Porean
2yr ago
I feel we are talking past each other. "In terms of the historical narrative, some artists were inspired by photography and made a cool synthesis of traditional art && the new technology" -- okay. But were there more artists (adjusting for base rate) creating realistic looking hand-drawn art pieces before or after the proliferation of the camera? Do you agree that the answer is before? Do you grasp the standard concerns shared amongst artists that believe before is the obvious answer?
Porean
2yr ago
Completely true. Current advances do not guarantee the "no more jobs" dystopia many predict. My excitement is likely primarily a result of how much I've involved myself in observing this specific little burst of technological displacement.
Porean
2yr ago
I agreed with the gist of the article, but I can't help but wonder if this topic was 99% covered by LW at some point.
Porean
2yr ago
I see it as a herald for things to come. Perhaps you feel that furries are scum and deserve what's coming for them. That's all well and good, but the broader point to be read lies in the topic of job displacement in general.
"AI workers replace humans" used to be a prediction, not an accurate description of current reality. We now have (or are on the brink of having) a successful demonstration of just that. The reactions and policies and changes that arrive from the current ongoing chaos are going to set precedent for future battles involving first-world job replacement, and I am personally very interested in seeing what kind of slogans and parties and perhaps even extremism emerges from our first global experiment.
I can't draw conclusions without knowing what kind of degenerate you are. If you're into hentai, the waifu diffusion model was trained on the 1.4 SD checkpoint && has much room for improvement. If you're a furry, fine-tuned models are currently a WIP and will be available soon. If you're a normal dude, I don't really understand because I honestly think it's good enough at this point.
The only thing I think is really poorly covered at the moment is obscure fetish content. A more complicated mixture of fine-tuning + textual inversion might be needed there, but I do truly believe the needs of >>50% of coomers are satisfiable by machines at this point.
Edit: I am less confident of my conclusion now.
AI art continues to be terrible at generating pornographic images where a lot of freelance artists' requests come from.
My dude, I listed three services that provide what I believe to be good quality AI pornography. I have personally been making use of these services and I suspect I will not be using my old collection anymore, going forwards.
It also has trouble maintaining a coherent style across multiple images,
This is just a prompt engineering problem, or more specifically cranking up the scale factor for whichever art style you're aping && avoiding samplers that end with _A.
Remember that people were extremely gung ho about the future of stuff like motion controls and VR in gaming
And I can assure you I was not one of these people. Neither was I a web3 advocate, or self-driving car optimist, or any other spell of "cool tech demo cons people into believing the impossible".
For Stable Diffusion, there is no demo. The product is already here. You can already get your art featured / sold by putting it up on the sites that permit it. I know with 100% certainty that I am never going to pay an old-school artist* for a piece of digital art again, because any ideas I had were created by me with a few prompt rolls an hour ago.
*I might pay for a promptmancer if I get lazy. But that will be magnitudes cheaper, and most likely done by people who used to not be artists.
Porean
2yr ago
Whenever someone brings up the photography analogy, I always think they're completely missing the point. It's almost like you're Seeing as a State -- artists exist now, revolution happens, artists exist after.
What you're neglecting to mention is that the artists that exist in the present will not be the artists of the future. We had photorealistic painters, and later we had photographers. The latter were not made of the former. People will suffer, perish, anguish, and all of this stuff is important for understanding how things play out in the near future.
Porean
2yr ago
A few followups to last week's post on the shifting political alignment of artists:
HN: Online art communities begin banning AI-generated images
Vox: What AI Art means for human artists
FurAffinity was, predictably, not the only site to ban AI content. Digital artists online are in crisis mode, and you can hardly blame them -- their primary income source is about to disappear. A few names for anyone here still paying for commissions: PornPen, Waifu Diffusion, Unstable Diffusion.
But what I really want to focus on is the Vox video. I watched it (and it's accompanying layman explanation of diffusion models) with the expectation it'd be some polemic against the dangers of amoral tech nerds bringing grevious harm to marginalised communities. Instead, what I got was this:
There's hundreds of millions of years of evolution that go into making the human body move through three-dimensional space gracefully and respond to rapidly changing situations. Language -- not hundreds of millions of years of evolution behind that, actually. It's pretty recent. And the same thing is true for creating images. So our idea that like, creative symbolic work will be really hard to automate and that physical labor will be really easy to automate, is based on social distinctions that we draw between different kinds of people. Not based on a really good understanding of actually what's hard.
So, although artists are organising a reactionary/protectionist front against AI art, the media seems to be siding with the techbros for the moment. And I kind of hate this. I'm mostly an AI maximalist, and I'm fully expecting whoever sides with Team AI to gain power in the coming years. To that end, I was hoping the media would make a mistake...
Porean
2yr ago
I tend to stare down the same paragraph for two hours and finally squeeze out, word by painful word, something that sounds like the ramblings of a schizophrenic with aphasia
The problem is that you are not writing fast enough. Think about text too slow and the words will blend together and lose all meaning. Put your brain into Word Salad Generation mode and just dump as you would into a Motte comment; you can edit for style/tone/content once you actually have something to edit.
I've shilled this before, but you should really try The Most Dangerous Writing App to knock out a first draft. As described by Alexey Guzey:
DO ACTUALLY TRY THIS DON’T FLINCH AWAY. This app might seem like the dumbest thing in the world but it DOES REALLY HELP. And if it doesn’t work, you will just lose 5 minutes.
Porean
2yr ago
I hate how much coverage the AI/rat community is giving to "Loab". It seems abundantly clear to me it's a social hoax (or at least just a funny art exhibition) rather than demonstrating anything insightful into the latent space of diffusion models.
Porean
2yr ago
This list will probably make it a lot easier for rDrama trolls (among others) to fit in, which is a bit unfortunate. At the same time, this glossary of terms is really accurate and well-cited, and I cannot help but admire it for that.
Porean
2yr ago
So, how do you find something that gives you energy to get out of the bed everyday?
Priorities, commitments, obgliation. You have to do something and the pain will be greater if you don't. "Time to go work in the shit factory."
Porean
2yr ago
This is pretty clearly a woman.
We have differences in lived experiences, then. I've said this before, but I really think Hanania nailed it by hypothesising that the anti-trans side cannot be understood without acknowleding how some are simply innately disgusted by what they perceive as abnormal physical features. Or, to simplify, too many people have a disgust reflex against non-passing transsexuals for the movement to succeed.
You can talk about how we should all apply Bayesian reasoning to deduce that an odd looking person is likely to prefer she/her, but that's a tall order for someone experiencing literal transphobia (as in: an instinctive, uncontrollable fear/repulsion) as they look at the person.
As for your commentary on how "passing is transphobic", I think it has been independently suggested a thousand times by some of the more radical trans activists.
Porean
2yr ago
Unironically just read every LessWrong article about Definitions. In a sane world, we'd just create new words to distinguish between transwomen and women and call it a day.
Porean
2yr ago
The Motte is no stranger to the JQ. You do not need to waste your time pointing out the basic statistics: we've seen them, we've discussed them, and we've had far longer and nuanced discussions on the topic.
Or, to put it in a way you'll understand: Lurk more. The "hey I just noticed this thing about Jewish overrepresentation..." skit makes you stick out like a lamppost.
Porean
2yr ago
it also means that the online community forms strong bonds and is only associated with positive emotions.
I can't speak for the rest of the population, but the lack of hugboxing on the Right was exactly why I turned right-wing back in Ye Olden Days of approximately a decade ago. The consistent hugs and kisses and emotions from left-dominated spaces in the early 2010s was exactly why I, and I suspect most online right-wingers, didn't like them. They were incredibly easy to bully and seemed to have not a shred of a spine, and that kind of behaviour is just innately appalling to politically agitated young males.
Nowadays, the online left is a lot more vicious and willing to persecute its enemies to the bitter end. And as much as I disagree with their values, I can at least respect that they've transformed themselves from limp-wristed victimhood to arguably successful political agitators.
Porean
2yr ago
Most of your post is in line with what I believe. The information workers in blue tribe will turn to protectionism as AI-generated content supercedes them. Red tribe blue-collar workers will suffer the least, and the Republicans will have their first and last opportunity to lure techbros away from the progressive sphere of influence.
There is one thing, though.
I simply do not forsee Republicans being likely to make AI regulations (or deregulation) a major policy issue in any near-term election, whilst I absolutely COULD see Democrats doing so.
It only takes one partisan to start a conflict. Republicans might not initially care, but once the democrats do, I expect it'll be COVID all over again -- sudden flip and clean split of the issue between parties.
But this is just nitpicking on my part.
Porean
2yr ago
One possible model of the situation is that AI will be so disruptive that it should be thought of as being akin to an invading alien force.
I agree we'd be better off if everyone thought that way, but the way I see it is that anyone that defects from Team Humanity has a shit ton of power to gain in the short term. To extend your analogy, the "pro-alien weirdos" would also be getting Alien arms and supplies. And if it's not team Blue or team Red, I'm sure team CCP can pick up the slack.
Porean
2yr ago
But what will the Program be?
Will it be state persecution of racist AI developers to protect disadvantaged minorities? A corporate utopia of AI-driven capitalist monoculture? An anarchist-adjacent future of AI empowered individuals purging the remnants of the old world?
Or maybe just foom and we all die. That's why I think it's worth discussing!
Porean
2yr ago
To which tribe shall the gift of AI fall?
In a not particularly surprising move, FurAffinity has banned AI content from their website. Ostensible justification is the presence of copied artist signatures in AI artpieces, indicating a lack of authenticity. Ilforte has skinned the «soul-of-the-artist» argument enough and I do not wish to dwell on it.
What's more important, in my view, is what this rejection means for the political future of AI. Previous discussions on TheMotte have demonstrated the polarizing effects of AI generated content — some are deathly afraid of it, others are practically AI-supremacists. Extrapolating outwards from this admittedly-selective community, I expect the use of AI-tools to become a hotly debated culture war topic within the next 5 years.
If you agree on this much, then I have one question: which party ends up as the Party of AI?
My kneejerk answer to this was, "The Left, of course." Left-wingers dominate the technological sector. AI development is getting pushed forward by a mix of grey/blue tribers, and the null hypothesis is that things keep going this way. But the artists and the musicians and the writers and so on are all vaguely left-aligned as well, and they are currently the main reactionary force against AI.
This does exist, but you are right to point out it is exceedingly difficult to make.
Given the volume of responses affirming the failures of generated porn, I'm realising my tastes must've bubbled me from dissent. I mostly consume images with only 1 figure involved && this has evidently biased my thinking.
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