Random AI Thoughts/Rants

Random Non-Original AI Thoughts/Rants

- Is ethical AI possible? Maybe you opt-in your work as training data and get paid a fraction of user subscriptions proportional to how much your work influences output. This will of course never happen for many reasons, least of which is that almost no one cares to work on introspecting what neural nets are actually doing despite this being crucial for safety.

- Dunno if a white hat version of these things could succeed. Too much of the core tech is out there already and it's too easy to reverse engineer successful models. The Disneys of the world will eventually be able to quash any white hats using their IP. Bad actors can always scrape everything anyways, so seems like there will be 10 black hats for every white. Basically, this will always be evil.

- One stumbling block for LLMs is that they will be used to generate a huge amount of bullshit: astroturfing, SEO pages, spam, fake news, and so on which will create a feedback loop where models become less reliable over time as they ingest their own misinformation. Maybe a premium walled garden dataset will emerge, and this might be how people can get paid. Likely much worse than the already brutal creative industry though.

- Given that all this stuff is just totally inert without a useful dataset, another side-effect could be that the internet will be a lot less open. Massive reductions in open source, free podcasts or articles, streaming music, webcomics or art blogs, etc. The incentive for creators will be to make bespoke things and get paid up front (see next point about fine art).

- All forms of commercial and/or "pop art" will be diminished, and concept art could disappear entirely. Commercial art will probably increasingly resemble the world of fine art, based on a sort of purism wherein a very small handful of people still get to live the dream as full-time "bespoke, non-AI" creators because their brand is strong. This sucks.

- Live music is probably safe for a long time, but computer music and workaday composers will probably get burned pretty soon...not that writing jingles was ever a super desirable creative position, but still a bummer for those people who now have to take a worse gig. Re: fine art again, this is actually a win for the classical world (and they needed one).

- The people already working in these aspirational jobs who are gleeful about this seem absolutely insane to me. I expect it's a combination of hype mixed with failure of imagination around longterm-ism. Doesn't seem that big a leap to me to automate the prompt piece of it either after you collect enough input/output mappings. These people say, "let's enjoy the ride to hell because maybe we'll end up in heaven at the end". Alternative proposal: we just like, stop actively descending to hell.

- Let's grant for a moment that it actually would be worthwhile to automate all of these aspirational jobs, e.g. that way, more people have more creative power and so on. And let's even grant that automating away the human input is impossible for some reason. As a society, there is a graceful way to move through a mass-replacement like this and an absolutely brutal one. Given the current parameters, I think we all know which is most likely. There is effectively a 0% chance this could be done right in the US at least.

- The best steelman I can do for generative AI is something like the democratization of creative ability: "Why should programmers and top artists deny me this tech while they get compensated a ton for basically sitting on a laptop all day. Meanwhile, I have to go work a depressing, difficult, and unsatisfying job. Isn't this just a bunch of selfish, rich (relatively) people defending the status quo that enables their cushy lifestyle?". I am sympathetic to this view because it illustrates a major problem with capitalism: there are certain jobs that the market values, many of which are frankly not that hard, where you are massively compensated (plus high quality of life and satisfaction) relative to your effort. The issue here is that generative AI will do nothing to equalize these positions in society because we are still fully enmeshed in capitalism. Legislators are and will always be massively behind the curve on these issues. The net result is that we will simply move all of the value and profit from the creative laptop class to the VC capitalist class; blue collar people aren't going to see a single cent.

- The idea that some blue-collar person will now be free to harness these tools, finally realize their creative idea, and profit from it is insane. No one will pay for it! If literally anyone can make a thing with low effort, why would they pay for it? Why would I buy your AI artwork when I can just copy your prompt? Infinity and zero are like two sides of the same coin: if you have infinite money, the money is worthless! Ok, so yeah, in the near term while prompting and organizing all of the resulting output still requires effort, some new people will be empowered...but it's shortsighted to imagine it will stay this way forever. The degree to which using these tools requires skill and effort is the inverse of the democratization effect...at best you're just shifting the talent burden to a different skillset, at worst a task is trivially easy and can no longer be a thing you pay for. Either these AI platforms all have a natural ceiling and will fail for whatever reason, or they will eventually succeed in effectively deleting every aspirational creative career while consolidating all of that value and wealth for themselves.

- This is a problem with or without AI, and I personally don't think a software engineer deserves to earn a huge salary compared to e.g. a garbage collector. If being a garbage collector paid double my current salary, I think I would still rather be in software because the lifestyle is more comfortable (although as a wannabe creator, needing a day job for half as many years has a certain appeal). Even if you worked super hard and ethically created a thing that gives billions of people value (and note that you can't take credit for your capacity for hard work or aptitude), do you then in turn deserve to be a billionaire? Does Einstein deserve a billion dollars for having been born Einstein? I think the next Einstein deserves to have enough money to comfortably keep making the next valuable thing at the appropriate scale, but that's probably on the order of millions or tens of millions at a maximum. I would like to raise the floor and dramatically lower the ceiling, and I wish compensation could be more reflective of the amount and difficulty (i.e. how much it sucks to have to do it) of the work.

- When anyone can do a task trivially, no one can do it for a living. If everyone can trivially generate whatever stunning artwork, then it is no longer possible to make artwork by hand and have [enough people to pay you a living wage] care about it. You will always be able to make work for yourself, but I'm not embarrassed to say that we are losing something valuable here by removing the external validation piece of making things, which is a large part of what makes it meaningful. There is a reason playing with cheat codes is quickly boring (and conversely, that tedious MMOs can be fun). Do we really want the prospect of attaining one of these aspirational careers to be made as vanishingly rare as becoming a movie star? Precisely the other way around, right? Fundamentally this is kind of a conservative argument in the literal sense, but automating away fulfilling tasks that give people purpose might actually be a net negative for human happiness. There is more to life than the raw output; we need a blend of consequentialism and deontology.

- If the great AI replacement happened tomorrow, would I stop making stuff? Not entirely of course, but I can say with full certainty that my interest would drop from 20-30 hours a week to around 6. I probably wouldn't bother with art or games at all and stick entirely to music. And as a result of now now long being able to imagine and pursue a career that I want would be so crushing. This is basically all I've wanted to do since childhood, I have other marketable skills but they are uninteresting to me as a source of meaning.

- As a result of above, I expect the amount of escapist media where you pretend to be a farmer or craftsperson to proliferate like crazy; we will further romanticize any lifestyle where one's work has a straight-forward impact on one's survival. This is cool because Master and Commander 2 will finally be made...by AI.

- I think this will (eventually) be disastrous for indie games. Something like mobile F2P, or games streaming services (the destruction is still in-progress on that last one). A critical mass of developers will adopt these tools as they creates a short-term advantage over their competitors...then everyone is forced to come along until we arrive in the future where no one can get paid except the platforms. You can't put the toothpaste back in the tube, dudes.

- Insane to me how short people's memory is here. Like, we used to willingly pay the equivalent of $40 in today's money for a CD in the 90's. For consumers the current model is incredible, but trying survive as a recording artist has got to be that much worse. There are loads of things that are better about making music today, but the loss of perceived value from everyone getting used to free can't ever really be repaired (sincerest apologies to vinyl).