mrmaplebar

And our world. Don’t forget that.

Let’s see if people keep voting for him and his party!

That’s not my intent. Machine learning as a method of computation isn’t the problem.

Among other things, the problem is how the business of AI is sourcing their input training data, how these outputs are being used to manipulate people and markets, etc.

ML is sometimes the best tool for certain computing tasks and succeeds where algorithmic programming fails. Sometimes traditional logic and algorithms is preferable for it’s determinism and easily understandable behavior.

The AI industry however is built on exploitation of human and natural resources, and it also built on top of a massive economic bubble and is hurting the market for jobs and human made things.

Comparing AI to human learning is neglecting to acknowledge the problems that we currently face with how AI is currently being trained and deployed by the biggest players in the industry.

Interesting idea.

No, that’s not actually how it works in the real world. You’re equating the human process of learning and practicing art to scraping and feeding a bunch of stuff into a machine learning algorithm, but they couldn’t be more different.

Of course a human artist learns from studying the works of other artists, but not at all in the same way that AI does. A human artist has a lifetime of lived experiences which contain a perspective that is unique to their place and time, as well as direct sensory observations and a worldview than informs how they learn and create. Human artists also have individual tastes and personal agency that inform the kinds of work that they like and want to study from.

In other words, when a person draws a cat, for example, they aren’t just recycling images of cats that they’ve seen in other people’s artwork, they are also imbuing their artwork with their own understanding of what a cat is, how it looks and acts, etc.

People don’t function like statistical models. They don’t experience the universe in the same way, they don’t learn in the same way, and they certainly don’t create or interact with artistic media in the same way. Even a digital painting made by a human is not analogous to generative AI output despite the fact that they are both pixels in the end. It’s an entirely different process from start to finish. Would anyone seriously try to argue that what Suno is doing with music in any way equivalent to a person learning how to play the piano or the guitar?

On top of that, a human is obviously not going to have the same potential impact on the market that generative AI would have. Even the most experienced writer can only thoughtfully write a book so quickly, while an LLM can be used to generate countless books in a single day. The market impact of a use is one of the key pillars to making a determination of “fairness” in a legal/copyright sense, and it’s abundantly clear that human learning and “machine learning” are not comparable in terms of their market impact.

In other words, when people equate AI to human learning, it is nothing more than anthropomorphization and personification. What is fair for a human to do one way is not necessarily fair for a corporate computer system to do in an entirely different way. It’s comparing apples to oranges.

If we’re going to talk about the fairness of using copyrighted works for AI training, we have to talk about that specific process, as it really is, and how it affects society. People who equate a person trying to learn how to manga with a corporate image generation machine strip mining every image on the internet are doing nothing but providing cover for some of the biggest, richest corporations on Earth while they exploit the work of unpaid creative labor.

There are other factors that go into the legal determination of fair use, including the amount of the work used and the potential effect of the use on the economic market for that work.

It’s not a correct interpretation of fair use to say that anything non-commercial is legit. (And, even then, in the case of corporate AI it is very commercial…)

https://fairuse.stanford.edu/overview/fair-use/four-factors/

But beyond that legal definition, let’s talk about what seems “fair” in a basic human sense:

If you were a painter who who makes art for a living, does it really seem “fair” for someone else to take your work, without any sort of consent or compensation, and use it to produce other works that are in direct competition (for time, money and attention) with you? How is that “fair” in any sense of the word?

That sounds like exploitation to me.

Call me crazy, but I think the working people whose labor and creativity have made “AI” possible should be reaping the rewards of its existence, not the capitalists and oligarchs in control of the big tech companies.

Because it’s very much not a person, and it didn’t learn anything.

A for-profit corporation simply scraped the net and fed a bunch of other people’s work (the direct result of human labor) into a system of biased nodes and anthropomorphized it by calling it “intelligence” and “learning”.

This is exploitation of labor of the working and creative class, nothing more, nothing less.

It doesn’t have the agency of a human being, nor does have the creativity or individual perspective of one. It has no senses of it’s own or lived experiences to draw from, and it is not sentient. Furthermore, it doesn’t interact with the world or economy like a human being, it does not create things like a human being, and if has no human rights or even copyrights.

LLMs are not people, no matter how some people choose to treat them.

Not really. It’s still not ethical to exploit the labor of others, even when our favorite computer nerd does it.

Ultimately the working people who created the data that was used to train the AI have not given consent and were not compensated for their work. Instead, Linus is paying money (probably the Linux Foundations’ money?) to a large corporation that is exploiting the unpaid work, skills and culture of human beings.

In ethics the ends don’t often justify the means.

Not to mention it’s unclear what the LLM even did to help debug this issue, because he seems to suggest it lead him him astray multiple times claiming that it was impossible to fix.

He’s a 56 year old man, so he probably uses AI to decide what to eat for breakfast.

What I think the average person who may not have an eye for art or an attention to details might not understand is, a lot of AI art that comes across as convincing to the untrained eye is still, at the very least, living deep in the uncanny valley.

Much in the same way that an AI voice or video can look somewhat convincing but a little bit off, the same thing is true for AI artwork. People who are artists or who have at least learned to see the nuance in art can often see the weirdness in generative AI “art”, even if it is sometimes hard to explain exactly why it feels off (maybe it’s the subtlety of the lighting, the shape design, the line quality, etc.).

Can you make AI art that is convincing enough to fool an untrained eye? Easily.

Can you make AI art that is convincing enough to feel a trained eye? Sure, but it’s going to be a lot harder.

In the case of these guys, they really aren’t fooling almost anyone with their obvious slop. Frankly, it doesn’t take a well-tuned eye for artistry to see that their artwork looks like every generic AI slop art output that we’ve been barraged with over the last year and change.

Sure… I’m all for giving people the benefit of the doubt, to some degree.

Unfortunately however, we do now exist in a zero trust world where you can’t always naively believe what you see to be authentic and legitimate… If I was going to commission or hire an artist to do some paid work today, I would need to at least see some kind of “proof of work”.

Because of the ethical implications of generative AI, people have every reason and right to be suspicious and critical of work that looks like it could be generated by AI. People who use AI understand this too, but sadly many of them choose the path of fraudulence and lying instead of reflecting on themselves.

When people make something like this, which to me is so obviously AI slop, and then is bold enough to try to deny it, it just adds insult to injury, frankly. “You can fool some people sometime, but you can’t fool all the people all the time.” These dudes want to pee on our legs and tell us it’s raining…

Pretty wild to see considering how many years the game was in development and some of the names behind it.

100% AI slop. These people must think we were born yesterday.

Dead pets. Miss em. Wish they could have stayed with me forever.

Playing in a band. It’s never been easier to play on my own, and in some ways I think it’s hard to be in a band since it involves a lot of compromise. But I do miss the feeling of regularly playing and making music with friends.

Mechanical fountain soda machines with free refills. This stuff costs like 2 cents and is always the best way to drink soda, but they seem to be dying out and disappearing.

Playing video games with friends. As I get older and tastes diverge it feels hard to get a group together to play games. It’s even more rare to play games together in the same room, staying up late into the night.

Finally, I miss that feeling that life is ahead of me and the ability to focus on dreaming and thinking about the future. As I get older, a lot more stuff is in the rear view mirror, the possibilities of the future seem more limited, and it’s easy to look back and question how you spent all that time in the past. I get more sad and scared thinking about the future, even though I’m sure that good things will happen too.

Go ahead and add Come Dancing by The Kinks to this playlist.

Right from the first Mario Kart I was a Koopa Troopa fan. Acceptable alternatives being Yoshi and Dry Bones.

One look at the characters faces show me the same generic generative AI slop eyes and expressions I’ve seen a million and a half times now. On top of that, some very unnatural looking lines.

Just overall a very low effort pun about AI with an equally low effort slop illustration, in my opinion.

How’s the crack work on Linux?

Cringe slopcore.

At a certain point in Nier Automata the game changes the way saving and re-spawning works to coincide with a major plot point in the story.

Nier Automata is fantastic at blending the gameplay and story in satisfying and surprising ways. I only played it for the first time earlier this year and I can say that it lives up to the hype!

Listen to unc this time kids, he knows best.