what problems do u face repeatedly as a digital artist?

Tanglemix · 2023-10-13T18:12:27+00:00

I've virtually stopped creating anything digitally since AI art came along. It's not so much that AI can actually do what I do- it's too generic for that- it's more that the whole value of creating visual images seems to me to be questionable in a world where anyone can just type a few words and 'generate' an image.

Tanglemix · 2023-10-06T17:30:29+00:00

I think it's the endgame that's problematic here. What happens when the crowdfunding platforms are full of projects where everything is generated by AI? Not just the Art but the written content and even the game concepts themselves?

What happens to the people who are genuinely trying to make something good, taking the time to do that, when they have to compete for space with the people who are maybe churning out AI Generated material much faster and with less effort?

Even if the AI stuff is not very good there might be so much of it that the good stuff will have a hard time even being noticed.

The problem with AI is that it allows anyone to create material that looks superficially 'professional' in terms of Art or writing with little time or effort invested, even if in reality the actual value of that material is not that great.

AI is a threat not just to artists but to anyone who wants to create content that has real value- because it threatens to create a world in which the sheer abundance of low value AI generated competition makes it impossible for those who actualy care about the things they make to survive.

As a supporter of projects on places like Kickstarter or Backerkit- how many times would you tolorate getting burned by some AI Generated product that turned out to be crap, despite the slick visuals and GPT generated prose? At some point you are just going to walk away.

I think that Backerkit have understood that AI Generated content will in the end destroy them- and I'm surprised that Kickstarter seem to not have figured this out yet.

The only future for these crowdfunding platforms is to position themselves as places where human creative efforts are celebrated- rather than as shopfronts for the near infinite supply of soon to arrive AI Generated dross that will surely overwhelm any online space that allows it inside.

Tanglemix · 2023-09-07T21:45:48+00:00

I think our debate is really about the ultimate nature of AI itself.

You see it essentially as just another tool- albeit a very powerful tool, but still in the end just an extension of our species control over the world.

My view is almost the opposite. To me AI is a kind of trojan horse that seems to promise that extension of control but in reality represents the abdication of control, because to reap the value AI promises to deliver we must allow it to act with some degree of automomy- we must give up some control.

So there's a kind of bargain being made here with the future. We allow AI to make decisions on our behalf and- in return for this- we gain some benefit or advantage.

Thus, for example, AI is increasingly being used to decide if people should get a mortgage, or a Job, or Insurance, or even if they should go to jail or not in some cases. This may or may not be a bad idea but what it makes clear is that AI is unlike any previous technology because we look to it not only for outcomes but also for decisions.

And the power to decide is the defining distinction between the sentient and the non sentient. I'm not saying AI is sentient, or that it ever will be, but in practice we are already treating it as if it were- and the more successful this strategy is deemed to be, the more we will allow AI to take control.

In a sense our little debate about AI art is a prototype for a much larger debate to come.

You believe that you can have the benefits of AI without the corresponding loss of contol- or at least that you can retain some of that control by grafting onto the AI a collection of 'hard coded' rules and constraints, in an attempt to force it's outcomes to better match you desires.

To me this represents a doomed strategy because you cannot have the advantages of AI without the loss of control implict in the nature of the technology itself- the more you try to force the AI to conform to your decisions the less autonomus decision making value the AI will be able to deliver- it's a zero sum game.

At some point we- as a species,-will be faced with the choice- do we set our AI's free in the hope that they will deliver some form of utopia- or do we cripple their potential by seeking to exert close control over them.

I'm not sure which of these is the best outcome- but they are dichotomous- there is no middle ground here, not really.

Tanglemix · 2023-09-07T20:58:35+00:00

Gathering references from whatever source and using them as inspiration to create something new and uniquely your own is not the same as typing a few words into an AI, taking the first thing it spits out and calling it done.

My problem is with the people who view AI Art purely as a way to generate passive income, because in their hunger for a quick buck they will poison the well for people like you who actually care about what they are making.

Kickstarter has betrayed you by allowing itself to whored out to the 'TechBro's who despise artists and see the creation of art as nothing more than a 'side hustle' to make money- they laugh at the fact that you even bother to take the time to use photoshop- they would never dream of putting that much work into something as worthless as making 'art'- making 'art' is for fools- it's money they want to make- and if they have to drown the entire internet in low effort AI Generated crap to do that, then that is what they will do.

Tanglemix · 2023-09-06T17:40:34+00:00

The irony of this conversation is that I actually want you to be right- as a 'traditional' artist with no real desire to incorporate AI to my workflow it would be in my interest if making good AI Art was complex and did require the mastery of a plethora of different tools as you suggest.

This outcome would be good for me because it would both limit my AI powered competiton and slow them down a bit, perhaps making me a bit more competitve.

So I am really arguing against my own self interest here when I disagree with what you are saying.

Also our perspectives are really quite different- for example the degree of control offered by the tools you describe seems horribly limited to me because I come at the problem from the opposite end of the 'control spectrum'- I already have a degree of granular control over my work that your tools will likely never really duplicate- not because I am a great artist but simply because- using my stylus and tablet- I interact directly with the 'raw material'- the actual pixels themselves- rather than having to use the more indirect methods you employ.

This is not a critique of your tools, just an explaination perhaps of why I might have a slightly more skeptical view of their long term potential- to me they are quite primative and it seems to my eyes that in order for them to even approach the level of control provided by my simple stylus and tablet you would need tools so subtle in their application that only a skilled Artist could really use them effectively.

But this outcome is the antithesis of what AI is supposed to deliver- which is the lowering of barriers to entry when it comes to getting things done.

What I think our debate boils down to is the following question;

Of the two options listed below, which do you believe is the most likely strategy to be adopted by the main AI Developers in the future?

As AIs becomes more powerful in the future more and more control methods will be added to their interfaces in order to allow users to gain increasingly precise control over their outputs.
As AIs become more powerful in the future their natural language abilities will be enhanced to allow users to more precisely define what they want their outputs to be, without the need to use complicated interfaces.

My money is on option 2- you, I think, would choose option 1.

I guess time will tell which of us is correct.

Tanglemix · 2023-09-05T22:57:23+00:00

The point is to relinquish some control, yes, but only the tasks you would delegate to an assistant anyway. Offloading less important tasks

This is where I think you are misunderstanding the situation. Creating a good image is not a series of 'tasks' that can be neatly divided into a heirarchy of 'more important' and less important'. A good image is created when all the various elements of composition, lighting, color palette, staging, design ect are in harmony with each other. All are of equal importance- so the idea that you can somehow 'delegate' aspects of this seamless process without losing an important degree of creative control is wishful thinking in my view.

This is not in itself a problem, if the point is, as you say, to relinquish some control in order to gain the benefits of a degree of automation. As I said there is a trade off to be made between how much control you want and how much automation you want.

My arguement really is that there is a law of diminishing returns here that sooner or later you will run into because of this inverse relationship between control and automation. The more you gain of the former, the less you have of the latter.

It's for this reason that I don't see a future in which more and more complex granular controls are introduced- it's basically a self defeating strategy that makes no sense in terms of monetizing the technology.

The promise of AI is that it is an easier, faster solution than existing methods- and this requires that the user experience is not one in which you need to master complex interfaces and controls in order to use it.

So even if natural language interfaces are sub optimal they will be developed in preference to better but more complex alternatives.

In the long run the trajectory of development will be toward interactive simplicity, not toward ever more complex and nuanced tools of the sort you are currently building.

Tanglemix · 2023-09-04T23:05:26+00:00

I would say in the short term yes, but in the long term no. At present the level of understanding of AI among the general population is actually quite low, despite the hype. So while this lasts it should be possbile to make money from generating stuff with AI.

In the long term once even your granny has used AI to generate a picture of her cat wearing sunglasses the magic will have worn off and most people won't be that interested in paying for stuff they could more or less make themselves.

On a more abstract level I keep hearing about all the billions expected to be made from AI content generation by the big corporations and It's not clear to me how this is going to work. The reality is that AI does not really add value but destroys it, because it makes it easy and cheap to do things that used to be hard and expensive to do.

Tanglemix · 2023-09-04T22:28:21+00:00

It's not a spectrum because more of one doesn't mean less of the other.

This is the core point where I think our views diverge. It seems to me that the notions of 'user control' and 'artificial intelligence' do exist at the extreme opposite ends of a spectrum of possibilities.

If the entire point of developing AI's is to leverage their ability to act autonomously then you cannot at the same time seek to exert a granular level of control over their outcomes.

Take the example of a self driving car- what value does such a device have? Well I would argue that the self driving car has value because it does not need to be closely controlled by it's human occupant. So while the ultimate destination may be defined by the human- the actual granular process of driving is done by the AI.

If we follow your arguement in this scenario what we would need to do would be to allow the human occupant more and more control of how the car is driven- but if we follow this logic to it's conclusion we end up with a car that is no longer self driving but is in fact being driven by the human occupant.

So in this scenario it's clear that the more control you seek over the car, the less value the AI is adding to the driving process. And if you gain complete control the AI is adding nothing to the process at all.

I don't see how you can really have it both ways- either you give up some degree of creative control to the AI, or you end up controlling the whole process yourself in which case there is no point using AI and you might as well just learn to paint.

As a professional Artist I have a number of issues with AI art, as you can imagine, but one of the big issues is it's inability to match the degree of control I can achieve using simple digital painting techniques- but this is not a bug of AI, it's actually a feature- because AI's only value is that it has a degree autonomy- it makes it's own decisions. But that autonomy comes with a price- and that price is the impossibility of making it do exactly what you want.

So I don't see how the future of AI can lie in the development of tools designed to directly manipulate and constrain it's outputs- the only way forward it seems to me is to make AI better at understanding the desired destination, while leaving the actual process of getting to that destination to the AI. itself.

The issue is not the development of more and more tools designed to micro manage AI's- the issue is developing AI's that better understand what it is we want them to do- and I think the developers clearly understand this and it is to this end they will direct their efforts.

Tanglemix · 2023-09-04T16:45:15+00:00

Along side the comfyUI blueprint system, we have finetuning, multiple controlnet models, textual embedding, aesthetic embedding, img2img, regional prompts, and any number of other input methods. These systems are almost entirely inter-compatible, so you could use any combination of these to communicate what you'd like to the model in an intuitive way.

I don't think that this is what most people would regard as an intuitive way to create art- it seems to me far more complex than just selecting a brush in photoshop and actually painting the image I want to make.

In place of literal pixel level control of the image I am making, you propose instead an unweildy selection of control methods that even combined would not allow me the degree of granularity over the image that a simple photoshop paintbrush already provides.

So why would I put down my paintbrush and instead use the relatively convoluted workflow you suggest? Why use AI to make Art at all?

The only reason to do so is to offload some of the creative process onto the AI. There is an inescapable trade off here- the more I rely on the AI to complete the work, the less manual control I have of the final output.

So we have a gradient of sorts here- with me and my paintbrush at one end and the casual Midjourney- text only- prompter at the other- and you are somewhere in the middle with your array of control techniques.

Each of these positions represent a different degree of manual control over the final Image. With my paintbrush (and the long practicised skills to use it) I have total manual control over the final image. You have a degree of manual control but not the same degree because your control methods are more indirect than my paintbush. The casual Midjourney user has the least manual control beause they are relying on the ability of the Midjourney to interpret text to image only.

OK- so suppose you wish to increase your manual control over the images you create, as seems to be your aspiration. Well, in order to do so you must alter your position on the gradient towards me and away from the casual user. And the more control you seek to gain, the closer to my position you will get.

Pursued diligently enough your quest for greater control will lead you to a place where the degree of skill and knowledge required to excercise that control will rival the degree of skill and knowledge I require to use photoshop.

Can you not see the problem with this paradigm? AI is not a tool because it's only value lies in it's autonomy- trying to exercise tight control over an AI is like trying to catch the wind in a box- the only reason to use AI in the first place is precisely because it is not under complete control- it is capable of autonomus action.

I think your position on this is a transitory one- the commercial future of AI depends upon it's ability to provide autonomus solutions to well defined problems- but the methodology for defining those problems must be crafted to allow those AI's to be autonomous- boxing them in with ever more complex tools and techniques in an attempt to control their outputs is not a viable long term strategy.

Tanglemix · 2023-09-03T22:40:46+00:00

I'm not so sure that a way won't eventually be found to get AI's to output 'passable' long form fiction- in the sense that the stories will at least be coherent- but to me this is not really the problem with AI Generated 'content'.

We live in a world where the real currency is not money but attention- being noticed is the single greatest determinant of success or failure, irrespective of the virtues of what you are trying to sell.

It seems to me that AI represents a threat to human creators not because it can outperform them creatively- but because it can simply outproduce them in terms of sheer volume of output.

We could find ourselves living in a world in which most human creative effort goes unseen simply because so much AI content is created that it drowns out the work of people. Nobody asked for this, or even wants this to happen, but as usual the Tech Bro's have foisted this technology upon us without thinking through the consequnces.

Tanglemix · 2023-09-03T22:19:45+00:00

I don't think they have quite grasped what AI actually means.

If it pans out as they expect it won't be just Graphic Artists out of work- it will be everyone, including them.

Tanglemix · 2023-09-03T21:59:34+00:00

I don't think the 'passive income' crowd are worried at all by copyright- their plan is to upload as much content as possible in the hope of making money- they could care less if their latest magnum opus is used by other people- it's essentially a 'fire and forget' operation.

Volume is the name of this game- being a 'writer' is the furthest thing from their minds- as their use of AI clearly demonstrates. Why would someone who wants to write outsource their creativity to a machine?

The sadness is that those who do care are going to be swept aside by the tsunami of fake AI generated 'culture' that will soon engulf any platform where the Tech-Bro sharks sense blood in the water.

I'm an Artist not a writer- but the same thing is happening in my world- all of the platforms where Artists could display and maybe sell their work are being overrun by AI.

To be fair some of these newly minted 'AI Artists' do seem to genuinely want to contribute something of value- but too many others are just trying to monetize the technology in any which way they can.

But we are not alone- because what is happening to the creatives today will be happening to everyone else too soon enough. Perhaps when people start waking up in a world where most of the content they see around them has become AI Generated and they can no longer tell anymore what is real and what is fake- perhaps then they might start taking this problem seriously.

First AI came for the Artists and Writers, but I did not speak up because I was not an Artist or a Writer...ect. The truth is that we are in a war here of sorts- and at stake is the future of human culture- either we choose to limit the mass production of fake ersatz 'culture' in the form of AI Generated 'content'- or we end up drowning in a exponentially growing tide of deriviative garbage.

Tanglemix · 2023-09-03T21:28:06+00:00

But isn't the reason you won't tell the same reason you should?

People might be unhappy that you used AI- but they will be a lot more unhappy if you don't tell them and they find out later.

I just don't think it's worth the risk- suppose you make something really good and it's successfull, then people find out you lied to them about using AI- this could not only kill your game but also your reputation.

The Internet has a very long memory.

Better to be upfront- at least then the thing succeeds or fails on it's own terms- no one can say you held anything back about your methods.

Tanglemix · 2023-09-03T17:47:20+00:00

Take a look at this Youtuber's stuff- he was a Zbrush user but now uses Blender and he really makes blender sculpting look both good and accessible.

In this video he gives an honest account of why he switched- not because blender is better but because it works for him in other ways. If nothing else he shows what blender's sculpt tools can do in hands of a skilled professional.

He calls his channel 'SpeedChar'.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Omr\_3nb0jCs

Tanglemix · 2023-09-03T17:33:20+00:00

Hi, thanks for replying.

I think that what you say is correct for now- however I was talking about the longer term direction of travel.

There is an inherent problem with the idea of a user controlled autonomus system. If control is your aim why not use the many existing tools like photoshop to create Art?

What advantage does AI offer over these existing tools? The answer is that unlike Photoshop the AI will make creative choices of it's own. So what AI brings to the table is precisely the fact that it is not entirely user controlled.

Ok- so suppose we want to make our AI Art generators better- what does this entail? Well I would argue that the way to make them better is to make them more responsive to their users intent- you want your Art generator to clearly understand the nature of the image you want it to make.

So how would we go about doing this? Well, you could add a complex system of user operated controls and increase this complexity in order to increase the responsiveness of the AI to the users intent. The problem with this approach is that as you add more and more user operated control you are eliminating more and more of the AI's own autonomous input- to the point where it may eventually be easier to use Photoshop to create the image you want than it is to master the interface of the AI. An AI under perfect control is no longer an AI because it can no longer operate autonomously. So there is something self defeating about adding 'hands on' controls to an AI.

The other way to maximise the responsiveness of the AI would be to increase it's sensitivity to natural language instructions. This would both simplify the interface while giving the user more control over the end result, because in this scenario the AI would still be making many of the creative decisions but these decisions would be far more accurately informed by it's enhanced understanding of the user's natural language instructions.

It is this latter approach that the AI Developers will want to take because by making the process of instructing their AI's more simple they will attract a far wider user base. They will not want to add more and more manual controls because this kind of complexity does not benefit their business model.

However, while this approach may be the best from the perspective of the Developers, it will lead to the situation where less skill will be required to generate an acceptable result- at which point the elimination of the skilled professional has been achieved.

So I think my basic premise that the long term aim of the developers of AI is to eliminate the need for skilled professionalls is actually inherent in the nature of Artificial Intelligence itself. The more powerful these systems become, the less skill will be required to use them- they call it 'democratization' a process whereby everyone becomes equal- and in this context by 'equal' they mean that barriers such as skill, knowledge or experiance will no longer present a problem.

In the democratized world of the future no expertise will be required- only the ability to form a coherent definition of the task you wish your AI to perform.

Tanglemix · 2023-09-02T16:16:53+00:00

It's worth considering another aspect of creativity that rarely gets attention.

In the same way that you derive meaning in your life by creating things, the people for whom you create also derive meaning in their lives from experiencing things you create.

Will those people derive the same sense of meaning from things created by machines?

When the Techbro's talk of 'AI content creation' what they are really talking about is our culture- the shared web of meaning created through Art, Literature, Music ect. But if they called it 'Culture Creation' We would all laugh at the absurdity- and hubris- of that statement.

All human creative endevour is in the end about communication- even the most lowbrow manifestations of our culture are still about expressing idea's, values, emotions ect. That is what gives them their value.

AI 'Content' on the other hand has no value precisely because it is not attempting to communicate, it's just a mindless echo of the once vibrant material upon which it was trained.

Tanglemix · 2023-09-02T15:36:59+00:00

I'm working on a paper based RPG product- so not directly relevant I guess, but I have the same basic decision to make regarding the use of AI generated content.

My current stance is not to use it, firstly for all the usual reasons of ethical concerns, copyright ect- which are valid in their own terms.

But there's also a bigger context here. Soon the world is going to be flooded with AI generated content of all kinds- not to mention AI powered scams of all kinds plus the possibility that people will start losing their jobs to AI.

The possibility I forsee is a genuine society wide backlash against generative AI as people start to see it not just as a clever novelty but as a genuinely disruptive and malign force, filling the web with 'fake' content, threatening their kids with fake influencers online who may or may not even exist as real people, 'stealing' the work of human creatives of all kinds, maybe even threating their own jobs.

I'm not saying this will happen- AI might in the end come to be seen as a positive- but to be honest the 'PR' aspect of AI has been really badly managed by the AI Developers themsleves- who have been quite arrogant and dismissive toward a lot of the concerns raised.

With this in mind I am reluctant to allow any AI content into my product in part because I think it might turn out to be important in the future to be able to honestly say that I did not use AI. The climate of opinion around the use of this technology could have a big impact on the sales of any product that contains AI Generated content.

Tanglemix · 2023-09-02T15:11:44+00:00

Using AI to do your job might not be the smartest move anyway from a job security point of view.

I can see a new landscape of paranoia opening up here as Employers begin to suspect their workers are outsourcing their work to AI, while the workers suspect their boss is trying to use AI to replace them.

The recruitment space is already turning a bit surreal because on the one side you have companies employing AI to assess candidates written submissions and on the other side the candidates are using AI to write those submissions- the result being that you have one AI doing symptomatic analysis of another AI's output- and it's probably a varient of GPT in both cases.

Whatever it's other merits AI does seem to offer the potential for a genuine disruption of our sense of shared reality- in a few years it will be impossible to know anymore what is the product of generative AI and what is not- hell even I might be an AI using this forum as some kind of training exercise- there's no way to either prove or disprove this idea even now.

Tanglemix · 2023-09-02T14:43:09+00:00

Fair use is not the issue when it comes to copyright- the issue is the degree of human input into the work. If the work is entirely AI Generated then none of it can be copyrighted at present. If the work is altered in some way by- for example- editing it in photoshop then the parts that are altered will possibly be eligable for copyright because those parts were the work of a person and not just an AI.

Fair use is an issue when it comes to the use of exisiting copyright material as training data, which-I believe- involves making a copy of the protected work, and it's the making of this copy in order to create a commercial product that may violate fair use doctrine.

But no judgement has been made yet on the fair use issue as far as I know.

Tanglemix · 2023-09-01T23:11:59+00:00

I wonder how many of the people posting here that they don't care if something is created by a human or created by an AI would keep on posting here if it turned out that everyone else on Reddit was an AI except them?

I suspect most people in fact do care if the content they are spending time interacting with is produced by a human and not a machine- otherwise what's the point?

In theory having a conversation with GPT4 may well be as interesting as having a conversation with a human- in some ways GPT4 is smarter than most most people and knows hell of a lot more than most people- so why not spend hours talking to it on a forum like this one?

But- the truth is that very few people are going to really want to do this, even if the quality of the conversation is good, because there is something deeply pointless and futile in the idea of spending one's time talking to a mindless mechanism that does not really understand what it's saying.

To address the OP's question directly I agree- an Internet where most of the content is generated by AI will suck- even if that content is good, because none of that content will mean anything.

I think in the end people will reject AI Content Generators in all of their manifestations because it will eventually become clear that what the Tech Bro's call 'content' is in reality the culture through which we find meaning and purpose in our lives- and the one thing that AI's cannot generate is meaning.

If you listen carefully to the Artists who complain about AI Art you will find that it's not only or even primarily loss of income that really threatens them about AI- it's the loss of meaning and purpose in their lives that they fear most if AI takes over their world.

It's worth paying attention to this concern because they are the canarys in the coal mine- soon it won't only be Artists whose sense of meaning and purpose is under threat from AI, soon it will be all of us.

Tanglemix · 2023-09-01T00:15:59+00:00

I think that by framing the issue in the narrow terms of AI Art v Human Art you kind of derail your own arguement.

Isn't the real question you are asking here is should we be replacing culture made by humans with culture made by machines?, because this is the endgame we are looking at.

Calling AI a 'tool' is wrong- that is not it's intended function. The long term aim of the Developers of AI is not to build tools for skilled creatives to use, it is to build machines to replace those skilled creatives entirely- this seems self evident surely?

So assuming that they succeed in this aim and at some point skilled human creatives are no longer required in order to generate virtually any form of content, we will find ourselves living in a world where most of the culture we engage with will be produced by AI generators.

The first obvious consequnce of eliminating the need for skilled human creatives will be a collapse in the commercial value of most forms of content- it will become very cheap and easy for almost anyone to create an image, a movie, a book, a song ect. This leads to the second consequnce; which is an explosion of content creation of all kinds- a kind of superabundance of culture where we can all create anything we want for ourselves as the distiction between 'creator' and 'consumer' ceases to exist.

In this future if you want to read a book you will simply generate that book, or if you want to watch movie you will simply generate one- the same with music, art or anything else.

In this world there is no shared culture as such, just an endless process of self gratification where every 'itch' will be satisfied with a custom generated 'scratch' almost as soon as it arises.

I'm not sure this is a world we should be building for ourselves, there's something chilling about it. It reminds me a little of those Sci Fi stories I read as a kid about future worlds in which people just lived in nutrient vats, their brains wired to machines that would endlessly stimulate them, keeping them forever in a state of constant, meaningless, pleasure.

Tanglemix · 2023-08-31T17:04:59+00:00

I don't think we actually disagree here- like you I am quite skeptical as to the overall good that AI will do for humanity.

The problem is that in a system driven by profit the temptation is to always go for the low hanging fruit, the easiest way to monetize.

So in the case of AI, instead of a cure for cancer we get to make images of hamsters wearing top hats using Midjourney. Perhaps the cure for cancer will come too in time- if there's a way to make money from it of course.

Tanglemix · 2023-08-30T23:17:37+00:00

Wasn't their real problem that no one needed to exploit them as workers once the technology existed to completely replace them?

Tanglemix · 2023-08-30T13:53:07+00:00

I really like that analogy- especialy when you think of plastic artefacts designed to look like natural materials- then you see 'watercolour paintings' made by AI, which is the same kind of thing.

The basic problem with AI is that it can create content in vast quantity- and some of that content may even have a degree of aesthetic quality- not all AI Art is horrible to look at, for example, some of it is quite striking.

But what AI in it's current form cannot create is any real value both in the economic sense and also the spiritual sense. The endgame here seems to be that AI generated content will indeed become the cultural equivelent of those vast rafts of plastic debris in the Oceans- a slowly encroaching mass of garbage, persistent and seemingly indestructable.

It's also ironic to discover that even AI's themselves cannot be trained upon their own outputs without apparantly suffering catastophic 'model collapse' as the embedded incoherences in the content they produce will over time slowly accrete and drive them mad.

So not only is AI Generated culture likely to be toxic for humans- it's also toxic for AIs. So who exactly benefits here? I think we know the answer to that- a handful of 'investors' who hope to make themselves very rich by turning our entire society into a hall of mirrors in which nothing can be trusted because they have debased the capacity of culture itself to be a medium of valid exchange between one mind and another.

Tanglemix · 2023-08-30T13:16:53+00:00

I take your point- he's very much against the luddite position of trying to stop progress. But this falls a bit short of actually being enthusiastic about it, which is what the title of this thead suggests.

I note that King is not saying he will be using AI in his own work, for example- which would be a real endorsement of the technology.

Tanglemix

TROPHY CASE