But in reality it seems like the opposite is going to be true. AI is automating the creative, intellectual work and leaving the rest to us.
As of now, the models still need large amounts of human produced creative works for training. So you can imagine a story set in a world where large swathes of humanity are regulated to being basically gig workers for some quadrillion dollar AI megacorp where they sit around and wait to be prompted by the AI. "Draw a purple cat with pink stripes and a top hat" and then millions of freelance artists around the world start drawing a stupid picture of a cat because the model determined that it had insufficient training data to produce high quality results for the given prompt. And that's how everyone lives their lives....just working to feed the model but everything consumed is generated by the model. It's rather dystopian.
I've been trying to figure out how to retool the story to fit a timeline where ubiquitous AI that can write poems and paint pictures predates ubiquitous self-driving cars.
That will likely always be the case. Even 100% synthetic data has to come from somewhere. Great synopsis! Working for hire to feed a machine that regurgitates variations of the missing data sounds dystopian. But here we are, almost there.
1. Interacting with the randomness of the world
and
2. Thinking a lot, going in loops and thought loops and seeing what they discover.
I don't expect them to need humans forever.
Hallucinations are highly creative as well. But unless the technology changes, large language models will need human-made training substrate data for a long time to operate.
In general though, I don't think the extra reasoning ability is going to enable it to displace that much farther than it already will, GPT lives in a box and responds to prompts. When it's connected to multiple layers of real-time sensor data and self-directing, that'll be another story.
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/openai-shifts-ai-bat...
There were independent efforts to create AI agents since last year as well. AutoGPT and BabyAGI iirc. They didn’t go far probably because the LLM used was not good enough for that.
Indeed, there is a risk it completely devalues creative jobs. That's ironic. Even if you can still use AI creatively, it removes the pleasure of creating. Prompting feels like filling Excel sheets while also feeding a pachinko machine.
It's already very tempting for large entertainment businesses to create lazy remakes as it involves less risk. Automating creative jobs will create a shift at the production level but also on the receiving end: the public.
> We’re teaching AI to understand and simulate the physical world in motion, with the goal of training models that help people solve problems that require real-world interaction.
Text-to-video is just the flashy demo that everyone can understand after exposure to text-to-image. Once the model can "simulate the physical world in motion" it's only a few steps away from generic robotic control software that can automate a ton of processes that were impossible before.
Humans still have the benefit of dexterity and precise muscle control but in the vast majority of cases robots can overcome those limitations with better control software and specialized robotic end effectors. This won't soon replace someone crawling under a house or welding in awkward positions, but it could for example replace someone who flips burgers or does manual labwork.
This could eliminate the limiting factor for automating many manual processes. (ruh-roh)
If you use Sora like models to imagine what actions needed to be taken, then realize it, well, the only thing left is to create an arm/fingers that can took action, then you are done.
Less glibly, no matter how good you are at following instructions, tearing out a wall filled with water than can destroy your home, fiberglass insulation that can damage your lungs and electrical wiring that can kill you will never be something I’d recommend a layman do. No matter how good the ai tutorials are.
AI is cheaper than a high paid designer, developer, writer, etc.
A robot is more expensive than a human laborer.
It's really funny to see the squirm from those thinking truckers would be automated away, not them.
Not when intelligence is cheap and highly abundant. Perfecting general robotics as an improvement on humans will be quick. The upper limit of strength and consistency is much higher.
It is currently more expensive to build a robot for many tasks than it is to have a human do it.
> Perfecting general robotics as an improvement on humans will be quick.
It has not been nor is there any indication it will be.
Same with robotics. Lots of potential, but hasn't happened yet. If you read the description, Sora, is based out of trying to simulate the physical world to solve physics based problems. Something that would be perfect for the next leap in robotics.
There's no physical task that robots have replaced humans for me.
Hell, even the roomba sucks (pun intended) and my wife has to pick up the slack.
Yes that’s my whole point…
I claim that the first part is the more difficult one and where we have the bottleneck currently. Furthermore, generative video AI is exactly the kind of thing that would give a model an understanding of what kinds of things have to happen in order to make coffee.
The rest of us have no choice. Despite millions of artists, animators, etc. all being resoundly opposed to AI art, the models that infringe their work are still allowed to exist, and it seems they're fighting a losing battle.
A lot of people are being "hysterical" because a lot of people don't have a choice.
To be clear, the problem of these scenarios is tightly intertwined with the problem of unfettered capitalism and wealth inequality in general. Food and shelter require money, and we get money by working a job. If millions of jobs disappear overnight, then of course millions of people are going to be distressed over no longer having ready access to food and shelter.
The idea of "just getting another job" doesn't scale to the destruction of entire industries employing tens of millions of people. This is how depressions are made.
The idea of "the depression will end someday" is not only not necessarily true as wealth inequality skyrockets, but is also cold comfort to the people who will lose their houses and for some, lives, due to the disruption.
A different economic system could perhaps allow us to appreciate these technological advances without worrying about them displacing our ability to live. But the American political system consistently and firmly rejects any ideas not rooted in social darwinist capitalism.
For your sake, I hope your resume is very impressive.
"Companies employing people" will be replaced by "people employing AI". Open models are free, small, fast, trainable and easy to use. They capture 90% of the value at 10% the cost, and are private.
What we're looking at is a massive decrease in the relative economic value of the average human's work. If the economic value of a hundred people is less than what the company can produce with a single human operator running AI models, then those 100 people are economically worthless, and don't get to eat.
We drastically need to tax the usage of AI models on the huge windfall they're about to create for their operators, and use that to fund universal basic income for those displaced. Generally speaking, as automation and wealth disparity skyrocket, UBI will be required to maintain any semblance of the society we currently have. I am incredibly pessimistic about the chances of that happening in any real way though.
Unfortunately, LLMs aren't intelligent in any way, so you cannot ask them to synthesize any kind of second-order knowledge.
This is why they won't take away the creative work, either. They are fundamentally incapable of creating anything new.
Fully-functional autonomous driving will have a much larger economic impact - and that's just the first area where autonomous robots will come into our lives.
The quickest way to address this would be an extremely high tax rate on any generative AI model, say 500%, while the government figures out what’s the best way to sustain an economy (such as UBI) with a diminishing set of consumers as more people are pushed towards unemployment.
How are you going to stop me from doing that?
Even the free and open source stuff will destroy industries and you can't confiscate everyone's consumer gamer PCs.
Taxing the big guys doesn't save creative industries. It's a lost cause.
The only thing I can imagine is like limiting people’s compute power
But even then they’d just go do it in another country or use an online service based in another country
There isn't a way to "capture" the value from that.
Even if you aren't directly selling AI assets to someone else, people simply using AI themselves will still destroy industries.
Good luck confiscating everyone's graphics cards. The cat is is out of the box already.
> the tax would be levied on you
No it wouldn't. AI is already everywhere. Its game over. You aren't going to be able to track basically anyone who is using local models or other AI.
Can see this create an explosion of new Content from aspiring Film, Story tellers and cut scenes from Game creators that previously never would have the budget or capabilities to be able to see their ideas through to creation.
This is not plunder, it is empowerment. Blocking generative AI would be a huge power grab for copyright owners. They want to claim ideas and styles, and all their possible combinations.
Gen AI need only ensure it never reproduces a copyrighted work verbatim. Culture doesn't work if we stop ideas from moving freely.
Another issue to look at is the lack of ownership of the tools of your trade. In a context where many use AI models to competitively produce, hosts of AI models essentially own the access to your trade - thereby able to charge a toll, or privilege certain behaviors for any who strive to make living with these tools. (of course this is happening now with plenty of software products). The ultimate trajectory of this is not democratization of a toolset, but a transfer of wealth from labor to capital. And keep in mind that the labor share of income has been steadily declining for half a century.
The creation of wealth from AI ultimately depends on the strength of democratic and pluralistic institutions that safeguard ownership of your trade, democratized access to capital, and safeguards of welfare in the environment of creative destrcution. Otherwise you wind up with the cotton gin.
Yeah, this is why "AI creators" shouldn't be the ones unilaterally deciding how this all plays out.
Go blame your fellow consumers if you don't like the fact that they prefer AI.
These are choices that everyone makes. AI companies alone aren't forcing everyone to use their cool new tools. Instead, thats a decision that 10s of millions of people are making every day.
The call for live music drastically shrank when it became trivial for any business or residence to play music on command.
Are you against automatic language translation? I can positively guarantee that the training data that they used to be able to create significantly better translation models was not authorized for that purpose.
The entire translator industry has been steadily shrinking ever since the invention of automatic language translation.
Etc etc etc.
There's obviously two aspects of this complex social issue right now.
1. Whether or not the usage of publicly available media as training data is legal/ethical.
2. Whether or not the output of these types of generative systems (even if they're trained on "ethical" training data) which may result in the displacement of many jobs is legal/ethical.
I'm neither for nor against AI (LLM, diffusion, video, etc), but if you are going to take a stance, then you have to be consistent in your view.
You don't get to cherry pick - I don't want to see you using chatGPT, copilot, stable diffusion, DALL-E, midjourney, sora, etc.
Means for us :(
I love tech, but if you take the stance that it's okay to hurt people for the sake of technical progress, you get into some very dark and terrible places...
Hurt is a very subjective word in this context, how many people do you think the invention of the steam engine hurt? Or the electricity?
The upside is that creative works are completely democratized.
Now, anyone, with very little effort is fully empowered to create creative works on their own and there is no barrier to entry.
Yes, empowerment and democratization harms people who's livelyhood depends on disenfranchisement.
That's a strawman. The real view is that protecting jobs that are made extinct by technology and automation is historically a bad idea because it leads to stagnation and poverty. It's better to let people lose their jobs, and for those people to find other jobs, while supporting them with a social safety net while they make the transition. Painful for them but unfortunately very necessary for a prosperous society.
This is the part that no one is expecting to see actually happen, though. Without that addressed, your argument is sound but footless.
What no one is asking is: 'it this makes it easy for anyone to be an artist, a director, a musician... what are we going to get, and will it be worse than what we have now?
Everyone is asking this.
But that's also not the only question. The one you're ignoring here is: If these tools enable one artist to do the work of a hundred, what happens to the other 99?
AI boosters have no good answer to this question. Given the intimate involvement some of them have with politics at the national and global level, this absence constitutes reasonable grounds for suspicion that no answer is intended or forthcoming, and that suspicion is what's asking here to be addressed.
Not really -- as people have gotten more efficient at their jobs, we tend to just produce more/better things, not impoverish a bunch of people. If one person can day (8 hours) making a shoe by hand, and one person can make a shoe in an hour using a shoe making machine, then we don't have one less shoe maker, we have two people making 16 shoes a day. As an effect, shoes are now much cheaper, so they aren't only worn by rich people. If the one-shoe-per-day maker refuses to use a shoe making machine, he or she can upsell their 'hand crafted' shoes to rich people who want to distinguish themselves.
Believe me, I am not a 'free market fixes everything' person, at all, but in these cases, that is how it has worked since the industrial revolution. This is not a new process (automation making a task much more accessible/efficient) and this is not a new complaint (what happens to the people who made a living doing task).
Change is scary -- and everyone has the right to be afraid of an uncertain future, but I can't recall an instance of the regressive approach actually working to allay the fears of those who imposed it. Yet, we all see huge reminders of how our lives have been improved by making hard things easier and accessible to more people.
It would not surprise me if anyone called this pollyannaish, or even Panglossian.
Did anyone get harmed when photography was used to supplant portraits? Did anyone get harmed when mail started getting sent by rail instead of horse? Did anyone get harmed when air travel became possible? Did anyone get harmed when we supplied electric power to homes?
I have an idea -- why don't you propose a solution to AI ruining creative jobs and we can apply that standard to it.
Of course you may respond that this is unrealistic, which it is; it requires a government capable of acting via regulation in defense of its citizens, and so nothing like it will be done.
I still prefer it to your argument, which is that those crushed in the gears of "creative destruction" should be delighted to suffer and die in the name of someone else's unaccountable conception of Progress.
Maybe mass unemployment will create a sea change in that mentality, but most of the people who's opinions need to be changed will probably just laugh at "the elites" getting screwed over.
The current batch of LLMs is in the same class of technological revolutions as Napster and The Pirate Bay. Immensely impactful, sure, but mostly because of theft of value from elsewhere.
The factories that replaced the artisans were only made possible by the work of the artisans forging the way.
AI is nothing like anything we’ve seen, and is truly unique in the dangers it poses to the world.
The question here is really about whether it's sufficiently transformative, or whether that's even the right standard to be applied to generated media.
You can deliver more content, faster, cheaper.
This is how technology works in general and should not be vilified. Someone comes up with a better way to do things (in this case bringing creative ideas to life) and charges a premium on top of that for their efforts. If the current wave of creators doesn't like it, then they should instead make something people want more than what their competition has to offer.
Either way, this is why local open source models are critical, so that everyone can benefit without needing to pay any single party.
IP law has yet to decide whether my interpretation of the situation is correct in the legal sense, but I find it impossible to see "ChatGPT absorbs the work of writers/journalists and sells a superficially reworded version without attribution or compensation" as anything but theft obfuscated behind lots of fancy math. It's only going to get worse if LLMs end up displacing traditional search engines, so one day you'll publish an article and get exactly one impression from GPTBot which then turns around and figuratively copies your homework.
This is an extremely different difference of scale, which does constitute a meaningful difference from prior technologies.
This is not to dismiss the concern. I simply wanted to state that artists will find ways to keep moving the creative bar forward.
[0] I really like this turn of phrase, thank you for sharing it.
That's not what extortion is. Stop abusing language.
(as pointed out in the "Freakonomics" episode highlighting this reaserch)
https://direct.mit.edu/rest/article-abstract/102/3/583/96779...
Training a massive model like this is a risk, and no one is going to take that risk without some reward. You can complain OpenAI is going to too much of the value, but its value that would have otherwise never existed. It's value.
South Korea had a high % of broadband penetration earlier than many Western countries, and as a result physical CD sales crashed very hard, and very quickly. So he asked himself, what's the most analog good I could sell? It's people. And went the pop idol / personality marketing route with great and lasting success.
Nonsense. Also, my point is that it shouldn't be up to tech companies to unilaterally decide what has value.
It's been this way for 10,000 years since the invention of the wheel. New inventions change how things are valued by making it easier for people do more work with less time.
Instead it is up to the consumers.
If consumers choose to give money to AI company, and not to artists, then in the eyes of the consumer those artists do not have value.
Nope, we are headed towards deflation. Families that need only a single worker to support everyone, and even support extended family, and less time working overall.
Who's "you"?
Automate away the lower classes all you want, just don't touch the white collar class, that's a heckin' nono.
That's one big trick, almost magical.
There is no stop now. It's too late for that. Time to think about the full development and how we'll handle that. How we as people will be able to exist next to it. What our purpose in the world is supposed to be. What the purpose of "value" is. What the purpose of "economy" or "the market" is.
Exiting times.
capture the value of every piece of media ever created
Copyright should have ended decades ago. It has accomplished nothing but harm.
Oh man, how I miss it when ice was hauled from the Arctic in boats.
What OpenAI does is amazing, but they obviously cannot be allowed to capture the value of every piece of media ever created — it'll both tank the economy and basically halt all new creation if everything you create will be immediately financially weaponized against you, if everything you create goes immediately into the Machine that can spit out a billion variations, flood the market, and give you nothing in return.
It's the same complaint people have had with Google Search pushed to its logical conclusion: anything you create will be anonymized and absorbed. You put in the effort and money, OpenAI gets the reward.
Again, I like OpenAI overall. But everyone's got to be brought to the table on this somehow. I wish our government would be capable of giving realistic guidance and regulation on this.