His point is that if you want to be properly compensated for your writing, then you need to take the capitalist bull by the horns, so to speak. His objection is this middle place where "buy me a coffee" is only likely to make you a few bucks here and there, nothing like a proper compensation for your efforts (if you think you need that) and yet also leaves a slightly stale taste in the mouth of some readers.
Basically, cheapening the blog for nothing. Not to say I entirely agree with him, but this is his point in a nutshell.
I disagree - the author makes his unqualified disdain for "begging" unambiguously clear. He is unreasonable, simplistic, and frankly does not make the (exact) argument you generously ascribe to him (though maybe he meant to, and you can see through his miswording).
AID is throwing money at them, without a capitalist infrastructure to keep them earning money and circulating it in an economy so others can earn money as well. Just giving them money doesn't teach them anything but dependence; they need job skills, too.
Do you throw money at startups, or do you have hackathons to teach people how to code and get a job at a startup? Then invest the money in a startup and help it along.
AI is unlikely to ever create great works of art because art is not, and has never been just about technical excellence; it is fundamentally a human thing: one human communicating to another. Just even knowing that some art was AI produced is enough to not see it as great: there is no human story or experience behind it, no human context, etc. You can definitely appreciate it in the category of AI work, however.
AI still struggles with technical excellence in some genres of art, but even if they master this, this human element they cannot overcome, by definition.
It's like piano performance: AI can already generate a "prefect" performance audio, a MIDI file can already encode that. But, I hate MIDI files, none of the live-ness, the weirdness, and non-repeatable nuances of an actual performance by an actual pianist.
Your entire argument hinges on being able to tell the extent to which generative AI was used in the creation of any given piece of art, which capability you will not have. You therefore fall into the category the commenter mentioned in that your perception of the value of a piece of art can be heavily influenced by someone convincing you it was AI generated, regardless of the facts.
Jut recently, there was a thread discussing Persepolis, a series of autobiographical graphic novels by Marjane Satrapi (recently deceased) that depict her childhood and early adult years in Iran and Austria during and after the Islamic Revolution. People remarked it was deeply moving.
Part of what makes it deeply moving is the actuality of it. This is a human story based on actual lived experiences. How does an AI produce this?? If it came out later that it was written by an AI (assume for the purpose of argument that we had AI when it was written), then of course m=it's impact would be different.
If a seemingly powerful piece of non-fiction is later exposed as fiction, and AI written fiction at that, won't that change your perception of it? Or if a nice anecdote someone likes to tell is exposed as made up, I would hope that matters.
I guess since we're not talking about art anymore, and are instead talking about the veracity of information, we can safely agree. If I read a news story, I do value that information higher to the extent I am convinced it is actually true information. If I read someone's autobiography, I do value that to the extent that I trust them and that it is coming from them. A piece of fiction, however, or music, or visual art, is something that can stand on its own and be appreciated or not without having to assume this context. The context and provenance can certainly color the appreciation, but it is no longer necessary.
But I am not just taking about factual information. You still don't get it. I was just using that example to show if you take out key components of what makes something what is it, it is no longer the same thing.
I am saying the an intrinsic component of art is the human context of it. You can call AI generated "art" by another name if you want, and enjoy it for what it is, but the reasons why you might enjoy it are different from the reasons you might enjoy human art.
Why do we still enjoy art in spite of the fact that we have photography? Or foot races even though we have cars?
Why is it that we still enjoy music despite not knowing how it was created? Why is it that we still enjoy visual art despite not knowing how it was created?
We can keep throwing counterexamples at each other forever. You can find an endless number of examples wherein the provenance of an activity or piece of work is important to the enjoyment of it, and I can find endless examples where the provenance is unnecessary. What will this prove?
So what you're saying is it will never be about the art itself, it's entirely about selling you on its origin story? Yeah, that sounds about right. So once it can create human-level art, it just needs to spew human-level BS script along with it for the artist to act out, got it.
You misunderstand art. If art were solely about the outcome, we’d all be staring at photographs instead, as no art will ever have as high fidelity.
Art is about the journey of the artist; the meaning with which that art is impregnated is the point. What you cynically refer to as “human-level BS,” others refer to as “the human condition” because we can relate to other humans, and empathy is a thing.
It’s okay not to like art. But pretending art is just “the painting at the end” is nonsense.
I'm doing no such thing. By invalidating the Monet piece if it is described as AI-generated, art becomes entirely about the creation story. So that moves the bar to telling a convincing story. And LLMs can absolutely do that at the level of those museum placards next to each painting. So if you add an actor to pose as the artist, the art is the performance now.
What makes you think I don't like art? Spent 3 hours at an art museum event last weekend staring in details at paintings whilst rich drunk fools kept taking selfies next to them.
But I no longer believe people care about empathy. The US wouldn't have elected a grifting performance artist president twice if they valued empathy. We're much more hindbrain-driven than I suspect you think we are.
> I'm doing no such thing. By invalidating the Monet piece if it is described as AI-generated, art becomes entirely about the creation story. So that moves the bar to telling a convincing story.
No. Art isn’t about the “origin story,” but about what it makes you feel. In part, what it makes you feel is due to the fact that it was made by a human, with human emotion and intent, to communicate an idea to the world. AI has no such emotional backing.
> And LLMs can absolutely do that at the level of those museum placards next to each painting. So if you add an actor to pose as the artist, the art is the performance now.
Museum placards are not what make art interesting.
> But I no longer believe people care about empathy. The US wouldn't have elected a grifting performance artist president twice if they valued empathy.
Irrelevant; two things can be true at once. Also, not everyone has empathy, and not everyone likes art.
That’s why most people don’t have art on their walls, but random prints from IKEA.
> We're much more hindbrain-driven than I suspect you think we are.
Many people are! But “people who like art” is a relatively small subset of people, and I maintain that nearly everyone who likes art likes it because it makes them feel something.
Otherwise, there would be no difference between a Picasso and a print from EBay.
People who like art don’t buy NFTs. They buy art made by humans.
I am reminded of The Doctor Who episode where the original Mona Lisa was destroyed and only one of many copies clearly marked "THIS IS A FAKE" underneath the pigments survived.
Only someone with little appreciation of music will describe the difference between an actual performance and an AI generated one as "human-level BS". It makes a large difference in my enjoyment of the music.
Have you listened to a MIDI file before? And have you listened to (or attended, preferably in person) a piano concert before? You can't compare them, AI changes nothing at all about this.
> Only someone with little appreciation of music will describe the difference between an actual performance and an AI generated one as "human-level BS".
Unfortunately, this seems to apply to quite a few people on HN, and for all types of art in general. I fear this worldview (or maybe the common root cause) is what leads to the all too prevalent lack of care or outright disdain for people and society in general we're seeing from the tech industry (amongst others) these days.
And you're telling me that as long as you believe a human struggled and went through a process, the nature of the outcome is irrelevant. Hence a Monet piece is instantly slop if one believes an AI created it. That rings true. But it also explains the perception that Piss Christ was art instead of rubbish.
We just disagree as to whether an AI can write a script for a human to portray a struggle that never happened and that a human actor can make you believe it. This almost demands a performance art piece to do exactly that. The art of course being in the performance by a human until it can be replaced by an indistinguishable robot. And then the artist becomes the robot's creator I guess. Why it's creators all the down, no?
I guess we also disagree about all these lines in the sand you keep drawing when it's seemingly entirely subjective experience of a world that may or may not exist according to Plato's Cave.
And sure, I love concerts, I love live performances, but I also love to listen to a much wider range of music when I'm not in a theatre. I can understand that you might feel differently, but we are all entitled to our own opinions and tastes. And what we do in our own lives if it isn't hurting others anymore than anyone else in the west is doing with their egregious carbon footprints is none of your business.
And I don't draw such lines in the sand. I am saying an experience that would be perceived as authentic human communication can be artificially generated until proven otherwise. Good luck with that.
I really wonder if humanity will be able to process alien life when it finally encounters it. Because it's likely to have a very different origin story, nature, and outlook.
Yeah, what you're saying is true but only to the extent of simulacra AI can produce. But it's not really art if you know what I mean, it's an artefact of training on other people's art.
So what I do with AI art is start with a photo I took. I then extract its Lin Canny lines or other descriptive features algorithmically. From there, I apply various models to re-express the image in an interesting way. IMO it looks more like Digital Art out of photoshop and I would refute any claim that this isn't remotely artistic given I was the one that took the photo that is the base image. And it doesn't end up looking like obvious AI art, but rather more Andy Warholish than anything else IMO.
And sure, the model was trained on other people's art but so are we.
It may not be your cup of tea, but it's a lot more effort than typing in a prompt and calling it a day. But, ya know, Rembrandt and Hans Zimmer were the OG prompt engineers in their respective media IMO.
Photographs made technical skill at recreating reality with paint less relevant, while making point of view, staging, etc, more important. You can absolutely create a photograph that is art, but a camera is not an artist, the person holding it is.
> Based on the Iranian Shahed-136, LUCAS was used in combat for the first time when a large number of them were fired against Iranian targets in the opening salvos of Operation Epic Fury, the U.S. part of the joint U.S.-Israeli attack on Iran that began on February 28 of this year.
I don't get this reasoning, and yet it is pervasive. Just because non-engineering people come up to you with apps they have created does not mean AI has or will replace software engineers.
Consider:
- I can read about my symptoms from Dr. Google, try a lifestyle change, herbal remedy, or over-the-counter drug, and that may actually work. This does not mean in the slightest that doctor are being made obsolete
- I can create music with generative AI, without needing any understanding of music theory, no taste for music, no creativity. This does not mean people with musical talent are being made obsolete at all.
- I can, with the help of AI, work on DIY projects around the house. This does not in any way mean engineers are being made obsolete.
Who will be helping domain experts to elucidate what they actually need through prototype-refine cycles?
Who will be writing and maintaining the operating systems, the languages, the version control systems, th editors and terminal emulators, knowledge/document management systems, the PaaS platforms, etc that these hordes of hobbyist software creators depend on?
Have these people actually properly tested their creations to ensure they are robust? Do they even understand the edge cases that could arise? Is their work secure? Cooking up some quick thing based on some prompt does not equate to engineering whatsoever.
Perhaps you fail to see this because, like many others, you subscribe to the fallacy that the value of software engineering primarily lies in the code produced itself, the arrangements of bits manufactured. It is not; a project is primarily valuable as a theory and abstraction building process. See https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/Naur.pdf
I guess maybe it's your definition of 'software engineers' ; if you meant that to mean people who know what they are doing, then there is a massive gap. However if you mean people who are hired as software engineer/developer then it's already replacing many and will replace many more. Many of these are worth absolutely nothing and never have been. They survived because software was considered magic and they talk a lot in meetings and 'jumping on calls' to appear busy and engaged, not because they ever were good at making software. That's the vast majority; millions upon millions in outsource factories for instance who just do exactly what a ticket says and then go to the next without caring if the rest implodes behind them etc.
Sure, but now they will be LLMs , which is the point; they won't be millions of humans who get paid. The point of GP was that it doesn't replace programmers; it does and will more so, at scale, because LLMs are better than all the bad ones and that's the majority, by far.
Firefox and Firefox-derivative browsers have and continue to be seriously sluggish and memory and energy hogs. This should not be swept under the rug.
Even today it is difficult for me to use Firefox, Mullvad, etc. When I used to use them, almost every time my machine became slow the solution was to kill Firefox.
EDIT: It's true folks, I would love to be able to use Firefox as my primary browser. But all my experience with it (and I used it for more than a decade) has been dogged by its sluggishness.
I use Firefox mobile pretty much exclusively. I haven't noticed any meaningful performance difference between it & Chrome. It also seems to perform fine on my Fedora laptop.
Mobile is different. I rarely even use mobile. I do however use a lot of tabs on desktop, and Firefox is found very wanting in the performance department.
I don't even think its about number of tabs. Just yesterday and today, Mullvad browser takes minutes to load a set of about 7 pinned tabs (with no other tabs) on startup, whereas Helium (which is based on Chromium) loads in a second or two close to a hundred tabs.
I feel for people who have this issue--wish I could help you solve it, but I can't repro. My 10-year-old laptop with 16 GB runs it great with low memory usage.
This does not make sense. Firefox would be taking minutes to open a page that Chrome opens within a second or two. And if Chrome was doing aggressive pre-fetching, then it should be using more memory, no? And yet the opposite is the case.
Not denying your experience but if it is taking "minutes" then that sounds like a highly specific glitch that you should try to debug.
Speaking personally I have used Firefox pretty much exclusively for 20+ years, always on low-end hardware. It's been years since I last had any performance issues.
I found that in general, Firefox works fast enough that I can't tell the difference in performance between it and Chromium-based browsers. I have 128 GB of RAM on my desktop, so even if it's a memory hog, I'd never notice.
However, occasionally I'd run into sites with terrible performance issues. Facebook [0] was often insanely slow on Firefox and would sometimes freeze up entirely.
I wanted a Chromium-based browser but didn't want Chrome, Edge, or Brave. I ended up landing on Vivaldi and have been happy with it so far.
[0] Yeah, yeah, ridicule me all you want for still using Facebook, but I enjoy it because I don't have shitty friends.
Why do you have quite a number of glaring UX issues? I want to love Orion, but even something as basic as the tabs theming is driving me away.
By default is it almost impossible to distinguish which tabs i active in some situations. I think the browser automatically tints the window based on the dominant color of the page you are viewing, which means if I am viewing youtube for example, the whole browser windows is tinted a bit darker, in such a way that I can't easily make out outline of the currently selected tab.
Such a bummer for what should have been an easlity changeable behavior with settings: I do not want any tinting, and I want hight contract mode
> If you buy a car from us, you agree not use it driving to and from work that involves automotive R&D that might compete with our product. And if our (heavily spying) car detects you are violating this, it will slow down to 20mph and cannot be made to go any faster, until we are sure the violation has ceased.
Or
> If you buy a laptop from us, you agree not to use it to study or acquire any knowledge that you may use to compete against us. If the laptop detects such a use, it degrades to one core and 4GB of memory, until the violation stops.
His point is that if you want to be properly compensated for your writing, then you need to take the capitalist bull by the horns, so to speak. His objection is this middle place where "buy me a coffee" is only likely to make you a few bucks here and there, nothing like a proper compensation for your efforts (if you think you need that) and yet also leaves a slightly stale taste in the mouth of some readers.
Basically, cheapening the blog for nothing. Not to say I entirely agree with him, but this is his point in a nutshell.
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