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| Made with Midjouney. Prompt was something along the lines of "Falcon Samurai with intricately etched armor, UHD, 8k, hyperrealism" |
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| Another falcon samurai, this one made with DALL-E 2. Similar prompt. |
I wrote this originally as a response to David McGrogan's post here. I’ve only just started to experiment with these technologies and my own opinion is still nascent and unformed. My instincts run something along these lines: It’s fine to use the output of these technologies, but I would draw the line at charging anyone money for it. For example, if you want to generate a picture to help your players visualize something and you show it to them at your weekly gaming session, I have no issue with that. If you want to release something for free that uses AI generated art, I have no issue with that. You want to put a few pieces of AI art on your blog, that anyone can look at for free and the way I have done several times now and will do in this post as well? No issue there, really, either. In any event, I think if you use this tech, you should be transparent about its use.
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| Made with Dream. I can't remember the prompt but it had something to do with an angel of war. |
There are other uses I object to not at all, and in fact think could be a net positive. For example, I think it could be incredibly helpful in commissioning a piece of artwork – you can give the artist something semi-close to what you would like them to do, or vice versa, they could use an AI to generate a few different images to show to you as prototypes for what they actually do.
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Midjourney. Prompt was a mishmash of language about fangs of broken truth in the smiling night, also some language from one of my earlier posts. |
But something feels slightly dishonest about putting together a commercial product that relies heavily on AI generated writing or art, in spite of the fact that it may have taken hours of playing with prompts to get something you wanted the same way it would take hours of manual work for a human to produce an image you wanted.
I don’t know why I feel this way yet – again, I’m still exploring this technology and have not really come down on one “side” or another. A lot of my professional work over the last 15 years has been in the application of machine learning to legal documents, and I wonder how much that influences my thoughts on this topic. I certainly understand some of the concerns that AI art raises, though part of me is saying “well, computers have been changing or removing the need for certain jobs for a long time now, why should creatives be treated as a sacred cow?” I wonder if some of the way we see this may come from whether we approach our own creation of art as amateurs or as professionals. For whatever it is worth, I’ve remained an amateur artist / writer / musician / what have you my entire life. I like to paint, for example, though I’m not very good at it. I will go on painting in spite of the fact that there are machines out there that can make stuff that is technically much more skilled than my creations, and I suspect a lot of other people will do the same – for many of us, we HAVE to do this stuff, there’s such a strong compulsion that it’s not really even a choice. So I don’t think that the advent of AI art is going to stop humans from creating things. But it may put people out of a job, and that does bother me, though I’m not certain why it should bother me more than say, automated check out machines or the phone tree systems you get when you call support, or something like the driverless car.
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| Made with DALL-E 2.Prompt: A sumi-e painting of an ancient blue dragon flying through a thunderstorm. |
I don’t know why I feel this way yet – again, I’m still exploring this technology and have not really come down on one “side” or another. A lot of my professional work over the last 15 years has been in the application of machine learning to legal documents, and I wonder how much that influences my thoughts on this topic. I certainly understand some of the concerns that AI art raises, though part of me is saying “well, computers have been changing or removing the need for certain jobs for a long time now, why should creatives be treated as a sacred cow?” I wonder if some of the way we see this may come from whether we approach our own creation of art as amateurs or as professionals. For whatever it is worth, I’ve remained an amateur artist / writer / musician / what have you my entire life. I like to paint, for example, though I’m not very good at it. I will go on painting in spite of the fact that there are machines out there that can make stuff that is technically much more skilled than my creations, and I suspect a lot of other people will do the same – for many of us, we HAVE to do this stuff, there’s such a strong compulsion that it’s not really even a choice. So I don’t think that the advent of AI art is going to stop humans from creating things. But it may put people out of a job, and that does bother me, though I’m not certain why it should bother me more than say, automated check out machines or the phone tree systems you get when you call support, or something like the driverless car.
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| Made with Dream. I think the prompt was something like "A wandering knight in the far future." |
I certainly understand the feeling of being a luddite. I have often thought that the internet has ruined everything, that social media in general is a mistake (I miss antisocial media!), and recently I have been seriously considering throwing my smartphone into the garbage. Sometimes I wish I could take the entire world back a ways technologically and kind of freeze it there, though I’m not sure if that is perhaps pure nostalgia on my part.
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| Made with Dream. Who IS this dude? I don't know yet, but him and his hat are going into SOMETHING my players will experience. |
It is a complicated topic. It deserves careful consideration and thoughtful discussion with one another.
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| 16 triangles. Made by me, 4" x 6", acrylic on canvas, August-September 2022 |
I will end with a quote by RACTER, from The Policeman's Beard Is Half-Constructed, a book of poetry written by a computer in 1984.
More than iron, more than lead, more than gold I need electricity.
I need it more than I need lamb or pork or lettuce or cucumber.
I need it for my dreams.
You can find Dream here.
You can find Midjourney here.
You can find DALL-E 2 here.
You mentioned that part of your job for the last 15 years has been applying ML to legal docs? Are you also an MLE?!
ReplyDeleteHi Max! Good to see you stop by! My role has been mostly in bridging the gap between engineers and end users - teaching people how to use the technology, what the practical differences between SVM and LSI are and where each shines in terms of application, how to identify which kinds of content "play nice" with these engines and which don't, how to use the tech to do document classification, clustering, and conceptual searching, etc. But if you asked me to explain the mathematics behind singular value decomposition or eigenvectors, I probably be reduced to a blubbering wreck. Sounds like you are pretty familiar with this stuff - is this an area you've been involved in too by chance?
DeleteAt this point I'm much more so on the Engineering side of than the Machine Learning side of Machine Learning Engineer, but otherwise ya! Really it was more so from my academic work, but after leaving academia I originally thought I was going to be going down the Data Science track. That's really cool! It was actually a little demo project using a clustering algorithm called LDA Topic Modeling (Latent Dirichlet Allocation) which helped me break into industry, and I used to have more experience with language models and text analytics since I was studying the cognitive neuroscience of language. I was even at one point going to do some stuff with SVM to try to classify patterns in EEG signals, but never got around to that. But ya at this point I've definitely forgotten a lot of the "deeper math" of it and am much more so on the engineering side.
DeleteOh man, that sounds fascinating, especially the idea of using the tech to classify patterns in EEG signals! I'm not an engineer by any stretch - I sort of fell into this work by being able to explain what was happening in these models to "laypeople" in terms they could understand but I find the topic and technology incredibly interesting!
DeleteI used to not advertise this too frequently but the last time I did it led to some really cool people joining so I'll do it again. Below is a no-expiration invitation to my Weird Worldbuilding server: Weird Places & Liminal Spaces. No obligation to join if you're already overwhelmed with various RPG communities, but below I'll explain what I consider the unique value of this community.
DeleteThe focus is on Weird Worldbuilding, something I'm obviously quite interested in and which I think is underrepresented (at least to my satisfaction) on many other TTRPG servers, although I do enjoy plenty of those other servers as well.
But I mention it mainly because aside from Weird Worldbuilding, we do often get really deep into the weeds on various STEAM (Science Technology Education Art Math)-related topics, as well as philosophy, and the interplay between all of these things.
For instance, we recently had a really interesting conversation about the implications of representational vs. embodied cognition and how those may be placed in a broader theory of cognitive neuroscience.
https://discord.gg/x2aEwUjrpj
Thank you very much for the invite, I'll take you up on it!
Delete