As the proud second assistant screenwriter of Netflix's 'Chop Kick Panda', I am mortally wounded by your words, Jeff. This is my livelihood here, man. Why should only actual talent (+nepo-babies) get to work in Hollywood? Hack rights now! Hack rights now! I-I mean... don't make me go back to being a barista, please sir. I've got this great idea for a Star Trek spinoff: The Baby Picard Show, starring Pedro Pascal as Papa Picard to an adorable little Jean-Luc puppet...
Yeah. This is spot on. These people freaking the fuck out over ai are the same people who freaked out over a cloned sheep. The same people who probably freaked out over the printing press. And the same type of person that freaked out over the plough.
The part I don’t like is the whole complaining that ai is “looking at pictures and using them as a base and not paying the creators!!”
That one blows my mind. Because like you said. That’s what a hack does. But it’s also, and this is important, what EVERYONE DOES. Stephen King doesn’t owe HP Lovecraft a penny of royalties for inspiring him. In the same way outside of the initial cost a musician doesn’t owe lifetime royalties to Martin guitar. Relying on past art to inform your current art is called “how it’s always been done”.
“I asked ChatGPT to summarize the Trump indictment in the style of Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, and it gave me a script — pasted in full in this footnote”
At first I thought Jeff was trying to comfort us with the idea that only those who aren't creative and talented have to worry about AI taking our jobs. Then I remembered that, by objective scoring, only 17.6% of us, by objective measure, rise above hackery and, of those 17.6%, 81.6% suffer from imposter syndrome. That means less than 3.4% of us will be comforted by this article leaving 96.6% of us rocking slowly at our desks as the tears flow freely. Nice work, Jeff.
I definitely ran into the "cannot create novel images" problem when I used Substack's built-in image generator to illustrate my latest short story. Turns out a passenger steam engine train made out of giant earthworm parts don't have a whole lot of visual references to pull from.
Ironically because I have become used to illustrating my posts with the image search and generator tools, since I couldn't get the right images, itade me consider hiring an illustrator, which wouldn't have crossed my mind before. If I had the money I would have done it, just because I wanted it.
Which kind of shows one way generative algorithms might increase art jobs, by raising the level of design and illustration needs from even simple self published fantasy stuff. Or by companies wanting to ingest and train generative algorithms on a mass of custom designed world building for new cinematic universes or something.
That said, Netflix dropping its price because it's content is cheaper? Never gonna happen. Netflix cheapened rentals by undercutting the price of how rentals were delivered. The only thing that would cheapen streaming services generally would cheaper and more convenient film and video distribution putting the streaming services out of business. Good luck inventing that.
"It was only a passing fancy" - looks like the song- and novel-writing machines of Nineteen-Eighty-Four are upon us.
Maybe I'm oversimplifying things, but from my viewpoint in technology-land, Jeff's supposition that AI cannot be creative feels about right. That's because at its heart it remains algorithmic (recipe-based) processing of huge amounts of data.
But to make a counter-argument, creativity might just be another name for taking the risk of getting things wrong. Which is why so few new ideas are any good. Perhaps the earlier iterations of generative AI (the ones that tended to gravitate to extreme political positions) have a greater chance of being creative than the current generation of AI models which could just be a bunch of conformists.
Putting this in British terms, what is the AI equivalent of some nutter in a shed?
I think I could get my copy of Stable Diffusion to make at least some off those images you mentioned happen. However, that's because I'm a maladjusted freak who has actually learned the esoterica of using a large language model. A task made simpler, at least, by a best-in-class GUI designed by a 4channer whose previous claim to fame was making mods that added egregious racism to a game already infamous for allowing you to run a colony of crack cocaine manufacturing cannibals.
It would also involve prompts that would more closely resemble an incantation than any form of human communication, and there's a good chance the time it would take me to tweak that prompt to get the desired result would be more than the time it would take you to just photoshop the damn thing.
As the proud second assistant screenwriter of Netflix's 'Chop Kick Panda', I am mortally wounded by your words, Jeff. This is my livelihood here, man. Why should only actual talent (+nepo-babies) get to work in Hollywood? Hack rights now! Hack rights now! I-I mean... don't make me go back to being a barista, please sir. I've got this great idea for a Star Trek spinoff: The Baby Picard Show, starring Pedro Pascal as Papa Picard to an adorable little Jean-Luc puppet...
Yeah. This is spot on. These people freaking the fuck out over ai are the same people who freaked out over a cloned sheep. The same people who probably freaked out over the printing press. And the same type of person that freaked out over the plough.
The part I don’t like is the whole complaining that ai is “looking at pictures and using them as a base and not paying the creators!!”
That one blows my mind. Because like you said. That’s what a hack does. But it’s also, and this is important, what EVERYONE DOES. Stephen King doesn’t owe HP Lovecraft a penny of royalties for inspiring him. In the same way outside of the initial cost a musician doesn’t owe lifetime royalties to Martin guitar. Relying on past art to inform your current art is called “how it’s always been done”.
“I asked ChatGPT to summarize the Trump indictment in the style of Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, and it gave me a script — pasted in full in this footnote”
Needs more Adam Driver.
At first I thought Jeff was trying to comfort us with the idea that only those who aren't creative and talented have to worry about AI taking our jobs. Then I remembered that, by objective scoring, only 17.6% of us, by objective measure, rise above hackery and, of those 17.6%, 81.6% suffer from imposter syndrome. That means less than 3.4% of us will be comforted by this article leaving 96.6% of us rocking slowly at our desks as the tears flow freely. Nice work, Jeff.
Tip: Daniel Tiger was written by an abacus
Well, at least your attempt with last week tonight proves that AI has no ability to write humor. At least not yet. amirite?
What happened to the podcast? Run out of ways to mangle TCW's name?
I definitely ran into the "cannot create novel images" problem when I used Substack's built-in image generator to illustrate my latest short story. Turns out a passenger steam engine train made out of giant earthworm parts don't have a whole lot of visual references to pull from.
Ironically because I have become used to illustrating my posts with the image search and generator tools, since I couldn't get the right images, itade me consider hiring an illustrator, which wouldn't have crossed my mind before. If I had the money I would have done it, just because I wanted it.
Which kind of shows one way generative algorithms might increase art jobs, by raising the level of design and illustration needs from even simple self published fantasy stuff. Or by companies wanting to ingest and train generative algorithms on a mass of custom designed world building for new cinematic universes or something.
That said, Netflix dropping its price because it's content is cheaper? Never gonna happen. Netflix cheapened rentals by undercutting the price of how rentals were delivered. The only thing that would cheapen streaming services generally would cheaper and more convenient film and video distribution putting the streaming services out of business. Good luck inventing that.
"We already have technology that does a lot of the artistic grunt-work: We have drum machines..."
You just gained a drummer-enemy, buster. A still-a-reader drummer enemy, but, YEAH.
"It was only a passing fancy" - looks like the song- and novel-writing machines of Nineteen-Eighty-Four are upon us.
Maybe I'm oversimplifying things, but from my viewpoint in technology-land, Jeff's supposition that AI cannot be creative feels about right. That's because at its heart it remains algorithmic (recipe-based) processing of huge amounts of data.
But to make a counter-argument, creativity might just be another name for taking the risk of getting things wrong. Which is why so few new ideas are any good. Perhaps the earlier iterations of generative AI (the ones that tended to gravitate to extreme political positions) have a greater chance of being creative than the current generation of AI models which could just be a bunch of conformists.
Putting this in British terms, what is the AI equivalent of some nutter in a shed?
I think I could get my copy of Stable Diffusion to make at least some off those images you mentioned happen. However, that's because I'm a maladjusted freak who has actually learned the esoterica of using a large language model. A task made simpler, at least, by a best-in-class GUI designed by a 4channer whose previous claim to fame was making mods that added egregious racism to a game already infamous for allowing you to run a colony of crack cocaine manufacturing cannibals.
It would also involve prompts that would more closely resemble an incantation than any form of human communication, and there's a good chance the time it would take me to tweak that prompt to get the desired result would be more than the time it would take you to just photoshop the damn thing.