thrwayaistartup

Does a picture of a humming bird lack insight? Does collage art lack insight? Do remixes lack insight? Does mass-produced formulaic pop music lack insight?

Maybe. Or maybe some artists enjoy those creative processes and some audiences enjoy the output. Maybe oil painters who critique photography, and photographers who critique collages, and musicians who critique mash-ups, and DJs who critique modern production studios, and, yes, artists who critique the use of AI models in creative processes, are all just being pretentious assholes.

(It is possible I am simply misunderstand Cave. I take most of his writing to be artistic prose. It's possible that these are sincere metaphysics and that Nick Cave does literally believe in some sort of ur-religious "essential and unconscious human spirit underpinning our existence". In which case I think he's got a nutty religion and consider the fact that AI is an existential threat to that religion mostly a net good for humanity.)

He is asserting the existence of an "unconscious human spirit", asserting that ChatGPT "is fast-tracking the commodification of the human spirit by mechanising the imagination", and that we should fight against AI as we would fight against genocide: "just as we would fight any existential evil, we should fight it tooth and nail, for we are fighting for the very soul of the world."

Incidentally, I agree with the importance of struggle and soul-work. I agree with the general valence of the lament, but come away with a very different call to action. In particular: I just don't think I have the right to impose luddism on the rest of the world for my particular niche while benefiting lavishly from the rest of the world's alienation form their much more essential labor.

To me, it's the ravings of an angry, arrogant, and entitled elitist who fears being dethroned from his comfortable luxury and refined status. And a hilariously hyperbolic one at that. Of all the actual evils I would write something like this about, AI Art probably isn't even in the top 1,000,000. Can you imagine looking at the world today and writing that last paragraph? My god.

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Quotes:

> ChatGPT rejects any notions of creative struggle, that our endeavours animate and nurture our lives giving them depth and meaning. It rejects that there is a collective, essential and unconscious human spirit underpinning our existence, connecting us all through our mutual striving.

> ChatGPT is fast-tracking the commodification of the human spirit by mechanising the imagination. It renders our participation in the act of creation as valueless and unnecessary. That ‘songwriter ‘you were talking to, Leon, who is using ChatGPT to write ‘his’ lyrics because it is ‘faster and easier ,’is participating in this erosion of the world’s soul and the spirit of humanity itself and, to put it politely, should fucking desist if he wants to continue calling himself a songwriter.

> This impulse – the creative dance – that is now being so cynically undermined, must be defended at all costs, and just as we would fight any existential evil, we should fight it tooth and nail, for we are fighting for the very soul of the world.

I have to admit not quite sure what you mean, and I do admit full guilt in starting us down the path of "mixed analogies" :). I'll try my best, though.

> Or past a certain point, the results of discovering improved health and ecological outcomes will become inextricably linked with discovering new technologies that cause conflict? What actually drives such a process?

I do think with respect to life-sustaining things -- medicine, pharma, food, shelter, water, energy -- that a combination of specialization and automation is necessary to increase the collective standard of living, and that labor alienation stems from a combination of specialization and automation.

Where I struggle is coming up with an affirmative argument that an artist should benefit from automation of medicine or farming, but that an alienated lab tech or food factory worker should not benefit from automated art.

Another way to look at this is: the less you pay for art-as-entertainment, the more resources you have to buy free time to produce your soul-work (whatever that may mean to you).

Hannah Höch would like a word.

Actually, I agree. I think Nick Cave is right about this. I do think this sort of alienation has a cost.

But that doesn't mean that there is any remotely moral case for undoing the green revolution and allowing billions to starve. And it does not mean that the machines which feed those billions of people who might otherwise starve are somehow the root cause of a decline of humanity. In fact, quite the opposite.

And this is the paradox: our alienation from agricultural work is precisely what enables our very existence.

My main observation is that there is a way out of this paradox. As it turns out, you can go out grow some food in a garden, or write a song, or paint a picture, even if that work is commodified and there is no paycheck. The commodification and automation of those industries does not prevent one from engaging in them as soul-work.

The teacher who plays in a band in his garage is no different -- from a "soul of humanity" perspective -- than Nick Cave. But Nick Cave's implicit argument argument demands that he is different, and not from an economic perspective, but from a very soul of humanity perspective. It's extraordinarily off-putting to me in that sense.

Of course, engaging in art as hobby instead of for pay does require free time and a share of returns on our societal bargain. On that note: elites like Nick Cave should be spearheading serious conversations about political economics and labor economics, instead of lamenting the loss of their extraordinarily unique status.

It's a wonderful thing to find meaning in one's work, and for the things in which one finds meaning to be well-compensated. But it is no birthright. Contrary to Nick Cave's view, I can absolutely assure you that non-artists in HR departments and nursing stations and factory floors and classrooms often live full happy human inner lives. Those lives are of their own making and do not derive from the artiste class's output.

Manual production of high-quality clothes, tables, and glassware used to be the norm. Generations of people found meaning in these crafts before the industrial revolution changed the economics. People still do these things, only in rare cases as their primary way of making a living. Most art does not sustain developed world middle class existence. Most art is hobby. And that's okay.

The creation of software and AI systems is itself a form of craft-work and soul-work, which many engineers and scientists relate to the same way that Nick Cave relates to music. It is unclear to me why Nick Cave's striving is more important than the striving of engineers and scientists, or why his feeling of what humanity is, is more important than theirs.

The NYT case could take years. In the meantime OAI could choose to go after ToS violators.

The legal system can accommodate more than one unresolved court case at a time. We don't like put a semaphore on related cases or anything like that. (Or, sometimes we do, but guess who you need to hire for many many billable hours to make that happen in your case?).

So, the legal system can accommodate the NYT case against OAI and an OAI case against the author. The operative question is: can the author's pocketbook also accommodate?

(Or, more to the point, can the author accommodate losing access to gpt4? What happens when he wants to launch a new feature or pivot to a new product?)

If I were the author I'd never do this because I would want an exit and this strategy + twitter thread wildly complicates any potential exit.

Even though I don't think there is anything particularly morally problematic here (I'm an information freedom maximalist).

2024 will be the year of synthetic data. 2025 will be the year of "you know you can use your own brain and type out 100 datapoints faster and cheaper than generating and filtering assloads of synthetic data, right?"

Maybe we can even skip 2024 :)

> (e) use Output (as defined below) to develop any artificial intelligence models that compete with our products and services. However, you can use Output to (i) develop artificial intelligence models primarily intended to categorize, classify, or organize data (e.g., embeddings or classifiers), as long as such models are not distributed or made commercially available to third parties and (ii) fine tune models provided as part of our Services

1. I'm with McKenzie on the coworkers aspect of the dialog. More separation from coworkers is better. In the Good Times (2013-2019,2021) it seems "right" to trade some comp for familiarity and good work vibes, and almost... inhuman... not to. But in the Bad Times you're reminded that an Excel formula could cost you not just your job but also a big chunk of your personal social network. Diversification is good.

2. I now realize what both sides of this are getting at is basically: "how to progress from Junior/Mid Engineer to something after that". There are many paths. The conclusion of the article is good, in that respect. Also: you can just stay a Mid/Senior Engineer. That's okay.

3. Call yourself whatever you want/need to stay employable. Be a good colleague/person. Work is work.