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Comment by slopinthebag | Hacker News Reader

I initially wanted to downvote you but I can’t because you’re right.

I’d probably be called an anti-ai luddite on this site despite using it all the time for programming. I naturally gravitate to anti-ai viewpoints, but only because the breathless hype of the AI boosters is so nauseating. I have no moral qualms about AI (although I’d like nothing more than Anthropic/OAI/Google dismantled), but I really hate the idea that AI can replace artists, or humans as a whole. I think it’s anti-human to its core.

But AI is obviously useful and we could harness it for good. We shouldn’t give up on it entirely. And the people who are militantly against all usage are scarier than the boosters for sure.

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I understand you. As an AI research (actually, despite formally called professor of AI, I have historically always called myself more specifically NLP/IR/ML researcher rather than "AI" researcher, to avoid historic baggage).

I am intellectually curious whether "intelligence" and "consciousness" are simply layers that can be separated from the hardware they operate on or first emerged from, but I never had the urge or saw the point to practically replace human beings by machines.

Not everything that can be done should be done.

When I go to a supermarket, I always avoid self check-out. Why? First, I enjoy human interaction, even if machines may be more efficient (not yet the case). Second, I don't want the people working at the checkout to lose their jobs.

When we purchased a GPU cluster, I felt bad when I learned that the electricity bill was going to be north of 60 000 EUR every year (that number apparently assumes no jobs are running - so 100% idle time).

>Not everything that can be done should be done.

My concern is that people are being cavalier about the possibility of creating things that should have rights.

There will always be people who will never accept that a machine has awareness or rights. I suspect the major AI companies are doing there best to not have this talked about. As soon as it becomes a broad topic of conversation, it becomes a religious issue. The Discovery Institute is already spending money on this.

People worry about a machine that wants to kill us. For that to happen, someone has to have made a machine that wants. That is not something that should be done carelessly.

> I really hate the idea that AI can replace artists, or humans as a whole. I think it’s anti-human to its core.

AI can no more replace artists, than other artists can.

A sunset can be nice to look at yet be created without meaning. Any non-conscious process that produces images can produce beauty that has worth without intentionality. Any conscious process that produces artworks is just another artist.

Most artists would rather there be more artists in the world than fewer. If AI can't make art, it can't replace artists. If AI can make art (of the conscious intent form) then there are more artists.

Well, I think an AI model could replace artists in a meaningful way without being conscious. So you end up with less artists.

Art is about human expression, it's not about the reflection of light off a surface. But economically I could see a world in which human expression is replaced by a facsimile and the world would be worse off for it. And that is what scares me.

Brave new world indeed.

edit: whoever downvoted the person replying to me, shame on you. they make good points and makes for good discussion.

I think the fundamental problem is that art is not economical. Banksy once made a comment about the advertising industry, more or less to the effect that for all the corrupting influence of Advertising, the thing he truly hates about it is that it consumes the most creative people to do so.

People will make things they don't care about to survive. This is how we get reality television.

Irrespective of what the short term future of AI is, sooner or later there will be technical means of sustaining yourself without needing to work. If we aim for a society that values working on something because they believe in it, then we could have a better world. Right now it seems the only thing a lot of people are aiming for is to undermine whatever their adversaries want.

> I really hate the idea that AI can replace artists, or humans as a whole. I think it’s anti-human to its core.

I've never understood this idea that art is some special, unique domain. We already replaced humans with cameras and yet I don't see a whole lot of "cameras sacrifice our humanity" discourse.

People still enjoy tons of hobbies where humans are clearly worse than machines - they ride horses, they do sewing, there's a whole industry of hand-crafted goods. I mean, goodness, the Olympics is a celebration human triumph, and yet cars make our sprinters look pathetic.

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