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Robin Williams’ daughter Zelda says AI recreations of her dad are ‘personally disturbing’::Robin Williams’ daughter Zelda says AI recreations of her dad are ‘personally disturbing’: ‘The worst bits of everything this industry is’
Agreed, we desperately need regulations on who has the right to reproduce another person’s image/voice/likeness. I know that there will always be people on the internet who do it anyway, but international copyright laws still mostly work in spite of that, so I imagine that regulations on this type of AI would mostly work as well.
We’re really in the Wild West of machine learning right now. It’s beautiful and terrifying all at the same time.
It would be a shame to lose valuable things like there I ruined it, which seem to be a perfectly fair use of copyrighted works. Copyright is already too strong.
Copyright IS too strong, but paradoxically artists’ rights are too weak. Everything is aimed to boost the profits of media companies, but not protect the people who make them. Now they are under threat of being replaced by AI trained on their own works, no less. Is it really worth it to defend AI if we end up with less novel human works because of it?
And they themselves trained on the work of other artists too. It’s just the circle of life. AI just happens to be better at learning than humans.
AI doesn’t need defending, it fill steamroll us all just by itself. We don’t really have a choice in this.
The “circle of life” except that it kills the artists’ careers rather than creating new ones. Even fledgling ones might find that there’s no opportunity for them because AIs are already gearing to take entry-level jobs. However efficient AI may be at replicating the work of artists, the same could be said of a photocopier, and we laws to define how those get to be used so that they don’t undermine creators.
I get that AI output is not identical and its output doesn’t go foul under existing laws, but the principles behind them are still important. Not only Culture but even AI itself will be lesser for it if human artists are not protected, because art AIs quickly degrade when AI art is fed back into it en masse.
Don’t forget that the kind of AI we have doesn’t do anything by itself. We don’t have sentient machines, we have very elaborate auto-complete systems. It’s not AI that is steamrolling artists, it’s companies seeking to replace artists with AIs trained on their works that are threatening them. That can’t be allowed.
It will kill all the ones that are stuck on old technology. Those that can make the best use of AI will prevail, at least for a little while, until AI replaces the whole media distribution chain and we’ll just have our own personal Holodeck with whatever content we want, generated on demand.
It’s not copying existing works and never did. Even if you explicitly instruct it to copy something existing, it will create its own original spin on the topic. It’s really no different than any artist working on commission.
You are free to ignore the reality of it, but that’s simply not the case. AI systems are getting filled with essentially all of human knowledge and they can remix it freely to create something new. This is the kind of stuff AI can produce just by itself, within seconds, the idea is from AI and so is the actual image. Sentience is not necessary for creativity.
When the artists are that easy to replace, their work can’t have been all that meaningful to begin with.
It’s sad to see how AI advocates strive to replicate the work of artists all the while being incredibly dismissive of their value. No wonder so many artists are incensed to get rid of everything AI.
Besides, it’s nothing new that media companies and internet content mills are willing to replace quality with whatever is cheaper and faster. To try to use that as an indictment against those artists’ worth is just… yeesh.
You realize that even this had to be set up by human beings right? Piping random prompts through art AI is impressive, but it’s not intelligent. Don’t let yourself get caught on sci-fi dreams, I made this mistake too. When you say “AI will steamroll humans” you are assigning awareness and volition to it that it doesn’t have. AIs maybe filled with all human knowledge but they don’t know anything. They simply repeat patterns we fed into them. An AI could give you a description of a computer, it could generate a picture of a computer, but it doesn’t have an understanding. Like I said before, it’s like a very elaborate auto-complete. If it could really understand anything, the situation would be very different, but the fact that even its most fierce advocates use it as a tool shows that it’s still lacking capabilities that humans have.
AI will not steamroll humans. AI-powered corporate industries, owned by flesh and blood people, might steamroll humans, if we let them. If you think that will get to just enjoy a Holodeck you are either very wealthy or you don’t realize that it’s not just artists who are at risk.
It’s such a shame too. Like you can have a million sensible takes and opinions and views on the topic, pro-AI, but the discussion revolves around the same shit on both sides.
It is an amazing tool, and could be used (and is used, it’s just obscured by the massive amount of shit and assholes trolling other people/artists) in so many creative ways. I’d been in a bit of a rut for quite a few years (partially because my brain no make happy chemicals or sleep), but I haven’t been as excited about the possibilities and inspired maybe ever in my life (at least not for a decade or nearly two) with art and my own stuff. I’m finally drawing again after way too many years of letting my stuff gather dust.
I used to think techno supremacists were an extreme fringe, but “AI” has made me question that.
For one, this isn’t AI in the scifi sense. This is a sophisticated model that forms an algorithm to generate content based on patterns it observes in a plethora of works.
It’s ridiculously overhyped, and I think it’s just flash in a pan. Companies have already minimized their customer support with automated service options and “tell me what the problem is” prompts. I have yet to meet anyone who is pleased by these. Instead it’s usually shouting into the phone that you want to talk to a real human because the algorithm thinks you want a problem fixed instead of the service cancelled.
I think this “technocrat” vs “humanities” debate will be society’s next big question.
I used to be on the tecnocrat side too when I was younger, but seeing the detrimental effects of social media, the app-driven gig economy and how companies constantly charge more for less changed my mind. Technocrats adopt this idea that technology is neutral and constantly advancing towards an ideal solution for everything, that we only need to keep adding more tech and we’ll have an utopia. Nevermind that so many advancements in automation lead to layoffs rather than less working hours for everyone.
I believe the debate is already happening, and the widespread disillusionment with tech tycoons and billionaires shows popular opinion is changing.
It’s pretty much exactly what the ship computer in StarTrek: TNG is along with the Holodeck (minus the energy->matter conversion).
You’ll be up for a rude awakening. What we see today is just the start of it. The current AI craze has been going on for a good 10 years, most of it limited to the lab and science papers. ChatGPT and DALL-E are simply the first that were good enough for public consumption. What followed them were huge investments into that space. We’ll be not only seeing a lot more of this, but also much better ones. The thing with AI is: The more data and training you throw at it, the better it gets. You can make a lot of progress simply by doing more it, without any big scientific breakthroughs. And AI companies with a lot of funding are throwing everything they can find at AI right now.
Values change. Images used to be difficult and time consuming to create, thus they had value. They are trivial to create now, so it becomes worthless. That’s progress. Yet instead of using that new superpower to create bigger projects and doing something still valuable with it, all the artists do is complain.
You obviously don’t realize that it didn’t. That’s prompts generated by AI put into another AI. There was no human telling it what to draw. The only instruction was to draw something original and than draw something different for the next image.
I don’t do any of that, I just acknowledge their superior and constantly improving performance. The thing doesn’t need to be self aware to put all the artists, and the other humans, out of a job if it can work 1000x faster than them.
Also AI will get awareness and volition real soon anyway, ETA for AGI is around 5 years, at the current pace I wouldn’t even be surprised if it arrives sooner. Human exceptionalism has the tendency to not age very well these days.
They don’t. See, it would be way easier to lake you Luddites seriously if you at least had any clue what you were talking about. But the whole art world seem to be stuck playing make-believe, just repeating the same nonsense that they heard from other people talking about AI instead just trying it for themselves.
Most of that AI stuff is publicly available, lots of it is free, and some can be run on your own PC. Just go and play with it to get a realistic idea of what it is and isn’t capable of. And most important of all: Think about the future. People always talk like issues with current AI systems are some fundamental limit of AI, when in reality most of those problems will be gone within six months.
Also it’s just bind boggling how people ignore everything AI can do, just to focus on some minuscule detail it still gets wrong. The fact that it can’t draw hands is not terribly surprising (hard structure to figure out from low res 2D images), meanwhile the fact that it can draw basically everything else, way faster and often better than almost any human, is rather mind boggling, yet somehow ignored.
CEOs are target for AI replacement just like everybody else. And AI that pays its own bills and runs on some rented cloud computing won’t be far off either. Either way, you don’t even have to go into doomsday scenarios with evil AI, the fact that AI will outcompete humans at most tasks alone ist enough to drastically reshape the world. If it’s ethically trained Open Source AI or some cooperate run thing really doesn’t matter, since either way, the changes will be huge.
Well, we are already way closer to that spooky scifi future than you’d think.
And you mean to tell me they decided to do it themselves? No, we both know that’s not what happened. That setup was arranged by people. You come with accusations of cluelessness and luddism only to say the exact same thing with different words.
You’d rather burst into wild speculation while acting superior rather than acknowledging matters as they are.
Who do you think are making the calls to replace people? Do you seriously believe that executives, who hold the highest power, will decide to replace themselves? They might as well use AIs just fine and reap all the benefits while doing none of the effort. Like many CEOs already do with their human subordinates.
As impressive as AIs might be and become, while you get lost on sci-fi fantasies you are losing sight of who is going to decide what they will be used for and how that will affect regular people.
Hell, we are already have a glimpse of how that’s going to play out. Most of the internet is molded by algorithms that, however inscrutable they may be, are directed to serve the interests of wealthy business owners. Some decades ago people dreamed of systems that would recommend things for you before you even knew that you wanted it, but some didn’t expect that it would be used to manipulate and advertise to us.
This is why keeping human interest in mind is of the utmost important.
You think oil paintings lost all worth when photography and printing and digital painting came about? That art isn’t worth it if it’s not expressed through the biggest and newest means?
That is what you think progress is? Human expression and passion being treated like trash because it’s not as optimal? What a dreary mindset.
If not to enable people to dedicate themselves to what they love, what is even the worth of technological advancement?
Don’t get mistaken. I love technology, I just can’t get excited about people being crushed by technology that is getting harnessed in the most cynical, greedy way. But you? You just seem to be eagerly praying for the day you will be turned into a paperclip, for “value”.
Lemmy is full of Luddite Twitter artist types. It’s an echo chamber in here.
Steamroll us? Not if I have anything to say about it. I look forward to setting condition 1SQ for strategic launch of thermonuclear weapons. Hooyah navy. If this is to be our end, then let it be SUCH an end, so as to be worthy of remembrance. I would rather this entire planet and all things upon it burn in radioactive fire than be sacrificed on the altar of technology.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
there I ruined it
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
The thing is, people still don’t grasp the ease with which this will be possible and to a large degree already. This doesn’t need hours of training anymore, you can clone voices with three seconds of audio and faces from a single image. Simple images can be clicked together in seconds with zero effort. Give it a few more years and you video can be created with equal ease.
You can regulate commercial use of somebodies likeness, which it largely already is, but people doing it for fun is unstoppable. This stuff is here today and it will get a whole lot more powerful going forward.
Just a few years back, Vernor Vinge’s scifi novels still seemed reasonably futuristic in dealing with the issue of fakes well by including several bits where the resolution of imagery was a factor in being able to analyze with sufficient certainty that you were talking to the right person, and now that notion already seems dated, and certainly not enough for a setting far into the future.
(at least they don’t still seem as dated as Johnny Mnemonic’s plot of erasing a chunk of your memories to transport an amount of data that would be easier and less painful to fit in your head by stuffing a microsd card up your nose)
IMO people doing it on their own for fun/expression is different than corporations doing it for profit, and there’s no real way to stop that. I think if famous AI constructs become part of big media productions, it will come with a constructed moral justification for it. The system will basically internalize and commodify the repulsion to itself exploiting the likeness of dead (or alive) actors. This could be media that blurs the line and proports to ask “deep questions” about exploiting people, while exploiting people as a sort of intentional irony. Or it will be more like a moral appeal to sentimentality, “in honor of their legacy we are exploiting their image, some proceeds will support causes they cared about, we are doing this to spread awareness, the issue they are representing are too important, they would have loved this project, we’ve worked closely with their estate.” Eventually there’s going to be a film like this, complete with teary-eyed behind-the-scenes interviews about how emotional it was to reproduce the likeness of the actor and what an honor it was. As soon as the moral justification can be made and the actor’s image can be constructed just well enough. People will go see it so they can comment on what they thought about it and take part in the cultural moment.
yeah i don’t think it should be legislated against, especially for private use [people will always work around it anyway], but using it for profit is really, viscerally wrong
You know I’m not generally a defender of intellectual property, but I don’t think in this case “not legislating because people will work around it” is a good idea. Or ever, really. It’s because people will try to work around laws to take advantage of people that laws need to be updated.
It’s not just about celebrities, or even just about respect towards dead people. In this case, what if somebody takes the voice of a family member of yours to scam your family or harass them? This technology can lead to unprecedented forms of abuse.
In light of that, I can’t even mourn the loss of making an AI Robin Willians talk to you because it’s fun.
We need something like the fair use doctrine coupled with identify rights.
If you want to use X’s voice and likeness in something, you have to purchase that privilege from X or X’s estate, and they can tell you to pay them massive fees or to fuck off.
Fair use would be exclusively for comedy, but still face regulation. There’s plenty of hilarious TikToks that use AI to make characters say stupid shit, but we can find a way to protect voice actors and creators without stifling creativity. Fair use would still require the person’s permission, you just wouldn’t need to pay to use it for such a minor thing – a meme of Mickey Mouse saying fuck for example.
At the end of the day though, people need to hold the exclusive and ultimate right to how their likeness and voice are used, and they need to be able to shut down anything they deem unacceptable. Too many people are concerned with what is capable than with acting like an asshole. It’s just common kindness to ask someone if you can use their voice for something, and respecting their wishes if they don’t want it.
I don’t know if this is a hot take or not, but I’ll stand by it either way – using AI to emulate someone without their permission is a fundamental violation of their rights and privacy. If OpenAI or whoever wants to claim that makes their product unusable, tough fucking luck. Every technology has faced regulations to maintain our rights, and if a company can’t survive without unbridled regulations, it deserves to die.
This was very well stated, and I wholeheartedly agree.