Another side effect: the wealth will be concentrated in rich tax-avoiding corporations and elites, meaning that the tax burden for society will fall even harder on the remaining middle and working classes, who will have to pay for the upkeep of everything.
And yet another side effect, the one that I believe trumps them all: a loss of meaning.
If somebody with zero skill in the arts can produce output of similar quality as a craftsman and about a thousand times faster, what is the point of art anymore? Sure, one can enjoy the very act of creating art, but we can't deny that art has value in relation to an audience, and is also a display of skill and a source of pride.
What if AI generates the perfect music just for you, based on your taste? Here we lose any and all social/cultural aspects of music. There's no point in discussing music as we have no shared experience. There's no point in emphasizing your favorite song because everybody exclusively listens to favorite songs.
What if you need to write a long essay and use AI to help write it. I receive it and use AI to summarize it. Other than this interaction being supremely depressing, what is the point of it at all? Just submit it to the big machine and perhaps some of it will show up in my use of ChatGPT-17.
So you were faster to write something whilst I was faster to consume it. This allows the both of us to do more in a single day. This "big win" won't gives us back free time nor raise our wages though. I just means that the nature of the work is for us to take the job of being guard rails for AI, a soul crushing job in itself but also temporary, until the rails are no longer needed.
>If somebody with zero skill in the arts can produce output of similar quality as a craftsman and about a thousand times faster, what is the point of art anymore?
I like to think "AI" will make art better reflect its real value, devoid of the tangential flat costs associated with housing, clothing, and feeding humans in the process of producing art.
The consumers at large demand driving down the cost for consuming and enjoying art, and raise hellfire if there is so much as a suggestion of raising that cost. Remember how much controversy there was and still is about raising the standard price of video games from $60 USD to $70 USD? And that $60 USD today is pennies compared to $60 back in, say, 1995.
If the consumers at large demand the cost of art to go down and "AI" will make the process of producing that art better reflect that real value, isn't this overall a good thing insofar as making the price tag more clear and agreeable and closing down sweatshops?
AI can probably replace Katy Perry, but could AI generated music ever replace Rancid or Junior Kimbrough or Fela Kuti? I don’t think so personally. I think truly human music will continue to stand apart.
I do agree with you in large part. I think I’m just slightly more optimistic that people who are driven to create will continue to do so and that people who really want real and human experiences and interactions will be able to find them with effort. Probably not anywhere on the mainstream internet though. Maybe even only in person.
Ever is a strong word. I shouldn’t rule out a future like that. But I don’t see the through line from our current ai to one that has entirely supplanted all human creation.
That consideration seems more along the lines of worrying about the eventual need to escape earth than a future on a closer horizon worth worrying about.
I’m more concerned about how every facet of our children’s lives will become inundated with shoddy ai being used to extract maximum profits at the cost of any humanness, and the death of all genuine communication on the internet.
AI has, in a few short years, gone from hardly being able to string words together, to writing coherent grammatical sentences, to being more proficient than an untrained human in many cases. ChatGPT is way better at writing poems than me, for example. Its style transfer capabilities are out of this world.
Thinking that the progression is going to slow down is just wishful thinking.
It is more visible with image synthesis. Sure, the style can be freely switched in a few seconds, fitting compositions from trained concepts is very impressive.
But there still is no real creativity. No emerging concepts aside from complete accidents that cannot be replicated again. The same is true for the other direction with models like Clip could create an interpretation of generated images. It is impressive, but there are still clear limitations. You cannot expect linear growth here, it could be that the current AI approaches are wrong, we hit a plateau and need fully new approaches for significant improvements. What we now have is insane amount of data and more powerful hardware, it could be that we have years of iterative and slow improvement while people fine tune their models.
I think LLM have the same problem overall, it is just more difficult to notice.
