You’re having a much more contentious conversation inside your head. Please stop projecting traits you’d rather be arguing against, when someone points out, it does the thing it’s for. It demonstrably functions. You could make a coherent moral argument about how it was made - but you haven’t. You’ve railed against an imaginary frothing psychopath, because someone politely described utility.
How it was made is addressable, by the way. It’s fixable. There will be vegan models made from bespoke, licensed, and public-domain data. Will that change your opinion in any way? If not, that complaint is decorative.
Okay, here’s reality from the recent past: some guy recreated GPT-2 for $20. Same size, similar training data, equal performance. The original required VC funding. This guy spent pocket change. That was a year ago. That’s how much efficiency has already improved, for training these models. These assholes only spend billions because it’s exclusionary, and they’re all caught in a dollar auction to see who can lose the gentlest. I’m sorry any hypotheticals about that are incompatible with your moral crusade.
Meanwhile, it does the thing.
That’s not going to change and you kind of have to deal with it. We now have programs that just do what you ask, for any output that’s text, images, audio, or video. They often fuck up in horrifying ways. But they’re usually about what you asked for. Especially if you asked for very little. That’s quite useful where small changes are wildly complex, like ‘make this guy look like another guy.’ The robot won’t do it as good as a team of human professionals, but I don’t have a million dollars to hire a team of human professionals, and I’m betting you don’t either. You can still consider projects that involve making one guy look like another.
They often fuck up in horrifying ways. But they’re usually about what you asked for. Especially if you asked for very little. That’s quite useful where small changes are wildly complex, like ‘make this guy look like another guy.’ The robot won’t do it as good as a team of human professionals, but I don’t have a million dollars to hire a team of human professionals, and I’m betting you don’t either. You can still consider projects that involve making one guy look like another.
I am an artist so I understand when I have the shallow desire to make something into a copy of another thing and my artistic capability fails me, or my lack of resources confines me from reaching my initial vision, that this is the true beginning of my artistic journey and all of that stuff before was just a way of backing myself into wanting something new or changed when I couldn’t get the perfect thing I wanted that was in my head.
I have also done lots of community theater so I understand the foolishness of thinking that the important part of making one thing look like another is aesthetic mimcry and not capturing the minimal potent essence of something so it can be received as far more intense of an experience for the audience than a perfect copy could. Theater is a memory not a photograph and you are pointing to how amazingly AI can fabricate high quality fascimiles of photographs as if that doesn’t insult the complexity of how the human brain approaches something it is invited to interpret.
The human brain was designed to see a vivid memory of a hunt through a couple of paint marks on a cave wall, the whole approach of AI and AI cultists deeply insults that magical relationship the human brain has with the most mundane, minimal arrangements of sensation.
Do you think for all these years everybody watching Shakespeare plays where two actors played characters supposed to be easily mistaken for one other as a key part of the plot, that audiences of these shows were getting a suboptimal experience because the two actors didn’t look perfectly alike?
Do you care that in Hamnet that two siblings that are supposed to look so alike that they are frequently mistook for one another, even by death itself, don’t actually look that similar? No, they are child actors who did an amazing job, to care about that in the context of the achievement of Hamnet is shallow and misses the point. You could presumably use AI to “fix” this part about Hamnet (and see Hamnet as Death experienced it and how AI would undoubtedly portray it) and everybody would hate you for it if you did…
My point is that even when AI is good at particular things, often the whole approach is hollow to the Why? with AI. This is something artists could have explained easily to techbros if they ever listened, because the Why? is the whole point.
Denouncing the pursuit of verisimilitude is a novel response to hand-wave CGI. Are you this philosophical when a movie does spend a million dollars, to make two unrelated actors look exactly the same? Should audiences be happier if a no-budget sci-fi film has cardboard displays? It’s cute, certainly. But when a central complaint is that people will notice generated elements and object to low quality, I think they’re gonna notice literal cardboard.
Films are photographs. That’s why The Social Network didn’t just say the Winklevii were twins and expect people to pretend. Movies are a visual medium, whereas theater is mostly heard. Like how television has viewers but theater has an audience. You can Dogville it, and people will roll with that, but anything that looks fake is more commonly a technical failure than a stylistic choice.
So yes, you can tell people the tin can is a spaceship… but they’d rather be shown. The preference for showing over telling is so ingrained that it’s cliche. Nobody needs to announce ‘we lay our scene in fair Verona’ when you can put the mediterranean coastline onscreen, and then cut to a cobblestone village where people have pointy shoes. Folks will get it. They’ll get it on a level deeper than narration, or an overlay reading “Verona, Italy, 15° E, 40° N, June 17th 1435, 0700 hours.” They’ll get it even if the aerial shot of the coastline was bought as stock footage. Or rendered, in one way or another.
Nope, this is a bullshitters tool for people with no talent who want to pretend there is a shortcut to making good art.
The tool you are obsessed with is just a way of convincing yourself you made something when it was stolen from other human artists.
Everybody else can see that but people who have drunk the Kool Aid of AI too hard to admit it to themselves.
You’re having a much more contentious conversation inside your head. Please stop projecting traits you’d rather be arguing against, when someone points out, it does the thing it’s for. It demonstrably functions. You could make a coherent moral argument about how it was made - but you haven’t. You’ve railed against an imaginary frothing psychopath, because someone politely described utility.
How it was made is addressable, by the way. It’s fixable. There will be vegan models made from bespoke, licensed, and public-domain data. Will that change your opinion in any way? If not, that complaint is decorative.
Stop referencing promises about the future to prove your point, you sound like a door-to-door salesperson.
Okay, here’s reality from the recent past: some guy recreated GPT-2 for $20. Same size, similar training data, equal performance. The original required VC funding. This guy spent pocket change. That was a year ago. That’s how much efficiency has already improved, for training these models. These assholes only spend billions because it’s exclusionary, and they’re all caught in a dollar auction to see who can lose the gentlest. I’m sorry any hypotheticals about that are incompatible with your moral crusade.
Meanwhile, it does the thing.
That’s not going to change and you kind of have to deal with it. We now have programs that just do what you ask, for any output that’s text, images, audio, or video. They often fuck up in horrifying ways. But they’re usually about what you asked for. Especially if you asked for very little. That’s quite useful where small changes are wildly complex, like ‘make this guy look like another guy.’ The robot won’t do it as good as a team of human professionals, but I don’t have a million dollars to hire a team of human professionals, and I’m betting you don’t either. You can still consider projects that involve making one guy look like another.
That utility is new and it’s not going anywhere.
I am an artist so I understand when I have the shallow desire to make something into a copy of another thing and my artistic capability fails me, or my lack of resources confines me from reaching my initial vision, that this is the true beginning of my artistic journey and all of that stuff before was just a way of backing myself into wanting something new or changed when I couldn’t get the perfect thing I wanted that was in my head.
I have also done lots of community theater so I understand the foolishness of thinking that the important part of making one thing look like another is aesthetic mimcry and not capturing the minimal potent essence of something so it can be received as far more intense of an experience for the audience than a perfect copy could. Theater is a memory not a photograph and you are pointing to how amazingly AI can fabricate high quality fascimiles of photographs as if that doesn’t insult the complexity of how the human brain approaches something it is invited to interpret.
The human brain was designed to see a vivid memory of a hunt through a couple of paint marks on a cave wall, the whole approach of AI and AI cultists deeply insults that magical relationship the human brain has with the most mundane, minimal arrangements of sensation.
Do you think for all these years everybody watching Shakespeare plays where two actors played characters supposed to be easily mistaken for one other as a key part of the plot, that audiences of these shows were getting a suboptimal experience because the two actors didn’t look perfectly alike?
Do you care that in Hamnet that two siblings that are supposed to look so alike that they are frequently mistook for one another, even by death itself, don’t actually look that similar? No, they are child actors who did an amazing job, to care about that in the context of the achievement of Hamnet is shallow and misses the point. You could presumably use AI to “fix” this part about Hamnet (and see Hamnet as Death experienced it and how AI would undoubtedly portray it) and everybody would hate you for it if you did…
My point is that even when AI is good at particular things, often the whole approach is hollow to the Why? with AI. This is something artists could have explained easily to techbros if they ever listened, because the Why? is the whole point.
Denouncing the pursuit of verisimilitude is a novel response to hand-wave CGI. Are you this philosophical when a movie does spend a million dollars, to make two unrelated actors look exactly the same? Should audiences be happier if a no-budget sci-fi film has cardboard displays? It’s cute, certainly. But when a central complaint is that people will notice generated elements and object to low quality, I think they’re gonna notice literal cardboard.
Films are photographs. That’s why The Social Network didn’t just say the Winklevii were twins and expect people to pretend. Movies are a visual medium, whereas theater is mostly heard. Like how television has viewers but theater has an audience. You can Dogville it, and people will roll with that, but anything that looks fake is more commonly a technical failure than a stylistic choice.
So yes, you can tell people the tin can is a spaceship… but they’d rather be shown. The preference for showing over telling is so ingrained that it’s cliche. Nobody needs to announce ‘we lay our scene in fair Verona’ when you can put the mediterranean coastline onscreen, and then cut to a cobblestone village where people have pointy shoes. Folks will get it. They’ll get it on a level deeper than narration, or an overlay reading “Verona, Italy, 15° E, 40° N, June 17th 1435, 0700 hours.” They’ll get it even if the aerial shot of the coastline was bought as stock footage. Or rendered, in one way or another.