Three thoughts on AI

[minoanmiss]

"machine learning" is an infinitely more accurate term. The goddamn computers are not thinking, ffs. We humans are so weird (or maybe this is just the peoples whose writings I've read) -- we anthropomorphize all sorts of things while dehumanizing actual humans. It's a pity that crap like ChatGPT has given projects like recognizing cancer in imaging a bad name.

That said... sometimes when I'm making a Thing I think "I can't wait for this to be done. I am tired and don't want to Make anymore, I want to have Made the Thing." but nowadays anything I want to draw I could summarize and input into an AI art creator. I would far rather draw it myself. I have a new appreciation for the process.

And THAT said... Now I have to tell AI art from human art with my poor defective eyesight?! WTFF.

Comments

[lunabee34]

I think AI images are harder to distinguish than AI prose.

[cmcmck]

I do some AI art as you know but I always admit that that is what it is!

On the other hand, my poetry is all mine!

[sabotabby]

I was thinking that the thing I want AI for is to go through all my years and years of photos and organize them into easily searchable folders with tags. It's not worth draining a lake for though. And of course they are only designing it to put already underpaid writers and artists out of work, not anything that would actually be useful.

[magid]

^This!

[dissectionist]

As someone in medical care, I am both thrilled by the advances in AI (one of which my own lab will be launching soon) and despairing of the ways in which AI is making it harder on both professors and students. We’re very explicit that any AI-generated submissions as applicant cover letters will receive a rejection, and yet I’d say a good 50% of our applicants now do it anyway. The frustrating thing is that their desire to save five minutes writing us a cover letter blows their own chances of getting into the lab, and they’re cheating themselves out of the skills of how to write cover letters and everything they would have learned working with us.

[full_metal_ox]

Not to mention the corrupting risk of students learning by osmosis to write like ChatGPT.

[amaebi]

*shudder*

Students trying to sound fancy is already enough of a plague upon the earth.

[full_metal_ox]

This sort of thing?

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DelusionsOfEloquence

[amaebi]

'zackly.

[amaebi]

Agreed about "machine learning."

Even with that, confusion seems pretty inevitable in the US, where people tend to think of human education as any or all of the accumulation of status points, the memorization of facts to hurl at people, or the acquisition of very specific skills in demand by the employers of that moment.

We are a culture deeply opposed to thinking.

[minoanmiss]

We Americans really do devalue complex thinking. I wonder if it's the glamorization of "Quick shots" and other split second decision making? Everything is supposed to be easy and quick to decide and only bad actors claim complexity.

[full_metal_ox]

I feel sorry for artists who’ve labored long and hard—be it by digital or manual means—to create popular subjects like Gothic fantasy landscapes, airbrushed saucer-eyed balloon-boobed anime girls, or dragon-riding warriors toting swords bigger than themselves—only to have viewers reflexively sneer, “I call AI.”