kibiz0r
Tech Con: https://youtu.be/zb7Bs98KmnY
UnEcon: https://youtu.be/Fz68ILyuWtA
Might be more of a Baader-Meinhof phenomenon for me, because those two videos were just recommended to me back-to-back, and I’ve only watched the second one so far.
I really expected zero updoots here and maybe a reply saying I’m dumb cuz Tech Con barely said anything about obsolescence. I was just stream-of-consciousness’ing, but I guess others are feeling the same vibes? ¯\(ツ)/¯
Damn, did Technology Connections get everybody fired up? I just watched an Unlearning Economics video on the same topic.
There are pretty substantial ghouls that preceded Reaganomics: chartered monopolies, anonymous transferable shares of companies (thinking Dutch East India Company here), prohibition of local currencies, central banking, labor theory of property
And that succeeded Reaganomics: Chokepoint capitalism, evergreen IP, the gig economy
Yes, in a proximate sense, specifically in the US, Reagan broke a lot of dams that were holding back the most calamitous floods that were poised to drown us... but he didn't fill them with water in the first place.
I'm not the same person as @snooggums@kbin.social, but it did look like they were replying on my behalf, so I understand the assumption. No worries there.
I agree with what you're saying.
I would just wanna clarify that you're primarily talking about "art as a marketable commodity" and the societal problems with how that interacts with AI development, where I was talking primarily about "art as a cultural message" and the fundamental inability of AI to cross the threshold from "art as a product" to "art as a message" because the model itself has nothing to message about. (With the caveat that a person may use the AI's product as a message, but then the meaning comes from the person, not the AI.) I think we agree with each other here.
Btw, and you probably already know this, Cory Doctorow has some really sharp insights and recommendations when it comes to the past, present, and future of IP law and how we might be able to protect creators going forward.
I do wanna respond to something that wasn't really directed at me, just cuz it overlaps with my original comment and I think it's kind of interesting:
Again, you can say by fiat an AI has the personhood of a toaster, but that doesn’t make the content it creates less quality or less real. And given in the past how often we’ve disparaged art for being made by women, by non-whites, by Jews, we as a social collective have demonstrated our opinion is easily biased to arbitrarily favor those sources we like.
You’re not going to find any way to objectively justify including only human beings as qualified to make art.
You're right that, without an objective measure of what counts as an artistic endeavor, we're permitted to be as discriminatory as we feel like being. Which seems... not great, right?
But I don't think you ever can make an objective measure of what counts as art, because art is like the observable physical effect of something that's going on in our consciousness -- an immaterial world that can't directly map 1:1 with the physical world.
So I think art is always destined to be this amorphous thing that you can't exactly pin down. It's maybe more of a verb than a noun. Like I can't look at an inert object sitting on a table and figure out that it's art. But if someone tells me that this is the last sculpture their aunt made before she died and she started it when she felt fine, but by the end she could barely hold her hands still, and she never finished it... Well, suddenly I catch a glimpse of the conscious experience of that person. And it's not that her conscious experience was baked into the object, but that I can imagine being in her place and I can feel the frustration of the half-finished angles and the resignation of staring at it after touching it for the last time.
Yes, there is a real history of people saying "Those savages aren't conscious", or that they are technically conscious but a "lower" kind of consciousness. And I know it makes us uncomfortable to think we might do that again, and so I think some of us have developed a reflex to say we need to make an objective rational view of the world so that human subjectivity doesn't come into it and poison things... But I don't think it's possible, as long as the nature of consciousness remains a mystery to us.
And I also think if we do come to agree on a rationalist framework for living, we will have lost something. Once you have rules and measures, there's no room for... well, for lack of a better word, "soul". I'm an atheist, but I'm also conscious. And I don't think that the totality of my conscious experience is somehow quantifiable, or especially that if we could replay those exact quantities then it's just as good as consciousness. Like, I am experiencing something here, and there's no good reason to think that matter precedes consciousness and not the other way around.
I'm rambling now, but you get what I mean?
Can you elaborate? "AI and the history of AI creativity and art" is a pretty broad scope, so I'm sure I have some massive blind spots within it, and I'd love some links or summaries of the areas I might be missing.
How is that the implication?
Inspiration is something we do through conscious experience. Just because some statistical analysis of a word cloud can produce sentences that trick a casual observer into thinking a person wrote them doesn’t make it a creative process.
In fact, I can prove to you that (so-called) AI can never be creative.
To get an AI to do anything, we have to establish a goal to measure against. You have to quantify it.
If you tell a human being “this is what it means to be creative; we have an objective measure of it”, do you know what they tend to do? They say “fuck your definition” and try to make something that breaks the rules in an interesting way. That’s the entire history of art.
You can even see that playing out with respect to AI. Artists going “You say AI art can’t be art, so I’m gonna enter AI pieces and see if you can even tell.”
That’s a creative act. But it’s not creative because of what the AI is doing. Much like Duchamp’s urinal wasn’t a creative object, but the act of signing it R Mutt and submitting it to a show was.
The kinds of AIs we design right now will never have a transformative R Mutt moment, because they are fundamentally bounded by their training. They would have to be trained to use novel input to dismantle and question their training (and have that change stick around), but even that training would then become another method of imitation that they could not escape. They can’t question quantification itself, because they are just quantitative processes — nothing more than word calculators.
His son would’ve been his only heir eligible to receive compensation if DC ever made things right, but he died young (from AIDS) and never had any children himself (because he was gay).
Edif: He did have a child! Wow!
she applauded the climate movement for starting to "crack the grip" which the fossil fuel industry holds on the nation's political economy.
"That's because of you," she said to those in the crowd. "Don't let the cynics win. The cynics want us to think that this isn't worth it. The cynics want us to believe that we can't win. The cynics want us to believe that organizing doesn't matter; that our political system doesn't matter; that our economy doesn't matter. But we're here to say that we organize out of hope! We organize out of commitment! We organize out of love! We organize out of the beauty of our future! And we will not give up. We will not let go! We will not let cynicism to prevail!"
It’s worth whatever it sells for when you resign. Which, if you did a good job, is way more than what it would’ve sold for the day you got it.
Why do we let execs sell stock received as compensation at all?
Very cool tech that could potentially do a lot of good.
However, we're talking about AI and big platforms here, so usual questions apply: