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Twonks | Bluesky
Transcript
A comic in four panels:
Panel 1. White text on black
AI Design Logic
Panel 2. A guy sits in a restaurant at a table with a checkered table cloth. A waiter stands near, hands behind back waiting attentively.
Guy: Get me a cheese pizza
Panel 3. The waiter returns with a pizza in hand.
Panel 4. The guy gestures proudly at the pizza. The waiter looks less than amused.
Guy: Wow, look what I made!
How is this different from what anybody who hires or employs people do?
I think most people leading a team would say "we built this". Personally, if I hire someone to build something for me, I'd say something like "I had this built" intead of saying I built it myself.
I think there should be a short form for "I had AI do this for me"... "I prompted" maybe?
How is this different from what anybody who hires or employs people do?
Fun question.
I prefer the term ‘built’ when I share my vibe coded slop, thanks
*sarcasm
the best part is that the waiter stole it from another restaurant
I mean I get the point, but people will actually say "I made pizza for dinner" when they just heated up a frozen pizza which is the same.
Do they? Because when this come up what I usually hear is more apologetic - something along the lines of "oh, I didn't actually make it". They certainly won't try to defend it when pushed.
I take pride in my cooking
I would say "I reheated a pizza" if I lowered myself to doing that
When I say that I make something, I made it from scratch
If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe
And AI would hand you a salad calling it a pizza.
It reminds me of what painters said about photography early on. While they toiled for hundreds of hours to paint a realistic image a dude with a box and zero skill beyond maybe some chemistry could snap an even more realistic image. Photography was not considered art for a very long time by the formal art community.
You forget that early photographers were almost exclusively painters.
Funny eh.
Arguably more so chemists but yeah I'm aware. Most / all of their paints were made by hand themselves as well, part of the reason it was a sensible transition to film production and manipulation.
Your analogy doesn’t work. Anyone could take a photograph, just like anyone could paint something, but making it art, eliciting a human reaction, requires skill.
And by the way, not every moment in history when a technological breakthrough threatened a well established craft, can or should be compared to the current state of AI, if anything because it paints a picture where anyone opposing change is some sort of luddite. “Change” is not always a good thing, and there are more than a handful of inconvenient examples: atomic vs conventional weapons, cigarettes vs herbal treatments for anxiety, leaded vs unleaded gasoline for increased engine performance, glass and paper vs plastic in food containers, etc. For each one, incessant marketing campaigns were launched, touting their advantages and how they would improve the world as we knew it. World Expos were organized around these things. People were legitimately excited.
The truth wasn’t quite that. The US found itself in a tight spot when they lost the monopoly on nuclear weapons, which triggered a histeria across the country that lasted for decades, and even nowadays, “nuclear deterrence” conditions geopolitics to the maximum degree. Cigarettes, turned out, weren’t as good to calm nerves as they were killing people. Leaded gasoline, which was the answer given by refineries to the question “what if we stop improving refining processes and start adding literal poison as an additive”. And microplastics are the latest in all the ways humans have found to screw the food chain.
Not every art piece is even physical or tangible in any sense. The art is in the conception or the idea. There is indeed a skill in constructing models as well as using them but ignoring all of that there's still the artistic touch in creating thought provoking or impassioned concepts irrespective of the tangible form they've been given. Although one can most definitely use a medium to impart meaning.
It was never my argument that people who have issues with new technology are necessarily luddites or that AI or really any technology whatsoever is absolutely problem free. Everything has its pros and cons, for example nuclear gave us access to functionally limitless clean (compared to coal and gas) energy as well as more powerful weapons. One unavoidable rule or law of reality is we don't get something for nothing.
Ultimately what is and is not art was, is, and will be an open question each individual has to answer for themselves. Even today an individual is free to view photography not as a legitimate art form or digital art or CGI and so on.
There is indeed a skill in constructing models as well as using them but ignoring all of that there's still the artistic touch in creating thought provoking or impassioned concepts irrespective of the tangible form they've been given.
We weren’t talking about constructing models. And where’s the skill in “using” them in this context, when the user is eventually given the exact end product they asked for, and it is as original as rehashing the training set can be?
Everything has its pros and cons, for example nuclear gave us access to functionally limitless much cleaner energy as well as more powerful weapons
I see that you went with the nuclear example, because all of the others seem straight up indefensible in comparison.
Problem is, I wasn’t talking about nuclear energy. Even if I did, development of nuclear energy didn’t require creating nuclear weapons at all. Yet they did, and it’s a great example of how technological achievements aren’t always a good thing.
AI slop is AI slop, but if you compare it to a film director explaining to a concept artist or director of photography what he wants, then selecting and refining examples and concept art and sketching out a storyboard, there is little difference to someone using AI to make some film. Just that the latter will typically be much worse because anyone can do it now, they won't have studied film making, and AI isn't very good at it so far. But either can be art, or it can be garbage.
Also with advances in hardware and better tools and software and models, we could see a new type of art form or medium. Something like the holodeck in star trek. Like a movie that is more interactive, like a role playing session in VR. Told to you by a narrator but you can interject and steer or derail the narrative. So the "directors" become more like world builders or campaign designers.
The sheer endless tsunami of this dreck makes it meaningless.
I'm not sure more people having more access means things are now worse. Like more people have more means to create art today than 500 years ago and yeah there's a lot of uninspired or derivative content but also there's a lot more legitimate artists making passionate and thought provoking work.
Yeah I imagine what you're saying will come to pass although I think it'll look more like parlor walls from Fahrenheit 451 for the majority. I think my main issue is when a human is totally uninvolved in the process. So far it seems pretty noticeable when there's someone with an actual idea they're trying to create vs there's no mind behind it.
Haha love the reference to Fahrenheit 451. There is also a good illustration in the horror story from _9MOTHER9HORSE9EYES9 with people sinking into some kind of experience stream, similar to wireheading. Or in "Systema Delenda Est" about postbiological life there is the concept of "Elysium" virtual worlds where people go in and never want to come out again, because they live in a narrative that is always perfect for them. Instead of slop you have perfection that is irresistible. Star Trek had Barkley becoming holo-addicted. Cheese Pizza is really bad for you too lol.
You could argue that something like computer games the story is ultimately told by the player and his decisions and actions, and the world should just react. There is a fundamental limit to storytelling in computer games, which only tabletop role playing games solve with an intelligent narrator or game master. I do think LLMs can fill that role but not very well. But better than what open world games offer today. Not better than a well written movie.
I think ultimately the will or mind should be unbounded sans the ability to willfully cause harm to other minds. It's purely due to limitations of technology that we are in our current predicament. The famous prosthetic engineer Hugh Herr made the argument it was not him who was disabled but our technology that was disabled. Now what minds do when they are unbounded by the reality around them is their own responsibility. If you've seen the show pantheon then things could turn out similarly aka minds in multiple embodiments exploring physical and simulated realities or otherwise experiencing whatever they desire without limitations beyond the limitation of willfully causing harm to others.
Ideally minds unchained from limitations wouldn't desire to cause harm anyways, but there's some real jerks out there.
That is a good argument.
It's more so historical fact. It was denounced for like nearly a century if not longer depending how you're measuring. It's similar to AI in that it decreases the mechanical effort one needs to create content but also itself imposes new required skills to develop that content. There's definitely a hierarchy in AI content and so far at least to myself it's very clear when there is a person actively trying to create something vs a completely automated content pipeline. I would challenge anyone who thinks all AI creations are nothing but slop to create something themselves equal to or better than some of the better works I've seen. Similar to a challenge of a traditional painter to create a compelling photographic composition.
Maybe to add to this I think it's worth noting the creative demand of designing and training a model. It's not without inspired thought. I'm curious to see the code as well. Amongst people who program there can most definitely be beautiful and ugly code in the same way there can be a pleasing or unpleasant movie scene or painting.
It’s similar to AI in that it decreases the mechanical effort one needs to create content
I get that you mean this from the perspective of the user, but you can't ignore they are fixing to restart disused nuclear power plants to sustain the required computational power and the datacenters creating drinkingwater supply problems left and right.
Photography never had anywhere near the societarial cost that AI has.
I would challenge anyone who thinks all AI creations are nothing but slop to create something themselves equal to or better than some of the better works I’ve seen. Similar to a challenge of a traditional painter to create a compelling photographic composition.
There'll always be a massive difference to me looking at something that comes from a logic machine and something that comes from a human. It's not always about details and graphical fidelity. It's why I have my 4 year old niece's doodles on my fridge, instead of asking an AI to improve them and hang those instead.
I think we're having two discussions. There is the discussion about whether or not media created using a neural network with a human prompting it can be considered art. Hypothetically an individual could design, train, and prompt a NN including creating the dataset themselves it was trained on. Would that also be discredited just for the fact part of their process used a NN? What if one also used all clean carbon neutral energy to run and train their NN?
The other discussion is about the issues surrounding people's current choices on how to develop neural networks. I guess you could link them together and say because of these issues anything created using these tools is not art. It would beg the hypothetical of if it would be art if these issues were not there.
I think we’re having two discussions. There is the discussion about whether or not media created using a neural network with a human prompting it can be considered art. Hypothetically an individual could design, train, and prompt a NN including creating the dataset themselves it was trained on. Would that also be discredited just for the fact part of their process used a NN?
I want to be clear that don't feel qualified at all to classify things as art or not (outside of my personal opinion), but you're still letting a logic machine make artistic choices and thusly letting your art (partly) be the result of calculations. Even if it's trained on only your art and your way of working and way of thinking somehow, the process in which it generates output is unaffected.
What if one also used all clean carbon neutral energy to run and train their NN?
The only difference between clean and dirty energy is how it affects life on earth. Wastefulness should be avoided either way.
You could argue if you own a windmill you could just burn it's output as it's only wind and this windmill is yours, but it's still better to have a smaller windmill or no windmill at all.
The other discussion is about the issues surrounding people’s current choices on how to develop neural networks. I guess you could link them together and say because of these issues anything created using these tools is not art. It would beg the hypothetical of if it would be art if these issues were not there.
I read this several times but I was unfortunately unable to distill where you're going with this particular paragraph. I think it ties into your first point?
You know this argument would apply to any digital tool used to make art right? Like Photoshop is using logic and algorithms to create image manipulations and similarly for vector art and video editing. Many effects one doesn't know the actual outcome until it's rendered and you have to go in and skillfully play with the software to get the desired result from the logic manipulations you're not performing by hand. It's not unlike crafting a prompt to get a desired result. An analogy to photography may be how people played chemically with film to get desired results. In an abstract sense one is twisting and dialing knobs of their tool to create art, not cognitively different than one playing with paint, brushes, and canvas to get a desired result.
I'm not inclined to conclude algorithms in blender, lightroom, Krita , after effects or Photoshop are intrinsically different from algorithms used for NN. Like hypothetically one could run through all of these algorithms with a pencil and paper, it would just take a really really long time.
There's a bit of subjectivity in that argument, for instance someone who dislikes rock music could argue the energy used to play or produce it was wasteful.
A large portion of your argument up to now dealt with choices individuals and companies have made in their attempt to develop and power NN and not about the nature of NN's themselves, particularly in contrast to other algorithms we already use to make what most people consider art.
It seemed the argument you were building was anything generated by NN was not art because of those issues. It's maybe a more valid argument if one is speaking about a particular model whose development or use is mired in copyright and environmental controversy but it's not useful to apply that to all NN full stop which is why I posed the hypothetical.
But the pizza was stolen from the store down the street
Family recipe
Somebody on the other app said that Cheese Pizza stands for CP and the AI thing becomes even more accurate
Yeah I was surprised no other comments here picked that up, I thought that had to be on purpose.
Obviously never used AI. How it really goes is that you ask for a cheese pizza and after you spend hours and a bunch of money on tokens, you get an onion and peanut butter pizza with no cheese and you go, "Fuck it. Close enough."
You forgot the part where they steal the pizzas from other parlors to sell them as thier own.
All that while using enough resources to create tons of pizzas