think I forgot this one
I’ve already seen people go absolutely fucking crazy with this - from people posting trans-supportive Muskrat pictures to people making fucked-up images with Nintendo/Disney characters, the utter lack of guardrails has led to predictable chaos.
Between the cost of running an LLM and the potential lawsuits this can unleash, part of me suspects this might end up being what ultimately does in Twitter.
lotta this is being used for blatantly political speech, really DIY editorial cartoons, e.g. the image we used
its eagerness to give you a school shooting, not so much
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It hasn’t been hashed out in court yet, but I suspect AI mickey will be considered copyright infringement, rather than public domain.
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You’re not wrong. Precisely how this AI debacle will strengthen copyright I don’t know, but I fully anticipate it will be strengthened.
I get why this is bad, but gimp is free for years and you can make whatever you want with it. Is it just that these AI programs need no skill at all? Where do you draw the line here?
why do I need to know where to “draw the line” when something clearly sucks shit?
> billionaire funds the mass production of vampires
> “look, people have been eating meat for ages. where do you draw the line? you can’t say this is bad unless you draw the line”
Is it just that these AI programs need no skill at all?
That’s a major reason. That Grok’s complete lack of guardrails is openly touted as a feature is another.
It’s also an accountability issue. If you create something in GIMP or whatever everyone agrees that you did that and are responsible for any copyright issues or defamation or whatever else arises from that work. That becomes fuzzier when people start saying “Grok made this!” Especially because Grok does operate according to a model that can and does go beyond whatever it’s been instructed to do, so you might be able to plausibly argue that if you craft the prompt right.
And I can guarantee that the cesspool formerly known as Twitter will try to play whichever side of that is more advantageous to them. Copyright infringement? That’s on the user. Unique IP? Well, Grok had a profound and independent creative role and so we deserve a piece.
I really wish we would stop calling shitty tech products (such as this) the invention of billionares like Elon Musk. He probably did jackshit during the development of this.
Musk is probably unique among Big Tech owners in that he’s using his product daily (most people think to the detriment of both Xshitter and his other ventures). He is definitely the person who both directed company resources to be devoted to a GenAI product, and ensured that it doesn’t have the “guardrails” his fans and himself decry as “woke”.
In other words, no other Big Tech CEO is dumb enough to give the OK to a product that trashes its reputation.
Elon musks underpaid some people to release _____
It’s using Flux which was developed by Black Forest Labs and is open source. Neither Elon nor twitter had any hand in its creation and simply use it on their site.
grok was also found to just be chat gpt with instructions to be ‘not woke’ and ‘funny’
i doubt x ai really does anything but they’re treated like an actual ai player for some reason
oh really? someone said it was an API call to somewhere else
I feel like generative AI is an indicator of a broader pattern of innovation in stagnation (shower thoughts here, I’m not bringing sources to this game).
I was just a little while ago wondering if there is an argument to be made that the innovations of the post-war period were far more radically and beneficially transformative to most people. Stuff like accessible dishwashers, home tools, better home refrigeration etc. I feel like now tech is just here to make things worse. I can’t think of any upcoming or recent home tech product that I’m remotely excited about.
A lot of the tech “innovation” is actually VC “innovation” and is meant to dismantle the safety nets of the working class. Literally half of their disruption is "we’ll finance you to lose money until you’ve ruined all competition, and then you can price gouge everyone while your “contractors” don’t get a decent salary, a retirement fund or any kind of insurance.
Most of the stuff these days is behind the scenes, like clean energy, innovative water reclamation, etc. it’s life changing but we don’t really see it every day.
In my opinion we should put cars away in urban areas and go to e-bikes/rickshaws. That would be both transformative and an improvement.
Also I think it’s more of a constant stream of small incremental changes. Things like GPS, the internet, lithium batteries, etc. They have all been things that are enabling a lot of other innovation, but have been rolled out more continously.
Just looking at battery tech, things like smart phones, drones, EVs all wouldn’t be possible without them and each of those have gone through massive innovations cycles themselves.
I think there’s definitely something to be said for the exhaustion of low-hanging fruit. Most of those big consumer innovations were either the application of novel physics or chemistry (refrigerants, synthetics, plastics, microwaves, etc) combined with automating very labor-intensive but relatively simple tasks (dish washing, laundry, manual screwdriving, etc). The digital age added some very powerful logic to that toolset, but still remains primarily limited to the kinds of activities and processes that can be defined algorithmically. The ingenuity of software developers along with the introduction of new tools and peripheral capabilities (printers, networks, sensors) have shown that the kind of problems that can be defined algorithmically is a much larger set than you would first think, but it’s still limited.
Adding on to this, it’s worth noting the degree to which defining problems algorithmically requires altering the parameters of that problem. For example, compare shopping at a store with using a vending machine. The vending machine dramatically changes the scope of the activity by limiting the variety of items you can get, only allowing one item per transaction, preventing you from examining the goods before purchasing, and so on. The high-level process is the same; I move from having no soda and some dollars to one soda and less dollars. But the changes that are made to ensure the procedure can be mechanized have some significant social tradeoffs. Each transaction has less friction, but also less potential. These consequences are even more pronounced if your point of comparison is an old-school sofa fountain where “hanging out waiting for the soda jerk and drinking together” is largely the whole point and while that activity requires more from you it also gives more opportunities to interact with and meet people and to see friends outside of work or school. Even if you don’t want to spend the time or be social (or even like me get severe social anxiety sometimes!) this still leads to a world where there are more and larger blocks of time that you can’t be expected to trade away to your job or other obligations. Your boss is likely to fire you for being late to work, unless that tardiness comes from the ferry you and your coworkers rely on being late. Because it’s inevitable friction in a necessary part of working (can’t work if you can’t get to work) and because it can’t be put entirely on the individual (even if you do want to blame the employee for taking the "wrong* boat so you really want to fire the whole team?) the system is basically forced to give you more grace than it otherwise would want to.
This is another way to frame the problems with more recent “innovations” - while social media and the gig economy both arguably empower individual consumers and producers of both cultural output and of services like taxis, they do so in ways that fundamentally change the relationship and individualize the connections between consumers, producers, and the system that they interact through. And because nobody has as direct a connection to the owners and operators of that system, they have more power to increase their profits at the expense of everyone who actually has to use the system to function.
There’s definitely something to this narrowing of opportunities idea. To frame it in a real bare bones way, it’s people that frame the world in simplistic terms and then assume that their framing is the complete picture (because they’re super clever of course). Then if they try to address the problem with a “solution”, they simply address their abstraction of it and if successful in the market, actually make the abstraction the dominant form of it. However all the things they disregarded are either lost, or still there and undermining their solution.
It’s like taking a 3D problem, only seeing in 2D, implementing a 2D solution and then being surprised that it doesn’t seem to do what it should, or being confused by all these unexpected effects that are coming from the 3rd dimension.
Your comment about giving more grace also reminds me of work out there from legal scholars who argued that algorithmically implemented law doesn’t work because the law itself is designed to have a degree of interpretation and slack to it that rarely translates well to an “if x then y” model.
I’ve thought about a similar idea before in the more minor context of stuff like note-taking apps – when you’re taking notes in a paper notebook, you can take notes in whatever format you want, you can add little pictures or diagrams or whatever, arranged however you want. Heck, you can write sheet music notation. When you’re taking notes in an app, you can basically just write paragraphs of text, or bullet points, and maybe add pictures in some limited predefined locations if you’re lucky.
Obviously you get some advantages in exchange for the restrictive format (you can sync/back up things to the internet! you can search through your notes! etc) but it’s by no means a strict upgrade, it’s more of a tradeoff with advantages and disadvantages. I think we tend to frame technological solutions like this as though they were strict upgrades, and often we aren’t so willing to look at what is being lost in the tradeoff.
That was exactly what Evernote promised to be, and it was to a point. Then it became about the money.
But yes, the book works everywhere (almost) doesn’t require a power source and in 150 years it’s components will not have degraded and it’s contents still readable. Unlike your iPad.
Not to detract from your point but people have been trying to create and market free-form note taking apps for ages… I believe the latest super-expensive iPads can do it wih the pen.
yeah, I was more thinking of like my phone’s notes app lol. Also, freeform computer note-taking requires weird hardware and can’t search the text of my notes, so, still a tradeoff…
I believe there are apps that can translate handwriting to normal text (doubt they would be able to deal wth mine…) but the time between them arriving around now and the demise of normal people taking notes on paper is too long. An entire generation has aged out of the habit.
(you do see people extol the virtues of specific German notebooks and Japanese fountain pen, but when I do, I cross the street to get away from them)
In reading about this I’ve seen some interesting concepts from scraping the edges of management cybernetics, focusing on organizations kind of like analogue information-processing systems. The one that really stuck in my mind is the accountability sink, am organizational function that takes the responsibility for some action or decision away from the people in the organization who actually do it and places it somewhere more abstract, like a process or a policy. This ties in to a lot of what we talk about here, since a lot of the tech industry these days seems to be about centralizing things around a few major platforms and giving the people who run those platforms as many accountability sinks as they can come up with, with AI being the newest.
Dan Davies continues to be awesome
oh yeah, it’s an idea void in material form
3D printers?
Airfriers?
We reinvented the easy bake oven and sold it to adults.
can confirm
Modern air friers are just convection ovens and those have been around commercially since the mid 40s. So… Even that’s not new.
… Nope. In fact one of my in-laws said that they’d buy us an air frier for Christmas once the sales came. Everyone forgot about it shortly after and I don’t care one bit.
(annoying air fryer owner voice) we have a 25 litre air fryer and it’s awesome, just a nice little countertop oven, and [METEOR FALLS ON LONDON]
[chimney sweeps start dancing]
Look what I didn’t make
What a surprise, I have that same photo! The one he wanted nobody to ever see anymore. Whoops, guess it’s on two servers now
Careful not to cut yourself on that edge Elon.
I’ll never not laugh at this.
I’m still waiting for even one argument for the usefulness of AI image generation that isn’t fucked up. Just one.
Grok seems so support nudity and deepfakes too according to some news articles I’ve seen because of course nothing screams more free speech than plastering the face of your favorite actor or political opponent into a porn scene, so now let’s see how long it takes the first bluecheck fucker to try and create CSAM with it, because I suppose that’ll be the point when it gets too hot even for Elon.
It’s pretty great for DnD. A lot of people have trouble imagining things in full detail from a text or spoken description, so being able to generate images of the scene, characters, objects etc is super fun and adds a lot of richness to the experience.
This is the best use I’ve found for it as well. Especially if I want to quickly create a unique token for an NPC.
Generally speaking I’ll commission actual artists for pictures of PCs, but for a named NPC sorcerer who’s just going to be in a handful of scenes? AI has been great.
I haven’t played DnD in decades, so I’m unfamiliar with the scene nowadays. How are these visuals presented for the players? Does everyone have a screen? Or this more for an online scenario?
In my specific case this is for a group that plays online. We use a virtual tabletop called FoundryVTT.
I play every week in person with a group of friends. But rather than playing with paper and pens and tabletop maps or whatever we use roll20 a free online DnD platform. It lets everyone see the map, characters, character sheets, notes, logs etc on a laptop or tablet. It’s a bit clunky at times, but generally speaking its great.
How would a random person on the Internet, with no previous experience or friends that play, join an online d&d game?
Roll20 actually has a list of public games on their platform looking for players. You could check out there.
Yeah absolutely. Of course the work of an actual artist will be better in almost every case. AI lacks consistency, it doesn’t always followed the prompt properly, it’s easily confused, geometry and anatomy are sometimes fucked up. But for a group of dirt poor students who just want to have a fun game to play on the weekends AI is good enough.
It’s also good for concepting an idea before commissioning a real artist.
as someone who only draws as a hobbyist, but who has taken commissions before, i think it would be very annoying to have a prospective client go “okay so here’s what i want you to draw” and then send over ai-generated stuff. if only because i know said client is setting their expectations for the hyper-processed, over-tuned look of the machine instead of what i actually draw
Would you rather have a dozen back and forth interactions?
Besides, this is something I’ve heard from other artists, so it’s very much a matter opinion.
The main opposition to ai images by artists is that it steals art from artists to make plagiarized versions, thereby taking away from paid work from those artists. If in the end, an artist is still being paid, what’s the difference between a commissioner handing a pile of reference sheets? Annoying, sure, but not immoral.
Would you rather have a dozen back and forth interactions?
these aren’t the only two possibilities. i’ve had some interactions where i got handed one ref sheet and a sentence description and the recipient was happy with the first sketch. i’ve had some where i got several pieces of references from different artists alongside paragraphs of descriptions, and there were still several dozen attempts. tossing in ai art just increases the volume, not the quality, of the interaction
Besides, this is something I’ve heard from other artists, so it’s very much a matter opinion.
i have interacted with hundreds of artists, and i have yet to meet an artist that does not, to at least some degree, have some kind of negative opinion on ai art, except those for whom image-generation models were their primary (or more commonly, only) tool for making art. so if there is such a group of artists that would be happy to be presented with ai art and asked to “make it like this”, i have yet to find them
Annoying, sure, but not immoral.
annoying me is immoral actually
have some kind of negative opinion on ai art,
An opinion is still an opinion no matter how widely held it is.
Also, I like how I’ve made a minor carve out for ai images as a tool with limited use, yet I still refuse to call it art. And then we have people who are attacking any use of ai images that are willing to call it “AI Art”…
annoying me is immoral actually
I believe that you believe that.
You trust modern reddit posts?
just fucking stop
it’s like you’re trying to convince me to bully you
Creativity is subjective. I’m talking about people who have trouble putting their ideas to words when working with an artist on a commission, not people who want an llm to do “their” rough draft.
I’m banking on the primary use case being “getting Elon sued into oblivion by Disney” .
…I mean yeah that’s a pretty obvious use case - if Elon’s given you a checkmark against your will, might as well use the benefits to cause him as much grief as possible.
(Also, loved your series on Devs - any idea when the final part’s gonna release? Seems its gotten hit with some major delays.)
Oh no, the dangers of having people read your work!
It is coming, potentially in the next week. I was on leave for a couple of weeks and since back I’ve been finishing up a paper with my colleague on Neoreaction and ideological alignment between disparate groups. We should be submitting to the journal very soon so then I can get back to finishing off this series.
oooh, please link in c/sneerclub when you can
Works great for generating mod assets, in my case making PBR textures for RTX remix. It’s a very niche use case though. It’s great though because I get high quality assets without relying on existing mods to do the same.
It’s great for making images to associate with language learning flashcards.
Integration with graphical design software for inpainting, outpainting, upscaling, etc.
Guess it’s appropriate that Musk should go from some sort of entrepreneurial tech guru who was going to save the planet to some right wing billionaire shitheel, steals “grok” from Heinlein, who went for sic-fi author darling to libertarian shitheel.
Musk appropriating “grok” from Stranger in a Strange Land is on-brand for him, seeing as he fundamentally misunderstands Banks’ Culture series and reduces it to “the one with the cool ship names”.
Edited for clarity
@gerikson @RememberTheApollo_
“Taking Tesla’s name is such an Edison move”I do chuckle a bit every time I see the logo. It really looks like an IUD.
@gerikson GSV The One With The Cool Ship Name is a vessel in The Culture though.
“Why did you choose that name, Mind?”
“Well you see I happened to catch this “TV” show on this backwater planet and it really stuck with me!”
<avatar turns out to be a copy of Jennifer Aniston>
@gerikson @RememberTheApollo_ As a member of The Affront, of course he would.
@gerikson @RememberTheApollo_ to be fair Heinlein had some fascist tendencies too even if Stranger In A Strange Land was just good (although I read it so long ago that I might have overlooked stuff)
@blikkie @gerikson @RememberTheApollo_ The bits about homosexuality haven’t aged very well and there’s a certain amount of “society shouldn’t inhibit hot young women’s natural desire to fuck curmudgeonly ageing authors”.
@chaucerburnt @gerikson @RememberTheApollo_ thanks. I read the book 20 years or so ago, so I don’t trust any memory I have of it.
@blikkie @gerikson @RememberTheApollo_ to be fair to RAH, it’s an ambitious book; he was trying to recognise and challenge society’s assumptions, including his own, and nobody is likely to do that flawlessly.
@blikkie @gerikson @RememberTheApollo_ One way to read Stranger in a Strange Land is what happens when our society is visited by a radical pacifist (who knows how to protect himself). Another way to read it is “our society is stupid and we know better how it should work”. I can see how Musk might be inclined to follow one of these interpretations over the other.
@gerikson @RememberTheApollo_ Wasn’t that word coinedby R.A.H.?
correct, see edit
@Cuprohastes @gerikson @cstross I’ve great that described as “Heinlein’s later, post-talented stage.”
I thought it was a Heinlein reference.
correct, see edit
@gerikson @RememberTheApollo_ he doesn’t grok it!
It’s the least of the things he appropriates. He also appropriates a chunk of the federal budget.
@RememberTheApollo_ @dgerard he was only ever cosplaying as an “entrepreneurial tech guru” though
Giving Elon an image generator is like giving a toddler a bucket of paint, both is guaranteed to mess up the house
Is that Play-Doh baby on the right supposed to be Vance?
I think that’s supposed to be Musk? Could be Vance
I’d love to abuse this, but I refuse to use Twitter
cursory reading seems to indicate this feature is for
Elon-pleasuring suckerspaying users anyway.
Finally you don’t even have to go off platform to post fake news on Twitter.
I’m glad the model doesn’t have heavy censorship applied like some of the others.
You just know that if Elon wasn’t trying to rehabilitate his whole “free speech” image, he’d have blocked anything that could criticize his views, while allowing everything that could criticize his opponents.
Nah, this is the kind of non-attack that Elon and friends are perfectly comfortable acknowledging. It helps their internal messaging at this point to have a public opposition who they can point to to say “these people hate you specifically and you should further consume our content and products to show them we mean business.”
Just as long as you don’t say the ‘c’ word.
😳
cisgender
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