After about half of a year of AI (somehow) depressing me more than anything else in the news and my productivity being at an all-time low because of it, I'm just going to say my piece (which more people outside this sub will probably already agree with than not): AI is anti-humanist, pro-corporate, and a net negative for all of society.
And proponents of AI are somehow more doomer than people who *hate* AI in a lot of cases. Go to any pro-AI thread and you'll see people literally making the argument akin to "AI is a net positive. We just need UBI to be adopted and humanity can survive". Effectively translates to "yeah, almost one will ever find work again. Humans will be basically obsolete, and we'll all starve to death if we don't all get free money forever". Really seems like they're basically writing their own counterpoint to their own claim that AI is "the next Industrial Revolution" to me. The Industrial Revolution and the age of automation both eradicated some jobs. The former plummeted the agricultural sector job quantity down and forced a lot of those people into factories and service jobs, then the latter aggressively shifted those jobs around in ways that would take essays worth of writing (that I'm sure I could put into ChatGPT and it could get 80% of it wrong) to explain, but the general gist is that the average jobs in the western world went up in the minimum required "skill" or education level. Primarily because they now needed to use tools that made those jobs more efficient, but there was still an intrinsic human element.
But trying to draw a line through that, that's not what's happening with AI. In terms of the "upper ceiling" to what we can see AI potentially doing, we haven't even scratched the surface and there's already plenty of people saying they're losing their jobs (see: interpreters or translators for instance). Past that though, we're not seeing what we collectively saw before in history: the "shift". We're not seeing the lost jobs shift to factories like in tech advancements past. We're seeing the jobs disappear. When computers became readily available, we didn't replace writers; when typewriters came about, we didn't replace writers; when quills came about, we didn't replace writers. Now (even if it leads to currently a much worse outcome) we can and have been replacing them. News sites, especially gaming and tech related ones, have used generative AI to vomit out fluff pieces. You basically just need someone to write the prompts and tags.
"AI doesn't steal". I WISH this was me strawmanning, but this is a genuine talking point you'll see AI proponents make. One look at the Studio Ghibli craze with AI art models and that argument gets thrown right away. These models don't interpret. They don't under B through Y. They're given A and they get to Z in as expedited a fashion as they can. They didn't teach themselves line by line how to draw something Miyazaki would be proud of. They were given a finished product and worked backwards from it in it "sure you can borrow my homework, just change a few things so no one notices".
This doesn't "democratize creativity", this is easily one of the stupidest things I've seen so many AI bros say. Every human is born with the intrinsic ability to be creativity. On top of that, this wording always seemed to be like the AI guys were somehow blaming "overpaid artists" or something for their lack of creative output. "Democratize creativity" puts a frankly strange amount of implied blame onto artists, writers, video editors - anyone in these creative fields - and the people in these fields can probably attest they already aren't usually living like kings. They're effectively subservient to the corporatism and therein lies the biggest issue. This doesn't "democratize" anything. The big players in AI are exactly the people who are the big players in everything else: Microsoft owns Co-Pilot, one of OpenAI's founders was Elon Musk, Google owns DeepMind and the VEO 3 (the latter of which might genuinely be the most effective slop generator in history so far), Nvidia and AMD with their framegen technology, Facebook/Meta, Grok (Musk again)... I think Midjourney was the only one I could find that doesn't have a starting evaluation measured in the billion-plus range. One reason for this is generative AI is insanely inefficient from an energy usage point-of-view. Between building and running the models, almost no one has the resources to get into the field. We just get to sit back, knowing that we as a society squeezed all the use we could out of artists, translators, editors, writers, programmers, etc., so that we could lay them off forever and distill their existence into a small handful of closed-source corporate-owned greed factories of human misery. The removal of humans from the process isn't a bug, it's a feature. AI is oligarchic and that's by design.
This is not another Industrial Revolution to me. It's another Manhattan Project. This is just one more lovingly crafted self-destruct switch humanity has permanently plugged into our reality.
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