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Peter Gabriel: AI competition statement
- retox 3y agoPresumably in response to this; https://petergabriel.com/news/diffusetogether-ai-video-contest-launches-today/ https://petergabriel.com/news/diffusetogether-ai-video-conte...
- wpietri 3y agoThanks, that's helpful. It seems to me that he's really missing some of the major concerns about "AI" as it stands today. As often happens with new technology, the old rules that secure rights don't quite fit anymore. E.g., if I were an artist who had spent years developing a unique, recognizable style, I'd be furious to have a for-profit company use my work to create something to imitate my art. It's probably not illegal at the moment, but it easily could be down the road, and it regardless raises real ethical questions. I'm disappointed to see Gabriel fail to grapple with that here, where his cache as a prominent artist is being used by a for-profit company for their own ends.
- matchagaucho 3y agoYes. This is about the ethics of AI training data sources. Peter is OK with AI consuming his tracks. But other Artists... not so much.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- user3939382 3y agoI thought this was the singer, I was so confused…
- rideontime 3y agoBut it is the singer.
- mtlynch 3y agoIt is the singer.
- SideburnsOfDoom 3y ago* The award-winning singer, musician, songwriter, record producer, and activist. He has a great voice, but that's hardly everything. He is somewhat of a "grand old man" now. And he makes "grand old man" pronouncements like this one. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Gabriel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Gabriel
- dragonfax 3y agoI too couldn't recognize him. I had to dig around the main site and verify that this is indeed the Peter Gabriel that we all know.
- yazzku 3y ago> it can provide great education and better healthcare to billions. Correction: if you are in America, *to those who can afford it.
- make3 3y agowhy, if you are in America? afaik chatGPT is available everywhere, & there's a huge amount of alternatives
- ChatGTP 3y agoJust a heads up ChatGPT isn’t a substitute for a real doctor.
- chatgtpsux 3y ago[flagged]
- Teever 3y agoSo tired of these kinds of Debbie Downer comments. It's entirely possible that new technology could drive the cost of these things down even in America.
- make3 3y agoit's interesting that the letter he signed is for large language and language + image (input) models, have nothing to do with this
- jimmygrapes 3y ago"Make tomorrow today"
- nr2x 3y agoSerious wisdom in there.
- brigadier132 3y agoWell said, this thing is here to stay. When I first played around with gpt-4 I was filled with immense dread. I, as many others have, immediately understood what kind of enormous societal impact this would have. But I put the question to myself, if I could magically wish this thing away, would I? I wouldn't. I understand the many that would, this thing completely upends the status quo. Massive swathes of people will have skills they have built up their entire lives become worthless. But the potential for good that can emerge from this, can potentially benefit everyone and the people that are not benefitting from the status quo the most. If you think AI is a disaster, think about the potential for medical breakthroughs that can emerge from this. Doctors will spend fewer hours writing charts and more time with patients. Every underprivileged child could have a personalized tutor. The number of discoveries and ideas that can be generated are endless.
- ChatGTP 3y agoIf you think AI is a disaster, think about the potential for medical breakthroughs that can emerge from this. The “think of the good” argument is over played. Same was true for combustion engines, they will probably send us extinct. I’d like it if people just stopped with it. People aren’t idiots, they know good things and very bad things can be achieved.
- gwoolhurme 3y agoYeah I really hate this line of argument as well. We obviously understand it can have a lot of beneficial effects in society. It's a strawman to say that people don't see that. The problem is nobody seems to be properly discussing the bad things that can and will occur.
- chatgtpsux 3y ago[flagged]
- bugglebeetle 3y agoWe can of course also judge the track record on this kind of techno-optimist rhetoric. People expressed all the same lofty ideals about social media, almost all of which have been outweighed by what we really got: anger-driven addiction, micro-targeted propaganda, turn-key state surveillance, and teenagers attempting suicide at all time highs.
- notatoad 3y ago>I have added my name to a letter written by Max Tegmark, Steve Wozniak and Elon Musk amongst others to pause on the release of new AI for six months while we try and figure out what we should be doing, but if we don’t use this time to play with and learn from what we have already created how can we hope to understand it? this is a great point, and i think represents a really good attitude. it seems like there's a whole lot of people who think if they pretend hard enough, AI will go away. and that's obviously not going to happen - it's a useful tool, and so let's all try to figure out how it can be useful in a productive way, not a world-ruining way. and that means using it.
- marban 3y agoEasier said when you collect royalties from a 50y+ catalogue of quality music for yourself.
- Riverheart 3y agoNot only that he’s 73 years old. Hard to believe he’d feel this way starting out his career. He has nothing to lose at this point.
- jwestbury 3y agoPossibly true. On the other hand, I think there's something laudable about a man in his mid-70s embracing new technology and looking for the good in it.
- gwoolhurme 3y agoI think it's only natural to think of AI as the enemy no? Sure theoretically it means better healthcare, scientific improvement. However what nobody has really answered well is what happens to the artists, writers, programmers, scientists, maybe even doctors and lawyers. As we become potentially obsolete what happens to us. Saying that you can do art as a hobby or programming as a hobby really isn't an answer people want to hear. If you want people to not see AI as an enemy then perhaps you should have that discussion. Just to give an anecdotal sob story, my mother passed away from cancer and if AI means a solution to cancer that is amazing, that no other person has to go through the anguish my mother and family had to go through would be amazing. That still doesn't change the point that what will millions of people do in this new industrial revolution? I've said in other threads that my visa is a working visa, if (when?) AI takes my job without that permanent residence what do I do? I don't have anything that ties me to my home country anymore. For me I can only see AI as a future enemy who can do a lot of good...
- williamcotton 3y agoHowever what nobody has really answered well is what happens to the artists So does the world currently only listen to singer-songwriters on acoustic guitar at small local venues? The humanity in the consumption of art has been subject to mass commodification for centuries at this point. This process is driven by money and not love. Technology has nothing to do with it.
- hackyhacky 3y agoYou're technically correct, but missing the point: When technology destroys menial jobs, it's progress. When technology destroys white-color jobs, it's a threat. </irony>
- chucksmash 3y agoWhen technology destroys work people don't like to do, it's progress. When technology destroys work people like to do, it's _______.
- Taywee 3y agoThis wave of AI has the power to be incredibly transformative for good, but not given any of the current economic or copyright systems we have now. I don't know how any of the proponents can pretend that this isn't an abject disaster on the horizon for anybody who depends on copyright to make their living. This is the natural progression to the unnatural properties of the shared delusion of pretending like ideas are property or that it every was natural to keep them artificially scarce. If we lived in an ideal system where ideas are free, copyright didn't exist, and artists and programmers could survive and thrive without the ability or need to hoard their work as if they were physical goods, this would be a non-issue. The system was antiquated for the needs of the modern world for multiple human generations already, and this is the dam breaking.
- erikpukinskis 3y ago> I don't know how any of the proponents can pretend that this isn't an abject disaster on the horizon for anybody who depends on copyright to make their living. OK, I'll bite. How is the an abject disaster on the horizon for... let's say, novelists?
- Taywee 3y agoMy wife is a novelist who widely participates in fiction writing communities, and a lot of competitions have had to stop taking submissions entirely due to AI work flooding all the submissions. There's been drama on and off recently with AI generated covers, too. Some waves have been made with people winning contests with AI generated short stories. Agents are absolutely inundated with AI queries, and it's only going to get worse as the technology gets better. It's actually really scary for writers right now. You just have to look at the huge amount of AI generated attempts and think "what do we do when the writing gets really good? What do we do when most novels are mostly AI generated?" People have spent decades working their ass off to get good and try to get their work sold, and they come out the end of this tunnel right into an era telling them that they're just about to be obsolete.
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago
- mftb 3y agoPeter Gabriel is fucking courageous. I love it. I'm a 50+ programmer. I can absolutely feel this shit pressing on me. Good. Are people right that there are ethical concerns, absolutely. We need to get busy realizing the potential and dealing with the issues.
- doug_durham 3y agoI’m in your same demographic. However I see these technologies as career extenders, not career threats. I can learn things faster than ever and adapt to changes more easily.
- mftb 3y agoThat's awesome. That's exactly the kind of thinking that turns L's to W's.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- shepherdjerred 3y agoAs someone much younger (mid 20's), I have absolutely no idea what to do. I don't even think there _is_ anything I can do, aside from waiting to see what happens. What happens when programmers are no longer needed? That certainly (I hope) won't happen in 5 years, but given the exponential rate of improvement, I can see programming as a profession being gone in 20-30 years.
- oriettaxx 3y agoyou sound too pessimistic even if programming is gone in 20-30 years, you have plenty of time (and energy) to make your daily move to "what is needed".
- reportgunner 3y ago> What happens when programmers are no longer needed? I can't imagine a situation like this. Who is doing all the actual programming work ? Who is receiving the products of the work ? Who is competing with the previous two groups ? Writing code might be no longer needed at some point but programmers don't spend majority of their time writing code.
- thrdbndndn 3y ago> there should be a right to choose to refuse it Even out of the context of AI, I think this isn't stressed enough in general copyright discussion, especially around piracy. People often say that piracy doesn't actually reduce the sale -- which I fully agree -- but that's not the only concern artists have, especially some indie ones. I have seen both illustration/musical artists explicitly stating they don't care if "their work is enjoyed and known by more people because of piracy", they only want paid users to get it. I don't even agree with this sentiment, but I respect it since it's their choice to make, not mine.
- honkycat 3y agoif society is going to collapse it is going to collapse. Even if we did pause AI development, bad actors would just ignore the rule and continue anyway. It's easy for me to say, I am young and healthy and can move away from programming after it bought me a house. Maybe I'll work in a brewery... Either way, the dirty words everyone seems to be avoiding is UBI and socialism. If AI sincerely destroys every white collar job, well... that will be interesting.
- kennyloginz 3y agoIs it not crazy, asks Mr Senior, that the piano maker is a productive worker, but not the piano player, although obviously the piano would be absurd without the piano player? But this is exactly the case. The piano maker reproduces capital, the pianist only exchanges his labour for revenue. But doesn’t the pianist produce music and satisfy our musical ear, does he not even to a certain extent produce the latter? He does indeed: his labour produces some- thing; but that does not make it productive labour in the economic sense; no more than the labour of the mad man who produces delusions is productive. — Karl Marx in Grundrisse (1857-61)
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago> piano maker reproduces capital, the pianist only exchanges his labour for revenue Literally why we have intellectual property. So you can capitalize your intellectual work.
- huehehue 3y agoThere's a massive piece of the music scene that I can't imagine AI ever replacing. Some genres are formulaic by design, but the draw for so many others is the human experience and the inventiveness. Many people follow artists because they connect with material that could only have come from the artist. One reasonable concern is that tech supplementation will lead to a deluge of derivative work, nullifying the efforts of the actual creators. That's always happened in some form or another, and does it really lead genuine fans away from artists they care about? There's a comment in another thread about generating a song that includes Kurt Cobain, which is such a weird example because a computer could not have dreamed that up in a thousand years. A computer couldn't write a punk song, and mean it. It will never replace the open mic, the buskers, the songs passed across generations, the Zappas of the world, and millions of others.
- jdkee 3y agoI believe it can and ultimately will, given enough training data.
- stemlord 3y agoBy the time it does, it's no longer a "computer" it's a form of life, and that's not "training data", that's "experience", thus by all intents and purposes it's a "person" and so it is still true that a "computer" cannot possess the free will required to express ones self creatively
- midoridensha 3y ago>Some genres are formulaic by design, but the draw for so many others is the human experience and the inventiveness. Those genres are safe (for a while), but they're also a puny portion of the market. American pop music is totally going to be replaced by AI. It's been nothing but awful, formulaic crap for the last 25 years, so there's no way that AI-generated music could possibly be worse.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago"When an artist's work is copied for commercial gain, there should be [(a)] a right to choose to refuse it or [(b)] to participate financially. If anyone legitimately feels their copyright has been infringed by this competition, we and Stability AI will work to take down the video until the dispute has been resolved." StabilityAI and Gabriel are providing (a) but not (b). https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/66788385/13/getty-images-us-inc-v-stability-ai-inc/ https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/66788385/13/getty-image... If Getty wins, is Gabriel committing contributory infringement. Even if what happens after text is entered into a prompt is not infringement, mass copying for "training" is done for commercial gain and it is done without consent. Google gets away with copying websites en masse into a cache for the purposes of running a commercial web search engine. Maybe copying for purpose of commercial "AI" will get similar treatment. That said, consider what happened when Google tried scanning books. It seems that some of these training sets have used hundreds of thousands of copyrighted works from "pirate" sources on the web. IMO, this is just another example of so-called "tech" companies, e.g., Uber, that can only operate if they are free from existing laws and regulations. Does StabilityAI have a commercially-viable plan if "training" requires obtaining consent.
- pentagrama 3y agoNice to see an artist who have a website and post readable messages there instead of posting images with text on Twitter or Instagram.