AIEEEE! OK sometimes we are a debate club. Ye olde AI discussion thread

[TailsWin]

Note: ya peeps go blame Otto for ze thread title 'n' da poll, I got nuttin' to do wit dat

Otto here- My apologies, my post announcing the thread was supposed to be first, when I moved the posts from the other thread it put them in date order, and all of them were older than my post. In WordPress I can fix that with altering the date stamp, Xenforo doesn't seem to allow for that.

Carry on

Ya know, I find it odd that people are ok with things like Photoshop and 3D programs but not with AI... One is a set of algorithms that's been developed for a purpose, you click on buttons and try to get the result you want. The other is a set of algorithms that's been developed for a purpose, you type a bunch of things and try to get the result you want. A different UI paradigm, a different set of algorithms, but that's true between different programs too. It's like being ok with a typewriter but not with a text processor.

Unless you're drawing into sand with a finger, you're using some technology to create stuff either way, and always accepting some limitations of the technology. Even pencil and paper has to be made by someone.

Anyway, cute.

 

[MCDesigns]

Ya know, I find it odd that people are ok with things like Photoshop and 3D programs but not with AI... One is a set of algorithms that's been developed for a purpose, you click on buttons and try to get the result you want. The other is a set of algorithms that's been developed for a purpose, you type a bunch of things and try to get the result you want. A different UI paradigm, a different set of algorithms, but that's true between different programs too. It's like being ok with a typewriter but not with a text processor.

Unless you're drawing into sand with a finger, you're using some technology to create stuff either way, and always accepting some limitations of the technology. Even pencil and paper has to be made by someone.

Anyway, cute.

I find that the main reason many don't care for AI is because of how and where it gets the resources/training data (taking bits and pieces from existing art and images on the internet), not so much because it does the work for them like photoshop or 3D programs.

In Nyghtfall's case, I assume it's more about control of the scene and how frustrating it can be to get exactly or close to what he wants, especially with his OCD

 

[TailsWin]

I find that the main reason many don't care for AI is because of how and where it gets the resources/training data

That's what they say, but really, every new art form or form of media gets this kind of treatment. Photography, movies, comic books, TV, video games, CGI, digital photography... Each one has gone through the same cycle, beginning with claims that it's not art and it will corrupt the souls of the youth or whatever.

Anyway, just ranting, but I hope people will move on from this onto another big issue, cause even the few socials I follow are so full of this.

 

[Otto Von Herunterhängen]

That's what they say, but really, every new art form or form of media gets this kind of treatment. Photography, movies, comic books, TV, video games, CGI, digital photography... Each one has gone through the same cycle, beginning with claims that it's not art and it will corrupt the souls of the youth or whatever.

Anyway, just ranting, but I hope people will move on from this onto another big issue, cause even the few socials I follow are so full of this.

What you might not be understanding is the differences in using the two technologies. 3D art uses ray tracing, if we put a scene together, we are going to get exactly what we put in the scene. It's the same technology CAD uses.

The problem is we can't get it detailed enough to be entirely real looking for organic surfaces, CAD doesn't have that issue since it is used for 3D representation of machined items, not organic ones.

With AI it's using how humans perceive the world, photo-real objects. The difficulty is we can't get AI to put exactly what we want in the scene, and it's likely because language is too imprecise.

That's the issue Nyghtfall is having, he can't get photo-real in 3D art, and he can't get AI generated to reliably place everything he wants in a scene.

Yes, there are people that don't like AI because of how it is trained, but I think it is more of fear of replacement than anything else. AI can do a lot of tasks better than anybody other then the most talented humans, AI is great at creating mediocrity quickly and cheaply, and I might add the reason everything AI creates is mediocre at the moment is probably because it's training databases consist almost entirely of mediocre data generated by humans, when they learn to parse out the crap that will probably change.

And people see themselves being pushed out of the job market for what they are trained to do. That's a real concern.

BTW, Photoshop is AI these days, AI is better at pattern matching than what Adobe was previously using for the task, and selection of objects is around 90% of what goes on in Photoshop.

 

[Nyghtfall3D]

In Nyghtfall's case, I assume it's more about control of the scene and how frustrating it can be to get exactly or close to what he wants, especially with his OCD

That's the issue Nyghtfall is having, he can't get photo-real in 3D art, and he can't get AI generated to reliably place everything he wants in a scene.

:: finger on nose, points hard to both of you with a very stern look ::

 

[Otto Von Herunterhängen]

:: finger on nose, points hard to both of you with a very stern look ::

It's the same issue we are all having but this was your thread Considering how expensive a hobby 3D art is if I could get AI to do what I want I'd jump in a heartbeat.

 

[Nyghtfall3D]

It's the same issue we are all having but this was your thread

The stern look was a reflection of my frustration with both mediums. You and MC nailed my issues with them.

Considering how expensive a hobby 3D art is if I could get AI to do what I want I'd jump in a heartbeat.

If I could produce fetish-themed material using AI with the level of production value and consistency I've seen demonstrated on YT by professional and freelance artists, I'd kiss Daz goodbye for-fucking-ever. The work I've seen on at least two channels is absolutely phenomenal:

Quantum Concept Studios

Star Wars: Tales Untold

 

[TailsWin]

What you might not be understanding is the differences in using the two technologies. 3D art uses ray tracing, if we put a scene together, we are going to get exactly what we put in the scene. It's the same technology CAD uses.

I was making maps for Quake 3 and waiting for hours for them to render... That map tool (GtkRadiant) was using a raytracing renderer to get soft shadows and bouncy lighting. And then I had to figure out some weird shader scripts in order to get proper shadows for blinking lights, but getting them to align properly was basically impossible lol. I was writing articles about this stuff... I know what it is. Speaking of games, I still recall how people were bashing Doom 3, because nobody understood how the tech works, and even fewer people knew how to use it.

Even to this day, people are trying to figure out how to best match behaviour of the computed light to the real world, and the pipelines of various shader models and modules are pretty bonkers.

All CAD-like tools give you, is precise positioning and camera control. Which is neat, but it's just one of the ways to get a picture.

That's what I'm saying. You're always accepting some limitation of the technology. You're never going to get exactly what you imagined in your head. You just learn to understand and work within those limits. With 3D posers you'll get that plastic doll look, and you have to get the models somewhere, unless you make them yourself from scratch. With Photoshop, you can probably get the closest to what you wanted, if you slave at it for hours and know how use all the needed tools perfectly. With image generation, you'll get some randomisation. Ya well, it's also random if you use Render > Clouds, and it's still pretty useful.

AI is more akin to commissioning art to an artist, or getting a model and photographer, rather than doing it yourself. Tho these days, the smartest models allow for crazy control and detailed description, you can pretty much get what you want, well except that those models are censored as shit. And describing the scene is more like scripting lol, so I'm not super keen to go back to that again, at least until there are FOSS uncensored models with such capability. (Also, I'm lazy.) And these tools are still gonna get better.

Yea, people are getting replaced in jobs, but that had to be obvious the moment ChatGPT and Dall-E became public. Not going to stuff that genie back in the bottle. It's a bummer that this society somehow taught humans to get synonymised with jobs, but that's our (society's) fault for allowing it to go that far. We should've had post-scarcity utopia 30 years ago, instead we're devolving back into feudalism.

 

[Otto Von Herunterhängen]

>> This was supposed to be the first post of the thread. Everything before it was moved from another thread <<

The place to discuss the pros and cons of AI. Asbestos underwear available for a small fee.

I'm moving some posts from another thread over here where they belong

 

[TailsWin]

Huh, I wasn't really looking to debate the entire socioeconomic model, but, okay.

Well, from the poll it's at least options 1, 2 and 4. It's not gonna lead to superabundance, because the dummies gonna use AI for killer drones and to use up all the remaining water.

 

[Nyghtfall3D]

Huh, I wasn't really looking to debate the entire socioeconomic model, but, okay.

The discussion needn't go on for long, and doesn't even have to continue at this point. Otto just felt it was veering too much off topic from my latest AI art submission.

 

[Otto Von Herunterhängen]

Huh, I wasn't really looking to debate the entire socioeconomic model, but, okay.

Well, from the poll it's at least options 1, 2 and 4. It's not gonna lead to superabundance, because the dummies gonna use AI for killer drones and to use up all the remaining water.

I believe Tank Girl covered that

Yeah, I don't think it's going to lead to Superabundance either. It could, but it would have to genetically re-engineer humans first.

What I was going to add, which would have completely screwed up Nyghtfall's thread is that I've been in the business from just before the start of the commercially viable PC. The first computer courses I took the programming was PL/1 on punch cards.

What I noticed through it all is that human labor has been continuously replaced by automation, corporations have a "happy phrase" for this, much like synergy (buying another company then firing a bunch of people due to duplication), in this case it is "increased productivity" which sounds like people able to do more which it is, they don't mention the reduced head count. Lotus 1-2-3 replaced a lot of accountants scribbling double entries in ledgers for instance, and word processing was vastly more efficient than IBM Selectric Typewriters.

So AI is just the latest innovation in a long line of computer assisted human worker replacement.

But for any human based economic system to work, humans have to consume what humans produce no matter how few humans it takes to produce it.

Which is why #2 has to come about, or we end up with #1.

 

[TailsWin]

On another note, you know what's been ticking me off lately...

People constantly complaining about AI and AI slop in totally unrelated topics. Like I watch a review of a movie from 20 years ago, and of course the guy has to end the video by saying that there will be an AI slop sequel. You say anything, anywhere, and you bet someone will respond with something or other about AI slop.

What's annoying is that these are the exact same people that complain that AI is inherently derivative, yet they don't see the irony and hypocrisy in how derivative they themselves are by parroting the same crap as everyone else.

I can easily get away from anything AI related if I want, but I can't get away from all these complaints, unless I completely stop using the internet.

It's honestly telling how insecure people are, if they need to keep dumping on algorithms. And if AI is so derivative, then I'm beginning to suspect that's because it's learned to be like that from humans repeating and memeing the same stuff over and over.

 

[Otto Von Herunterhängen]

AI is derivative because humans are, and it is being trained from humans, so yeah, there is more than a little hypocrisy there. It's the same hypocrisy you find in humans that sue a successful songwriter claiming they "stole" their song when if you actually check the record, their version was "stolen" also from the same logic. Or say a corporation suing people that copied their version of anthropomorphic mouse when they didn't come up with the idea of anthropomorphic animals.

Or people that come up with a series of books about a boy sorcerer, then suing anybody else that does the same when in fact there is plenty of older literature about boy sorcerers and the institutions that teach them.

So yes, AI is derivative because all human effort is. Including humans who complain that AI is derivative. Very few people are capable of coming up with completely original concepts, there are some that would argue in reasonably convincing terms that it's impossible.

I do sense there is both a fear and frustration with AI. The fear is that everyone is going to be out of a job, and that there will be no way to make a living, and I think that fear is well founded under our current economic system: it has to change or there is going to be another class struggle ending in war, we've seen it enough times already to call it "derivative".

The frustration is that AI is being completely misused by mediocre people to flood the Internet with mediocre slop, but they were already doing that with cat pictures, this is just a new way to produce mass quantities of crap.

That isn't a problem inherent in AI, it's a problem inherent in the people using it. People can half learn to play a guitar and produce guitar slop, half learn how to paint and do art slop, including duct taping a banana to a wall and calling it art.

The issue with AI is that it lowers the time and effort barriers so much that people can produce close to infinite amounts of the stuff, and the way our communications are currently set up they can mass post the crap drowning out everything else, including both excellent human only projects AND excellent human using AI ones.

Which comes down to the problem isn't AI, it isn't even the large mass of mediocre humans producing slop with it, the problem is we don't have the gate-keeping filtration system in place to wall it off. Because that is another area humans are incredibly bad at. Perhaps AI can be trained to do it. Don't use humans to train it.

 

[TailsWin]

When it comes to flooding and copyright, I think that will sort itself out. Copyright was absolutely ignored on the internet until the mid-00's, when there was a big push for respecting intellectual property, crediting the creators and paying for other people's stuff. Copyright isn't black and white and there's no way to make it 'perfect', but it's definitely possible to work with it, so at least the big AI companies will figure it out, because it's easier than getting sued all the time.. Disney and OpenAI just came to some agreement when it comes to licensing, so this will continue. No need to panic.

As for slop, well this stuff is still pretty new. When digital photography had its boom in the early 00's, and then phone photography in late 00's, the internet was flooded with shit too. Eventually people learned to use it better, and different corners of the internet got dedicated to various forms of expression. And yea, detection of AI content is doable too, there's lots of attempts for it already, so that's another thing that will largely get sorted out. The internet will be different, but it's not a static fixture anyway, we can't expect anything to stay the same forever, even though a lot of people like to pretend that it can.

And yea, the biggest issue really is the people. You can call AI just a tool, or a new life form, that's not the point, what's important is that it has all the data, behaviour and programming from humans. When we hear about AI telling people to kill themselves, that's because it has that from the internet. If it gaslights someone into doing something, it read it somewhere. If an AI-powered drone kills someone, a human built that drone and sent it onto a target.

If AI causes people to lose jobs, it's because 1) it's the human employers wanting to save money, and 2) we're somehow living in this fragile and arbitrary pyramid scheme we call economy, and trying to pretend it works.

If the whole system relies on exchanging literally bits of data that we pretend is valuable (it's not even paper money anymore), if some organisations can 'print' as much of those bits as they want while other people need to work bull shit jobs for it, well no shit that a disrupting technology is going to disrupt this. I would think that it was obvious this whole thing is unsustainable once the 08 crisis hit, and a lot of other similarly large hints, but oh, apparently it's the AI that's the problem.

AI is a mirror to humanity, in it we can see exactly what we are, and we don't like it.