I promise this question is asked in good faith. I do not currently see the point of generative AI and I want to understand why there’s hype. There are ethical concerns but we’ll ignore ethics for the question.
In creative works like writing or art, it feels soulless and poor quality. In programming at best it’s a shortcut to avoid deeper learning, at worst it spits out garbage code that you spend more time debugging than if you had just written it by yourself.
When I see AI ads directed towards individuals the selling point is convenience. But I would feel robbed of the human experience using AI in place of human interaction.
So what’s the point of it all?
My last three usages of it:
- A translation
- Looking up what actors from Mars Attacks had shared work on another movie. I recognized that Pierce Brosnan and John Doe Baker had done Goldeneye and wondered if there were more.
- Name suggestions for a black and white cat - I got some funny suggestions like Oreo and a kick-ass suggestion for Domino
art. It’s a new medium, get over it
I’d say there are probably as many genuine use-cases for AI as there are people in denial that AI has genuine use-cases.
Top of my head:
- Text editing. Write something (e.g. e-mails, websites, novels, even code) and have an LLM rewrite it to suit a specific tone and identify errors.
- Creative art. You claim generative AI art is soulless and poor quality, to me, that indicates a lack of familiarity with what generative AI is capable of. There are tools to create entire songs from scratch, replace the voice of one artist with another, remove unwanted background noise from songs, improve the quality of old songs, separate/add vocal tracks to music, turn 2d models into 3d models, create images from text, convert simple images into complex images, fill in missing details from images, upscale and colourise images, separate foregrounds from backgrounds.
- Note taking and summarisation (e.g. summarising meeting minutes or summarising a conversation or events that occur).
- Video games. Imagine the replay value of a video game if every time you play there are different quests, maps, NPCs, unexpected twists, and different puzzles? The technology isn’t developed enough for this at the moment, but I think this is something we will see in the coming years. Some games (Skyrim and Fallout 4 come to mind) have a mod that gives each NPC AI generated dialogue that takes into account the NPC’s personality and history.
- Real time assistance for a variety of tasks. Consider a call centre environment as one example, a model can be optimised to evaluate calls based on language and empathy and correctness of information. A model could be set up with a call centre’s knowledge base that listens to the call and locates information based on a caller’s enquiry and tells an agent where the information is located (or even suggests what to say, though this is currently prone to hallucination).
shitposting.
Need some weidly specific imagery about whatever you’re going on about? It got you covered
In creative works like writing or art, it feels soulless and poor quality. In programming at best it’s a shortcut to avoid deeper learning, at worst it spits out garbage code that you spend more time debugging than if you had just written it by yourself.
I’d actually challenge both of these. The property of “soulessness” is very subjective, and AI art has won blind competitions. On programming, it’s empirically made faster by half again even with the intrinsic requirement for debugging.
It’s good at generating things. There are some things we want to generate. Whether we actually should, like you said, is another issue, and one that doesn’t impact anyone’s bottom line directly.
To win a competition isn’t speaking to the purpose of art really, whose purpose is for communication. AI has nothing to communicate and approximates a mish mash of its dataset to mimic to great success the things it’s seen, but is ultimately meaningless in intention. It would be a disservice to muddy the art and writing out in the world created by and for human beings with a desire to communicate with algorithmic outputs with no discernible purpose.
I feel like the indistinguishability implied by this undercuts the communicative properties of the human art, no? I suppose AI might not be able to make a coherent Banksy, but not every artist is Banksy.
If you can’t tell if something was made by Unstable or Rutkowski, isn’t it fair to say either neither work has soul (or a message), or both must?
That is only if one assumes the purpose of art is its effect on the viewer which is only one purpose. Think of your favorite work of art, fiction, music, did it make you feel connected to something, another person? Imagine a lonely individual who connected with the loneliness in a musical artist’s lyrics, what would be the purpose of that artist turned out to be an algorithm?
Banksy, maybe Rutkowski, and other artists have created a distinct language (in this case visual) that an algorithm can only replicate. Consider the fact that generative AI cannot successfully generate an image of a full glass of wine, since they’re not commonly photographed.
I do think that the technology itself is interesting for those that use it in original works that are intended to be about algorithms themselves like those surreal videos, I find those really interesting. But in the case of passing off algorithmic output as original art, like that guy who won that competition with an AI generated image, or when Spotify creates algorithmically generated music, to me that’s not art.
