The Generative AI Thread

[DistortAMG]

I have to be honest. I have been listening to some AI generated music recently, specifically some reggae.

I have to admit, some of it is extremely good. Some of it not so much but the fact some of it is brilliant is quite astonishing to me, as a lover of many a great artist across many generations.

Even some of perhaps the most iconic American hip hop, gangster rap and heavy metal that has been re worked by generative AI, into 1950s & 60's era rock and roll, jazz and blues is really good too

Ill post some links when I get home as they are saved in my favourites.

I agree with @GooseOnTheLoose here, generative AI absolutely shines when you use it to assist your own work, be in graphic design, writing, computer programming, music, whatever.

It allows you to essentially supercharge your own workflow without taking away your own personality and stamp in the work.

Take computer programming for example (and yes even that has someone's personality) a single person can now create in a matter of weeks what a team of say 10 people could do in a year. That is the supercharge aspect.

AI doesn't shine when you lazily ask it to do all the work for you. Put lazy in, get lazy out so to speak.

 

[rob666]

Just in one post, that is a few thousand musicians out of work, programmers out of work, graphic designers out of work, and editors/writers out of work.
It assists you to do what you want, without what used to be the paid efforts of other qualified professionals...

If I was any young white collar worker in any form of non productive service industry, I would be very concerned for my future prospects...and looking at a physical apprenticeship to replace any admin based job.

Lots of stuff in the papers reporting how AI will separate the very rich from the rest of us even quicker...as is already happening.
Ten grand invested in Nvidia a decade ago would give you a nice three million quid profit now.
Very nice profit for those willing and able to gamble with those sort of numbers..

I am happy being a productive worker with zero chance of being replaced by AI...but god help the next generation of professional and clerical workers.

When and if the AI bubble bursts I hope it doesn't wipe out too much of the rest of the economy.

Better here than in the Blackpool topic though.

 

[DistortAMG]

Just in one post, that is a few thousand musicians out of work, programmers out of work, graphic designers out of work, and editors/writers out of work.
It assists you to do what you want, without what used to be the paid efforts of other qualified professionals...

If I was any young white collar worker in any form of non productive service industry, I would be very concerned for my future prospects...and looking at a physical apprenticeship to replace any admin based job.

Lots of stuff in the papers reporting how AI will separate the very rich from the rest of us even quicker...as is already happening.
Ten grand invested in Nvidia a decade ago would give you a nice three million quid profit now.
Very nice profit for those willing and able to gamble with those sort of numbers..

I am happy being a productive worker with zero chance of being replaced by AI...but god help the next generation of professional and clerical workers.

When and if the AI bubble bursts I hope it doesn't wipe out too much of the rest of the economy.

Better here than in the Blackpool topic though.

When the standardised worldwide shipping container put huge, huge numbers of manual dock workers out of work worldwide as the work of many could be done by the few, or when the mechanical tractor put possibly more numbers out of jobs on the farms, people said the same, yes it put huge numbers out of work, people re skilled but some did not, but the equilibrium was re balanced after a generation or two as new people were born into a world where those jobs never existed for them and new industries were created.

Humans we are very adaptable, this arguably (in the grand scheme of things) is one of the prices we pay for progress and advancement. I do not know about you, but in many ways and without even having to live a past life, I can confidently say I prefer living in a modern world that living in caves. Now the argument could be made that you don't know what could be until it happens, so you are not missing anything, but that is another argument for another time.

 

[rob666]

Nice and cool here in the cave though.

The big papers say the balance is being thrown out all the more...more and more capital in the hands of a very few individuals, and it is the professional classes that will be hardest hit this time, the manual workers and tradesmen are safer, for now, than the clerics and administrators...their wealth is now moving to the powerful at the top.

Apparently, cavemen did far less work overall than modern man, civilisation has a lot to answer for.

 

[GooseOnTheLoose]

Nice and cool here in the cave though.

The big papers say the balance is being thrown out all the more...more and more capital in the hands of a very few individuals, and it is the professional classes that will be hardest hit this time, the manual workers and tradesmen are safer, for now, than the clerics and administrators...their wealth is now moving to the powerful at the top.

Apparently, cavemen did far less work overall than modern man, civilisation has a lot to answer for.

I think you're conflating the financial valuation of a technology with the utility of the technology itself.

You're absolutely right that we're in a bubble. The market cap of Nvidia and the frantic scramble by VC firms to throw billions at anything with ".ai" in the URL is reminiscent of the madness of the late 90s.

When the dot com bubble burst in 2000, however, it wiped out the speculators and the companies that had no business plan other than "we have a website" (RIP Pets.com). It didn't wipe out the internet. The underlying technology remained, matured and became the fundamental infrastructure of modern life. Amazon and Google survived the pop because they actually did something useful.

Going back further, the Railway Mania of the 1840s saw families ruin themselves investing in railway shares that were essentially worthless. When that bubble burst, it was economically devastating for the investors. The track had physically been laid though and the infrastructure remained. The trains kept running. The revolution happened regardless of the share price.

AI will follow the same trajectory. The hype will die, the bubble will burst and a lot of tech bros will lose their shirts. But the tools, the ability to process data, generate code and assist creativity, will remain because they are useful.

You're largely correct on the transfer of wealth and the "professional classes" taking a hit. We're entering a period of friction where the "knowledge worker" is facing the same existential threat that the weaver faced from the loom, or the dock worker faced from the container. It's a painful transition for the generation caught in the middle, even if it eventually leads to increased productivity for the species.

As for the cavemen... they might have worked fewer hours, but they also died of dental infections at 25 and didn't have Ibuprofen, central heating, or Nemesis. I think I'll stick with civilisation, warts and all.

TLDR: Bubbles pop (dotcom, railways, tulips), but the tech stays. The internet didn't vanish when the market crashed in 2000. Cavemen didn't have paracetamol or pints.

We're still doomed, but it'll at least be efficient doom!

 

[rob666]

Scary times to be a white collar worker "somewhere in the middle".

Another few years and I would have to be paying out a few grand for a robomower.

 

[Coaster]

And I do not disagree with you in the slightest.

There is a vast grey area between "Write me a book" and "Help me write my book" though.

If I use an LLM to spitball plot points, to bounce ideas back and forth about character development, to ask for advice on how to avoid lazy stereotypes in my dialogue, or to iterate on a scene I am stuck on... am I stealing? Or am I using a tool as a co-author and editor? Is that functionally different from bouncing ideas off a friend, or hiring a sensitivity reader? The creative spark, the direction, and the curation are still mine. The AI is just the sounding board.

Yes, imo the way to work on character development, avoid stereotypes etc. is to research, read a ton of books, build knowledge and ask for feedback. If you use AI to do this for you, you're handing your ability to build skills over to billionaires and the work is no longer 100% your own. You're robbing yourself of that experience and feeding a machine that ultimately wants to put you out of a job/reduce your opportunities.

Bouncing ideas off a friend is a much better way, since you'll both build skills and knowledge - as well having fun!

 

[GooseOnTheLoose]

Yes, imo the way to work on character development, avoid stereotypes etc. is to research, read a ton of books, build knowledge and ask for feedback. If you use AI to do this for you, you're handing your ability to build skills over to billionaires and the work is no longer 100% your own. You're robbing yourself of that experience and feeding a machine that ultimately wants to put you out of a job/reduce your opportunities.

Bouncing ideas off a friend is a much better way, since you'll both build skills and knowledge - as well having fun!

I admire the romanticism of the "pure" artistic process, but this argument relies on a utopian view of the creative workflow that doesn't always align with reality.

Bouncing ideas off a friend is indeed wonderful, provided you have friends who are:

• Available at 2am when the writer's block lifts.
• Knowledgeable about the specific niche you are writing about.
• Willing to act as an unpaid editor for your rough drafts without getting annoyed.

AI acts as a tireless, albeit hallucination prone, sounding board. It lowers the barrier to entry. Not everyone has a literary circle or the funds to hire a sensitivity reader or a research assistant. For a neurodivergent writer who struggles to organise thoughts, or someone writing in a second language, it is an accessibility tool, not a cheat code.

Using tools "robbing" you of of skill building is a pretty weak argument. The pocket calculator didn't rob mathematicians of the ability to understand number theory. It freed them from the drudgery of long division to focus on complex problem solving. Google Search didn't rob us of the ability to research. It saves us from spending weeks in a library hoping the specific book we needed wasn't checked out.

As for "handing over to billionaires"... we're having this conversation on the internet, likely via devices running Windows (Microsoft), Android (Google), or iOS (Apple), powered by cloud infrastructure owned by Cloudflare or similar.

We're already deep in the billionaires' ecosystem. Using Microsoft Word instead of a quill didn't destroy literature, even if it did line Bill Gates' pockets.

The work remains your own because you're the one curating the output. You are the director. The AI is just a very fast, very well read intern who occasionally lies about the number of fingers on a human hand.

 

[BarryZola]

AI acts as a tireless, albeit hallucination prone, sounding board. It lowers the barrier to entry. Not everyone has a literary circle or the funds to hire a sensitivity reader or a research assistant. For a neurodivergent writer who struggles to organise thoughts, or someone writing in a second language, it is an accessibility tool, not a cheat code.

This is alright, until (and as is now happening) the poor of the world (usually Africa/India) see that the way to make money is to flood the likes of Youtube and TikTok in the West with Ai shiz like they couldn't do before due to language issues. And it isn't artistic stuff, even with the help of Ai, it's just whatever the latest percentage clicked on shite has been in the last month. This abundance of **** then just drowns out most of the decent stuff just because of the sheer numbers that the general person has to wade through. Ai has been awful for most genuinely artistic people. I don't see any way that this latest iteration of Ai is going to be good for the general public in the medium to long term.

 

[GooseOnTheLoose]

This is alright, until (and as is now happening) the poor of the world (usually Africa/India) see that the way to make money is to flood the likes of Youtube and TikTok in the West with Ai shiz like they couldn't do before due to language issues. And it isn't artistic stuff, even with the help of Ai, it's just whatever the latest percentage clicked on shite has been in the last month. This abundance of **** then just drowns out most of the decent stuff just because of the sheer numbers that the general person has to wade through. Ai has been awful for most genuinely artistic people. I don't see any way that this latest iteration of Ai is going to be good for the general public in the medium to long term.

You appear to have mistaken YouTube and TikTok for the National Gallery or the Louvre.

These are platforms built on the backs of "Charlie Bit My Finger", cats playing keyboards and teenagers eating Tide Pods. They've never been bastions of high culture or "genuine art". They're attention marketplaces designed to sell advertising space.

Content farms aren't a new phenomenon, nor are they exclusive to the Global South. For the last decade, we have been subjected to "5 Minute Crafts" videos (originating from Cyprus and Russia) and "Elsagate" content (largely Western / Eastern European) that churned out absolute nonsensical sludge using human actors.

The fact that a creator in India or Nigeria can now use AI to overcome a language barrier to compete in the global marketplace is actually a levelling of the playing field. Why should the West have a monopoly on monetising the attention economy? If their "AI shiz" is getting clicks, it's because the Western audience is clicking on it.

The problem is the algorithm, not the AI tool.

YouTube and TikTok are designed to maximise watch time. If an AI generated video of "Family Guy characters as 80s Sitcom stars" keeps a user on the app for 30 seconds, the algorithm pushes it. The machine feeds us what we consume. If "decent stuff" is being drowned out, it's because the general public, collectively, prefers the low effort dopamine hit of the "shite" you describe over a 40 minute video essay on the socio-economic impact of the Corn Laws.

We've been drowning in low quality cookie cutter "slop" long before ChatGPT learned to hallucinate.

Television spent two decades filling prime time slots with You've Been Framed, Rude Tube and World's Wildest Police Chases. This wasn't high art; it was a broadcaster buying cheap, user generated clips for £250 a pop, hiring a comedian to do a voiceover in a shed and gluing it together to sell advert breaks. It was the original "content farm".

Look at the Reaction Video genre on YouTube. Millions of views are generated by people simply sitting in a chair, watching a video someone else made and occasionally pulling a face. That requires zero creative input, yet it dominates the platform.

Look at the "Asset Flip" phenomenon on Steam, where "developers" buy a pre made pack of assets from the Unity store, slap them together without any code changes, and sell it as a new game.

Look at the BuzzFeed era of listicles. "17 Pictures of Hedgehogs that look like Muffins". That wasn't written by a journalist; it was scraped from Reddit by an overworked intern.

The "abundance of ****" you describe is an economic model, not a technological one.

The demand for endless, mind numbing content to fill the silence of modern existence has always been there. AI hasn't invented the concept of "low effort shite"; it's just democratised the production of it. Previously, you needed a TV studio or a video editing suite to churn out garbage, whereas now you just need a prompt.

The mechanism has changed, but the mediocrity remains constant. AI hasn't created the demand for trash, it's just made the supply chain more efficient.

 

[BarryZola]

You appear to have mistaken YouTube and TikTok for the National Gallery or the Louvre.

These are platforms built on the backs of "Charlie Bit My Finger", cats playing keyboards and teenagers eating Tide Pods. They've never been bastions of high culture or "genuine art". They're attention marketplaces designed to sell advertising space.

Content farms aren't a new phenomenon, nor are they exclusive to the Global South. For the last decade, we have been subjected to "5 Minute Crafts" videos (originating from Cyprus and Russia) and "Elsagate" content (largely Western / Eastern European) that churned out absolute nonsensical sludge using human actors.

The fact that a creator in India or Nigeria can now use AI to overcome a language barrier to compete in the global marketplace is actually a levelling of the playing field. Why should the West have a monopoly on monetising the attention economy? If their "AI shiz" is getting clicks, it's because the Western audience is clicking on it.

The problem is the algorithm, not the AI tool.

YouTube and TikTok are designed to maximise watch time. If an AI generated video of "Family Guy characters as 80s Sitcom stars" keeps a user on the app for 30 seconds, the algorithm pushes it. The machine feeds us what we consume. If "decent stuff" is being drowned out, it's because the general public, collectively, prefers the low effort dopamine hit of the "shite" you describe over a 40 minute video essay on the socio-economic impact of the Corn Laws.

We've been drowning in low quality cookie cutter "slop" long before ChatGPT learned to hallucinate.

Television spent two decades filling prime time slots with You've Been Framed, Rude Tube and World's Wildest Police Chases. This wasn't high art; it was a broadcaster buying cheap, user generated clips for £250 a pop, hiring a comedian to do a voiceover in a shed and gluing it together to sell advert breaks. It was the original "content farm".

Look at the Reaction Video genre on YouTube. Millions of views are generated by people simply sitting in a chair, watching a video someone else made and occasionally pulling a face. That requires zero creative input, yet it dominates the platform.

Look at the "Asset Flip" phenomenon on Steam, where "developers" buy a pre made pack of assets from the Unity store, slap them together without any code changes, and sell it as a new game.

Look at the BuzzFeed era of listicles. "17 Pictures of Hedgehogs that look like Muffins". That wasn't written by a journalist; it was scraped from Reddit by an overworked intern.

The "abundance of ****" you describe is an economic model, not a technological one.

The demand for endless, mind numbing content to fill the silence of modern existence has always been there. AI hasn't invented the concept of "low effort shite"; it's just democratised the production of it. Previously, you needed a TV studio or a video editing suite to churn out garbage, whereas now you just need a prompt.

The mechanism has changed, but the mediocrity remains constant. AI hasn't created the demand for trash, it's just made the supply chain more efficient.

I actually can't argue, and I enjoyed that reasoning. I'm still annoyed though.

 

[GJMarshy]

Very interesting reading this thread.

What’s notable is how everyone seems to agree it’s not taking us in a particularly good direction. There’s benefits in efficiency and medical efforts, but we have to ask at what cost?

Yes I can now draw out a record breaking coaster by hand and get AI to make a photorealistic render of it in seconds. Is that fun? Yes. Am I contributing to heat/carbon emissions of huge data centres? Also yes.

Could I use Ai for more productive things? I can and do, but only because these days it’s practically an arms race. Take CVs. There was a time you could know you’d do well in sifting because you write well, and can coherently organise your thoughts with accurate grammar and the right level of detail vs conciseness.

Today, anyone can pretend to be far more competent than they actually are, and so employers and jobseekers pay the price. That’s just one apart in which it’s actively harming the job market (and thereby hitting the economy). As this thread has proved, you could follow this rabbit hole a lot further. To places personally I’d rather not think about!

Honestly I don’t know. It does seem to be the one innovation most of us wish would never advance, or never be created in the first place.

Can’t close Pandora’s box now though. We’ll have to keep having conversations like this so we can all live with this weird future we’ve made for ourselves.

Also I realise just how old and cynical I sound in this post. I’m only 28! Makes it hit home how fast it’s forced everyone to grow up, or more accurately “wise-up”.

Marshy.

 

[Matt N]

Very interesting reading this thread.

What’s notable is how everyone seeks to agree it’s not taking us in a particularly good direction. There’s benefits in efficiency and medical efforts, but we have to ask at what cost?

Yes I can now draw out a record breaking coaster by hand and get AI to make a photorealistic render of it in seconds. Is that fun? Yes. Am I contributing to heat/carbon emissions of huge data centres? Also yes.

Could I use Ai for more productive things? I can and do, but only because these days it’s practically an arms race. Take CVs. There was a time you could know you’d do well in sifting because you write well, and can coherently organise your thoughts with accurate grammar and the right level of detail vs conciseness.

Today, anyone can pretend to be far more competent than they actually are, and so employers and jobseekers pay the price. That’s just one apart in which it’s actively harming the job market (and thereby hitting the economy). As this thread has proved, you could follow this rabbit hole a lot further. To places personally I’d rather not think about!

Honestly I don’t know. It does seem to be the one innovation most of us wish would never advance, or never be created in the first place.

Can’t close Pandora’s box now though. We’ll have to keep having conversations like this so we can all live with this weird future we’ve made for ourselves.

Also I realise just how old and cynical I sound in this post. I’m only 28! Makes it hit home how fast it’s forced everyone to grow up, or more accurately “wise-up”.

Marshy.

Personally, I would not be quite this cynical.

With regard to productivity; yes, you can now use AI to produce something somewhat serviceable with limited talent in a way that you couldn’t before. But I think that those who rely solely on AI will still never be quite as strong as those who have the fundamental prowess and use it as a supplementary tool.

I personally am sceptical of the belief that AI can do anything, and I think it does have tells and weak spots if you solely rely on it. I can’t quite put my finger on why, but I feel that a written extract written solely by ChatGPT or similar has a certain tone to it that feels a bit… off and is easily detectable. AI likes certain words, certain phrases and certain ways of structuring things that just… aren’t how a normal human would write or speak. If you read carefully enough, I think this is quite easily detectable, and I think it’s still quite easy to sort the wheat from the chaff in things like job applications. It might surprise you, but from having spoken to some people (e.g. lecturers when I was at university), there are plenty of people out there who don’t even remove the AI prompts when they copy and paste an AI-generated document!

I work in a field that has perhaps desensitised me to AI somewhat. Working as a developer/data analyst, I use generative AI quite regularly to assist with my coding. It is very good at handling small scale queries and doing things like refactoring code, don’t get me wrong… but I would not rely solely on it for something of any significant scale. I’ve had it generate me code containing functions that bluntly don’t exist, generate me incomplete code, tell me things that are plainly wrong even in the face of me providing evidence to the contrary… it’s certainly an unreliable narrator! The amount of times I’ve had it tell me one thing and then go “you’re right!” and u-turn on itself when I present evidence to the contrary provides me with the proof I need that it certainly isn’t a consistently reliable aid…

With all of that said, generative AI is undeniably a powerful tool that can hugely optimise the workflow of an already knowledgeable person. I have used it to help polish CVs and job applications I’ve written before to make them sound more “application-friendly” (I really struggle to word things in the way they seemingly like on job applications). I have used it to help me do coding, and it has optimised my workflow in many ways. I don’t rely on it as a crutch, but I use it a bit like a Google that talks to me, and I think it is powerful in that sense. I’m a sceptic of how far AI on its own can carry you, but when you pair AI with a human who has fundamental knowledge, I think you have a really powerful combination.

A phrase I’ve heard that I like and agree with is “AI won’t replace humans, but humans that use AI will replace those that don’t”. That’s how I think this AI arms race will go; I’m not sure it will be this grand replacement event like some envisage or want, but I think AI will become an increasingly essential part of an optimised human workflow.

 

[rob666]

Would love to see AI doing my jobs for the week, dead wood pruning, moss off paths and pruning roses.
I image such machines would cost millions, and still not have reasonable access to do a proper job.
Many jobs are safe...white collar jobs less so.

My main contact with AI seems to be very poor quality video on youtube.

 

[BarryZola]

Would love to see AI doing my jobs for the week, dead wood pruning, moss off paths and pruning roses.
I image such machines would cost millions, and still not have reasonable access to do a proper job.
Many jobs are safe...white collar jobs less so.

My main contact with AI seems to be very poor quality video on youtube.

You say that, but if a significant number of the white collar jobs go, there may be a load of people needing to go into manual jobs...like gardening! Then your job space becomes too crowded and your job security is at threat as there is only a demand for a certain number of gardeners. Yes, you will personally be alright, but the next few generations may find it a more crowded profession.

 

[rob666]

Yup, all such skilled manual jobs are the same.

I usually turn down a new (long term weekly) job every month.
I could double my round every year.

...but I am semi retired and weak with arthritis, and have to get the coasters in as well.

My punters can't get plumbers, decent brickies and general tradesmen out...my own joiner only works for ex customers he likes...and still has a years waiting list!

How to get the slop off youtube is another matter...

 

[Coaster]

I admire the romanticism of the "pure" artistic process, but this argument relies on a utopian view of the creative workflow that doesn't always align with reality.

Bouncing ideas off a friend is indeed wonderful, provided you have friends who are:

• Available at 2am when the writer's block lifts.
• Knowledgeable about the specific niche you are writing about.
• Willing to act as an unpaid editor for your rough drafts without getting annoyed.

AI acts as a tireless, albeit hallucination prone, sounding board. It lowers the barrier to entry. Not everyone has a literary circle or the funds to hire a sensitivity reader or a research assistant. For a neurodivergent writer who struggles to organise thoughts, or someone writing in a second language, it is an accessibility tool, not a cheat code.

Using tools "robbing" you of of skill building is a pretty weak argument. The pocket calculator didn't rob mathematicians of the ability to understand number theory. It freed them from the drudgery of long division to focus on complex problem solving. Google Search didn't rob us of the ability to research. It saves us from spending weeks in a library hoping the specific book we needed wasn't checked out.

As for "handing over to billionaires"... we're having this conversation on the internet, likely via devices running Windows (Microsoft), Android (Google), or iOS (Apple), powered by cloud infrastructure owned by Cloudflare or similar.

We're already deep in the billionaires' ecosystem. Using Microsoft Word instead of a quill didn't destroy literature, even if it did line Bill Gates' pockets.

The work remains your own because you're the one curating the output. You are the director. The AI is just a very fast, very well read intern who occasionally lies about the number of fingers on a human hand.

I don't agree that using AI for novel writing is the same as using a calculator for maths. Using AI steals work from other authors & writers, whereas a calculator completes sums without stealing anything.

Creative writing is all about building skills and fine-tuning creative processes; if you get AI to do it for you, you're not truly exercising creativity imo.

 

[Zeock]

Grammarly has turned off their 'Expert Review' feature, which used the work of experts without their permission. I personally think that the removal of this feature is good for AI regulation.

Grammarly Turns Off 'Expert Review' Features, Faces Lawsuit From Author

The feature presented editing suggestions designed to emulate the style of journalists, authors, or other writers without their permission.

uk.pcmag.com