Well said, this thing is here to stay. When I first played around with gpt-4 I was filled with immense dread. I, as many others have, immediately understood what kind of enormous societal impact this would have.
But I put the question to myself, if I could magically wish this thing away, would I? I wouldn't. I understand the many that would, this thing completely upends the status quo. Massive swathes of people will have skills they have built up their entire lives become worthless. But the potential for good that can emerge from this, can potentially benefit everyone and the people that are not benefitting from the status quo the most.
If you think AI is a disaster, think about the potential for medical breakthroughs that can emerge from this. Doctors will spend fewer hours writing charts and more time with patients. Every underprivileged child could have a personalized tutor. The number of discoveries and ideas that can be generated are endless.
"Every underprivileged child could have a personalized tutor."
Tutor for what, prompt engineering? The impact of this on the kids is hard to fathom and just because "similar" advancements in the past opened up doors does not mean this one will as well.
>When I first played around with gpt-4 I was filled with immense dread
Really? When I played around with it I was filled with incredible optimism and hope. It was an amazing companion that helped me with my code, answered questions, and what I hoped Google Assistant/Alexa/Siri etc would become a few years in. Sadly they never did.
This is amazing, and would be an excellent personal assistant when it becomes cheap enough for smaller personalized LLMs.
It seems to me that he's really missing some of the major concerns about "AI" as it stands today. As often happens with new technology, the old rules that secure rights don't quite fit anymore. E.g., if I were an artist who had spent years developing a unique, recognizable style, I'd be furious to have a for-profit company use my work to create something to imitate my art. It's probably not illegal at the moment, but it easily could be down the road, and it regardless raises real ethical questions. I'm disappointed to see Gabriel fail to grapple with that here, where his cache as a prominent artist is being used by a for-profit company for their own ends.
There's a massive piece of the music scene that I can't imagine AI ever replacing. Some genres are formulaic by design, but the draw for so many others is the human experience and the inventiveness. Many people follow artists because they connect with material that could only have come from the artist.
One reasonable concern is that tech supplementation will lead to a deluge of derivative work, nullifying the efforts of the actual creators. That's always happened in some form or another, and does it really lead genuine fans away from artists they care about?
There's a comment in another thread about generating a song that includes Kurt Cobain, which is such a weird example because a computer could not have dreamed that up in a thousand years. A computer couldn't write a punk song, and mean it. It will never replace the open mic, the buskers, the songs passed across generations, the Zappas of the world, and millions of others.
>Some genres are formulaic by design, but the draw for so many others is the human experience and the inventiveness.
Those genres are safe (for a while), but they're also a puny portion of the market. American pop music is totally going to be replaced by AI. It's been nothing but awful, formulaic crap for the last 25 years, so there's no way that AI-generated music could possibly be worse.
Even out of the context of AI, I think this isn't stressed enough in general copyright discussion, especially around piracy.
People often say that piracy doesn't actually reduce the sale -- which I fully agree -- but that's not the only concern artists have, especially some indie ones. I have seen both illustration/musical artists explicitly stating they don't care if "their work is enjoyed and known by more people because of piracy", they only want paid users to get it. I don't even agree with this sentiment, but I respect it since it's their choice to make, not mine.
"When an artist's work is copied for commercial gain, there should be [(a)] a right to choose to refuse it or [(b)] to participate financially.
If anyone legitimately feels their copyright has been infringed by this competition, we and Stability AI will work to take down the video until the dispute has been resolved."
StabilityAI and Gabriel are providing (a) but not (b).
If Getty wins, is Gabriel committing contributory infringement.
Even if what happens after text is entered into a prompt is not infringement, mass copying for "training" is done for commercial gain and it is done without consent. Google gets away with copying websites en masse into a cache for the purposes of running a commercial web search engine. Maybe copying for purpose of commercial "AI" will get similar treatment.
That said, consider what happened when Google tried scanning books. It seems that some of these training sets have used hundreds of thousands of copyrighted works from "pirate" sources on the web.
IMO, this is just another example of so-called "tech" companies, e.g., Uber, that can only operate if they are free from existing laws and regulations.
Does StabilityAI have a commercially-viable plan if "training" requires obtaining consent.
Peter Gabriel is fucking courageous. I love it. I'm a 50+ programmer. I can absolutely feel this shit pressing on me. Good. Are people right that there are ethical concerns, absolutely. We need to get busy realizing the potential and dealing with the issues.
I’m in your same demographic. However I see these technologies as career extenders, not career threats. I can learn things faster than ever and adapt to changes more easily.
This wave of AI has the power to be incredibly transformative for good, but not given any of the current economic or copyright systems we have now.
I don't know how any of the proponents can pretend that this isn't an abject disaster on the horizon for anybody who depends on copyright to make their living.
This is the natural progression to the unnatural properties of the shared delusion of pretending like ideas are property or that it every was natural to keep them artificially scarce. If we lived in an ideal system where ideas are free, copyright didn't exist, and artists and programmers could survive and thrive without the ability or need to hoard their work as if they were physical goods, this would be a non-issue. The system was antiquated for the needs of the modern world for multiple human generations already, and this is the dam breaking.
> I don't know how any of the proponents can pretend that this isn't an abject disaster on the horizon for anybody who depends on copyright to make their living.
OK, I'll bite. How is the an abject disaster on the horizon for... let's say, novelists?
The last time we saw a copyright struggle like this was Napster. After a lot of ire we eventually landed on Spotify, shows, and merch. Musicians seem fine this time around, but graphic designers are in for a world of hurt. Artists and musicians mostly already starve, unless they're extremely lucky and famous.
I think it's only natural to think of AI as the enemy no? Sure theoretically it means better healthcare, scientific improvement. However what nobody has really answered well is what happens to the artists, writers, programmers, scientists, maybe even doctors and lawyers. As we become potentially obsolete what happens to us. Saying that you can do art as a hobby or programming as a hobby really isn't an answer people want to hear. If you want people to not see AI as an enemy then perhaps you should have that discussion. Just to give an anecdotal sob story, my mother passed away from cancer and if AI means a solution to cancer that is amazing, that no other person has to go through the anguish my mother and family had to go through would be amazing. That still doesn't change the point that what will millions of people do in this new industrial revolution? I've said in other threads that my visa is a working visa, if (when?) AI takes my job without that permanent residence what do I do? I don't have anything that ties me to my home country anymore. For me I can only see AI as a future enemy who can do a lot of good...
I don't think any profession that requires a license is at risk. Software engineers resisted a licensing regiment for decades and now the profession will pay a price.
If AI enables a 12 year old in India to write the code of a 2019 software developer then that is a positive for the earth. If someone is upset that they're losing their lunch to their skillset that earned them an outrageous salary then might I suggest they, and I, learn to augment your productivity with the skills or take up something with better permanence like drywall or plumbing.
I think we can look at history and see how revolutionary technologies changed the landscape of society.
No one knows really the magnitude of AI, but if we take the two extremes, AI takes all our jobs, and AI is just some stats that has no real utility, we’ll probably land somewhere in the middle.
Personally, I’m trying to learn these technologies to augment my current work. I’m treating it like going from using Notepad to program Java, over to a full fledged IDE. Not a perfect analogy, I know.
Given its inevitability, I think it’s logical to try and use it to our advantage as workers. If it ends up taking our jobs anyways, at least we tried. If it doesn’t take our jobs outright, then we’ll still be behind those that use the AI products as tools that augment their productivity, leading to a game of catch-up.
Even with the 6 month hiatus proposed, AI versions will still be released by those that refuse to follow the agreement. We’re in an AI arms race against the likes of other world super powers. And the morality of some are quite questionable (not that US’ morality is perfect by any means)
When AI Chess started kicking my @ss, I assumed that human competitive Chess was over.
Quite the opposite happened. We appreciate human-vs-human Chess even more because Stockfish, and other AIs, demonstrated there are more challenging lines and strategies to pursue.
A train is approaching on the tracks, on one track you create free energy, solve diseases, create a new dawn for human ingenuity and also some white collar jobs are removed, others are created. On the other track we continue to toil in the dirt.
> what happens to the artists, writers, programmers, scientists, maybe even doctors and lawyers
They find better things. Maybe agitating for a different economic system. Some countries will fail horribly at this. In any case, LLMs aren't coming for most writers or coders or scientists or medical researchers. They will help with our credentialing fetish.
This comes off as incredibly passive. You are in control of how you use and adapt to AI.
>if AI takes my job
AI is not going to take anyone's job. People using AI will take jobs from people who don't use AI.
>What happens to the doctors
That's completely up to them. Some will use AI to research new treatments, to assist with their daily workload, or even to treat patients.
Some doctors will stick their head in the sand and refuse to work with the new technology. They might lose their jobs if they can't compete with AI-assisted doctors, and it will be entirely their fault.
Is it not crazy, asks Mr Senior, that the piano maker is a productive worker, but not the piano player, although obviously the piano would be absurd without the piano player? But this is exactly the case. The piano maker reproduces capital, the pianist only exchanges his labour for revenue. But doesn’t the pianist produce music and satisfy our musical ear, does he not even to a certain extent produce the latter? He does indeed: his labour produces some- thing; but that does not make it productive labour in the economic sense; no more than the labour of the mad man who produces delusions is productive.
if society is going to collapse it is going to collapse. Even if we did pause AI development, bad actors would just ignore the rule and continue anyway.
It's easy for me to say, I am young and healthy and can move away from programming after it bought me a house. Maybe I'll work in a brewery...
Either way, the dirty words everyone seems to be avoiding is UBI and socialism.
If AI sincerely destroys every white collar job, well... that will be interesting.
>I have added my name to a letter written by Max Tegmark, Steve Wozniak and Elon Musk amongst others to pause on the release of new AI for six months while we try and figure out what we should be doing, but if we don’t use this time to play with and learn from what we have already created how can we hope to understand it?
this is a great point, and i think represents a really good attitude. it seems like there's a whole lot of people who think if they pretend hard enough, AI will go away. and that's obviously not going to happen - it's a useful tool, and so let's all try to figure out how it can be useful in a productive way, not a world-ruining way. and that means using it.
brigadier132|2 years ago
But I put the question to myself, if I could magically wish this thing away, would I? I wouldn't. I understand the many that would, this thing completely upends the status quo. Massive swathes of people will have skills they have built up their entire lives become worthless. But the potential for good that can emerge from this, can potentially benefit everyone and the people that are not benefitting from the status quo the most.
If you think AI is a disaster, think about the potential for medical breakthroughs that can emerge from this. Doctors will spend fewer hours writing charts and more time with patients. Every underprivileged child could have a personalized tutor. The number of discoveries and ideas that can be generated are endless.
ladzoppelin|2 years ago
lannisterstark|2 years ago
Don't bother. People here love to miser. There's no way you're getting any positive responses to this. Let doom and gloom begin.
lannisterstark|2 years ago
Really? When I played around with it I was filled with incredible optimism and hope. It was an amazing companion that helped me with my code, answered questions, and what I hoped Google Assistant/Alexa/Siri etc would become a few years in. Sadly they never did.
This is amazing, and would be an excellent personal assistant when it becomes cheap enough for smaller personalized LLMs.
ChatGTP|2 years ago
The “think of the good” argument is over played. Same was true for combustion engines, they will probably send us extinct.
I’d like it if people just stopped with it. People aren’t idiots, they know good things and very bad things can be achieved.
retox|2 years ago
wpietri|2 years ago
It seems to me that he's really missing some of the major concerns about "AI" as it stands today. As often happens with new technology, the old rules that secure rights don't quite fit anymore. E.g., if I were an artist who had spent years developing a unique, recognizable style, I'd be furious to have a for-profit company use my work to create something to imitate my art. It's probably not illegal at the moment, but it easily could be down the road, and it regardless raises real ethical questions. I'm disappointed to see Gabriel fail to grapple with that here, where his cache as a prominent artist is being used by a for-profit company for their own ends.
matchagaucho|2 years ago
Peter is OK with AI consuming his tracks. But other Artists... not so much.
huehehue|2 years ago
One reasonable concern is that tech supplementation will lead to a deluge of derivative work, nullifying the efforts of the actual creators. That's always happened in some form or another, and does it really lead genuine fans away from artists they care about?
There's a comment in another thread about generating a song that includes Kurt Cobain, which is such a weird example because a computer could not have dreamed that up in a thousand years. A computer couldn't write a punk song, and mean it. It will never replace the open mic, the buskers, the songs passed across generations, the Zappas of the world, and millions of others.
midoridensha|2 years ago
Those genres are safe (for a while), but they're also a puny portion of the market. American pop music is totally going to be replaced by AI. It's been nothing but awful, formulaic crap for the last 25 years, so there's no way that AI-generated music could possibly be worse.
jdkee|2 years ago
pentagrama|2 years ago
thrdbndndn|2 years ago
Even out of the context of AI, I think this isn't stressed enough in general copyright discussion, especially around piracy.
People often say that piracy doesn't actually reduce the sale -- which I fully agree -- but that's not the only concern artists have, especially some indie ones. I have seen both illustration/musical artists explicitly stating they don't care if "their work is enjoyed and known by more people because of piracy", they only want paid users to get it. I don't even agree with this sentiment, but I respect it since it's their choice to make, not mine.
1vuio0pswjnm7|2 years ago
If anyone legitimately feels their copyright has been infringed by this competition, we and Stability AI will work to take down the video until the dispute has been resolved."
StabilityAI and Gabriel are providing (a) but not (b).
https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/66788385/13/getty-image...
If Getty wins, is Gabriel committing contributory infringement.
Even if what happens after text is entered into a prompt is not infringement, mass copying for "training" is done for commercial gain and it is done without consent. Google gets away with copying websites en masse into a cache for the purposes of running a commercial web search engine. Maybe copying for purpose of commercial "AI" will get similar treatment.
That said, consider what happened when Google tried scanning books. It seems that some of these training sets have used hundreds of thousands of copyrighted works from "pirate" sources on the web.
IMO, this is just another example of so-called "tech" companies, e.g., Uber, that can only operate if they are free from existing laws and regulations.
Does StabilityAI have a commercially-viable plan if "training" requires obtaining consent.
mftb|2 years ago
doug_durham|2 years ago
Taywee|2 years ago
I don't know how any of the proponents can pretend that this isn't an abject disaster on the horizon for anybody who depends on copyright to make their living.
This is the natural progression to the unnatural properties of the shared delusion of pretending like ideas are property or that it every was natural to keep them artificially scarce. If we lived in an ideal system where ideas are free, copyright didn't exist, and artists and programmers could survive and thrive without the ability or need to hoard their work as if they were physical goods, this would be a non-issue. The system was antiquated for the needs of the modern world for multiple human generations already, and this is the dam breaking.
erikpukinskis|2 years ago
OK, I'll bite. How is the an abject disaster on the horizon for... let's say, novelists?
sterlind|2 years ago
gwoolhurme|2 years ago
williamcotton|2 years ago
So does the world currently only listen to singer-songwriters on acoustic guitar at small local venues?
The humanity in the consumption of art has been subject to mass commodification for centuries at this point.
This process is driven by money and not love. Technology has nothing to do with it.
intrasight|2 years ago
I don't think any profession that requires a license is at risk. Software engineers resisted a licensing regiment for decades and now the profession will pay a price.
yinser|2 years ago
spacephysics|2 years ago
No one knows really the magnitude of AI, but if we take the two extremes, AI takes all our jobs, and AI is just some stats that has no real utility, we’ll probably land somewhere in the middle.
Personally, I’m trying to learn these technologies to augment my current work. I’m treating it like going from using Notepad to program Java, over to a full fledged IDE. Not a perfect analogy, I know.
Given its inevitability, I think it’s logical to try and use it to our advantage as workers. If it ends up taking our jobs anyways, at least we tried. If it doesn’t take our jobs outright, then we’ll still be behind those that use the AI products as tools that augment their productivity, leading to a game of catch-up.
Even with the 6 month hiatus proposed, AI versions will still be released by those that refuse to follow the agreement. We’re in an AI arms race against the likes of other world super powers. And the morality of some are quite questionable (not that US’ morality is perfect by any means)
matchagaucho|2 years ago
Quite the opposite happened. We appreciate human-vs-human Chess even more because Stockfish, and other AIs, demonstrated there are more challenging lines and strategies to pursue.
yinser|2 years ago
unknown|2 years ago
[deleted]
JumpCrisscross|2 years ago
They find better things. Maybe agitating for a different economic system. Some countries will fail horribly at this. In any case, LLMs aren't coming for most writers or coders or scientists or medical researchers. They will help with our credentialing fetish.
EMIRELADERO|2 years ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34378139
welshwelsh|2 years ago
>if AI takes my job
AI is not going to take anyone's job. People using AI will take jobs from people who don't use AI.
>What happens to the doctors
That's completely up to them. Some will use AI to research new treatments, to assist with their daily workload, or even to treat patients.
Some doctors will stick their head in the sand and refuse to work with the new technology. They might lose their jobs if they can't compete with AI-assisted doctors, and it will be entirely their fault.
make3|2 years ago
kennyloginz|2 years ago
— Karl Marx in Grundrisse (1857-61)
JumpCrisscross|2 years ago
Literally why we have intellectual property. So you can capitalize your intellectual work.
yazzku|2 years ago
Correction: if you are in America, *to those who can afford it.
Teever|2 years ago
It's entirely possible that new technology could drive the cost of these things down even in America.
make3|2 years ago
marban|2 years ago
Riverheart|2 years ago
honkycat|2 years ago
It's easy for me to say, I am young and healthy and can move away from programming after it bought me a house. Maybe I'll work in a brewery...
Either way, the dirty words everyone seems to be avoiding is UBI and socialism.
If AI sincerely destroys every white collar job, well... that will be interesting.
jimmygrapes|2 years ago
nr2x|2 years ago
notatoad|2 years ago
this is a great point, and i think represents a really good attitude. it seems like there's a whole lot of people who think if they pretend hard enough, AI will go away. and that's obviously not going to happen - it's a useful tool, and so let's all try to figure out how it can be useful in a productive way, not a world-ruining way. and that means using it.
user3939382|2 years ago
mtlynch|2 years ago
rideontime|2 years ago
dragonfax|2 years ago