Comment on I get it, but you're both part of a bigger problem.

• kibiz0r@midwest.social ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  If you dislike vapid slop that’s designed to maximize adherence to opaque and fickle metrics, you might wanna reconsider whether gen AI is fine and unrelated to the problem.

  We’re seeing the genesis of the information equivalent of Kessler Syndrome here. Toxic promotion algorithms are quaint, comparatively.

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  • Hackworth@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    So I’ve been producing video professionally for ~25 years, and judicious use of gen ai allows me to do some things that I wouldn’t have the time/resources to do otherwise. As a simple example, Premiere’s generative extend will add a few seconds to the end of (basically) any video clip (basically) seamlessly. Often that’s all the pad I need to improve a cut. The alternatives (re-shoots) are expensive, time-consuming, and approved on a need basis.

    Many of the same concerns about the market being flooded with low quality content were raised with the advent of video and again with digital video and again with HD video. The barrier to entry for film is high; for video, it’s virtually non-existent. But I don’t think anyone would claim today that video was a bad idea. AI is in some ways the same kind of democratization of production technology.

    I’d be remiss if I didn’t address the ways in which it’s not similar. We can set up a completely automated workflow right now that will quickly generate YouTube “content” and probably make a profit. We could do this before gen AI, but not with such hallucinatory gusto. YouTube is currently being flooded with this crap. But just like people left Twitter (or reddit) when it became overrun by bots, people aren’t going to stick around for your platform full of AI content (at least not until it’s much better).

    The IP side of this is mostly funny to me. They’re already talking about a “post-plagiarism” world in academia. I don’t see how copyright survives gen AI at all long-term, frankly. As an artist who saw his first published feature film on pirate bay the same day - it just doesn’t bother me. I’ve only ever really gotten paid to do specific work for a client. I don’t expect to get paid for things I make to express myself artistically.

    But I hate that I’m shackled to Adobe for a variety of other reasons, and if someone has a good suggestion for an open source alternative to After Effects, I’m all ears.

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    • kibiz0r@midwest.social ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      I can understand that take, but to me the more relevant comparison is the fossil fuel boom.

      Like the advent of more powerful creative tools (camera, printing press, etc.), fossil fuels allowed us to do what we were already doing but faster.

      Unlike a camera, though… Coal, oil, and gen AI all have to pull raw material from somewhere in order to operate, and produce undesired byproducts as a result of their operation.

      In the early days of fossil fuel, it must been impossible to even conceive the thought that there might be limits to how much we could safely extract raw materials or dump hazardous residual crud.

      From one person’s perspective, the world seems so impossibly large. But it turns out, there are limits, and we were already well on our way to exceeding them by the time we realized our predicament.

      I think we’re sprinting towards discovering similar constraints for our information systems.

      It won’t be exactly the same, and much like climate change I don’t think there will be a specific minute of a specific day where everything turns to shit.

      But I think there are instructive similarities:

      • The most harmful kinds of gen AI, as with fossil fuels, will have the highest ROI.
      • There will be safe, responsible ways to use it, but it will be difficult to regulate from the top down and full of perverse incentives to cheat from the bottom up.
      • It will probably continue to accelerate even as the problems become more noticeable and disruptive.
      • It will be next to impossible to undo the damage at a significant scale.

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      • Hackworth@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        Oh, I was really just focusing on video production and entertainment in the next few years. If we’re talking AI’s influence on the information landscape as a whole and humanity in general: I think we’ve discovered how to make a spark- maybe how to gather kindling. We’ll have this fire thing figured out soon, and then who knows what happens. I have no doubt that too much is going to get burned as we learn the dangers and limits of the flame. But civilization awaits us if we survive. I dunno what that means for this technology. Like really, I can imagine so many seemingly equally plausible 2050s that I can’t plant a flag in one. From utopian to dystopian to down right mediocre, I wouldn’t know where to place a bet.

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