We simply lose things that bring people joy and for what?

Why would you campaign to strictly make people less happy?

I disagree completely. Idk but creating brings millions of people joy, anything that democratizes it more accessible is a good thing. AI has absolutely brought many more people joy.

A world where a technology exists that can query the sum of human knowledge and skill to translate ideas into form but is gatekept because few people like feeling special is a horrifying dystopia and I can’t imagine how someone could be so fucking evil as to really wish for that.

Like really, I want to keep giving y’all benefit of the doubt that you simply don’t consider a perspective outside your own, but you don’t make it easy.

This technology makes some of those enjoyable jobs

Technology is what made those jobs enjoyable and accessible to those who do them now in the first place.

Nobody is forcing you to use AI or any technology, you can still farm goats and use them to make drums before you lay out a beat, people will probably be pretty impressed if you did that.

Why would you want to remove the jobs people enjoy and are passionate about just for the sake of it?

If they are passionate about their craft for the sake of it they will keep doing it, if they are doing it as a job then like with any other job market when new technologies or trends arrive they will have to adapt.

To put it in perspective with an analogy: It’s an absurd notion for instance that new programming languages should be banned not for their quality but simply because not every developer will learn them, and it’s an absurd notion that someone who loves programming in C for the sake of it cannot do so just because Java exists.

Having DAWs did not make it illegal to mess around with an old rompler and a step sequencer for the sake of it, nor did orchestra plugins eliminate violins, but market demands orchestral music done quicker, you either do this or don’t.

If it wasn’t for the horrible system we live in

This would be the case for every system that still has some market demands, even something like anarcho-communist cooperative based market economics would favour technological advancement and efficiency every time and some jobs would simply not be in demand any more.

There is simply no economic system that makes any sense where someone would need to hire an orchestra for every sting on kitchen nightmares instead of using a VST or sample library or now in the not too distant future - generating one.

I fully agree that we need to change the system to ensure when these technological advancements happen that people don’t end up on the street.

However, I’m sure most would agree that even though it was not fair to e.g. human computers, the move to electronic calculators is a net positive for society.

Similarly endlessly distributable digital copies of books etc. democratized media to a massive degree even if it put libraries at risk.

but it does not make life easier,

It definitely does make life easier for many artists, for instance you can upscale old media or restore media where the original was lost to time, game devs can use AI-generated assets for background stuff like adding nigh-infinite variety to textures that would be impractical for an indie dev to do or a sole dev can compensate for whatever skills they lack manually etc.

it does not get us better things

I think with regards to quality it’s completely value neutral, I’ve seen plenty of dogshit AI art, but also some really good unique stuff. I think it just follows Sturgeon’s Law as everything.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon's_law

My experience is simply the polar opposite of yours.

Most artists I’ve known are extremely upper class, at the very least they come from very privileged backgrounds, and usually had the safety net required to take gap years for unpaid apprenticeships or to start bands, have capital to invest and can afford to lose it, can live with parents and rely on them financially waiting for publishing deals or comissions money or adrev etc etc.

Come to think of it IRL I actually have never heard of a “working class” artist, other than in the strict Marxist sense in that they’re not an owner class.

Even if they work a low paying or shitty job part-time they almost always have very high QoL due to those privileged backgrounds. One guy who went into the arts I know has a day job that paid half mine out of the gate, but he had way more disposable cash because his parents paid his rent and bills.

Someone I know who’s in theatre just bailed out after school, took a gap year, did an unpaid apprenticeship and later got a day job as a theatre tech, now swimming in cash from being a manager and her published plays, she’s the second richest person I know.

I’m not saying that arts are just a passtime of the rich mind you, (though I do think the rabidly anti-ai types have a “fuck you got mine” streak) I think it’s survivorship bias ultimately, those who can be full-time or even decently part-time professional artists in some capacity are the ones who have privilege.

Meanwhile 99.9% of “Techbros” aka people in CompSci at uni were the hustler-grindset type working folks trying to escape poverty or otherwise move up the ladder, either real career chasers who are all about networking or grifters/scammers/shady characters you’d see betting on horses and hanging out in money laundering candy/barbershops.

They were in it for the money alone because they heard the money is good and that’s because they def needed the money.

Most people had at least 1 job just to afford rent, many had 2 (uni is pretty much free here in the UK).

The only rich people were drug dealers in blacked out BMWs and Chinese immigrants with Rolexes and extremely strong spice vapes and no knowledge of English.

The remaining 0.1% were genuinely gifted kids who pursued PhDs or less talented nerds (me) and they were all usually not super well off locals or they were immigrants from shithole countries of families who could afford to send their kids overseas and not much else, where they prolly didn’t need to work semester time but they couldn’t fuck around either (also me).

Idk about Silicon Valley, I’m not American nor have been, from what I’ve seen people who talk about the “bay area” on Mastodon are either insufferable cunts or some kind of weird internet people/hacking savants/furries though.

Oh dear. Well thanks!

And that baby? Albert Einstein. Checkmate liberals ✅💯

Idk I honestly don’t even know which iPhone is latest anymore, my gut says 8 but I know that there’s also iPhone X which was somehow the first one with an OLED screen and why I remember it.

Last one I owned was the 5S, great phone, but their branding and looks haven’t appealed to me since then.

But how is OP meant to do that if they don’t know what they’d even be listening for? I’m not single these days but I never figured this whole body language thing out either, people’s movements just don’t seem to mean all that much.

Bruh. Meanwhile I’m still with my free and libre Mistral-7B I refined using my own WhatsApp messages and I almost never use it…

Chrome Password Manager is easily the most intuitive I’ve found. Tons of people use it without even realising it exists. Auto synced via Google account on android and you don’t have to worry about it. Idk if she uses iOS what would be comparable.

So do you have a rebuttal or? Because this is the way I see it, using music because it’s what I know more:

I get an idea in my head for a melody or piece of music -> I either lay it out on an instrument or in a DAW piano roll or on paper -> I tweak and refine and add/remove elements -> I export the file and upload to a website.

The actual creative spark is the first step, the rest is a matter of speaking the language and skills at using the tools of choice to convey ideas clearly. Both are skills in and of themselves but one is about technique, the other is about a well-trained imagination and analytical mindset.

Prompts in that case are just another language like notes and scales, used to put ideas into form.

Then you add onto that LoRAs, controlnets, refiner models, custom refines of existing models, embeddings, weights, sampling steps, classifier-free guidance scale, and it’s quite a lot to actually learn and use effectively.

I don’t see how it’s any less creative whatsoever. Less skilled? Sure, absolutely, it can be. No denying there. Understanding that notes fit into scales and what a key is in music is a much bigger learning curve than simply typing in what you want, but in both cases that’s not all there is to it.

Maybe you could say it’s also less intentional, but plenty of art has unintentional elements which doesn’t make it any less creative.

I’m sure every amateur musician had that one experience where you make a piece of music that you think is sad, show it to a friend and they say it sounds cheerful, it doesn’t happen because you’re uncreative, it happens because your ‘musical language’ needs work.

Eventually you make that one track with a clear intent and show it to someone and they tell you exactly what you meant by it and it is the best gosh darn feeling on earth.

Proompting may be goofy, but it’s just another language, and it doesn’t invalidate the creative spark that starts it all.

Why don’t they then? And why do they now that AI is around?

Almost as if there’s a barrier to entry there for most people that’s been removed.

But the prompt is the creative aspect. It’s always the idea, and the rest is convention and form. And lol, modern poor aren’t going to have access to charcoal, paper, time or a deathbed, but they’re going to have a smartphone, hence it does indeed make creative expression more accessible.

I’d never have even tried music if I couldn’t pirate a DAW, plugins etc etc. Sure, cheap eBay fender clones and bargain bin amps help too, but like AI, piracy met me where I was. Shit ain’t cheap but once you know how to sail the high seas the possibilities are endless and it encouraged me to explore more.

Heck I’d actually gotten better at drawing too thanks to AI, I don’t have the time or energy as a wageslave to hone those skills, I’m not a millionaire like PewDiePie, but I can at least draw some basic shapes now because using that with controlnets and img2img in SD to produce ideas from my imagination was just encouraging enough to get me going and more realistically attainable. As with music, it brought me great joy.

Creativity isn’t to be gatekept and those select few privileged enough to practice it in lieu of something more materially useful aren’t to be put on a pedestal, there’s no such thing as talent for most people, just barriers to entry and accessibility.

People being able to enjoy art and artistry, especially not just by brainless consumption, but by producing it themselves will always be a good thing in my book. That’s what generative AI does.

All the artbros seething are just landlords of the art world feeling their houses lose value to new buildings that belong to everyone.

All the arguments about power use are null and void because if it wasn’t this it’d be something else, most advances in computing would require more power, we need to solve that problem with nuclear & renewables, not by artificially placing a cap on scientific advancements.

They absolutely do all those things though? Like render farms consume fucktons of electricity and they absolutely rely on theft because every artist uses references not to mention asset packs etc. and you are absolutely posing as an expert on the subject feeding people misinformation without any AI (probably). I’m sure someone editing film would consider your optimised premiere shortcut stream deck a device for someone who’s “stopped thinking” as well, without any AI at all.

Eh, I make my own music and somewhat play guitar, I don’t even use samples because it feels personally a bit like cheating myself out of the most challenging and interesting part, though ofc plenty way more talented and successful musicians sample all the way, so it’s just a personal stance.

I’d say actually it’s that experience, just making art as self-expression that has thoroughly inoculated me against artbro talking points.

I’m not against creative industries, nor am I pro corpos, but AI is just a tool and now that anybody can make images, the drawing people seethe, sorry not sorry, I’d rather make creativity more accessible than please egos of a select few rich kid narcissists.

Maybe, but SysV Init was just fucking awful. It’s a shame.

What’s weird about the image? It shows up as a trollface to me. Are you like, 14?

Nah, Japanese food is definitely better to my taste. Korea has kimchi but idk what else is even notable. Chinese food is trash.

Lmao I’m in the wrong thread 💀

Europe is nothing other than a geographical location, western Russia is also in “Europe”, but surely you can see how this is not the same as the US, which is not a geographical location but a specific political entity?

People obviously don’t judge Venezuela for what the US does and vice versa, so why include the UK in discourse about EU?

Iirc I assumed you simply used Europe as short-hand for EU, kind of like saying America but you really mean the US, because otherwise the comment makes no sense at all.

Might be more commonly taken in the US because Americans tend to eat greasy, heartburn-inducing food more often.

Yeah that was the implication. Our food quality just doesn’t necessitate this sort of stuff.

Yeah the western dichotomy of “bland” and “spicy” is only an accurate representation of their own view of the world and has little to do with the truth.