AI has become as a deeply polarizing issue on the left, with many people having concerns regarding its reliance on unauthorized training data, displacement of workers, lack of creativity, and environmental costs.
  • lilypad [it/its, pup/pup's]@hexbear.netEnglish
    6·
    25 days ago

    Ok reading further, i think i agree with the author on the way creativity functions and perhaps misunderstand what they mean by democratizing creativity. That being said, theres some places i think the author is reaally overestimating what LLMs are capable of. E.g.

    A camera captures the world as it exists while AI visualizes worlds that could be.

    This is a pretty sweeping statement that i think is wrong. An LLM cannot visualize worlds that could be. Its a statistical model throwing together statistically linked output. The LLM (i hate that the author uses the word AI, its become a meaningless term) spits out the statistically linked tokens, it doesnt go in with an idea of a world or visualize a world that could be, it shoves together the tokens that best match its input.

    Idk, maybe im way off base here

    • CommunistCuddlefish [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
      3·
      25 days ago

      No I agree with your initial criticisms of the little essay.

      Copying the most relevant bit from another comment I left here:

      Pushing people to rely on unreliable tools is a bad idea. Why should “a factory worker draft a union newsletter” with an LLM when the union newsletter will inherently be worse because it was made by an LLM that produces flat-toned bullshit? You lose the human and personal voice, the fire and zeal that are needed for organizing, by passing it through an LLM. Or “rent strike scenario simulations” done by an LLM are completely unreliable and worthless. " enable a nurse to visualize a protest poster" using an LLM to emphasize the importance of the skilled human labor that nurses provide? An absurd and self-undermining tactic.

      Basically to my eyes LLMs are a tool that can be utilized as a part of an overarching creative process composed of subprocesses but are not themselves creative. The purpose of creativity is to be creative! Thats not to say that nothing that touches an LLM is creative, but rather that the LLM use is an outsourcing of parts of the creative processes.

      Here’s a couple examples of “creative use of an LLM” that I thought were fine and were truly creative:

      1. Having some generative model generate video scenes following a theme that someone wanted and stitching them together into a music video that had a coherent theme for a song that he wrote. That took effort and the LLM couldn’t have made the whole music video.

      2. Using one of those voice models trained on celebrities’ voices to make Taylor Swift sing “Get Low” by Lil John. Because it’s a funny idea someone wanted to see happen and they used the tools to make it happen. Now there’s major ethical problems with literally putting words into someone else’s mouth but that’s a different issue from whether it is a creative endeavor or not.