AI PBs
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but that doesn’t mean we have to let tech companies run rampant either.
That’s a tricky phrase. I’m not sure the context you mean it in.
At this point it is highly unlikely, in any practical sense, that we can do anything about tech companies running rampant.
When has that ever happened before in any meaningful way?
and it’s not good for the world if artists have no incentive to share their art.
The artist issue is one that I have an unpopular opinion about, at least on this forum, but that statement is definitely a problematic opinion.
It suggests that the only, or main, incentive for creating art is financial gain. But there are many other reasons that art is created. The trope of the starving artist is a trope for a reason. Many artists do art just for art’s sake, even if there is no money in it, which, in most cases, there is not. Art for art’s sake is the motto of MGM Studios, despite the mountains of cash they make in entertainment. If you’re only creating art for financial incentive, you’re not being displaced by AI, you’re just competing with it in a market that’s historically been brutal for artists. It just means that your art has to be subjectively better than what AI can produce - by any possible metric. You have a soul. AI doesn’t. You can truly create. AI can’t. These are all the arguments made, but at the end of the day, does that make your art more marketable than AI art? If the reason you do art it is financial, you better hope so.
Is it easier to do art when you’re getting paid for it? Sure. But art is hardly the only medium that AI is taking over and I don’t know why it gets romanticized as a protected class that needs saving, exempt from the same pressures that affect every other job in a capitalist system. I’d love to game, or dance, or write all day instead of working a job, but there isn’t any money in it for 99.9% of people who can do it. So I don’t do it. The world I live in sets the reality I have to operate within. And AI is now part of the world that we live in.
But on the flip side, there are plenty of venues where computers are better but haven’t taken over. Computers can play chess and beat grand masters, but they haven’t stopped chess tournaments. AI can outplay most people in competitive video games, but e-sports hasn’t crumbled.
Again, the problem isn’t AI. The problem is people. When people value human work/creation/skill, there will be money to follow. If they don’t, there won’t be. There are tons of concern for artists put out of work by AI, but not much for the customer service reps that are being cut at a far higher rate. Hasbro’s Dungeon’s and Dragons tribulations are a battle ground for that right now. They first said they wouldn’t use AI art, then they got caught using AI art, then they pretty much abandoned their pledge to not use AI. There was a big ado and calls for boycotts. But do people still buy their product? Yes. Absolutely.
If people value art made by other people, they’ll find it and pay for it. If they don’t, no amount of regulation or gatekeeping will save it. AI doesn’t kill art. People choosing convenience, price, or novelty does. And because people are the worst, artists suffer.
And copyright law… well, that’s also a joke, like most laws. The punchline here is that the “law” is heavily favored to big corporations and companies with expensive legal teams that make it increasingly easy to steal from individuals who can’t afford to fight back in court. It definitely does not favor the majority of artists, most of whom are forced to sell the rights to their art to some soulless company or corporation “in perpetuity and throughout the universe” in order to make scraps of money from it.
The industrial revolution caused a whole lot of chaos before we had reform and regulations to make it better. And for all the faults of the modern world, things are better in countless ways than they were in the 1870s.
I agree.
The Industrial Revolution happened over many decades. But it took just as many decades for laws and regulations to catch up to what has happening - for many of the same reasons it won’t work today. Too much money and influence on the side of the people with the new toys. In the meantime people were brutally and inhumanly pushed past their limits for generations with what we’d today consider abuses in order to feed the industrial machine. But here, today, AI isn’t playing out over decades, it’s evolving over months, across dozens of industries.
Governments are barely able to define what an LLM is, let alone agree on how to regulate it. Meanwhile, companies are training new models, with trillions of parameters, trained on questionable data sources, and putting them out before the public even understands the risks.
So yes, regulation is an option. But trying to regulate AI is like putting a rookie traffic cop on a Formula 1 track. They can try to slow things down, but no one’s gonna listen. In the absolute worst case scenario, they move their servers to another country with less scruples without missing more than a beat.
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@Warma-Sheen said in AI PBs:
The Industrial Revolution happened over many decades. But it took just as many decades for laws and regulations to catch up to what has happening - for many of the same reasons it won’t work today. Too much money and influence on the side of the people with the new toys.
This is a misrepresentation of the historical facts. Laws and regulations that reformed the worst excesses of the Industrial Revolution happened because ordinary people demanded it in spite of overwhelming monetary opposition from the incredibly wealthy and influential capitalists of that time. John D. Rockefeller’s net worth is estimated at around $253 billion in 2013 dollars, Cornelius Vanderbilt at $203 billion, and Richard Mellon (of Carnegie-Mellon) at $103 billion. These and other “captains of industry” of that era commanded money and influence on the same scale as any modern tech billionaire.
The government did not decide to regulate because there was no money telling them not to. “Strikes organized by labor unions became routine events by the 1880s. There were 37,000 strikes between 1881 and 1905.” We owe the eight-hour workday to continual agitation by hundreds of thousands of workers over more than fifty years. The President of the United States sent federal troops to end strikes (these are all different Presidents), and Rockefeller was widely blamed for organizing the murder of 21 people, striking miners and their families. Between 1850 and 1937 almost 900 people were killed by the authorities in labor disputes. Regulations did not “catch up to what was happening,” they were dragged kicking and screaming by we the people.
This kind of mealy-mouthed defeatism serves no one but the ruling class. Ordinary people have stood up for themselves and demanded better treatment in the past, and we can do it again.
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The fact that our government is currently useless is not really an argument against regulation. Like I too am depressed by living through a goddamn authoritarian takeover as a goddamn career public servant but it has nothing to do with my opinions on what should be. It’s almost a red herring - what the law currently is has no real bearing on what is right and that is something that has been true practically forever.
Eventually the law will catch up to reality, or eventually the heat-death of the universe will render this all moot, but that doesn’t change whether those materials used to train AI were stolen in fact (they were) or whether AI is having a negative impact on art that outweighs its positive applications as a tool (it is).
@Trashcan ty for those receipts.
let it be a challenge to you
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@Trashcan It isn’t a misrepresentation. Its just a retelling. You’re saying the same thing I did, but with a different, antagonistic slant for no other reason than to be mean and nasty, presumably because I don’t agree with you.
You quoted the first part of what I wrote, then left out the rest.
@Warma-Sheen said in AI PBs:
In the meantime people were brutally and inhumanly pushed past their limits for generations with what we’d today consider abuses in order to feed the industrial machine. But here, today, AI isn’t playing out over decades, it’s evolving over months, across dozens of industries.
But if helps you to give a more detailed picture restating and supporting my points, then insult me anyway, you do you. That is definitely a pretty common response these days.
If your argument is that we should start the march against AI now so that in 70 years we might have a chance of winning the fight like we did during the Industrial Revolution, feel free. As I agreed, regulation is an option.
But the rest of my point remains that this isn’t a fight that will last 70 years and the same tactics won’t work because the circumstances are drastically different and the thing we’re trying to stop is moving much, much faster.
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@Warma-Sheen
Thisit won’t work today.
is
But trying to regulate AI is like putting a rookie traffic cop on a Formula 1 track.
They can try to slow things down, but no one’s gonna listen.
by definition.
At this point it is highly unlikely, in any practical sense, that we can do anything about tech companies running rampant.
Disagreeing with you does not equate to insulting you. If your argument is not that there is nothing (in any practical sense) that we can do, so why bother, feel free to explain what it is.
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I’m too lazy to quote, but there was something said by Mr. Probably An AI or At Least An AI Fanboy about how one of the things that makes something plagiarism is if it causes loss of profit for the person it’s stealing from.
AI has been doing precisely this to… basically every creative field. Visual art, writing, music, now video (remember that horror of a Coca-Cola ad??).
Additionally, the initial training of it utilized stolen works (books, art, film, etc.). The companies have admitted to this. The primary reason they are fighting back in court is because (as they’ve also admitted) to start over would be a massive loss of money for them.
It is theft. Plain and simple. And dude up there admitted it during his roundabout blatherings.
(Also, I hate the ‘but I can’t art’ arguments. Anyone can. Visual art is literally just practicing and training yourself. idgaf if you work 40 hours a week- so do many artists. Step away from the forums, the Fortnite, the RP for like, 30 minutes a day and you can art. Expensive? It can be but to start you literally just need paper and something to make marks with. You can go to Dollar Tree, spend $3, get a pack of printer paper and a box of pens or pencils.)
Now, that said: I am not a omg never touch AI for anything ever. It has its place as a tool (ChatGPT works well for me to brain dump into and then get it to organize my thoughts for me). But I am exhausted by people going ‘I spent 15 minutes typing in prompts my art is real and just as valid as your 80-hour painting!’.
Hell, people shouldn’t even be bragging about ‘prompt engineering.’ Basically every major AI now responds to real language, no need for +this -that in your prompts anymore.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everett_massacre
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thibodaux_massacre
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludlow_Massacre
People died for those rights and still do. It’s privileged and insulting to talk about worker’s rights as a given and simply unintelligent to think rights happen naturally at the benevolence of wealthy leadership.
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@Warma-Sheen said in AI PBs:
But art is hardly the only medium that AI is taking over and I don’t know why it gets romanticized as a protected class that needs saving, exempt from the same pressures that affect every other job in a capitalist system. I’d love to game, or dance, or write all day instead of working a job, but there isn’t any money in it for 99.9% of people who can do it.
You are vastly underestimating the quantity of creative people who currently make a living with their creative skills. I’m not just talking about the starving artist trope making their own music in their garage. I’m talking about the graphic designers, the technical writers, the voiceover narrators, the people who write ad copy, the animators who make the Marvel movies, the musicians, the novelists, etc. There are a tremendous number of jobs impacted by GenAI.
And hey, if the AI companies had gotten their tech through legit means, that’d still suck, but it would be different. The printing press put the monks out of business, but it did not steal their work to do so. These companies are, in my opinion, crooks. You can say copyright law is a joke but I couldn’t disagree more. I think it is a cornerstone of society. Not just for financial reasons, but for moral ones. Because it’s one thing to not make money off your art. It’s quite another to make art and then have some company steal it so THEY can make money.
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@Warma-Sheen
Thisit won’t work today.
is
But trying to regulate AI is like putting a rookie traffic cop on a Formula 1 track.
Is it “mealy-mouthed”? You seem to have a habit of leaving off the parts that are relevant to the point you’re trying to counter, as though the posts aren’t all above to be referenced.
Your obvious omission of it shows that even you know it was wrong.
But again, you can be insulting if you need to. That’s how these conversations go on this forum. I just don’t know why you do, instead of just having a conversation with an exchange of ideas with someone who might have different thoughts than you. But you do what you need to do.
I don’t have all the answers. I never claimed to. But I can see when 2 + 2 does not equal 5 and I don’t have a problem speaking when I see people trying to make that math work. If the answer was that simple, somebody else would have figured it out by now.
Rather than looking for a solution that actually has a chance in hell of working, if you want to take a 200 year old solution that takes 50-70 years and apply it to a modern problem that will be irreversible in no more than 10 years absolute max (as if it isn’t basically already there now) and ignore all the very obvious issues between the two so you can pat yourself on the back and get all the upvotes, go for it.
Problem solved. “You got it, dude.”
See you in 70 years when we will all most definitely be AI free of the problem that became ubiquitous 65 years prior.
You are vastly underestimating the quantity of creative people who currently make a living with their creative skills.
Possibly. But I also think you are overestimating how many jobs GenAI is currently affecting - the key word being currently. Those jobs still exist. Some are affected. But others are not. My mother is a voiceover narrator. She doesn’t make a living off of it but she does make side income. She hasn’t seen much drop off of work YET, because, based on the conversations she’s had with the people she works with, the companies that pay for voiceover narration don’t find that AI quality is sufficient to stop hiring real people. AI can’t get the right amount of emotional range and proper inflections when it needs to. But what AI has done is allow people/companies who were not paying for it before to add GenAI robotic voicerovers to their service or business model for free. But these were people who wouldn’t have paid for real voicever anyway. The worry is that in the future as AI improve, it will get better and be good enough to stop hiring real people. The companies have told her when she’s asked, that more than likely that will be the case. It just isn’t at that point yet.
I think there could/would/should be some kind of graph with a line representing the quality of “creative” work (some creatives produce a more quality product than others, they just do) and the ability of AI to replicate that creative work to a specific degree. And as AI gets better, the more it will eclipse people and the more people will be put out of work as companies cut payroll to make more profits. That’s what companies do.
And I’m not arguing that its not bad and its not wrong. AI was trained on the cesspool that is the internet. The good stuff and the bad and everything in between. But ignoring the realities of it won’t make it go away. Railing about how bad it is for people won’t make it go away. Moar defeatism, I know…
At this point, I think there’s value in being able to use GenAI to enhance what you do for as long as you can do it. If you’re a technical writer, use AI to make you a better technical writer so that you can stay working longer than other technical writers who ignore it and do not increase in quality or production.
People have to adapt to changes in order to survive. Get on board the train or get run over by it. As I said above, I don’t have all the answers. But I think it is obvious that this thing is gonna be here to stay. So at this point, it is a matter of using it to your advantage and staying ahead of others who cannot/will not evolve along with it.
It has been said ad nauseam, but GenAI is tool. And the better you can use that tool, the better off you will be. But you can’t get better if you don’t practice with it. There is an art and a talent to using AI and some people don’t understand that. And in the current climate and the foreseeable future, being able to use AI skillfully is quickly becoming a survival skill in the job market. Early adapters will benefit.
Do I think that’s a solution to the problem? No, its just an adaptation to it. And a lackluster one at that. But that’s as much as I have right now.
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Rethinking the Luddites in the Age of AI
Brian Merchant’s new book, “Blood in the Machine,” argues that Luddism stood not against technology per se but for the rights of workers in the face of automation.
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@Warma-Sheen said in AI PBs:
At this point, I think there’s value in being able to use GenAI to enhance what you do for as long as you can do it. If you’re a technical writer, use AI to make you a better technical writer so that you can stay working longer than other technical writers who ignore it and do not increase in quality or production.
People have to adapt to changes in order to survive. Get on board the train or get run over by it. As I said above, I don’t have all the answers. But I think it is obvious that this thing is gonna be here to stay. So at this point, it is a matter of using it to your advantage and staying ahead of others who cannot/will not evolve along with it.
More than plenty are hopping onto that train. But like. The problem with that train you’re advocating folks should be hopping onto in order to get ahead is that the ahead it’s barrelling towards is over the bodies of everyone else.
The train of AI is barreling down tracks littered with the bodies of art that weren’t its to take, and it’s heading straight towards the artists. I don’t see any reason at all to want to help it run any faster. And I’m sure as hell not about to think much decency about others who are willing to do so. If that train is running people over, why would ANYONE think that the reasonable reaction to that massacre is to board it?
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@Warma-Sheen said in AI PBs:
Is it “mealy-mouthed”?
Unwilling to state facts or opinions simply and directly.
There is no thesis statement in any of your posts beyond “AI is harmful but there’s no point in resisting so we might as well all use it anyway”, and you’ve spent almost 2000 words saying it if I remove the asides about how I’m mean.
If this is not your argument, feel free to state simply what it is.
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@Warma-Sheen said in AI PBs:
At this point, I think there’s value in being able to use GenAI to enhance what you do for as long as you can do it. If you’re a technical writer, use AI to make you a better technical writer so that you can stay working longer than other technical writers who ignore it and do not increase in quality or production.
If you’re a good technical writer, GenAI isn’t going to help you become a better one, it’s only going to help you become a faster one. Of course, in doing so, it’s going to introduce errors into your work that you won’t notice if you’re going fast enough.
Same thing goes for those using GenAI to get the tone right in emails, or to fill in the background of an image, or prototype code, or summarize law briefs, or all of the other relatively reasonable uses of GenAI that I’ve heard of. It doesn’t make you better, it makes you faster.
And when GenAI makes a professional faster, it allows the company to reduce staffing, like you mentioned, but it also introduces errors that slipped through because the now-overstretched staff has to go fast with GenAI to keep up with demand.
So maybe we can’t put the GenAI genie back in the bottle, but we can, and I posit, we should still mock the crap out of companies that can afford it when they use it, and chastise them for taking shortcuts that hurt their workers and are unethical and environmentally unsustainable. At the same time, our higher education and businesses should be working to find out what GenAI is actually good at, and what it can be trained to do (relatively) ethical and environmentally-sustainable methods.
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@Roadspike said in AI PBs:
It doesn’t make you better, it makes you faster.
It doesn’t always do that either.
When developers are allowed to use AI tools, they take 19% longer to complete issues—a significant slowdown that goes against developer beliefs and expert forecasts. This gap between perception and reality is striking: developers expected AI to speed them up by 24%, and even after experiencing the slowdown, they still believed AI had sped them up by 20%.
he/him
this machine kills fascists -
Hi, tech writer here.
I am job hunting (as I left a toxic work environment right before the AI obsession began in corporations). I have been job hunting.
The work disappeared for a good while. And reports from people who weren’t laid off basically came down to them being piled on so high with work they couldn’t manage. One person even reported that her coworkers had nicknamed her AI. ‘Send it to AI.’
Which was hugely demoralizing (understandably) to her.I know a developer who runs a team: he was made to lay off his tech writer and told ‘just use AI.’ Except he’s in the financial sector. They cannot use it (for security, accuracy, etc.) and when he pointed it out, was told ‘it’s just writing, do it yourself.’
Industries that have realized they cannot use it (government, financial, and medical primarily) are slowly hiring again. But a) the competition is HUGE (great for companies; bad for me), and b) they are hiring 1 person where they used to have 8. I was interviewing for a job with a major credit card company and told that I would be on loan to 4 different departments ‘as needed’ if I got the job.
No one I know (including myself) is refusing to use AI at all. It can be used as a tool. But you still need the experience, the knowledge, the skill to do it right. This is where companies are getting it wrong. They are actively looking for people without experience, without knowledge of their worth to pay barely over minimum wage (you could go to Target for $15/hr and probably better benefits as most of these jobs are also short-term contracts).
There is no ‘get on the train’ for people with decades of experience. For people with families. And every single person who is willing to get paid poorly, get no benefits, and be at risk every single day for their contract to be cut off is just encouraging the companies and hurting everyone else.
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I have hesitated to post anything in this thread, because I very much do not appreciate being drafted into the role of OP for this particular topic. Anyways…
@ProperPenguin said in AI PBs:
Hi, tech writer here.
I am job hunting (as I left a toxic work environment right before the AI obsession began in corporations). I have been job hunting.
The work disappeared for a good while. And reports from people who weren’t laid off basically came down to them being piled on so high with work they couldn’t manage. One person even reported that her coworkers had nicknamed her AI. ‘Send it to AI.’
Which was hugely demoralizing (understandably) to her.I know a developer who runs a team: he was made to lay off his tech writer and told ‘just use AI.’ Except he’s in the financial sector. They cannot use it (for security, accuracy, etc.) and when he pointed it out, was told ‘it’s just writing, do it yourself.’
And this is the core issue, the lack of appreciation and respect to a profession from other professionals and industries. “Anyone can write. Anyone can draw. Anyone can take a photograph. Anyone can shoot film. Anyone can work an assembly line.” No, anyone can’t, and no a robot cannot give you as good a quality, yet. If you need specialized, expert, professional work done, you need to pay for a specialist, expert, and professional.
I like AI for hobbyists, people who don’t have the cash or the level of personal investment into whatever hobby it is to pay for a professional. “I want a PB that isn’t a photograph of a real person, I don’t have any artistic talent at all, and I don’t want to pay $150 for an image I am going to slap on a wiki and never really think about again.” “I need a desc, but I hate writing them. I’ll just have an AI write one over and over until I get one I like.”
And I am now going to exit the thread again. Have fun, y’all.
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It doesn’t always do that either.
Yeah, there’s also this: Trust in AI Coding Tools is Falling.
The thing about GenAI is that it can make you seem more competent at a skill without actually having the competence. Maybe enough to fool a layperson, but not enough to actually BE competent. So someone without skill in programming can do some vibe coding, someone without skill in writing can write an article faster, etc.
But even setting aside the ethical/legal/environmental/etc. impacts, it just doesn’t work great. Programs are buggy and you don’t know how to fix them (or worse, don’t even realize they have gaping security flaws or subtle edge case conditions). Writing sounds same-y and cringe because it’s using statistics to generate the words instead of having a human voice.
There are certainly limited things when an ethical GenAI tool can be useful and increase productivity. It might give me the answer to a programming question faster than StackOverflow. But people on SO don’t generally hallucinate library functions that don’t exist. And if they did, the upvote/comment system would probably point that out.
A tool that makes up information and generates wrong answers might be useful in some situations, but it is not going to make you better or faster in general.
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But people on SO don’t generally hallucinate library functions that don’t exist
The main thing I have wanted to use AI for that relates to code is generating regex. I am bad at regex. My brain just does not wrap around it.
And oh my god, they are bad at it. When I told a few dev friends this, they got surprised and then tested on other instances (not just ChatGPT) and found yeah, it spits out a whole mess or sometimes it suddenly veers into turning your request into Python or similar.
Regardless, I do think that reliance is one of the biggest risks with AI. So many people (the number growing everyday; ask a teacher) will just grab whatever ChatGPT spits out without vetting it.
After the first instance of a legal team doing this (and thus submitting filings filled with fake cases and other outright false information), I have been flabbergasted that it just keeps happening and I think this push to ‘get on the train’ is in part to blame.
It is also telling (and I do not think I’ve seen this come up on the thread yet) that the investors in ChatGPT and other AI ventures are starting to pull out because their investments are not paying off.
I am not fully without hope (even though I’ve been unemployed for 2 years and I’ve found myself going back to school; taking on more debt so I can pivot to a new career, despite tech writing being something I love to do) because I do think the bubble will burst. Between the fact that audiences are overwhelmingly underwhelmed by AI content (Disney has come out about several instances where they wanted to openly use it, but it failed for several reasons) and the environmental impact… I think it’s a tech that will fall off the map (and there are some estimating that it will and it will happen in 2026).
