So, Vaush discussed how apparently chat GPT had a "stroke" of sorts last night and really started getting really freaking weird. And, let's face it, it's an interesting topic, and I think it shows the limits of AI at this current time. While some of us (me) might long for the days when AI and robots can take over most or all human work so we can be free to play all day, we're gonna have to wait a bit longer. I mean, Andrew Yang talked about the robots taking the jobs, and in a lot of fields, AI isnt ready for prime time. Between the issues with self driving cars stopping mainstream adoption, to lawyers citing them for legal cases only to realize that they were outputting garbage, to google's AI getting too "woke" and refusing to generate images of white people, to stuff like chat GPT getting lazy and apparently having said melt down last night, AI still needs a lot of work to make...work.Don't worry, we will probably get there eventually. It just might take a bit longer than we thought.
Still, Vaush, in the clip above, ended up going on a bit of a tangent rant about AI art. Apparently he doesnt like AI art because it rips assets from actual artists and reuses them, and he sees this as intellectual theft. He also said that the people who like AI art are tech bros who hate real artists and the like.
As someone who is actually very pro AI in principle (I just don't like the idea of shoehorning it into everything to create a wave of planned obsolescence to force us to prematurely upgrade our PCs), and also a bit anti work, let me offer a different principle.
The reason we care so much about intellectual property is that in a world of work, where we force people to work to eat and meet their basic needs, people kinda need their work recognized. Artists need food to live. They need to charge for their art. They need credit for their work, because if they create a masterpiece and if someone steals it, it devalues their work, causing them to lose their job and not be able to meet their basic needs.
But, here's the thing, if automation comes for art, in which it can produce a crapton of it in far less time than human artists can output it, then guess what? That kind of devalues it in the market place. Does that mean that we should be opposed to AI? Well, only if you're a luddite, by luddite, I mean someone who artificially wants to preserve jobs for their own sake so that we can continue to collect a paycheck.
But, here's the thing. The reason we link money to work is to incentivize work. if the work can be done without human inputs, then we don't need to do that any more. And we should welcome this new zero marginal cost society in which we can create tons of stuff with virtually no human inputs. it doesnt matter to me if it tends to devalue human work, if that model is obsolete, then it's obsolete. If human work still has value, than it will always find a place in the market place. If generative AI is just outputting flawed low quality asset flips, to me, that's just another limitation to it and real artists who produce something new should still get rewarded in the market. If they don't, well, who cares? Because honestly, in my ideal world, we'll all sit around screwing around anyway. If we wanna create something, we won't need to be paid for it ideally, because we'll be so past this whole idea of linking work to money that it won't matter.
It's like that one episode of rick and morty with the dinosaurs and how they created a true post work society and then morty's dad (who is a lazy bum in some ways) wrote a book about how we shouldnt need to work any mroe and then got pissy because he didnt get credit. He himself kinda missed that he wouldnt NEED credit if we actually moved that far into post scarcity. The concept of IP and ownership doesnt matter as much when that stuff isnt linked to your survival. Again, that crap exists primarily as an INCENTIVE. Where we're going, we eventually won't NEED incentives.
The true tragedy of automation is when automation takes away peoples' livelihoods, and then because we're stuck in this mentality of jobism, we then force them to get new jobs doing something else. That's the real problem, and what we wanna get rid of. And I would argue in the long term, we should WANT to get rid of that.
So when Vaush goes on about tech bros defending AI art, it comes off to me as cringey. Given vaush is a leftist i get why he does it. He's pro worker and wants the worker rewarded for their work. But I tend to side more with the tech bros here because I dont look at the inputs of the work as much as the PRODUCT. if AI can produce a comparable PRODUCT to human inputs, then we shouldnt need human inputs. Period. Maybe that means no one will get paid, but if we move beyond people needing to get paid for work due to having a UBI (although by then I hope UBI would be more than the basics), or fully automated post scarcity techno communism, then more power to it. I mean, it's not like I think we should be forced to sit around all day producing things for other humans to consume if it's not a necessity. And many forms of work that arent profitable can still produce internal value and purpose. Like this blog (seriously, doing this, while giving me no money, is far more valuable from an internal perspective than any bog standard job that pays). I dont even care that AI can produce articles. AI has no actual creativity. I was actually going to have an AI produce an essay or article about it taking peoples' jobs and it wouldnt even do it, it just gave me canned talking points about retraining humans for new fields. Again, zero creativity. Human will be fine, even with AI art. Because AI isnt even real intelligence. It just regurgitates facts in a rote way like a C student trying to pass an exam by reciting what the text book says.
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