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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   36049 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 20, 2023

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That's a lovely theory, but when it's being done by people like the above, then their attitude will be "Yeah, sure, whatever" and they will prefer playing with the shiny new toy to vague premonitions of societal something-or-other.

This tweet is a succinct summary:

Pre-2008: We’ll put the AI in a box and never let it out. Duh.

2008-2020: Unworkable! Yudkowsky broke out! AGI can convince any jail-keeper!

2021-2022: yo look i let it out lol

2023: Our Unboxing API extends shoggoth tentacles directly into your application [waitlist link]

It's clear at this point that no coherent civilizational plan will be followed to mitigate AI x-risk. Rather, the "plan" seems to be to move as fast as possible and hope we get lucky. Well, good luck everyone!

I would have linked the thread from the man himself. The key section:

In the end, it's just far far easier for present-day people to imagine that future people will show concern for something, than it is for anyone in the present day to do anything differently. The former is cheap and scores lots of social points; the latter, expensive.

When people were imagining how AI might go, they talked about those Future People carefully sharing the gains of AI with those put to immediate unemployment. When Stable Diffusion came out, was there any attempt to share gains with artists, or even make it a tool for them? Nope.

Why, because people were hypocrites and intentionally planning to betray humanity for profit? No, because their self-models had some flex in them, and therefore they cheaply imagined and said things that were cheap to imagine and say, and felt good at the time.

The thing about the Future is that it's made up of the same people and same sort of people who are implementing the present, right now. That's the source of the results you get in real life rather than in imagination.

Yud is trying to make a point that people are mean or 'don't care', but he's doing it poorly.

That's not the point. The point is that there is no reliable societal mechanism to share the economic gains of technology with those most affected, and that there is no reason to believe that such a mechanism will exist in the future if it doesn't exist now. And yes, there are economic gains from Stable Diffusion. The gains are from everyone who uses SD art without having to pay an artist. That this has not translated into monetary profit for StabilityAI does not disprove his thesis, it strengthens it. The fact that StabilityAI does not have the money to compensate artists even if they wanted to is proof that everyone who was pontificating that AI companies could just "share the gains" was not thinking clearly about the gears-level mechanisms by which AI would transform the world.

The gains are from everyone who uses SD art without having to pay an artist.

The fact that StabilityAI does not have the money to compensate artists even if they wanted to is proof that everyone who was pontificating that AI companies could just "share the gains" was not thinking clearly about the gears-level mechanisms by which AI would transform the world.

On the one hand, you're correct that people being made obsolete by the new AI aren't being directly compensated for their lost income. On the other hand, you just explained how the gains are being distributed as widely as one could possibly hope for.

I'm certain there's some economic theory/concept that explains this (marginal cost of labor?). Yes, it will harm human artists that earn their keep through commissions, but the cost barrier (edit: for the prospective consumer of art) there was always going to be high (especially after seeing Tumblr do its best to meme more respect for artists and their prices), AI just lowered the cost barrier dramatically.

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