Not pictured: broke stenographers operating the rollercoaster in tears because their jobs were taken by computers long before the chatbots came to town.
(It’s me, I am the stenographer :( )
I wish I could type as fast as you.
YouTube added the shittest, laziest AI generated category graphics to the app, leaving me thinking “fucking Google doesn’t have any spare money knocking around to spend on this?!”.
Gpt will probably replace a lot of jobs but creative ones it will not. Don’t forget that it’s a tool, it need input to “create”. …I hope
I don’t think it will replace creatives for personal projects and requests. But in the souless corporate/business world it will definitely replace them. We already see it happening, even with gpt in its infancy.
I actually think the “it’s soulless… FOR NOW” panel is pretty important.
People who believe in the value of human creativity have been pretty casual about saying that AI generated work isn’t as good as work created by a person, but what happens if in another iteration or two it actually CAN produce “good” “art”? Like, what happens if it’s cranking out screenplays and paintings that DO pass muster? We’ve got to be prepared for that possibility, and try to act now to make sure that our world is structured around preserving human dignity on its own merits. The existence of a faster work-doing machine shouldn’t necessitate that all human workers must now starve.
I think this idea misses the fundamental way that the transformer works on neural networks. The output can be useful, but the mechanism of arriving there is more about probability than creativity.
An LLM cannot create true art because it cannot experience feelings, it has no continuity of being. It can only replicate the artistic patterns it was trained on; those patterns can come from true art, and can be combined in unique ways, but the only real art is in the writing of the prompt and the data it was trained on.
It’s like how the patterns of a kaleidoscope can make beautiful images, but all the creativity is in it’s construction and how it’s used.
We could conceivably extend the transformer model to include other aspects of thought, possibly even a consciousness capable of artistic expression, but it will take a lot of new work, it’s not a place we can arrive by simply adding more power or additional training to our current models.
Almost all the algorithms used by modern AI were written decades ago, it’s only usable now because compute power has made such huge gains. It will likely take many decades more to create true artificial consciousness.
A computer-generated “Van Gogh” is not art any more than a mass-produced coffee mug is artisanal, no matter how “realistic”.
This has all happened before. Take photography. People thought it was the end of visual art. If anyone can take a photograph, why would anyone spend years learning to paint?
Artists answered by pushing the medium beyond the limits of realism. Impressionism. This did not make photographs go away. But when I see a picture of someone’s cat, I don’t usually go “art!” – even though 200 years ago the mere existence of a photorealistic picture would have implied very impressive artistry.
The work that clankers are very quickly taking over is that which does not require art. Visual filler. Lorem ipsum. Corporate communications. Out with artisans, in with industrial machinery. This is the same story that has already happened to almost every artisanal trade, from scribery to pottery to smithing. Visual artists and writers thought themselves exempt from the industrial revolution; they aren’t. It will be a worsening socio-economic crisis. But it won’t “end” art. Clankers definitionally cannot, and will never do art. Not until they gain a conscience of their own.
+100. I wish I could pin this.
That being said, I think AI Bro existentialism and singularity hype has a lot of people on particular edge, beyond what the camera and other past innovations triggered, since it’s pushed at such high levels of our world. But (speaking a fervent local ML tinkerer), the proof is not in their puddin’, as professional, foundational researchers would tell you as well. Not just because of technical limitations, but because corporate enshittification is already taking effect.
People on the more spiritual side of things thought that being photographed meant trapping a part of your soul into the camera. It was a more existential creation than we give it credit for. Before then, nobody had ever stopped time.
What you’re describing is Clarktech, technology sufficiently advanced to be indistinguishable from magic. We don’t know remotely how to create an AI artist that can actually create original works of art with their own perspective, critique, and soul. A system like any we know how to design has to create art from what is essentially the averaging of the work of many artists. Everything they make is a work by committee. Any individual perspective is washed out in the generating process.
We simply don’t have any idea how to create an AI that would exhibit the kind of individual perspective of a human artist. Until we at least have some plausible pathway for that, we might as well be arguing about what happens if it turns out magic is real.
what happens if it’s cranking out screenplays and paintings that DO pass muster?
It’s inevitable. Eventually we will be able to ask for, and then refine, the perfect TV show for our particular tastes. Want ‘Buffy’ but set in the Fallout universe with Dumbledore and Boromir? Give it a minute and you’ll have it.
It is definitely possible to create that. The question is, will it ever be profitable, or cheap enough to be user made/controlled? I doubt it. Tech growth isn’t just limited by what’s possible, but also by what’s practical.
Then human interest will move on. Maybe to video games, or social VR spaces… I dunno, but it’s the same principle of, say, photography zapping the attention of photorealistic painting, and other things draining attention from photography, or TV zapping novels. See azer’s comment above, worded much better than I can.
On the flip side, I think the more likely scenario is these models will always run off the rails super easy, and need humans to guide them…
Think how neat that is. What if an individual writer (and an artist helper?) could make a TV show without a mega corporate budget and production studio, maybe even on their own computer for free? What if fans could make and share TV? Think of what that’s already doing to the video game space, and we are not that far from that with current tooling like Wan 2.2.
It’s inevitable.
Nope. Think about the massive amount of computational grunt going into all these LLMs now, they’re thrashing AI into every possible nook and cranny, desperate to find some place that makes actual profits. There’s also a tremendous issue with gigo - AI learning on AI slop is never going to produce masterpieces.
Firmly in the dubious category here.
AI should have been used to do work for us to give us more time for art. Not the other way around…
Star Trek universe, anyone?
The flip side is that AI being able to create art democratizes art so that anyone with an idea can execute it. I don’t need to have a steady hand to make a drawing of the idea I have and I don’t need to be a software expert- I can describe what I want and what message I’m trying to convey and when the AI produces what I had imagined, I can share it with the world.
Or at least a crappy version of it, for the low price more pollution and unemployment.
What does ‘democratise art’ even mean? It’s not like everyone votes for a specific generated AI image.
Anyway, I think what you mean is Socialism, in terms of AI making ‘skills’ available for everyone.
But it’s not. It’s stealing your capability to learn and taking it for itself without paying you for your efforts. Every input you use trains the model. Even though you’re not creating art, you’re still creating a prompt and you should be paid for your labour.
It’s already been said by the operators of this massive scam. They can only operate via theft.
Democracy is about having your say. When you create the art yourself, that is you expressing yourself democratically. With AI, it’s doing the talking for you.
AI produces what I had imagined
nope. AI is producing what AI imagined. It is not some kind of magic brain reading machine and never will be. I’d rather see palsy-drawn shaky line stick figures than midjourney six finger abominations any day.
By choosing the path of least resistance you’re cheating your own creativity and robbing the world of yet another human voice.
And training the machines to take other artists jobs.
Cute.
AI is producing a vague estimate from a large amount of training data (usually image-description pairs), and a user prompt, sometimes with the help of a user image. As such, the AI is unable to be used for anything beyond slop. But for the media executives with their “granduous ideas”, it’s more than enough. They’re almost always having the outsider’s understanding of what art is (the “coming up with an idea” thing), but de facto see themselves as a kind of “artists”.
Yep. And the big names are so overinvested on AI that we’re building gigantic data centers and google is investing in fusion (PURCHASING!) before it’s even proven… pouring more resource stress and emissions worldwide…
what the fuck are we doing
democratise art?
that’s the most stupid thing I’ve heard.
everyone can do art, grab a pencil and a paper, or clay, or a stick and a knife, or…
Doing art is practically free. you cant have anything more democratised than art.
AI is simply not art, it is inherently unable to do anything creative and only makes cheap soulless slop.
If it’s used as a fancy brush, an artist can do amazing stuff with it, but the creativity and art still comes from the artist, not AI itself.
Beethoven composed music while deaf and you are complaining about not having steady hands. If you really want to make art, just start doing it. It really is that simple.
No it is not. Because at some point it is paywalled. That’s not democraticed. That is blitzscaled.
When I had a good idea for art I wanted for personal use I went to fiverr and paid someone to do it for me. AI is killing the already meager income streams of starving artists.
The flip side is that AI being able to create art democratizes art so that anyone with an idea can execute it.
Is having a for-profit company intermediating and generating all art really “democratizing” it?
AFAIK “democratizing” something doesn’t simply mean “makes it easier”. That ease is also only temporary. Once you’re thoroughly deskilled and dependent upon it, that’s when the subsidies will end.
Then the question is: whom does that favor more: people with good ideas or people with bad ideas? Of those two groups, which one was more likely to work hard and develop a talent?
You misspelled plagiarism. Ai learned from stealing.
And as for art:
….
Actually , you know what? I’m not going to touch this. I’d rather watch you fail than help you learn via criticism. So You go head and call whatever you think you’re doing ‘art’ all you want.
No other real artist touch this one either. Save the criticism and lessons for real artists. Let this one fail on their own.
Humans learn by copying other artists too.
Yup yup Leonardo totally got sued by the first person who made a cave painting for plagiarism.
Great logic.
Go huff your own farts some more, troll bait.
AI isn’t a person. It’s just a bunch of numbers that get multiplied with an input.
To make those numbers a real person steals everyone’s art and find out which set of numbers best copies that art.
It’s pure theft, if you only feed it a few comics it will recreate them as perfectly as a photocopier. The magic is that if you feed it enough art it’s copies become less authentic to the original (although sometimes still almost identical) so people feel like it’s an “artist making new art” instead of a broken copy machine. Then you slap a name like “AI Model” on the copyright infringement machine and you can sell a subscription for 30$/month so any moron can copyright infringe. Best part is they take the liability!
What a great money making deal, and you can kill the environment all at the same time!
Or you could pick up a pencil and put it to paper, actually expressing what’s in your soul through your own efforts. I know which one I’d prefer to look at.
Also, saying AI “Democratizes art” ignores several million years of people making art with whatever was on hand, whether that be 3D modeling software, or charcoal on a cave wall. Art has always been Democratic and Free; AI, notably, isn’t.
Yeah my artwork isn’t the greatest https://billsaquarium.com/ but it’s my artwork and can tell the stories I want to tell.
Also AI can’t make original painting like the kind my wife paints. It’s all digital.
man we’re all gonna be plastic crap eventually! dig the comic.
Thank you, this is an arch with the plastic diver, so follow along for a new one coming out tomorrow. And if follow Patreon you get them way sooner.
I’m gonna get downvotes again, but: no I couldn’t. Art class was mandatory for 9 years of school for me and I can still only draw shit with straight lines. Using a ruler. I can’t do anything with a “free hand” as the teacher called it. If I had a project that required art on even a 3rd grade level I could choose between AI and hiring a person I can’t afford.
That said, I hate what it does to professional artists. And luckily I don’t have time to go through with the video game I wanted to create so I don’t have to choose between AI and a real human with actual creativity right now.
You don’t have to draw perfect art. I make a webcomic and it’s not all straight lines shit. But it’s true art that I did myself no AI needed.
Example
That’s still better than anything I’ve ever drawn in my life lmao
Truth be told, I’ve given up on the idea of ever creating anything artful on my own. The couple of video game ideas I have, if I end up creating any of them, will have to have outsourced art. For which I’d use humans, just nobody particularly expensive lol
I have an idea for a fast-paced side scroller that doesn’t require all that much artwork necessarily, but is also not the one I’m most excited about. The one I really want to make is a 3D RPG (without the MMO that often comes in front of those letters - I’m crazy but not THAT crazy) and I have a lot of mental material, but I literally can’t afford to get it done at the moment. Have been considering reaching out to a studio whose asset packs I like on the Unreal and Unity stores to get a lot more work done in the same style, but I already know it’d be crazy and my ADHD ass isn’t going to finish the game anyway. Plus I’d want sound effects, semi-OK voice acting… All things I can’t do alone unless AI (voice actually is the easiest - I could do one role myself, and get some friends to do a few more).
But at this point I’ve realized my other two projects are more likely to bring in money than the game which is more of a creative output, and I can work on them alone or give people a stake in the company to get them to work for cheap. Why make a passion project for yourself and other people to enjoy when you can focus on what truly matters in life, B2B SaaS.
hiring a person I can’t afford.
That’s the crux of the issue for me. Most models will be trained using everything they can find on the internet and steal the ability to draw from these images. Then nobody will pay artists and AI vendors will make money instead of real humans.
Capitalists win and we loseMotherfucker I don’t give a fuck whether you’re a professional artist or a literal child drawing the most dogshit scribbles imaginable, I STILL prefer that over the most refined AI Slop that could possibly be generated. Its not ABOUT the technical skill on display, it’s about the sheer fact that YOU, a REAL, PHYSICAL PERSON, picked up the tools and decided to TRY. That alone is what’s worthy of commendation, not the fact that AI can shit out generically hot anime waifus in .0032 seconds.
printing press vs calligrapher
Missing panel where management is burnt out fixing slop and doing this on top of normal work.
Tangentially related: Oh boi I just love AI bros coming out of nowhere defending GenAI when nobody asked for their opinion. Wish more communities / instances would take a hard anti-AI stance and just get rid of them. It’s not like anyone will make them see where they’re wrong.
I’ve started adding 🤡 or 💩 tags to people’s usernames when they can’t pull their head out of their ass.
Gives me a heads up on what to dodge without falling victim to an overzealous admin wildly swinging the ban-hammer.
And you tag people’s usernames, while not being an admin yourself, how? Lol we should have these tags in real life to help avoid narcissists! 😂
Option in Boost, the app I use. There’s an option “Tag User” when you click on a name, and whatever you type appears next to their name in all their comments.
Wow I use boost and I had no idea!
Voyager too
I think the first page works all on its own. Whole thing is great tho!
I don’t know if you’ll be fine, however, AI is not the root cause for your suffering.
The problem isn’t AI, it is capitalism.
I’d love for those artists to receive a Universal Basic Income so they can keep drawing whatever they want however they want. Don’t even need to be paid for it.
Them making creative work is enough of a contribution to society. No need to put a monetary value on it.
I want to upvote harder. When the arts have died, humanity’s soul will follow soon after!
sticker i made. feel free to use it wherever you’d like.
Heavy statement to say to someone that would lose its life job over dystopian machines, I have friends that are in this cartoon, one with a kiddo. What to say to them ?
I’d say vote/rebel/protest for Universal Basic Income or any other form of economy where you aren’t forced to work or die.
While I wholeheartedly agree that universal basic income should be a thing, I still think it’s deeply problematic that unthinking machines replace people specifically in fields of artistic expression.
While AI can produce pretty convincing images in many styles, the actual expression of experience, feelings and general humanity is gone. Even disregarding the hardship of the artists being replaced (or assuming UBI will be a satisfying solution for them), that loss in itself is a good enough reason to be skeptical.
The main reason for the existence of art is to share human experience, and to be able to experience the world from another perspective than your own. This is a hugely important role in society that is very easily overlooked, and one that is completely lost with naïve use of AI.
Same we said to typesetters, switchboard operators, elevator drivers, milkmen, travel agents, video rental employees, lamplighters, computers (the job), horse farmers, coal miners, etc. You learn a new skill, you get a new job and carry on.
Yeah, I sometimes sit in awe of the work of the milkmen of 3,000 years ago and imagine their lives and the things that must have inspired them to carry that milk.
Which milkman is your favorite?
John
I’d say: It’s your boss that fired you, not the tool.
under capitalist logic and current law, the company is legally required to maximize profit, at least if it’s publicly traded. it’s because the CEO has a responsibility to the shareholders, and shareholders typically demand maximization of profits.
You see, it’s not the internet censorship tool that prevents you from speaking your mind, it’s the people that control it!
You can dislike the tool.
AI was built on stolen work, and will not create a generation of future artists that simply has a new tool available. It’ll create a generation of workers that create profit for the wealthy class by generating garbage until it’s somewhat presentable. Meanwhile, AI will starve out because it will run out of data to learn from.
Generative AI is the current fad of the tech bro world and it’s what everyone clings onto because if everything goes well (for them), they can get future generations hooked and make stupid money. Meanwhile, media literacy will further decline, and with it the ability to look up anything on the internet, making it even more easy for the masses to be controlled.
“It wasn’t the bullet that killed you, it was the gun.” C’mon, dude. You’re being obtuse.
More “it wasn’t the gun, it was the one who pulled the trigger”, which is a true statement. We don’t blame guns for murder. We blame the murderer.
This is true, no one has ever thought of gun control before.
“It wasn’t the gun that killed you, it was the person who pulled the trigger.” C’mon, dude. You’re being obtuse.
Hi there, NRA. Didn’t know you did small-time socmed.
The point being made is you can’t blame the tool for the operator’s usage of it.
Watch me.
Guns have no use other than killing.
It depends on the tool.
Not everyone who supports gun rights are right-wing idiots.
Who was it again that said “Under no pretext should arms and ammunition be surrendered; any attempt to disarm the workers must be frustrated, by force if necessary”?
You’re right but the right wing idiots are the ones perpetuating that kind of obviously flawed argument and not one of the armed socialist flavors.
But sure, go off
I hate Buddhists.
i don’t know what buddhism has to do with that? apart from that, buddhism is a great worldview in my experience.
Let’s replace them with AI
True. AI is just the latest step in capitalism killing even more of humanity and nature and humanity’s nature in the endless pursuit of greed for the wealthy few.
All these people worried about AI, are just worried economically. Your skill is still yours, and your talent is genuine and irreplaceable. Let companies use AI. The free market will take care of it.
Not only that, the true value of artisan art, manually made by humans will skyrocket.
Vote with your wallet, don’t buy off companies that use AI.
Let companies use AI. The free market will take care of it.
That some deep sarcasm
Screw voting with your wallet; consumer-based solutions will never work. Unionize your workplace instead.
Unionize your workplace instead.
and how does that help? serious question, i have no idea. don’t tell me to “read it up on the internet”. how do unions help when the demand for human workers is decreasing?
Because workers, and not just bosses, will get a say in where, when, and how technology is introduced. That’s what the Hollywood writers’ strike was largely about, and they won important restrictions on the use of AI, as did the screen actors guild.
Many workplaces get a bit of a shock when just too much behavior is automated out.
Example; if you heard about the recent wave of theft from department stores like Target, it’s been theorized they wouldn’t have that if the stores had more staff, even if they weren’t working security. Many tech companies have gone way downhill after removing jobs they thought they could automate.
I’ve even told my job, after they encouraged me to use AI for coding multiple times, it’s looked good in demos but has spit out unusable garbage that just briefly “looks” good many times.
Artwork, as in the comic, risks becoming sloppier as models start training off other AI art. And, some hobbyists actually make open repos not visible to humans designed to specifically pollute those AI models - just for fun.
There’s a hidden price to AI, and companies see it when they’re forced into it more and more.
Hell fuckin’ yeah! Y’all best slap an email to the IWW and get that ball rolling so you’ll be able to join the general strike planned for May 1st 2028 (May day).
Just got an update, it’s moved to 2030. 2028 was clashing with some prior commitments of dear leader.
I can’t find anything referencing 2030, so I assume you’re joking (or something is whooshing over my head).
For others reading, May 1st 2028 is still on, plan around it and try to get any contracts you negotiate to end on that day (but strike with the rest of us even if not).
Oh you’re were being serious
You actually think one general strike 3 years out is the way to go hey?
There really is something very cute and cuddly about Americans coping with totalitarianism.
You have no idea how much I would love to see a general strike tomorrow, or literally any time before 3 fucking years from now, and if we’re lucky that will happen.
But so far the only concrete date we have that’s being pushed by our biggest unions is May 1st, 2028, so that’s the date I’m going to spread. If there is a call to have one sooner by any of the major unions, then I’ll switch to spreading that one instead.
Less than 10% of the US workforce is unionized. Non-unionized workers are terrified to unionize, or to join in a general strike without one due to living hand to mouth, often a month’s wages away from homelessness, and many more with health conditions rely on their job for critical life insurance to afford staying alive.
Unlike the EU, we don’t have strong social safety nets that would encourage a less formal and spontaneous general strike.
That’s not to say I don’t understand how time sensitive this is, and that every week we wait, the regime gets stronger and more able to suppress us, but I’m trying to work with what I’ve got.
If you have any suggestions, I’d be happy to hear them.
