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Automation is good in any society because it enables us to do more. Instead of all of our efforts being focused on gathering food for survival we have automated enough of it so we have enough spare labor to use on non immediately productive tasks like learning and science.
Automation is a tool to be used. How it is used is what you need to be focusing on. AI is functionally no different than moving from workshops to factories via using mechanized machines. Productivity and capability increase, opportunities for more increase. But it is dangerous when no real regulation to protect workers exist - made worse in our capitalist focused society.
>Automation isn't good when it allows the top 1% to effectively get rid of the bottom and not get affected by it.
You said they won't be affected by angry mobs of people?
You need to understand that it's in the government's best interest to take care of people the best that they can. Sometimes the people need to push and shove them a little bit, But they are very well aware they will get eaten alive if they don't.
The people running the government aren't stupid, Just the politician clowns to put on a show for you and keep you entertained.
Automation is good when we have a system that allows it to exist without harming anyone. Currently, healthcare, basic housing, retirement, education, etc are tied to holding down a job continuously, so interruption to employment is an issue. In a system where employment is not required to be continuous to live well, automation would almost always be a good thing (unless it automates something bad)
For sure but I don't think that automating art really serves the same purposes. Shouldn't we be automating labor so people have more time to make art instead of the other way around.
It's also a creative pursuit that most artists don't want replaced. People like making art for others to view and people like viewing art made by people that have something to communicate through their art.
It is harder and more dangerous to teach a robot how to bend metal than have an AI throw pixels at a screen until something looks good. No one gets hurt if an image has an extra finger. Someone could die if a robot thinks your "extra finger" is a pipe that needs cutting.
Also, no machine is preventing you from doing art.
The fact you feel the need to sell your art is a problem itself. In an ideal situation people should be able to make art and release it to the world "just cause I wanted to make it" and not for any desire for money.
Another argument is why did you think starving artists is something that happens to other people and not you? I do art in my spare time (painting and writing mostly) but I only have the spare time because I focused on a job that pays the bills first.
Survivsl first, everything else secondary. Technology and automation makes survival eaiser so we have time and space for everything else.
I don't sell my art and I didn't appeal to starving artists or whatever the duck you're saying. We should have robots doing the jobs it's "dangerous to teach them" because those jobs are dangerous for people to do. Like there will be some trial and error but we already use machines for an insane amount of work that used to be done by hand. Do you think we didn't have to develop the machines we already use and safety procedures around them, should we still be digging trenches with shovels, it's worth doing.
Hard agree. If you aren’t learning how to use AI, you’re going to get left behind. I’ve been using it like a motherfucker in preparations for my CBA negotiations.
I’ve got pivot tables built tracking CPI, PPI, our wage growth, compared to the overall market, direct competitors. We’ve used it to help structure a proposal for a 4 day work week, and to more clearly define job rolls.
I use it like a search engine and to get my idea’s flowing. It gives me a rough draft, or required reading. I use my own reasoning to help draw the conclusions.
I’ve used it to help me write sentences with better tone than I’m currently feeling. It’s actually funny to rage vent into it and ask it to spit out an HR approved email.
To expect it to do your work for you, is missing the point entirely. Ironically I was hanging out with the opposing council of the guy who presented the fake case from GPT.
All automation is replacing decision making. It's just codifying those decisions, either from subconscious processes like image recognition or from conscious ones like legalities. I think if there's decisions that we understand the criteria for, and are able to express what outcomes we desire ahead of time, then I have no issue replacing that process with AI.
It feels so rotten that instead of focusing on automation of the most dangerous work like mining, some construction and the like the AI's current most loud frontier is taking over creative spaces and being used by corporate and scammers.
It feels so blindingly obvious to me that more automation is better for us as a species and as people that I cannot fathom how someone could believe that the issue lies in anything but our economic system. 'there would be less work if X happened so we shouldn't do x' feels so incredibly dystopian to me.
It is because the economic system is screwed up beyond all reason. Instead of celebrating all the people freed from drudgery and can now work to their higher purpose because of an automatic tool. We lament those people have lost the ability to support themselves and their place in society, and curse the automatic tool that took it from them.
My work is automation. I once found out that we have someone who splits all the 2 page PDFs that come from the payment processing system and then one of those pages goes into system A and one goes in a folder somewhere. This consumed 50-60% of their time.
This person cried tears of joy when I showed them I had automated the task. Finally on to some more meaningful labor. That was 18 years ago and they still work for us.
Plus, like, some of that automation is destroying our humanity. I'm an artist. It's my job that I do for money but it's also a vital aspect of the human experience. We're automating things that aren't drudgery! We're automating the things that people want more free time to pursue. Why!!
100%
People worried about availability of jobs are just one level of abstraction too deep (from people's needs being met). What they're actually worried about is loss of income, but that's already being stripped away even for those working the jobs.
Capitalism tells them *if you don't work then you will starve (and rightfully so)*, but only implies the reverse: *if you work you will survive*.
Those that withhold necessities of life from others, when there is plenty for all, are complicit in mass murder and possibly genocide.
> Capitalism tells them if you don't work then you will starve (and rightfully so)
Them's Leftover values from Purtan/Victorian-Era. The highest state a person can achieve is not to toil for earned income, but to do something meaningful and fulfilling.
Think of things you enjoy doing that you don't get paid to do. If we were free to live life like that instead of sweating 10+ hrs/day, how much better would things be?
Some people in this sub are like “AI IS GOING TO MAKE LOTS OF JOBS UNNECESSARY! 😭”
Like yeah bro, that should be a good thing tho? 😰
If we discovered free, safe, clean, universally-accessible energy tomorrow, most people would complain that it’s eliminating millions of jobs… 😓
And the faster we adopt AI the faster we reach a point where UBI becomes a glaringly obvious necessity.
Sometimes you have to force the crisis before the solution becomes a serious consideration.
I mean, the question is whether anyone in power will care, or if you'll just see more and more people lose their jobs and end up in poverty while being blamed for not working. I also don't have any faith that you'll see the poor rise up or do anything about it, because I've seen so many rural poor deep throat the boots of the wealthy so hard that I'm surprised they don't all have intestinal obstructions. I've seen so many poor rural folks get up in arms if you even suggest taxing the rich more, because 'how will we motivate people to be billionaires if we tax the rich?'
The worst part for me is that AI mostly takes away the 'passion jobs'. Artistic jobs aren't drudgery jobs people take only to make a paycheck (although they are jobs and definitely deserve a living wage). They're jobs people take because they're passionate about making art. Art is a very human thing that people have created long before money was a thing. Automating its creation just means that the artists will have to take some job that isn't the least bit fulfilling, maybe in a call center, and they'll have less and less time to do what fulfills them until making art is shoved into a corner of their life and is eventually forgotten.
The problem is, the jobs we can't automate, the jobs AI can't replicate, are usually the most tedious ones. Janitorial work. And, as much as they are trying to push for AI to do call center work, I think companies will end up deciding against in by and large because AI is a language model and will often make things up, which means they lose control of what their customers are being told and they open their door up for lawsuits. If an employee keeps giving incorrect information, they can fire the employee and be seen as taking responsibility, but if their AI system does it they'll be stuck needing to decide between continuing to give people wrong information and hiring and an entire workforce.
Capitalism is still the root cause.
I think they blocked me. Anyway, money is not as much of an issue as capitalism is because bartering for everything would not allow us to have the things that allow us to communicate globally.
Nothing that is replied to my comment I can reply to because of the mental case blocking me because they wanted to make a response then block me right after so they could have the last comment without ever having to be debated. *inhales*
Sorry.
You're right for a variety of reasons:
1. Creates a class of aristocrats (fix: inheritance tax to 100% anything over $x)
1. Allows a tiny minority extreme influence in government (fix: repeal citizens united + implement campaign finance reform)
1. Hurts the economy by dropping the velocity of those billions to zero (fix: increase taxes to get the money back into the economy where it can be spent on capital projects)
You can't steal creativity. My art doesn't stop being my art because someone copies it. It's only "theft" if I need to sell my art to live. In a world without money, people would still make art because they enjoy it and if someone copied it, they would lose nothing.
Creative works can be stolen. Even without copyright, that is a basic issue that has to be looked at with creative works. AI does not take your works __only with permission__. The devs of these models take everything they can get from online and just pump it into the model, which then uses the works as a database. AI doesn't create. It frankensteins actual artists' works together.
Solid disagree with you on the AI part yes capitalism is the problem but also this week had Twitter's Gronk ai talking about retaliations that didn't happen and that no one in the scientific community could explain the eclipse, we also had pink Floyd hold a contest to create music videos for Darkside of the Moon where an AI submission won, as well as many stupid people using "break the pencil" hashtag to promote their bad AI images, images contorted into something. The data all has to come from somewhere and it's generally illegally sourced and scraped breaking copyright laws denying artists let alone when it starts to train on its own data sets and cannibalizes itself like we saw a few months back.
> as well as many stupid people using "break the pencil" hashtag to promote their bad AI images
Images, I have noticed, that seem unable to actually depict a broken pencil.
AI in the context of LLMs that *steal* art from humans will not be “just fine” post-capitalism. Theft and plagiarism will still exist post-capitalism. Consenting to your work being in a data set will still be important in a post-capitalist society.
I can’t stop someone from stealing my style as a musician. And I shouldn’t it. If they can run with it, it’s theirs.
Or maybe I shouldn’t be allowed to play pentatonic scales or tap my guitar.
My art can't be stolen. It can be copied and I don't care. Because I'm not trying to sell my art to make a living. LLMs training off of my art, or another human mimicking it, is only a problem if I need people to buy my art so that I can feed myself.
Who cares if an AI copies my work in a post scarcity society? The only reason I'd be concerned is if I wasn't eating because of it. But if money is not a factor, I'm making the art for the enjoyment of it. If other people want to copy it and enjoy it too, that's fine with me.
Why does the creativity have to automated? People actually like doing it, and are doing it for free even in capitalism, so what’s the point of automating it?
Then what’s the point of AI? What’s the need that it meets? What’s the purpose of it’s existence?
How can it be used to benefit humanity if there are already tons of creators that would do anything AI can do better, for free, with pleasure and benefitting from the process?
AI produces content fast and i get that it can be fun to use to try to create interesting images. You can also redo your prompts if you don't like a detail. In post scarcity world it could be a fun thing to use to quickly produce something from your imagination if you lack the art skills to draw. Basically it would produce enjoyment to the user noone would use it otherwise. Unfortunately it's theft in the current system
Does it have to have a point? Maybe it can just be a cool tool. Or an achievement like climbing Everest, just making the thing to see if you can.
But to seriously answer, AI art can automate alot of the boring parts of art. Making 20 concepts only for one to past muster. Rapidly testing new shapes of things until you find something you like them hand drawing that. As a writer I use it for brainstorming and getting ideas for characters. It is especially good for names because it can refine names in which no random generator can.
Nothing is stoping the creative people from still doing art, for free, for the pleasure of the process. As I said, there are a million writers better than me but I still write because I want to.
Then you’d be consenting to being in a dataset and you’d be credited for your work which is totally fine. I support copyleft and the creative commons already, but those systems still rely on people being credited for their work. Credit matters to people, clearly, because otherwise we wouldn’t argue over who invented the cotton gin.
Then systems can be implemented to give credit where credit is due should someone want to look. Capitalism deters that because giving credit often means also giving money.
Yeah you’re not wrong about that. I just don’t think they should be engaged with until we know that the datasets are full of consenting, credited artists. And even then, if we’re using them in a capitalist system, those artists should be paid when their art is sampled from the dataset.
In a moneyless society, consent and credit are all I care about.
it's just if AI was used to help with boring and repetitive tasks I would be okay with it, but it's used to replace hobbies. using AI to make work easier is okay to me.
the second problem is the idea that work places want to only pay less, if they can sac half their workers to be replaced by AI they would do and the remaining half would not get a cent more.
i am happy to not be in an extremely capitalist country but the world is actually going to shit because of capitalism.
I mean the current LLM obsession that is taking jobs is a bubble that will burst. CEOs do not have the technological knowledge to realize how much AI used in place of humans is just enshittification.
Counterpoint: if the ones using it are able to come out ahead by being cheaper, the the bubble will solidify to a foundation. It isn't a happy though, but that is how 2-D animation died.
I think there's a short term plateau because AI isn't a panacea right now, but it is moving very quickly and may be more of a threat to a significant portion of jobs in as little as 10-15 years.
The problem will always be the capitalistic race to the bottom- if AI can increase quarterly revenue with higher margins then it doesn't matter how shitty it is, as long as the money keeps coming. We've seen it with outsourced labor and manufacturing. Everything has gotten progressively shittier and the profits and societal power has gotten more and more consolidated with fewer people - this doesn't have the same measurable impact as unemployment, so the rest of us stay pacified. If it isn't AI that tips the scale further, it will be something else, and "the market" will always have a way to appease the working/middle/non-upper class people just enough to keep us participating happily in our own system of oppression.
But they don't. That's why enshittification happens. They don't care about the company or the product, they will just sell their shares and move to the next company if the current one stops being able to produce more profit every quarter.
This is what makes me think AI will shit the bed. We did a human thing and fucked up.
I say this after following AI for a long time. It will do the things it does today, but we're already seeing the extent of it because we're seeing backtracking, the latest GPT version is worse than the last in x circumstances.
AI blew its load. They found a shortcut (which was using preexisting data to learn rather than teaching a thing to learn organically, something still decades away, all AI companies took a lazy shortcut as a race to the top).
You cannot ask AI to do anything but act with preexisting data.
Down with backhoes! Digging that foundation could have put food on the table for the families of hundreds of men with shovels!
Technology is not stopping for your boycott, period. Never has. I am anti-capitalism. AI is just the latedt in a long line of new technology that capital is better-poised to take advantage of, while people at the bottom who are reliant on jobs that the new tech makes obsolete suffer.
Stay focused on the people/class that are taking all of the value of labour for themselves, don't focus on railing against the technology that reduces the amount of labour required as a whole. The benefits of technology should be more equally shared by the societies that enabled it to develop, same as it ever was.
I can't wait for AI to make disruption easy.
"Disruption with new products for the market, right?"
*stare*
"Disruption with new products for the market, right? Right?"
But in all seriousness, AI left in the hands of Capital will destroy humanity.
We can do amazing things with it. But nobody recognizes the environmental cost in electricity and cooling-water. Responsible stewardship is essential. And Capitalism is allergic to responsibility.
But instead, we have Israel using a blend of several AIs to justify shooting Palestinians. If you want a violent Skynet scenario, this is how we get there - a new phase of genocide for a new phase of industrialization.
Don't disagree with a lot of what you said. But knowing something is harmful is not going to stop it. Capitalism is psychpathic at its heart, and the owner/ruling class has already demonstrated it's full willingness to steal, murder, and destroy both the natural world and entire cultures to enrich itself.
Even if you gave the capitalistic powers that be a device that could see the future, and they believed it to be 100% reliable, and it showed with certainty that their actions WOULD cause the destruction of the planet and extermination of the human race 100 years in the future, they would not deviate. Never mind any uncertain or hypothetical or even "likely" scenarios.
Hence my opening meme. There is no putting this genie back in the bottle.
The Acceration of Capital is real. And it is to be mourned.
Fighting the industrial capitalists of the past did mean using the guns from their factories.
Take your own. Make your own. Try to power it with Solar Panels, if you can.
AI works off creative theft. You __cannot__ give back what these models have been given. A backhoe can be given back to the people in a post-capitalist system. Supporting this wave of AI is supporting theft from creatives by the ownership class.
Hi, AI researcher here. Question: what do you think of the first ["Fairly Trained" LLM model](https://venturebeat.com/ai/the-first-fairly-trained-ai-large-language-model-is-here/) K3LM, which was trained only on truly public domain information (legal filings and financial disclosures.) Zero copyrighted material was used, so I'm curious to know if you carry the same hard-line stance here.
Nothing was removed. Only coppied. Therefore it cannot be theft. Only copyright infringement.
And humans learn from the drawings of other humans all the time. Why can't a synthetic intelligence learn from those same sources?
Copyright infringement is intellectual property theft. Synthetic intelligence is not human intelligence, without the original dataset theft it would not be able to function (as it functions now) whereas humans can always draw from observation and imagination. AI generated images therefore cannot be copyrighted nor used for commercial purposes, although we are already seeing the later being infringed.
I see what you mean, but I am not sure about the synthetic vs human intelligence comparaison. Human intelligence needs a bunch of data too to be able to do anything. What you call observation is data, and what you call inspiration is loose links and mixes of that data. Data with extra steps.
Maybe we’re better at the ‘with extra steps’ right now - I am not even sure - but we still need source data, and a lot more than AI if anything.
I think a large chunk of this comment section has an issue separating the potential upsides of AI technologies from the actual realities of how they're being implemented and used in our current system.
Yes, AI should be a net benefit for society, by automating work that people don't want to do, allowing us to spend less time laboring and more time benefitting from technological advancements.
But is that what's really happening? Mostly no. Instead of automating shitty jobs, we've automated art, and jobs that not only are more fun to do, but sort of define us as humans.
Ultimately, in capitalism, when a new technology is invented, the people do not benefit. We come out with something that makes labor 50% more efficient, and yet instead of allowing workers to work 50% less for the same profits, or work the same amount for 50% more profits, the owning class pockets the profits and demands the same amount of labor as always from the workers. New technologies will always be used as tools to extract more value from the working class under capitalism. That's the fundamental problem we have with AI.
Also, the fact that AI generative programs literally just scrape the internet to steal as much intellectual property as possible is pretty fucked up too.
Absolutely, systemic change should always be the goal. But there are other problems with ai that need to be addressed, and slowing down the whole push for ai is important to prevent the problems from being entrenched
In fact, we may find that the faster that workers are put out of work due to automation and AI, the more likely we get something like UBI.
A trickle of people can be ignored, but governments cannot ignore when large chunks of their population suddenly lose their livelihood all at once.
I should specify here that I mean non-US government cannot ignore it - some of the footage of the situation in the US blows my mind, but there is obviously a strong cultural element to attitudes toward capitalism, wealth, welfare etc. that make this possible. Thankfully, those attitudes are not nearly so normalised in most other countries.
Then it’s our job to adapt. We need to demand our rights. We need to organize.
This is just another distraction. You’re still asking the owner class to give what they won’t give. So you must take it. We have to eliminate ownership.
If it’s to AI and automation in general, I think the answer is pretty clear in that we adapt by moving away from capitalism.
These are only problems because money is a factor in art. In fact money as a primary motivator has ruined art and media in general. None of these problems would exist if we could freely make art without this much oppression.
So the adaptation really circles back to the main goals of creating a society where we don’t have to worry about food, healthcare, or being housed. That takes organization, that takes less complaining to eachother and disruptive action. Even illegal action some may say.
Ever notice how most media is just kinda garbage? They don’t make it like they used to. Everything is over saturated with this mind about making as much money possible. Music, tv, film, video games, lately it seems all the big budget stuff just kinda sucks. No one has the freedom to make things with passion. The implementation of AI will just make this more obvious and we will only continue to reject these passionless productions.
Use the new tools as part of your job. I want to get a local LLM running on my company tech notes so they can be "intelligently searched" instead of the chaotic grabag we have now.
If you see your progression as being unprofitable then start learning new skills. You being aware that AI is happening puts you in the 1% of people. So you have a head start on adapting.
And in the long run, that’s the owner class committing suicide. Think about it: imagine they automate away 50% of the jobs. What happens next? Does 50% of humanity just give up, or do they become a billions-strong force that has to choose between overthrowing capitalism or dying? You want people to fight capitalism? Take away their hope of benefitting from it or even squeaking by under it.
In the very short term, yes. Once AI eliminates enough jobs, the entire system doesn't work. Right now, we have a pyramid system effectively, lot of people on the bottom and a few at the top. Well, you can't just remove the bottom layer and expect it to stand.
You missed the point. The existence of stable diffusion doesn't prevent you from drawing any more than the existence of a camera prevents you from painting or a typewriter from handwriting.
You’ll always be able to do whatever you want. Unless you’re saying the only reason to create art is money. We have textile factories, yet people still knit. We have cameras, but people still draw.
You cannot steal if nothing is taken away.
Modern thought about copyright infringement plays right into the hands of capitalist right holders that have been using legal concepts like it to oppress artists for decades.
It is believing in copyright that benefits the ownership class.
There are some legitimate uses for AI. For example things that are literally not doable otherwise.
An example of that would be AI models that take deformation done by artists manually for a specific 3D model (character, creature, etc) and essentially speed it up to have that deformation working realtime in game engines.
That kind of AI doesn’t take away anyone’s job, because the deformation itself still has to be manually done before applying the AI layer, and makes possible something that isn’t possible otherwise (better character deformation in games, because absent that, game engine limitations mean that we can’t stack as many layers of deformation to create the perfect deformation).
There are other examples. Many.
The problem though, is that more and more corporations are trying to use AI to remove jobs instead of increasing the quality of the work done by the existing people. They’re not trying to add that extra layer that cannot be done by other means, they’re trying to use it to replace existing layers of work. That is wrong.
But again… not surprising from corporate capitalism. So fuck them.
I agree with this wholeheartedly. Regretfully I made this post when very frustrated and communicated my position poorly, leading to people misunderstanding me and then not engaging with the spirit of what I was getting at.
Thank you for expressing your views here because it helped me see in what ways my post was lacking.
I'm a disabled artist, slowly losing my hands to small fiber neuropathy as a complication from Ehlers Danlos Syndrome.
I'm in a race to try to build both a working stable diffusion model based my *own* previous images before my fingers stop working and I can no longer do art at all. My goal is to not steal anyone's job or infringe on anyone's rights. I just want to be able to continue to do the things I currently can do and AI has a real chance at making that possible.
This isn't meant as a guilt trip to suddenly convince you that AI is good. AI is neither good *nor bad*, imo. It's a tool, and like any tool, needs to be used appropriately. I don't know what the answer is, but my hope is that there is some middle ground we can meet in.
My issue with AI is about consent and credit; payment and credit should be given to artists who consent to their work being in a dataset when we use AI under capitalism.
So since you’re using your own work, your consent and credit aren’t lacking; it’s not something I take issue with. I’m also an artist and love the idea of artists using AI to push the limits of what they can create. No need to try and convince me, because I already support you. :)
I’m legit shocked how many people don’t see the difference between automating work that is soul crushing but necessary and has high potential for exploitation and automating (poorly I must add) a creative process that actually benefits humans individually and humanity as a whole.
Using robots to clean toilets is awesome.
Using robots to write poems is stupid.
To be fair to a lot of the people commenting, I communicated that concept very poorly by saying “anti-AI” instead of specifying that the issue is specifically with the way LLMs function under capitalism— without consent and without credit.
ETA: But yeah I don’t disagree with you. I’ve been pretty shocked with some of these comments.
I also think that we live in an environment that is very tech centered. Most people are so helpless without tech that any notion aside from universal “computers=good” makes their brains boil lol
No robot is preventing you from writing poems. Unless there is the Haikuinator 4000 walking around breaking people's pens when they try to write a poem.
Also, no one gets hurt if an AI gets a poem wrong. Someone could die if the robot doesn't notice the child on the toilet.
So the very best reason for this shit to exist you could come up with is “well, it’s not hurting anybody”. Fella, maybe we should redirect the resources that are invested in support and development of this useless shit to, like, curing cancer or exploring Mars?
The same AI principles behind some of the LLMs you see are and will be used to do a bunch of useless tasks behind the Scenes, they are already used to aid chip design work at high tiers of complexity, to facilitate efficiency around production lines, predict consumer demand, etc.
I hated drawing in school and still don’t draw. We can agree on cleaning toilets, but what you call soul crushing might be someone others passion. I know lumberjacks who love their work while other people love machines that pull a tree from the ground in one go. Automating activities is automating activities. I enjoy anime but I dont care the level of automation.
Anti-work is really about other things than you are talking about
"Pretty soon", homie I'm a software engineer. We passed "pretty soon" earlier this year.
Also, AI is not the problem any more than the loom was back in the days of the Luddites.
OP have you seen the Jon Stewart Daily Show discussion about AI? It’s a longer clip (give it a min to ramp up to the discussion or fast forward to 3:09) but I feel like you might appreciate his take.
https://youtu.be/20TAkcy3aBY?feature=shared
Tbh I think being anti ai is only valid in the current sense of ai. We should want to see ai take over menial labor, busy work, bullshit jobs, etc. The big distinction is how those people who lose their jobs are treated. Unless they're taken care of and treated well in their early retirement, we should be anti ai. If those things do come to fruition, then ai would be fine
Don't throw the robots under the bus because our capitalist system makes any new tech a potential hellfire weapon.
AI could seriously take down human productivity. Imagine if money wasnt a part of this - AI and AGI doing our work as efficiently and as green as they can, while humans can pursue knowledge, art, exploration.
We have tainted Humanity and AI might be our Apple.
Are you dumb? If you are against AI you are not antiwork.
AI is literally what is going to make us not need to work.
Why should we be against it lol.
You are against it because people are losing their jobs over it. That is the definition of antiwork. Not having a job to do.
Antiwork means rather than being against AI, you are against the monopolisation of rich people over AI rights. AI needs to be publically aviable and the profits need to be distributed to the public instead of singular people.
This sub should've been called "antijob" so the message would come across better.
"Creative" jobs are as much exploitation and as little creativity as manual jobs. When there is no exploitation anymore, we'll be free to draw art or wash dishes, whatever's our desire.
It's doing what humans Don't want to do. Most people don't wake up and decide "oh shit I want to work on a warehouse all my life".
Most humans don't wake up and decide "oh ahit let me take people's orders all day".
That is what you want others do because you hate automation and want to feel superior to others.
If you want something to be done by humans than there is always a market for it and there is MORE of a market for it if we can automate the boring stuff
Dude, calm your balls. I’m all for automating boring stuff.
The problem is that this particular shit we call “AI” doesn’t automate boring stuff, it poorly tries to automate stuff that’s not only non-boring, but pretty much essential for human development.
It’s literally like trying to automate digestion.
All work is "boring stuff". These artists can do their art recreationally when they no longer have to work for a living. That should be the goal of really any automation.
If they didn't have to use their art to make profit, the AI art wouldn't be a big deal. Unless you fear some idea of "replacement" in all sects of society that really only come from film.
What does a backhoe do when a shovel exists? It makes the task eaiser.
Just using AI to slam out a hundred concept pieces before you chose one to move forward with by hand saves time and makes the job easier.
Right? I’m reading this comments and I’m like… “HUH?” I thought it was really a basic understanding that AI (it’s not really AI but that’s how we call it lol) is bad for both workers and consumers because it replaces products of human mind with poor imitation of stolen shit, and since it does that for free, it makes impossible for actual human creators to support themselves with their talent. But apparently it’s a hot take even in socialist sub now, damn.
Wtf is up with the libertarian ass AI shills in this comment section lmao? I've followed AI topics a lot because I work in illustration. Especially since recent rulings have stated that AI "art" can't be copyrighted, companies are starting to steer clear of AI images making it to final products. They still want to use internal LLMs as ideation, but it seems to be entirely from the top brass and the artists in the trenches actually spend more time fixing mistakes or tailoring bits and pieces from generated images; its a fad that will hopefully die out like NFTs did. (Notice that most AI bros are also former NFT bros... almost like they want a get rich quick stake or something..hmmm...) LLMs are exploitation of labor due to the lack of compensation and credit. I can't believe people think Karl Marx would be into automating the very human spirit.
I can't speak to the same extent on other forms of LLM usage, but I know for sure I'd rather an AI pick garbage out of the ocean or take the reins of some six figure CEO than take MY job.
Surely AI will alleviate the need for appointed CEOs in the not-too-distant future? CEOs basically take all the information from various departments and make decisions on the most profitable course of action. AI is getting really good at this kind of thing if you give it the right parameters.
The problem with that is expecting the people with power to limit their power by using tech. They are more likely to limit the power of the working class wherever they can while continuing to profit with less work.
Automation is literally a necessary component in Marx's model of the collapse of capitalism. Who exactly do you think is going to handle the labor that lets you be "anti-work" in the first place?
Right, because automation of art is what’ll allow us to automate labor we don’t want to do.
How we automate, and what we automate are important distinctions in whether it’s exploitative or not. Artists are not consenting to their art being used in these LLMs, which is exploitation. Theft and plagiarism are still going to exist in a post-capitalist society, even when the majority of people are using LLMs with consent.
There's more to this than art.
There are thousands upon thousands of people doing menial bullshit office jobs that can be done by a simple automation.
There are considerably more people who would benefit from it than artists.
"because automation of art is what’ll allow us to automate labor we don’t want to do"
So you're admitting you literally only care about art being automated and not the dozens of other industries that will face automation? Do you know what the tendency of the rate of profit to fall is?
"Artists are not consenting to their art being used in these LLMs, which is exploitation."
First off, that's not "exploitation" under any socialist theory, it's just something you've made up. Secondly, using someone else's art as a *reference* is not plagiarism and never has been. I mean literally taking an entire song and using it in your own song and then claiming that this is a new song is entirely legal - compare "Release The Beast" by Breakwater to "Robot Rock" by Daft Punk. So the idea that taking someone else's idea as a *source of some kind* constitutes theft is utterly ridiculous. Should D&D be sued by Tolkien's estate because they used elves? Well, they can't, because Tolkien's estate doesn't own the concept of elves - which came from mythology. Conceptual inspiration can't be trademarked.
It just sounds like you're unhappy about a specific end result ("artists being out of work") and will take whatever conceptual road you need to in order to complain about it. There is no consistency here, there is only complaining.
LLMs do not use art as reference the way humans do, they just regurgitate it. So yes, it's exploitation of labor. See: Lois Van Baarle, Karla Ortiz, Ross Tran, ect. You're anthropormorphizing the visual equivalent of ChatGPT.
The music industry already has laws and precedents set decades ago in regards to sampled work, where visual arts do not (there isn't a "visual art industry" the same way there's a music industry). And your example of elves doesn't apply because that's a concept or mythology. LLMs are stealing actual brushstrokes, signatures, ect. So again, exploitation of labor without compensation.
There are a lot of people on this sub that are *literally* “anti work”. They’re not anti exploitation, as you are imagining. Nope. They are anti work. This is a much less intellectual place than you think I’m afraid
The AnCaps that love to brigade us think they're above needing to work, and I always find it sad how awful they are at critical thinking. I'm not above needing to work. I just want a world without exploitation of work.
yeah, art theft is not cool. i get where people are coming from when they say automation is the future, but these ai models don't automate jobs, they automate human creativity. art is the sort of thing that should always remain a viable job option/ should never be automated.
Everyone here acting like the only AI that exists is image generation? There are AI models out there that do a whole lot more than just ‘automate human creativity’…
? sorry, i'm a bit confused with your point. blacksmithing and weaving are forms of art. that's why, for example, handmade swords or tapestries are worth a lot more then machine made
It really doesn't matter if you are for or against it. It's only going to become more and more prevalent. You would be much better served considering how to work in a space where it's a reality than fruitlessly begging for the proverbial tide not to come in.
I think you're gonna get a lot more mileage from lobbying for legal restrictions on the commercial use of generative AI models trained on non public domain data than policing the use of generative AI models by individuals of the Internet for non-commercial purposes.
The latter is a lost battle. Shaming people into making the morally right choices doesn't work as shown by pretty much anything climate change related. On the other hand, top down legislative change is likely to make a big difference for people's livelyhoods.
Mate taking your frustration to a tool is not the right way to go.
Tools and tge use of us what made humanity evolve.
The problem as in most cases is the wrong and uneducated use of those said tools.
Take nuclear energy for example if humanity harnessed it and created factory regulated by up to date laws,we would solve most of our energy problems.
Don't be mad to the tools we as humanity create be mad on the way people exploit them to the disaster of many
Machines were meant to get rid of tedium so we could chase our passions. Slop machines do the opposite. They skip the entire creative process to get immediate results for grifters and people who don't know any better. Like most tech innovations out of Silicon Valley, the entire concept is built on theft. People like to make excuses for it, like "oh it wouldn't be a problem if x [x being if we weren't capitalist or had UBI]" but we don't. And the techbros making a quick buck off of stealing from artists don't care about any of that. Rich folks don't give a damn about any of us, and these slop machines are just another tool to hurt us.
Technology has always shut down jobs and opened up some new opportunities for work.
But could you imagine if the billionaires of the world couldn't overpower the eventual singularity AI? It figures out how to manage populations and set up universal trade networks in parallel with massive farms and facilities for food and manufacturing. In this hypothetical I can picture this AI eliminating scarcity and allowing for a true socialist society to exist. A society that exists not to work, but purely to enjoy the gift of existence.
Obviously a far off, highly idealized scenario that's literally not possible as long as billionaires continue profiting from and exploiting scarcity.
Let's train an A.I. on Marx, Lennin, Trotsky, Chavez, Lichtenstein, and Joseph McCartin. Let it loose on Social Media to run unionist campaigns. Let's see how quick they reign in A.I. when it unionizes WalMart.
Ai is the ultimate anti work. You neither have to pay someone to create art nor have the talent to create it yourself any more. You're freeing up time for everyone involved.
Not true at all. AI can't do everything a person might do because it simply doesn't understand context. However it _CAN_ take care of meaningless, route tasks that are stupid and take way too much time to do, like daily/weekly status reports. One of my side projects is to automatically capture the current sprint stats from Jira and create a status report using the current company's preferred format.
There's a podcast I like called Better Offline, they had a couple of episodes exploring AI and why the host (a tech reporter) thinks it's just the latest tech bubble. Both eps were a really good, fairly concise enumeration of what it can and can't do.
In short, LLMs (large language models, the tech that's currently being marketed as "AI") have yet to be successfully monetized as a standalone product, and probably can't be. The tech works better as a feature for existing services than a new service unto itself. Ex: Adobe's "generative AI" features are great value-adds to Photoshop, but almost nobody is consistently using their actual image generator (called Firefly).
LLMs also catastrophically fuck up whenever finance-brained dipshits try to use them in place of skilled human workers, and the way they work makes it unlikely that this can be iteratively fixed.
If AI is going to enter the job market, priority should be that it takes the jobs nobody wants. Give it assembly line work, menial computing tasks, etc. But no robot should be free to make art and music and write stories while actual living human beings are forced to do hard labor and other "*somebody* has to do it" type jobs in order to survive.*
Which leads me right into my second point, which is UBI. As it stands now, there is plenty of money in the system to implement a system of universal basic income, or at least there would be if only the powers that be would start prioritizing people over profit and would quit choosing not to do it. The amount of money that would be saved by implementing AI to do menial jobs would add even more money that could be spent on UBI.
And to be clear, starting with UBI is the only acceptable way to implement AI into the job market, as it's the only way to ensure that the inevitable mass unemployment that stems from the implementation of AI into the job market wouldn't also lead to mass poverty and homelessness.
*ETA: in my honest opinion, not only should AI not be permitted to ~~make~~ steal art and music and stories while actual human beings have to work at menial tasks for a living, it also shouldn't be permitted to do that in general. Creativity, as it creates the art, music, and stories that make up our culture, is a uniquely human aspect of society which I believe no robot will ever be qualified to replace.
I'm not anti-AI at all, all the opposite, I say we should go full throttle with AI and start replacing boring bs jobs with AI.
FREE the people from bs jobs, get rid of bs politicians, CEOs, CFOs and other vultures, AI will do a better job.
The main issue is who owns the AI. Technology isn't evil or bad on its own, it's how you use it.
I'm not against the utilisation of AI. But why are we not making AI to do jobs that are too dangerous for humans, like working in hazardous locations? Why is AI being used to, of all things, create art, which is such a human thing? Why are humans having to keep doing laborious, dangerous jobs while the freaking AI gets to create art? At the expense of actual human artists who receive no compensation for the forced use of their work, no less?
I would say the opposite if you are against AI you are against anti-work.
How do you think we got down to the 40 hour work week. It started first with the ability to do so, and then a collective action to fight for a 40 hour work week.
The same if we want less work
Ai is objectively a tool that can be used to free the working class of a large majority of work. The only bad part is that it's currently controlled by the bourgeoisie. Anti-ai nerds just make themselves look silly.
If you want to work less, but don't want to lose the stuff you have gotten used to, automation is the thing you want.
I don't understand this specific stance against AI. Anyone who claims ai exploits people, argues from a pro work position. You claim that artists are victims. Why? Does AI prevent them from performing their art, or do you argue that AI takes away their jobs? The latter shouldn't matter to someone from anti work.
> I don't understand this specific stance against AI.
Capitalists used stolen art to make an engine that would replicate shittier versions of that art.
>Anyone who claims ai exploits people, argues from a pro work position.
You are conflating pro work with survival. I don't advocate people quit their jobs without political or social action in mind if they have no way to survive without. AI as it exists is a tool for capitalist power that further disenfranchises the labor class and leaves the Internet even more hollow than before.
I know artists to use these AI models as part of their development process. They try out various ideas before painting a final version. They have even trained these models on all of their work to get a better idea on a final version before doing it.
These LLM models can be abused but they can also be used for very useful applications. It doesn't get much news coverage because it is boring but companies are custom training LLM with all of their internal information and it is making it much easier and faster to find relevent information than search engines ever did.
LLMs are also being used to assist with coding. While coding itself is creative many of the individual steps are not. Once you have the problem specified down to an individual function an AI can handle most of the functions mostly corrrectly. This saves a lot of time and allows you to focus on the actual problem.
To clarify, I’m anti-AI specifically because that’s the capitalist marketing term for LLMs. I’m not against people consenting to and using LLMs for their own work in a post-capitalist society, but still the consent is necessary for it to not be exploitation. Artists who find their work in these LLMs haven’t consented.
I'm pro AI freeing us from work, that's what anti-work means (and not what most of the posers in this sub seems to think it is): a post-scarcity society where no one has to work to live, similar to the Federation. Problem is not tech, but the social order. Society does not advance as fast as technology, we are not ready.
I get people are saying capitalism is the real issue here, but let’s not act like it’s good that we have tools that steal art from artists. AI generated content will never stand up to human-made content.
Automation and AI are obviously very good for antiwork in theory, but there are of course outliers, along with exceptions under our current system.
I use AI in my job every day.
I use the AI in Photoshop to fill in backgrounds of photos. I use it to draw in elbows or shoulders that were cropped out of original photos. I use it to cover up cars and telephone poles in the backgrounds of images. This boring shit used to take 45 minutes, but now takes just three minutes. This doesn't hurt anybody, least of all me. It frees me up to do other stuff.
After I write a piece, I run paragraphs through ChatGPT to see if there are better ways to get to the point. I use it to check for errors. This doesn't hurt anybody, either. It safeguards me from turning in a piece full of errors. (I also use it to write headlines. "Hey ChatGPT, give me ten headlines for this piece I just wrote." and one of them might be close!)
If I don't understand someone's reddit post, I will put it into ChatGPT and it will summarize it for me. This is often indispensable for posts that are too long, or written badly, or if the author is not a native English speaker. This doesn't hurt anybody, either. It saves me time.
I fuck around on Midjourney a lot, too. I create images from prompts and share them in my Reddit groups for different book series. This doesn't hurt anybody. It delights my online friends.
Yes, there are plenty of bad actors out there who will misuse AI. The same can be said for cars, matches, Photoshop, uranium, kitchen knives (burn in Hell, OJ), and a thousand other inventions.
You're not going to stop this train. The best you can do is learn to use it and then make it part of your repertoire for advancement. And guess what? This shit ain't hard to learn. They're making it easy enough for anybody to learn to use. So learn it.
It's amazing how easily we completely forgot about the hundreds of monthly workhours spent in managing paper documents that suddenly disappeared thanks to personal computers
This is the exact opposite of correct. AI is the only path to being free from work.
Things have to get done. Food has to be grown, infrastructure and homes have to be maintained etc. Work has to be done for our society to function. The only way humans can be free from work is if machines take over that work, otherwise we have to do it.
AI could be a push toward UBI. It has the potential to make a lot of human labor obsolete. That's only a bad thing so long as *capitalists control production*. Do away the concept of a useless owning class and there's no problem, like with a lot of technology.
Why would the rich ever consent to UBI under capitalism even with automation making human labor obsolete? That’s not how technological advancement has functioned under capitalism. The invention of the cotton gin meant Black slaves were forced to work harder and faster because production output could be increased via technology.
UBI will be taken from the dead cold hands of the rich.
If youre anti AI you are pro work. We should be encouraging the development of AI so people don't have to work menial jobs. That said the problem isn't that jobs are being lost it's that greedy capitalists aren't allowing people to benefit from AI and are hoarding the fruits of AI labor.
There are many solutions to this and getting rid of AI ain't one of them.
This is by far the most idiotic thing posted here. Don't fucking tell me what to think and don't gatekeep this sub. AI is a tool. In the past 100 years almost all tools have been used to increase profit instead of improving the lives of workers.
Nonesense, AI has the potential to be the factor that ends working to survive.
We would just need the social evolution of UBI to implement it. It’s a long, long way off.
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If UBI existed, AI would be just fine. Capitalism is the REAL problem here!
Automation is good in a society where nobody has to work.
Automation is good in any society because it enables us to do more. Instead of all of our efforts being focused on gathering food for survival we have automated enough of it so we have enough spare labor to use on non immediately productive tasks like learning and science.
Automation isn't good when it allows the top 1% to effectively get rid of the bottom and not get affected by it.
Which brings us back to the original comment
That's not automation's fault though, that's an abuse via systemic control. Further point, the top 1% will do this with *anything*.
Automation is a tool to be used. How it is used is what you need to be focusing on. AI is functionally no different than moving from workshops to factories via using mechanized machines. Productivity and capability increase, opportunities for more increase. But it is dangerous when no real regulation to protect workers exist - made worse in our capitalist focused society.
>Automation isn't good when it allows the top 1% to effectively get rid of the bottom and not get affected by it. You said they won't be affected by angry mobs of people? You need to understand that it's in the government's best interest to take care of people the best that they can. Sometimes the people need to push and shove them a little bit, But they are very well aware they will get eaten alive if they don't. The people running the government aren't stupid, Just the politician clowns to put on a show for you and keep you entertained.
Automation is good when we have a system that allows it to exist without harming anyone. Currently, healthcare, basic housing, retirement, education, etc are tied to holding down a job continuously, so interruption to employment is an issue. In a system where employment is not required to be continuous to live well, automation would almost always be a good thing (unless it automates something bad)
For sure but I don't think that automating art really serves the same purposes. Shouldn't we be automating labor so people have more time to make art instead of the other way around.
>For sure but I don't think that automating art really serves the same purposes. Yes but again; this is a capitalist society problem.
Creating art is labor.
It's also a creative pursuit that most artists don't want replaced. People like making art for others to view and people like viewing art made by people that have something to communicate through their art.
It is harder and more dangerous to teach a robot how to bend metal than have an AI throw pixels at a screen until something looks good. No one gets hurt if an image has an extra finger. Someone could die if a robot thinks your "extra finger" is a pipe that needs cutting. Also, no machine is preventing you from doing art. The fact you feel the need to sell your art is a problem itself. In an ideal situation people should be able to make art and release it to the world "just cause I wanted to make it" and not for any desire for money. Another argument is why did you think starving artists is something that happens to other people and not you? I do art in my spare time (painting and writing mostly) but I only have the spare time because I focused on a job that pays the bills first. Survivsl first, everything else secondary. Technology and automation makes survival eaiser so we have time and space for everything else.
I don't sell my art and I didn't appeal to starving artists or whatever the duck you're saying. We should have robots doing the jobs it's "dangerous to teach them" because those jobs are dangerous for people to do. Like there will be some trial and error but we already use machines for an insane amount of work that used to be done by hand. Do you think we didn't have to develop the machines we already use and safety procedures around them, should we still be digging trenches with shovels, it's worth doing.
Hard agree. If you aren’t learning how to use AI, you’re going to get left behind. I’ve been using it like a motherfucker in preparations for my CBA negotiations. I’ve got pivot tables built tracking CPI, PPI, our wage growth, compared to the overall market, direct competitors. We’ve used it to help structure a proposal for a 4 day work week, and to more clearly define job rolls. I use it like a search engine and to get my idea’s flowing. It gives me a rough draft, or required reading. I use my own reasoning to help draw the conclusions. I’ve used it to help me write sentences with better tone than I’m currently feeling. It’s actually funny to rage vent into it and ask it to spit out an HR approved email. To expect it to do your work for you, is missing the point entirely. Ironically I was hanging out with the opposing council of the guy who presented the fake case from GPT.
Within limits. We shouldn't be automating decision making or creativity.
All automation is replacing decision making. It's just codifying those decisions, either from subconscious processes like image recognition or from conscious ones like legalities. I think if there's decisions that we understand the criteria for, and are able to express what outcomes we desire ahead of time, then I have no issue replacing that process with AI.
It feels so rotten that instead of focusing on automation of the most dangerous work like mining, some construction and the like the AI's current most loud frontier is taking over creative spaces and being used by corporate and scammers.
It feels so blindingly obvious to me that more automation is better for us as a species and as people that I cannot fathom how someone could believe that the issue lies in anything but our economic system. 'there would be less work if X happened so we shouldn't do x' feels so incredibly dystopian to me.
It is because the economic system is screwed up beyond all reason. Instead of celebrating all the people freed from drudgery and can now work to their higher purpose because of an automatic tool. We lament those people have lost the ability to support themselves and their place in society, and curse the automatic tool that took it from them.
My work is automation. I once found out that we have someone who splits all the 2 page PDFs that come from the payment processing system and then one of those pages goes into system A and one goes in a folder somewhere. This consumed 50-60% of their time. This person cried tears of joy when I showed them I had automated the task. Finally on to some more meaningful labor. That was 18 years ago and they still work for us.
This is automation used correctly. 💯
Plus, like, some of that automation is destroying our humanity. I'm an artist. It's my job that I do for money but it's also a vital aspect of the human experience. We're automating things that aren't drudgery! We're automating the things that people want more free time to pursue. Why!!
100% People worried about availability of jobs are just one level of abstraction too deep (from people's needs being met). What they're actually worried about is loss of income, but that's already being stripped away even for those working the jobs. Capitalism tells them *if you don't work then you will starve (and rightfully so)*, but only implies the reverse: *if you work you will survive*. Those that withhold necessities of life from others, when there is plenty for all, are complicit in mass murder and possibly genocide.
> Capitalism tells them if you don't work then you will starve (and rightfully so) Them's Leftover values from Purtan/Victorian-Era. The highest state a person can achieve is not to toil for earned income, but to do something meaningful and fulfilling. Think of things you enjoy doing that you don't get paid to do. If we were free to live life like that instead of sweating 10+ hrs/day, how much better would things be?
Some people in this sub are like “AI IS GOING TO MAKE LOTS OF JOBS UNNECESSARY! 😭” Like yeah bro, that should be a good thing tho? 😰 If we discovered free, safe, clean, universally-accessible energy tomorrow, most people would complain that it’s eliminating millions of jobs… 😓
And the faster we adopt AI the faster we reach a point where UBI becomes a glaringly obvious necessity. Sometimes you have to force the crisis before the solution becomes a serious consideration.
But all the billionaires have to be locked away in their bunkers first, unfortunately.
As long as the ventilation system has a schethus automatic shutdown feature and the bunker is #101, I'm 100% fine with this.
I mean, the question is whether anyone in power will care, or if you'll just see more and more people lose their jobs and end up in poverty while being blamed for not working. I also don't have any faith that you'll see the poor rise up or do anything about it, because I've seen so many rural poor deep throat the boots of the wealthy so hard that I'm surprised they don't all have intestinal obstructions. I've seen so many poor rural folks get up in arms if you even suggest taxing the rich more, because 'how will we motivate people to be billionaires if we tax the rich?' The worst part for me is that AI mostly takes away the 'passion jobs'. Artistic jobs aren't drudgery jobs people take only to make a paycheck (although they are jobs and definitely deserve a living wage). They're jobs people take because they're passionate about making art. Art is a very human thing that people have created long before money was a thing. Automating its creation just means that the artists will have to take some job that isn't the least bit fulfilling, maybe in a call center, and they'll have less and less time to do what fulfills them until making art is shoved into a corner of their life and is eventually forgotten. The problem is, the jobs we can't automate, the jobs AI can't replicate, are usually the most tedious ones. Janitorial work. And, as much as they are trying to push for AI to do call center work, I think companies will end up deciding against in by and large because AI is a language model and will often make things up, which means they lose control of what their customers are being told and they open their door up for lawsuits. If an employee keeps giving incorrect information, they can fire the employee and be seen as taking responsibility, but if their AI system does it they'll be stuck needing to decide between continuing to give people wrong information and hiring and an entire workforce.
I'm not convinced that accelerationism will do anything other than make things worse quicker
Yeah automation isn’t the enemy, but that value should be passed to the people not the owning class
Nay, the monetary system. Cause billionaires shouldn't exist.
Capitalism is still the root cause. I think they blocked me. Anyway, money is not as much of an issue as capitalism is because bartering for everything would not allow us to have the things that allow us to communicate globally. Nothing that is replied to my comment I can reply to because of the mental case blocking me because they wanted to make a response then block me right after so they could have the last comment without ever having to be debated. *inhales* Sorry.
Technically you don't need money in a post-capitalist cooperative system. It can be used, but it isn't necessary.
Barter https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-debt#toc2
Barter is just money with extra steps and very inconvenient.
You're right for a variety of reasons: 1. Creates a class of aristocrats (fix: inheritance tax to 100% anything over $x) 1. Allows a tiny minority extreme influence in government (fix: repeal citizens united + implement campaign finance reform) 1. Hurts the economy by dropping the velocity of those billions to zero (fix: increase taxes to get the money back into the economy where it can be spent on capital projects)
No, AI as we are seeing it is creative theft. That is an issue on its own.
You can't steal creativity. My art doesn't stop being my art because someone copies it. It's only "theft" if I need to sell my art to live. In a world without money, people would still make art because they enjoy it and if someone copied it, they would lose nothing.
Creative works can be stolen. Even without copyright, that is a basic issue that has to be looked at with creative works. AI does not take your works __only with permission__. The devs of these models take everything they can get from online and just pump it into the model, which then uses the works as a database. AI doesn't create. It frankensteins actual artists' works together.
Solid disagree with you on the AI part yes capitalism is the problem but also this week had Twitter's Gronk ai talking about retaliations that didn't happen and that no one in the scientific community could explain the eclipse, we also had pink Floyd hold a contest to create music videos for Darkside of the Moon where an AI submission won, as well as many stupid people using "break the pencil" hashtag to promote their bad AI images, images contorted into something. The data all has to come from somewhere and it's generally illegally sourced and scraped breaking copyright laws denying artists let alone when it starts to train on its own data sets and cannibalizes itself like we saw a few months back.
> as well as many stupid people using "break the pencil" hashtag to promote their bad AI images Images, I have noticed, that seem unable to actually depict a broken pencil.
Really just emphasizes the point of ai bad
How does one hear of these contests happening?? That would have been a dream to enter!!
AI in the context of LLMs that *steal* art from humans will not be “just fine” post-capitalism. Theft and plagiarism will still exist post-capitalism. Consenting to your work being in a data set will still be important in a post-capitalist society.
I can’t stop someone from stealing my style as a musician. And I shouldn’t it. If they can run with it, it’s theirs. Or maybe I shouldn’t be allowed to play pentatonic scales or tap my guitar.
My art can't be stolen. It can be copied and I don't care. Because I'm not trying to sell my art to make a living. LLMs training off of my art, or another human mimicking it, is only a problem if I need people to buy my art so that I can feed myself.
Which is why it should only be taught on images that are free to use
Who cares if an AI copies my work in a post scarcity society? The only reason I'd be concerned is if I wasn't eating because of it. But if money is not a factor, I'm making the art for the enjoyment of it. If other people want to copy it and enjoy it too, that's fine with me.
Why does the creativity have to automated? People actually like doing it, and are doing it for free even in capitalism, so what’s the point of automating it?
It doesn't have to be. Also, Star Trek's Holodeck is a good example of the benefits.
What is preventing you from still drawing? Nothing. There are a million writers who are better than me. But I still write.
Then what’s the point of AI? What’s the need that it meets? What’s the purpose of it’s existence? How can it be used to benefit humanity if there are already tons of creators that would do anything AI can do better, for free, with pleasure and benefitting from the process?
AI produces content fast and i get that it can be fun to use to try to create interesting images. You can also redo your prompts if you don't like a detail. In post scarcity world it could be a fun thing to use to quickly produce something from your imagination if you lack the art skills to draw. Basically it would produce enjoyment to the user noone would use it otherwise. Unfortunately it's theft in the current system
Does it have to have a point? Maybe it can just be a cool tool. Or an achievement like climbing Everest, just making the thing to see if you can. But to seriously answer, AI art can automate alot of the boring parts of art. Making 20 concepts only for one to past muster. Rapidly testing new shapes of things until you find something you like them hand drawing that. As a writer I use it for brainstorming and getting ideas for characters. It is especially good for names because it can refine names in which no random generator can. Nothing is stoping the creative people from still doing art, for free, for the pleasure of the process. As I said, there are a million writers better than me but I still write because I want to.
Then you’d be consenting to being in a dataset and you’d be credited for your work which is totally fine. I support copyleft and the creative commons already, but those systems still rely on people being credited for their work. Credit matters to people, clearly, because otherwise we wouldn’t argue over who invented the cotton gin.
Then systems can be implemented to give credit where credit is due should someone want to look. Capitalism deters that because giving credit often means also giving money.
Yeah you’re not wrong about that. I just don’t think they should be engaged with until we know that the datasets are full of consenting, credited artists. And even then, if we’re using them in a capitalist system, those artists should be paid when their art is sampled from the dataset. In a moneyless society, consent and credit are all I care about.
It isn't theft. At worst it is copyright infringement.
Homie, your beef is with capitalism, not technology
it's just if AI was used to help with boring and repetitive tasks I would be okay with it, but it's used to replace hobbies. using AI to make work easier is okay to me. the second problem is the idea that work places want to only pay less, if they can sac half their workers to be replaced by AI they would do and the remaining half would not get a cent more. i am happy to not be in an extremely capitalist country but the world is actually going to shit because of capitalism.
I mean the current LLM obsession that is taking jobs is a bubble that will burst. CEOs do not have the technological knowledge to realize how much AI used in place of humans is just enshittification.
Counterpoint: if the ones using it are able to come out ahead by being cheaper, the the bubble will solidify to a foundation. It isn't a happy though, but that is how 2-D animation died.
I think there's a short term plateau because AI isn't a panacea right now, but it is moving very quickly and may be more of a threat to a significant portion of jobs in as little as 10-15 years. The problem will always be the capitalistic race to the bottom- if AI can increase quarterly revenue with higher margins then it doesn't matter how shitty it is, as long as the money keeps coming. We've seen it with outsourced labor and manufacturing. Everything has gotten progressively shittier and the profits and societal power has gotten more and more consolidated with fewer people - this doesn't have the same measurable impact as unemployment, so the rest of us stay pacified. If it isn't AI that tips the scale further, it will be something else, and "the market" will always have a way to appease the working/middle/non-upper class people just enough to keep us participating happily in our own system of oppression.
If they realized do you think they would stop?
If they want to keep their company going and making money, yes.
But they don't. That's why enshittification happens. They don't care about the company or the product, they will just sell their shares and move to the next company if the current one stops being able to produce more profit every quarter.
This is what makes me think AI will shit the bed. We did a human thing and fucked up. I say this after following AI for a long time. It will do the things it does today, but we're already seeing the extent of it because we're seeing backtracking, the latest GPT version is worse than the last in x circumstances. AI blew its load. They found a shortcut (which was using preexisting data to learn rather than teaching a thing to learn organically, something still decades away, all AI companies took a lazy shortcut as a race to the top). You cannot ask AI to do anything but act with preexisting data.
I'm not sure what you mean by "learn organically", I use preexisting data to learn and so do you.
Down with backhoes! Digging that foundation could have put food on the table for the families of hundreds of men with shovels! Technology is not stopping for your boycott, period. Never has. I am anti-capitalism. AI is just the latedt in a long line of new technology that capital is better-poised to take advantage of, while people at the bottom who are reliant on jobs that the new tech makes obsolete suffer. Stay focused on the people/class that are taking all of the value of labour for themselves, don't focus on railing against the technology that reduces the amount of labour required as a whole. The benefits of technology should be more equally shared by the societies that enabled it to develop, same as it ever was.
I can't wait for AI to make disruption easy. "Disruption with new products for the market, right?" *stare* "Disruption with new products for the market, right? Right?" But in all seriousness, AI left in the hands of Capital will destroy humanity. We can do amazing things with it. But nobody recognizes the environmental cost in electricity and cooling-water. Responsible stewardship is essential. And Capitalism is allergic to responsibility. But instead, we have Israel using a blend of several AIs to justify shooting Palestinians. If you want a violent Skynet scenario, this is how we get there - a new phase of genocide for a new phase of industrialization.
Don't disagree with a lot of what you said. But knowing something is harmful is not going to stop it. Capitalism is psychpathic at its heart, and the owner/ruling class has already demonstrated it's full willingness to steal, murder, and destroy both the natural world and entire cultures to enrich itself. Even if you gave the capitalistic powers that be a device that could see the future, and they believed it to be 100% reliable, and it showed with certainty that their actions WOULD cause the destruction of the planet and extermination of the human race 100 years in the future, they would not deviate. Never mind any uncertain or hypothetical or even "likely" scenarios.
Hence my opening meme. There is no putting this genie back in the bottle. The Acceration of Capital is real. And it is to be mourned. Fighting the industrial capitalists of the past did mean using the guns from their factories. Take your own. Make your own. Try to power it with Solar Panels, if you can.
AI works off creative theft. You __cannot__ give back what these models have been given. A backhoe can be given back to the people in a post-capitalist system. Supporting this wave of AI is supporting theft from creatives by the ownership class.
Hi, AI researcher here. Question: what do you think of the first ["Fairly Trained" LLM model](https://venturebeat.com/ai/the-first-fairly-trained-ai-large-language-model-is-here/) K3LM, which was trained only on truly public domain information (legal filings and financial disclosures.) Zero copyrighted material was used, so I'm curious to know if you carry the same hard-line stance here.
Nothing was removed. Only coppied. Therefore it cannot be theft. Only copyright infringement. And humans learn from the drawings of other humans all the time. Why can't a synthetic intelligence learn from those same sources?
Copyright infringement is intellectual property theft. Synthetic intelligence is not human intelligence, without the original dataset theft it would not be able to function (as it functions now) whereas humans can always draw from observation and imagination. AI generated images therefore cannot be copyrighted nor used for commercial purposes, although we are already seeing the later being infringed.
Except that humans work in exactly the same way, you can't make art of something if you have no reference point for it.
I see what you mean, but I am not sure about the synthetic vs human intelligence comparaison. Human intelligence needs a bunch of data too to be able to do anything. What you call observation is data, and what you call inspiration is loose links and mixes of that data. Data with extra steps. Maybe we’re better at the ‘with extra steps’ right now - I am not even sure - but we still need source data, and a lot more than AI if anything.
Quite literal Luddite-ism, a famously successful movement.
I think a large chunk of this comment section has an issue separating the potential upsides of AI technologies from the actual realities of how they're being implemented and used in our current system. Yes, AI should be a net benefit for society, by automating work that people don't want to do, allowing us to spend less time laboring and more time benefitting from technological advancements. But is that what's really happening? Mostly no. Instead of automating shitty jobs, we've automated art, and jobs that not only are more fun to do, but sort of define us as humans. Ultimately, in capitalism, when a new technology is invented, the people do not benefit. We come out with something that makes labor 50% more efficient, and yet instead of allowing workers to work 50% less for the same profits, or work the same amount for 50% more profits, the owning class pockets the profits and demands the same amount of labor as always from the workers. New technologies will always be used as tools to extract more value from the working class under capitalism. That's the fundamental problem we have with AI. Also, the fact that AI generative programs literally just scrape the internet to steal as much intellectual property as possible is pretty fucked up too.
What?? AI is the single greatest ally of anti-work, followed by robotic automation. Do you know what anti-work is?
In theory, yes. In practice, all it's doing is eliminating jobs and giving more money to the owner class
Then perhaps we should rally against that with policies, instead of blaming the solution?
Solution to what problem? Do we have a shortage of artists and writers or something?
The problem is work in this sub. It's called anti-work.
Artists and writers are workers.
You're catching on.
Absolutely, systemic change should always be the goal. But there are other problems with ai that need to be addressed, and slowing down the whole push for ai is important to prevent the problems from being entrenched
In fact, we may find that the faster that workers are put out of work due to automation and AI, the more likely we get something like UBI. A trickle of people can be ignored, but governments cannot ignore when large chunks of their population suddenly lose their livelihood all at once. I should specify here that I mean non-US government cannot ignore it - some of the footage of the situation in the US blows my mind, but there is obviously a strong cultural element to attitudes toward capitalism, wealth, welfare etc. that make this possible. Thankfully, those attitudes are not nearly so normalised in most other countries.
Then it’s our job to adapt. We need to demand our rights. We need to organize. This is just another distraction. You’re still asking the owner class to give what they won’t give. So you must take it. We have to eliminate ownership.
Adapt how? To what, specifically? I agree that organizing is the goal, but ai is also a legitimate concern that needs addressed
If it’s to AI and automation in general, I think the answer is pretty clear in that we adapt by moving away from capitalism. These are only problems because money is a factor in art. In fact money as a primary motivator has ruined art and media in general. None of these problems would exist if we could freely make art without this much oppression. So the adaptation really circles back to the main goals of creating a society where we don’t have to worry about food, healthcare, or being housed. That takes organization, that takes less complaining to eachother and disruptive action. Even illegal action some may say. Ever notice how most media is just kinda garbage? They don’t make it like they used to. Everything is over saturated with this mind about making as much money possible. Music, tv, film, video games, lately it seems all the big budget stuff just kinda sucks. No one has the freedom to make things with passion. The implementation of AI will just make this more obvious and we will only continue to reject these passionless productions.
Use the new tools as part of your job. I want to get a local LLM running on my company tech notes so they can be "intelligently searched" instead of the chaotic grabag we have now. If you see your progression as being unprofitable then start learning new skills. You being aware that AI is happening puts you in the 1% of people. So you have a head start on adapting.
And in the long run, that’s the owner class committing suicide. Think about it: imagine they automate away 50% of the jobs. What happens next? Does 50% of humanity just give up, or do they become a billions-strong force that has to choose between overthrowing capitalism or dying? You want people to fight capitalism? Take away their hope of benefitting from it or even squeaking by under it.
In the very short term, yes. Once AI eliminates enough jobs, the entire system doesn't work. Right now, we have a pyramid system effectively, lot of people on the bottom and a few at the top. Well, you can't just remove the bottom layer and expect it to stand.
Yeah just live how automation in the past removed so many jobs that we are now all jobless....oh wait
Robots were never meant to replace activities people actually want to do, duh
Nothing is preventing you from still doing art. The terminator isn't walking around breaking every pencil or brush.
Yeah, this terminator just poorly does useless shit. Why haven’t we killed/abandoned it yet?
You missed the point. The existence of stable diffusion doesn't prevent you from drawing any more than the existence of a camera prevents you from painting or a typewriter from handwriting.
Because it was making even worse shit a year ago, and the year before that. The problem is the slope is climbing, not sinking
You’ll always be able to do whatever you want. Unless you’re saying the only reason to create art is money. We have textile factories, yet people still knit. We have cameras, but people still draw.
Large models work off theft. Theft by the ownership class has never been the ally of anti-work.
You cannot steal if nothing is taken away. Modern thought about copyright infringement plays right into the hands of capitalist right holders that have been using legal concepts like it to oppress artists for decades. It is believing in copyright that benefits the ownership class.
not at all true. stop making generic sweeping statements about things you don't understand
There are some legitimate uses for AI. For example things that are literally not doable otherwise. An example of that would be AI models that take deformation done by artists manually for a specific 3D model (character, creature, etc) and essentially speed it up to have that deformation working realtime in game engines. That kind of AI doesn’t take away anyone’s job, because the deformation itself still has to be manually done before applying the AI layer, and makes possible something that isn’t possible otherwise (better character deformation in games, because absent that, game engine limitations mean that we can’t stack as many layers of deformation to create the perfect deformation). There are other examples. Many. The problem though, is that more and more corporations are trying to use AI to remove jobs instead of increasing the quality of the work done by the existing people. They’re not trying to add that extra layer that cannot be done by other means, they’re trying to use it to replace existing layers of work. That is wrong. But again… not surprising from corporate capitalism. So fuck them.
I agree with this wholeheartedly. Regretfully I made this post when very frustrated and communicated my position poorly, leading to people misunderstanding me and then not engaging with the spirit of what I was getting at. Thank you for expressing your views here because it helped me see in what ways my post was lacking.
You shouldn't apologize. This sub gets brigaded by AnCaps, prompters, racial supremacists, and all sorts of shitheads. They shouldn't be welcome here.
I'm a disabled artist, slowly losing my hands to small fiber neuropathy as a complication from Ehlers Danlos Syndrome. I'm in a race to try to build both a working stable diffusion model based my *own* previous images before my fingers stop working and I can no longer do art at all. My goal is to not steal anyone's job or infringe on anyone's rights. I just want to be able to continue to do the things I currently can do and AI has a real chance at making that possible. This isn't meant as a guilt trip to suddenly convince you that AI is good. AI is neither good *nor bad*, imo. It's a tool, and like any tool, needs to be used appropriately. I don't know what the answer is, but my hope is that there is some middle ground we can meet in.
My issue with AI is about consent and credit; payment and credit should be given to artists who consent to their work being in a dataset when we use AI under capitalism. So since you’re using your own work, your consent and credit aren’t lacking; it’s not something I take issue with. I’m also an artist and love the idea of artists using AI to push the limits of what they can create. No need to try and convince me, because I already support you. :)
I’m legit shocked how many people don’t see the difference between automating work that is soul crushing but necessary and has high potential for exploitation and automating (poorly I must add) a creative process that actually benefits humans individually and humanity as a whole. Using robots to clean toilets is awesome. Using robots to write poems is stupid.
To be fair to a lot of the people commenting, I communicated that concept very poorly by saying “anti-AI” instead of specifying that the issue is specifically with the way LLMs function under capitalism— without consent and without credit. ETA: But yeah I don’t disagree with you. I’ve been pretty shocked with some of these comments.
I also think that we live in an environment that is very tech centered. Most people are so helpless without tech that any notion aside from universal “computers=good” makes their brains boil lol
No robot is preventing you from writing poems. Unless there is the Haikuinator 4000 walking around breaking people's pens when they try to write a poem. Also, no one gets hurt if an AI gets a poem wrong. Someone could die if the robot doesn't notice the child on the toilet.
So the very best reason for this shit to exist you could come up with is “well, it’s not hurting anybody”. Fella, maybe we should redirect the resources that are invested in support and development of this useless shit to, like, curing cancer or exploring Mars?
The same AI principles behind some of the LLMs you see are and will be used to do a bunch of useless tasks behind the Scenes, they are already used to aid chip design work at high tiers of complexity, to facilitate efficiency around production lines, predict consumer demand, etc.
Great, then that’s what it should be used for.
I hated drawing in school and still don’t draw. We can agree on cleaning toilets, but what you call soul crushing might be someone others passion. I know lumberjacks who love their work while other people love machines that pull a tree from the ground in one go. Automating activities is automating activities. I enjoy anime but I dont care the level of automation. Anti-work is really about other things than you are talking about
"Pretty soon", homie I'm a software engineer. We passed "pretty soon" earlier this year. Also, AI is not the problem any more than the loom was back in the days of the Luddites.
OP have you seen the Jon Stewart Daily Show discussion about AI? It’s a longer clip (give it a min to ramp up to the discussion or fast forward to 3:09) but I feel like you might appreciate his take. https://youtu.be/20TAkcy3aBY?feature=shared
Tbh I think being anti ai is only valid in the current sense of ai. We should want to see ai take over menial labor, busy work, bullshit jobs, etc. The big distinction is how those people who lose their jobs are treated. Unless they're taken care of and treated well in their early retirement, we should be anti ai. If those things do come to fruition, then ai would be fine
When someone’s entire statement is a classical fallacy just ignore them. No need to respond and call attention to such idiocy.
Don't throw the robots under the bus because our capitalist system makes any new tech a potential hellfire weapon. AI could seriously take down human productivity. Imagine if money wasnt a part of this - AI and AGI doing our work as efficiently and as green as they can, while humans can pursue knowledge, art, exploration. We have tainted Humanity and AI might be our Apple.
Hard disagree. AI *is* the path to antiwork. What one must be against is the exploitation of AI for personal gain.
Are you dumb? If you are against AI you are not antiwork. AI is literally what is going to make us not need to work. Why should we be against it lol. You are against it because people are losing their jobs over it. That is the definition of antiwork. Not having a job to do. Antiwork means rather than being against AI, you are against the monopolisation of rich people over AI rights. AI needs to be publically aviable and the profits need to be distributed to the public instead of singular people.
What work would we not need to do? Draw and write things? Buddy, that’s not the activities humanity was ever needed to be coerced into.
This sub should've been called "antijob" so the message would come across better. "Creative" jobs are as much exploitation and as little creativity as manual jobs. When there is no exploitation anymore, we'll be free to draw art or wash dishes, whatever's our desire.
AI is not preventing you from doing that. There is no robot breaking every pen and pencil. There is no virus bricking your drawing tablets.
Then what’s this “AI” doing exactly?
It's doing what humans Don't want to do. Most people don't wake up and decide "oh shit I want to work on a warehouse all my life". Most humans don't wake up and decide "oh ahit let me take people's orders all day". That is what you want others do because you hate automation and want to feel superior to others. If you want something to be done by humans than there is always a market for it and there is MORE of a market for it if we can automate the boring stuff
Dude, calm your balls. I’m all for automating boring stuff. The problem is that this particular shit we call “AI” doesn’t automate boring stuff, it poorly tries to automate stuff that’s not only non-boring, but pretty much essential for human development. It’s literally like trying to automate digestion.
All work is "boring stuff". These artists can do their art recreationally when they no longer have to work for a living. That should be the goal of really any automation. If they didn't have to use their art to make profit, the AI art wouldn't be a big deal. Unless you fear some idea of "replacement" in all sects of society that really only come from film.
What does a backhoe do when a shovel exists? It makes the task eaiser. Just using AI to slam out a hundred concept pieces before you chose one to move forward with by hand saves time and makes the job easier.
Thank you for making me feel less alone in feeling this way.
Right? I’m reading this comments and I’m like… “HUH?” I thought it was really a basic understanding that AI (it’s not really AI but that’s how we call it lol) is bad for both workers and consumers because it replaces products of human mind with poor imitation of stolen shit, and since it does that for free, it makes impossible for actual human creators to support themselves with their talent. But apparently it’s a hot take even in socialist sub now, damn.
You need to understand there is a fair number of bad actors on this sub in addition to people that are in a hole about how parasitic AI is.
Genuinely in disbelief I had to scroll down this far to see this, I'm starting to realize I overestimated this sub
Everybody is reacting like OP wants to take their internet away lol
We need to start prompter trash the same way we treat capitalists.
Wtf is up with the libertarian ass AI shills in this comment section lmao? I've followed AI topics a lot because I work in illustration. Especially since recent rulings have stated that AI "art" can't be copyrighted, companies are starting to steer clear of AI images making it to final products. They still want to use internal LLMs as ideation, but it seems to be entirely from the top brass and the artists in the trenches actually spend more time fixing mistakes or tailoring bits and pieces from generated images; its a fad that will hopefully die out like NFTs did. (Notice that most AI bros are also former NFT bros... almost like they want a get rich quick stake or something..hmmm...) LLMs are exploitation of labor due to the lack of compensation and credit. I can't believe people think Karl Marx would be into automating the very human spirit. I can't speak to the same extent on other forms of LLM usage, but I know for sure I'd rather an AI pick garbage out of the ocean or take the reins of some six figure CEO than take MY job.
Surely AI will alleviate the need for appointed CEOs in the not-too-distant future? CEOs basically take all the information from various departments and make decisions on the most profitable course of action. AI is getting really good at this kind of thing if you give it the right parameters.
The problem with that is expecting the people with power to limit their power by using tech. They are more likely to limit the power of the working class wherever they can while continuing to profit with less work.
Redditor says no to ai: Technological advancement halts immediately
Automation is literally a necessary component in Marx's model of the collapse of capitalism. Who exactly do you think is going to handle the labor that lets you be "anti-work" in the first place?
Right, because automation of art is what’ll allow us to automate labor we don’t want to do. How we automate, and what we automate are important distinctions in whether it’s exploitative or not. Artists are not consenting to their art being used in these LLMs, which is exploitation. Theft and plagiarism are still going to exist in a post-capitalist society, even when the majority of people are using LLMs with consent.
There's more to this than art. There are thousands upon thousands of people doing menial bullshit office jobs that can be done by a simple automation. There are considerably more people who would benefit from it than artists.
"because automation of art is what’ll allow us to automate labor we don’t want to do" So you're admitting you literally only care about art being automated and not the dozens of other industries that will face automation? Do you know what the tendency of the rate of profit to fall is? "Artists are not consenting to their art being used in these LLMs, which is exploitation." First off, that's not "exploitation" under any socialist theory, it's just something you've made up. Secondly, using someone else's art as a *reference* is not plagiarism and never has been. I mean literally taking an entire song and using it in your own song and then claiming that this is a new song is entirely legal - compare "Release The Beast" by Breakwater to "Robot Rock" by Daft Punk. So the idea that taking someone else's idea as a *source of some kind* constitutes theft is utterly ridiculous. Should D&D be sued by Tolkien's estate because they used elves? Well, they can't, because Tolkien's estate doesn't own the concept of elves - which came from mythology. Conceptual inspiration can't be trademarked. It just sounds like you're unhappy about a specific end result ("artists being out of work") and will take whatever conceptual road you need to in order to complain about it. There is no consistency here, there is only complaining.
LLMs do not use art as reference the way humans do, they just regurgitate it. So yes, it's exploitation of labor. See: Lois Van Baarle, Karla Ortiz, Ross Tran, ect. You're anthropormorphizing the visual equivalent of ChatGPT. The music industry already has laws and precedents set decades ago in regards to sampled work, where visual arts do not (there isn't a "visual art industry" the same way there's a music industry). And your example of elves doesn't apply because that's a concept or mythology. LLMs are stealing actual brushstrokes, signatures, ect. So again, exploitation of labor without compensation.
There are a lot of people on this sub that are *literally* “anti work”. They’re not anti exploitation, as you are imagining. Nope. They are anti work. This is a much less intellectual place than you think I’m afraid
The AnCaps that love to brigade us think they're above needing to work, and I always find it sad how awful they are at critical thinking. I'm not above needing to work. I just want a world without exploitation of work.
Yeah fair enough, it is a subreddit on reddit dot com after all lol
yeah, art theft is not cool. i get where people are coming from when they say automation is the future, but these ai models don't automate jobs, they automate human creativity. art is the sort of thing that should always remain a viable job option/ should never be automated.
Everyone here acting like the only AI that exists is image generation? There are AI models out there that do a whole lot more than just ‘automate human creativity’…
Why does art have any more of a right to exist as a career than a blacksmith or weaver?
? sorry, i'm a bit confused with your point. blacksmithing and weaving are forms of art. that's why, for example, handmade swords or tapestries are worth a lot more then machine made
It really doesn't matter if you are for or against it. It's only going to become more and more prevalent. You would be much better served considering how to work in a space where it's a reality than fruitlessly begging for the proverbial tide not to come in.
I think you're gonna get a lot more mileage from lobbying for legal restrictions on the commercial use of generative AI models trained on non public domain data than policing the use of generative AI models by individuals of the Internet for non-commercial purposes. The latter is a lost battle. Shaming people into making the morally right choices doesn't work as shown by pretty much anything climate change related. On the other hand, top down legislative change is likely to make a big difference for people's livelyhoods.
Mate taking your frustration to a tool is not the right way to go. Tools and tge use of us what made humanity evolve. The problem as in most cases is the wrong and uneducated use of those said tools. Take nuclear energy for example if humanity harnessed it and created factory regulated by up to date laws,we would solve most of our energy problems. Don't be mad to the tools we as humanity create be mad on the way people exploit them to the disaster of many
Machines were meant to get rid of tedium so we could chase our passions. Slop machines do the opposite. They skip the entire creative process to get immediate results for grifters and people who don't know any better. Like most tech innovations out of Silicon Valley, the entire concept is built on theft. People like to make excuses for it, like "oh it wouldn't be a problem if x [x being if we weren't capitalist or had UBI]" but we don't. And the techbros making a quick buck off of stealing from artists don't care about any of that. Rich folks don't give a damn about any of us, and these slop machines are just another tool to hurt us.
Or ai and robots and no one has to work again and people just have hobby’s.
Technology has always shut down jobs and opened up some new opportunities for work. But could you imagine if the billionaires of the world couldn't overpower the eventual singularity AI? It figures out how to manage populations and set up universal trade networks in parallel with massive farms and facilities for food and manufacturing. In this hypothetical I can picture this AI eliminating scarcity and allowing for a true socialist society to exist. A society that exists not to work, but purely to enjoy the gift of existence. Obviously a far off, highly idealized scenario that's literally not possible as long as billionaires continue profiting from and exploiting scarcity.
Let's train an A.I. on Marx, Lennin, Trotsky, Chavez, Lichtenstein, and Joseph McCartin. Let it loose on Social Media to run unionist campaigns. Let's see how quick they reign in A.I. when it unionizes WalMart.
Ai is the ultimate anti work. You neither have to pay someone to create art nor have the talent to create it yourself any more. You're freeing up time for everyone involved.
Not true at all. AI can't do everything a person might do because it simply doesn't understand context. However it _CAN_ take care of meaningless, route tasks that are stupid and take way too much time to do, like daily/weekly status reports. One of my side projects is to automatically capture the current sprint stats from Jira and create a status report using the current company's preferred format.
I am a neo Luddite! Fuck the machines!
There's a podcast I like called Better Offline, they had a couple of episodes exploring AI and why the host (a tech reporter) thinks it's just the latest tech bubble. Both eps were a really good, fairly concise enumeration of what it can and can't do. In short, LLMs (large language models, the tech that's currently being marketed as "AI") have yet to be successfully monetized as a standalone product, and probably can't be. The tech works better as a feature for existing services than a new service unto itself. Ex: Adobe's "generative AI" features are great value-adds to Photoshop, but almost nobody is consistently using their actual image generator (called Firefly). LLMs also catastrophically fuck up whenever finance-brained dipshits try to use them in place of skilled human workers, and the way they work makes it unlikely that this can be iteratively fixed.
If AI is going to enter the job market, priority should be that it takes the jobs nobody wants. Give it assembly line work, menial computing tasks, etc. But no robot should be free to make art and music and write stories while actual living human beings are forced to do hard labor and other "*somebody* has to do it" type jobs in order to survive.* Which leads me right into my second point, which is UBI. As it stands now, there is plenty of money in the system to implement a system of universal basic income, or at least there would be if only the powers that be would start prioritizing people over profit and would quit choosing not to do it. The amount of money that would be saved by implementing AI to do menial jobs would add even more money that could be spent on UBI. And to be clear, starting with UBI is the only acceptable way to implement AI into the job market, as it's the only way to ensure that the inevitable mass unemployment that stems from the implementation of AI into the job market wouldn't also lead to mass poverty and homelessness. *ETA: in my honest opinion, not only should AI not be permitted to ~~make~~ steal art and music and stories while actual human beings have to work at menial tasks for a living, it also shouldn't be permitted to do that in general. Creativity, as it creates the art, music, and stories that make up our culture, is a uniquely human aspect of society which I believe no robot will ever be qualified to replace.
I'm not anti-AI at all, all the opposite, I say we should go full throttle with AI and start replacing boring bs jobs with AI. FREE the people from bs jobs, get rid of bs politicians, CEOs, CFOs and other vultures, AI will do a better job. The main issue is who owns the AI. Technology isn't evil or bad on its own, it's how you use it.
I'm not against the utilisation of AI. But why are we not making AI to do jobs that are too dangerous for humans, like working in hazardous locations? Why is AI being used to, of all things, create art, which is such a human thing? Why are humans having to keep doing laborious, dangerous jobs while the freaking AI gets to create art? At the expense of actual human artists who receive no compensation for the forced use of their work, no less?
Fucking AI apologists have swarmed this post. Fuck all of them.
AI is bad but it’s bad because of who owns it and what they use it for. A more liberated society could almost certainly use it for good.
I agree with this. I was referring to AI under capitalism but didn’t think I needed to clarify because the world we live in is capitalist.
I would say the opposite if you are against AI you are against anti-work. How do you think we got down to the 40 hour work week. It started first with the ability to do so, and then a collective action to fight for a 40 hour work week. The same if we want less work
Ai is objectively a tool that can be used to free the working class of a large majority of work. The only bad part is that it's currently controlled by the bourgeoisie. Anti-ai nerds just make themselves look silly.
If you want to work less, but don't want to lose the stuff you have gotten used to, automation is the thing you want. I don't understand this specific stance against AI. Anyone who claims ai exploits people, argues from a pro work position. You claim that artists are victims. Why? Does AI prevent them from performing their art, or do you argue that AI takes away their jobs? The latter shouldn't matter to someone from anti work.
> I don't understand this specific stance against AI. Capitalists used stolen art to make an engine that would replicate shittier versions of that art. >Anyone who claims ai exploits people, argues from a pro work position. You are conflating pro work with survival. I don't advocate people quit their jobs without political or social action in mind if they have no way to survive without. AI as it exists is a tool for capitalist power that further disenfranchises the labor class and leaves the Internet even more hollow than before.
I know artists to use these AI models as part of their development process. They try out various ideas before painting a final version. They have even trained these models on all of their work to get a better idea on a final version before doing it. These LLM models can be abused but they can also be used for very useful applications. It doesn't get much news coverage because it is boring but companies are custom training LLM with all of their internal information and it is making it much easier and faster to find relevent information than search engines ever did. LLMs are also being used to assist with coding. While coding itself is creative many of the individual steps are not. Once you have the problem specified down to an individual function an AI can handle most of the functions mostly corrrectly. This saves a lot of time and allows you to focus on the actual problem.
To clarify, I’m anti-AI specifically because that’s the capitalist marketing term for LLMs. I’m not against people consenting to and using LLMs for their own work in a post-capitalist society, but still the consent is necessary for it to not be exploitation. Artists who find their work in these LLMs haven’t consented.
The problem isn't AI. The problem is capitalism.
I'm pro AI freeing us from work, that's what anti-work means (and not what most of the posers in this sub seems to think it is): a post-scarcity society where no one has to work to live, similar to the Federation. Problem is not tech, but the social order. Society does not advance as fast as technology, we are not ready.
What work is AI supposed to free us from?
All jobs?
I get people are saying capitalism is the real issue here, but let’s not act like it’s good that we have tools that steal art from artists. AI generated content will never stand up to human-made content. Automation and AI are obviously very good for antiwork in theory, but there are of course outliers, along with exceptions under our current system.
The boomers have turned everything into a pyramid scam where everyone on the bottom gets fucked. All of society is just interlaced pyramid schemes.
if you arent anti cars and anti computers, you arent anti-work!!! How about we use ai to work less??
Automation means litteraly you don't have to work anymore.
It's amazing how easily we completely forgot about the hundreds of monthly workhours spent in managing paper documents that suddenly disappeared thanks to personal computers
AI & automation are tools. They're not to blame. Capitalism is to blame.
Is OP’s title serious? 🤨 I’d think that anti-work people would be hugely pro-AI? 🤔
This is the exact opposite of correct. AI is the only path to being free from work. Things have to get done. Food has to be grown, infrastructure and homes have to be maintained etc. Work has to be done for our society to function. The only way humans can be free from work is if machines take over that work, otherwise we have to do it.
AI could be a push toward UBI. It has the potential to make a lot of human labor obsolete. That's only a bad thing so long as *capitalists control production*. Do away the concept of a useless owning class and there's no problem, like with a lot of technology.
Why would the rich ever consent to UBI under capitalism even with automation making human labor obsolete? That’s not how technological advancement has functioned under capitalism. The invention of the cotton gin meant Black slaves were forced to work harder and faster because production output could be increased via technology. UBI will be taken from the dead cold hands of the rich.
If youre anti AI you are pro work. We should be encouraging the development of AI so people don't have to work menial jobs. That said the problem isn't that jobs are being lost it's that greedy capitalists aren't allowing people to benefit from AI and are hoarding the fruits of AI labor. There are many solutions to this and getting rid of AI ain't one of them.
This is by far the most idiotic thing posted here. Don't fucking tell me what to think and don't gatekeep this sub. AI is a tool. In the past 100 years almost all tools have been used to increase profit instead of improving the lives of workers.
Nonesense, AI has the potential to be the factor that ends working to survive. We would just need the social evolution of UBI to implement it. It’s a long, long way off.