Good post by David Golumbia on ChatGPT and how miserable it all is :rat-salute-2:
I don’t think there is ever going to be a good reason to use a nuclear bomb
My take remains the same, the current way in which capitalists will use AI is bad. But there doesn’t seem to be a solution that doesn’t just end up on a slippery slope and it still doesn’t address the elephant in the room which is how do you actually enforce this.
Society would have to around and see AI art as reprehensible as child porn, so that not only you can get a broad international legislative consensus against it, but also be able to mark sure capitalists enforce this legislation.
So will we get the same consensus with AI tools? Its a rhetorical question isn’t it? We can’t get people organized to do any meaningful climate change praxis and that is an existential threat.
We only have one recent example of something becoming socially taboo in a short amount of time and it was NFTs. If you can convince the entire art community to organize and oppose AI art then maybe AI art could end up just like NFTs. Actual professionals and people involved in the community are the ones that should be convinced to be against it. Wasting time arguing with with the average person wont change anything if half the art community is split on the issue.
Counterpoint: it helps me with programming problems.
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.
dont care i love that thing it gives great advice (sometimes). even though its by default very neolib.
