The dangers of letting computers generate images
People in the internet discussing AIs have always been a funny subject. Some people like my mother believe that it is possible to a AI to duplicate itself and live in every computer out there, just like Helios from Deus Ex. Now this is obviusly false because if, in the very impossible case that a IA wants to duplicate it to, ehem, dominate the world, the only thing you'd have to do to stop it is to run "sudo shutdown now" and call it a day.
But that answer is so simple and concluding for most people. So they masturbate their brain thinking on how AIs can dominate the world like in the movies. But the thing that made me open Emacs wasn't the stupidity of people worrying about computers, but the people who are worried because they think that computers will be able to replace artists. They believe, actually, without irony, and they probably will bet at least a dollar, that AI is a danger to art. I do not know their arguments and it's not like I need to know them. But I think that people with more than 2 braincells are able to tell whether something was made by an AI or not. To prove my point, I have used Stable Diffusion 2.0 or whatever this shit is.
Image generated by Stable Diffusion 2.1 or whatever
Image generated by a human
You see the difference? This AI will try to be human, this piece of software written in Python (yes) is trying to behave like a human. It's trying to understand what a "kanye west" and "gta san andreas" are. And after all the effort of trying to generate images, all it can give us is a try of gta san andreas loading screen with Kanye West on it.
People claiming that AI can do things human can't do it's ridiculous, that claim is stupid, DALL-E Mini (aka "el dalle" and "craiyon") is unable to generate a white version of a black man, while a human could easily use photoshop to make Denzel Curry white.
Here, just for fun, I am dropping an image here and let the reader guess whether it was AI generated or not:
Imagine, for a second, that you are dalle (shit has intelligence, artificial, but still intelligence, so shit must be alive), imagine what would dalle think if it saw people complaining about AI generated images, you know what would dalle do? absolutely nothing. Dalle's only purpose is to generate images. Nothing else. Anything but generating images it outside dalle's compression.
Well, truth is that dalle doesn't even bother on making up the image so it doesn't look AI generated, and that's the funniest thing about dalle. Stable Diffusion tries so hard on hiding the fact that the image was generated by an AI, but dalle doesnt.
But despite dalle's handicap of only being able to generate images from a text prompt, it has something that humans will never be able to have: all the knowledge in the world, dalle trains itself with shit on the internet, like a search engine bot, with the difference that dalle learns from what it sees. Dalle will eventually have all the knowledge known to humanity. Everything that the humanity has once know is known by dalle. And there's nothing you can do about it.
Ancient Greeks used to call this kind of entities "oracles", entities who were able to predict the future. dalle doesn't predict the future but you can ask it whatever and it will give you nine different answers, for example, you can ask dalle "The Truth", and it will use all the knowledge available in the internet to give you "The Truth". I am too lazy to take another screenshot. So the tangible form of "the truth" is left as an exercise to the reader
The other day I was watching TV and the ads came in. It was the afternoon so I got no ads about a romanian woman telling me to sign up in a betting website, that ad was a psychotic break, sadly it's lost media, but a ad about hipsters and shit doing shit in Photoshop and travelling through the world (by the world I mean the state of California). I don't really know what they were trying to sell because I didn't pay much attention to the ad but to the dystopic concept of a hipster travelling through the world doing Graphic Design, and I came to the conclusion that graphic designers come from rich families or at least families in which money is not a great concern and that's why they can travel. My point is pretty sad but true, artists are doomed to starve. Artists are not seen as a productive part of the industrialized world, so they should starve.
So no, AI is not replacing your work, because the AI generators are so shit that it can be only used for memes. and weird shit. If someone claims to be an "AI artist", I'd advise you to get a shotgun and do a favor to the world.
Another common concern on talking about "dangers of computers generating memes" is the intellectual property, anyone with more than 3 braincells know that intellectual property is a extremely stupid thing that could have been only originated in Great Britain and perfectioned by the United States. If you worry about anything "stealing" your work, the internet is simply not the place to share your art. As long as the server your file is in sends a copy of the file to the client, nothing to do to avoid its copy. DRM is an option, but it hasn't worked too good because of the concept of "WebRIP", and, even yet, there's something called "the human mind", the biggest analog hole in the digital world. You can get a copy of a DRM protected anything by recording your screen, getting a capture card, taking screenshots, or whatever.
To summarize, AI is good for memes and everyone complaining about it are faggots.