Thomas D. Embree 🇨🇦

@yogthos Good, that means we’re about to have cheap, sustainable fossil fuel alternatives that will obliterate the fossil fuel industry, and we’re about to have a novel substance with all the recreational effects of tobacco and none of the harmful effects on health that will obliterate the tobacco industry.

AI should be lobbied, and lobbied hard. The more it is used, especially in STEM fields, the faster we can solve problems like climate change, housing, wealth inequality, misinformation, etc

@The_Sasswagon AI is not destroying the planet, it literally didn’t exist until a few years ago. The way we produce energy is the problem, and that won’t go away if we banned AI.

AI is actually accelerating the timeline on a lot of important research, things that were decades away are now just years away. That alone might be what saves the climate.

If it was as simple as using less electricity by using less technology, it wouldn’t be so hard to abandon your smartphone.

@The_Sasswagon They do if they aren’t physically capable of holding a brush, instrument, etc.

This allows people like that to paint, create music, etc. entirely on their own, by their own hand (or voice), without relying on the services of a skilled artist who might not be able to capture what that person is imagining.

People who don’t have time to learn painting can now bring beauty into the world that would have otherwise never left their head.

Artists are complaining about that. Fuck them.

@callouscomic I lean towards disappointing. We are literally surrounded at all times by amazing technology, but the default position is still “technology bad” 🙄

It reminds me of the concerns people had when trains were being invented, people refused to ride on them because “God never meant for us to travel faster than 20 km/h” or that such breakneck speeds would somehow cause harm to a woman’s uterus or ovaries.

@apotheotic As for things like creating images in the style of a specific artist, that is not plagiarism unless you are asking for a perfect replica of a specific art piece and claiming it as your own original work.

All artists imitate the styles they find appealing, if you paint a Van Gogh style painting it isn’t plagiarism of Van Gogh. Likewise, if I were to imitate Van Gogh’s style using an AI, the resulting image would be my original work and not Van Gogh’s creation.

@apotheotic The issue with copyright is an inevitable misstep that was bound to happen while figuring out this technology. However, some of criticisms aren’t about ethical issues surrounding copyright, they are about the marketability of skills (such as painting) that you either had to learn yourself or otherwise needed to pay someone to do for you.

Now you can do that with an AI. Great for disabled people who can create freely now, bad for the artists who exploited that for financial gain.

@2xsaiko That is a poorly made AI model, then. Whoever put that system in place didn’t train the model properly. In fact, I’m going to guess that you chose a random model like ChatGPT or llama or Gemini.

Or you might not even realize that you need a model specifically trained to handle the kind of thing you are asking.

That isn’t a limitation of AI, that is human error. Do you think people are just pretending it works or something?

@jarfil I think it’s unavoidable instict. In our ancestral environment, it was basic survival sense to fear the unknown and assume it could be dangerous. Caution just makes sense in that scenario.

There hasn’t been enough time for our genes to adapt to our new, radically different environment. So people will continue to react to technological advances as if a tiger could leap out at any moment and maul them to death. Even I experience a vague unease, and I love technology.

@Kissaki In another thread, people are mocking AI because the free language models they are using are bad at drawing accurate maps. “AI can’t even do geography”. Anything an AI says can’t be trusted, and AI is vastly inferior to human ability.

These same people haven’t figured out the difference between using a language AI to draw a map, and simply asking it a geography question.