WotC Would you buy WotC products produced or enhanced with AI?

[kayakingpoodle]

You said all that, but you never said the AI was actually wrong.

Was the AI wrong?

"ai", llm's specifically are the latest poster child for proving the ends don't justify the means. It was tainted from conception.

This is my opinion
.

 

[Art Waring]

To folks labeling those opposed to gen-ai as "Luddites," you have not only failed to learn from history, but you are perpetuating dangerous rhetoric that was once used to sentence workers to death for fighting against their increasingly grim working conditions.

You are also dehumanizing people who are trying to help other fellow artists, publishers, & hobbyists survive in increasingly hard times for many of us.

Perhaps you might want to consider having some empathy for those who are directly affected by recent developments, rather than throwing them under the bus in the name of ill-gotten "progress"...

Some words by Richard Conniff (writer at the Smithsonian) to consider:

Despite their modern reputation, the original Luddites were neither opposed to technology nor inept at using it. Many were highly skilled machine operators in the textile industry. Nor was the technology they attacked particularly new. Moreover, the idea of smashing machines as a form of industrial protest did not begin or end with them. In truth, the secret of their enduring reputation depends less on what they did than on the name under which they did it.

The original Luddites would answer that we are human. Getting past the myth and seeing their protest more clearly is a reminder that it’s possible to live well with technology—but only if we continually question the ways it shapes our lives. It’s about small things, like now and then cutting the cord, shutting down the smartphone and going out for a walk. But it needs to be about big things, too, like standing up against technologies that put money or convenience above other human values. If we don’t want to become, as Carlyle warned, “mechanical in head and in heart,” it may help, every now and then, to ask which of our modern machines General and Eliza Ludd would choose to break. And which they would use to break them.

 

[Hawk Diesel]

I voted that I will not buy WotC products, regardless. Hasbro is an awful company. They didn't sit great with me to begin with, but after the OGL scandal, I'm good. I'd much rather give my money to 3rd party pubishers.

 

[ezo]

No human being ingests petabytes of info, shoves it through a 10 to 100+ megawatt datacenter full of thousands of ultra-fast processors, to reduce it all down into some multi-billion-dimensional arrays of probability vectors.... and then automagically pop out perfect imagery on command.

In fact a human artist (or any other human for that matter) operates at about 100 watts, gradually processes a few gigs of experiences through limited sensory inputs, ponders and muses at something like 10 or 100bps, practices, maybe confers with others, and gradually improves in skill, starting from varying degrees of innate talent.

Interestingly, a human can even create without training or without ever seeing art before. Heck, some people create even not being able to see or hear or move their arms. A current gen AI, on the other hand, can't even exist in any funtional form without ingesting practically the entirety of human output scrapable off the internet.

There is, in fact, zero commonality between what current gen AIs do to "learn" and what a human artist does.

Scale is different, sure, process is identical.

And who knows what AI might do in the future (as far as human creating without ever seeing, etc.)?

 

[J.Quondam]

You say this with far too much certainty when our understanding of human thought and creativity is extremely limited. When that’s finally demystified it may look remarkably similar to something a machine could do.

Is there a single human being who has ever ingested petabytes of art data, processed it at a 10-100MW, then generated perfect imagery within seconds of a request? No; that's not how we do it. Yes, I am 100% certain of that.

Might some future form of AIs mimic human ability? Perhaps. But what we today call "gen AI" is not even remotely that.

 

[Lanefan]

Correct. We want artists to be paid well for their work because we value them and their work. Not eliminated in favour of a photocopier.

The answer to “starving artists” is not “eliminate artists”. It’s “hire artists and pay them properly”.

The answer to "starving artists" is a massive political/societal change to a post-employment society; in other words a discussion you probably won't want us having here.

 

[overgeeked]

To folks labeling those opposed to gen-ai as "Luddites," you have not only failed to learn from history, but you are perpetuating dangerous rhetoric that was once used to sentence workers to death for fighting against their increasingly grim working conditions.

You are also dehumanizing people who are trying to help other fellow artists, publishers, & hobbyists survive in increasingly hard times for many of us.

Perhaps you might want to consider having some empathy for those who are directly affected by recent developments, rather than throwing them under the bus in the name of ill-gotten "progress"...

Some words by Richard Conniff (writer at the Smithsonian) to consider:

What appeal to empathy can you make that those who lack empathy will understand? None.

People who lack empathy will not even begin to understand until they are personally affected by something. And even then it's only that they were personally affected because something about the lack of empathy also prevents generalizing one's own feelings to the feelings of others, much less acknowledging that others have feelings. So to a lot of absurdly pro-“AI” people it's all academic until they are the ones to lose their job, house, healthcare, access to food, etc.

They're this guy, basically.

 

[overgeeked]

The answer to "starving artists" is a massive political/societal change to a post-employment society; in other words a discussion you probably won't want us having here.

Exactly. The answer is not having the necessities of life locked behind a paywall.

 

[mellored]

Humans can imagine. AI can only reproduce.

Pretty sure no human would of made these.

People judged those things as "ai fails".


At it's simplest is

1. Humans give something a score.
2. Give AI a bunch of examples.
3. Spend a long time calculating how to get the highest score with that data. More compute allows for more data and nuance.
4. It can now rapidly and repeatedly do the thing that gives the highest score.

So if you want "imaginative" AI, then we just need to do is score a bunch of "imaginative" things. Though I expect a lot of disagreement on that, and there's not enough compute for individual tastes yet.

Note you can use negative scores too. So ranking stuff by how "slop" it is works too. (I.e. a smooth car ride is 10 points, a fender bender is -500 points, and a totaled car crash is -10,000 points).

 

[J.Quondam]

Scale is different, sure, process is identical.

No. If mere scale was the issue, then a gen AI should be millions of times "better" than a master artist because it swallowed millions of times as much data as that artist. Likewise, by your reasoning, a blind human artist should not exist, because a gen AI that can't train on image data can't produce image output.

What human artists do is fundamentally different than what current gen AIs do.