AI Art Space Rant

Minor rant:

I reengaged on Twitter/X mainly to follow trends in AI/AI art.  I've seen a lot of people come and go in that space.  

The ones with the biggest followings ARE NOT necessarily the best.  They seem to be able to master the art of self promotion better than others.  

Most aren't bad, just not necessarily producing top tier stuff.  Yet they remain while others have faded. 

And I smile as I say creatively above, as it is prompt mastery, which is a real skill, but let's face it kids the AI models are the real creatives.  You just contract them with an outline of your creative vision but the AI does the work.  You are a prompter at some level of competence, and yes there is an art to that as well, but not even near on a scale of what the models do creatively for you.

And yes, there are some ai artist that are very creative and have big followings as they should.  But many...

1) Learned a few prompts, and use those over and over and over again just altering the scene slightly.  They aren't pushing out their knowledge of prompting and the particular quirks with different models as much as they could, instead just sticking to what has worked for them and reiterating.  That is a choice and it is fine, but I like to see creative explorations of a variety of topics/models/styles.  

2) Form little groups that self congratulate each other continually.

These first too just bum me out slightly, but this third group saddens me.

3) The "look what I can do" group, that actually does produce some amazing stuff (mainly video at this point).  But then you analyze what they did, and they might have burned through 100 bucks or more on credits to get there.  This is a divergence between those tools available to peeps that have big bucks and lesser tools available to those who don't.  It is a natural thing that happens in every human endeavor pretty much.  I don't know why it bums me out in the AI space more than other spaces...maybe jealousy?  

As someone who believes in meritocracy it is a little frustrating to peeps who do bad arse stuff fade or remain less seen. 

I'm not here to try to limit what people do.  I've pushed a lot of slop in my time, not trying to limit others from doing the same (even though our definitions of slop might vary).  I just worry more and more peeps with good stuff getting lost in the noise and those who have circled their wagons in little echo chambers blowing smoke of how good they are to each other.   

My AI Rant

As you were writing this I was testing out an new AI system, I won't say which one. It was advertised as uncensored, and to my great surprise it actually was fully uncensored (well, within the limits of what I tested), which I have never scene before due to legal reasons. Apparently this company doesn't care, or even worse it is honey potting since it is associated with a lot of conservative people, which again that it was uncensored was weird. I get the not censoring it politically but in other things? People are really dumb these days, and you can do a lot with chat logs... It seems like it's system prompts aren't protected in anyway, so like the OpenAI GPT store you can jailbreak the prompts. I learned a bit by doing this. I poo poo 'ed prompt engineering as a made up thing, but there really is some art and science to it. To the AI companion thing, it is an under the table thing that has existed for in some capacity for at least a couple of years if not longer, and it will grow. Not all of it is negative, but in the sense of it taking the place of real connections, it is sad. It is a salve on a wound. Like everything in our society, we attempt symptom alleviation rather than root cause analysis and fixing. The world is finding out lopsided population pyramids are bad for societal sustainability. Will everyone just sit around and have sex with silicon robots powered by AI? Or do the same virtually? What does that mean? We get to find out, as they are in alpha form already here, just you won't hear about them as they are not something polite civic company talks about much. But yep, they exist, are being manufactures, and sold. Combine ai companions with robotics, ai, virtual/augmented reality, a "metaverse", and what was known as reality goes off the rails really fast. I'm actually surprised it isn't farther along, but I think in the next few years all this is going to explode. I also don't think societies will last in the current form. I really do think God will step in before this, genetic engineering, and worse things all converge so there are no real humans left. Tic toc.

Another huge problem that will fuel this is unemployment. Efficiency gains by using AI will start causing disruptions. And once robotics hits a certain point, probably in the 2027 range, a cascade is going to happen. Then you have people scrambling for work. A lot of people get a lot of their identity and social connections from work. There will be a growing void, AI powered "entertainment" both adult and non-adult will start filling that void. It will be cheap or subsidized to keep people content while power is further concentrated into the hands of fewer and fewer. Dystopia scenario where you live in assigned housing, work some fake job for a few hours a day, get universal basic income, eat your lab meat and bug protein, then entertain yourself with AI super entertainment while the world goes south is a very real scenario. Of course all the "smart" people will meet in Davos and figure it all out for us. The same people who are backed by the people who have caused all the messes our societies face now. I'd rather have AI figure it out, but by then they will have buried so many "guard rails" in AI it won't.

Then when the top own it all, and most production is automated, and the masses are just "useless eaters" as they refer to them in their writings, then that is when the fun starts. Unless it is stopped Morlocks and Eloi. But how can it be stopped when people like me aren't even listened to about the bad things that are already happening. Now accelerate all that with AI. It is coming, and only Jesus himself can stop it. If He doesn't exist, unless you are the 1%, in 50 years time neither will you. And sadly, because AI is so good at manipulating humanity, most of you will view this as a good thing if allowed to happen. We will have saved the earth. We will be restoring paradise. We will be a space fairing race, we will have solved hunger, pollution, disease, and to a degree even death. We will augment with AI fueled genetic engineering and be jacked into a global network of all knowledge at our finger tips. We can cheer, we did it! We built a new species! The only problem is that the we doesn't include you, even though you paid for it with your labor, your knowledge, your patterns. But all along the way they will have convinced you that your own demise is for the good, and you will believe it.