As an artist, I think it is a net negative for us. Disregarding the copyright issue, I think it’s also consolidating power into large corporations, going to kill learning fundamental skills (rip next generation of artists), and turn the profession into a low skill minimum wage job. Artists that spent years learning and perfecting their skills will be worth nothing and I think it’s a pretty depressing future for us. Anways thoughts?
Not going to go over this very long(and expanding) post in its entirety, only focusing on the particularly cohesive ones, as I don’t feel like you totally understand my point. I am not saying “AI art good”, but rather that I think the root problem is capitalism. So the answer to this question:
has nothing to do with my point.
I do not think that this is a position devoid of empathy - I find myself able to love myself as a sack of meat, as I do not treat myself as more than I am. I understand that I care about other sacks of meat, in other words, other people. But I do not hesitate to claim that I absolutely am driven by chemicals, electrical signals in the brain; my ideas come from reality, from material processes, just like that of a computer.
Talk to their friends, play games, eat food, fall in love, study science, literature, and culture, and create art, and share it for the sake of human communication, not work and production. You yourself mention this is an important aspect of art, and indeed AI art does not even take away from this aspect. In fact, even in the status quo, people don’t need to draw fantastic things that are on par with professional artists to share art as a form of socialization, and similarly, people don’t necessarily learn to draw in hopes of making it a profession but just drawing to draw for yourself and for your friends. I myself have drawn something terrible multiple times and shared it with my friends - that’s fun, and under socialism, even with AI, this would be no different!
This fixation on mechanical materialism is disturbing. We are more than sacks of meat. We are each other and ourselves. We are social, biological, geographical, ideological, dialectical beings. Comparing ourselves to an AI is sophistry.
It’s kind if creepy that you’re deducing people to chemicals and their thoughts and life experience to be the same as a computer.
I’m not going to try and pull out a bunch of fancy theories and flowery language to get my point across but I still feel like everything that I have read here leaves me feeling hopeless that people don’t care about what happens with AI and how people are going to be affected materially and spiritually.
Sure, that sounds nice in theory, that people will just chill and fall in love and eat food together and there will be sunshine and gumdrops and roses if AI takes over and communism is realized. But that isn’t what is going to happen. That is why I’m saying that AI is a really bad thing for everyone in reality and where we stand with the world right now.
The reality is what people will be replaced by AI. Capitalism will continue to be the driver of the world, and a lot of people will live in abject poverty. There will be no opportunities to work except maybe for the people who are caregiving for the elderly and disabled (if robots do not take over that). And people will continue to shit on artists or people who are critical of AI replacing them. Information, education, art, culture, music, research will be centralized to corporations that use AI and the few that upkeep it. This is bad for a lot of reasons. And even if people start colonizing Mars, what will there be to do if robots and AI are doing all the work? I guess people will get bored enough to just start making their own creative works, but that goes back to what I was saying before that it will be met with a lot of resistance from people who hate artistsorr believe that people don’t deserve to have anything materially or spiritually.
People need a reason to live. Like I said, even if you are going to reduce people to “meatsacks” there is a reason why people NEED things outside of food, water, and shelter. I believe in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs but depending on the person and situation those needs can be moveable.
Can we stop this progression? I don’t know what is to be done - I guess we can only see it unfold and time will tell. But honestly I haven’t seen an argument that is giving me hope other than going back to the core of why I choose to be alive and keep going, and that is keep learning more and not give up. I guess that’s all I can do. Even if people tell me it’s futile.