Why do people fall for it so easily? Is it just laziness? Rush to finish things? We are so much better at creating new things that using the tech feels like cheating to ourselves.
The issue here is you're trying to make something a binary that is a continuum. Humans are tool users and the vast majority of animals depend wholly on their bodies to accomplish everything. It's our greatest strength and weakness.
>We are so much better at creating new things
Are we? If this were really true we'd have had rockets at least 10 thousand years ago if not more. Actual 'new' creations that are not mixes of previous things are incredibly rare and most of those are found by shear luck with interacting with the natural world. We love telling ourselves a particular story about how creative and wonderful and fucking great we are but the vast majority of human behavior, including my own is just an iterative copy of other humans behavior.
Wouldn't be surprised if in a few decades that we have to X-ray the participants in hand competitions for robotic enhancements.
I am consistently surprised by the levels of self-righteous hubris in the techbro community. People rationalising horrible behaviour and perpetuating the tragedy of the commons, just with computers.
I'm old enough for nostalgia so i regularly find myself pining for the days when the software industry was smaller and the nerds arena was not taken over by the MBA types and temporarily embarrassed millionaires.
Of course it is! You post process a picture you took with your camera. As a photographer, can you open paint/photoshop and create a picture out of nothing and submit it to this contest without it being considered cheating?
Yes it is my personal belief that we are definitely much much better at creating than AI models, which the only thing they do is output an empty and dull regurgitation of its training. There's nothing truly personal and original coming out of it when it comes to creating music, literature, art, etc.
Do you know why I am so against all this hype? Because it is a poison for the mind, it deprives you from thinking from understanding and from questioning things by ourselves, and I'm already witnessing AI junkies that consume and take for granted every single output from a model.
We have already proven that most social networks are toxic and detrimental to people, especially teenagers. On top of that now add no thinking for ourselves anymore.
Why think if you can now outsource it to a computer, right?
I guess those AI models were trained on solutions to Navier-Stokes and a proof of the Quasi-Riemann hypothesis.
> Do you know why I am so against all this hype? Because it is a poison for the mind, it deprives you from thinking from understanding and from questioning things by ourselves, and I'm already witnessing AI junkies that consume and take for granted every single output from a model.
This argument has been made against every human innovation, including writing. Maybe it's true this time but I doubt it.
> Why think if you can now outsource it to a computer, right?
I was already outsourcing plenty to the wikipedia, do-yourself-youtube videos, and so on. This doesn't seem that different.
When I revealed it was AI written everyone immediately ate their words and said they hated it all along and it was obviously derivative.
(throwaway because when I posted this under my main account I started getting death threat emails. like, grow up.)
And when they found out you stole it and claimed it as your own, they weren’t impressed?
Jesus Christ you AI Delusion Syndrome people (I use that term loosely) have brain rot.
This needs to be emphasized.
Basically they realized it was droppings from the theft machine when they'd been told it was original content and they felt betrayed and disgusted -reasonably so, I might add.
> I recently had ChatGPT Astra write a bunch of short stories for me in a universe I'm fond of.
Because that way of stating it makes it pretty clear you yourself don't really see yourself as the author of the stories.
Simultaneously, you presented them to your friends as if you were the author. So basically your friends found out you BS'd them. Why wouldn't they be upset? Seems like a totally natural reaction.
Now, if you performed extensive labor to get the story into the shape it it's in, hours long conversations with the model, some manual tweaks, etc etc, maybe you have a better claim to authorship than you would if you used a one shot prompt (though your own framing makes it sound like you did very little)
Something like the forest and trees applies here.
An LLM can be good at math and shit at art. And in fact, they all are
This just is such repeated drivel, a thought terminating cliche.
Remember over a decade ago when AI trained itself to whip human players at Go using moves no human ever did. Because I do.
We operate within history whether you like it or not. This problematizes any abstraction that is conceived in terms of ahistorical static information and difference.
If I stimulate your neurons with a couple of electrical charges you will experience a "real" phenomenon which isn't real by any classical sense of the definition because the origins of that phenomenon are not "natural".
Why don’t we allow scooters in 100m sprints in track and field events?
https://bo.world/blogs/newsroom/insane-100-mph-e-turbo-scoot...
But a damned shovel cannot create the dirt it digs.
AI is not a shovel. A shovel digs faster than hands, but it is still digging in the ground and cannot unearth anything that wasn't there.
Generative AI tooling creates things that weren't there. It is not deterministic and not compatible with the spirit or rules of creative competition.
Jesus Christ you AI Delusion Syndrome people are exhausting.
People get upset when other people use AI in the arts because the point is largely human expression. Technical virtuosity isn't even necessarily the most important thing in art (just look at modern art and how common the philistine refrain of "my kid could do that" is).
Art doesn't serve a utilitarian function. Using AI for it largely misses the point, and I think that's what people get upset about. It's like showing up to play tag and saying "actually I'm going to play hide and seek instead" you aren't following the established social norms of the game.
Contests, in general, always ways have restrictions around them, because they are meant to test particular human feats. I'm sure plenty of future contests will have rules against AI just as today plenty of contests arbitrarily limit technologies for the good of the competition (e.g. no doping in sports).
To respond to this situation by emphasizing the utilitarian function and value of AI is to completely miss the point.
And at the same time many of these distinctions are artificial human constructs.
The idea of these photography contests is nearly dead, if not dead. Much like the no doping in sports, once the technology gets too good, for example replicating the exact processes of your body the error rate on detection gets so high you might as well flip a coin. When making rules for any system you can always have adversaries. In contests you have two types of cheating you have to deal with. Cheaters that want to win, and cheaters that want to show you your system is broken and can't be fixed. The second type is the kind that shows you that your rules are arbitrary little abstractions in the shadows on the wall of Plato's cave.
LLMs are truly worse at creative processes and I'm sorry you're not exposed to enough beauty in your life to recognize that
Drugs allows you to cope with hard things or allows you to escape the toll you have to pay.
Similarly, AI allows brain to do more with less energy expenditure. This is why it looks so tasty and is very addictive.
Your brain doesn't work at that hard, AI allows this, however there's no free lunch on that planet. The effort you give into something returns as quality and finesse, however it's tiring as well.
Addiction is a complex is a hard problem regardless what you are addicted to, it's not a light or easy matter to discuss, though.
It's like anything goes in most human endeavors. Society is winging it; duct-taped solutions abound. Most people lack taste or a keen eye for quality, and only notice when there is something seriously wrong. Even then, politics and all sorts of other concerns skews how people respond to things. This is why we complain about AI slop in the fields we know about, while the public at large think AI is the best thing after sliced bread.
Faced with this, unless someone is really passionate about their work, they eventually kind of tune out, and then look for how to expend the least effort possible to get whatever (uncertain or politicized) reward they can in their endeavors.
Going forward, I’ll be using local diffusion models exclusively, and I couldn’t care less what others think. This workflow suits me perfectly, and I genuinely enjoy the process. I have over 100,000 digital and film photos I've slowly been processing using this method - I have restored photos I tried to restore the older ways without success. I'm so grateful for these local models.
I use the Portable version of ComfyUI, most are done with Qwen Image 2.1 and some hard restores using FIBO2. You can find a bunch of video tutorials on YT for both models.