I know you’re being sarcastic but if we actually look on the bright side, then tools like this could make indie games easier to produce. More and better indie games could in theory bring more competition to companies like EA and that could actually pressure them to make games cheaper.
AI is pretty decent for general purpose mono-textures, grass, brick wall, concrete, that sort of thing. Its not very good if you want to texture something that isn’t mostly flat (though some manual post processing can mean its still a time saver) and its more or less useless for objects that aren’t all made out of one material.
I’m a socialist. I understand market forces and I wish more people did. Technology itself can help the lower class. Government protection of technology (patents, copyright) will always hinder them.
lowering the barrier to entry without protecting the elite will bring about market forces necessary to defeat corporations—small sizes can move and adapt faster and try new things than those with institutional bureaucracy, who just follow the money and don’t innovate. Corporations learned this, and now use government protections (copyright, patents) to prevent these new, necessary, market forces. I don’t like the “economic” terms myself, but it’s not rocket science that corporations benefit from cops (aka law enforcement aka laws).
We can remove the restrictions on new market forces by reducing IP protections, prevent corporations from mucking with newbies by preventing them from getting uncompetitive protections, or by stealing from corporations without regard for the law. I think we should steal more, honestly.
Stopping technology has never worked, though. I understand the plight of artists, but I’m extremely excited for the new human artists that dream up art that AI can’t create because it hasn’t been fathomed before.
The idea of a socialist society is that there isn’t a burning need to work beyond what’s needed to keep life going. You can focus on art, or writing, or anything else creative. There’s no particular need to legally protect what you create, because you’re doing it for the pure enjoyment of creativity in the first place. Your livelihood isn’t threatened by someone else copying it. If anything, you’re delighted that someone else takes enjoyment from it.
And if someone wanted to feed your art to an AI model, that’s fine, too. Who cares? That machine can’t replace your personal creative drive. This is only a problem now because capitalism forces artists to make money off their art or do something else to make ends meet.
Then steal from those corporations. It’s not hard. Copyright and patents were to benefit the public domain, not anything or anyone else. It does not do that. The public domain has done nothing but perish as more and more “protection” has been applied. Now it is all intellectual “property” to be owned and measured and controlled and regulated, unless you opt out of it with open source.
We have tools like the GPL and AGPL. Corporations hate those. Turns out when you start giving away and “taking”, everyone benefits. Open source hasn’t made the world worse the more it’s been growing — maybe choosing to forgo most protections of copyright and IP is actually good. Maybe.
If that technology existed (it doesn’t, probably won’t for decades without noticeable drops in quality) then for the first several years it would be sold exclusively as a premium product subscription locking indie devs out the same way custom builds of Unity Engine or Cloud Computing Suites are.
AI is actually deterministic, a random input is usually included to let you get multiple outputs for generative tasks. And anyway, you could just save the “random” output when you get a good one.
Maybe deterministic wasn’t quite the correct word but basically it only gives you a result that resembles your previous result if you change absolutely nothing, not the training data for the model, not the model, not the random seed, not the prompt,… which makes it useless for iteratively approaching a usable result. I guess the output space is not contiguous might be a better way to describe it.
Oh, I said that as a programmer all right. And that’s how I’ve approached AI - I ran it locally, and kept poking it until I began to get a feel for it. Until I could see patterns. Until I could put together a methodology
They exist. Word choice matters greatly. Shorter is better. Varied word choice is better. Less “orders” is better. Strange combinations of tokens can convey something in non-obvious ways. They all seem to have a very strong attachment to the name “Luna”
They’re as deterministic as any software is, if you run it in the same state with the same input you’ll get the same result, sometimes with minor wording changes
And software isn’t as deterministic as we pretend it is. Programming doesn’t require it either, luckily. Every program you’ll ever write is interacting with complex systems no one fully understands, and it will sometimes act unpredictably
Programming is about finding patterns in the chaos, then using them to get the result you want. You need consistency - not deterministic outcomes. You can program with anything you can find the patterns in - even human behavior or the physical world. You can program yourself.
You can treat AI like something unknowable, or you can find the patterns and put them in your toolbox
I know you’re being sarcastic but if we actually look on the bright side, then tools like this could make indie games easier to produce. More and better indie games could in theory bring more competition to companies like EA and that could actually pressure them to make games cheaper.
I imagine a decent use for Ai is creating textures.
AI is pretty decent for general purpose mono-textures, grass, brick wall, concrete, that sort of thing. Its not very good if you want to texture something that isn’t mostly flat (though some manual post processing can mean its still a time saver) and its more or less useless for objects that aren’t all made out of one material.
Your examples are exactly what I was thinking of. The mundane things that everyone just grabs from a library anyways.
I’m a socialist. I understand market forces and I wish more people did. Technology itself can help the lower class. Government protection of technology (patents, copyright) will always hinder them.
lowering the barrier to entry without protecting the elite will bring about market forces necessary to defeat corporations—small sizes can move and adapt faster and try new things than those with institutional bureaucracy, who just follow the money and don’t innovate. Corporations learned this, and now use government protections (copyright, patents) to prevent these new, necessary, market forces. I don’t like the “economic” terms myself, but it’s not rocket science that corporations benefit from cops (aka law enforcement aka laws).
We can remove the restrictions on new market forces by reducing IP protections, prevent corporations from mucking with newbies by preventing them from getting uncompetitive protections, or by stealing from corporations without regard for the law. I think we should steal more, honestly.
Stopping technology has never worked, though. I understand the plight of artists, but I’m extremely excited for the new human artists that dream up art that AI can’t create because it hasn’t been fathomed before.
Good luck inventing or creating something that a person or corporation with more money won’t immediately copy and then push you out of the market.
Patents and copyright, as originally conceived, are the lower classes only chance to compete.
In a capitalist context, sure.
The idea of a socialist society is that there isn’t a burning need to work beyond what’s needed to keep life going. You can focus on art, or writing, or anything else creative. There’s no particular need to legally protect what you create, because you’re doing it for the pure enjoyment of creativity in the first place. Your livelihood isn’t threatened by someone else copying it. If anything, you’re delighted that someone else takes enjoyment from it.
And if someone wanted to feed your art to an AI model, that’s fine, too. Who cares? That machine can’t replace your personal creative drive. This is only a problem now because capitalism forces artists to make money off their art or do something else to make ends meet.
Then steal from those corporations. It’s not hard. Copyright and patents were to benefit the public domain, not anything or anyone else. It does not do that. The public domain has done nothing but perish as more and more “protection” has been applied. Now it is all intellectual “property” to be owned and measured and controlled and regulated, unless you opt out of it with open source.
We have tools like the GPL and AGPL. Corporations hate those. Turns out when you start giving away and “taking”, everyone benefits. Open source hasn’t made the world worse the more it’s been growing — maybe choosing to forgo most protections of copyright and IP is actually good. Maybe.
AI isn’t so much technology to create stuff as it is technology to scam people out of their money though, much like cryptocurrencies or the Hyperloop.
If that technology existed (it doesn’t, probably won’t for decades without noticeable drops in quality) then for the first several years it would be sold exclusively as a premium product subscription locking indie devs out the same way custom builds of Unity Engine or Cloud Computing Suites are.
That’s how I look at AI. It will never (in it’s current forms) replace people, but it can turn a passionate creator into a one person army
Using AI is a form of programming - you turn the right words into action. Programming is magic, an AI user is a warlock
As a programmer I can tell you that AI is nothing like programming because programming is deterministic and repeatable and AI is anything but.
AI is actually deterministic, a random input is usually included to let you get multiple outputs for generative tasks. And anyway, you could just save the “random” output when you get a good one.
Maybe deterministic wasn’t quite the correct word but basically it only gives you a result that resembles your previous result if you change absolutely nothing, not the training data for the model, not the model, not the random seed, not the prompt,… which makes it useless for iteratively approaching a usable result. I guess the output space is not contiguous might be a better way to describe it.
Right, technically deterministic, but not practically
Oh, I said that as a programmer all right. And that’s how I’ve approached AI - I ran it locally, and kept poking it until I began to get a feel for it. Until I could see patterns. Until I could put together a methodology
They exist. Word choice matters greatly. Shorter is better. Varied word choice is better. Less “orders” is better. Strange combinations of tokens can convey something in non-obvious ways. They all seem to have a very strong attachment to the name “Luna”
They’re as deterministic as any software is, if you run it in the same state with the same input you’ll get the same result, sometimes with minor wording changes
And software isn’t as deterministic as we pretend it is. Programming doesn’t require it either, luckily. Every program you’ll ever write is interacting with complex systems no one fully understands, and it will sometimes act unpredictably
Programming is about finding patterns in the chaos, then using them to get the result you want. You need consistency - not deterministic outcomes. You can program with anything you can find the patterns in - even human behavior or the physical world. You can program yourself.
You can treat AI like something unknowable, or you can find the patterns and put them in your toolbox