mrmaplebar

There's the no AI camp that irrationally hates anything that even sounds like AI use. There's the fanatic camp that thinks AGI is basically here and everything will be AI. Then there's those that recognize AI is a useful tool, and it's not going away.

Hmm... You're kind of showing your hand here, aren't you?

The no AI ever group is large and very vocal. It's probably a plurality and maybe a majority of people. Until that group shrinks there won't be any meaningful dialog about acceptable AI usage.

I don't think the arguments that "AI is a useful tool" and "it's not going away" are strong or convincing enough to simply shrug away the real social, technological, cultural, ethical, economic, environmental and legal issues that are at the heart of the AI industry today. Part of having a rational dialog about AI is not just jumping on the hype train, but also acknowledging the new problems and challenges that come with it.

If anything, like all emerging technologies, those arguments really only highlight our social responsibility to question the uses and consider the implications of AI even more. After all, tools can be used for good or bad. And if we're going to have to live with the existence of AI, then we will certainly need reasonable laws and regulations in place to protect people from misuse of those tools, right?

So, if you're wondering why the anti-AI group is large and growing, part of that is probably because "resistance is futile" is not a compelling reason to get on board with a grossly unprofitable technology that is being shoehorned into everything while stealing from artists and threatening the livelihoods of workers. I don't like seeing working people exploited for the short term stock market gains of a handful of big tech companies. I think it's wrong, and it's not something I want to support as long as I have the choice.

But anyway, I'm more than happy to have a meaningful dialog about AI, and I don't see why we can't, because I don't think anything I've said is "irrational" or off-base at all.

But that's my point, not everyone agrees with that assessment.

Well people can't even agree on who won the last election or even if the world is round, so I can only speak to my point of view on things.

The problem is there's things like code completers, that predate AI, and no one ever had a problem with those even though presumably they were also taking work from other people. So how much AI can be used before AI becomes unacceptable. You can set the bar at zero, but then you start getting problems of defining what even constitutes AI.

To me it's very clear that the heart of the problem is not in "AI" or "machine learning" itself, but the way that almost all of the large AI models have been trained on work which has been scraped from other people without even so much as basic consent--to say little about licenses or payment. Consent is pretty massively important factor here. After all, I think most of us can agree on the fact that consent is the difference between "borrowing" and "theft", the difference between "sex" and "rape", and the difference between "employment" and "slavery".

Is it possible to make an ethical AI?

Of course it is. But I feel that it would require an AI that was developed in a non-exploitative way, trained on data that has been legitimately acquired, licensed, public domain, cc-0, or otherwise "fair use". Almost nobody is doing that, to my knowledge. Maybe someone in the open source world is working on it, and if so, kudos to them, but certainly none of the big AI corporations are.

As for where we draw the line of what is or isn't OK, in the US at least, "fair use" law is the mechanism that we have historically used to determine which particular unauthorized uses of other people's copyrighted work are OK. And there are many factors that are considered for determining whether some kind of use is or isn't fair.

So I agree there is a nuanced discussion to be had, but most of the time we are not talking about simple, small code completion tasks (like asking your IDE to create an empty definition of a method in the .cpp file or whatever). We are generally talking about people using large model AI systems to generate the actual "business logic" of a program, seemingly out of thin air (as long as you pay no attention to the man behind the curtain).

Part of having a real discussion is opening our eyes to the darker side of the AI industry and acknowledging the fact that the intellectual labor of working people and the creative class are being exploited at a truly unprecedented scale.

At any rate, I'm more than happy to have the conversation, even if I don't have infinite time to dedicate to it.

Whether it's art or code is basically a difference without a distinction to me personally. I'm not sure what makes it different.

Like, in my view, if you're using a generative AI model that was trained without license, compensation or even so much as basic consent from the people who created the original training data, then I feel that is an unpaid exploitation of other people's intellectual labor. You are taking advantage of someone else's work, and in most cases doing so regardless of any kinds of copyright, license, or other agreement. And, considering a former top AI executive at Microsoft called what they were doing "the largest theft of labor in human history", I think I'm not alone in looking at it that was.

As a person, I've always been something of a "jack of all trades"--I like making art and playing music, but I also like computers, programming, FOSS and game dev. I'd be lying to you if I sad that I wasn't pretty sad and disappointed to be living through a time of mass fraudulence and exploitation, when human skills and creativity are instantly punished by theft and exploitation on an unprecedented scale, by those with the most money and compute power in the name of short term profit and "the ends justify the means" thinking.

As someone who has an ethical problem with how most generative AI has been trained on the exploited labor of other people, I do feel like I have a right to know who is and isn't leveraging it.

I was hoping to have servers be more public, so visible on the master server list and able to be joined by random people. (I'm a glutton for punishment I guess. lol)

To be honest, I think it's hard to have this discussion in the abstract, because a lot of it comes down to what that "specific level of creepy" means, both on the individual level and culturally. I think to what degree sex, violence, drug use, antisocial behavior, etc., are acceptable in media depends a lot on the context.

Many, or rather most, of the popular manga/anime series out there are shonen shows, primarily targeting the tastes and sensibilities of adolescent boys, so I think to some degree sexual content and violence are to be expected.

What's more, I think America is generally more sensitive to sexual content in media than Japan, while Japan is probably more sensitive to stuff like drug use... so there is a cultural aspect to it as well of course.

My daughter was getting into anime a few years ago and even going back to the classics it's really hard to avoid the eye rolling booba jokes and upskirt shots. Maybe I'm just old now.

You are. That's fine, I am too.

I think sometimes people forget that many of these classic manga and anime are from the shonen genre, and are primarily targeting adolescent boys.

That's not to say that people of any age and gender can't watch and enjoy them, but just that they aren't necessarily made with everybody in mind. (Girls can and should enjoy shonen works, just like guys can and should enjoy shojo works.) But much like how many western cartoons were made targeting young kids and will contain jokes and stories that some adults may not always resonate with anymore, shonen manga and anime are made with literal teen boys in mind, and as a result they are mainly made to appeal to the humor, emotions and fantasies of teen boys.

Things like sex, low-brow human and power fantasies sell, in general, to many demographics. But I think that's especially true for teen boys who are in the swing of puberty and young adulthood and generally very stupid and horny.

I think Americans tend to be much more sensitive about sex while being more ambivalent to violence, while the Japanese tend are probably the opposite, culturally speaking. While there is obviously no shortage of "problematic" stuff in various manga and anime, and some creators who take things too far or glorify toxic behavior, I can't necessarily blame Japanese creators for knowing their audience and what will sell.

A classic like Dragon Ball comes to mind: there are plenty of sexual gags, panty shots, strange relationships, pervy dude, and so on. Sex is often played off for comedic value, but it'd be disingenuous to suggest that there isn't a mild horniness to it too. There's also a ton of violence and killing, and the whole thing is really one big power fantasy. We could debate whether or not any of that is a problem or whether it was all key to its success as a manga/anime, but regardless, Dragon Ball was a show that was targeting young men but has endured to the point of becoming a cultural icon, loved by people of all ages all over the world.

In other words, I think that we should expect shonen shows to be a little bit raunchy and immature at times, but some stuff manages to transcend that genre/demographic and rise above it that becoming truly iconic.

It’s easy to say “you just have to find the good anime, here’s an example” and then discounting the fact that it’s basically one out of 1,000.

Ok, sure... But like, how is this different from any other kind of media? What's the ratio of good movies and TV shows to bad ones? What's the ratio of good music and video games to bad ones?

I would love to tell people to skip the generic stuff and latest flavor of the season anime for masterpieces and cult classics like Akira, Cowboy Bebop, Metropolis, Ping Pong the Animation, Redline, etc., but people will still opt to watch a show about a catgirl with a nicotine addiction and use that as their north star for understanding the medium. (Not seriously judging Chainsmoker Cat, because I haven't seen it and don't know much about it.)

The point being that there is no shortage of good, high-quality anime spanning 50+ years for people who care to seek it out. I've been watching anime for decades and I'm still seeing discovering classic shows and awesome movies that I haven't seen before. So yeah, go watch the good ones and skip the bad ones.

Maybe this is my pro-weed bias talking... But in the modern world where cannabis is increasingly legal and recreationally used, I'm not really sure what a meta-analysis of decades old studies is supposed to actually add to the discussion.

Is there a causative link between cannabis use and schizophrenia or psychosis? If so, are we seeing a proportionate uptick in schizophrenia and psychosis diagnoses in places where recreational cannabis use has been legalized?

There's plenty of data these days, we should be doing real, original research.

The evolutionary power inherent to all "spiral beings" including humans and animals, and absent in beastmen and anti-spirals.

The spiral metaphor is present in everything from animal DNA, to Simon's drill, and all the way up to the scale of galaxies themselves. To me it represents the power of evolution, reproduction, dynamism, and the perpetual desire to be and do more.

As I understand it, the anti-spirals view spiral power as an out of control threat to the stability and order of the universe, and so it is up to Lordgenome the Spiral King and his army of basement to prevent spiral power from growing too much by limiting the population of the planet and having all other humans live underground.