Recent comments in /f/Futurology

SpinCharm OP t1_ja21sgg wrote

Reply to comment by nuclearbananana in AI is accelerating the loss of individuality in the same way that mass production and consumerism replaced craftsmanship and originality in the 20th century. But perhaps there’s a silver lining. by SpinCharm

When I ponder that concern, it fits into a broader one of the value of anything computer generated. “Value” in this context isn’t just monetary or qualitative. It can also be trust. What value can we place on a news article written by computer if we have trust issues with it? We’re already seeing news videos comprising of a generated human speaking generated vocalisations on news topics. What is the value of this and how is that value affected by our trust of its source?

I imagine a future where we are inundated with a limitless supply of AI material. Video, music, printed word, appliances, living quarters, politicians, food.

While all of it will have some value, value is relative to the individual and to other similar generated outputs. But I am currently thinking that much of this will be eclipsed in value by those created by persons. The value of something made by a person instead of by machine will increase in those cases where it is of sufficient quality.

In that regard, AI products may provide a higher baseline of convenience and standard of living. But I suspect that we will start valuing things made by persons for their scarcity, uniqueness, and ability to communicate at a personal level.

When I extrapolate where I see AI going, I can imagine, like most of us, an idealized world of automation, simplification, adornment, convenience and safety. But when I placed myself in that picture I can’t help but think that I’m going to quickly become bored with all the spoon feeding and pampering that I imagine possible. It will all have value, but when we’re completely smothered by it all, it’s relative value diminishes.

We all value roads, and we couldn’t do without them for long. But they’re ubiquitous, expected, utilitarian, and endless. We all value them if we think about it, but for some of us, we value trails more. Or walkways. Or air corridors.

Because we receive a higher qualitative experience - higher value.

I suspect after people have gotten past this current fascination with digital watches, they’ll turn (back) to those things of higher qualitative value. Like art.

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VulcanMind1 t1_ja20l45 wrote

Reply to comment by TheSensibleTurk in How far off are we from not needing to learn languages? by AmericanMonsterCock

I totally disagree with your assessment of AI ability for translation. I've used Facebook translation, Google text and verbal recognition to translate. I also have friends that do translation services.

The reality is there are many examples of sarcasm or cultural explanation that doesn't allow for direct translation.

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SpinCharm OP t1_ja1zi7b wrote

Reply to comment by KiwiShortKing in AI is accelerating the loss of individuality in the same way that mass production and consumerism replaced craftsmanship and originality in the 20th century. But perhaps there’s a silver lining. by SpinCharm

I’ll take a stab at it. Art (to me), is something created by someone that is intended to communicate at an emotional level.

While there are examples of things that meet that criteria that clearly aren’t art, I think almost all creations that are intended to be considered art by their creator meet that criteria.

Right or wrong I’ll stick with that for now and revise it in time. But with that, the question then is, Can AI create art?

Can AI create something with that intention of communicating at an emotional level?

So first, can AI create anything to begin with. I’ll just assume yes to keep the thought progressing. Next is whether AI can have intention.

Well, a computer virus has the clear intention of malicious acts. So computers or computer code can be said act with intent. I’m not particularly happy with that perspective but I can’t ignore precedent.

So that leaves whether a computer can intend to communicate at an emotional level. Clearly they can. A program can be executed that has the intention of eliciting an emotional response from a person.

So where does that leave us with my definition of, “Art (to me), is something created by someone that is intended to communicate at an emotional level.”

I have almost boxed myself into a corner here but there’s one out left and I’m going to take it. A computer isn’t “someone”. It’s “something”. Which means we need to review the classic agreement that computers aren’t people, no matter how clever they evolve to be. Neither is anything else in the universe. The only thing in the entire universe that is “someone” is a person.

If that changes in the future then I’ll need to review my definition. But for now, it stands. A computer can’t create art because, regardless of how complex its intentions are, how creative it’s output is, and how it makes us feel, it isn’t human and therefore what it creates isn’t art.

It’s something else. I don’t know what it is. But I (as of now) don’t consider it art. I don’t consider paintings created by dogs or monkeys art either. I don’t consider sunsets, or supernova, or the Fibonacci sequence art either.

Perhaps there needs to be a new word to describe the output of AI so that we preserve the meaning of art.

Or we need a better definition. But if we think we need a better definition, then we’re implicitly doing so to make a distinction between human and AI output and therefore don’t actually need to complete the exercise as we’ve already decided there’s a distinction we wish to make.

Getting back to your point. We need a way to define art in order to distinguish a difference between human and AI generated art.

But I think logically that’s no longer necessary. The need itself means we implicitly agree that there’s a difference. The rest is semantics.

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Deadboy00 t1_ja1xtdi wrote

Reply to How far off are we from not needing to learn languages? by AmericanMonsterCock

These tools have been commercially available for years. For sure, I wouldn’t depend on it for high level UN talks…but sure seems accurate enough. Hell I would never have passed accelerated French at college without ai powered tools and that was a decade ago!

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/products/cognitive-services/speech-translation/

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nuclearbananana t1_ja1xhi6 wrote

Reply to AI is accelerating the loss of individuality in the same way that mass production and consumerism replaced craftsmanship and originality in the 20th century. But perhaps there’s a silver lining. by SpinCharm

You're a good writer, have you thought of starting a blog? Feels like a waste to see good content being lost on reddit.

There's undoubtedly going to be a silver lining to AI generated art, in the same way we value handcrafted items over mass produced. The one and hope and dread as of late is in creating drawing/painting, with the end result to so easily achievable, all the value will switch the process, and the intention and feelings of the artist.

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KiwiShortKing t1_ja1x5be wrote

Reply to comment by SpinCharm in AI is accelerating the loss of individuality in the same way that mass production and consumerism replaced craftsmanship and originality in the 20th century. But perhaps there’s a silver lining. by SpinCharm

I'd like to defend you here. I'm not sure what khamelean even means when they complain about anecdotal evidence and sample data, as you are making a philosophical point and you've outlined a valid premise. It's actually a very dismissive comment on their part.

If I understand you correctly, you're arguing that the method in which "AI" works is to harmonise and blend existing content, and in doing so, it both exposes and promotes the common features of what we do. And the scale and scope at which this operates means that it could stifle novel thinking, by both overexposing people to the same repeated concepts, and devaluing creative works (perhaps by mass production and efficiency) in a way that discourages people from producing novel content.

I think this is a reasonable concern, but it brings to mind older philosophical debates, like how you can define art (if at all). You have to tackle that problem first if you are to make a case for the distinction between the value of AI generated art and art produced by a human.

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Yuli-Ban t1_ja1x0ql wrote

Reply to comment by blueSGL in AI is accelerating the loss of individuality in the same way that mass production and consumerism replaced craftsmanship and originality in the 20th century. But perhaps there’s a silver lining. by SpinCharm

NAIL ON THE HEAD

That's exactly what I predict.

> Everyone has the capability to generate new stuff and then has the ability to share it. Good stuff gets popular and becomes zeitgeist-y for a while, bad stuff just exists.

Indeed, this is essentially already the case on some websites, like Newgrounds, Soundcloud, and Reddit, except the capabilities are expanded even further.

Though again, I still predict that the "human-created" tag will exist and there will be some segregation between that which is created by humans and that which is created by machines, among other metrics (i.e. human prompted/AI-generated; human-created/AI-assisted, etc.)

Ideally, there will be as few bad actors as possible trying to corrupt such a tag. There might also exist the issue of copyright. Despite some predictions, I don't see copyright dying immediately. Indeed, if anything, I view copyright as being the last chokehold of "canonicity." You, or an AI, may generate the best-ever episodes of a certain TV show, but if the rightsholders say it's non-canon, then it's non-canon, period. Some may disregard their statement, but enough won't.

One other thing I predict is the demographics of all this.

Despite the democratization of media creation being imminent, I actually don't see the vast majority of people joining in on creation, even if the majority do join in on curation. The claims that this will be the case feel eerily reminiscent of the claims by the cyberdelic movement in the 1990s that the Internet will lead to direct democracy and total enlightenment, with every man an artist and every website an enlightened forum.

I predict 60% to 70% of people will stick to AI-generated memes, purely personal creations, edits to existing media, and other small things. Only about 10% to 20% of the population will be responsible for this massive explosion of content creation (and the remaining will stick with human-created media).

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blueSGL t1_ja1vmoa wrote

Reply to comment by Yuli-Ban in AI is accelerating the loss of individuality in the same way that mass production and consumerism replaced craftsmanship and originality in the 20th century. But perhaps there’s a silver lining. by SpinCharm

What about this, with the same prompt/model/seed/...'settings'... combination you can pull the same image out of an image model as someone else

I can easily see there be a time where people generate [music/tvshows/movies/etc] themselves but share the created media and have other people vote and rank it.

e.g. head over to a website that hosts ratings for... AI generated Simpsons episodes and share all the 'settings' needed to load into your own system to recreate it.

Then you can brows by popular generated content, circa whatever month you happen to be in, or by all time, or whatever other metrics you can think of.

Everyone has the capability to generate new stuff and then has the ability to share it. Good stuff gets popular and becomes zeitgeist-y for a while, bad stuff just exists.

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