Comment on this one goes out to the arts & humanities
exocrinous@startrek.website 7 months agoYour description contains a mistake. You mixed up wants and needs. You said some people want fake art, and then you changed your wording and said those people need fake art. Sneaky.
Wants and needs are not the same thing. For example, many people want a modded truck that rolls coal and produces an engine sound louder than a helicopter, but nobody needs one. Many people want to build an LNG plant to process natural gas, but nobody needs one. Many people want a reason to discriminate against trans people and kick them out of sports, but nobody needs one.
nednobbins@lemm.ee 7 months ago
That wasn’t intentional.
Would it be more accurate for me to change “want” to “need” or the other way around?
exocrinous@startrek.website 7 months ago
It would be more accurate to change need to want. Because soulless corporations want soulless art, but they don’t need it. Passionate, meaningful art sells better and it has a prosocial effect. Why do you think Disney calls their theme park engineers “imagineers”? They want passionate people working for them. Disney only cares about money, but passionate workers make more money.
And imagine how fucked society would be if we didn’t have stories that made us think. You know those elsagate videos that were controversial a few years ago? I don’t want kids to watch shows like that. I want kids to watch shows that teach them valuable lessons. Like Star Trek Prodigy, and The Owl House, and Diego, and all the stuff I liked when I was little that made me think but which I’ve forgotten. Kids need to think. Adults need to think. We need to have important social lessons reinforced. We need gay, bi, ace, trans, and nonbinary characters on TV because that saves lives.
Could an AI write Scar into The Lion King? Could an AI sneak a blatantly homosexual coded villain into a work by a homophobic company in order to have at least some representation? No. Companies only care about money, they will not program their art AIs to care about ethics. And that’s why AI art sucks. Art without ethics is bad.
nednobbins@lemm.ee 7 months ago
Covering the second half:
I hadn’t heard of Elsagate and had to look it up. How does AI factor into that? As near as I can tell Elsagate started with some random guy making disturbing videos and mislabeling them as child-friendly.
I’m a good bit older than you so my nostalgia doesn’t take me lead me to any of the title you mentioned. For the most part it’s stories that aren’t covered by anyone’s IP. My childhood had a lot of folk tales recited from memory. Those stories were fairly common but there would be regional variation and most tellers would put their own twist on the stories (for example, when my Aunt told the story of the Seven Kids she would do a particular squeaky voice when she got to the part where the wolf swallows the chalk (in her version it was always chalk). That’s actually quite close to how LLMs work. She heard various versions of that story throughout her life, then she repeats it with some other bits that she incorporated from the rest of her life. I do the same thing when I retell the story to my children. It’s basically the same story my Aunt told but I translate it into English and add some modern slang.
What would stop an AI from writing Scar into the Lion King? If you told an LLM to, “Write Hamlet but have all the royal family be Lions,” it’s likely you’d get some evil lion version of Claudius.
There were a lot of homosexual coded villains in older media. There were also a lot of films where all the black people were bad guys, all the Asian people were goofy servants and all the women were housewives or prizes. The general consensus today is that those choices were horribly discriminatory. If AI manages to avoid that sort of behavior it would be a good thing.
The flip side is also that artists can just as easily slip hateful material into otherwise reasonable art. Human history is full of unethical choices. Even if the AI itself doesn’t have ethics the people using it can be held to the same ethical standards as the users of any other tool or medium.
nednobbins@lemm.ee 7 months ago
OK. With that change we get:
AI produces something not-actual-art. Some people want stuff that’s not-actual-art. Before AI they had no choice but to pay a premium to a talented artist even though they didn’t actually need it. Now they can get what they actually want but we should remove that so they have to continue paying artists because we had been paying artists for this in the past?Is that accurate?
The rest of your comment seems to be an other thread so I’ll respond separately.