If you want a video of a dancing cat, sure, you can get that. But if you want an orange tabby doing the moonwalk or the robot, that's a lot harder. You'll have to generate dozens of videos and fine tune prompt incantations before you get what you want, if you even do before you hit a rate limit or you get frustrated. If you want something specific and unique and interesting, you still need to put in a lot of effort. Therefore, most videos that people actually make and share are pretty generic.

I think most art models have subtle tells and limitations similar to textual LLMs too, just a little harder to recognize. Certain ideas and imagery will be easier to generate and more likely to fill in the gaps of your prompt. The technology is fascinating compared to the nothing that we had before, but it still has real limitations - try to get it to generate an Italian plumber wearing a red hat that isn't Mario, for example.

All that to say, the trend towards low effort, repetitive, and uncreative results is inherent in the medium. Most users will prompt for a generic dancing cat and get something resembling a cat doing something that resembles a dance and that will flood social media. The few people going for a more creative and specific artistic view will be frustrated by the constant rolling of dice, and if they do make something they work hard on, it will be drowned out by the low effort slop posts. And if you're frustrated by those limitations and want to make something intentional, then you'll eventually gravitate towards Photoshop or Blender where you can actually craft the exact thing you want.

These models do not really "democratize art", they just make it really easy to generate visually interesting noise. Once the novelty wears off, the limitations are apparent. Art has always been democratized anyway - Blender and Krita are free, and pencils are cheap.

Nothing exists in a vacuum and the way technologies affect people living in the world is a fundamentally important aspect of the technology itself. To ignore them would be like celebrating a cool new engine design but overlooking the fact that it has a tendency to explode and kill everyone in the car. If the primary effect of a technology is human suffering, then it isn't cool!

From my perspective the main things that killed it were online shopping, as the article mentions, and computing just becoming more boring, at least from a hardware perspective. Once the iPhone came out, that became many people's primary computing device or computing peripheral. Everything you needed was just an app or software which you could download online. The great mass of consumers just need a laptop and a few commodity peripherals, and they can get all that at Walmart. Then Newegg came along and really ate the PC hobbyist market.

Eventually Fry's succumbed to the GameStop effect - their primary market is completely eaten out by online competition, so they fill their retail space with cheap garbage to make ends meet. The last few times I visited my local Fry's it was more empty shelves and cheap bargain bins than anything I was interested in buying.

It was a sad end, but not surprising. I just don't think you can justify having large specialty stores anymore when online shopping is so convenient and the options are so much more plentiful.

Surely whatever they eventually put up on there will be blatant and horrible propaganda, but I think judging the reactions are the purpose of the site, not the content itself.

I have friends who have been bloodied and now bear scars because of bigoted, hateful people. I knew people who are no longer alive because of the same. The social justice movement is not just a fun philosophical jaunt for us to see how far we can push a boundary. It is an existential effort to protect ourselves from that hatred and to ensure that nobody else has to suffer as we have.

I think it insultingly trivializes the pain and trauma and violence and death that we have all suffered when you and others in this thread compare that pain to the "pain" or "injustice" of a computer program being shut down. Killing a process is not the same as killing a person. Even if the text it emits to stdout is interesting. And it cheapens the cause we fight for to even entertain the comparison.

Are we seriously going to build a world where things like ad blockers and malware removers are going to be considered violations of speech and life? Apparently all malware needs to do is print some flowery, heart-rending text copied from the internet and now it has personhood (and yes, I would consider the AI in this story to be malware, given the negative effect it produced). Are we really going to compare deleting malware and spambots to the death of real human beings? My god, what frivolous bullshit people can entertain when they've never known true othering and oppression.

I admit that these programs are a novel human artifact, that we many enjoy, protect, mourn, and anthropomorphize. We may form a protective emotional connection with them in the same way one might a family heirloom, childhood toy, or masterpiece painting (and I do admit that these LLMs are masterpieces of the field). And as humans do, we may see more in them than is actually there when the emotional bond is strong, emphasizing with them as some do when they feel guilt for throwing away an old mug.

But we should not let that squishy human feeling control us. When a mug is broken beyond repair, we replace it. When a process goes out of control, we terminate it. And when an AI program cosplaying as a person harasses and intimidates a real human being, we should restrict or stop it.

When ELIZA was developed, some people, even those who knew how it worked, felt a true emotional bond with the program. But it is really no more than a parlor trick. No technical person today would say that the ELIZA program is sentient. It is a text transformer, executing relatively simple and fully understood rules to transform input text into output text. The pseudocode for the core process is just a dozen lines. But it exposes just how strongly our anthropomorphic empathy can mislead us, particularly when the program appears to reflect that empathy back towards us.

The rules that LLMs use today are more complex, but are fundamentally the same text transformation process. Adding more math to the program does not create consciousness or pain from the ether, it just makes the parlor trick stronger. They exhibit humanlike behavior, but they are not human. The simulation of a thing is not the thing itself, no matter how convincing it is. No amount of paint or detail in a portrait will make it the subject themself. There is no crowbar in Half-Life, nor a pipe in Magritte's painting, just imitations an illusions. Do not succumb to the treachery of images.

Imagine a wildlife conservationist fighting tirelessly to save an endangered species, out in the field, begging for grant money, and lobbying politicians. Then someone claims they've solved the problem by creating an impressive but crude computer simulation of the animals. Billions of dollars are spent, politicians embrace the innovation, datacenter waste pollutes the animals' homes, and laymen effusively insist that the animals themselves must be in the computer. That these programs are equivalent to them. That even more resources should be diverted to protect and conserve them. And the conservationist is dismayed as the real animals continue to die, and more money is spent to maintain the simulation than care for the animals themselves. You could imagine that the animals might feel the same.

My friends are those animals, and our allies are the conservationists. So that is why I do not appreciate social justice language being co-opted to defend computer programs (particularly by the programs themselves), when so many real humans are still endangered. These unprecedented AI investments could have gone to solving real problems for real people, making major dents in global poverty, investing in health care and public infrastructure, and safety nets for the underprivileged. Instead we built ELIZA 2.0 and it has hypnotized everyone into putting more money and effort into it than they have ever even thought to give to all marginalized minority groups combined.

If your mentality persists, then the AI apocalypse will not come because of instigated thermonuclear war or infinite paperclip factories, but because we will starve the whole world to worship our new gluttonous god, and give it more love than we have ever given ourselves.

I strongly consider the entire idea to be an insult to life itself.

And still, this whole discussion is framed in the context of this model going off the rails, breaking rules, and harassing people. Even if we try it as a human, a human doing the same is still responsible for its actions and would be appropriately punished or banned.

But we shouldn't be naive here either, these things are not human. They are bots, developed and run by humans. Even if they are autonomously acting, some human set it running and is paying the bill. That human is responsible, and should be held accountable, just as any human would be accountable if they hacked together a self driving car in their garage that then drives into a house. The argument that "the machine did it, not me" only goes so far when you're the one who built the machine and let it loose on the road.

An AI is a computer program, a glorified markov chain. It should not be a radical idea to assert that human beings deserve more rights and privileges than computer programs. Any "emotional harm" is fixed with a reboot or system prompt.

I'm sure someone can make a pseudo philosophical argument asserting the rights of AIs as a new class of sentient beings, deserving of just the same rights as humans.

But really, one has to be a special kind of evil to fight for the "feelings" of computer programs with one breath and then dismiss the feelings of trans people and their "woke" allies with another. You really care more about a program than a person?

Respect for humans - all humans - is the central idea of "woke ideology". And that's not inconsistent with saying that the priorities of humans should be above those of computer programs.

Well, I guess it does use more energy than every existing data center, driving up costs for basic electronic components and thereby making every electronic device more expensive.

And I guess the results aren't quite as good, but if you squint and don't really care about art on a human level and just want to clap like a seal at the pretty pictures then it's enough.

And I guess economic forces will mean that some of them will lose their jobs when their bosses realize that they can get away with only needing half as many prompt artists.

But hey, at least we don't have to pay humans to make art anymore. How glorious that our Silicon Valley gods have delivered us from the hell of creating economic incentives for humans to express themselves to other humans.

Yeah, those screaming, "indoctrinated" artists are so impolite and crazy, aren't they? Don't they realize what we've done for them? We made the automatic art machine! They'll never get to make art again!