New blog-post: "When online commenters 'detect' my art as AI"

→ https://www.davidrevoy.com/article1164/when-online-commenters-detect-my-art-as-ai

@davidrevoy Speaks a lot about "anti-AI" hysteria.
These people don't need art. They need an enemy to vent their frustration on.

If only we could simply appreciate art based on whether we like it, no matter who created it.

@skobkin
you didn't read any of david's comics, did you? AI slop being everywhere and spreaders of slop not disclosing their use of AI means no one can trust if anything is authentic anymore, whether it's art, news, articles.

don't celebrate this breakdown of trust.

@pelle

you didn't read any of david's comics, did you?

I did.

AI slop being everywhere and spreaders of slop not disclosing their use of AI means no one can trust if anything is authentic anymore, whether it's art, news, articles.

Sorry, but for me it's nothing new. People were generating misinformation or bad quality stuff long before LLM's became available.

spreaders of slop not disclosing their use of AI

Expecting this is a bit strange. If by slop you mean very low-quality content which is used to just earn money, then such people never had any motivation to behave according to high standards. Why would they do this now?

But I agree with you on the fact that flood of low quality content is bad.

Although there's nothing new here too since when any elite process becomes available to everyone, we're getting more low-quality stuff in absolute numbers. But we're also getting more good stuff because more people enter the field.
Couple examples are movies/shows and sound recording. When video cameras and sound recording gear became available to everyone, we've got a lot of shitty content, but at the same time self-made stars started to pop across the world without being produced by big recording labels (at least when they started). So as any other cheap technology, this is double-sided.
"AI" is just a tool and it's not going anywhere.

no one can trust if anything is authentic anymore

I don't see this as a problem really because the "authentic" term itself doesn't make much sense to me. This reminds me of "NON-GMO" products. I don't see any value in them too. I want good products, not some magically "natural" stuff which doesn't guarantee anything. I'll gladly buy GMO vegetables if they're being made with good quality control.
Same goes for images or code.

So from my point of view it's just another shift in history which required us to review our beliefs and adapt to changes.

I guess one of the things this change is pushing us to is that we need to learn to work with information better. We should've done that before, but we didn't. Maybe this push will help us. Or maybe we still wouldn't do that and just drown in the ocean of useless and unverified information. But that's not an AI problem. It's a humans problem. We had this problem for a long time, but didn't do much about it.

don't celebrate this breakdown of trust

Please don't put words in my mouth.
I celebrate people who wasn't able to do some stuff before becoming able to do that without paying a lot of money which they may not have.

I don't like misinformation and bad quality, but I do not consider "AI" it's cause. It's people who do that. And that's the backside of it - all people now able to do much more than they was able to do.

@skobkin
people have been been killed since before assault rifles.
an assault rifles is just a tool.
assault rifles are here to stay, deal with it.
guns don't kill people, people kill people.
it's just another shift in history, no point resisting it.

@pelle
This is a wrong analogy. I'm giving you a benefit of the doubt and wouldn't say that your intentions were malicious.

The main purpose of weapons is killing people.

"AI" purpose is not. If you want better analogies, then look at knives for example.
We need them in our everyday lives. We're using them in the kitchen, we're using them when working with paper documents, we're using them when carving wood. But bad people can also use them to kill other people. We're not blaming knives for that.
Well okay, some politicians do blame knives, games or rock music, but I hope we can agree that politicians who're usually reactionists and populists are not very good for being moral compasses and their opinion usually isn't based on scientific research.

P.S. I'm writing "AI" in quotes because I personally consider it a misused buzzword brought to us by marketologists. For me it's just a "machine learning", but since most people agreed on using "AI" as a term for that, I'm using it too.

@skobkin
proponents of rifles would say the main purpose of them defence, security, autonomy, or perhaps recreation or sport.

anyway, i was going to do the analogy of the mass-killing of pigs in gas chambers to produce hotdogs, because arguably the main purpose of that is taste — and like generative AI it is extremely environmentally destructive.

but i figured if your approach to generative AI is between inevitabilist resignation and scolding the opposition for its »hysteria,« then i have no reason to assume it would be any different for slaughterhouses.

generative AI is just a tool.
hotdogs are just food.
who cares, right?