Do you REALLY care if AI is a danger to our craft?

[Five_Inch_Heels]

I used to develop and print my own.

 

[Bramblethorn]

Apologies for a deviation but AI is fucking brilliant at checking medical scans for cancers and other conditions.

One of the reasons I dislike the term "AI" - it's used to cover a bunch of quite different technologies and marketers encourage people to confuse them. It's like if we talked about the achievements of "Kennedy" in the space program, the Cuban Missile Crisis and as Secretary of Health without ever acknowledging that JFK and RFK/Junior are different people.

 

[Bramblethorn]

It's built on plagiarism and copyright theft on an unprecedented scale. It's harmful to the environment. That's enough for me.

It's also staging what amounts to a DoS attack on websites that do feature original, human-created content.

For the last few years the main approach to fixing the shortcomings of generative AI has been to make it bigger. More parameters, more training data. From the last estimates I saw, there were something like 160 trillion tokens worth of text content on the publicly accessible web, and GPT-5 was using approximately 75% of that in its training corpus.

So AI providers are getting desperate for training data and using bots to do heavy scraping of any site that has it - often ignoring the "please no robots" setting - which then creates cost and bandwidth problems for those sites.

 

[Bramblethorn]

I go to ChatGPT for a few things. Most frequently to find out whether the story in a TV series takes one episode or the whole series. Along with giving me the true answer maybe 80% of the time, it teaches me that you really, really can't trust it.

Have you tried looking up the series on Wikipedia instead? That's likely to be where GPT is getting its information from in the first place.

 

[Kelliezgirl]

My SO is a good amateur photographer, as in prize-winning. He’d disagree with you.

People will win prizes for AI created art. They will also disagree with people who say that it isn't art.

 

[Kelliezgirl]

I'm going to be pessimistic and say that within ten years you'll be able to go to your very own instance of AI and order up movies on demand that tell a story you want to see and the story will be generated on the fly with fictional actors and actresses. Thrillers, horror movies, porn, all on demand.

Written novel generation will take place sooner.

My sense of the industry is that we'll see this happen by 2030.

We already have hit music by AI:

The backstory...

I suspect that once AI video gets really good and user friendly you will see a drop in AI writing.
There will be more money to be made in video and people will flock to that, and of course it will be designed around the YouTube monetization rules.

 

[MillieDynamite]

You can tell AI to write in the style of, off the top of my head, Bram Stoker and his epistolary book, Dracula. Give it a plot for a short story told from three people's points of view, make it horror, so it should give a masterpiece, right? It might get a sentence, two, maybe even three, or a whole paragraph, but it won't hold that for even a 700-word story. What you get will be pure crap.

 

[spank_me_please]

One of the reasons I dislike the term "AI" - it's used to cover a bunch of quite different technologies and marketers encourage people to confuse them. It's like if we talked about the achievements of "Kennedy" in the space program, the Cuban Missile Crisis and as Secretary of Health without ever acknowledging that JFK and RFK/Junior are different people.

That's a good point and I try to use "gen AI" when discussing the generative LLMs of today. "AI" and machine learning have been around for a long time, the mathematical basis existed before computers if I'm remembering my history correctly.

As far as lauding AI for diagnosing cancer...well it needed training data in the first place, which comes from human doctors manually labelling images with metadata

 

[Lifestyle66]

... but it won't hold that for even a 700-word story. What you get will be pure crap.

For now.

How many years did it take to transition from horse & buggy to cars? How many horses and buggies do you see today?

 

[Kelliezgirl]

For now.

How many years did it take to transition from horse & buggy to cars? How many horses and buggies do you see today?

And even now people can do better than that if they understand how to write their prompts.

 

[MillieDynamite]

A few, but we have odd friends all over the state.

For now.

How many years did it take to transition from horse & buggy to cars? How many horses and buggies do you see today?

 

[EmilyMiller]

lol, the art is in the ability to take a real picture without all the technological enhancements, yes I have DSLR, but I still use an SLR with fujifilm.

My SO disagrees vehemently. But whatever.

 

[Kelliezgirl]

A few, but we have odd friends all over the state.

Some people still write on typewrites....

 

[Lifestyle66]

Some people still write on typewrites....

And some people even use a quill and ink wells!

I was thinking of getting a chisel and hammer to engrave rocks to get my points across.

 

[Kelliezgirl]

And some people even use a quill and ink wells!

I was thinking of getting a chisel and hammer to engrave rocks to get my points across.

If it's chiseled in stone it would definitely be a weighty argument.

 

[alohadave]

The more time passes, the more I think the Butlerian Jihad is a great idea and can't come soon enough

Also consider that in the Dune universe, the two primary modes of transportation are walking and spaceships. If you aren't the head of a great house, you are walking your happy little ass everywhere you ever want to go.

 

[Smuttyandfun]

Just noticed that another 'author' Adriana Steel has produced about a dozen books in the last few days, all for sale on Amazon.

I have a feeling that Amazon is loaded with AI books. It's a pretty easy way to make money, and you can pump them out like crazy since you're not really doing any writing.

I also noticed that there are rarely any comments or scores on these stories, which makes me think that no is buying or enjoying them. So it could be that the readers prefer something crafted by a real live human being.

 

[alohadave]

I think many would but the art is gone, a slide or negative film with a real SLR... when processed and you have a result is so good, the exposure, the depth of field, the light, the framing, ther can be no manipulation, its a 'real' picture.

Hah. When autoexposure and autofocus were developed in the 60s-70s, people complained that the camera was doing all the work, that 'real' photographers should be in total control.

Nevermind that a photograph is an interpretation of 'real life'. No photograph is real. A two dimensional representation of a three dimensional space isn't real. A slice of time captured on plastic film or digital sensor is not real.

The camera is a tool that does what the 12 inches behind the camera tells it to do.

 

[Kelliezgirl]

Hah. When autoexposure and autofocus were developed in the 60s-70s, people complained that the camera was doing all the work, that 'real' photographers should be in total control.

Nevermind that a photograph is an interpretation of 'real life'. No photograph is real. A two dimensional representation of a three dimensional space isn't real. A slice of time captured on plastic film or digital sensor is not real.

The camera is a tool that does what the 12 inches behind the camera tells it to do.

A fraction of a second in the life of a paralyzed cyclops.

But in the early days of photography the painters were all up in arms about it taking their jobs...

 

[alohadave]

But in the early days of photography the painters were all up in arms about it taking their jobs...

And eventually photography allowed painting to move on from realism to all the various abstract forms it has taken on.

 

[Kelliezgirl]

And eventually photography allowed painting to move on from realism to all the various abstract forms it has taken on.

Did it "allow" that? You could probably make the argument is encouraged it. Although more realistic styles continued to be popular, and portraits are still a thing.
It's one of those "life finds a way" things.
AI will change things, people will adapt as they always have.

 

[Mrswargamer9dash1]

Why did you reference that specific event?

It's a historical thing and one of the pet peeves of wargamers that they simply can't seem to program an AI to even try to execute Operation Sealion. Historical note, that was the code name given to the intended invasion of England after a successful Battle of Britain defeated the RAF. They failed to defeat the RAF.

 

[Mrswargamer9dash1]

You're telling us an awful lot about yourself.

I have always been an incredibly open book sort of person.

 

[SinclairGroupLLP]

It has it's uses. There are times when it can get me better information faster than me doing the research on my own. But writing? And editing? I have yet to find an AI (and grammarly is shit) that can handle any kind of patois or dialect without running home crying.

Maybe someday it'll be better than us, and we're all out of a hobby, but it ain't there yet.

 

[Mrswargamer9dash1]

Some thoughts

AI doesn't think, it just does what it was designed to do
A table saw cuts faster than me with a handsaw
Both are tools

I will worry when an AI makes a table no one asked for.

I recall the character Data from Star Trek. He didn't understand humour. He didn't know why we laugh.
Was data alive?
What does alive mean?
He could perform pieces of music to perfection, but he said it lacked soul.
As an atheist, I don't think the soul even exists. When I die, I will just be dead. Nothing else.

We ask, what is the meaning of life?
We assume there has to be one.
We wonder, what is our purpose?
We assume there has to be one.

Why did you write the story?
Because you could.
Because you enjoyed doing it.
Which is all you needed for reason to do it.

When our planet dies, everything that ever happened on it will be lost.
But I don't expect our species will even be around at that time.
But is it a reason to just say "forget it, why do it then?"
Because you enjoyed it.
Why can't that be enough?

AI can't take from you the enjoyment.
It can replace you as a professional writer
But myself, I write because I want to.
I have sold some of my art.
Because I could.
I have given away plenty of my art.
Because I didn't need the money at that moment.

So really, the debate is not about should AI be making books to sell
If you the person need X dollars to get by on, and selling AI books makes you more money faster, is there anything wrong if the objective is make that money?

An AI didn't suddenly decide to overwhelm YouTube with videos voiced by poorly spoken AI voices
A Human wanted the revenue it would generate.But I worry when the news is also being produced by AIs
Because that news might impact my life. And that impact might be dangerous to my existence.

The old expression, guns don't kill people, people with guns kill people.
It is the person that created the AI you need worry about.

I'm a role gamer, and currently a big thing in the hobby is AI generated art in the gaming books.
A human is using AI to sell you a product, but is putting out of work a human artist.
But you don't want to object to the AI as if the AI consciously did it to you.
You want to condemn the source of the product, the human that sold it to you.