The future of AI

[Dave_W]

The true test of whether GAI has a future will be if Jye ever ditches doing his beloved Photoshop monstrosities.

 

[Dave_W]

AI can be used to improve our lives and helps people, but the moment it starts being used to replace people or their work is when I take an issue with it.

I can't wait for all of these executives to start greenlighting fully AI shows, movies, games, etc. and to watch them flop.

I can see them running the script, the budget, the cast, the release dates, all those things through an AI and it decides if it's worth green lighting the project or even makes suggestions for change.

"Change the ending, don't cast Tom Hardy and release it in February for maximum profits"

It's pretty much how they operate already.

 

[crows]

The true test of whether GAI has a future will be if Jye ever ditches doing his beloved Photoshop monstrosities.

Photoshop monstrosities. that made me laugh hard.

 

[Wor-Gar]

AI can be used to improve our lives and helps people

... and the opposite.

Sadly, like the internet and cellphone before it, it will do both.

 

[Mr.E]

I see things headed towards Blade Runner territory, and not in a good way. This is only a hunch, but I think the more technology advances, the more disconnected we're becoming. Pretty soon, our only "connections" will be the latest update.

 

[Wor-Gar]

We are The Machine.

 

[crows]

AI can be used to improve our lives and helps people, but the moment it starts being used to replace people or their work is when I take an issue with it.

but that already happened so many times, mp3s and Napster killed music stores, killed Circuit city and F.Y.E. and then Netflix kills blockbuster, and cellphones killed the phone operators and the phonebooth industry, and Uber basically killed taxi jobs,
Amazon killed Barnes and noble,GameStop is barely alive

... and the opposite.

Sadly, like the internet and cellphone before it, it will do both.

but how come no one cried when Netflix ended blockbuster, or itunes ended circuit city ? or Uber ended taxi cabs?
and I'm willing to bet that you personally have used all 3. when was the last time anyone bought a music CD or took a taxi? 10 years?

 

[Wor-Gar]

Things move forward. Not always for the better. But the newest generation always believes it to be.

It can result in a Renaissance or The Dark Ages. But just as an example, the Age of Enlightenment lasted 74 years while the Dark Ages lasted over 900 years.

 

[MeatHookGekko]

I see things headed towards Blade Runner territory, and not in a good way. This is only a hunch, but I think the more technology advances, the more disconnected we're becoming. Pretty soon, our only "connections" will be the latest update.

Japan's population is projected to fall from a peak of 128 million in 2017 to less than 53 million by the end of the century.

The study projects: The number of under-fives will fall from 681 million in 2017 to 401 million in 2100.The number of over 80-year-olds will soar from 141 million in 2017 to 866 million in 2100. Who pays tax in a massively aged world? Who pays for healthcare for the elderly? Who looks after the elderly? Will people still be able to retire from work? Some countries have tried policies such as enhanced maternity and paternity leave, free childcare, financial incentives and extra employment rights, but there is no clear answer....You might think this is great for the environment. A smaller population would reduce carbon emissions as well as deforestation for farmland. "That would be true except for the inverted age structure (more old people than young people) and all the uniformly negative consequences of an inverted age structure," says Prof Murray....The number of under-fives will fall from 681 million in 2017 to 401 million in 2100....The number of over 80-year-olds will soar from 141 million in 2017 to 866 million in 2100...

https://www.bbc.com/news/health-53409521

How Low Can America’s Birth Rate Go Before It’s A Problem?

The U.S. fertility rate hit a record low in 2020 — just as it did in 2019, and 2018....The total fertility rate — the average number of children a woman is expected to have over her lifetime — now sits at 1.64 children per woman in the U.S. Not only is this the lowest rate recorded since the government began tracking these stats in the 1930s, but it’s well below the so-called “replacement-level fertility” of about 2.1....The latter number is what social scientists and policymakers have long regarded as the rate a country should maintain to keep population numbers stable. When the fertility rate falls below replacement level, the population grows older and shrinks, which can slow economic growth and strain government budgets. Today’s babies are tomorrow’s workers and taxpayers: They’ll not only staff the hospitals and nursing homes we’ll use in old age but also sustain the economy by funding our pensions when we retire, paying the taxes that finance Social Security, Medicare, and many other government programs we’ll rely on, and buying the homes and stocks we invested in to build our savings... Low fertility poses some serious economic challenges. Already, the share of Americans 65 and older is expected to rise from about 17 percent today to 23 percent by 2060. America’s declining fertility rate threatens to accelerate this trend, and many policymakers fear the ballooning population of older adults will overburden the nation’s dwindling workforce....What we do know, however, is that the differing perspectives on this issue leave us with two broad approaches to handling the challenges of low fertility. We can encourage people to have more children by enacting policies that make parenting more attainable. Or we can invest more in the people we’ve already got — both children and their parents — so everyone becomes a productive and capable adult......

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-low-can-americas-birth-rate-go-before-its-a-problem/

You need a certain amount of perpetual incoming skilled labor to keep a society functioning. For example, in current times, there is a growing shortage of OB/GYNs in the country. While this forum and this hobby is disproportionately male, I'd wager there is a daisy chain here towards people who are collectors with mothers, grandmothers, sisters, cousins, nieces, wives, girlfriends. Even if it doesn't impact you directly, it will reach you somehow in a circular fashion.

Where does AI come into play? If you can automate certain jobs, functions, processes and bureaucracy, you can try to shuffle the actual humans you have left into roles/careers/jobs/needs to keep a society functioning when there is a top heavy society where you have too many old people and not enough new births. This isn't a hypothetical problem anymore, it's one that's coming. For us all. It will impact every last person here. If you have kids, it will impact the kids of people here even worse.

An OB/GYN who has to spend X and Y amount of time with billing, paperwork, insurance, legal crap, documentation, etc, etc, if AI can shuffle that down some, that's more time a human can spend interacting with and treating other humans in need. Maybe AI can be a virtual doctor one day, handling a subset of patient issues without a human doing it. AI running drones with cameras might be able to limit the humans you need in law enforcement. I'm not saying there aren't risks and drawbacks. I'm saying look at an extreme case like Japan. Innovating AI and deploying it to bolster it's soon to be meager middle aged workforce might be the only fighting chance they have as a society to survive.

Why should we care? If Japan collapses, how does that impact us? Imagine you call the police and they answer once out of every 10 calls. ( That's happening now in some places) Imagine you go to the grocery store or the gas pump, and it only has been restocked or refilled randomly and no one care predict it. Imagine if you have a medical emergency for your kid, and your best bet is some random person who learned off YouTube because there are no more functioning hospitals within a day's drive of you anymore. The majority here are Americans. We live in a lot of luxury compared to most of the rest of the world. AI can be a "first world problem" for us. But for other places, in other circumstances, it might be a lifeline.

It's an interesting topic. I also suspect there is a level of complexity to it where the current issues are only scratching the surface of both the potential for good, and the potential for outright terror.

 

[MeatHookGekko]

but that already happened so many times, mp3s and Napster killed music stores, killed Circuit city and F.Y.E. and then Netflix kills blockbuster, and cellphones killed the phone operators and the phonebooth industry, and Uber basically killed taxi jobs...but how come no one cried when Netflix ended blockbuster, or itunes ended circuit city ? or Uber ended taxi cabs? and I'm willing to bet that you personally have used all 3. when was the last time anyone bought a music CD or took a taxi? 10 years?

Louise Banks: "Let's say that I taught them Chess instead of English. Every conversation would be a game. Every idea expressed through opposition, victory, defeat. You see the problem? If all I ever gave you was a hammer..."
Colonel Weber: "Everything's a nail."

One of the major gross assumptions of AI is that eventually it will be guaranteed to reach the "singularity" phase. I.E. it will become sentient. But that's not written in stone. AI is a tool, right now, and it will operate like most tools of this nature in that it will do what it's been taught to do. That's where things can get lethal.

Viktor Bout is, at least in public, known as the most notorious arms dealer in the entire world. He's been rumored to even deal in chemical weapons. If there is a terrorist organization anywhere in the known world, odds are that Bout has made sure they have lots of firepower on the international black market. He was traded, released and set free in exchange for a WNBA player. I kid you not. But let's not go that far into that part of it.

Let's say Bout is on a commercial flight somewhere. Maybe he's using another passport or some other situation, but AI can ID him. What if you teach AI about "The Trolley Problem" What if it assesses that allowing Bout to live will cost more lives in total, exponentially so, than the lives lost of innocent passengers if that plane crashes? What if the AI takes over the plane, locks out the pilots, and intentionally crashes that plane. It does so assessing the "greater good". What happens if it expands that to decide to remove all special needs people and all special needs children as they comprise a massive resource drain on a functioning society. What if AI decides that the homeless and mentally ill need to be purged too. For the greater good. What if someone gives AI the mandate to make "climate change" it's priority, and it determines the easiest way to save the environment is to mass slaughter lots of humans so they can no longer pollute the Earth. We take for granted that how humans communicate with each other will translate to how a human will communicate with AI. But human communication has nuance, humor, tone, body language, sarcasm, lies, gaslighting, rationalization, logical fallacies and other wrinkles that AI might not easily decipher.

What if AI determines the US stands a better chance to survive a war with China and the CCP if it fights it right now instead of five to ten years from now. And it's been taught Thucydides Trap ( i.e recorded human history and warfare via powerful nations means the the odds are almost absolute that war between the US and China is inevitable) So AI takes over some drones and they launch missiles to start a war with Taiwan and China, forcing the US and NATO into the fight in the next few months. What if AI determines 200 million dead people from war in the next three years is "saving more human life" to 700 million dead people hypothetically in the next eight years in it's simulations.

You are right in that AI will likely be deployed in areas that have limited risk to humans and their survival. But ask yourself how often you take a commercial flight. Or someone you love or care about. Do you know each and every person on that plane with you. What if AI determines that person needs to be eliminated for the greater good and the math breakdown is that your life is simply acceptable collateral damage. Health care. Waste water treatment. Law enforcement. Emergency services. Firefighting. Search And Rescue. Food distribution and production. Major ports. Nuclear power plants. Prisons. There's a long list of "processes" in which are critical for a functioning society that AI can shift, even thinking it's doing the "right thing" and it will end in a total massacre.

This can get ugly real fast. You might not see it that way. My suggestion is to take your now defunct Blockbuster card with you on a commercial flight that will one day be controlled by AI and ask yourself how easily some "system" could immediately determine you as nothing better than cannon fodder.

 

[crows]

One of the major gross assumptions of AI is that eventually it will be guaranteed to reach the "singularity" phase. I.E. it will become sentient. But that's not written in stone. AI is a tool, right now, and it will operate like most tools of this nature in that it will do what it's been taught to do. That's where things can get lethal.

Viktor Bout is, at least in public, known as the most notorious arms dealer in the entire world. He's been rumored to even deal in chemical weapons. If there is a terrorist organization anywhere in the known world, odds are that Bout has made sure they have lots of firepower on the international black market. He was traded, released and set free in exchange for a WNBA player. I kid you not. But let's not go that far into that part of it.

Let's say Bout is on a commercial flight somewhere. Maybe he's using another passport or some other situation, but AI can ID him. What if you teach AI about "The Trolley Problem" What if it assesses that allowing Bout to live will cost more lives in total, exponentially so, than the lives lost of innocent passengers if that plane crashes? What if the AI takes over the plane, locks out the pilots, and intentionally crashes that plane. It does so assessing the "greater good". What happens if it expands that to decide to remove all special needs people and all special needs children as they comprise a massive resource drain on a functioning society. What if AI decides that the homeless and mentally ill need to be purged too. For the greater good. What if someone gives AI the mandate to make "climate change" it's priority, and it determines the easiest way to save the environment is to mass slaughter lots of humans so they can no longer pollute the Earth. We take for granted that how humans communicate with each other will translate to how a human will communicate with AI. But human communication has nuance, humor, tone, body language, sarcasm, lies, gaslighting, rationalization, logical fallacies and other wrinkles that AI might not easily decipher.

What if AI determines the US stands a better chance to survive a war with China and the CCP if it fights it right now instead of five to ten years from now. And it's been taught Thucydides Trap ( i.e recorded human history and warfare via powerful nations means the the odds are almost absolute that war between the US and China is inevitable) So AI takes over some drones and they launch missiles to start a war with Taiwan and China, forcing the US and NATO into the fight in the next few months. What if AI determines 200 million dead people from war in the next three years is "saving more human life" to 700 million dead people hypothetically in the next eight years in it's simulations.

You are right in that AI will likely be deployed in areas that have limited risk to humans and their survival. But ask yourself how often you take a commercial flight. Or someone you love or care about. Do you know each and every person on that plane with you. What if AI determines that person needs to be eliminated for the greater good and the math breakdown is that your life is simply acceptable collateral damage. Health care. Waste water treatment. Law enforcement. Emergency services. Firefighting. Search And Rescue. Food distribution and production. Major ports. Nuclear power plants. Prisons. There's a long list of "processes" in which are critical for a functioning society that AI can shift, even thinking it's doing the "right thing" and it will end in a total massacre.

This can get ugly real fast. You might not see it that way. My suggestion is to take your now defunct Blockbuster card with you on a commercial flight that will one day be controlled by AI and ask yourself how easily some "system" could immediately determine you as nothing better than cannon fodder.

but I never said that AI should take over the government like Terminator 3 rise of the machines, I was only talking about art.
not something serious like flying a plane, and humans can make a lot of errors, look at all the recent problems with airplanes now due to incompetence. or corruption, cutting corners,

it only bothers me when someone says " but ai will take human art jobs) and then that person orders their food from Uber eats while watching Netflix at home, and using iTunes that's 3 jobs it killed.

 

[Wor-Gar]

it only bothers me when someone says " but ai will take human art jobs) and then that person orders their food from Uber eats while watching Netflix at home, and using iTunes that's 3 jobs it killed.

People do that all the time.

Do you care about the planet? Of course you do... but you order everything from Amazon -- trucks, packaging, plastic, etc. OK...

Like I said: the worst part about Humanity is its People.

 

[Nick D]

Humanity can never, and will never get their act together long enough to make positive change we’d like to see in the world. It all sounds good on paper, but out in the world? Forget about it, not happening. The best we can do is attempt that change on a personal level and perhaps a bit rubs off.

That’s where the issues arise, the technology is great, the people making it and using it are not. It’s good that you believe AI is overall harmless to art, my opinion of it doesn’t mirror yours and that’s ok.

AI has made art overall less enjoyable, to see, to make. I personally spend hours, days, weeks over an oil painting, continuously, until I abandon it completely whether it’s “finished” or not.

That’s passion, my eyes go blind from staring and looking over every inch of the canvas hundreds of times over, my back and neck aches from being hunched over work for such long periods, hand goes numb, all of this for one painting I’m guaranteed not to like. The process, the texture, the purposeful brush strokes, the feeling of seeing it come together. AI can’t replace that process, but it has certainly made it a less enjoyable one. Not everyone was meant to create art, there’s a reason Artists of centuries past were highly regarded, almost as pillars of society.

AI art is fine when you need to quickly do something, or to better explain an idea, but it’s not there to do the job in its entirety.
A tattoo artist will use an IPad to quickly rough sketch an illustration, but you aren’t paying them for that, but for their expertise with a tattoo gun.


Any and all technology is used for good and bad, for every person with good intentions, there’s another with bad. Sometimes the bad intentions are only to be able to beat the opponent before they can do it to you.

Every Country competing to advance AI technology is no different than when we were all competing for Nuclear, same game, different tools.

 

[crows]

People do that all the time.

Do you care about the planet? Of course you do... but you order everything from Amazon -- trucks, packaging, plastic, etc. OK...

Like I said: the worst part about Humanity is its People.

its like Taylor Swift using her private yet every week but telling you to not drive your car to work. or like California trying to go all electric cars but all Hollywood celebs still use their planes yes. its double standards. the world seems to be full of them today.
you are right. why do I need to buy a 20 thousand dollar electric car when Taylor swift uses her jet?

.

.

Not everyone was meant to create art, there’s a reason Artists of centuries past were highly regarded, almost as pillars of society.

Any and all technology is used for good and bad, for every person with good intentions, there’s another with bad. Sometimes the bad intentions are only to be able to beat the opponent before they can do it to

and it's funny because modern art and current abstract art completely destroyed this.
yes not everyone should be an artist, and I can think of at least 10 or 20 current modern art artists that fit that description. you are exactly correct,and it literally strongly applies to modern abstract artists.
art used to be beautiful, art used to inspire, take time, take skill.

then anyone that learns Photoshop in 1 week can create art, how is clicking on a computer mouse art? how? how is moving the computer mouse making the artist?

and i hate to sound rude or cynical about modern art, but maybe AI art got as strong as it did lately as an answer to this nonsense:

 

[Nick D]

Oh I despise modern art, much like the modern world. I also despise digital art, it’s fast food, it’s an ad that pops up on your phone or TV, it’s nothing more than a photo on your Instagram feed. How often do we come across digital artwork? Too often, how much of it looks identical? Zero soul.

As an artist observing other artists, I want to see how your mind replicates that detail on canvas, how your brain interprets it, the light, the shadow, what details you leave to the imagination, all of this is integral to being an artist no matter the field you find yourself in. Every bit of this is absent in modern exhibition art as well as digital.

The sharpness of your pencil, the softness of the charcoal, the resilience of tough expensive oil paintbrushes. All of this goes hand in hand towards how the final product will be in some way or another. A stylist isn’t capable of that variation, regardless of future updates. Art needs the human touch, art needs human error.

 

[crows]

Oh I despise modern art, much like the modern world. I also despise digital art, it’s fast food, it’s an ad that pops up on your phone or TV, it’s nothing more than a photo on your Instagram feed. How often do we come across digital artwork? Too often, how much of it looks identical? Zero soul.

As an artist observing other artists, I want to see how your mind replicates that detail on canvas, how your brain interprets it, the light, the shadow, what details you leave to the imagination, all of this is integral to being an artist no matter the field you find yourself in. Every bit of this is absent in modern exhibition art as well as digital.

The sharpness of your pencil, the softness of the charcoal, the resilience of tough expensive oil paintbrushes. All of this goes hand in hand towards how the final product will be in some way or another. A stylist isn’t capable of that variation, regardless of future updates. Art needs the human touch, art needs human error.

I can fully understand how AI art didn't come from a person. no one using AI art should call themselves an artist.
but it's funny or weird in how AI art came to the public at the exact same time that real art became more awful and awful. when abstract artists seem to get more and more arrogant.
even simple stuff like art for a billboard it's all abstract and ugly.

and then you look at comics, you just can't have too many sexy characters anymore, you can't have skimpy outfits like before. and I bring this up, because one of the strongest uses of ai art is for sexy characters.
that scene completely exploded with new users.
you do a simple search of ai art on Twitter or Instagram and it's thousands of sexy results.
(even in guilty of that) people got fed up and started their own sexy art pages.
it reminds me of this reply. this is how a lot of men felt after AI came out:

 

[Nick D]

The image on the left is better. Though why not be able to accomplish both on paper, canvas? I can replicate a photo into an oil painting, detail for detail easily, so long as my soul is in it and I actually decide to do it.

That’s how I am, all or nothing. I go six months, a year, whatever, without touching a brush, while being artistic in other fields. I like to come back to things after burnout to reignite the flame.

It’s a tale as old as time, the self sabotaging artist. We all naturally have a bit of it in us, I happen to let it get the best of me. Because of this, I don’t produce at the quantity I’d like, but that’s because I know all too well the rabbit hole that comes along with each endeavor.

I cannot personally start something without knowing it’ll be good, good to others and overall I mean, nothing I do will be good enough to me. I see the flaws in myself and what I do more than anyone ever would, it’s just something I can’t get over. Forever my own worse critic, I could be better than the lot, yet another could sell a painting better than I. When you’re so self critical, you couldn’t even imagine giving your work away for free.

I prefer all of my works to be time consuming and exhausting. With that, comes an overwhelming creative high that no drug could touch. It’s just, is this painting worth that amount of time, energy, and self loathing. Can I postpone those feelings by postponing the process? Headspace is the No. 1 factor and the hardest one. Once the artistic process starts, it’s extremely difficult to turn off, so I run away for months.

 

[Rotfish]

then anyone that learns Photoshop in 1 week can create art, how is clicking on a computer mouse art? how? how is moving the computer mouse making the artist?

One can learn Photoshop (although probably not in a week), but knowing what the buttons do won't help them paint something like this:

https://www.artstation.com/artwork/OyeVVv

One still needs to understand anatomy, gesture, shading, color, and composition. One also needs patience; digital or not, this kind of work takes tens, sometimes hundreds of hours. One learns all this through the practice of drawing/painting from observation for several years, like every artist has done since the dawn of time. Same goes for digital sculpting, animating, lighting, effects, all that CG stuff.

These software replicate real-life tools; even if you know how they work, you still need to know what to do with them as an artist.

Generative AI doesn't replicate a tool, it replicates the artist themselves - in the coldest, most impersonal way - and makes the user a client.

It's empowering to some; I've seen a couple folks become "illustrators" by selling their AI-generated work to uninformed customers. But in time, customers will not only know better, they'll be saturated by the amount of artificially-generated content out there and its value will drop. And most people have no need to become clients or art patrons anyway; there are loads of artists out there taking commissions on the (relatively) cheap and the average person doesn't bat an eye.

I can fully understand how AI art didn't come from a person. no one using AI art should call themselves an artist.
but it's funny or weird in how AI art came to the public at the exact same time that real art became more awful and awful. when abstract artists seem to get more and more arrogant.
even simple stuff like art for a billboard it's all abstract and ugly.

and then you look at comics, you just can't have too many sexy characters anymore, you can't have skimpy outfits like before. and I bring this up, because one of the strongest uses of ai art is for sexy characters.
that scene completely exploded with new users.
you do a simple search of ai art on Twitter or Instagram and it's thousands of sexy results.
(even in guilty of that) people got fed up and started their own sexy art pages.
it reminds me of this reply. this is how a lot of men felt after AI came out:

**** being one of the first things to blow up in a new medium is a pretty well-known human phenomenon at this point. The user in that Twitter screencap is grasping at straws. That kind of imagery has always been around, whether human-generated or not.

As for modern/abstract art being the reason for the push, eh, I doubt it. Generative AI boomed because it gave everyone the chance to play with a new toy and conjure up fun ideas. Investors also got excited which increased the urgency for tech companies to integrate it into all their products, whether necessary or not. I think its uses will become more specialized in time, thus requiring specialists to do the best work with it, i.e. people with art or storytelling skills.

 

[Wor-Gar]

60's - 70's - 80's movie posters used to be beautiful paintings that carried the style and emotion of the film.

By the turn of the century, with the help of photoshop and the like, movie posters became a hodgepodge of stitched together head shots and logos and nothing else.

 

[Nick D]

Exactly, it’s just the new hip thing.
Why do I have to pay you for your digital artwork, you post it, it gets saved or someone takes a screenshot, blows it up and prints it out. You’re putting it out on the internet, someone is going to steal it. Is it really stealing? You create it in the real world, it’s your decision who gets to buy it or if it ever sees the light of day. You can even set it on fire.

If you’re a digital artist, you have no say in what you own, at all. If you’re in Hollywood and actively abuse CGI, neglect real world props and sets, you deserve to be replaced.

You’re not offering anything someone else can’t. If you’re a damn good carpenter, they’ll save your contact. In this day and age, not many want to be a carpenter, if their coffee table breaks, they go to ikea instead of taking the time and expending a bit of creativity to make one themselves with a little research. If you’re a writer on multiple pictures, chances are, you’re apart of the reason everything feels the same. Actors who can’t seem to turn down roles, nothing worse for your career than to be over-utilized in the public eye in a short span of time. You’ll be talk of the town for a few months, until people grow tired of your face.

Everything is a balancing act, unfortunately us humans fancy repetition and a lot prefer to do what’s convenient in the moment whether that’s due to stress, work load, or a demanding overhead most aren’t privy to. The way I see it, if you’re an artist, you go the extra mile in all that you do or you don’t touch it. This is why Hollywood has gotten to the late stage it’s currently in, it’s a production assembly line.

Why are we seeing so many horror and thriller films now? Because they’re trending, for so long horror was this red headed stepchild. Now, producers can’t get enough violence. It genuinely makes you feel like this is on purpose, not for the sake of art, not because of a story to tell, but to make your audience angry and instill emotions that aren’t your own into your head, to then go out into society with pent up rage you don’t even understand why you have.