Hot take here, but I think the version of this experiment that used rat neurons instead of human neurons was more interesting. I can't look for the link right now but there's a video on Youtube, the equipment and techniques are fairly similar.
We know a human can play Doom, so it kind of makes sense a portion of a human brain can do so in some fashion. But it's way more interesting when an animal that normally doesn't play Doom can, specially if it's just a portion of its brain.
Outside of that, I'm personally not very fond of hardware that can rot or die from malnutrition though. It's fun as an experiment, but as a thing you can actually use I just don't see it. It has a literal limited lifespan, requires more maintenance and imagine trying to debug it ("Turns out it caught some bacteria and it's malfunctioning" kinda scenarios? No thanks.)
> The Get Some PRIORITIES! troll began to appear after the September 11, 2001 Terrorist Attacks. A classic offtopic troll, it employs highly hyperbolic language to criticize the other posters and Slashdot in general for discussing trivialities like new gadgets or changes in U.S. copyright law in the wake of such a horrific event. ([0]).
You're right! Therefore society should collectively stop having fun, playing games and propagating culture, until all of our problems are dealt with. I bet that will go just swimmingly.
I'm sorry to inform you that the mere automated pre-processing used in building of a training set will most likely disable any form of poisoning because the image is being altered before training. All popular training tools do this.
Art stealing is a thing. I've had by art stolen regularly. Multiple Doom mods use sprites I made and only one person (the DRLA guy) asked for permission. I've had my art traced and even used in advertisements with me only finding out by sheer chance. I've had people use it for coloring without crediting the source. This has happened for more than thirty years. You can only learn to live with it, lest you risk going absolutely insane. If you are popular, people will do stupid stuff with your stuff. And if you aren't popular, you art is not going to be used to train, anyway (sets are ordered by popularity and only the top stuff gets used. The one with 3 upvotes is not going in.)
AI is technically another tool, and it can be used poorly (what people refer to "AI slop", using default settings, some LoRA and calling it a day) and it can be used properly (forcing compositions, editing, fixing errors...) to convey an idea or emotion or tell a story. Critical eye does the rest.
After all, the machine doesn't do anything on its own, it needs a driver. The quality of the output is directly proportional to the operator's amount of passion.
Consider zero and single click deployments in IT operations. With single click deployments, you need to have everything automated, but the go sign is still given by a human. With zero click, you'll have a deployment policy instead - the human decision is now out of the critical path completely, and only plays part during the authoring and later editing of said policy. And you can also then generate those policies, and so on.
Same can be applied to AI. You can have canned prompts that you keep refining to encode your intent and preferences, then you just use them with a single click. But you can also build a harness that generates prompts and continuously monitors trends and the world as a whole for any kind of arbitrary criteria (potentially of its own random or even shifting choice), and then follows that: a reward policy. And then like with regular IT, you can keep layering onto that.
Because of this, I don't think that intent is the point of differentiation necessarily, but the experience and shared understanding of human intent. That people have varying individual, arbitrary preferences, and are going through life of arbitrary and endless differences, and then source from those to then create. Indeed, this is never going to be replicated, exactly because of what I said: this is humans being human, and that giving them a unique, inalienable position by definition.
It's like if instead of planes we called aircraft "mechanical birds" and dunked on them for not flying by flapping their wings, despite their more than a century long history and claims of "flying". But just like I think planes do actually fly, I do also think that these models produce art. [0]
What do you mean? How can AI cripple an artist? Even if the AI can do stuff better than I can in less time, it doesn't affect my art at all. It's the same thing as human artists better than them existing. Then again, I've seen people who get jealous to a raging degree because artist X can do better than them, so...
Every artist worth anything strives to be better at their craft on the daily, if that artist gets discouraged because there's something "better", that means that artist is not good because those negative emotions are coming from a competitive place instead of one of self-improvement and care for their craft or the audience. Art is only a competition with oneself, and artists that don't understand or refuse this fact are doomed from the start.
Nice idealistic view. It doesn't pay the bills.
Artists quit doing art when they have to flip burgers instead.
And AI is absolutely unconditionally a competitor in that arena.
Then they were never real artists. I spend 14 hours a day at the office in a rather stressful job and still make time to draw, and I'm everything but a superhuman.
Online artists are more likely to be consultants and marketing experts. They "flip burgers", or rather make PowerPoints and lays out magazine articles, 12 hours a day for 8 days a week anyway. So AI only "financially" hurts them in the sense that it hurts their dopamine income.
This is more like it. Every dedicated artist I know does something else to pay the bills, from actual burger flippers to sysadmins like me. They will make time to draw things because they simply like doing it.
I really think this is why a lot of discussions and projects around generative AI and AI-relevant art don't go well. It's a one-way outside influence that also affect economy as second order effect to cultural impacts. Because economical impacts of these online arts are mere downstream effects, manipulations in that domain just don't work.
Disclaimer: I'm an artist with 30+ years of experience.
Downgraded to AI training? Nonsense. You forget artists do more than just draw for money, we also draw for FUN, and that little detail escapes every single AI-related discussion I've been reading for the last 3 years.
Not an artist myself. I think some artists may become more like head chefs in some Chinese restaurant, who is more like QA and give direction to cooks to improve their work. I think it is hard to notice the details and give concrete feedback if you are not working on it professionally for a long time.
This is probably true. I've noticed some people have better critical eye with the AI output than others. People with artistic skill can make stuff of much higher quality, it seems. I guess they get immediately bored of the default settings which compose most of the low-quality slop being pushed around.
The issue is whether the artists creating things for love of the game will be crowded out even further by studios churning out slop (or in HN terms, Minimal Viable Products) for cash. There are probably 15 disposable reality TV shows created for every scripted sitcom or drama that needs good writers, set designers and directors.
They already are; have been for decades now. AI is amplifying this, true, but art done for love and for money are already pretty much disjoint ventures, and in areas where they mix (like TV shows), it's an uphill battle for the artist - and they're not always right, either; a good show is more than just great writing or beautiful art.
The fact that those TV shows exist indicates the root of the problem has nothing to do with AI.
Those show are cheap because they employ fewer people. They still need to employ some people though. To me the greater tradgedy is that they make a product where those people who make it do not care about it. People are working to make things they don't like because they need income to survive.
The problem is not that AI is taking jobs, it is that it is taking incomes. If we really are heading to a world where most jobs can be done by AI (I have my doubts about most, but I'll accept many), we need a strategy to preserve incomes. We already desperately need a system to prevent massive wealth inequality.
We need to have a discussion about the future we want to have, but we are just attacking the tools used by people making a future we don't want. We should be looking at the hands that hold the tools.
Discussions like this often lead to talking about universal basic income. I think that is a mistake. We need a broader strategy than that. The income needs to be far better than 'basic'. Education needs to change to developing the individual instead of worker units.
Imagine a world where the only TV shows were made were the ones who could attract people who care about the program enough that they would offer their time to work on it.
That too would generate a lot of poor quality content, because not everyone is good at the things they like to do. It would be heartless to call it slop though. More importantly those people who are afforded the lifestyle that enables them to produce low quality things are doing precisely the work they need to be doing to become people who produce high quality things.
Some of those hands learning to make high quality things may be holding the tools of AI. People making things because they want to make will produce some incredible things with or without AI. A lot of astounding creations we haven't even seen or perhaps even imagined will be produced by people creatively using new tools.
(This is what I get for checking HN when I let the dog out to toilet in the middle of night)
What distresses me about all this is that we are handling children like if they were a separate species....just use your memory! Of course they can reason better than we think, did everyone forget making plans and having chats with other preschoolers as a preschooler? Everyone has been one! No exceptions!
And yet we act like if kids were a separate state of matter or something.
This strange mental separation can only bring in bad results.
We know a human can play Doom, so it kind of makes sense a portion of a human brain can do so in some fashion. But it's way more interesting when an animal that normally doesn't play Doom can, specially if it's just a portion of its brain.
Outside of that, I'm personally not very fond of hardware that can rot or die from malnutrition though. It's fun as an experiment, but as a thing you can actually use I just don't see it. It has a literal limited lifespan, requires more maintenance and imagine trying to debug it ("Turns out it caught some bacteria and it's malfunctioning" kinda scenarios? No thanks.)