This is such a meta conversation, it being a conversation about the fact that we are having conversations about AI. I agree with everything @athousandships said 100%. I really think the perception of “what AI can do” for business owners is much more dangerous, at least in the short term than what LLMs can actually replace.
I also personally think UBI (Universal Basic Income) that @pauldrewett alluded to would be a great thing, especially here in the US. Having UBI would solve a lot of our broken social programs in the US. UBI will become more popular an idea when unemployment skyrockets and it disrupts the bottom line enough to create financial or social unrest that threatens businesses’ solvency. Basically, corporations will start paying UBI taxes when it becomes the only way for them to stay in business like an ouroborus.
UBI I think will also solve the problem that so many artists are facing right now: How can I make a living with my art if businesses use AI to replace me? What we will end up with is bespoke, human-generated art becoming a premium. Especially when artists no longer have to create art to survive. There are a lot of accepted myths that good art can only come from pain and suffering. But reality doesn’t bear that out.
Vincent van Gogh is one of my favorite examples. Yes, he created fantastic impressionist art. Starry Night is my favorite painting of all time. (I highly recommend seeing it in person at the MOMA in NYC if you ever get a chance, because it is actually a 3D painting that no picture can capture - I know because I’ve tried.) He suffered from mental illness. He was financially supported by his brother who bought his paints for him. Van Gogh, like many artists of the renaissance period (he was not of that period) had a patron, resulting in individualized, localized UBI.
We are seeing this now with AI music. It’s good. Good enough that multiple AI (LLM-assisted) songs have become Billboard #1 hits and people can’t tell. What AI can do is mass-market appeal. What it can’t do is create something very specific. I’ve been playing with it for 6 months now, and it’s great as long as you know what a good song sounds like, and you’re not too picky about details - and you like playing with RNG until you get something “good enough”.
And that’s the things about LLMs - the danger isn’t “can replace a human” but, “good enough” that I can get along without a human doing it. Things that require accuracy will always be harder - but when the math works within statistical tolerances, it will replace accountants as long as it makes less mistakes than a human - not when it’s perfect.
But, to the point @athousandships made earlier, you still will need knowledgeable people making stuff with LLMs. Those chart-topping songs weren’t made with a one-word prompt. They were made by musicians who learned how to direct the AI to make something good - and no one heard all the AI slop that was generated to get there.
I made the Dragonforge Theme Song with a simple prompt. I literally needed a filler song that I had rights to legally release so I could add it to my Game Template and have a default example song. I didn’t really care what it sounded like as long as it wasn’t crap. An I got a pretty epic song out of it. Suno gave me two options, and I really liked the one I linked above.
When I started using Suno, it was impossible to make two songs on the same musical theme. Two months ago, in October, I made a game jam game called Skele-Tom with LLM-generated music on a theme. And I told everyone it was AI music, and then I got 70 people to review my game jam entry. Despite the AI music, people loved my game and music. People asked for the soundtrack, which I published. (It’s ridiculously killer IMO.) I got #12 overall and for the music category - despite people knowing it was AI-generated. You can read the comments here and note that many people hated that I used AI music, but still admitted it was really good, and that was frustrating too. And I agree - that is frustrating.
Disney just made a deal for 200 of their characters to be available in Sora. And the deal was a $1 Billion investment by Disney. They are getting ahead of things by jumping on the bandwagon for video content creation. And everyone is going to follow suit. This is going to have a huge impact on the creatives in the movie/TV industry.
Personally, I like the idea of not having to spend the rest of my life chasing the brass ring just to eat and have a place to sleep in my old age.
Also, I read about Cognitive Offloading yesterday and I wanted to pass this along because I think it’s interesting, and backs up my own theories on how learning by LLM is a bad idea.
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