Can I ask you something, since you seem to know a lot about ai, I wanna say, since im an artist and writer myself, I just don't get the arguments against it in an art capacity. I don't think it's a perfect technology, far from it. it should be more heavily regulated and companies should take more responsibility for the consequences of their technology. just from an artist pov myself, I don't agree with a lot of the anti-arguments because they seem so contradictory when compared to other similar things people are ok with. I try to look at the arguments objectively but I really just do not get it and I've really tried to listen to people's perspectives and have a respectful debate, but whenever ive tried or seen other try to have a conversation (from both sides) it only ever ends in insults or, concerningly enough, often threats.
Sure, happy to give you my thoughts!! If we're talking about AI in the arts, as I think you are above, then here's my longwinded spiel lol.
Obviously no conversation on AI should begin without considering its environmental impacts. AI models require massive infrastructure & an insane amount of advanced networking hardware in order to make them functional. Specifically, AI requires a highly specialized type of processor designed for large scale parallel computing (GPUs or TPUs) that are working constantly. These generate a SHIT TON of heat which require a SHIT TON of water to cool, often relying on millions of gallons of freshwater diverted from surrounding environments for evaporative cooling. Many data centers housing all this infrastructure are also often built in resource-constrained areas experiencing water scarcity or drought, putting further hardship on the populations that live there. I've seen estimates forecasting that AI-related water consumption could equal the basic annual domestic needs of 1.3 billion people by 2030, and that's already a finite resource making it to too few people on this earth.
That's also not to mention that these data centers consume massive amounts of electricity, which strains the power grid and often impacts power quality for nearby communities. This also raises household electricity rates and accelerates fossil fuel emissions.
So right off the bat, anything you're doing with AI needs to be counterbalanced against such a heavy cost to resource-strained local populations, finite resources like water & fossil fuels, & the environmental changes such usage will inevitably inflict. I would argue that there is veeery little that is worth this strain, but assuming we decide okay, it's worth the cost, then we get into how these AI models are trained.
To simplify how AI is trained: it's basically a super huge statistical model, which is fed millions or billions of pieces of data and taught to identify patterns & come up with predictions without direct programming. Direct programming here meaning a human specifying what it should do in every single scenario, because no human could possibly think of all things someone could ask an AI nor could they ever determine all the possible right outputs to give.
But no one human can just sit and generate billions of example books, songs, images, tweets, blog posts, videos, etc to give to this AI. Even an entire team of hundreds of people working their entire lives would never be able to come up with all this data for an AI to consume. So where do these AI models get their data from, then?
Most modern AI foundation models are built using the Common Crawl dataset. This dataset was built by using a massive web scraper which, again to simplify, went around and yoinked content off of millions of web pages. The problem with this, is that it went and did this against the direct terms of service of soooo many of these websites, including stealing content from behind paywalls or from sites where authors of the content must give express permission for this content to be utilized.
To use an example grounded in our fanfic community, under the Archive of Our Own (AO3) Terms of Service, all fic authors on the site retain full ownership and copyright of content you publish to the site, including your fanfic and original fic (that's right, not even the creators of the original work on which you based your fanfic are allowed to use your work for anything!!) Their Terms of Service also expressly prohibit using the site or content hosted within for commercial activity, including specifically web scraping for generative AI model training.
However, Common Crawl has indeed scraped AO3, and you can literally view AO3-exclusive fics when you search inside that dataset.
So all these AI models are pretty illegally using content they are prohibited from accessing in the first place. Meaning that these AI models are ostensibly using works that you or I, as members of the fanfic community, have published and own and did not give our consent for, as part of the foundation for its own work. And while the AI model is generalizing across millions of these stolen pieces of data and you may not see your personal style or content recognizably ripped off (yet) the fact remains that it's straight up illegal by any stretch of the imagination to have trained on this content in the first place.
But say you don't care about environmental impacts or stolen data, then we come to my last major thought about AI as applied to art.
Why The F Do We Care About It
This point depends more on your personal taste and preferences, but I find I generally align with the common refrain: "Why should I bother to read something someone else couldn't be bothered to write?"
Personally, I am already a hater of the white-washed, committee-developed, exec-aligned, and advertiser-approved slop we're being fed from all corners of the "art" world today. And that's when it's human written in the first place, just filtered through all these parameters designed to whittle it down into its most predictable, most squeaky-clean form possible.
For example, I remember seeing a quote from Dakota Johnson on the trainwreck that was Madame Web's critical reception: “There’s this thing that happens now where a lot of creative decisions are made by committee. Or made by people who don’t have a creative bone in their body. And it’s really hard to make art that way. Or to make something entertaining that way."
She goes on to say that studios think audiences are stupid enough to eat stuff like this up. The implication being that people are happy to see the same predictable plot, cliched characterization, & practiced dialogue they have seen a million times after its been run through a gauntlet of executives for their stamp of corporate approval. But judging from the million recent think pieces on Marvel's significant decline in quality and audience enthusiasm, people aren't buying it so much anymore.
And to me, AI content is very much a Marvel parallel, except without even the sop of human involvement. It's generalized across much more than a committee; it’s generalized over all its millions of pieces of data, meaning it finds the most statistically likely possibility to return you when you ask for something, and this stems from whatever is most common in its dataset. Then that content is further subjected to whatever optimization rules and political guardrails the owning company has slapped on top of it like "no dark content; not even a hit of conflict" or "always sound agreeable and receptive", until the output it gives you is the most trite, predictable, sanitized stuff you have ever seen.
I personally do not find this output very compelling, and I wonder at the idea that anyone is going to enjoy AI-generated content for very long. We are already living through what feels like a vacuum of creativity thanks to the corporate white-washing of every scrap of content ever, and AI just redoubles that feeling by generating more of it!
I want to see human ideas, more diversity and creativity in the content that we're given. I think a lot of people are beginning to feel similar fatigue with the same old and are looking for something fresher feeling too.
But this point is different for everyone; I'm sure there are Marvel fans reading this who are like HEY!! >:( and who vehemently disagree because the content is familiar and fun to them!! And maybe AI output is interesting to you and maybe it will stay that way for a while, because you don't mind a heavily pattern-based spot of content!
But I do very much think if you consume enough of it over time it's going eventually to feel too formulaic and uninspired to you. And I also think at that point, it's not going to be worth the data theft and environmental impacts it relies on to exist.
To me, it's already not worth that.
Anywayyy there are a bunch more thoughts I have on AI applications outside of the creative fields, but for now these are my primary thoughts as constrained to AI applications to art. Sorry this was so long winded lol but hopefully these were useful points to think on!!
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