alt textThe simple answers to the questions that get asked about every new technology:

Will [blank] make us all geniuses? No
Will [blank] make us all morons? No
Will [blank] destroy whole industries? Yes
Will [blank] make us more empathetic? No
Will [blank] make us less caring? No
Will teens use [blank] for sex? Yes
Were they going to have sex anyway? Yes
Will [blank] destroy music? No
Will [blank] destroy art? No
But can't we go back to a time when- No
Will [blank] bring about world peace? No
Will [blank] cause widespread alienation by creating a world of empty experiences? We were already alienated

The simple answers to the questions that get asked about every new technology:

Will [blank] make us all geniuses? No
Will [blank] make us all morons? No
Will [blank] destroy whole industries? Yes
Will [blank] make us more empathetic? No
Will [blank] make us less caring? No
Will teens use [blank] for sex? Yes
Were they going to have sex anyway? Yes
Will [blank] destroy music? No
Will [blank] destroy art? No
But can't we go back to a time when- No
Will [blank] bring about world peace? No
Will [blank] cause widespread alienation by creating a world of empty experiences? We were already alienated
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[–] 103 points 3 months ago (31 children)

A few of those answers need to be reevaluated for "AI"...

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  • [–] 81 points 3 months ago (15 children)

    Yeah, the problem with this comic is that it somewhat minimizes how <technology> can exacerbate the ongoing problems.

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  • [–] 40 points 3 months ago* (14 children)

    Yep, this comic did not age well. This technology literally targets artists. That's pretty new.

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  • [–] 57 points 3 months ago (12 children)

    But it will not destroy art or music.

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  • [–] 22 points 3 months ago (9 children)

    Man I really hope so. But the vast majority of people consume mass produced formulaic media already, I don't see AI helping that trend.

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  • [–] 39 points 3 months ago (5 children)

    No amount of people doing that will ever destroy art or music, the only thing that can is reducing artists living conditions enough to where they can't make art.

    commercial incentives already ruined art if you're worried about this ruining art.

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  • [–] 4 points 3 months ago (3 children)

    But now Spotify and co have a financial incentive to generate as much slop as possible and to push it to their users aggressively. Why? Well cause if their users only listen to slop, they won't have to pay any actual artists anymore. So you know it's guaranteed to happen. This is capitalism after all.

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  • [–] -3 points 3 months ago

    I know artists who use AI to help them design something, but then they go out and actually manifest the physical thing…be it a mural or a sculpture or a tattoo. So no, it likely won’t harm the artists who can use it to their advantage, not for a long time.

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  • [–] 6 points 3 months ago

    Isn't that literally the last line, but for art? The average person gave very little fucks about "art" before AI, and most art happened for purely base reasons, like marketing or porn. Fancy shmancy art will continue to exist.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 months ago

    Art is a fundamental human drive. In fact, not even human - neanderthals also made art. The fact that we can make cool looking pictures really easily with a computer will no more destroy art than photography did.

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  • [–] 7 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    Often times I see people discuss art and music, and I wonder if they see creative literature as art, or if it's forgotten.

    I mention this because AI has been devastating on the literature world.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago

    This brought to mind a 2012 interview with Eric Wolpaw, writer of Valve games and Psychonauts:

    Interviewer: "People take for granted that writing is easy. It’s not."

    Erik Wolpaw: "Yeah. Everybody can write. I mean, you’re a writer. But everybody thinks that they can, because everybody can to a certain extent."

    I think of writing as a form of art, but it's not the first thing that comes to mind when I hear the word.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago

    Don't worry, artists were already destroyed. Pop music destroyed music, visual artists destroyed themselves .

    Tech death musicians compose pieces on the level of Bach and have to have day jobs, museums have blank canvases and bananas taped to walls.

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  • [–] [S] 35 points 3 months ago* (4 children)

    i still think it holds up tbqh, ai exacerbates and concentrates many problems but it doesn't really create new ones. content farm slop existed before ai, it's just easier to make now. people who use ai for everything already didn't give a shit about most things. people are still making awesome music and art. there are still many smart, talented people and there still will be. and we were already alienated.

    as always, the problem is capitalism

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  • [–] 10 points 3 months ago

    Well, the new problems are the scale of things. For example if humanity had only burned a small amount of oil each year, earth would have been pretty alright, at least until the heat death of the sun. But we started burning way too much and fucked. Same here, a few people being able to create slop kinda just self regulated, but now all of humanity can do it for free and it’s incredibly destructive.

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  • [–] 6 points 3 months ago (2 children)

    Blaming capitalism is a cop out at this point. You can't just ignore some very specific problems about a very specific technology then gesture wildly at the world and be like, "if only we didn't have the entire system set up the way we do, if only we had a perfect economy".

    Good and bad things can still happen in capitalism. You can't just throw up your hands and say "capitalism" when rat poison ends up in baby food. Regulation can still exist in capitalism and has a proven track record to work. You don't have to replace the entirety of your economic system to prevent AI data centers from being built.

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  • [–] [S] 10 points 3 months ago

    You don’t have to replace the entirety of your economic system to prevent AI data centers from being built.

    obviously not, and i support people who stop them. but even there, ai isn't exceptional. streaming services like youtube or netflix, or massive online games, also consume a ton of electricity and have polluting datacenters, datacenters used for ai aren't fundamentally different from datacenters used for something else, and yet people only build movements against them when it's ai. don't get me wrong it's good that we're educating people on the harms caused by datacenters. and it's good that many of these projects are being canceled. but datacenters are a problem exacerbated by ai, not created by it.

    and you're right that a communist economy would not inherently fix this. maybe there would be less datacenters overall because people (and their governments) would prioritize the health of communities over chatbots, netflix and fortnite. but datacenters are not inherent to any economic model.

    for everything else tho?

    • deskilling by ai is a problem because it makes you dependent on an ai company for doing the skill you used to do. without capitalism, there wouldn't be an incentive to make you dependent on a product.
    • ai taking jobs is a problem because under capitalism, you need a job to live.
    • ai slop creations are a problem because they're low quality trash created not for their artistic merit, but for something else, like an ad, or pure revenue (like with content farms). without capitalism there would be no incentive to pump these out as much. people would probably still create them as art, but, whatever. shitty art exists and has always existed. same goes for code.
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  • [–] 17 points 3 months ago (9 children)

    Which? They all seem accurate

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  • [–] 8 points 3 months ago (8 children)

    There is already science that shows that people using llms makes them measurably worse, in an incredibly short amount of time, at tasks than they were before using llms.

    So, "will x make us all morons? No" actually has some peer reviewed work that seems to imply "possibly NOT 'no' "

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  • [–] 3 points 3 months ago

    Said "science" is a handful of cherrypicked studies that cannot reliably say such things. The US has been in a downward spiral of ignorance for a little while now. And if it is caused by anything, it's a combination of poor schooling, poor parenting, and social media.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    Google Maps also makes us bad at finding our way manually. Are we therefore a moron?

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago

    If you've offloaded your capacity to navigate, and are worse at navigating, then you're objectively worse at navigating, that's the reality.

    What are you offloading to ai? Are you worse at it now? Is it critical thinking? Then yes.

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  • [–] 0 points 3 months ago (4 children)

    Getting worse at tasks doesn't make you a moron. Are you a moron because you aren't as good at mental arithmetic as you were when you practiced it for school? No.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 months ago (3 children)

    "What should I do" and "what is 17+19" are fundamentally different questions.

    What cognitive deficiency makes one a moron? This is the question.

    If you believe there is nothing one could be deficient at that makes one a moron, then yes: no technology would make you a moron. You're starting from a position where there is no prerequisite to not be a moron. It's a tautology.

    If there is a nugget... some bare minimum of performance required to not be a moron... then you must consider if a technology is driving people to that state.

    I know morons.

    I know they exist. I know what they lack.

    I know why AI excites them. It provides a leveling mechanic that allows them to put up a facade of competence. I have no frame of reference to viscerally comprehend the excitement of being able to cosplay as a competent person. It must be the most exciting thing in the world.

    For everyone else who alreadyhad two brain cells to rub together, it's a Tuesday.

    Synthesizing direction from inputs is intelligence. Deriving future inputs from observed data is a calculator. They couldn't be more different. It's obscene delusion to suggest they're the same let alone similar

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  • [–] 0 points 3 months ago (2 children)

    AI making you a moron requires not only that using AI degrades your faculties to such an extent that you become one, but that "all of us" (let's say, the majority of people in rich countries) use it so much it has that effect.

    I'm sure it will have some effect on the unexpected portions of one's brain, but still doubt the first part is true, as do I doubt the second.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago (1 child)

    "All" is obviously a step too far. I can give you that. I think it's an overly literal way to interpret the spirit of the statement, as essentially nothing afflicts "All", making the statement pretty much universally worthless. But it's still a good faith argument on your end I think, so ok.

    I think it will make most people more moronic. How many people it pushes over the line? Couldn't say... but anecdotally a lot of people I interact with before have been pushed over the line already.

    In my experience, there seems to be a correlation to how close to that line people are and how excited they are about LLMs. A few major exceptions. Possibly bimodal distribution? I dunno.

    If it were refrained as "will x make a terrifyingly shit ton of people morons? So much so that societal organization will be measurably harmed?" Maybe it'd be easier.

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