If you wouldn't call yourself a piano player just because you used a player piano...

[highplainsdem]

Don't call yourself a writer if you use AI to churn out text that wasn't born, word by word, in your own mind.

Don't call yourself an artist if you use AI to generate images that you didn't first see in your own mind and make visible to others through your own skills and work.

Don't call yourself a songwriter or musician if you use AI to assemble a song or music for you that you didn't first hear in your mind, demanding your attention and wanting to be heard by others, through your voice and your hands.

Don't think you're a better researcher because you let AI do your research for you (especially if you didn't fact-check everything to catch the fake quotes and references it's so likely to generate...though even if you fact-check it, you're just a fact-checker and not a researcher).

Don't think you're great at business if you let AI generate your reports, presentations, marketing and sales projections.

Don't think you're good at coding if you have AI code for you.

Don't think you deserved a degree if you cheated your way to it using AI.

Don't think you're good at communicating if you have AI write your social media posts, emails, or even dating-site posts.

Because you're a fraud.

You are, at best, good at using software designed to do the work and communicating for you, if you don't mind being a fraud.

And you can be replaced in an instant by anyone who can give that AI similar prompts, no matter how little intelligence, talent, skill, education, and work experience they have. You're almost infinitely replaceable, thanks to AI, and there's a very good chance everyone doing your type of AI "assisted" work will also be completely replaced by AI. Because you aren't needed any more. Because you'd helped enable those who think replacing human creativity and work and communication with AI was just fine. And very, very profitable.

And if the AI you have to use is controlled by people who could take it away at any time - as is the case now - you're at their mercy and at any moment could find yourself unable to write, create music or visual art, do research, manage your business, code, do a school assignment, or even communicate with people online.

Yanking away crutches will lead to falls.

But you will have set yourself up for that fall.

And the people behind the AI hype will still be laughing all the way to the bank. And to the survivalist retreats that some of them have been preparing for the day when AI itself - if not humans harmed by what they've done to society and the economy with their AI hype - might turn on them.

https://www.democraticunderground.com/100217685127

[Hugh_Lebowski]

1. So ... what if you're an NFL coach and you use AI to determine a game plan

for your next contest?

I.E. you leveraged it to determine which of the plays in your playbook (which you and your coaching staff created, and you spent many many hours coaching and training your team to execute effectively on the field) ... are most likely to succeed against your opponent and help you win the game?

What if you used AI to determine which of the many players on your team are the best ones to be out there on any given gametime and down and distance situation?

What if you even used it help you determine how many millions to shell out to which players, and which ones you are good with letting go/extending their contracts?

Are you 'cheating' if you didn't watch every minute of game film of your team, and all the other games of the team you're playing this week ... personally, and 'create' your gameplan based on what your own brain told you were ALL the takeaways from all that time spent viewing film?

Or is 'watching game film' actually cheating, because it's an electronic medium (in this day and age it's not film), and if you weren't there for the opponent's games and don't remember everything that happened in theirs, and your own games, and don't 'process' all that info yourself, you're a fraud of a coach?

I mention this scenario because I think the matter is really not as cut and dry as you are thinking it is on this subject.

The main application of AI is, and IMHO will always be ... Business, not the Arts. And it will always just be a 'tool' of humans.

The vast majority of cases, your success in the Arts is about WAAAAAAAY more than your ability to effectively copy someone else. Which ... anyone can do, because people are basically computers. Artists have been ripping each other off since the dawn of time. AI is not any better at coming off with a ripoff of last summer's blockbuster teeny-bopper hit ... than a human would be.

There are definitely concerns with the technology, but the Arts are not really one for me

[highplainsdem]

3. To the extent you use AI to replace part of what you're doing, you make it

Last edited Mon Mar 20, 2023, 05:30 PM - Edit history (1)

more likely that you'll be replaced.

And, you're a bit of a fraud to the extent you let AI replace your decision-making.

It's more likely to eliminate assistants first:


https://news.byu.edu/intellect/new-byu-developed-ai-tecg-could-benefit-future-super-bowl-opponents

But one British football (soccer) team has already replaced its coach with AI:

https://allfootballapp.com/news/Headline/A-club-from-England-appoint-Artificial-Intelligence-(AI)-as-football-coach/1011713

FWIW, there's a personal element to coach/player relatonships that could make most coaches hard to replace completely. But if the players could get used to AI providing the directions, then the team owner might just want to replace that expensive coach with someone who'd work for a lot less - whether a genial father figure who could act tough if necessary, or a favorite cheerleader who'd like a promotion but wouldn't demand a 7- or 8- figure salary. They wouldn't be real coaches, just mouthpieces.


Btw, I've started to see tweets and articles on the likelihood of CEOs being replaced by AI. Which would be karma for CEOs using AI to lay off employees.


As for artists - they have every reason to be concerned about AI, as I've posted elsewhere. Which is why they're organizing against it: https://www.democraticunderground.com/10143047376

[Metaphorical]

2. Really?

I wrote my first book in 1997, a book on XML for Wiley. It took me eighteen months, I received an advance of about $18,000. The book required an acquisitions editor, couple of copy editors, a graphic designer. I think I ended up making slightly below minimum wage by the time the book finally earned back its advance. I've written 24 books since then. Most of the publishers I've worked for have gone out of business, companies that made massive amounts of money at the time.

I mostly self-publish today. I use Grammarly, which is an AI tool that is very good at catching spelling and grammatical errors, use AI outlining tools to help me organize how I tell my stories, and both Google and Bing to help with research. I use OtterAI to transcribe the interviews I have with people that make up much of the research for that book. Bing has been using the ChatGPT 4.0 engine for a while now, something I just recently learned. I use AI to help produce the videos I use to support those books.

It now takes me about two months to write a book. The books are smaller than they were 25 years ago, where they had to be of a certain width in order for the spine to be visible on the bookshelves at Barnes and Noble. I know a number of writers who now turn around 4-6 books a year, making $20K-$40K a book, primarily because they use AI-based tools to help them. Those tools do not write their books, but they can often prove invaluable when staring at a page to figure out what you need to write next. At that rate, a writer can make a decent living, rather than starving, because they control the whole process from the initial outline to the final cover. I've also been working with Photoshop since the late 1980s, when the product first debuted. AI is so profoundly interwoven into that program that you'd be hard-pressed NOT to use AI with it, and it's only becoming more so. I've become reasonably proficient with Stable Diffusion, but I use it primarily to convert 3D models that I render in Daz3D into more photographic forms. You'll likely discover it is not the one-click wonder that you're envisioning.

Most professional writers and artists I know try to stay very close to the cutting edge of this kind of research because they are in a very competitive global market. By and large, they are not the ones who are howling about how unfair this latest set of tools is, that it's a crutch; instead, those artists are building models with their artwork to get their "style" out to the broader community because it's both revenue and exposure.

Before you continue your rant, I'd strongly recommend that you spend some time working with the technology to get an idea about what you're talking about.

[highplainsdem]

4. I've already posted threads about how some publishers, editors and writers who

AREN'T self-publishing feel about AI, and it isn't exactly positive.

I first posted about a self-published writer using AI back in December. I wasn't impressed by it then, and I was less impressed when I read that she discovered that using it very much caused her own creativity to start to shut off. Though that shouldn't have been surprising. Muscles atrophy when not used, and so does the brain.

If you're not using AI to do the actual writing of your books, then you are mostly writing them yourself - and I don't understand why you think you need AI to outline for you. Outlining is basic reasoning. Google for research doesn't bother me. Bing AI got plenty of negative media attention because of all the mistakes as well as the out-of-control behavior that caused it to sound insane at times and forced Microsoft to gag it, though they're gradually releasing that gag. If you're using Bing AI for research, I hope you're double-checking everything it gives you, because it's infamous for mistakes, fabrications and hallucinations.

As for Grammarly - I've never needed it, and I don't use spellcheckers. If you'd ever tried to introduce a spellchecker to Elizabethan spelling, you wouldn't either. I like my OED and other reference works, though I'll also do quick checks online.

As for the competitive market - I know it's rough for self-published writers. And AI is making it much worse since now a lot of people with no truly serious interest in writing, zero interest in spending much time on it, and little if no ability to write, are using AI to churn out books. Which they can self-publish in a couple of days.

You can try to stay afloat in that tsunami by churning out more and more books yourself, or spending a lot more on promotion. Or you can speak out about the misuse of AI and try to stop the flood and make AI creations unacceptable to publishers and consumers.