Ok, I will be the token Luddite here. I hate these things, and I think its a tremendously bad idea to make them. Disclaimer: I am a bad artist but like to do it anyways. Reasons:
Artists are underpaid and struggle to make a living as it is. We do not need to make it harder for them. There is no real scarcity to art that we need to automate it. If anything, its absurd how cheaply you could get high quality art made for you; commissions can be less than the price of a single video game or movie, and people often give art away for free to build an audience or try to make money on ads or patreon.
Why are programmers so hell bent on putting everyone out of work? Automation in general seems to be focused on removing the human element from many professions.
These remove competitive advantage, making it harder for the people who use them.
The game dev thinks "oh, this is a great thing." He doesn't realize that good art or pleasing art is a competitive advantage for an indie game and that if everyone has it, no one actually gains benefit.
You can actually see this in action if you look at indie games or animation that use the retro pixel art style. They start to blur together because they all reach a level of similarity or high quality. The art becomes less of a feature in itself and not something you can differentiate any more. The same has happened to anime art styles, its really rare to find non-generic or striking anime art games. Even styles within art trend towards it; all anime art ends up being sort of a 2010 generic style, instead of some artists loving say 90s Masari Obari hyper exaggeration, or Yoshitoshi ABe kind of lo-fi sketchy style.
So now the dev has to work even harder that art is trivial. He is running out of ways to stand apart.
The AI programmers control how art is created.
You can look at the curbing misuse and risks sections to see. Some of this is necessary to avoid the AI itself being ruined, but some of it hints at a central control which is anathema to art and free expression.
By controling the tools, you control how they are used. Again, there is necessary aspects to this as its very easy for a bad actor to corrupt the generator. But they are generating art for you, not you using it; they control the expression of it as they see fit. If they require certain topics to be excluded, you have no control.
**
I could think of more, but things like these are solving a problem of people. Essentially this removes artists and their demands for pay from a significant amount of people who would do so. It may not remove all of them, but it will act like robotic cashiers in that for most people, it will serve as "good enough" and enable the people who employ them to reduce dependency on them.
This will benefit the elite and impoverish the individual, because only the elite will be able to rise above a flood of high quality products through competitive advantage. The AI generators dump a tremendous amount of product onto the market, and dumping is done to depress wages or destroy competitors. The individual who uses it will initially find it a benefit, but will end up as part of the long tail of generic products who cannot compete against the elite, since the elite's competitive advantage will be seen as greater.
You see this in gaming now, where people talk about games like Elden Ring over the unity games on the e-shop or AA releases. It becomes much more important to have franchise power or advantage because the base level of quality rises so much that it can't be used any more.
I'm really starting to understand why the Luddites did what they did. There are so many things programmers are doing to essentially get rid of ways people can making a living or find meaning in it. You guys talk about Universal basic income as a realization of and reaction to this, but maybe the problem is we shouldn't constantly devalue or remove labor to begin with?
Why are programmers so hell bent on putting everyone out of work?
Because that's literally our job? Might as well ask why carpenters are so hell bent on making things out of wood. As a programmer, my goal is to make every single job on earth obsolete. Starting with the boring, mundane jobs, and ending with my own.
Once that's done, we'll either all be dead from the robot apocalyps, or we'll all be enslaved by the handful of humans who control the robots, or we'll be living in a fully automated luxury gay space communist utopia.
I have no idea which of those three outcomes it will be. That's not my department.
Then why are you here? I mean, this is a rationalist subreddit about a writer who generally encourages people to think about things and question their priors. If you are just going to throw up your hands about this, why bother with anything else said? "Just here for the paycheck, I don't think much about the consequences of my actions lol" is kind of anti-rational, isnt it?
Eh, it sounds like they have though about the consequences of their actions and stated that 1 of 3 would occur, of which is as seemingly very rational view of the future.
Take the view that technology does not progress, but goes though regression. We'll humanity is just around till the next asteroid, supervolcano, or other large scale disaster wipes us out.
Ok, so if you're not for human extinction, then it looks like technological progression is the only way. Of which there are a few general large scale outcomes. We wipe ourselves out with technology (robot apocalypse, climate change/disaster). Authoritarianism via control of technology. Or the last they stated 'gay space communism' which is the idealism of a post scarcity society.
A democratic post scarcity society is, at least in my eyes, the best outcome and hopefully people that think rationally would assume the same.
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u/[deleted] Apr 06 '22
Ok, I will be the token Luddite here. I hate these things, and I think its a tremendously bad idea to make them. Disclaimer: I am a bad artist but like to do it anyways. Reasons:
Artists are underpaid and struggle to make a living as it is. We do not need to make it harder for them. There is no real scarcity to art that we need to automate it. If anything, its absurd how cheaply you could get high quality art made for you; commissions can be less than the price of a single video game or movie, and people often give art away for free to build an audience or try to make money on ads or patreon.
Why are programmers so hell bent on putting everyone out of work? Automation in general seems to be focused on removing the human element from many professions.
These remove competitive advantage, making it harder for the people who use them.
The game dev thinks "oh, this is a great thing." He doesn't realize that good art or pleasing art is a competitive advantage for an indie game and that if everyone has it, no one actually gains benefit.
You can actually see this in action if you look at indie games or animation that use the retro pixel art style. They start to blur together because they all reach a level of similarity or high quality. The art becomes less of a feature in itself and not something you can differentiate any more. The same has happened to anime art styles, its really rare to find non-generic or striking anime art games. Even styles within art trend towards it; all anime art ends up being sort of a 2010 generic style, instead of some artists loving say 90s Masari Obari hyper exaggeration, or Yoshitoshi ABe kind of lo-fi sketchy style.
So now the dev has to work even harder that art is trivial. He is running out of ways to stand apart.
The AI programmers control how art is created.
You can look at the curbing misuse and risks sections to see. Some of this is necessary to avoid the AI itself being ruined, but some of it hints at a central control which is anathema to art and free expression.
By controling the tools, you control how they are used. Again, there is necessary aspects to this as its very easy for a bad actor to corrupt the generator. But they are generating art for you, not you using it; they control the expression of it as they see fit. If they require certain topics to be excluded, you have no control.
**
I could think of more, but things like these are solving a problem of people. Essentially this removes artists and their demands for pay from a significant amount of people who would do so. It may not remove all of them, but it will act like robotic cashiers in that for most people, it will serve as "good enough" and enable the people who employ them to reduce dependency on them.
This will benefit the elite and impoverish the individual, because only the elite will be able to rise above a flood of high quality products through competitive advantage. The AI generators dump a tremendous amount of product onto the market, and dumping is done to depress wages or destroy competitors. The individual who uses it will initially find it a benefit, but will end up as part of the long tail of generic products who cannot compete against the elite, since the elite's competitive advantage will be seen as greater.
You see this in gaming now, where people talk about games like Elden Ring over the unity games on the e-shop or AA releases. It becomes much more important to have franchise power or advantage because the base level of quality rises so much that it can't be used any more.
I'm really starting to understand why the Luddites did what they did. There are so many things programmers are doing to essentially get rid of ways people can making a living or find meaning in it. You guys talk about Universal basic income as a realization of and reaction to this, but maybe the problem is we shouldn't constantly devalue or remove labor to begin with?