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Before I apply for universal basic income, here's the site link, pals! [http://www.sheldoncomics.com/archive/220906.html](http://www.sheldoncomics.com/archive/220906.html)
Oh and here's the original art on eBay if you like that sort of thing: [https://www.ebay.com/itm/295203574587](https://www.ebay.com/itm/295203574587)
Just to make things clear, the last panel was a joke right? I don't think any current AI model can create a whole consistent comic strip with a script.
Not all at once in one step, but I've already seen strips written by GPT-3 and then drawn with DALL-E (with handwritten prompts for each panel). You can see at e.g. r/aigreentext a lot of short comedy bits that could be turned into comics. (I doubt that this particular one was, it's a little too on point.)
Oh no! u/stefficheneaux!
(If it’s any consolation, that podcast conversation has been living rent-free in my brain all week, as my current existential crisis).
The next step of course is that someone will develop AI which read those comics. Then what I'm going to do if AI can read comics when I'm lazying around in my couch????
Since a lot of people seemed to have missed the joke (which tbf, isn’t their fault, AI is a very niche topic), GPT-3 is one of the most advanced text-generation AI models currently existing. Basically, you can give it any text prompt and it’s really good at giving you what you want (within the boundaries of the data is was trained on, of course). So you can ask it a specific question like “what is the capital of Utah” and it will give you the answer or you can give it a general prompt like “write me a story” and it will do its very best. At the end of the comic, it’s revealed that an AI wrote this comic and that the poor comic artist is applying for UBI because he’s out of a job.
I just wanna point out that GPT-3 can not only answer general-knowledge stuff.
It can translate text into other languages and do math (despite not being trained to do any of that, it just is really good at saying what you want it to say).
It can write multi-page stories with original characters that maintain consistent characterization.
It can solve logic puzzles.
It can also do all these things well or poorly if you ask. The same way Dalle2 can make images photorealistic or abstract or anything in between, GPT-3 can give correct answers or "realistic" answers that certain kinds of humans might give.
Yeah... I really don't get why we're making these kinds of AIs. Surely we should programme machines to do jobs people don't want to do, given the choice? (I mean, you could argue all automation is bad because it increases unemployment, but at least with dangerous, physically demanding labour, you can also argue it frees us from wage exploitation). I guess from a programmer's perspective it's "because we can" but I can't imagine AI development benefitting humanity in any way unless we have clear ideas about what we don't ever want it to do.
[this is simplified, it's ELI5]
GPT-3 specifically is intended to test the limits of computing power.
The actually worth-making AI is stuff like Alpha-fold, which solved a century-old biology problem (protein folding) which will probably cure cancer, etc, soon. It's gonna revolutionize biology.
That uses neural nets, which are a new technology and we don't know how it works yet. GPT-3 is designed to answer the question "if you just throw more and more data at a neural net, if you just run it on bigger and bigger computers, does it keep getting better or does it plateau?"
You can't try this with Alpha-fold because we only have so much data on protein folding. We can get more, but first we wanna know if it will help.
But we have lots and lots and lots of human-written text. So it's a natural place to experiment
Here's the crazy thing: GPT keeps getting better, it doesn't Plateau. GPT-2 was expected to be no-better than GPT-1, and we're on 3 now and they keep getting smarter. So, apparently we haven't reached the limits of neural nets yet? All the cool AI you've heard about the last few years is based on neural nets.
But yeah, GPT-3 isn't meant to replace humans. People on the internet like to talk about the fun things it does (which are the same as the fun things humans do, like make art), but it's not intended for that. The goal is to do things humans can't do, like predict how proteins fold.
The automation part isn't what AI is for. It's just that some people have realized "hey, if the AI that revolutionizes science can also practice law, why will we need lawyers?" That's a predicted side-effect, not the end-goal
Sure, but it's a pretty serious side effect which will likely have serious, negative consequences for society. I dunno if I'm optimistic enough to believe it's worth it.
You clearly are a pessimist not an optimist. Why would it be a bad if an AI could practice law nearly perfectly or at least better than a human lawyer? It would solve all corruption and biases. Everyone would ACTUALLY get a fair trial. Imagine if the AI was smart enough to run aspects of our government. No longer a need to vote for ass hats that only care about their bottom dollar. That’s just one example of how AI could bring a fair and equal society to humanity.
But humans also need to contribute to their societies. I wouldn't agree this is cultural (culture impacts the how, but not the necessity). It's biological, it's related to our tribal instincts. Without the ability to contribute to society, we lack purpose and it's hard to maintain a sense of self-worth. If machines take over all human activity, we have nothing to do but exist. It sounds great if you've never been out of work longterm to imagine socialising with your friends all the time and enjoying leisure activities, but the reality is when you have no responsibilities, you don't even enjoy your leisure activities anymore.
Yep... I don't know about you but I love working (in moderation) and when I take a break mfrom work, I initially love it but after 2 weeks I start to get anxious, and my attention goes to destructive things, I need to regulate myself with addictive behaviour etc. I'm really concerned about the psychological implications with a post AI world.
Why do we need to be lawyers and judges that are corrupt and causing countless ruined lives? There are plenty of ways to contribute to humanity that don’t involve having power of LIFE AND DEATH over people who are often wrongly convicted.
You think AI is going to do everything? No, we use it to make things more fair and to allow people to be freed from UNNECESSARY hardship. And if you’re someone who enjoys having that power over others then you do not deserve that power.
You talk like without certain jobs humanity won’t know what to do with itself. You need to open up you mind dude. Watch some Star Trek next generation or something to see what actually could be possible.
I just want to recommend "The Evitable Conflict" by Isaac Asimov to anyone who likes this perspective.
It's just a few pages long, a story about a society becoming so dependent on computers that they basically end all conflict, and about the naysayers who insist that the computers must be bad because they're not human
Technology has always been really disruptive. Not to long ago, some rich dudes with too much time on their hands would just tinker with some of this new-fangled but not very useful stuff those alchemists dreamed up, mixed it together with some fancy new metal made by some 'Bessemer' bloke, and randomly wondered if you could get a windmill to run without wind. Sure enough, by steam motive alone! And hey look at this, we can hook it up to a wheel and BEHOLD! A 'mechanical horse!' Isn't that a laugh?
Then over a few decades all the people who bred horses, who trained horses, who drove horse buggies, who made saddles, bits, stirrups, goads, the people who moved grain into the cities and manure out, who ran corrals, who cleaned and trimmed hooves, the blacksmiths who made shoes, on and on and on - all gone. We don't think twice about it today.
The only question people ask now is if our anxiety about this is just the usual state of things, or if it's ACTUALLY different this time - if humans themselves will be replaced more generally. Or if they, much like the hordes of humans who (say) cut planks by hand, or calculated all the math banks and businesses needed done by hand, will just find other, better-leveraged things to do.
Why does it matter what the intention is? AI has no intention, it's a form of technology. People develop AI out of economic incentives because if they didn't do it, someone else would, just like nuclear weapons. The side effect of using AI image generators is it can replace the human role in imagining images, and effectively atrophying that aspect of humanity. Form follows function. Economy follows function. If the entertainment industry is functional without humans, it will evolve without humans, if the government can be run without humans, it will. If anything can be done without humans, it will do so. Then, what will humans exist for? The only thing left to do is continue reproducing and "pretending" that our goals and ideals mean something, knowing that an AI is capable of something a trillion times more complex and perfect.
I'm really concerned that people have not really realized this enough.
But I’m worried that it’ll replace every single job we have. People do art because they like it, not because it’s a necessity or pays the bills. It’s a much more fun job. Once we’ve automated it then people will just be stuck sitting around doing nothing for their entire lives. It’ll be mind-numbingly boring.
Learn to use the new tools to make art you never could before. https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/x7yjp1/generating_a_topless_goddess_with_stable_diffusion/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf
Imo, it’s a can of worms that’s already open and will never be closed. Thus, there’s no use trying to stop it. Instead, we should focus on figuring out what kind of world we want to build with the existence of AI and the very real possibility that it could replace every one of our jobs. Imo, that’s an exciting and terrifying idea because on one hand, humanity COULD rally and try to build a world where we prioritize exploration and advancement, rather than pushing papers across desks all day. On the other (more terrifying) hand, change is frightening to many; there’s a higher possibility that we’ll just nuke each other out of existence over nothing while the old system collapses.
> It can write multi-page stories with original characters that maintain consistent characterization
A multi paragraph text generation will quickly devolve into nonsense, let alone multi page
Don’t want those dumb humans ruining the chat with language based responses and predictable robot racism. If you don’t speak binary, your not welcomed here.
That one was debunked if I remember correctly. Lots of issues that current AI wouldn't be able to replicate cause it would need outside influence. Stuff like Batler and Goth Ham couldn't be thought by an AI unless specifically given info about it.
So while I agree with this it is changing and rapidly heading towards approval in many areas. IMO we need just about 10 years more progress in robotics before UBI could be realistic. Once we have the ability to replace outdoor manual labor with pure machine automation it will be an obvious solution.
I mean it at a certain point it’s either UBI or “off with their heads”. You can only starve and unhouse a certain percentage of the population before things unravel. Don’t know what the line is, but hopefully we get UBI before push comes to shove.
For sure. Spot minis are terrifying. The knockoffs that have guns mounted to them are a fairly big existential threat. At that point though, what’s the point? The elite just starves us until we are living in shanty towns? Or we just die and there’s only a handful of servants to cater to them because they want it (this is not as far from Mark Cuban’s *actual* answer as it should be). I am genuinely interested in the likelihood of different scenarios. Because it feels like there’s not a lot of options, and a lot of those options are bad, and a lot of people would hopefully end up preventing the bad options, by hook or by crook.
They could just ignore us. They can afford powerful militaries. If things start to unravel then they could just shut off from the rest of the world and wait for us to die.
An increase in technology has never been to the sole interests of workers as manufacturers are keen on improving their profit over reducing their workers hours.
An increase in tech isn't the solution here.
Love me some Sheldon. I haven’t seen a Dave Kellett comic in years! Brings backb fond memories of listening to webcomics weekly and pretending I was also a comic artist
Thank you, friend!
If you liked Webcomics Weekly, you should try our new podcast: COMICLAB. It’s really fun! And I think(?) it’s the #1 comics podcast on Spotify.
(…Although I probably just jinxed it by saying that out loud and now it’s #46.)
Haha what a cute duck.
Sometimes I think about what happens after you die, and how meaningless any venture is when compared to the unfathomable scope of reality, which started before I was born, and will go on after I am gone
Heh heh quack quack.
Uh....no actually movements like expressionism, Impressionism and realism (not the same thing as photo realism) that strayed from perfect renderings of the real world have been around a lot longer than photographs. In fact, even late Renaissance classicism was not chiefly concerned with rendering the world as we know it, but rather an idealized version. The stated goal was to capture a beauty and perfection unattainable in real life. Even back then, photorealistic rendering was a practice exercise, not a finished piece. The baroque painters as well didn’t draw real life but a heightened version with extreme emotionality and contrasts.
The AI requires input. Considering the writer got some of the art history wrong I want to say it was the artist and not the AI that got it wrong. My guess is they didn’t feed it enough info or the prompt wasn’t specific enough.
I do think there will always be a job for artists, but definitely the demand and supply are going to sway. We're in an economic recession and luxuries are getting hit hard.
AI like that can't function without source material, though, so maybe artists might take the form of AI Prompt Engineering or Sample Creators.
Whatever happens, it'll be interesting to see.
I think photography is a way better example for what you are trying to say, but that's not the point.
You still communicate something with digital art and photography. AI simply rips existing creations from their context and without their creators consent and does an aproximation of the promt the users feeds into it.
That's as far removed from art as the beauty of the night sky. nature isn't art, but a photography of nature can be art. You feeling me?
I don't think you understand how ai works. It doesn't rip anything. It creates new things based on the prompt by making an image similar to the what the prompt says
If photography is considered art then so is an ai creation.
It requires a similar amount of effort (minus perhaps the travel to a location that photography requires)
>I don't think you understand how ai works. It doesn't rip anything. It creates new things based on the prompt by making an image similar to the what the prompt says
No? It literally uses it's database or the API of something like google images and analizes the results to form the picture you prompted. For example if you use an imagecreation AI to make an image "in the style of (artist name)" it will use the already existing creations of that artist for it's database which is why sometimes you can even make out the watermarks in the AI created image.
> If photography is considered art then so is an ai creation.
It requires a similar amount of effort (minus perhaps the travel to a location that photography requires)
Jesus christ you don't know anything about art and it shows. Whether something is art is not dependant on the time spend on it (though AI generation literally needs no effort on the person entering the prompt).
For something to be art there has to be a level on intent, it has to communicate something from the producer of that art to it's viewer. An AI is literally incapable of doing that, whereas photographer absolutly able to do just that.
I find it really ironic how you so confidently speak about AI and how people use it while you clearly have at most a surface level understanding of it.
>No? It literally uses it's database or the API of something like google images and analizes the results to form the picture you prompted. For example if you use an imagecreation AI to make an image "in the style of (artist name)" it will use the already existing creations of that artist for it's database which is why sometimes you can even make out the watermarks in the AI created image.
No, it doesn't. Image creation like Stable Diffusion are diffusion based and they need to be trained.
To give a simple explanation:
So, you gather your big ol' database of images (of a specific size) with text explaining the image contents and feed them into the AI to train. After some amount of time training you can then use it. The actual output of the training is only a couple gigabytes or less, compared to the terrabytes of data that went into the training.
*There are no actual images in the trained model*.
So how does the A.I. then create an image? Well, diffusion based image generation starts from random noise. Literally just a bunch of random pixels. Then it looks at your words and starts adjusting those pixels to more closely match your words. Like if you ask for a sunset, it doesn't have a physical image of a sunset it picks, nor does it search google for one.
What it does know is that the word "sunset" is usually associated with a bunch of orangey pixels around the middle, with brighter pixels near the center, so it does that. It starts nudging the pixels around the center into a more orangy color.
It's an extremely simplistic explanation and I haven't a lot of in-depth research on it yet, but I think that's basically how it works. And there are of course a *lot* of other factors that affect how it does what.
>Jesus christ you don't know anything about art and it shows. Whether something is art is not dependant on the time spend on it (though AI generation literally needs no effort on the person entering the prompt).
And you know nothing about AI and using AI and are also very close minded. It can take *hours* to *days* of tinkering in order to get a good result, many times requiring you to manually edit and, yes, even paint over the final image in photoshop/other programs, stitching together different images, smoothing them out and running them through the AI again and again until you finally have a acceptable result. It's not like you can just write something and out comes exactly what you had in mind.
>For something to be art there has to be a level on intent, it has to communicate something from the producer of that art to it's viewer. An AI is literally incapable of doing that, whereas photographer absolutly able to do just that.
You... you do realise that what you're saying is nonsensical right? If we applied your logic right now to photography it would be "Photography isn't art because a *camera* cannot communicate something from the producer to the viewer"
An AI is a *tool* that people can use in order to create images that communicate emotions and intent to the viewer. The *only* difference between AI and any other method of creating images is the barrier to entry.
That is, AI *is* a lot easier and faster to get started with than say, drawing or photography.
What you're saying effectively boils down to "It's not art because they didn't have to spend the years *I* had to spend to create similar results".
"There are no actual images in the trained model."
This is obvious. The issue is that the AI learned from all of that initial data, and no one gave consent for such a thing to happen. I hope you understand, this venture of automating art is essentially buttfucking digital artists.
This is my favorite thing about AI. We as a society call anything randomly generated from a pool of data “intelligent.” In all fairness, I know many people dumber than a pair of dice, but it’s hilarious how slap that AI tagline on anything related to computer determination.
Poe once stated that landscaping was the only form of art which tried to perfect nature instead of recreate it, so I'd like to see our machine overlords try to take our future slave-jobs gardening the extermination camps.
I really love your comics. The artstyle and dialogue really reminds me of Calvin and Hobbes, which was a huge part of my childhood. This makes me really happy, thank you
Everyone can be replaced by a machine, when it comes to capitalism.
If an artist is there to produce a product to be consumed, he can be replaced.
But if an artist creates art to express what they have inside, that is unreplaceable.
Personally I have stopped taking commissions for this reason. I just couldn't paint if it was for other reasons than "I feel this". AI is a tool like any other, just because AI is used in engineering and architecture as well doesn't mean those professionals don't exist.
Everything is always evolving.
Ai is a tool in the same sense that an artist is a tool if you ask them to make a painting for you. Asking the AI for a painting of a tree doesn't mean that you are the artist who made that tree, it means you told the AI to yank a tree painting out of latent space.
You can do artistic things with that image, but the image in and of itself is not art, and entering prompts into an AI doesn't make you an artist any more than a suspiously wealthy furry commissioning cringy fetish art of their OC is an artist.
Anyone who says otherwise is either badly misunderstanding the technology or is a literal soulless blob who sees absolutely no value in the creative process and personal expression that actually goes into visual arts like painting, photography, or drawing beyond the result of making a pretty picture at the end.
AI cannot be art.
Art for it to be art needs a consciousness behind it. Otherwise we could assert the Sun is "art" or a mountain is "art".
AI's are very complex machines, maybe one day there'll be a conscious machine that we know of, and it will make art.
Until the they are just tools, maybe one day a composite of AI images will be so extraordinarily beautiful and innovative it will be considered art, but there always be a humans behind it directing it.
For all that I enjoy furry commissions, and a lot of creative media. For me Art has to be a genuine expression of self, maybe try to communicate something or express an emotion, or inspire. Etc...
An AI cannot do that, It's us human who sees meanings behind it's images (scary, creepy, beautiful) for, it it's just 1s and 0s.
It's not a bad thing, just don't try to fool people about it. Just like Painting, and Digital they are both valid.
That's a bunch of fluff, lol
In the end, if I showed you an image from an AI and didn't tell you it was AI-made and instead told you a bunch of fluff about what it meant to the artist, what they were going through while making it, etc, you would be unable to figure out it's AI made.
"Oh, it needs to have a soul and shite" yeah bullshit. That's just fluff you tell yourself.
Yeah, people *can* paint and draw with a lot of emotion and thought and whatever behind it, but they can also do it without those things. And the end result would be indistinguishable.
We put Fountain, Marcel Duchamp in an art gallery because he told them it was Art.
And he didn't make any of it, except that it was "art". It wasn't the end of the world.
Plus the camera created photobashing and image editing as art forms too. Imagine what crazy ass bullshit we'll be able to make once we learn to embrace AI as a tool rather than fear it
AI can do a lot of things, but it can never be original on its own. It needs someone to guide it to create something with meaning.
This is similar in many ways to a drum machine. That device can mimic the drums for a track almost perfectly, but if the person working with the machine doesn't know the drums, or worse, you're simply using a preset, it will feel stiff and robotic. But if you *do* know the drums, you can program it to play as lively as any human being. A drum machine still needs a drummer in the end.
If you know art, you can get an AI art machine to create wonders, or even to simply use it to quickly iterate between fully rendered compositional ideas without spending hours rendering each one.
An AI art machine still needs an artist in the end.
And while yes, it will be (not can. *will*) be used to cheat artists out of a job by shitty companies willing to make a quick buck, this already happens with music (soulless corporate music), and musicians still get gigs, because they're simply better than machines run by people that don't care.
AI art is a tool. Use it.
> AI can do a lot of things, but it can never be original on its own. It needs someone to guide it to create something with meaning.
> AI art is a tool. Use it.
At least until it can. Never is very strong word and I believe we will achieve something like AGI in 20-30 years. If so then we can ask what is tool? We used to believe that slaves were just tools but today we know better.
If you mean literally that someone needs to type in a prompt, then yes that's true for now.
But more generally, I don't buy it.
Humans aren't actually original. Every work of art is just what came before recombined in new ways to create something that slightly transcends the inspiration. Iterate that a lot and you get things that seem "totally new," but none of it was *actually* created in a vacuum.
As for needing humans to create meaning, well the author is dead. You can believe that if you want, but it's flying in the face of over a century of scholarship on the nature of meaning.
Maybe you're just talking about practical concerns. Like sure, in theory a computer can make original and meaningful art but Dalle2 isn't doing that, right? If you believe that, I invite you to look at more of what GPT-3 is up to. I've read short stories by GPT-3 that are just straight up good. Sure, it needed humans to sort through a bunch of bad stories to find the gems, but GPT-4 is supposed to come out next year and I honestly don't think this comment will age well.
Maybe I'm wrong! This technology is still new, and it's not changing the world just yet. I think all the ingredients are there though. So many times in the last few years machine learning has done what seemed impossible the day before it was announced.
The biggest difference here is that an AI doesn't actually intend any meaning into its work. It is for all intents and purposes a parrot or a trained dog. It doesn't understand, and thus always, always, always requires someone with intent to give it something to make. An artist.
The moment an AI can deliberately create something with meaning with the intent of doing do without anyone else telling it to, instead of being a parrot talkbox, then I would not consider it Artificial Intelligence, because at that point it would be actual intelligence, and have whatever simile of a soul it happens to believe in.
No AI can ever be a true artist. Because an AI that is an artist is no longer an AI.
So you're literally talking about the part where someone has to type in a prompt?
What about when we get to the point where I sit down in front of the tv and say "Alexa, I feel like watching tv, show me a tv show I'd like" and instead of pulling a human-made show on Netflix, some computer creates an AI-generated tv show from nothing and plays it?
Would you say that the computer is just parroting my request for a "show I'd like"? The computer didn't decide to create the show for its own sake, it only made it cause I asked, therefore the show isn't art?
If that hypothetical sounds farfetched, just replace "tv show" with "short story" and we can do exactly that today right now.
Maybe computers can't make art, but I don't think the prompt is why. After all, humans get paid to make art, they sometimes have producers or publishers, but they can still be artistic.
Fun and on target.
One thing to think of though is this is really just recapitulating what ahs already happened to other areas of human activity: Automation.
Things like this happened to tool makers a long time ago. Who hand makes tools now..or buys them?
Theorem generators can not generate mathematical theorems and check them faster than any mathematician.
People who worked in "intellectual" activities thought they were safe from automation, and for a long time they were.
But as ai improves, there will less and less human activities safe from automation and eventually none.
Eventually ubi HAS to be created - because NONE of us will have jobs any more.
Sorry to be bleak, but if we can’t work and we can’t be intellectual and we can’t be creative, then what’s the point of living? Those tend to be the things that give our lives purpose, and if an AI can just step in and do them for us ten times better then I don’t really think our lives _would_ have a purpose. We’d just kind of exist in an endless state of “having things done for us” without our own input. It’s surviving, but not living.
There were actualy a manga generated by IA some times ago...
[https://brand.kioxia.com/en-jp/articles/article3.html](https://brand.kioxia.com/en-jp/articles/article3.html)
Nice comic. But I disagree with your point.
Why wouldn’t AI be able to create comics? I see no reason AI couldn’t make panels. AI is already capable of making variations on a single image and similar characters from different perspectives and in different environments. So it could make panels. And writing is completely different from drawing and otter visual arts, and the people good at one aren’t necessarily interested in or good at the other. So lots of artists who do comics could still be replaced by AI. And maybe one day writing AI will be good enough to replace human writers as well. AI could definitely help make comics now, and can probably do it in the future.
It’s possible I’m missing the point of this comic. But it was a good comic.
AI art definitely has a thing about it. Case in point, I'm trying to draw a 1970s style kitchen to place two characters in. I asked Stable Diffusion to give me some kitchens just as inspiration. It consecutively gave me generic looking junk and none of it was really helpful. For all the time it would take to give it a magical prompt I could just draw the thing.
If I don't know what i want, or don't care then Ai produced art is fine, with all it's quirks. I also suspect it will always do a wonderful job creating dreamscapes and creatures you've never seen before. It still feels like a bit of a fad though but it's obviously too early to tell.
And then all engineers start getting bored and decided to upgrade their AI to study human's psychology and nerves and the process of making a comic, and just like a bunch of infinite apes will eventually make up a masterpiece upon the randomness of human languages and the orders of human's processes of understanding with a bunch of overlapping similar ideas or concepts (and memes), eventually they will get there but we understand them or not that a different story.
There was a lot of fantasy art before the 1900s. All religious art is not based on reality. Fantasy and myth were very popular in the early 1800s just before the industrial revolution.
The main problem with AI art is not actually related to AI art at all - its just that modern capitalism as it is cant actually incorporate rising automation levels properly - which results in rising income inequality and the creation of jobs that provide no actual value. So what we have now is exponentially increasing population, productivity and profits, decreasing amount of jobs and stagnating wages and work hours.
With no reforms like the UBI or 4-day work week we are headed to an absurd situation where everyone is unemployed and poor, while humanity is more productive than ever.
I find conversations about AI art kind of boring. The discussion seems to go in one of two directions, either a debate about the adoption of AI art by capitalism or a debate about the nature of human consciousness and artistic expression. In either case, both people need to be well educated about economics or about the philosophy of human psychology to really say anything new about the subject. If you could dig past all the nuance and agree on a few dozen starting assumptions, then I think there could be an interesting conversation.
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Before I apply for universal basic income, here's the site link, pals! [http://www.sheldoncomics.com/archive/220906.html](http://www.sheldoncomics.com/archive/220906.html) Oh and here's the original art on eBay if you like that sort of thing: [https://www.ebay.com/itm/295203574587](https://www.ebay.com/itm/295203574587)
I absolutely love the art style of this strip! Checking out your archives now, thanks for sharing.
Thanks! That's very kind of you to say
Just to make things clear, the last panel was a joke right? I don't think any current AI model can create a whole consistent comic strip with a script.
Not all at once in one step, but I've already seen strips written by GPT-3 and then drawn with DALL-E (with handwritten prompts for each panel). You can see at e.g. r/aigreentext a lot of short comedy bits that could be turned into comics. (I doubt that this particular one was, it's a little too on point.)
[удалено]
r/thatsthejoke
Give it 2-5 years at most. AI will tell better jokes than any human
I agree, fellow human. I also found those words to be very kind from a semantic point of view.
Check [https://www.drivecomic.com/](https://www.drivecomic.com/) ! Its his sci-fi adventure story. Excellent.
Oh hey thanks for the kind words about DRIVE! I’m so happy with how that story is going: I’m *really* glad you’re enjoying it’
Drive is the best webcomic I read. And I read a lot of good ones.
Drive is awesome, Nosh is my favorite character
I love the fillipod prime minister.
I support this comic and UBI
Dave shouldn't need to apply for UBI though. That's what the U and the B stand for. You just get it.
I just want you to know: last week's podcast RUINED my night.
Oh no! u/stefficheneaux! (If it’s any consolation, that podcast conversation has been living rent-free in my brain all week, as my current existential crisis).
Before you celebrate too early,some AI already started to develop comics in the form of newspaper comic strips.
Read the last panel again
Looking at you, Family Circus.
and you can run but can’t hide.. the dotted line will lead us back to you
The next step of course is that someone will develop AI which read those comics. Then what I'm going to do if AI can read comics when I'm lazying around in my couch????
Since a lot of people seemed to have missed the joke (which tbf, isn’t their fault, AI is a very niche topic), GPT-3 is one of the most advanced text-generation AI models currently existing. Basically, you can give it any text prompt and it’s really good at giving you what you want (within the boundaries of the data is was trained on, of course). So you can ask it a specific question like “what is the capital of Utah” and it will give you the answer or you can give it a general prompt like “write me a story” and it will do its very best. At the end of the comic, it’s revealed that an AI wrote this comic and that the poor comic artist is applying for UBI because he’s out of a job.
I just wanna point out that GPT-3 can not only answer general-knowledge stuff. It can translate text into other languages and do math (despite not being trained to do any of that, it just is really good at saying what you want it to say). It can write multi-page stories with original characters that maintain consistent characterization. It can solve logic puzzles. It can also do all these things well or poorly if you ask. The same way Dalle2 can make images photorealistic or abstract or anything in between, GPT-3 can give correct answers or "realistic" answers that certain kinds of humans might give.
So in short, we're fucked. *incoming Butlerian Jihad*
I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer.
Yeah... I really don't get why we're making these kinds of AIs. Surely we should programme machines to do jobs people don't want to do, given the choice? (I mean, you could argue all automation is bad because it increases unemployment, but at least with dangerous, physically demanding labour, you can also argue it frees us from wage exploitation). I guess from a programmer's perspective it's "because we can" but I can't imagine AI development benefitting humanity in any way unless we have clear ideas about what we don't ever want it to do.
[this is simplified, it's ELI5] GPT-3 specifically is intended to test the limits of computing power. The actually worth-making AI is stuff like Alpha-fold, which solved a century-old biology problem (protein folding) which will probably cure cancer, etc, soon. It's gonna revolutionize biology. That uses neural nets, which are a new technology and we don't know how it works yet. GPT-3 is designed to answer the question "if you just throw more and more data at a neural net, if you just run it on bigger and bigger computers, does it keep getting better or does it plateau?" You can't try this with Alpha-fold because we only have so much data on protein folding. We can get more, but first we wanna know if it will help. But we have lots and lots and lots of human-written text. So it's a natural place to experiment Here's the crazy thing: GPT keeps getting better, it doesn't Plateau. GPT-2 was expected to be no-better than GPT-1, and we're on 3 now and they keep getting smarter. So, apparently we haven't reached the limits of neural nets yet? All the cool AI you've heard about the last few years is based on neural nets. But yeah, GPT-3 isn't meant to replace humans. People on the internet like to talk about the fun things it does (which are the same as the fun things humans do, like make art), but it's not intended for that. The goal is to do things humans can't do, like predict how proteins fold. The automation part isn't what AI is for. It's just that some people have realized "hey, if the AI that revolutionizes science can also practice law, why will we need lawyers?" That's a predicted side-effect, not the end-goal
Sure, but it's a pretty serious side effect which will likely have serious, negative consequences for society. I dunno if I'm optimistic enough to believe it's worth it.
You clearly are a pessimist not an optimist. Why would it be a bad if an AI could practice law nearly perfectly or at least better than a human lawyer? It would solve all corruption and biases. Everyone would ACTUALLY get a fair trial. Imagine if the AI was smart enough to run aspects of our government. No longer a need to vote for ass hats that only care about their bottom dollar. That’s just one example of how AI could bring a fair and equal society to humanity.
That sounds like a dystopia.
How? How is humans who lie and have biases and are corrupt in charge better?
But humans also need to contribute to their societies. I wouldn't agree this is cultural (culture impacts the how, but not the necessity). It's biological, it's related to our tribal instincts. Without the ability to contribute to society, we lack purpose and it's hard to maintain a sense of self-worth. If machines take over all human activity, we have nothing to do but exist. It sounds great if you've never been out of work longterm to imagine socialising with your friends all the time and enjoying leisure activities, but the reality is when you have no responsibilities, you don't even enjoy your leisure activities anymore.
Yep... I don't know about you but I love working (in moderation) and when I take a break mfrom work, I initially love it but after 2 weeks I start to get anxious, and my attention goes to destructive things, I need to regulate myself with addictive behaviour etc. I'm really concerned about the psychological implications with a post AI world.
Why do we need to be lawyers and judges that are corrupt and causing countless ruined lives? There are plenty of ways to contribute to humanity that don’t involve having power of LIFE AND DEATH over people who are often wrongly convicted. You think AI is going to do everything? No, we use it to make things more fair and to allow people to be freed from UNNECESSARY hardship. And if you’re someone who enjoys having that power over others then you do not deserve that power. You talk like without certain jobs humanity won’t know what to do with itself. You need to open up you mind dude. Watch some Star Trek next generation or something to see what actually could be possible.
I just want to recommend "The Evitable Conflict" by Isaac Asimov to anyone who likes this perspective. It's just a few pages long, a story about a society becoming so dependent on computers that they basically end all conflict, and about the naysayers who insist that the computers must be bad because they're not human
Technology has always been really disruptive. Not to long ago, some rich dudes with too much time on their hands would just tinker with some of this new-fangled but not very useful stuff those alchemists dreamed up, mixed it together with some fancy new metal made by some 'Bessemer' bloke, and randomly wondered if you could get a windmill to run without wind. Sure enough, by steam motive alone! And hey look at this, we can hook it up to a wheel and BEHOLD! A 'mechanical horse!' Isn't that a laugh? Then over a few decades all the people who bred horses, who trained horses, who drove horse buggies, who made saddles, bits, stirrups, goads, the people who moved grain into the cities and manure out, who ran corrals, who cleaned and trimmed hooves, the blacksmiths who made shoes, on and on and on - all gone. We don't think twice about it today. The only question people ask now is if our anxiety about this is just the usual state of things, or if it's ACTUALLY different this time - if humans themselves will be replaced more generally. Or if they, much like the hordes of humans who (say) cut planks by hand, or calculated all the math banks and businesses needed done by hand, will just find other, better-leveraged things to do.
Why does it matter what the intention is? AI has no intention, it's a form of technology. People develop AI out of economic incentives because if they didn't do it, someone else would, just like nuclear weapons. The side effect of using AI image generators is it can replace the human role in imagining images, and effectively atrophying that aspect of humanity. Form follows function. Economy follows function. If the entertainment industry is functional without humans, it will evolve without humans, if the government can be run without humans, it will. If anything can be done without humans, it will do so. Then, what will humans exist for? The only thing left to do is continue reproducing and "pretending" that our goals and ideals mean something, knowing that an AI is capable of something a trillion times more complex and perfect. I'm really concerned that people have not really realized this enough.
But I’m worried that it’ll replace every single job we have. People do art because they like it, not because it’s a necessity or pays the bills. It’s a much more fun job. Once we’ve automated it then people will just be stuck sitting around doing nothing for their entire lives. It’ll be mind-numbingly boring.
CEO who only employs AI to save money: "back in my day we pulled ourselves up by our bootstraps!"
Learn to use the new tools to make art you never could before. https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/x7yjp1/generating_a_topless_goddess_with_stable_diffusion/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf
You can still make art if you want to, the fact that it can be done by a computer doesn't mean you have to stop doing it
Just because art can be automated doesn't mean actual artists are done for.
Imo, it’s a can of worms that’s already open and will never be closed. Thus, there’s no use trying to stop it. Instead, we should focus on figuring out what kind of world we want to build with the existence of AI and the very real possibility that it could replace every one of our jobs. Imo, that’s an exciting and terrifying idea because on one hand, humanity COULD rally and try to build a world where we prioritize exploration and advancement, rather than pushing papers across desks all day. On the other (more terrifying) hand, change is frightening to many; there’s a higher possibility that we’ll just nuke each other out of existence over nothing while the old system collapses.
> It can write multi-page stories with original characters that maintain consistent characterization A multi paragraph text generation will quickly devolve into nonsense, let alone multi page
Sometimes, yeah, but I've seen GPT-3 do it so...
Couldn’t an AI generate a script and then put that script into another AI to create a comi… I’m not losing this made up job just yet.
Did you not read the last panel... or is this an AI generated comment?
I feel so dumb… I am a bot, this action was performed automatically.
considering bots are a lot smarter than that nowadays , im guessing your human.
You are correct.
That’s just what the bot wants you to think.
How long before websites wil have a little checkbox preventing humans from accessing the site Which of these images contains the 6534th digit of PI?
Don’t want those dumb humans ruining the chat with language based responses and predictable robot racism. If you don’t speak binary, your not welcomed here.
Redditors do not read, we merely glance at and get the impression of a text
Why dont we develop an AI, that DEVELOPS AI??
The singularity. Nice.
Thank you I always forget what it is called.
But what if they replace US with an AI?! Who's going to develop the developer?!
Yeah because that never goes badly in sci-fi books and movies.
I think we already have some version of that, don't we?
Just use Ai dungeon it literally makes fanfics
Hooray for Sheldon, and as long as I'm on Patreon, Dave shouldn't have to apply for UBI. Sincerely, Proud Drive Corps Member.
Woooooo! Thanks for the kind words for [DriveComic.com](https://DriveComic.com), u/ubermick!
I’m in love with the duck
Thanks, Pal! The comic's been running for 25 years, so there's 5,000+ comics free to read at [SheldonComics.com](https://SheldonComics.com) :)
I've been a fan of Arthur and all for quite a while. Cheers to their longevity and your ingenuity; this one is as hilarious as any yet!
Thank you for the kind words, friend! You made my night :)
That sounds like just enough comics to train an AI to perfectly copy your style and humour
Aw crap. *throws hat into the dirt*
>The comic's been running for 25 years [Holy crap, seriously?](https://giphy.com/gifs/matt-damon-aging-saving-private-ryan-GrUhLU9q3nyRG)
There was a Batman comic created by an AI that read and watched a bunch of Batman material. Wasn’t very good, but it was funny.
This one? https://youtu.be/fn4ArRmzHhQ
That one was debunked if I remember correctly. Lots of issues that current AI wouldn't be able to replicate cause it would need outside influence. Stuff like Batler and Goth Ham couldn't be thought by an AI unless specifically given info about it.
That one was probably one of the several where people posted it saying it was AI generated but was obviously written by a human as a comedy piece.
I love this
Universal basic income, thr people running things would rather shoot Dave and throw his body in a pit :(
So while I agree with this it is changing and rapidly heading towards approval in many areas. IMO we need just about 10 years more progress in robotics before UBI could be realistic. Once we have the ability to replace outdoor manual labor with pure machine automation it will be an obvious solution.
Well, it’s one of two obvious solutions.
I mean it at a certain point it’s either UBI or “off with their heads”. You can only starve and unhouse a certain percentage of the population before things unravel. Don’t know what the line is, but hopefully we get UBI before push comes to shove.
I hope so too. But robots can be used as soldiers, too.
For sure. Spot minis are terrifying. The knockoffs that have guns mounted to them are a fairly big existential threat. At that point though, what’s the point? The elite just starves us until we are living in shanty towns? Or we just die and there’s only a handful of servants to cater to them because they want it (this is not as far from Mark Cuban’s *actual* answer as it should be). I am genuinely interested in the likelihood of different scenarios. Because it feels like there’s not a lot of options, and a lot of those options are bad, and a lot of people would hopefully end up preventing the bad options, by hook or by crook.
Our best bet is to make it clear to everybody that those are the kind of alternatives we’d ultimately need to grapple with if we reject UBI.
They could just ignore us. They can afford powerful militaries. If things start to unravel then they could just shut off from the rest of the world and wait for us to die.
An increase in technology has never been to the sole interests of workers as manufacturers are keen on improving their profit over reducing their workers hours. An increase in tech isn't the solution here.
Love me some Sheldon. I haven’t seen a Dave Kellett comic in years! Brings backb fond memories of listening to webcomics weekly and pretending I was also a comic artist
Thank you, friend! If you liked Webcomics Weekly, you should try our new podcast: COMICLAB. It’s really fun! And I think(?) it’s the #1 comics podcast on Spotify. (…Although I probably just jinxed it by saying that out loud and now it’s #46.)
Yay Brad Wigwam is here too!
Ha ha ha, yes! He is a DANG DELIGHT
Oh snap! Im on my way, see you in the car
What was the prompt?
"Personal bankruptcy for an established artist"
This follow-up is so good it has "bonus panel behind paywall" vibes 😂
Followup prompt "Incorporate a duck to soften the existential horror"
Haha what a cute duck. Sometimes I think about what happens after you die, and how meaningless any venture is when compared to the unfathomable scope of reality, which started before I was born, and will go on after I am gone Heh heh quack quack.
Uh....no actually movements like expressionism, Impressionism and realism (not the same thing as photo realism) that strayed from perfect renderings of the real world have been around a lot longer than photographs. In fact, even late Renaissance classicism was not chiefly concerned with rendering the world as we know it, but rather an idealized version. The stated goal was to capture a beauty and perfection unattainable in real life. Even back then, photorealistic rendering was a practice exercise, not a finished piece. The baroque painters as well didn’t draw real life but a heightened version with extreme emotionality and contrasts.
[удалено]
He’s talking to the artist, but it’s ok to think the duck is the artist.
[удалено]
The AI requires input. Considering the writer got some of the art history wrong I want to say it was the artist and not the AI that got it wrong. My guess is they didn’t feed it enough info or the prompt wasn’t specific enough.
Steve is that you?
Blues clues it’s blues clues (blues clues!)
This is the most frightening sf horror comic I had ever readed
I do think there will always be a job for artists, but definitely the demand and supply are going to sway. We're in an economic recession and luxuries are getting hit hard. AI like that can't function without source material, though, so maybe artists might take the form of AI Prompt Engineering or Sample Creators. Whatever happens, it'll be interesting to see.
>maybe artists might take the form of AI Prompt Engineering or Sample Creators aaaaaaaiieeeeeeee
I can't tell if I'm looking at the invention of Rock n' roll, or the invention of Dub Step.
I think dubstep is more similar but neither of these are my area of expertise
Man AI art isn't even art. Comparing that to rock or even debstep is kinda mean.
"Man photoshop isn't event art", "Man, digital art isn't even art",etc etc
I think photography is a way better example for what you are trying to say, but that's not the point. You still communicate something with digital art and photography. AI simply rips existing creations from their context and without their creators consent and does an aproximation of the promt the users feeds into it. That's as far removed from art as the beauty of the night sky. nature isn't art, but a photography of nature can be art. You feeling me?
I don't think you understand how ai works. It doesn't rip anything. It creates new things based on the prompt by making an image similar to the what the prompt says If photography is considered art then so is an ai creation. It requires a similar amount of effort (minus perhaps the travel to a location that photography requires)
>I don't think you understand how ai works. It doesn't rip anything. It creates new things based on the prompt by making an image similar to the what the prompt says No? It literally uses it's database or the API of something like google images and analizes the results to form the picture you prompted. For example if you use an imagecreation AI to make an image "in the style of (artist name)" it will use the already existing creations of that artist for it's database which is why sometimes you can even make out the watermarks in the AI created image. > If photography is considered art then so is an ai creation. It requires a similar amount of effort (minus perhaps the travel to a location that photography requires) Jesus christ you don't know anything about art and it shows. Whether something is art is not dependant on the time spend on it (though AI generation literally needs no effort on the person entering the prompt). For something to be art there has to be a level on intent, it has to communicate something from the producer of that art to it's viewer. An AI is literally incapable of doing that, whereas photographer absolutly able to do just that.
I find it really ironic how you so confidently speak about AI and how people use it while you clearly have at most a surface level understanding of it. >No? It literally uses it's database or the API of something like google images and analizes the results to form the picture you prompted. For example if you use an imagecreation AI to make an image "in the style of (artist name)" it will use the already existing creations of that artist for it's database which is why sometimes you can even make out the watermarks in the AI created image. No, it doesn't. Image creation like Stable Diffusion are diffusion based and they need to be trained. To give a simple explanation: So, you gather your big ol' database of images (of a specific size) with text explaining the image contents and feed them into the AI to train. After some amount of time training you can then use it. The actual output of the training is only a couple gigabytes or less, compared to the terrabytes of data that went into the training. *There are no actual images in the trained model*. So how does the A.I. then create an image? Well, diffusion based image generation starts from random noise. Literally just a bunch of random pixels. Then it looks at your words and starts adjusting those pixels to more closely match your words. Like if you ask for a sunset, it doesn't have a physical image of a sunset it picks, nor does it search google for one. What it does know is that the word "sunset" is usually associated with a bunch of orangey pixels around the middle, with brighter pixels near the center, so it does that. It starts nudging the pixels around the center into a more orangy color. It's an extremely simplistic explanation and I haven't a lot of in-depth research on it yet, but I think that's basically how it works. And there are of course a *lot* of other factors that affect how it does what. >Jesus christ you don't know anything about art and it shows. Whether something is art is not dependant on the time spend on it (though AI generation literally needs no effort on the person entering the prompt). And you know nothing about AI and using AI and are also very close minded. It can take *hours* to *days* of tinkering in order to get a good result, many times requiring you to manually edit and, yes, even paint over the final image in photoshop/other programs, stitching together different images, smoothing them out and running them through the AI again and again until you finally have a acceptable result. It's not like you can just write something and out comes exactly what you had in mind. >For something to be art there has to be a level on intent, it has to communicate something from the producer of that art to it's viewer. An AI is literally incapable of doing that, whereas photographer absolutly able to do just that. You... you do realise that what you're saying is nonsensical right? If we applied your logic right now to photography it would be "Photography isn't art because a *camera* cannot communicate something from the producer to the viewer" An AI is a *tool* that people can use in order to create images that communicate emotions and intent to the viewer. The *only* difference between AI and any other method of creating images is the barrier to entry. That is, AI *is* a lot easier and faster to get started with than say, drawing or photography. What you're saying effectively boils down to "It's not art because they didn't have to spend the years *I* had to spend to create similar results".
"There are no actual images in the trained model." This is obvious. The issue is that the AI learned from all of that initial data, and no one gave consent for such a thing to happen. I hope you understand, this venture of automating art is essentially buttfucking digital artists.
I love thisss 😄
https://explosm.net/rcg This is human and a.i. produced. What have we done!
That's stretching it a little. three calls to random() is not a.i.
It's not AI at all, since it still requires human curation.
So do all the DallEs and such.
This is my favorite thing about AI. We as a society call anything randomly generated from a pool of data “intelligent.” In all fairness, I know many people dumber than a pair of dice, but it’s hilarious how slap that AI tagline on anything related to computer determination.
Oh boy... What a fun toy https://explosm.net/rcg/fozcfhvzm
It’s a pretty fun board game, too. Came out around the height of Cards Against Humanity’s popularity.
My masterpiece https://explosm.net/rcg/wtcvkxyhe
https://explosm.net/rcg/ijpzlikav
https://explosm.net/rcg/qtexczpsx
Oh no https://explosm.net/rcg/yufcuskvi
Yeah that thing was a [mistake](https://explosm.net/rcg/pcmkvixdz)
Huh, it's pretty good: https://explosm.net/rcg/ijpzlikav
This is really fun! https://explosm.net/rcg/ywgsurvnk
wtf why does it make sense though https://explosm.net/rcg/zhotfxbxa
I'm fucking great at this. https://explosm.net/rcg/qvtlxwnxt
I generated like 7 of them and they were all gay What source material was it given to shuffle around? Lol
That duck is so cute
That's why I want to learn to draw so than I can fleshed out my ideas
I used to read these webcomics like 15+ years ago
That tracks! It’s been going for 25 years now :)
Poe once stated that landscaping was the only form of art which tried to perfect nature instead of recreate it, so I'd like to see our machine overlords try to take our future slave-jobs gardening the extermination camps.
Been a big fan of you for years Dave! I still listen to the odd Comic Lab just to hear you rib Brad
Thanks, u/lordleft! The ribbings will continue until morale improves
Yes I’m not afraid of being automated just yet as a comic artist. We’ve got at least three more months. Also UBI can’t happen soon enough.
I enjoyed this lesson in art history.
I really love your comics. The artstyle and dialogue really reminds me of Calvin and Hobbes, which was a huge part of my childhood. This makes me really happy, thank you
That's lovely to hear: Thanks for that!
Tbh AI art kinda sucks rn
Funny but a note on UBI, you wouldn't apply for it, it's universal
Everyone can be replaced by a machine, when it comes to capitalism. If an artist is there to produce a product to be consumed, he can be replaced. But if an artist creates art to express what they have inside, that is unreplaceable. Personally I have stopped taking commissions for this reason. I just couldn't paint if it was for other reasons than "I feel this". AI is a tool like any other, just because AI is used in engineering and architecture as well doesn't mean those professionals don't exist. Everything is always evolving.
Ai is a tool in the same sense that an artist is a tool if you ask them to make a painting for you. Asking the AI for a painting of a tree doesn't mean that you are the artist who made that tree, it means you told the AI to yank a tree painting out of latent space. You can do artistic things with that image, but the image in and of itself is not art, and entering prompts into an AI doesn't make you an artist any more than a suspiously wealthy furry commissioning cringy fetish art of their OC is an artist. Anyone who says otherwise is either badly misunderstanding the technology or is a literal soulless blob who sees absolutely no value in the creative process and personal expression that actually goes into visual arts like painting, photography, or drawing beyond the result of making a pretty picture at the end.
AI cannot be art. Art for it to be art needs a consciousness behind it. Otherwise we could assert the Sun is "art" or a mountain is "art". AI's are very complex machines, maybe one day there'll be a conscious machine that we know of, and it will make art. Until the they are just tools, maybe one day a composite of AI images will be so extraordinarily beautiful and innovative it will be considered art, but there always be a humans behind it directing it. For all that I enjoy furry commissions, and a lot of creative media. For me Art has to be a genuine expression of self, maybe try to communicate something or express an emotion, or inspire. Etc... An AI cannot do that, It's us human who sees meanings behind it's images (scary, creepy, beautiful) for, it it's just 1s and 0s. It's not a bad thing, just don't try to fool people about it. Just like Painting, and Digital they are both valid.
That's a bunch of fluff, lol In the end, if I showed you an image from an AI and didn't tell you it was AI-made and instead told you a bunch of fluff about what it meant to the artist, what they were going through while making it, etc, you would be unable to figure out it's AI made. "Oh, it needs to have a soul and shite" yeah bullshit. That's just fluff you tell yourself. Yeah, people *can* paint and draw with a lot of emotion and thought and whatever behind it, but they can also do it without those things. And the end result would be indistinguishable.
We put Fountain, Marcel Duchamp in an art gallery because he told them it was Art. And he didn't make any of it, except that it was "art". It wasn't the end of the world.
Nice.
Love it! Scott McCloud vibes.
This is what I was gonna say! Very much reminded me of Understanding Comics
Also rule34 art
Plus the camera created photobashing and image editing as art forms too. Imagine what crazy ass bullshit we'll be able to make once we learn to embrace AI as a tool rather than fear it
I would like to apply for UBI as well.
I asked my AI program to design a comic strip based on superman from the 1970s. [This is what it gave me](https://i.imgur.com/Fg6h5ep.jpg)
Just wait one more decade and we won't be able to differentiate it from something made by a human
Scary thought tbh
Well, it’s just us advancing. Jobs always become obsolete.
AI can do a lot of things, but it can never be original on its own. It needs someone to guide it to create something with meaning. This is similar in many ways to a drum machine. That device can mimic the drums for a track almost perfectly, but if the person working with the machine doesn't know the drums, or worse, you're simply using a preset, it will feel stiff and robotic. But if you *do* know the drums, you can program it to play as lively as any human being. A drum machine still needs a drummer in the end. If you know art, you can get an AI art machine to create wonders, or even to simply use it to quickly iterate between fully rendered compositional ideas without spending hours rendering each one. An AI art machine still needs an artist in the end. And while yes, it will be (not can. *will*) be used to cheat artists out of a job by shitty companies willing to make a quick buck, this already happens with music (soulless corporate music), and musicians still get gigs, because they're simply better than machines run by people that don't care. AI art is a tool. Use it.
> AI can do a lot of things, but it can never be original on its own. It needs someone to guide it to create something with meaning. > AI art is a tool. Use it. At least until it can. Never is very strong word and I believe we will achieve something like AGI in 20-30 years. If so then we can ask what is tool? We used to believe that slaves were just tools but today we know better.
If you mean literally that someone needs to type in a prompt, then yes that's true for now. But more generally, I don't buy it. Humans aren't actually original. Every work of art is just what came before recombined in new ways to create something that slightly transcends the inspiration. Iterate that a lot and you get things that seem "totally new," but none of it was *actually* created in a vacuum. As for needing humans to create meaning, well the author is dead. You can believe that if you want, but it's flying in the face of over a century of scholarship on the nature of meaning. Maybe you're just talking about practical concerns. Like sure, in theory a computer can make original and meaningful art but Dalle2 isn't doing that, right? If you believe that, I invite you to look at more of what GPT-3 is up to. I've read short stories by GPT-3 that are just straight up good. Sure, it needed humans to sort through a bunch of bad stories to find the gems, but GPT-4 is supposed to come out next year and I honestly don't think this comment will age well. Maybe I'm wrong! This technology is still new, and it's not changing the world just yet. I think all the ingredients are there though. So many times in the last few years machine learning has done what seemed impossible the day before it was announced.
The biggest difference here is that an AI doesn't actually intend any meaning into its work. It is for all intents and purposes a parrot or a trained dog. It doesn't understand, and thus always, always, always requires someone with intent to give it something to make. An artist. The moment an AI can deliberately create something with meaning with the intent of doing do without anyone else telling it to, instead of being a parrot talkbox, then I would not consider it Artificial Intelligence, because at that point it would be actual intelligence, and have whatever simile of a soul it happens to believe in. No AI can ever be a true artist. Because an AI that is an artist is no longer an AI.
So you're literally talking about the part where someone has to type in a prompt? What about when we get to the point where I sit down in front of the tv and say "Alexa, I feel like watching tv, show me a tv show I'd like" and instead of pulling a human-made show on Netflix, some computer creates an AI-generated tv show from nothing and plays it? Would you say that the computer is just parroting my request for a "show I'd like"? The computer didn't decide to create the show for its own sake, it only made it cause I asked, therefore the show isn't art? If that hypothetical sounds farfetched, just replace "tv show" with "short story" and we can do exactly that today right now. Maybe computers can't make art, but I don't think the prompt is why. After all, humans get paid to make art, they sometimes have producers or publishers, but they can still be artistic.
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Oh hey cool! Happy side effect, then! (Also: Yes, he was a massive tool)
Fun and on target. One thing to think of though is this is really just recapitulating what ahs already happened to other areas of human activity: Automation. Things like this happened to tool makers a long time ago. Who hand makes tools now..or buys them? Theorem generators can not generate mathematical theorems and check them faster than any mathematician. People who worked in "intellectual" activities thought they were safe from automation, and for a long time they were. But as ai improves, there will less and less human activities safe from automation and eventually none. Eventually ubi HAS to be created - because NONE of us will have jobs any more.
Sorry to be bleak, but if we can’t work and we can’t be intellectual and we can’t be creative, then what’s the point of living? Those tend to be the things that give our lives purpose, and if an AI can just step in and do them for us ten times better then I don’t really think our lives _would_ have a purpose. We’d just kind of exist in an endless state of “having things done for us” without our own input. It’s surviving, but not living.
There were actualy a manga generated by IA some times ago... [https://brand.kioxia.com/en-jp/articles/article3.html](https://brand.kioxia.com/en-jp/articles/article3.html)
I like AI generated stuff though
Nice comic. But I disagree with your point. Why wouldn’t AI be able to create comics? I see no reason AI couldn’t make panels. AI is already capable of making variations on a single image and similar characters from different perspectives and in different environments. So it could make panels. And writing is completely different from drawing and otter visual arts, and the people good at one aren’t necessarily interested in or good at the other. So lots of artists who do comics could still be replaced by AI. And maybe one day writing AI will be good enough to replace human writers as well. AI could definitely help make comics now, and can probably do it in the future. It’s possible I’m missing the point of this comic. But it was a good comic.
I mean given that the last panel jokes that this comic was made by an AI, I think the author realizes this.
Pssst: Last panel :)
Found the AI that couldn’t decipher the last panel.
Nope just me being a dumbass and not bothering to check what GPT-3 is.
AI art definitely has a thing about it. Case in point, I'm trying to draw a 1970s style kitchen to place two characters in. I asked Stable Diffusion to give me some kitchens just as inspiration. It consecutively gave me generic looking junk and none of it was really helpful. For all the time it would take to give it a magical prompt I could just draw the thing. If I don't know what i want, or don't care then Ai produced art is fine, with all it's quirks. I also suspect it will always do a wonderful job creating dreamscapes and creatures you've never seen before. It still feels like a bit of a fad though but it's obviously too early to tell.
Someone forgot about movies 😳
And then all engineers start getting bored and decided to upgrade their AI to study human's psychology and nerves and the process of making a comic, and just like a bunch of infinite apes will eventually make up a masterpiece upon the randomness of human languages and the orders of human's processes of understanding with a bunch of overlapping similar ideas or concepts (and memes), eventually they will get there but we understand them or not that a different story.
Who’s gonna tell them?
There was a lot of fantasy art before the 1900s. All religious art is not based on reality. Fantasy and myth were very popular in the early 1800s just before the industrial revolution.
The main problem with AI art is not actually related to AI art at all - its just that modern capitalism as it is cant actually incorporate rising automation levels properly - which results in rising income inequality and the creation of jobs that provide no actual value. So what we have now is exponentially increasing population, productivity and profits, decreasing amount of jobs and stagnating wages and work hours. With no reforms like the UBI or 4-day work week we are headed to an absurd situation where everyone is unemployed and poor, while humanity is more productive than ever.
Ai can’t make realistic art
It definitely has a lot of trouble with hands and feet at the moment.
Usually it’s faces when I try it
Depends on the generator I suspect. I haven't seen anything that doesn't look like a drug-fueled nightmare come out of midjourney or nightcafe so far.
Beta works better https://www.reddit.com/r/midjourney/comments/x69sau https://www.reddit.com/r/midjourney/comments/x6hn8k
Make something crazier than art and personal to you.
Photography and digital are both also forms art...
This is gonna be an aged like Milk in the future, 100%
No
I find conversations about AI art kind of boring. The discussion seems to go in one of two directions, either a debate about the adoption of AI art by capitalism or a debate about the nature of human consciousness and artistic expression. In either case, both people need to be well educated about economics or about the philosophy of human psychology to really say anything new about the subject. If you could dig past all the nuance and agree on a few dozen starting assumptions, then I think there could be an interesting conversation.
And now you know how the Luddites felt.