Read: Discord is de-anonymizing all users.

Leeeave.

Consider this image. It’s full of blatant tells, like the bouncer becoming a real boy from the knees down, or the improbable stacking inside that trenchcoat. Yet it obviously conveys meaning in a clever way. You wouldn’t commend whoever made it for their drawing skills, but the image transmits an idea from their brain to yours.

The model did not have to comprehend anything. That’s the user’s job. A person used the tool’s ability to depict these visual elements, in order to communicate their own message.

If some guy spends days tweaking out the exact right combination of fifteen unforgivable fetishes, that amalgamation is his fault. You would not blame the computer for your immediate revulsion. It tried its best to draw a generic pretty lady in center frame. But that guy kept doodling a ball-gag onto Shrek until image-to-image got the leather strap right, and once he copy-pasted Frieren behind him, it just made her lighting match.

Neural networks are universal approximators, so you’re always going to need human art to approximate human art. However, there are efforts to produce models using only public-domain, explicitly licensed, and/or bespoke examples. (Part of the ‘do words matter’ attitude is that several outspoken critics scoff at that anyway. ‘Like that changes anything!’ They’ll complain about the source of the data, but when that’s addressed, they don’t actually care about the source of the data.)

Personally, though… I don’t have a problem with using whatever’s public. For properly published works, especially: so what if the chatbot read every book in the library? That’s what libraries are for. And for images, the more they use, the less each one matters. If you show a billion drawings to an eight-gig model then every image contributes eight bytes. The word “contributes” is eleven.

Recognizing that no tool is immune to human expression. So even if a stick-figure single prompt isn’t art, some weirdo pouring their time and energy into an iterative process should be.

Distinguishing capitalist implications of a technology vis-a-vis material impact on existing professions, versus people running some jumped-up chatbot and renderer on their own desktop for their own purposes.

Frankly it should be illegal.

Not just “never required.” Explicitly disallowed.

I feel I’ve been pretty respectful throughout this conversation.

I wish to disabuse you of that notion. Every response has been condescending repetition of your apparently dogmatic opinions - and insistence upon your right to hold them, as if anyone challenged that. Conversations are supposed to pursue a mutual understanding of reality, instead of spitting conclusions at one another. You can’t make declarations about all art with a sweep of your hand, and then flinch in confusion when the person you’re talking at has a follow-up question.

You “don’t feel the need to convince you or anyone of anything,” but boy howdy you sure keep yapping. And then cannot imagine why that’s not the end of it.

Meanwhile, I’ve held the vain hope this interaction might be productive in some way. From the very start, I asked you: do words matter? And you clutched pearls as if the answer was obviously yes. But then ev-er-y sin-gle response, that one included, ends with useless ‘agree to disagree’ fluff, and some sign-off like you’re just going to nope out, and then you keep coming back to do it again. I’ve made it crystal clear why I’m still trying. I for one give a shit about this topic, enough to constructively discuss it. Why the fuck are you still here if you’re not even listening?

You can’t go from ‘it does harm! fact!’ to an appeal from the nature of beauty.

Nor can you honestly claim ‘this is an open forum for debate’ and then make crystal fucking clear you’re not actually arguing, you’re just spouting words at someone. You came to me. I did not seek your opinion, I did not invite brainstorming, and I’m not keeping you here. But for some fucking reason every single response includes a pearl-clutching rejoinder like you can’t figure out why someone is talking back to you. All you did was offer concrete rationale and claims to fact which are supposedly relevant to the broad and important topic at hand! Why would anyone have something to say about that?

If addressing your alleged reasons cannot possibly change your mind, then they’re just lies. That’s pretense. That’s pulling out excuses that sound like arguments, but cannot be foundational to your conclusions, or else removing them would make that belief structure collapse.

If you don’t actually want to discuss this, consider shutting up.

At what point were you engaged in debate? You act bewildered that someone tried to critically examine your assertions. I’ve been asking questions from your opinion. Do you not recognize your own stated beliefs?

That is a fact, not opinion.

Incorrect. Locally running ComfyUI or Ollama neither picks their pockets nor breaks their bones. When these cloud companies crash, local models aren’t going anywhere, and they won’t do psychic damage to someone whose DeviantArt posts were in the training data.

Would any difference there be specifically attributed to any individual chatbot prompter?

In one shot, probably not. After a week of fucking around to pursue a specific idea in each person’s head, almost certainly. Then again, you could have one group of people prompt a hundred images total, and a completely different group each pick their favorite ten, and that non-interactive selection would reveal individual aesthetic internality. Curation is not creation, but it requires identifying a work’s shortcomings, even if you won’t correct them yourself.

Would a demonstrable difference change your conclusion? Like, is this line of questioning relevant, or are we just saying words recreationally?

Then why are we talking?

You seem to think opinions are decorative things, having no bearing on reality. Like the topic at hand doesn’t practically impact entire career paths for millions of people. As if the only reason to try to dissuade someone from dismissive absolute rhetoric is if I am somehow swayed by it, and secretly believe the opposite of all the words I’m saying.

Solipsistic time vampire. Why does anyone give a shit where you stand, if you don’t know what it means to stand by it?

If that journey is multiple days of fucking with these tools, why does that not count? Why is this the only technology immune to human expression?

I don’t need the constant reminders of what an opinion is - but you might need a refresher on what arguments are. If you give a reason for an opinion, people will often assume that’s why you believe something, and address it in a way that may alter your conclusion.

You kinda did, though. And then repeated it here. Then immediately contradicted it. You are unsuccessfully splitting hairs as if a sweeping absolute has nuance.

Indirect effort is still effort. CGI artists don’t draw the frames that audiences see. “The destination” is rendered by a computer, from their work. It’s obviously more direct than simply describing the scene - but there’s a gradient, not a cutoff. If someone spends a week fighting any tool to get exactly what they want, then it’s not a trivial push-button affair, and the result is a reflection of their desire and experience.

Even for generated art, you can feed in a blurry approximation, or have it modify a finished-looking image. You can photoshop the output and loop it back through. Hell, a generated video could animate a scene you painted on canvas. To insist that’s not just lesser, but utterly disqualified, is not a defensible assertion.

Consider this Neural Viz video. It’s mostly people talking to-camera. You might insist they could’ve done that with real actors… but that’s the thing, this tech can do anything you might do with real actors. Would you suggest that no amount of telling actors what to say and do makes someone an artist? Why is this silly bullshit not art, when a version wiggling GI Joes in front of the camera would be?

Then meaning does not simply come from ‘the struggle, the challenges.’ Art is a sprawling complex aspect of human existence, and once again, a new thing has people making grand assertions for why only the old ways are real art. Directly addressing these philosophical declarations often results in open hostility. I’m not sure passive-aggressive ‘agree to disagree, good day’ is much better. Why’d you say anything if you don’t wanna talk about this?

As if amateurs never code stuff the normal way.

… so does it count or not, when someone spends just as long fighting these tools to express what they want?

Does the professed difficulty of getting the robot to draw what you want impact that glib treatise on the nature of art, or are we instantly in words-don’t-matter territory?

Most code is not art. I certainly don’t care what someone experienced while making a program; I just need it to work. If a jumped-up chatbot lets people make something with only a shallow understanding of my field of expertise - great. That is the dream of BASIC, realized. If that shit works then we’ve successfully made computers a bicycle for the mind.

Just don’t let them touch networking or cryptography.

I find it hard to justify the value of investing so much of my time perfecting the art of asking a machine to write what I could do perfectly well in less time than it takes to hone the prompt.

And a professional guitarist can probably pull off a better solo than an audio model, in real time.

And a professional artist can certainly draw exactly what they want faster than talking the robot into rendering it.

Why do we keep comparing the robot to expert humans? You already learned how to do the thing the hard way. No shit the tech isn’t superhuman. There’s still obvious value in a tool that does things for people who know what they want but not how to do it.

It didn’t used to be.

Boomer tropes exist because divorce had to be granted. It wasn’t just a choice by either spouse. It was a parliamentary or ecclesiastical decision, and if some jurisdiction got too free in handing them out, they could be reversed.

You were expected to get married and stay married until one of you died. Even if it meant separate beds and not asking why he frequented that bar by the docks.

An evolved version of the concept appeared in the 1972 Signetics 2513, best known as the character generator in the original Apple I.

A backhanded compliment, given the Apple I sold fewer than 200 units. By that time Signetics was a subdivision of Philips and the brand did not last.

Having erased the game everybody loved for a janked-up and shamelessly greedy do-over, they’re now trying to erase even its memory.

Like how specifying “Halo CE” requires further disambiguation.

If - if - they release another Xbox, they’re gonna name the fucker “The Original Xbox.”

Despite all of this progress, one critical piece is still missing: business models that make economic sense and allow AI developers to sustain themselves long enough to deliver lasting impact.

“It’s definitely working, except for the part where it does stuff for money.”

I am one of Lemmy’s rare defenders of the underlying technology, so allow me say: yikes.

The business model for LLMs will be trying to beat the convenience, cost, and security of running the damn thing yourself. So far you idiots have burned money giving them away, and those aren’t going anywhere when you start to crash and burn. People will foreverafter have unfettered access to a program that half-asses anything you ask it for. The big-boy versions your datacenters run have fractionally more ass. They’re not fundamentally better.

Frankly, teaching people to use the small-scale versions properly will work out better than adding another billion weights. These things struggle to remember what they’re doing when simply listing US states without an E in them. A semantic .h file describing other files must be more reliable than ingesting a big-ass project and hoping the context never gets lost.

We’re gonna end up personifying that functionality just so people forgive it for being stupid. The sycophantic butler routine is too Asimov, and people are shocked that a computer doesn’t do exactly what it’s told. The button in your system tray needs to pop up a little guy who you know is only trying his best. You can absolutely get useful work out of him - or out of fifteen of him at the same time, doing different stuff. But if a cat in a necktie says ‘here you go,’ you’re gonna skim for problems. And if the loading animation on his forehead says it’s not his turn on the brain cell, you’ll avoid giving him your credit card.

Oh fuck off.

A site cannot send someone a video and then be mad that they still have it.