Sasha

Saudi Arabia is the third largest oil producer on the planet, though often they are second. So no, they're CO2 production is not negligible, they just export it, and that's worse IMO

Ah I understand.

I'm not talking about that either, and I'm not against automating jobs. I'm more talking about preventing unecessary harm, I don't really want to say who I work for but our company will shutdown entire storefronts and just lie about why. The union works to ensure this sort of thing doesn't happen unfairly, and that people have access to the legal support they need when it does, among other things.

The reality is that they aren't working bullshit jobs, and we don't automate everything they do. Even the things we do automate require their constant help to support, but the business doesn't care and will just fire them because they see some vague report suggesting they can.

Creating jobs is much harder, of course, but there are things we can and should do to make sure transitioning people out of those jobs is as painless as possible. I'm honestly of the opinion that we shouldn't have to have jobs to survive, and that pushing for good social support is a necessary part of increasing automation.

As a loosely related aside, even though my job doesn't qualify for being bullshit, I definitely feel like I'm wasting my life doing it, but I have no other choice except dying.

Is it our responsibility to help people? I think it is if we're helping to hurt them. While we can technically throw the blame up the corporate chain, I think we need to have personal responsibility for our actions, I understand that you, as I do, likely rely on your job to exist, but we can still push for the least harm possible.

If you advocate up said chain on behalf of others, then that is good too.

I'm aware of what this technology can do, I actively use some to help with my work. But I make sure it's as ethical as it can be.

And AI art is not really all that useful. Just because you can automate art doesn't mean it's a waste. I think that's a dreadfully bleak view.

Helping funding research is great and all, but maybe they should pay all the people they're stealing from? Or at the very least get consent.

You just described the problem back to me, artists should get paid for creating, I don't think being paid for something you love takes away from it, but that's an opinion and I understand people have their own. I think that's just an extension of the beauty of art (having our own opinions about it). Profit motives are the exact problem here, not a justification to make it worse.

If Adobe is doing that, then that's awesome. If they're making tools to replace artists, instead of tools to help them, significantly less awesome.

My problem is that lots of tools do exist that replace artists, and most do steal their training data. I would love for these things to change, maybe we'll make it out okay, but we need to make noise.

Yep, then we have nothing to argue about. I'm an idealist, I'm just angry about the way these things are going instead of accepting them.

Hello, we have the same job.

It is not something to be proud of, but it is a part of progress and it is vaguely justifiable if it actually has a worthwhile purpose. We should also be helping the people whose jobs we replace, but we don't. I joined a union to try and help those people, to secure their jobs and to get them the pay they deserve.

AI art is not a worthwhile thing to create. Stealing from people is bad. These are my points.

A solar flare is entirely unrelated to anything I'm talking about, hence the pudding.

My guy, they stop being an artist because someone stole all their work and fired them for it

I don't understand your argument.

I'm in no way convinced that this will lead to new cool jobs, and I have never heard anyone suggest how that could happen. In all honesty, I'd hate to lose my job as a dev and suddenly the only option in my industry is now "debugging AI mistakes."

If you want to create cool new jobs, how about doing it without disregard for the people you're hurting? That's entirely possible, but the current system doesn't care about people, it cares about money.

If we saw the potential in these tools, and decided as a society to just let the machines do all the stuff we don't want to do, and we all got to do whatever meaningful beautiful things our hearts wanted, then sure. But that isn't happening. The system isn't broken so it won't fix itself.

"Maybe something good will come of all this pain" is a bad philosophy, imo.

Modern society was partly possible due to the printing press. Yep, it sucks that people had their jobs replaced and if it were happening now I'd be fighting for them to be looked after, as they should.

Generating art is not some amazing world changing technology, it's trash. We do not need to replace artists, and frankly we just fucking shouldn't.

I can kinda get behind that, but only if it's done right (which I'm absolutely convinced it won't be, thanks to history).

Even just paying the people who lose their jobs, and helping them transition to other work is bad because voice acting is probably a dream job for a lot of people. We also have to ethically source training data, and I don't really see that happening. After all, who would want to contribute to losing their own job?

If we could do all that, I think we can agree as a society to protect those jobs instead. I legimately think we can have only the good, but I understand that doing so requires a fight. I'd much rather fight for that than lay down and accept the worst possible option.

Edit: I'll add further, that this is probably already happening, just for the CEOs. They have the power to create tools capable of replacing them, and to prevent them from replacing them.

Do you understand that there's a choice about what purpose to make these for?

That yeah, you can just ignore all the harm you'll do? That people do just ignore all the harm they are doing?

No, I'm not one to call people stupid. I'm calling people and corporations greedy, there's an insanely long history of that and I'm sick of it ruining this world.

People do choose to make good AI, ones that will and currently are benefiting people. This is not one of them, I'm not calling all AI bad, I'm calling theft and soulless art generation bad.

What if a solar flare hits? What if the world was made of pudding?

In what world is it a bad thing for someone to get paid for their skills? That's a bizarre spin to put on it.

And yes, UBI should definitely happen, but we shouldn't start painting the world with crap to do it.