[rtpoe]

We've got threads for AI images, and I'd rather not clog those up with general commentary on AI.

So, that's what this is for.

I note that currently, AI is most commonly used for text generation and image creation. Those are "expert systems", not true AI. Chat GPT can't produce a picture of George Washington riding a motorcycle in a thunderstorm, and DALL-E isn't going to be spewing out an essay on euphemisms in Shakespeare's sonnets anytime soon. They can do one thing - not multiple things like a real person.

Anyway.....

[Bramlet]

Great caricature – all what's needed to say! Hypocrits – as usual.

I reject AI 110%.

[TheZookie007]

I'm with Jon Stewart.

"Jon Stewart On The False Promises of AI | The Daily Show"

[rtpoe]

AI has created a new form of sexual abuse
How do you stop deepfake nudes?
https://www.vox.com/24145522/ai-deepfake-apps-teens-ban-laws

However, users don’t need a specific app to make nonconsensual nude images; many AI image generators could potentially be used in this way. Legislators could require developers to put guardrails in place to make it harder for users to generate nonconsensual nude images, [Britt Paris, an assistant professor of library and information science at Rutgers who has studied deepfakes] said. But that would require challenging the “unchecked ethos” of AI today, in which developers are allowed to release products to the public first and figure out the consequences later, she said.

“Until companies can be held accountable for the types of harms they produce,” Paris said, “I don’t see a whole lot changing.”

[rtpoe]

AI images and the decline of Deviant Art

The Tragic Downfall of the Internet’s Art Gallery
Once a vibrant platform for artists, DeviantArt is now buckling under the weight of bots and greed—and spurning the creative community that made it great.
By Nitish Pahwa

https://slate.com/technology/2024/05/deviantart-what-happened-ai-decline-lawsuit-stability.html

As VFX animator Romain Revert (Minions, The Lorax) pointed out on X, the bots had come for his old home base of DeviantArt. Its social accounts were promoting “top sellers” on the platform, with usernames like “Isaris-AI” and “Mikonotai,” who reportedly made tens of thousands of dollars through bulk sales of autogenerated, dead-eyed 3D avatars. The sales weren’t exactly legit—an online artist known as WyerframeZ looked at those users’ followers and found pages of profiles with repeated names, overlapping biographies and account-creation dates, and zero creations of their own, making it apparent that various bots were involved in these “purchases.”

It’s not unlikely, as WyerframeZ surmised, that someone constructed a low-effort bot network that could hold up a self-perpetuating money-embezzlement scheme: Generate a bunch of free images and accounts, have them buy and boost one another in perpetuity, inflate metrics so that the “art” gets boosted by DeviantArt and reaches real humans, then watch the money pile up from DeviantArt revenue-sharing programs. Rinse, repeat.

After Revert declared this bot-on-bot fest to be “the downfall of DeviantArt,” myriad other artists and longtime users of the platform chimed in to share in the outrage that these artificial accounts were monopolizing DeviantArt’s promotional and revenue apparatuses. Several mentioned that they’d abandoned their DeviantArt accounts—all appearing to prove his dramatic point.

Worse still, DeviantArt showed little desire to engage with these concerns: Film concept artist Reid Southen (The Woman King, Jupiter Ascending) pointed out that the site’s social media managers had hidden dozens and dozens of critical replies to the tweet that boosted Mikonotai.

---

To take it from the publishing industry, A.I. is already decimating once-common job prospects. An April report from the Society of Authors found that 26 percent of the illustrators surveyed “have already lost work due to generative A.I.” and about 37 percent of illustrators “say the income from their work has decreased in value because of generative A.I.”

There’s little relief to be found in other sectors like gaming, where companies like Activision are already hiring young artists to “polish” generative-A.I. output. Or even in cinema, per the Canadian artist: “I’ve heard stories about companies going all in on A.I. imagery for matte paintings for movies—those sorts of things that used to be done by a digital artist—and then discovering that A.I. can’t take feedback.”

 

[rtpoe]

A week or so ago, investment banking firm Goldman Sachs put out a report titled "Gen AI: Too Much Spend, Too Little Benefit?"

In it, they speculate about the future of AI - and they're very anxious about it. They find that it has yet to show even the slightest hint that it will be profitable - or even useful.

And as an investment bank, they don't give a crap about anything other than making money for their clients. So if they are skeptical of AI - they have to be taken seriously.

Edward Zitron read that 31-page report so you don't have to:

All the following passages from his commentary at https://www.wheresyoured.at/pop-culture/ (emphases in original)

...what does "more[powerful]" actually mean? While one might argue that it'll mean faster generative processes, there really is no barometer for what "better" looks like, and perhaps that's why ChatGPT, Claude and other LLMs have yet to take a leap beyond being able to generate stuff. Anthropic's Claude LLM might be "best-in-class," but that only means that it's faster and more accurate, which is cool but not the future or revolutionary or even necessarily good.

---

All of this excitement, every second of breathless hype has been built on this idea that the artificial intelligence industry – led by generative AI – will somehow revolutionize everything from robotics to the supply chain, despite the fact that generative AI is not actually going to solve these problems because it isn't built to do so.

--

The reason I'm suddenly bringing up superintelligences — or AGI (artificial general intelligence) — is because throughout every defense of generative AI is a deliberate attempt to get around the problem that generative AI doesn't really automate many tasks. While it's good at generating answers or creating things based on a request, there's no real interaction with the task, or the person giving it the task, or consideration of what the task needs at all — just the abstraction of "thing said" to "output generated."

---

The most fascinating part of the report (page 10) is an interview with Jim Covello, Goldman Sachs' Head of Global Equity Research. Covello isn't a name you'll have heard unless you are, for whatever reason, a big semiconductor-head, but he's consistently been on the right side of history, named as the top semiconductor analyst by II Research for years, successfully catching the downturn in fundamentals in multiple major chip firms far before others did....

Covello believes that the combined expenditure of all parts of the generative AI boom — data centers, utilities and applications — will cost a trillion dollars in the next several years alone, and asks one very simple question: "what trillion dollar problem will AI solve?" He notes that "replacing low-wage jobs with tremendously costly technology is basically the polar opposite of the prior technology transitions [he's] witnessed in the last thirty years."

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Being able to access information faster might make you better at your job, but that's efficiency rather than allowing you to do something new. Generative AI isn't creating new jobs, it isn't creating new ways to do your job, and it isn't making anybody any money — and the path to boosting revenues is unclear.

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....one theme brought up repeatedly is the idea that America's power grid is literally not ready for generative AI. In an interview former Microsoft VP of Energy Brian Janous (page 15), the report details numerous nightmarish problems that the growth of generative AI is causing to the power grid, such as:

  *  Hyperscalers like Microsoft, Amazon and Google have increased their power demands from a few hundred megawatts in the early 2010s to a few gigawatts by 2030, enough to power multiple American cities.

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Even Goldman Sachs, when describing the efficiency benefits of AI, added that while it was able to create an AI that updated historical data in its company models more quickly than doing so manually, it cost six times as much to do so.

---

I feel a little crazy every time I write one of these pieces, because it's patently ridiculous. Generative AI is unprofitable, unsustainable, and fundamentally limited in what it can do thanks to the fact that it's probabilistically generating an answer. It's been eighteen months since this bubble inflated, and since then very little has actually happened involving technology doing new stuff, just an iterative exploration of the very clear limits of what an AI model that generates answers can produce, with the answer being "something that is, at times, sort of good."

It's obvious. It's well-documented. Generative AI costs far too much, isn't getting cheaper, uses too much power, and doesn't do enough to justify its existence. There are no killer apps, and no killer apps on the horizon. And there are no answers.