> AI democratizes access to pop culture.
Pop culture was already democratized. That's literally what makes it popular culture.
> So now when I connect with a human it’s not to share memes, it’s higher order.
I suspect that improving the image quality of the memes does not measurably improve the quality of the human connection here.
> IOW we can spend more time playing D&D because we didn't have to draw our characters.
You never had to draw your characters. You can just play and use your imagination. Why would we let LLMs do our dreaming for us?
It's a rhetorical example. Suppose you need to create an avatar of your character. Why does it follow that it's not beneficial to have an AI help generate the avatar?
You're responding to the specific example, not the general argument. Unless your counter is that whatever humanity is doing that AI is helping is probably stupid and shouldn't be done anyway.
> Unless your counter is that whatever humanity is doing that AI is helping is probably stupid and shouldn't be done anyway.
No, my counter is that whatever generative AI is doing is worth doing by humans but not worth doing by machines.
As the joke comic says: We thought technology was going to automate running errands so that we had time to make art, but instead it automates making art while we all have to be gig workers running errands.
> No, my counter is that whatever generative AI is doing is worth doing by humans but not worth doing by machines.
There is no basis to this claim, why is one worth doing by a biological machine but not a silicon one? People cling too highly to biological exceptionalism not understanding that one arose due to certain processes in the world and universe where somewhere else we might have been silicon beings all along. That is to say, people have huge amounts of cognitive dissonance thinking that they are actually simply machines of a biological variety.
> As the joke comic says: We thought technology was going to automate running errands so that we had time to make art, but instead it automates making art while we all have to be gig workers running errands.
Hardware is harder than software. Soon gig workers will be automated by AI too. I have heard this refrain a thousand times but it never ceases to make me think that it's in a specific time and place of the early 21 century. In the 22nd century, given such progress, we might talk of these discussions the same way artists and weavers did in (and of) the early 20th.
> There is no basis to this claim, why is one worth doing by a biological machine but not a silicon one?
You're entitled to your own value system, but in mine, humans are worth infinitely more than computers.
Same in mine. But mine isn’t predicated on the irreplaceability of human labor to derive value from human life. If we automated literally everything and we could all just live off UBI and drink wine and look at the stars all day, humans would still be intrinsically valuable. Or, the ability of a machine to generate art good enough to serve as a fun D&D avatar does not devalue a human doing the same. You may be attaching a… market value… to humans by proxy of their capital output. Very capitalist of you. If you look at things that way, the value of a human life has been trending toward zero and will continue. So I prefer not to hold a belief system that only values humans by the value of their labor. Therefore I am not bothered when we invent a new tool that might compete with human labor.
You are interpreting "labor" in a purely economic sense, but that's choice of framing.
What I'm getting at is that our actions are rewarding and meaningful when we put effort into them and they provide value (in the general, not economic sense) to others.
If I spend a day drawing you a picture, you get a warm fuzzy feeling because of how much I must care to sacrifice one of my finite days on Earth to make a thing just for you. If I spend ten seconds writing a prompt and an AI spits out an objectively prettier picture, it's still less meaningful and less valuable in every sense that matters. I gave up nothing to produce it and you gained little by having it.
> Therefore I am not bothered when we invent a new tool that might compete with human labor.
This is likely a luxury you have by being economically stable enough to not have to worry about how you're going to put food in your stomach today. While it's fun to imagine idyllic post-capitalist societies, artists today need to be able to afford shelter and healthcare. Generative AI will destroy their livelihood.
That may be a sacrifice you are willing to make (since it likely isn't coming to take your job), but I care too much about other people to be delighted by that.
No one needs an avatar. You can draw a stick figure or take a selfie or whatever. This is all so silly and trivial.
> No one needs an avatar. You can draw a stick figure or take a selfie or whatever. This is all so silly and trivial.
This does not answer the question, this sidesteps the requirements. I can either have no avatar, or I can make one for the marginal cost of zero via an AI. This then belies that the true complaint of people against AI is one of an economic variety, not a technological one, in which case, fix the economics, and support open source AI so that all may have such tech, not just big tech.
Consider consulting documentation then. A model can help sift through orders of magnitude more literature than you can in the same timeframe.
OK? What does that have to do with pop culture IP rights?
If you're building an LLM for management or technical consulting then the valuable content is locked up behind corporate firewalls anyway so you're going to have to pay to use it. In that field most of what you could find with a web crawler or in digital books is already outdated and effectively worthless.