Comment on OpenAI says it’s “impossible” to create useful AI models without copyrighted material
frog@beehaw.org 5 months agoIt seems that most of the people who think what humans and AIs do is the same thing are not actually creatives themselves. Their level of understanding of what it takes to draw goes no further than “well anyone can draw, children do it all the time”. They have the same respect for writing, of course, equating the ability to string words together to write an email, with the process it takes to write a brilliant novel or script. They don’t get it, and to an extent, that’s fine - not everybody needs to understand everything. But they should at least have the decency to listen to the people that do get it.
intensely_human@lemm.ee 5 months ago
Well, that’s not me. I’m a creative, and I see deep parallels between how LLMs work and how my own mind works.
frog@beehaw.org 5 months ago
Either you’re vastly overestimating the degree of understanding and insight AIs possess, or you’re vastly underestimating your own capabilities. :)
veloxization@yiffit.net 5 months ago
This whole AI craze has just shown me that people are losing faith in their own abilities and their ability to learn things. I’ve heard so many who use AI to generate “artwork” argue that they tried to do art “for years” without improving, and hence have come to conclusion that creativity is a talent that only some have, instead of a skill you can learn and hone. Just because they didn’t see results as fast as they’d have liked.
frog@beehaw.org 5 months ago
Very well said! Creativity is definitely a skill that requires work, and for which there are no short cuts. It seems to me that the vast majority of people using AI for artwork are just looking for a short cut, so they can get the results without having to work hard and practice. The one valid exception is when it’s used by disabled people who have physical limitations on what they can do, which is a point that’s brought up occasionally - and if that was the one and only use-case for these models, I think a lot of artists would actually be fine with that.
jarfil@beehaw.org 5 months ago
Alternatively, you might be vastly overestimating human “understanding and insight”, or how much of it is really needed to create stuff.
frog@beehaw.org 5 months ago
Average humans, sure, don’t have a lot of understanding and insight, and little is needed to be able to draw a doodle on some paper. But trained artists have a lot of it, because part of the process is learning to interpret artworks and work out why the artist used a particular composition or colour or object. To create really great art, you do actually need a lot of understanding and insight, because everything in your work will have been put their deliberately, not just to fill up space.
An AI doesn’t know why it’s put an apple on the table rather than an orange, it just does it because human artists have done it - it doesn’t know what apples mean on a semiotic level to the human artist or the humans that look at the painting. But humans do understand what apples represent - they may not pick up on it consciously, but somewhere in the backs of their minds, they’ll see an apple in a painting and it’ll make the painting mean something different than if the fruit had been an orange.