The OP, perhaps unknowingly, makes a pretty telling admission here - that generative AI isn't "inevitable" because it's creating useful results (it isn't), but rather because users find flipping through its outputs fascinating to the point that it consumes all their former creative energy.
I always enjoy when people discover the adage “the purpose of a system is what it does” via first principles.
In this instance, it’s a bullshit machine designed to chew time and resources and here he is proving that
there's also the "just one more" effect at play because for any given prompt the results would be not quite what you had in mind but close enough for you to think "if i just tweak the prompt a bit, it'll be perfect"
which it won't be but surely the next tweak will do the trick...
Sort of - many of these folks then learn to train models and enter more useful fields.
Stable Diffusion can be a gateway drug to inaction but I’ve tangibly witnessed it spawn careers in Computer Vision “for good” too.
For sure - I’m saying the curiosity of one (for the initiated) can lead to an insanely valuable skill set if they ask “huh. wonder how this works.”
If you go to college you’re taught to do this in reverse from the beginning as a Data Scientist (image classification, reinforce learning, etc).
This is something I ID’d very early on about ai, it’s kinda like dreaming in that you have a unique and personal experience that means something to you because your random inputs go into it, but by that same token, it’s an experience. Nothing you make with it will be very interesting to others.
As a result I think the best use of that level of gen is just for making personal dreamlike experiences that are meaningless and strange like dreams as opposed to trying to be anything specific. The tech makes bizarre abstractions as a matter of course. It turns inputs into a computer dream vision
That’s what I was imagining ages ago, Kinda like a high tech visual executive ball clicker. I had the idea before gpt 3 came out haha. I would buy that. It’s unclear what level of this stuff can be done without burning down the planet though. Some stuff can be done on device and a lot can’t.
Wow. I can imagine getting obsessed with just about anything (autism) but these things are so boring! It's something to screw around with for a few minutes before becoming bored with it. There's just no there there. It doesn't ever produce anything new or original. This guy must be so empty inside.
I grok special interests, technology, history, media, or whatever. Exploring a real subject can be endless. How many books and documentaries and videos and podcasts are there on any possible subject now?
Generative AI is just endless feedback carrying no information that wasn't scraped.
I think it takes certain type of personality. Like, I fucked around with Midjourney for a bit when this whole AI art thing was getting started so if I was going to criticize it, I wouldn't be using secondhand information. I got bored after a while and found the process frustrating and limited.
The relationship between an AI art program and an AI artist is more like the relationship between an artist and their patron or commissioner, except if the artist lacked a soul, agency, basic sentience, and all of their content was stolen, just in a less obvious way than a human could do it.
While not exactly the same, this feels adjacent to the artist's trap of endlessly gathering reference in lieu of getting started on creating the thing it's for, because it gives you the feeling of making progress while doing it but afterward you realize you still haven't actually created anything.
I was talking about instead of putting something out creatively, I personally spend my time playing casual games that give me a dopamine rush when win a level. Communities are fine.
Maybe it is all the gambling discussion lately but seeing a lot of people describe addictive/unhealthy behavior patterns and then finish their post with "were all like this, right? Right?" without ever even realizing what they posted apparently... the way people talk about gear in fo76 is concerning
people generally get into mmos because of something missing from their lives, which is then amplified as they become habitually addicted
that's my pet theory, anyways
I got into a MUD when I was a kid but have bounced off MMOs after a couple months, even when I was still playing the MUD. Eventually I realized I needed to put more energy into leveling up myself than a character.
Ironically, this is exactly the kind of lazy "kids these days" sentiment I'd expect to see emblazoned across some hideous AI-generated image with a million 'likes' from Facebook boomers
Games are someone else's creative output though, and at least for games with a storyline, are the same as one seeing a movie with friends. Even if you play it alone, many people participate in community together to appreciate the games later. Conventions, fanart, writing, or just chatting.
Also the implication that someone with a more powerful GPU would be generating images faster and have more of them, like the purpose of the image isn’t to actually ever look at it but to have a large amount of them.
