Nephatrine-Drip

So... AI. It's pretty divisive right now it seems. I'll start off by saying I'm optimistically pro-AI. It's not without issues, but I think a lot of people are wanting to throw the baby out with the bathwater when it comes to AI.

First, let me just get my admittedly selfish reasons for wanting an AI future out of the way.

Remember Star Trek? I want to go onto a holodeck and just ask for the computer to create whatever I can imagine and tailor it to my needs. I see it as an empowering and freeing technology. I'm not out to create products to sell, but just want to create things for my own enjoyment. There are ideas stuck in my head that I simply lack the skills to bring into the real world to share with anyone. Yes, I can theoretically learn how to draw, model, animate, rig, compose, etc... but people work and have lives and “just learn how to do it yourself” is not genuine advice and may not even be an option at all for people with certain disabilities or conditions.

I think it's a technology that could allow people without money, time, dexterity, and so on to be able to do some of the same things people with those privileges have even if it's still to a lesser degree. I see it as raising the floor for what a person can create and augmenting the abilities of those who are already perfectly capable of “doing it themself.”

It's not there yet, but it if we stop the freight train at this stage I'm worried we might not get to that destination.

But it's theft!

First, the scrapers the big companies use do claim to support robots.txt and so as long as you post your work to sites (or better yet host it yourself so you're in control) that ask those bots not to scrape them, that's all that's needed to protect you from the likes of Microsoft, Claude, ChatGPT, etc.

But assuming they've already scraped it up or your work is posted on sites that don't stop them, are they stealing your work? If you post up an image, book, song, etc. on the publicly-accessible web, anyone can download it and use them for their own private purposes. What they can't do is redistribute your work, claim it to be their own, etc. As it stands now, a human can download all your art and study them and then create their own art that might borrow or be inspired by your art and that's seemingly fine. In fact, I'd say most human artists are also trained on large data sets of existing human-generated media.

If the AI model is spitting out your work verbatim, that's definitely plagiarism and there are definitely still issues with “regurgitation” and data overfitting in some models. If the prompter was trying to force it, then I think that the problem is on the user. I can ask someone to draw me an infringing image and I'm the naughty one for making that request. The real problem is what if a user unknowingly triggers a regurgitation? Can that happen? How often? It seems like a very rare corner case, if anything. I do think it's a genuine concern that must be addressed. I don't think it's intractable and so it doesn't completely spoil my outlook on AI, but I can understand this complaint. Hopefully all the lawsuits happening have encouraged the big AI companies to take this seriously.

But it's slop!

People throw around words like “slop”, “soulless”, etc. Right now... they're pretty right. The problem is that most human-generated works are also bad. Sturgeon's law states “ninety percent of everything is crap.” and I think that is pretty accurate. Heck, 90% of everything I personally create is crap.

In the distant past, to get seen you had to know the right people, get lucky, or just be that damn good. The difficulty publishing something filtered out a lot of the crap. With the internet, the barriers to entry were lowered to basically nothing. Go on DeviantArt or a any fanfiction site, and not only is 90% of it absolutely terrible slop, but you'll see human creators unashamedly using the character designs, settings, and styles of other human creators seemingly without controversy.

Does generative AI lower that bar even more? Yes. Does it make it easier to churn out more crap at an alarming rate? Yes. It's just continuing the existing trend though. People seem to be under the impression search didn't suck until AI came around, but it's been pretty bad for a while now between all the junk posted on the internet and SEO scraper websites plagiarizing things wholesale.

But it's taking human jobs!

It's a good bet that AI-generated art will never really rival good human-generated art. So who really needs to worry? If you can actually be replaced by AI “slop” then... maybe you were the one producing slop to begin with?

Most people I think buy their furniture from the likes of Ikea, Amazon, or Walmart. It's “slop” furniture made of MDF and won't probably be something worth leaving to their children or grandchildren. It's “good enough” for most people for most purposes.

There are still human craftsmen though. I can buy a $10,000 table handmade by a human rather than in a factory. I can buy $300 ceramic plates thrown by human hands. I can buy a hammer forged and shaped by a human blacksmith. Those costs involved in handmaking goods makes them unaffordable to most people and having custom art is similarly a luxury most people cannot or will not do. Generative AI empowers those who would simply have to go without by putting art services within their reach.

I think in many cases AI-generated art is, even today, “good enough” for many purposes in the same way my shitty bookshelves ordered off Amazon are. Corporate art has pretty much always been defined as being soulless, for instance... so AI-generated art is a perfect fit to occupy space on meaningless presentations and training materials. If I needed a quick placeholder representation of something in my the online tabletop game, I wasn't ever going to hire a human to generate than – I'd have been just grabbing something off Google image search previously.

If I need a twitch emote or the like, I might consider spending some small sum of money on a site like Fiverr or Etsy to have a human artist create some cookie cutter emotes almost assuredly from a generic template they already have. Those people probably should be scared.

If I have an idea for a game, but am not an artist, generative AI could empower me to get a MVP out for people to play without relying on unfitting premade off-the-shelf assets that they'll recognize from a dozen other no-budget games. If I'm a small musician, I can make a music video for my music that I wouldn't be able to otherwise afford. Maybe those things will get them noticed. Maybe down the line they'll be able to afford to hire humans to create those things to go alongside their works.

If I've got a small team with a big idea, generative AI acts as a multiplier for the amount of work they are able to produce. It might make the difference between a goal being attainable or not being realized at all. In such a situation, I'd argue generative AI might be key to those people remaining employed. “Just hire more human workers” isn't realistic or even doable in many situations.

But it's destroying the planet!

I agree. I'm totally against propping up large datacenters (AI or otherwise) that need a city's worth of water and power to run. It's bad for the normal people living in those areas (unless you're employed there I guess). It's bad for the environment. We need to develop these technologies further so that such things aren't needed and we need to be more selective until then. Huge AI datacenters may be the only way a big AI company can work right now, but that doesn't mean we should do that.

To be fair though, you can run stable diffusion on a pretty run of the mill PC and there are people running all kinds of AI models locally on their own hardware. I think that it's hard to argue that is somehow driving environmental collapse. Ideally, that is the future we should be driving towards. Seeing how the internet in general seems to have centralized on a few websites ran by large corporations, it's hard to imagine we'll actually be able to pull away from that when it comes to AI... but everyone having their own personal local AI agents is still possible.