To be honest, this development is simply the logical consequence of applying the principle of profit maximization.
Unfortunately, technology has now reached such a scale that the people behind the spreadsheets are willing to sacrifice humanity itself.
That, too, is not surprising, because they will only realize their mistake when it is already too late.
Another example of the same principle is climate change.
People can still do culture, and art, and whatever they want.
Go draw a picture, write a book, compose a song. It’s not like chatgpt is stepping on your doorway to stop you.
That is true, of course, but LLMs, image and video generation, and so on, will, in my view, lead to fewer and fewer people being willing to publish their creative works, because the staggering output of AI models will not only make it increasingly unlikely that they will receive compensation for their work, but also that they will receive recognition for it.
As a result, I think, there will likely be fewer and fewer people willing to accept that their work is being used for free to train precisely those models from which only the people who steal their work benefit - without this theft, the business model of OpenAI and the like simply cannot function.
In my view, this will sooner or later lead to a vicious cycle in which the models are trained predominantly only with content they have generated themselves. This will then lead to a stagnation of what we understand as culture - for these models are neither creative nor intelligent: they can merely combine existing content to create something that appears new; however, they cannot produce anything truly new. Nevertheless, given its ever-expanding reach, it will likely be this repetitive AI output that has a significant influence on popular culture, at the very least.
Economic viable mass produced “art” made with the intention of grabbing money was always shit. Before and after AI.
If new uninspired blockbuster gets done with AI instead of incredibly bad and uninspired human resources is of no consequence to the art I enjoy.
Good inspired art doesn’t need to be economically viable in a capitalistic system, and many times is not. Before and after AI.
People with something to express will always be doing it. There will be always someone wanting to make a handcrafted opera, and if it’s good it will always find its public. I do artistic expression myself, I get no revenue whatsoever, and I have no intention of stopping doing it. Because it’s not about money, it’s about self expression.
I’m currently studying and gathering studies about language and cognition to see if LLMs could do anything to our culture. So far I’d lean to say that, yes, they could curate our words and thus alter the way we speak, write and think. Words are linked to our perception of reality somehow and given enough time our overlords could curate words they like, shadowban others and in that way interact with what we can communicate and think about.
Obviously there is a large group of people rejecting AI so they wouldn’t suffer from this.
That sounds very interesting - please keep us posted.
I think it’s very important to examine the effects of LLMs on society, how they influence discourse, their impact on the formation of public opinion, and the question of whether - and if so, to what extent - they shift the interpretation of words and narratives toward the few corporations that offer cloud models, and so on.
This is a broad field, but one that strikes me as quite important from a wide variety of perspectives.
It’s good to hear that there are people here who are looking into this from a scientific standpoint. I’d be very happy if you could update us on the state of research from time to time.
The more perspectives there are on this topic, the better.
To clarify one important thing though: I am not a scientist or an expert in the area. I’m a translator by trade, and since I couldn’t find anything related to this, I decided to try and write my own paper. I learned how to do it when I was still a student but it’s a while back and I don’t have the resources or institutional backup to carry on my own experiments. I’m simply trying to find evidence and synthetize it. My hope is 1) that it interests people and get them to think about it and 2) maybe in those people I got thinking, there will be actual researchers with the means to do that properly.
It doesn’t matter that you’re not a scientist. Your approach is still interesting - and yes: maybe it will inspire people or even spur research on these topics. I’m keeping my fingers crossed!
I don’t think so. I think AI cranks up the noise to 11, definitely, and makes culture hard to find. I think it spells the doom of search engines like Google for actually finding human-created stuff.
But that culture, that creativity, is still out there. It’s just hard to find. It takes word of mouth and effort to find it. It’s the Dark Forest stage of the Internet.
Yes, that’s probably how it will go.
Culture will likely always exist, but unfortunately it’s now increasingly competing with an even more massive, uniform, and uncreative flood of commercial bullshit.
I fear this will have a disastrous effect. The early signs are already very clear: misinformation on a massive scale, the centralization of “interpretive authority” in the hands of just a few, very powerful companies, and so on.
It’s not as if the internet wasn’t already full of what you might call products of the culture industry, but now these products aren’t even produced by people anymore -instead they’re churned out automatically in an all-consuming flood of mediocrity.
Culture changes generationally, often reactionary. Old things become new.
Old tends/fashions come back into style, often because there was something compelling and novel about them in the first place. We see it with romanticized aesthetics but I think social organization sees similar patterns.
Anyways, that preamble was for my naive and optimistic pitch that at some point, we’ll see a wholesale rejection of AI and see a Renaissance of in-person socialization and art. Hippies, beat nicks, bars with live local talent, social clubs like the Elks and Shriners… shit like that, I think it’s due for a big comeback.
Not tomorrow. Maybe 20 years… but if there is any modern constant, it’s for children to reject the lifestyles of thier parents.
AI is new means of production. The fight mustn’t be against this new means of production. Rather, it must be to seize these new means of production.
“AI bad” is not a coherent argument.
AI is a new way of combining what already exists. Moreover, these models serve as a tool of power for those who are already powerful.
“AI is good” is not a coherent argument.
They didn’t say it was… You’re reaching for a false dichotomy
Counterpoint: Angine de Poitrine.
Man, go buy a cheap guitar and learn Wonderwall(or like any other songs) then go somewhere public and play your guitar and you will be preserving human culture.
I disagree when it comes to culture. Replacing human workers on the other hand is the issue, but only in a capitalist society.
Movies The SeedDance 2 model and probably future ones will make it possible for a lot more people to make their stories come to life.
I am sick and tired of most Hollywood movies and shows. They are mostly very low risk and low creativity.
Just one example made by 1 person: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZXH9iXsN-tY
This is so close to good enough. I’d watch a full length movie and enjoy it without getting the “slop” yuckiness feeling.
Music Can still be made by a few people like always, now just with more tooling.
Art Same as music, but with just 1 person
This exact same thing has been said about every technological advancement since the industrial revolution.
I’m not saying we shouldn’t have concerns, but all this AI doomer bullshit is just a circle jerk blown out of proportion.
I’m afraid it’s true this time. You do know how LLMs work, don’t you?
Edit: And you do have at least some idea of how the entertainment industry works, right?
So did the people who thought a woman’s uterus would fly out of her body if she was traveling on a train at 50kpm.
I’m more than willing to admit I was wrong when AI destroys the world, but I think we’ll find many other things to blame it on before that happens.
I have no idea what you’re getting at, but it’s a fact that every minute - if not every second - AI-generated content is being published that you could never read in your entire lifetime.
That’s the scale we’re talking about.
Try to imagine what that might mean for people who make a living doing anything that could even remotely be called creative work.
Like I said, when the world falls apart, I’ll give you all the credit for being right. Just let me know when it happens.
Its not the world falling apart, just what we understand to be culture.
We thought the machines would take over the jobs to give us time enough to create great works of art of all sorts, and then we find out right at the last minute that actually the machines will be taking care of art because we’re too busy working multiple jobs.
What we understand to be culture changes every fifty years or so. Have you waltzed to a harpsichord or taken the family to a public execution lately? Now, THAT was culture.
Well, in one respect it’s humans - always humans - that cause destruction in one way. Even if some of us try, like backing a carbon offset program that plants trees (in correct places that historically support trees), there’s the rich and powerful creating some other hyperfixation like fast fashion, space races, greed wars, religious wars and witch hunts like the one against AI to cock it up again
On the other hand, I as a builder of tech fucking hate what the obsession with AI has done to the current global economy, and how generative AI is a complete waste of existence as its meaningful use is dwarfed by its cost…
But I do see value in developmental AI, and while it’s little more than a standard algorithmic program with memory, parameters and developer bias, it is useful at doing some work better than us, and much faster. And since the dawn of humanity we’ve been inventing things to make life tasks easier. I do believe that form of AI will persist. In a way, vehemently opposing the AI programs that make calculations or accurate code is about as righteous as refusing to use a hammer to nail together some wood, or making fearmongering pamphlets about the advent of electrified cities.
Hahaha. What a terrible example. Do you know how the black hole in the movie Interstellar was made? Do you know what a virtual green screen is? There’s too much we don’t know because people are specialized in it.
The entertainment industry is obviously just one simple example.
The reason I mention this example is that you’ll have a hard time defining what culture is - and, consequently, why it makes sense to preserve it.
Attempting to engage in such a discussion on a social media platform is doomed to fail from the start.
I had assumed that what I mean would be clear enough. That’s why I included the comparison with climate change in the description.
Wow, what an excellent point, DandomRude!✨
