Pendell

this feel remarkably gross.

I am genuinely looking into buying a Pixel 8 Pro as my next phone, but I really hope I can sidestep touching any of the generative ML stuff they want to bake into it. I already don't let Google upload my photos anyways, and I don't think they're quite stupid enough to start permanently fucking with on-device photos just yet.

Of course, then there's the question of where the standard image processing and trickery done by smartphones anyways crosses into generative ML territory. When they start using ML to artificially increase the resolution of our pictures at the time of snapping the photo, will we even notice? Or perhaps they already do that. Maybe they've been doing that for years. There's levels to this stuff and complexity to the topic that's really annoying.

I just don't want Google to force me to use Bard OpenAI GPT ImageFuckoWucko DingleDongle SuperPhotoShlonger to turn a picture of my little sister into a dinosaur or some fucking stupid nonsense.

The difference is that when humans take existing things and remix them to attempt a new thing, it usually looks good but makes a lot of stupid and terrible people mad. When AI does it, it looks terrible and makes a lot of stupid and terrible people happy.

Bad Art (whatever the fuck that means) is allowed to exist. Someone's shitty drawing is still art even if it's not objectively "good".

'AI' systems might get better (or already are) at making art that looks "good" but they still will be unethical because of the way they're built and why they exist in the first place. Most of those tools aren't built in a "let's help artists be more efficient" mindset but in a "you won't need to pay an artist anymore, instead pay us 20 bucks a month so we can use our model built with stolen work".

That's the issue.

i think it's also important to realize that AI basically only learns from being given more data, it can only learn from its own results if a human is hand tweaking it, and if you feed it back its own work unfiltered it's just like feeding an animal its own shit. it's totally valid to produce bad art for its own sake, but often the point of making bad art is to get better at making art with practice. AIs do not experience practice like we do.

Predictive Algorithms (as we should be calling them as they are not even approximating any sort of Intelligence) do not learn, they do not study, they cannot absorb lessons about the structure and form of art let alone approach the spark of humanity that brings art to life.

All Predictive Algorithms do is predict. They take an input and produce an output, like any computer program. It's just that the input is as much human creativity as you can possibly scrape together, through legal or illegal means, and the output is something that through sheer statistical probability kind of resembles the stuff that you put in.

Predictive Algorithms only "improve" over time because the humans developing them give them more and more data with more and more precise tagging and metadata, and tune the prompt system to draw from more of the correct specific input data.

These systems are the computerized implementation of the Infinite Monkey Theorem, that a monkey allowed to mash random keys on a typewriter an infinite number of times will eventually clack out the complete works of Shakespeare. The theory is a satirical observation on how with a large enough dataset you can generate just about any statistical anomaly as easily as anything else. That's Predictive Algorithms. They have no soul, simply a typewriter mashing random keys an effectively infinite number of times in seconds.