Ansel Adams Estate Calls Out Adobe for Selling AI-Generated Art Using Photographer’s Name

I won’t say “it can’t happen here.”

But the concerns over AGI are largely a diversion to the real risks that “in the wild” Generative AI present.

There are tons of people who are using this technology. The vast majority of them haven’t a clue how it works - they just ask it to plan a party or come up with a poem or a good guacamole recipe. Despite not knowing the underlying math, their experience with it helps tear down the idolatry. They see the stupid results, they get a strong sense for the pros and cons, and realize GenAI is fun and useful but can’t replace anyone except an entry-level staffer (and even THAT is a trade made with trepidation).

There are boatloads of other people who won’t touch this stuff, but who are fearful of it becoming skynet. The fear is legit, in the sense that these algorithms are fallible. But experience with the actual Things That They Fear would go a long way to fleshing out the technology and their fears.

What IS something that people should watch/know/explore/investigate, is the ethics/morality/political leanings of the team building any GenAI or machine learning model. There core of most of these models are so deep/in the weeds that it’s easy to gloss over them. But if a statistician/model developer is really evil, they can twist the core to make the model profess that liberty is an evil concept, and abortion to be a magnificent civil right.

Flushing this out in the open isn’t hard - about 10 minutes of prompting can usually do the trick - but it DOES require vigilance. I suspect, much like platforms such as HuggingFace with a sort of leader board, websites will “score” models on the basis of bias.

There is a vast network of hypesters (generally called “tech bros” or tech brothers) who are like Russian and Chinese bots. They use la gauge that would fill up a buzzword bingo card in a minute - “game changer”, “next level”, “broke the internet’ and related nonsense. In my experience, they are empty suits but they can dazzle the masses. Their cousins are the doomsters, who see HAL and the Terminator in a stupid chat bot.

Everyone on FR, whether we like it or not, embraces technology -this IS an online bulletin board. We need to examine GenAI as we would scrutinize Trump, DeSantis, or any politician. After that discernment process, a healthy understanding of what this technology can and can’t do will be sharpened.

The risk of Artificial General Intelligence isn’t that hardware and software and data will combine to equal human cognition. It won’t. The risk is that someone SAYS they got a bot that can replace a person “in toto” and the public believes them.

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