D&D General Plagiarised D&D art

[EzekielRaiden]

If the alternative is "for the rest of eternity I do not want any progress that could displace people from their jobs", then heck yeah I will sign onto this.

I work in technology. There's been a saying for decades "half of what I know will be obsolete in five years". I've been living this, needing to constantly learn new skills in order to remain valuable. I have a lot more than "10+" years, and the amount that has changed is staggering -- I could not do my job with what I knew when I started. Most of it is not true, and much of it would be actively misleading or harmful.

And these things should apply to non-tech fields...why, exactly?

Has half of medicine become obsolete every five years? Half of physics? Law? Journalism? Economics? Engineering?

How would one even define what "half of art becomes obsolete every five years" means?

 

[Charlaquin]

I am not against artists, but I am against limiting my access to art to only that which is created by human artists.

All art is created by human artists. Some art happens to be recompiled from a large database of art created by human artists, without those artists’ permission.

 

[Blue]

And these things should apply to non-tech fields...why, exactly?

I was giving a large real world counterexample to your sky-is-falling rhetoric. This has been around for a long time in the real world. People aren't "unemployed and unemployable for a decade or more" as you made out.

They replaced garbage men with trucks that automate pickup of cans the next town over - I didn't cry. Do you have any clue how many man-hours have been "stolen" by automation that produced your wardrobe? About how the same number of people working agriculturally can now feed so many more others, instead of having the majority of the human workforce involved in it?

This has been "business as usual" since progress moved humans from needing to spend all of our waking hours grubbing for enough calories to survive.

 

[Scribe]

I didn't say we did "need it", I just said we should not restrict it, or stand in its way. We should let AI bring great art to our society, and if AI creates better art than humans we should embrace it.

Why? Why do we need AI to create art? Who benefits? Once its working, (and ignoring the massive power requirements for all the servers...) programmers will no longer be needed, their jobs are done, it will just be out there, doing its thing, and generating massive amounts of content that mega corps will be making money off of, not artists, not programmers. Soulless, mass generated, mass consumption.

And a lot of the people living in my community are working on computers. One of the teams I supervise is actually developing AI algorithms and tools for analysis (not for art FWIW, but that would be no different philosophically). Shouldn't I care about them?

Again, I work in Software, so yeah, great. Care for your team. Care for your neighbor, but there comes a point where 1 individual (Programmer) is replacing X individuals (Artists) through their work. Thats not a net benefit for society, at all.

Computers and social media are the largest advancement in communication in history, eclipsing even the printing press in terms of providing people access to information, art and entertainment.

The greatest tools for misinformation, propaganda, brainwashing, and divisiveness ever invented, and with advancements in AI (voice, deep fakes) the people who actually are in power in the world are laughing.

 

[Charlaquin]

I mean eventually, someone will invent Artificial Intelligence as in an artificial intelligence that can think and learn.

Eventually.

Eh, maybe, but I don’t think it’s an inevitability by any means. Historically, humans tend to compare the workings of our own minds and bodies to whatever the latest cutting-edge technology happens to be. Currently, that’s computers, and of late quantum computers in particular are the in-vogue analogy for the human brain. But I suspect in time people will look back on that comparison the same way we do today on Renaissance polymaths comparing the human mind to hydraulics.

 

[Hussar]

Put another way, you're always allowed to plagiarize yourself.

Good thing, too, else 99% of what I've created in my life would violate my own copyright!

I violate myself frequently…. Wait…. What were we talking about?

 

[ECMO3]

It is not debatable. It is literally the nature of the computer programming required to achieve the ends they seek. You cannot improve a neural network's output unless it has fresh data to observe.

This is not factually true, and neural network can use a feedback loop with machine learning algorithms on the data it is producing to create "fresh" data. This is how they developed new languages using machine-learnign algorythms. Those were "fresh" words.

The limits are the bounds of the medium it is using. To use a common saying - if you type millions of letters in a random sequence over and over again eventually you will write the novel "War and Peice" if use AI with a machine learning feedback loop you will get there much, much faster.

Also humans are used extensively in training AI algorithms, especially early on. You act like humans are completely out of the loop, they are not and in fact the "AI art" put in the recent WOTC publication that caused an uproar was done by a human.

An "AI"--a neural network--does not think. It does not decide.

It doesn't need to think to create original content. It does make decisions based on a set of algorithms. Humans make decisions based on reason influenced by biases based on their race, social status etc. I hardly think you can state that the second process is objectively better

At no point does it ever contain any amount of meaning or symbolism.

AI by itself does not, but Machine Learning does contain meaning or symbolism and art by its very nature is in the eye of the beholder.

You can't create synthetic data of that kind. It's like trying to have a 5th grader teach herself algebra solely by having her write new math equations of the kind that she already knows--she'll never generate a variable because she's never been taught to. To say nothing of something like calculus!

You can create synthetic data. Suggesting AI can't create new data because it is using numbers is like saying a human artist can create new art because there are only 10000 different shades of red she can use.

If you are taking this approach and talking about digital art, like is being done by most human artisits today; there is a fixed and finite number of different combinations of an image of a given size due to the fixed number of colors and the fixed number of pixels. Nothing is truely "original" as that entire palate exists on a pixel-by-pixel basis.

All an artist can do is select the color represented by a certain string for a given pixel .... which is exactly what a computer can do.

Further, all that stuff you said about AIs "inventing a language"? Hogwash, mostly caused by media outlets getting a scoop without understanding. Here is an actually sober explanation of what happened with the AI "inventing its own language." TL;DR: The output was mostly gibberish and resulted from the AIs involved having a faulty reward mechanism, which judged only the negotiation result, not the way the negotiation was done--so if saying "I want" made a negotiation succeed more, then saying "I want" twice would totally make it succeed twice as much, right??? That's exactly the "thinking" that went into these bots' behavior.

You can also read, here on Snopes, an actual statement from one of the researchers who worked on this project:

But, as usual, science literacy in journalism is rare to nonexistent, and thus we got ridiculous, alarmist "AI INVENTING NEW LANGUAGES!!!" It isn't. At the absolute most sophisticated, it is developing encodings which map similar structures to similar places in a massive poly-dimensional space.

Ok then why are you so against AI art if it will never be good? Put AI art out there and let people decide if it is any good!

Also I was not talking about the Facebook "near world takover" by machines. I think that is the same sort of hysteria that is causing fear of AI art. I was talking about OpenAI and DALLE-E2.

 

[Hussar]

And these things should apply to non-tech fields...why, exactly?

Has half of medicine become obsolete every five years? Half of physics? Law? Journalism? Economics? Engineering?

How would one even define what "half of art becomes obsolete every five years" means?

Medicine? Maybe not five years but certainly ten. Ask any cancer survivor what their odds would have been had they got cancer even five years earlier.

I grew up with trickle down economics. You figure we should stay with that?

News used to be an hour once per day at six pm for the most part.

Every field changes rapidly. How rapid might be different per field but they do change.

 

[Scribe]

News used to be an hour once per day at six pm for the most part.

Yeah and now its 24/7/365 panic, doom, and anxiety, oh, and monetized. What a vast improvement that has been on our society.

 

[Clint_L]

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