think I forgot this one
I’m still waiting for even one argument for the usefulness of AI image generation that isn’t fucked up. Just one.
Grok seems so support nudity and deepfakes too according to some news articles I’ve seen because of course nothing screams more free speech than plastering the face of your favorite actor or political opponent into a porn scene, so now let’s see how long it takes the first bluecheck fucker to try and create CSAM with it, because I suppose that’ll be the point when it gets too hot even for Elon.
It’s pretty great for DnD. A lot of people have trouble imagining things in full detail from a text or spoken description, so being able to generate images of the scene, characters, objects etc is super fun and adds a lot of richness to the experience.
This is the best use I’ve found for it as well. Especially if I want to quickly create a unique token for an NPC.
Generally speaking I’ll commission actual artists for pictures of PCs, but for a named NPC sorcerer who’s just going to be in a handful of scenes? AI has been great.
It’s also good for concepting an idea before commissioning a real artist.
You trust modern reddit posts?
it’s like you’re trying to convince me to bully you
just fucking stop
as someone who only draws as a hobbyist, but who has taken commissions before, i think it would be very annoying to have a prospective client go “okay so here’s what i want you to draw” and then send over ai-generated stuff. if only because i know said client is setting their expectations for the hyper-processed, over-tuned look of the machine instead of what i actually draw
Would you rather have a dozen back and forth interactions?
Besides, this is something I’ve heard from other artists, so it’s very much a matter opinion.
The main opposition to ai images by artists is that it steals art from artists to make plagiarized versions, thereby taking away from paid work from those artists. If in the end, an artist is still being paid, what’s the difference between a commissioner handing a pile of reference sheets? Annoying, sure, but not immoral.
Would you rather have a dozen back and forth interactions?
these aren’t the only two possibilities. i’ve had some interactions where i got handed one ref sheet and a sentence description and the recipient was happy with the first sketch. i’ve had some where i got several pieces of references from different artists alongside paragraphs of descriptions, and there were still several dozen attempts. tossing in ai art just increases the volume, not the quality, of the interaction
Besides, this is something I’ve heard from other artists, so it’s very much a matter opinion.
i have interacted with hundreds of artists, and i have yet to meet an artist that does not, to at least some degree, have some kind of negative opinion on ai art, except those for whom image-generation models were their primary (or more commonly, only) tool for making art. so if there is such a group of artists that would be happy to be presented with ai art and asked to “make it like this”, i have yet to find them
Annoying, sure, but not immoral.
annoying me is immoral actually
have some kind of negative opinion on ai art,
An opinion is still an opinion no matter how widely held it is.
Also, I like how I’ve made a minor carve out for ai images as a tool with limited use, yet I still refuse to call it art. And then we have people who are attacking any use of ai images that are willing to call it “AI Art”…
annoying me is immoral actually
I believe that you believe that.
I feel like generative AI is an indicator of a broader pattern of innovation in stagnation (shower thoughts here, I’m not bringing sources to this game).
I was just a little while ago wondering if there is an argument to be made that the innovations of the post-war period were far more radically and beneficially transformative to most people. Stuff like accessible dishwashers, home tools, better home refrigeration etc. I feel like now tech is just here to make things worse. I can’t think of any upcoming or recent home tech product that I’m remotely excited about.
I think there’s definitely something to be said for the exhaustion of low-hanging fruit. Most of those big consumer innovations were either the application of novel physics or chemistry (refrigerants, synthetics, plastics, microwaves, etc) combined with automating very labor-intensive but relatively simple tasks (dish washing, laundry, manual screwdriving, etc). The digital age added some very powerful logic to that toolset, but still remains primarily limited to the kinds of activities and processes that can be defined algorithmically. The ingenuity of software developers along with the introduction of new tools and peripheral capabilities (printers, networks, sensors) have shown that the kind of problems that can be defined algorithmically is a much larger set than you would first think, but it’s still limited.
Adding on to this, it’s worth noting the degree to which defining problems algorithmically requires altering the parameters of that problem. For example, compare shopping at a store with using a vending machine. The vending machine dramatically changes the scope of the activity by limiting the variety of items you can get, only allowing one item per transaction, preventing you from examining the goods before purchasing, and so on. The high-level process is the same; I move from having no soda and some dollars to one soda and less dollars. But the changes that are made to ensure the procedure can be mechanized have some significant social tradeoffs. Each transaction has less friction, but also less potential. These consequences are even more pronounced if your point of comparison is an old-school sofa fountain where “hanging out waiting for the soda jerk and drinking together” is largely the whole point and while that activity requires more from you it also gives more opportunities to interact with and meet people and to see friends outside of work or school. Even if you don’t want to spend the time or be social (or even like me get severe social anxiety sometimes!) this still leads to a world where there are more and larger blocks of time that you can’t be expected to trade away to your job or other obligations. Your boss is likely to fire you for being late to work, unless that tardiness comes from the ferry you and your coworkers rely on being late. Because it’s inevitable friction in a necessary part of working (can’t work if you can’t get to work) and because it can’t be put entirely on the individual (even if you do want to blame the employee for taking the "wrong* boat so you really want to fire the whole team?) the system is basically forced to give you more grace than it otherwise would want to.
This is another way to frame the problems with more recent “innovations” - while social media and the gig economy both arguably empower individual consumers and producers of both cultural output and of services like taxis, they do so in ways that fundamentally change the relationship and individualize the connections between consumers, producers, and the system that they interact through. And because nobody has as direct a connection to the owners and operators of that system, they have more power to increase their profits at the expense of everyone who actually has to use the system to function.
There’s definitely something to this narrowing of opportunities idea. To frame it in a real bare bones way, it’s people that frame the world in simplistic terms and then assume that their framing is the complete picture (because they’re super clever of course). Then if they try to address the problem with a “solution”, they simply address their abstraction of it and if successful in the market, actually make the abstraction the dominant form of it. However all the things they disregarded are either lost, or still there and undermining their solution.
It’s like taking a 3D problem, only seeing in 2D, implementing a 2D solution and then being surprised that it doesn’t seem to do what it should, or being confused by all these unexpected effects that are coming from the 3rd dimension.
Your comment about giving more grace also reminds me of work out there from legal scholars who argued that algorithmically implemented law doesn’t work because the law itself is designed to have a degree of interpretation and slack to it that rarely translates well to an “if x then y” model.
I’ve thought about a similar idea before in the more minor context of stuff like note-taking apps – when you’re taking notes in a paper notebook, you can take notes in whatever format you want, you can add little pictures or diagrams or whatever, arranged however you want. Heck, you can write sheet music notation. When you’re taking notes in an app, you can basically just write paragraphs of text, or bullet points, and maybe add pictures in some limited predefined locations if you’re lucky.
Obviously you get some advantages in exchange for the restrictive format (you can sync/back up things to the internet! you can search through your notes! etc) but it’s by no means a strict upgrade, it’s more of a tradeoff with advantages and disadvantages. I think we tend to frame technological solutions like this as though they were strict upgrades, and often we aren’t so willing to look at what is being lost in the tradeoff.
That was exactly what Evernote promised to be, and it was to a point. Then it became about the money.
But yes, the book works everywhere (almost) doesn’t require a power source and in 150 years it’s components will not have degraded and it’s contents still readable. Unlike your iPad.
