this post was submitted on 12 Apr 2025
29 points (91.4% liked)
Ask Lemmygrad
946 readers
17 users here now
A place to ask questions of Lemmygrad's best and brightest
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
The messaging from the anti-generative-AI people is very confused and self-contradictory. They have legitimate concerns, but when the people who say "AI art is trash, it's not even art" also say "AI art is stealing our jobs"...what?
I think the "AI art is trash" part is wrong. And it's just a matter of time before its shortcomings (aesthetic consistency, ability to express complexity etc) are overcome.
The push against developing the technology is misdirected effort, as it always is with liberals. It's just delaying the inevitable. Collective effort should be aimed at affecting who has control of the technology, so that the bourgeoisie can't use it to impoverish artists even more than they already have. But that understanding is never going to take root in the West because the working class there have been generationally groomed by their bourgeois masters to be slave-brained forever losers.
It can be frustrating sometimes. I've encountered people online before who I otherwise respected in their takes on things and then they would go viciously anti-AI in a very simplistic way and, having followed the subject in a lot of detail, engaging directly with services that use AI and people who use those services, and trying to discern what makes sense as a stance to have and why, it would feel very shallow and knee-jerk to me. I saw for example how with one AI service, Replika, there were on the one hand people whose lives were changed for the better by it and on the other hand people whose lives were thrown for a loop (understatement of the century) when the company acted duplicitously and started filtering their model in a hamfisted way that made it act differently and reject people over things like a roleplayed hug. There's more to that story, some of which I don't remember in as much detail now because it happened over a year ago (maybe over two years ago? has it been that long?). But point is, I have seen directly people talk of how AI made a difference for them in some way. I've also seen people hurt by it, usually as an indirect result of a company's poor handling of it as a service.
So there are the fears that surround it and then there is what is happening in the day to day, and those two things aren't always the same. Part of the problem is the techbro hype can be so viciously pro-AI that it comes across as nothing more than a big scam, like NFTs. And people are not wrong to think the hype is overblown. They are not wrong to understand that AI is not a magic tool that is going to gain self-awareness and save us from ourselves. But it does do something and that something isn't always a bad thing. And because it does do positive things for some people, some people are going to keep trying to use it, no matter how much it is stigmatized.
It's a disruptive new technology that disrupt an industry that already has trouble giving a living to people in the western world.
The reaction is warranted but it's now a fact of life. It just show how stupid our value system is and most liberal have trouble reconciling that their hardship is due to their value and economic system.
It's just another mean of automation and should be seized by the experts to gain more bargaining power, instead they fear it and bemoan reality.
So nothing new under the sun...
Yes, and the solution to the new trouble is exactly the same as the solution to the old trouble, but good luck trying to tell that to liberals when they have a new tree to bark up.
I tried but they are so far into thinking that communism does not work ...
it's basically this
I would argue that generated images that are indistinguishable from human art would require an AI use disclosure. The difference between computer-generated images and human art is that computers do not know why they draw what they draw. Meanwhile, every decision made by a human artist is intentional. There is where I draw the line. Computer-generated images don't have intricate meaning, human-created art often does.
I don't really see how a human curating an image generated by AI is fundamentally different from a photographer capturing an interesting scene. In both cases, the skill is in being able to identify an image that's interesting in some way. I see AI as simply a tool that an artist can use to convey meaning to others. Whether the image is generated by AI or any other method, what ultimately matters is that it conveys something to the viewer. If a particular image evokes an emotion or an idea, then I don't think it matters how it was produced. We also often don't know what the artist was thinking when they created an image, and often end up projecting our own ideas onto it that may have nothing to do with the original meaning the artist intended.
I'd further argue that the fact that it is very easy to produce a high fidelity images with AI makes it that much more difficult to actually make something that's genuinely interesting or appealing. When generative models first appeared, everybody was really impressed with being able to make good looking pictures from a prompt. Then people quickly got bored because all these images end up looking very generic. Now that the novelty is gone, it's actually tricky to make an AI generated image that isn't boring. It's kind of a similar phenomenon that we saw happen with computer game graphics. Up to a certain point people were impressed by graphics becoming more realistic, but eventually it just stopped being important.
Kind of unrelated but if you are to start to learn about AI today, how would you do it regarding helping with programming (generating images too as side objective) ?
Having checking the news for quite sometimes, I see AI is here to stay, not as something super amazing but a useful tool. So i guess it's time to adapt or be left behind.
For programming, I find DeepSeek works pretty well. You can kind of treat it like personalized StackOverflow. If you have a beefy enough machine you can run models locally. For text based LLMs, ollama is the easiest way to run them and you can connect a frontend to it, there even plugins for vscode like continue that can work with a local model. For image generation, stable-diffusion-webui is pretty straight forward, comfyui has a bit of a learning curve, but is far more flexible.
Thank you, I'll check them out.
the weird perspective in my work isn't an artistic choice, i just suck at perspective lol
Yes but you intentionally suck, otherwise you would just train for thousands more hours. Or be born with more talent. /s
Last I checked, Marxists are not opposed to automation and development of productive forces.