Hah, that's really interesting, and I didn't know there was such opposition. Even though I doubt it could result in is being a mute species, truly, I have no clue why it's so important to me to be a competent musician. Why did I, and do I continue to, invest so much time and money in training for a career they I can never even hope to break even on? Maybe these days it's a sunk cost issue for me, and I'm also clinging to music as tied to my identity. And maybe at the start it was me simply not knowing any better, and assuming that a career making music would be easier then a more normal career, before I learned the opposite is true.
Also, there's a bunch of signaling involved. Parents want to signal that their children are talented, so they send them for music lessons. And I when I got older, I wanted to signal that about myself.
Also, somewhere mixed in there is a genuine love of creation and desire to express myself, as well.
haroldbkny
29d ago
Let's explore this more. Do you feel the same way about how most clothes needed to be produced by a tailor, but now they're mass produced for orders of magnitude less money?
What about how bread used to be produced by bakers, but now you can get bread in the store, once again for orders of magnitude less?
I don't know if there's a wrong answer here, but there is a pattern of "these things used to cost way more, but now there are cheaper options that have taken away part of the everyday-niche these things used to do by making it way cheaper. You can still buy the original product that is way more expensive, but the more expensive original versions have been relegated to luxury status."
The AI art we have right now seems to me to be more akin to waves on the beach just so happening to etch very detailed pictures into the sand by random chance; this to me is lacking the principle features that make art interesting (communication between conscious subjects; wondering at what kind of subjectivity could have lead to the present work).
I agree with you on this, but I probably feel differently from you from here onwards. Okay, so we have developed the technology for waves on the beach to produce aesthetically pleasing patterns that we can use as a really cheap source for many things that we currently use art for today. We will have cheap pleasing images for our books, advertisement, and maybe even in art museums, but these images will lack most meaning behind them of what an artist would otherwise have been trying to express.
I'm kind of okay with this state of affairs. It's just changing the place art has in our society, vs cheap pretty things. Once again I feel it's comparable to live musicians being replaced by CDs.
Edit: also note that I am a trained musician who really values live performance. I believe in the power of improvisation and connecting with an audience. I would have loved to make a living performing live music... But I can't and a lot of that is that the monetary value of live music isn't worth that much to consumers, because people can mostly just use recorded music instead, for their use cases. Unfortunately that's simply the way of the world and I needed to accept it and move on.
haroldbkny
29d ago
I do feel a little bad for artists. I mean, if you had a decent side hustle charging $50 to draw D&D characters, or a more lucrative side hustle drawing furry porn, AI is going to replace you.
Me too, but I don't really know what is to be done about it.
I agree with your assessment, it probably is all about money and fear of replacement at the end of the day. But it really is coming for all of us. What are all of us going to do? I merely hope that either we have time to learn new trades that won't get replaced again within our lifetimes, or I hope we will enter a post scarcity society where AI has made everything so cheap that money is meaningless.
I'm a pretty firm believer that the only thing that keeps life so good for so many people is that technological progress keeps making things cheaper and better. And really, I don't even know if I can say that I think that efforts to stop technology through the use of social stigma are bad. Instead I just feel like they're simply doomed to failure. People are going to follow the money. Maybe nuclear power is the one big exception I know of.
I don't know if I can fully articulate it, but there's something I don't like about that kind of argument. Humans will learn by stealing from other humans, and sometimes that results in humans putting each other out of business. If it's just about the fact that AI can product more quantity of art, easier and cheaper than humans, well, our entire history is one of newer, better, cheaper replacing older and more expensive. Some people spend their lives learning antiquated art forms, and well, that's kinda the breaks, and I don't really believe any amount of cultural outrage could or should change that.
Think about how diminished the role of musicians is in our society since the invention of the record player. Previously, if you wanted music at your event, or you even just wanted to hear music, you had to hire musicians. But we are well over a century of that being not the case, increasingly so as time goes on and recorded music became the norm. Musicians barely earn squat making music these days. It's sadly the case that almost all trained musicians make their primary living teaching other musicians, unless they're one of the lucky few who won the lottery of having an album go platinum.
haroldbkny
29d ago
I'm sure I don't notice if it's AI art most of the time. I'm sure I totally failed Scott's Turing test. So I guess when I see the vitreol, it's only instances when I see it specifically presented and called out as AI art, because I myself would notice it as such otherwise.
haroldbkny
29d ago
Has anyone noticed how much vitriol there is towards AI-generated art? Over the past year it's slowly grown into something quite ferocious, though not quite ubiquitous. I'm starting to feel (almost) as if it's outside the overton window to admit to using or liking AI art. Like I said, it's not ubiquitous, but maybe it's getting there. Pretty much any thread I ever see that features AI art (outside of specialty groups devoted to AI interest) has many vocal detractors accusing AI art of being trash and stealing from real artists.
While my mind is not fully made up on the issue of whether AI art is "good", if you ask me, I wouldn't say that it's bad that AI learns from "stealing" from artists. Honestly, ask absolutely anyone who's learned anything creative: learning art is all about learning how to steal from people. I know it's not completely analogous, but I don't personally believe that it should be bad for AI to learn by stealing while it's okay for human artists to learn by stealing.
More than anything, I'm kinda surprised there's this strong sentiment, and willingness to call out AI art and its proponents as being some sort of evil in the world. Maybe it's mostly because people get off on being judgy these days, and believing they have some sort of moral high ground, and less that they actually care about artists? I'm not sure, but I would have thought the Butlerian Jihad would have started for something more severe than art.
haroldbkny
1mo ago
Meanwhile, I'm just trying to prepare myself for how much worse things are going to get under the inevitable eight years of Harris
Why do you feel it's inevitable?
haroldbkny
1mo ago
And it's possible Bush was only incoherent when he wanted to look folksy.
I forget where, but I remember hearing some anecdote about how Bush was really smart and eloquent in private, and he'd talk about how he was usually just stammering when speaking in public because he was terrified and nervously choosing his words, because of how much could go wrong if the POTUS said something incorrect or damaging.
Only partially related, but I'm still so mad at the covid collective insanity that took place. Can you believe there was a time when the Canadian CDC actually recommended that people use gloryholes to avoid spreading covid? And I've actually argued with pro-lockdown people who defend that recommendation as legit instead of denouncing it as insanity and bandwagon jumping. Multiple people I've argued with have said something like "well, just because you're sucking dick through a hole doesn't mean it's unsafe sex with anonymous partners". And this flabbergasts me.
In what world would people use a gloryholes that's safe and not anonymous? Gloryholes exist in adult bookstores. Did any people go modifying their houses, drilling holes into their walls saying "gee, I sure would like to have sex with girls I'm seeing, but I don't want to violate lockdown and be in the same room as them"? Did any guy tell the new girl he's dating (the one that he is not yet seeing steadily enough such that he would just include her in his covid bubble) that he wants to meet her at the adult bookstore so she could suck his dick through the filthy hole there without him looking at her face-to-face, so they don't share the same airspace? Women love being asked for non face-to-face sexual favors, while being in a separate room, being done through disgusting holes where random guys stick their dicks regularly, that never get cleaned, right?
To me this is up there with "racism is a bigger public threat than the pandemic" and promoting mask wearing when getting up from your restaurant table to go to the bathroom as terrible apologism to justify their own side's horrible behavior.
There's a large continuum between those two positions. I probably fall pretty much in the middle, myself. But environmentalists have been banging the "we are going to cause the extinction of the human race any day now" drum for 30 years, and quite frankly I'm sick of it and their dishonesty. I'd rather no manatees die, and I think we can try to save them, but that's a far cry from pod living.
haroldbkny
2mo ago
I believe that to some degree. But you have to stack rank. At the end of the day, not everyone can survive, and we're all dead in the end anyway. So I consider human life far above most else.
haroldbkny
2mo ago
There a very big gap between an existence without manatees that a few people ever see on a recreational voyage, and living in a pod devoid of sunlight and subsisting on nutrient paste, or whatever other dystopia you might want to bring up.
haroldbkny
2mo ago
I guess I propose that they might mean close to nothing, when there's still 10 to 30 million other species that remain that easily fill the gap left.
haroldbkny
2mo ago
But how are these impactful? What's the negative implication for humans from them being extinct?
Don't worry about anything like that. How much energy you can get out of crops is capped by photosynthesis. It's not that much because photosynthesis is extremely inefficient. If there was a plant that had a higher photosynthesis efficiency, we'd know.
That was just a doesn't-matter-farfetched-hypothetical to quickly illustrate how past shifts in ecology might (or might not) have unrealized impacts on human progress, it's not meant to be a serious postulation. I could have said "What if the Gros Michel banana specifically contained some protein that could have cured malaria"
You heard wrong. Truffles are still farmed, and apparently there's been a recent breakthrough. Some micro-testing which lets people buying tree seedlings are successfully inoculated with the symbiotic fungi that grows truffles.
That's interesting. Do you have any links you can share? Perhaps only certain species of truffles were impacted?
haroldbkny
2mo ago
Edit: reading your other response you were looking for catastrophic impacts on humans, which isn’t the main point of what I wrote, but I’ll keep it up because I think it’s an interesting subject.
Makes sense. But, yeah, I guess the core of my hypothesis is that human ingenuity and the human drive for survival is what keeps industries afloat in the face of ecological adversity, due to humans' vested interests. So it needs to be an example where humans have a large vested interest.
And that's not to say that there aren't problems which develop which make the agriculture harder or more expensive. It's just that I suspect people keep coming up with ways to overcome these problems, which results in much less impact to everyday people. Perhaps I'll edit that onto my post when I get a moment.
haroldbkny
2mo ago
Cool. I wasn't sure of the cause of the potato famine. But if it is a case of human-caused invasive species of disease, then I would definitely call it one example of a catastrophe.
haroldbkny
2mo ago
Well, I'd certainly never heard of this before, but I am still wondering, after quickly skimming the article, what the catastrophe is.
This also might depend on your definition of what a catastrophe is, but I guess I'm referring to large loss of human life, or drastically decreased living conditions for tens of thousands of humans, as the end-result of an event like this in order for me to consider it a catastrophe.
haroldbkny
2mo ago
Invasive species have caused catastrophes though.
What sort of catastrophes? I'm interested to know, I know little about this.
haroldbkny
2mo ago
I remember a links post by Scott from like 8 years ago where he asked, given the fact that humans have been responsible for the extinction of tens of thousands of species, mostly bugs I think I recall, (not to mention introduced lots of invasive species detrimental to various local environments), why the hell haven't we seen catastrophic impacts to our ecology and agriculture? I guess I have a pet theory I've been working up in my mind for a while
Epistemic status: I know close to nothing about agriculture, except some basic historical facts I've heard about previous food industries changing.
Essentially, I think that capitalism and human industry may be what has saved us and prevented catastrophic changes. As someone who works in engineering, I know you always have to deal with changes to your plans, and nothing ever goes right. When you do deliver systems that work, nothing ever stays non-broken, and you always have to come up with new fixes. However, you have goals, and as such you keep finding tradeoffs and workarounds so you're still able to deliver and fulfill the customer need consistently. If you don't, then you lose the customer's business and someone else ends up fulfilling their need instead. Perhaps almost all human-impacting ecological sectors have essentially already been turned into self perpetuating industries.
Is there some fungus which is going to kill all the Gros Michel bananas in the world? Banana farmer moguls absolutely do not want that happening, and they're not stupid. They will end up employing experts that help them set up systems to delay that eventually as long as possible, so they can still meet their quarterly earnings projections, whether by developing new farming methods or new antifungal treatments for the plants.
Does it finally get to the point that the Gros Michel banana can no longer hang on? Either the Gros Michel banana moguls have already started setting up systems to farm new varieties of bananas in preparation for this eventually, or else some until-now specialty supplier of bananas that used to be not as popular (like the Cavendish banana) ends up rising to power by fulfilling the now-unmet demand for bananas, capturing the market and supplanting the old industry leaders as the new head of the industry.
For the record, Gros Michel bananas did taste different, and maybe even better, than Cavendish bananas. But I guess Cavendish bananas are a sufficiently good workaround because they've been the norm for 70 years now.
Is it still bad that humans cause so many changes to the ecology? Yes, but maybe not THAT bad. I postulate two situations.
-
There might be aspects of ecology that would have been ripe for eventual human exploitation that have not yet been industry-ized. What if the Gros Michel banana specifically contained some protein that could have been turned into a low-carbon-emission fuel source using 2025 technology? Well, then we are out of luck in exploiting that fuel source as a new industry. However, this still doesn't impact current industries, only potential future ones. We may never realize what we could have achieved and what we lost the opportunity to do had that banana not gone extinct, and as such this isn't viewed as a catastrophe.
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There might be negative effects to the environment that are so detrimental that there is no mitigation possible, and it will make non-viable even other related industries that might have come in and filled the gap. This is the catastrophe scenario that is typically pushed by environmentalists to make laymen worried. But really, I'm not certain I know of any examples of this catastrope scenario coming to pass (not that that means it cannot happen in the future). I guess I've heard that in pre WWII France, they had the technology to farm truffles, and the decimation of France in the war resulted in them somehow losing that capability. As such, truffles need to be hunted and gathered these days by specially trained pigs, and the price of truffles went sky high. I'm not too clear on how this happened, and I'm not sure if it has to do with ecology or just loss of human knowledge.
I speculate that this model of "ingrained industries as a shield" may also apply to other non-agricultural scenarios as well.
haroldbkny
2mo ago
it's been 12 hours and people need to post more. (Seriously, post a top level comment. Do it now.)
Last time I just posted a top level comment, I got threatened-to-be-modded at. Perhaps people have too high expectations for these threads.
What's something that you were wrong about?
I was wrong to let politics run my life. It almost ruined the best relationship I've ever had, because I kept grinding away at the political differences between us, trying to finally show once and for all that leftists have gone crazy and were destroying everything. I kinda still sort of think that is true, but I learned that to be happy you gotta put this aside. Once I did that, I have had the best years of my life.
I was also wrong that there would be no end to the feminist escalation, 10 years ago, and for many years afterward, I thought that the future would be a boot stomping on men's faces for eternity, because both men and women feel more sympathy for women. I still can't stand feminists, but for what it's worth over the past couple of years there has seemed to be some return to normalcy, where not absolutely everything needs to be framed in terms of female oppression and we need to constantly be walking on eggshells for fear of being called out and fired from work.
haroldbkny
2mo ago
Surely there is a sampling bias here, but I do get the general sense that this closer to the norm than not.
You mean that the norm is the 50th percentile for disproportional violence within police interactions? So you think that these interactions account for at least the 25th percentile of police interactions, as in, 1 out of every 4? I can't prove you wrong, but I personally disagree. This sounds to me to be a direct case of the Chinese Robber Fallacy. With the number of cops in the country, you can cherry pick these examples all day and never stop. What is the reason you think the sources you're watching aren't playing that numbers game?
haroldbkny
2mo ago
Yeah, I have no clue myself, but I think it'd be interesting to know. I'm guessing based on OP's post that the diary sheds no light on it, though, or else it might have been a bigger deal.
I wouldn't ask you to dox yourself, but I'd be very interested to hear it!
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