a programmer, these tools are vaguely useful for some boilerplate code when monitored, but most of the code it spits out either doesn’t work or reflects the reality that the model does nothing but put together words it thinks are related, with no understanding of the underlying use of the code in question. It only performs well when you give it a purely abstract exercise. Start using it for anything real, and you’ll be rewriting 70% of the code it gives you.
You are correct but I think in these discussions there is an assumption that AI tooling will eventually become good enough to overcome those problems.
I’m not particularly worried about that, tbh. These models don’t understand why we put the things together that we put together, just that we do. They can duplicate the things we do, but that doesn’t mean they can duplicate the subtextual conversation between the reader/viewer/listener and the art that makes art art in the first place.
