capitalism is the reason why AI is doing art
Capitalism is the reason why AI doing art is a problem.
I like washing my dishes and do the laundry (but not washing clothes by hand, that we left for good). I feel like some manual labor each day leaves a breathing room for my mind when I don’t scroll or consume content or work with my mind exhausted and occupied. It reminds me of how Don Carleone liked his garden work in the book. Just a simple labor with evident results.
The problem here that I see is that people who are the most influential and interested in these AIs most, like Muskie or Altman, never did their dishes or clothes, so this labor doesn’t exist for them. Their impotency to feel, to create art, to write, to make jokes is what makes them create an AI for these tasks and since they can’t tell good from bad there, they are happy with them. We don’t have a soulless AI, we have an AI created for these soul-lacking suits who’ve never done their dishes or joked at themselves.
That’s not an informed opinion, just a funny thought I had from this post <3
Keep talking like that and they’re going to take your asshole certificate away.
They can try.
I have an unused piece of land where I wish to grow cucumbers next spring and try fertilization with billionaires to compare it to other plots.
I think they’d give me other worthy naming ideas as their legs get sucked up in the grinder.
I like washing my dishes and do the laundry (but not washing clothes by hand, that we left for good). I feel like some manual labor each day leaves a breathing room for my mind when I don’t scroll or consume content or work with my mind exhausted and occupied. It reminds me of how Don Carleone liked his garden work in the book. Just a simple labor with evident results.
I think the point is that folks of a certain age have seen time and again how instead of tech advances “making our lives easier” they are instead used to increase expectations of “productivity”. Here, the path we’re on doesn’t lead to more time to create art (or to choose what “simple labor” you might find fulfilling as a hobby), it leads to expectations to produce more for the 1% with the same amount of time we had before, or excuses about how an overworked department doesn’t need to be expanded since there’s AI now, or etc etc.
I cannot overstate how much I want a robot butler to take my dirty dishes and fill and start my dishwasher for me. Or just wash the dishes “by hand”. It’s not that filling the dishwasher takes a long time, but it’s just boring work.
I just can’t fold laundry. Everything else I’m fine.
leave me alone and let me try to learn how to play a dobro
TL;DR:
The misuse of technology in capitalism threatens jobs and financial stability. Affordable robots and AI could either enhance our lives or lead to unemployment and misery. Proposals like an automation tax could fund education or basic income. We need good legislation to ensure technology benefits everyone, not just profits. Recent steps like Europe’s AI act offer a little hope, but a lot more political action is urgently needed.Long Version:
From my perspective, the core of the problem is not the technology, but the reckless way we use it in our capitalistic system. Or let’s say, let it be used.For example, a light load robotic industrial arm costs merely 1k to 5k € nowadays. The software for it is cheap as well.
What the business owners and managers see, is not an awesome new invention which could help to propel humanity into the future of a robotic utopia, but cheap labour force, aiding them to cut jobs in order to maximize their profit margin as human labour is expensive.I am sure AI and robots are our future, one way or another, whether we want it or not.
But I would like to see a future where AI and robots help us to increase our quality of life, instead of making us unemployed and endagering our financial survival.There are various ideas how this could be achieved. I don’t intend to go way too in-depth here, so just as an example:
an automation tax: estimate to which amount a business can be automated and then demand a tax proportional to how much the business was automated. Such a tax could then be used to finance higher education for people or a universal basic income. Maybe at first just an income for those who can’t get a decent job due to automation.We had similar developments as those we see now with virtually all technological advances, where human labour was replaced by more and more clever machines. Jobs where lost due to that but it could still be seen as a good thing in general.
An important difference is the level of required skills though. Someone who’s job it was to go around a street and light gas lanterns every day, extinguishing them some time afterwards, was replaced by electric light grids. A switchboard operator at a telephone company, who connected people manually, got replaced by clever hardware. And so on. Those people didn’t require high skills for their job though. They had it a bit easier to find another one.
This becomes increasingly difficult as AI and technology in general advances. Recently we see how robots and AI are capabable of tasks where higher skills are necessary. And it’s probable that this trend will incresingly continue. At some point, we will have AI developing new and better AI. An explosion of artificial intelligence can then be expected.
It’s less a problem as long as people have job prospects in higher skilled work levels. But that will, for a while at least, not be the case. This has different reasons:
As I see it, we have a “work pyramid”, where the levels of the pyramid represent the required skills and the width of the pyramid levels represent the amount of available jobs. In other words, there is a way higher demand for low skilled work than for high skilled work. (BTW, what I mean by work skill is the level of specialisation and proficiency, often connected to more intense and long training and education.)
As recent developments in AI now slowly creep into higher and higher levels, people may start investing in their own education in order to even get a job. But higher skilled work is less available making it increasingly tight and problematic to get one.
There may of course also be an effect observable where new jobs are created by enabling more even higher skilled jobs due to the aid of AI, but I think this has limitations. On the one hand, the amount of jobs created that way might be insufficient. On the other hand, people might not want to or can’t get an education for that.
The latter needs to be emphasized from my perspective. There are a lot of people who simply don’t want to study for a decade in order to get a PhD in something so that they can get some highly specialised job. Some people like the more simple jobs, those requiring more manual than cognitive labour. And that’s totally fine. People should be happy and like the work they do.
Currently, not all people even have access to that kind of education. Be it due to limitations in available places at universities / colleges, or due to financial reasons or even due to physical or mental health reasons.
You may now understand, why I see that we are going to create more misery if we don’t change the way we handle such things.
I would like to see humanity in that robotic utopia. No one needs to work, as most work is done by AI and robots. But everyone can get a fair share and live a happy life however they would like to live it. They can work, take up some interest and pursue it, but no one needs to.
But currently, this is probably not going to happen. We need good legislation, need to create a system where advancements in AI and robotics can be made without driving people into financial ruin. We need to set those guarding rails which help to guide us towards such a robotic utopia.
That’s why I am advocating for putting this topic higher on political priority lists. Politics worldwide don’t have it even set on their agenda. They are missing crucial time frames. And I really hope they’ll wake up from that slumber and start working on it. I’ve got some hope. Europe recently passed their first AI act.
It’s a start.Sincerely,
A roboticist working in AI and robot research.
There are roughly two possible outcomes of automation in general:
- The utopical one is that as the robots, AI and so on, do more and more of the work, people in general get more free time: i.e. the productivity gains of automation are distributed and benefit people in general.
- The dystopical one is that automation just leads to fewer jobs and more people suffering because they can’t afford a roof over their heads or food on their plates: i.e. the productivity gains of automation are kept by the people who own most assets, including the machines that do the automation, hence most people will just lose their livelihoods
For all we’ve seen so far, in the current political and economic system we have - were the gains of work (be it automated or not) mainly end in the hands of asset owners (and, remember asset ownership, which is a curve that pretty much follows the wealth one, is incredibly unequal) - we’re well on the dystopia track.
I don’t think this is at all something that can be solved from the side of Technology, nor do I think that the consequences of natural improvement in automation technology being dystopia are the responsability of the Techies, though I would not at all be surprised if the Techies are, along with other groups (for example, immigrants), be made scapegoats by the people who made automation productivity increases lead to dystopia rather than utopia.
A roboticist working in AI and robot research.
Thank you for representing your field better than the other guy in this discussion. This gives me some hope that there are folks involved who can see the forest for the trees.
Affordable robots and AI could either enhance our lives or lead to unemployment and misery.
See also Mashall Brain’s “Manna”
Yes but the artbro luddites will not read this. They are narcissists who are upset that some kid with a computer in Argentina can now generate anime titties instead of paying $300 for them to draw it and they are fighting the realization of how bullshit their industry was from the get-go
I don’t think I could agree with this more if I tried.
Robotics researchers agree but they can’t get it to work yet. Simple tasks as cleaning tables, loading dishwasher and folding laundry have been tried for the last two decades with very limited success. The ones that do succeed are usually tele-operated for a demo.
Not to mention if it does happen and it does make it to consumers these robots will be insanely expensive to make and maintain. People going “why doesn’t AI just work on physical labor?!” can’t seem to understand that software is a million times easier and cheaper to make
It’s not like scientists woke up one day and said DAMN we need to make robots take away fun jobs ans nothing else. It’s just where machine learning took us.
I don’t mind AI being able to do all 4, and humans can use the AI tools to create their own art, or do it without them if they want. But I definitely agree I want manul labour done by robots.
Side note: has this woman never heard of a dishwasher? Minimal manual labour required.
My dishwasher has remote start functionality if I download the app. But what I really need is remote-load functionality.
Honest question: what is the upside of having a remote start functionality on a dishwasher? You have to load the dishwasher before starting, so you need to be at home anyway and it’s not like you have to schedule your dishwasher to finish right when you’re coming home from work or something. I can’t see the benefit.
The benefit is that the dishwasher can be labeled as “smart”, be more expensive and can track your activity through the app. Oh, and don’t forget about more points of failure and security issues!
Sorry for being bitter, I’m in the process of a kitchen upgrade and find I’m frustrated by the options I have
The dishwasher came with the house, I didn’t choose it, but I searched it up at the time. Apparently some people will put in the detergent in the morning, and everyone loads their dishes in all day, then you can start it from bed at night so it’s clean in the morning.
Apparently another benefit of WiFi connectivity is that you can get a notification when it’s done.
Personally I’ve never connected it as the benefits don’t seem to outweigh the spying.
Dishwasher requires less labour yes. But would be nice with zero labour though.
AI tools to create their »own« art
I use AI tools to repair audio. Where’s the line between me doing it and computers doing it?
are you using your own knowledge to guide the tool or are you just letting the tool appropriate someone else’s work?
If you’re asking this question you don’t know how most AI audio repair tools work.
if you’re deflecting like this, it means you do …
Yes I do.
Example: noise removal. Noise removal tools identify unwanted frequencies and remove them while preserving wanted ones. This is not stolen audio work from others. No audio is introduced.
Do you know of any decent guides for getting started please? I’ve got a load of cassettes from the 90s that I want to fix, and trying to do it manually is slooooowww 😩
What exactly are you trying to do with them? I’d say let me know what you’re currently doing and what you’re trying to achieve. Very happy to help! I actually just finished a pretty huge digitizing project with VHS, DV, and 8mm cassette so this is all very fresh currently lol
Sorry, I missed your reply.
I’m mostly just trying to clean them up. They’re old tapes, so they’ve started to degrade. They have that wavy sort of sound, as if they’re playing back at an uneven speed. They’ve also got random noise in places, so instead of being able to record a sample of noise and remove it from the whole track, I’ve got to do it manually for sections of the recording.
Apart from the wavy sound it’s all straightforward enough, just time consuming
Yeah those are pretty complicated issues. Is it all spoken word? I have a few ideas that might be useful and, more importantly, sweeping/not manual lol. And don’t worry about the delay in the reply!
If you’re comfortable, you could send me a 60s sample that you feel is somewhat representative and I can try one or two things and then show you what I did. There are some pretty amazing automated, straightforward tools that can do a lot in certain situations. Depending on the specifics we may be able to pull off some serious improvements for you.
Thank you :)
These are all music. My father was given a lot of demo tapes when he ran a pub, and I’ve ended up with them. I thought it would be a nice project to digitise and restore them, then send a copy to the bands. I won’t be able to send a clip for the next day or two though.
Sorry, I missed your reply.
I’m mostly just trying to clean them up. They’re old tapes, so they’ve started to degrade. They have that wavy sort of sound, as if they’re playing back at an uneven speed. They’ve also got random noise in places, so instead of being able to record a sample of noise and remove it from the whole track, I’ve got to do it manually for sections of the recording.
Apart from the wavy sound it’s all straightforward enough, just time consuming
AI tools to create art to be exclusively consumed by AI tools? I approve.
There are plenty of places without a dishwasher, I just moved from an apartment that didn’t have one. Hand washing was a very time consuming chore and we only barely escaped the poverty trap so buying one was out of the question, and if we did, it would be a small portable one because it was just an apartment. I’m not adding value for free to the landlord charging double what would have been barely reasonable in a non-enshittified society.
AI doesn’t make you art, it makes art for other people, based on yours
It makes media. And it makes it very quickly and cheaply. Who cares if it’s any good? We can substitute quality for quantity when we no longer have to even pretend to cover cost of living of artists.
Then, once we no longer need all these surplus humans, we can put AI to its real job. See: Israeli’s Lavender Program
But it’s got such a nice name! How could that be?!?!
Curious if they used the name because it’s a common ingredient in soaps.
You know to do a little ethnic cleansing.
Or, how you say…genocide.
I want AI (well, a robotic helper) for laundry and housework. Technically I’ve already got a dishwasher which is close enough there.
I’d love to have AI help me with making art just like other tools, but not take over it
Yes but you see the billionaires who own everything want the AI to make all the art and writing so they don’t have to pay you and so they can keep all the money they (not you) make off of art and writing.
Damn straight
Laundry and dishes are much harder than Art.
And we had washing machines for years…
For a LLM? That statement might be true. For a Human? It’s absolutely not.
Laundy and dishes require precision, art doesn’t.
Broh wat
If the problem was anything, it would not be precision for an ai. Just let them try it enough times, and they’ll be precise at basically anything.
The problem would be creating an AI based machine that could actually do those tasks better than the machines we have that already do them.
While I’m not exactly a fan of AI, it does make sense that the first things we’re able to replicate with AI, however terribly, are intellectual things like art and writing. While AI might be able to understand how to wash dishes, it would need a way of interacting with the physical dishes to do so, which goes beyond something a computer program can do while confined to a computer.
I wouldn’t be surprised if future dishwashers and washing machines end up having little cameras and sensors so that AI can determine how best to wash them, but if anything that feature would be implemented more for collecting your private information than for any real washing benefit. Plus you’d still have to load and unload the machines - if we wanted AI to handle everything, we’d need robots, which would be waaaay more expensive, and likely something only the richest would be able to afford anyway.
Wake me up when we actually have AI. Hyper-complicated games of mad-libs is not AI.
Hi I’m here to wake you up and point you in the direction of AI integration in adobe premiere and Da Vinci resolve lol
And?
Techbrodudes do techbrodude. Loads of shitty features have gone into software over the ages. (Like the move to web apps over native, say.) The fact that techbrodudes are chasing after the latest piece of shit tech means nothing.
It’s not tech bro dudes in production making this work. My entire editing workflow has been wildly altered, especially audio work. I am actually very critical of LLM‘s and the way AI is developing, but when it comes to video and audio editing? It’s a completely different discussion. You wouldn’t believe what is being a accomplished right now
AI transcription alone has been a wonderful way to become more ADA (and equivalent) compliant for smaller operations.
Abso-fucking-lutely!
I mean I certainly agreed with the sentiment, but this is largely describing dishwashers, washing machines, and dryers, which were invented some time ago.
Part of the reason these take time is that a lot of folks are resource conscious (as am I). So we want the dishwasher to be efficiently loaded, the clothes to be dried on a clothesline if possible, the white/colors to be separated (increasea the longevity of the clothes), etc. Sacrificing all of these things makes these chores really very quii, if you can afford to have them all in your home.
And in fact, the cost of these things is relatively low — in my high COL area, it’s not that people can’t afford these things, it’s that they can’t afford a place big enough to accommodate them. Which is its own issue altogether…
Too bad tech businesses don’t give a fig about what you want.
