Humans like using machine learning to help pathologists, enhance a phone picture, or create a better map. However, AI generators irritate many people. These programs function by spidering photographs from all across the internet, absorbing the visual culture inherent inside them by reading their captions, and then saturating them with fizzy visual noise until they appear like static. To create a new picture, the AI begins with a caption and some static, then reverses the process, reducing noise until an image arises that roughly corresponds to the description. (It’s not very good at sketching hands, but neither am I.)
This is revolting. It’s revolting to watch artists databased into obscurity. It’s revolting to think that someone might tell a computer, “I want a painting of Alex Jones in the manner of Frida Kahlo,” and the computer would deliver it without hesitation. These systems combine sceneries, regions, and cultures—things individuals think of as “theirs,” “their life,” and “their crafts”—into a 4-gigabyte open source tarball that can be downloaded into a Mac to create a baseball-playing penguin in the manner of Hayao Miyazaki. People who are able to employ the new tools will gain new power. People who excelled with the old tools (paintbrushes, cameras, Adobe Illustrator) will be acknowledged and transformed into Soylent.
For the time being, art websites are prohibiting AI-generated work, and stock picture suppliers are also denying it. On Twitter, famous bloggers who tried out having an AI draw their articles were told they shouldn’t do it again and promised not to. Some words are banned from the interface of the picture generator, which is too bad because I wanted to ask the bot to paint a “busy” cottage in the style of Thomas Kinkade. (It is necessary to address one’s darkest fears.)
Don’t get rid of the messenger, but come on: Image generators will be built into everything and used for many different good, bad, and lustful purposes. We’ll be saying things like, “Computer, build a version of Die Hard where all the characters are corgis” in a decade, or 10 minutes (time is foggy around this stuff). The video will then be put on YouTube, where machine learning will make sure that the film studio gets the audio track cut that was agreed upon beforehand. Then, other systems will download the video and decide that there is a link between the voice of arch-terrorist Hans Gruber (played by Alan Rickman) and corgis. This will lead to a rogue AI-enhanced compression algorithm replacing all instances of Snape in Harry Potter with a corgi. This will cause the Great Corgi Cinematic Snowball Virus of 2024, after which all filmed entertainment will only feature corgis and the occasional crossbreed This will devastate Game of Thrones while making The Purge lovely.
The marvel of the age is that we can learn from both at any time. anything to keep from being bored.