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The simple answers to the questions that get asked about every new technology:
Will [blank] make us all geniuses? No
Will [blank] make us all morons? No
Will [blank] destroy whole industries? Yes
Will [blank] make us more empathetic? No
Will [blank] make us less caring? No
Will teens use [blank] for sex? Yes
Were they going to have sex anyway? Yes
Will [blank] destroy music? No
Will [blank] destroy art? No
But can’t we go back to a time when- No
Will [blank] bring about world peace? No
Will [blank] cause widespread alienation by creating a world of empty experiences? We were already alienated
A few of those answers need to be reevaluated for “AI”…
Yeah, the problem with this comic is that it somewhat minimizes how
<technology>can exacerbate the ongoing problems.Yep, this comic did not age well. This technology literally targets artists. That’s pretty new.
But it will not destroy art or music.
Man I really hope so. But the vast majority of people consume mass produced formulaic media already, I don’t see AI helping that trend.
Isn’t that literally the last line, but for art? The average person gave very little fucks about “art” before AI, and most art happened for purely base reasons, like marketing or porn. Fancy shmancy art will continue to exist.
No amount of people doing that will ever destroy art or music, the only thing that can is reducing artists living conditions enough to where they can’t make art.
commercial incentives already ruined art if you’re worried about this ruining art.
But now Spotify and co have a financial incentive to generate as much slop as possible and to push it to their users aggressively. Why? Well cause if their users only listen to slop, they won’t have to pay any actual artists anymore. So you know it’s guaranteed to happen. This is capitalism after all.
That will mean people make music for the love of the craft again, music has sucked because of commercial incentive, maybe this will revive the craft.
I know artists who use AI to help them design something, but then they go out and actually manifest the physical thing…be it a mural or a sculpture or a tattoo. So no, it likely won’t harm the artists who can use it to their advantage, not for a long time.
Art is a fundamental human drive. In fact, not even human - neanderthals also made art. The fact that we can make cool looking pictures really easily with a computer will no more destroy art than photography did.
It will (and already has) HURT them, certainly. But that’s still a far cry from “destroy”.
i still think it holds up tbqh, ai exacerbates and concentrates many problems but it doesn’t really create new ones. content farm slop existed before ai, it’s just easier to make now. people who use ai for everything already didn’t give a shit about most things. people are still making awesome music and art. there are still many smart, talented people and there still will be. and we were already alienated.
as always, the problem is capitalism
Blaming capitalism is a cop out at this point. You can’t just ignore some very specific problems about a very specific technology then gesture wildly at the world and be like, “if only we didn’t have the entire system set up the way we do, if only we had a perfect economy”.
Good and bad things can still happen in capitalism. You can’t just throw up your hands and say “capitalism” when rat poison ends up in baby food. Regulation can still exist in capitalism and has a proven track record to work. You don’t have to replace the entirety of your economic system to prevent AI data centers from being built.
AI is a huge umbrella term, not a very specific technology at all.
obviously not, and i support people who stop them. but even there, ai isn’t exceptional. streaming services like youtube or netflix, or massive online games, also consume a ton of electricity and have polluting datacenters, datacenters used for ai aren’t fundamentally different from datacenters used for something else, and yet people only build movements against them when it’s ai. don’t get me wrong it’s good that we’re educating people on the harms caused by datacenters. and it’s good that many of these projects are being canceled. but datacenters are a problem exacerbated by ai, not created by it.
and you’re right that a communist economy would not inherently fix this. maybe there would be less datacenters overall because people (and their governments) would prioritize the health of communities over chatbots, netflix and fortnite. but datacenters are not inherent to any economic model.
for everything else tho?
Well, the new problems are the scale of things. For example if humanity had only burned a small amount of oil each year, earth would have been pretty alright, at least until the heat death of the sun. But we started burning way too much and fucked. Same here, a few people being able to create slop kinda just self regulated, but now all of humanity can do it for free and it’s incredibly destructive.
Which? They all seem accurate
There is already science that shows that people using llms makes them measurably worse, in an incredibly short amount of time, at tasks than they were before using llms.
So, “will x make us all morons? No” actually has some peer reviewed work that seems to imply "possibly NOT ‘no’ "
Google Maps also makes us bad at finding our way manually. Are we therefore a moron?
Getting worse at tasks doesn’t make you a moron. Are you a moron because you aren’t as good at mental arithmetic as you were when you practiced it for school? No.
Said “science” is a handful of cherrypicked studies that cannot reliably say such things. The US has been in a downward spiral of ignorance for a little while now. And if it is caused by anything, it’s a combination of poor schooling, poor parenting, and social media.