If you think that’s depressing, wait until you find out that it’s basically nothing in the grand scheme of things.

_

And as others have pointed out the water isn’t gone, there’s some cyclicality in how the water is used.

There is so much wrong with this…

AI is a range of technologies. So yes, you can make surveillance with it, just like you can with a computer program like a virus. But obviously not all computer programs are viruses nor exist for surveillance. What a weird generalization. AI is used extensively in medical research, so your life might literally be saved by it one day.

You’re most likely talking about “Chat Control”, which is a controversial EU proposal to scan either on people’s devices or from provider’s ends for dangerous and illegal content like CSAM. This is obviously a dystopian way to achieve that as it sacrifices literally everyone’s privacy to do it, and there is plenty to be said about that without randomly dragging AI into that. You can do this scanning without AI as well, and it doesn’t change anything about how dystopian it would be.

You should be using end to end regardless, and a VPN is a good investment for making your traffic harder to discern, but if Chat Control is passed to operate on the device level you are kind of boned without circumventing this software, which would potentially be outlawed or made very difficult. It’s clear on it’s own that Chat Control is a bad thing, you don’t need some kind of conspiracy theory about ‘the true purpose of AI’ to see that.

Yes, but most people dont have that or take way too long than is worth in effort and (lack of) enjoyability for a simple meme. There already exist models to unblur entire images in seconds. AI should take the shitty work lol.

It is understandable. But what is not understandable is turning a blind eye to the nuance and choosing hate over understanding. I’m glad you have not done so and done your own research, and I happily applaud you for that. But I meet plenty of people that blindly take some art social media influencer’s misguided (sometimes suspiciously conveniently so) ideas on how AI works. Big companies aren’t all that exists, and they are not the only ones making advancements. Or the majority of it, really. It just looks that way because they get all the attention and have all the means.

Pretending it is so is gives them far more unwarranted power than is healthy, as it creates a situation where people think they’re destroying the big corporations, but in fact are destroying the means for smaller creatives that operate in the shadows to keep up and compete. AI technology will never be restricted in a way that will just harm the corporations as it currently is. Stricter copyright laws are a common proposal but I’m sure Disney et al are just downright content if that what ends up with it, as they have enough data to their own to easily train their own AI. And banning the technology as a whole would open up cans of worms that it won’t be banned everywhere, leading to economic losses to the countries that do ban it.

I’m working day to day with professional artists from smaller companies that are using it for the right jobs to speed up their work. But their voices are unheard because if they speak up they get showered with hate and people calling them fake or frauds. Again, people that have created wonderful things without AI and deserve the title of artist multiple times over. They don’t have millions of followers to back them up, so they just don’t bother with and do what artists do, which is to create. Ironically, it’s also in part artists that are silencing other artists over AI, not the big corporations.

is super energy demanding so it actively hurts the environment for no real benefit.

While I agree with that, it should be mentioned that it’s mostly LLMs that require massively out of proportion energy. Generating images is about as expensive as playing a video game on high settings. Modeling software and 3D software also drain energy and producing art is just generally more expensive than consuming it. I think just saying ‘it hurts the environment’ is slightly misguided, since you can say that about literally everything. Humans existing at all is bad for the environment, but the balance of it is what matters. I do think LLMs go over the edge and big company’s insistence to shove it into literally everything is despicable, and not proportional to the benefit.

The energy would be so much better used solving actual problems

So one thing I want to mention there is that AI is downright revolutionary in medicine. You can’t look at technology as something that takes linear paths from improvement to improvements. The lessons learned in one area can also become applicable to other areas. AI can be used to detect cancers early, solve protein folding, find tumors on medical scans. And that’s from just the relatively little knowledge I have of it. So yes, image generation doesn’t solve such issue, but the technology that allowed them to exist does solve real tangible issues, and it’s popularity and spread is inherently linked.

If some people enjoy AI generation, then that’s fine but I think it shouldn’t replace a passionate, skill-based workforce.

100% agree. No AI should ever replace humans. I would rather see people get excited to make something because of AI, and once they have some success and secure funding, switch over to competent human artists. That’s how humans should replace AI in my eyes, not the other way around.

While I kind of get what you’re trying to say, I do personally think you have some point that the expression of the AI is more generic, but that’s kind of where the value is. Certain actions, even if you are manually doing everything, are repetitive and provide a low level of artistic expression. Like coloring in large surfaces, background characters, background buildings. It’s impressive to do so yourself and you can even get very good at it, but in a regular scenario they are unimportant by design. Sometimes you just want to get to the core of where your ideas matter. You can also use AI to upscale your own drawings to allow yourself to add more detail and work on a larger scale. I personally find it horrible and demotivating to manually upscale something I’ve drawn already. You’ll be tracing lines for hours if you want to do it well.

For the more detailed things that no AI is sophisticated enough to be guided towards, that’s something I would also draw myself and leave the AI out of, exactly because I want that level of finer control there. To me it’s about using AI for it’s strengths and not as a catch all, just like you don’t use a sledge hammer to kill a fly.

I do disagree with the framing that ControlNet ‘claws back’ control over the process. I see it more as it enhancing the control you already have. Because you are specifically priming the AI with very fine parameters. The amount of information you can encode in a string of text is just miniscule compared to being able to provide a texture that could realistically be 2K in resolution where you have 2048*2048*4(For every RGBA value) = 16777216 individual pixels that you could fine tune. Same thing with image to image, even doing a couple of iterations with that creates possibilities beyond human understanding of scale, same as other art. Now not every one of those permutations will be valuable, but the same can be said about drawn art. And driving it to the valuable creations is what an artist does.

A big part of my process is reflecting on the value the AI added, and whether or not I can still call something my own by the end of it. I even compare images I’ve completely made myself to the ones that I produced with the AI to ensure that. Especially when I started out I binned some ideas because I didn’t feel they were expressive enough. To me it is a requirement to be happy with what I created. And I think that’s something a lot of people understand in their own way. So I guess we must agree to disagree on that, based on our different experiences.

With ControlNet, you can control that very finely though. It partially combines computer graphics into the mix which is definitely not easy to get into.

But it’s different from drawing, that is for sure. Different decisions with different outcomes and different possibilities. But you see similar differences with every form of art. You don’t make 200 strokes for a photograph, or for a cut out collage, or algorithmic art, or sculpting. But you do make different decisions that are similar in nature. They shape the end product, and in a way no other person would do exactly the same. You still have to be involved in every step of the process, even if some steps are no longer done by yourself, they are replaced by other decisions.

Again, this is assuming they aren’t just clicking generate and calling it good to go, but if someone is using ControlNet they should be well above that, since the quality of blank generations is often not the best and demands refinement to anyone with an creative outlook.

This is why we shouldn’t confuse AI art, AI assisted art, and other forms of visual art, even if they all end up making an image as the end result. Something can be impressive when drawn, but mediocre if made with AI. Just like painting a scene isn’t the same as taking a photograph of that same scene, even if they end up being visually similar. Everything exists in context.

And yes, you are giving up some creative control for sake of convenience. But the question is how much. A painter that hand crafts their brushes will make a different painting had they used a pre-made brush. But we can agree I think that the creative control they lost by doing so is negligible. Artists generally lean on what they have produced before as references too. 3D sculptors can start with a cube too, but if they’re going to be making a person they will start with a mesh of a human figure, male or female depending on what they want. There is no shame in taking shortcuts in steps where it’s possible, even if it’s commendable if you don’t.

Art takes long and is expensive to produce, it would be unsustainable in this modern day to do everything from scratch every time. And as long as you focus on the parts where your decisions make the artistic intent happen, you can still make something unique and valuable in it’s own right.

Yes, I want it to go that way too. But that does take time. Which is why I think it’s a shame some people are really hostile to it indiscriminately. I get that the big corporations are absolutely wielding the worst aspects of it, and I hate that too. But once you go to grassroots and small corporations, suddenly there is a whole different view of it. AI is a product of humanity’s collective efforts, and as such all of humanity should be it’s benefactor, not a small group of people that just happened to have the most money and influence at the time. Especially if they had nothing to do with actually creating the technology behind it. And by making the story about them rather than the people using it as it should, it will inevitably lead to people falling behind to corporations, and widening the gap even further. Making artists even less valued than they already are. Which is something I’ve always fought against even before AI.

I’m sure it won’t bring the same results for everyone, and that’s fine. I’m glad it’s that way and not just so easy it would consume all other ways of making things, as it would cease to be a tool at that point and just become the entire process. I really just try to make what I am already imagining since before I even put anything to paper, and so I know what I want the AI to help me with ahead of time. I get surprisingly close to the idea in my mind because of that. Much closer than I reasonably could get in other ways with the finite time I have.

The majority of people using AI will not insist you use it, aside from just trying to get others a realistic look on what the technology actually is. Just like a photographer won’t preach to a painter that they should pick up a camera. But that does not mean there isn’t benefit to derive from understanding how the other produces art. And if the painter thinks the camera is doing all the work and the photographer is a fraud, it’s probably good for them to get some exposure and realize it’s not just pressing a button. Like I explain here how that metaphor works for AI.

Most people I know that use AI are *shocker*, artists from before AI was a thing. They know how to draw with pencils, brushes, sponges, but also painting programs like Photoshop, sculpting programs, modeling programs, surface painting programs, shader production, algorithmic art. They are through and through artists. Them adding AI to their toolbox does not change that.

You are looking at the lowest form of AI art and then declaring that to be all there is. There is more than just pressing generate to a prompt. If you’re actually interested, I wrote a lengthy post about it: https://lemmy.world/comment/12743504

Hi, person here who’s drawn extensively with pencil as a kid but then slowed down. AI has reignited my passion for art, because unlike pencil or even digital drawing, you can iterate much more quickly, which allows me to do so while working a demanding job and having a life besides it. You are severely underestimating the amount of micro-decisions that go into AI art, and more importantly AI assisted art. If you’ll allow me, let me explain.

Lets break it down into levels of effort and creative input, I like to refer back to photography since it has some comparison:

1. Empty canvas prompting.

2. Image to image

3. Collaboration.

4. AI truly as a tool.

Sadly, most people that talk confidently about how much they hate AI just know point #1 and maybe point #2. But I see point #3 and #4. And when I talk to artists that haven’t yet picked up on AI, but if they are aware (or made aware) of #3 and #4, suddenly their perspective also changes in regards to AI. But the hostility and the blind anger makes it quite hard to get through to people that not all art with AI is made equally. We should encourage people that want to use AI to reach the point of #3 and #4 so that their creative input is significant to the point it’s actually something produced by their human creativity. And this is also where an existing artist switching to using AI will most likely start off from.

Also, in terms of time. #1 might take seconds, #2 might take minutes to hours, but #3 and #4 can take days or weeks. Still not as long as drawing those same pieces by hand, but sometimes I wish it was as easy as people would make it out to be.

Ironically voting for parties like AfD is probably the most illusioned vote you could make. The other parties are full of shit too but there it’s the byproduct not the main feature.

I feel you in avoiding public transit. That’s where my hate comes from as well. And yes, many people that do these things have have excuses. Because they need to, to justify doing their business in a place where their habit unavoidably harms and frustrates other people. I hate the fact we still allow that so readily as society. Or at least we should restrict it further to the point a normal person doesn’t have to be bothered by people like that in public. It undermines public services to an extent.

But after I no longer needed to use public transit, I did start to see things in a slightly different light. And that’s the only thing I wanted to say. People that are conscientious about enjoying any kind of mind altering substances will choose to do so safely and harmlessly outside of public, or in designated places like clubs specifically for that substance. Harm reduction must be central to substance use. And I know now that many people have that mentality. But that mentality is somewhat threatened exactly because they make sure nobody is bothered by them. It causes the experience to be defined by those people in public places, the loud minority.

I hate public smokers with a passion. But you must realize that you have effectively zero exposure to people that contain their smoke by doing it at home or using a method without smoke production. And there could be a lot more of those.

The last line is especially golden for me since I live in the Netherlands so we have plenty of weed being smoked but the vast vast majority of public smoke hinderance is from tobacco smokers. If they decide to smoke in public they have absolutely no shame and will literally do it at places like bus stops and just outside restaurants. Weed smokers rarely do that here. So if I were to believe you it seems to just be correlated to people with shitty attitudes rather than the substance.

But there’s no denying that if everyone would drop alcohol for weed, it would be better. Not because weed is harmless but because alcohol is pretty terrible health wise.

I never anthropomorphized the technology, unfortunately due to how language works it’s easy to misinterpret it as such. I was indeed trying to explain overfitting. You are forgetting the fact that current AI technology (artificial neural networks) are based on biological neural networks. There is a range of quirks that it exhibits that biological neural networks do as well. But it is not human, nor anything close. But that does not mean that there are no similarities that can be rightfully pointed out.

Overfitting isn’t just what you describe though. It also occurs if the prompt guides the AI towards a very specific part of it’s training data. To the point where the calculations it will perform are extremely certain about what words come next. Overfitting here isn’t caused by an abundance of data, but rather a lack of it. The training data isn’t being produced from within the model, but as a statistical inevitability of the mathematical version of your prompt. Which is why it’s tricking the AI, because an AI doesn’t understand copyright - it just performs the calculations. But you do. And so using that as an example is like saying “Ha, stupid gun. I pulled the trigger and you shot this man in front of me, don’t you know murder is illegal buddy?”

Nobody should be expecting a machine to use itself ethically. Ethics is a human thing.

People that use AI have an ethical obligation to avoid overfitting. People that produce AI also have an ethical obligation to reduce overfitting. But a prompt quite literally has infinite combinations (within the token limits) to consider, so overfitting will happen in fringe situations. That’s not because that data is actually present in the model, but because the combination of the prompt with the model pushes the calculation towards a very specific prediction which can heavily resemble or be verbatim the original text. (Note: I do really dislike companies that try to hide the existence of overfitting to users though, and you can rightfully criticize them for claiming it doesn’t exist)

This isn’t akin to anything human, people can’t repeat pages of text verbatim like this and no toddler can be tricked into repeating a random page from a random book as you say.

This is incorrect. A toddler can and will verbatim repeat nursery rhymes that it hears. It’s literally one of their defining features, to the dismay of parents and grandparents around the world. I can also whistle pretty much my entire music collection exactly as it was produced because I’ve listened to each song hundreds if not thousands of times. And I’m quite certain you too have a situation like that. An AI’s mind does not decay or degrade (Nor does it change for the better like humans) and the data encoded in it is far greater, so it will present more of these situations in it’s fringes.

but it isn’t crafting its own sentences, it’s using everyone else’s.

How do you think toddlers learn to make their first own sentences? It’s why parents spend so much time saying “Papa” or “Mama” to their toddler. Exactly because they want them to copy them verbatim. Eventually the corpus of their knowledge grows big enough to the point where they start to experiment and eventually develop their own style of talking. But it’s still heavily based on the information they take it. It’s why we have dialects and languages. Take a look at what happens when children don’t learn from others: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feral_child So yes, the AI is using it’s training data, nobody’s arguing it doesn’t. But it’s trivial to see how it’s crafting it’s own sentences from that data for the vast majority of situations. It’s also why you can ask it to talk like a pirate, and then it will suddenly know how to mix in the essence of talking like a pirate into it’s responses. Or how it can remember names and mix those into sentences.

Therefore it is factually wrong to state that it doesn’t keep the training data in a usable format

If your arguments is that it can produce something that happens to align with it’s training data with the right prompt, well yeah that’s not incorrect. But it is so heavily misguided and borders bad faith to suggest that this tiny minority of cases where overfitting occurs is indicative of the rest of it. LLMs are a prediction machines, so if you know how to guide it towards what you want it to predict, and that is in the training data, it’s going to predict that most likely. Under normal circumstances where the prompt you give it is neutral and unique, you will basically never encounter overfitting. You really have to try for most AI models.

But then again, you might be arguing this based on a specific AI model that is very prone to overfitting, while I am arguing this out of the technology as a whole.

This isn’t originality, creativity or anything that it is marketed as. It is storing, encoding and copying information to reproduce in a slightly different format.

It is originality, as these AI can easily produce material never seen before in the vast, vast majority of situations. Which is also what we often refer to as creativity, because it has to be able to mix information and still retain legibility. Humans also constantly reuse phrases, ideas, visions, ideals of other people. It is intellectually dishonest to not look at these similarities in human psychology and then treat AI as having to be perfect all the time, never once saying the same thing as someone else. To convey certain information, there are only finite ways to do so within the English language.

This is an issue for the AI user though. And I do agree that needs to be more conscious in people’s minds. But I think time will change that. Perhaps when the photo camera came out there were some shmucks that took pictures of people’s artworks and claimed it as their own because the novelty of the technology allowed that for a bit, but eventually those people are properly differentiated from people properly using it.

Like if I download a textbook to read for a class instead of buying it - I could be proscecuted for stealing

Ehh, no almost certainly not (But it does depend on your local laws). But that honestly just sounds like some corporate boogyman to prevent you from pirating their books. The person hosting the download, if they did not have the rights to publicize it freely, would possibly be prosecuted though.

To illustrate, there’s this story of John Cena who sold a special Ford after signing a contract with Ford to explicitly forbid him from doing that. However, the person who bought the car was never prosecuted or sued, because they received the car from Cena with no strings attached. They couldn’t be held responsible for Cena’s break of contract, but Cena was held personally responsible by Ford.

For physical goods there is ‘theft by proxy’ though (receiving stolen goods that you know are most likely stolen), but that quite certainly doesn’t apply to digital, copyable goods. As to even access any kind of information on the internet, you have to download and thus, copy it.

That would be true if they used material that was paywalled. But the vast majority of the training information used is publicly available. There’s plenty of freely available books and information that you only require an internet connection for to access, and learn from.

Your first point is misguided and incorrect. If you’ve ever learned something by ‘cramming’, a.k.a. just repeating ingesting material until you remember it completely. You don’t need the book in front of you anymore to write the material down verbatim in a test. You still discarded your training material despite you knowing the exact contents. If this was all the AI could do it would indeed be an infringement machine. But you said it yourself, you need to trick the AI to do this. It’s not made to do this, but certain sentences are indeed almost certain to show up with the right conditioning. Which is indeed something anyone using an AI should be aware of, and avoid that kind of conditioning. (Which in practice often just means, don’t ask the AI to make something infringing)

This would be a good point, if this is what the explicit purpose of the AI was. Which it isn’t. It can quote certain information verbatim despite not containing that data verbatim, through the process of learning, for the same reason we can.

I can ask you to quote famous lines from books all day as well. That doesn’t mean that you knowing those lines means you infringed on copyright. Now, if you were to put those to paper and sell them, you might get a cease and desist or a lawsuit. Therein lies the difference. Your goal would be explicitly to infringe on the specific expression of those words. Any human that would explicitly try to get an AI to produce infringing material… would be infringing. And unknowing infringement… well there are countless court cases where both sides think they did nothing wrong.

You don’t even need AI for that, if you followed the Infinite Monkey Theorem and just happened to stumble upon a work falling under copyright, you still could not sell it even if it was produced by a purely random process.

Another great example is the Mona Lisa. Most people know what it looks like and if they had sufficient talent could mimic it 1:1. However, there are numerous adaptations of the Mona Lisa that are not infringing (by today’s standards), because they transform the work to the point where it’s no longer the original expression, but a re-expression of the same idea. Anything less than that is pretty much completely safe infringement wise.

You’re right though that OpenAI tries to cover their ass by implementing safeguards. Which is to be expected because it’s a legal argument in court that once they became aware of situations they have to take steps to limit harm. They can indeed not prevent it completely, but it’s the effort that counts. Practically none of that kind of moderation is 100% effective. Otherwise we’d live in a pretty good world.