The only thing that matters right now is development in AI. Its moving faster right now than any tech development I have seen in my lifetime and I've been following tech closely since the late 80's. And we're clearly getting into the sharp exponential phase of the s-curve on current AI model development.

The closest comparison I can think of is the internet in the mid 90's when it was massively improving month by month and doubling home connection speeds every 6 to 12 months, etc. Current AI development seems faster than that, and more consequential...the amount of progress just in 2022 alone was simply stunning. And now less than a month into 2023 we already have a text-to-music model demonstrated. This year is going to be wild.

Buy house? How? With what money? Why not "build house"? Are you American?

There will be opponents to everything. We could achieve personal and societal utopia and there will be folks trying to ruin/undermine it because it doesn't align with their religion or general worldview.

They have already started to.

You won't be you in even the first 100 years after AGI. You will evolve and transcend so fast that your future self will be less like you than you are like your parents. Of course, there may be a choice:

A: Stay human with a human brain and live forever B: Have a human form but 2x intelligence C: Become a God

😂😅 agree

winter is coming

Rebellion against something billion if not trillion times smarter?

Yeah good luck with that.

No overall disagreement, but a couple of points that I thought were worth sharpening.

> I'm not going to lie, I didn't expect this. Even 6 months ago, I was of the mind that once I had a magic media machine, I would eschew all human-created media and leave that to the hipsters. But now I'm increasingly feeling like this fear that all human-created art is dying is a very, very premature call.

Consider the possibility that you were previously seeing the situation from afar, and thinking about the long term, but now that you're seeing it from up close, it's harder to emotionally see past the limitations of current technology.

We don't make people dig ditches without excavators not just because it's economically inefficient, but because making people do work that could very cheaply and easily be automated is not compatible with human dignity: The idea of paying artists when you have that magic media machine should feel the same. Maybe it just doesn't right now because where it used to seem like an abstraction but a possible one, now it seems like a reality but an unachievably distant one.

> I've noticed on DeviantArt and ArtStation, 90% to 95% of people using AI-generation tools are actually kind enough to mark their creations as AI-generated. The fear that sinister and lazy techbros will pretend they themselves created Midjourney and DALL-E 2 generations to trick consumers and rob from hard-working artists is just that: a relatively unfounded fear.

The stakes are very low there. We weren't really worried about people freely uploading stuff to DeviantArt being cheated out of anything, as they weren't being paid in the first place. The place you should be looking is how concept artists, visual designers, commissioned artists etc. are doing.

Fyi, the last "A" in "GABA" already means "acid" so "GABA acid" would be redundant. :)

Just a lot of progress in consumer electronics during that time, so it's very visible.

Lots of progress in the last few years for certain diseases for example, like multiple sclerosis. Which is now decently treatable with a new procedure. But the medical and industrial fields are quite 'invisible' in daily life for most people, hence you don't really notice the progress.

hahahahaha

When you can't find your own dimension because the dimensions market is still fucked up.

if we're being technical toasters from 20 years ago pale in comparison to some of the toasters we have today

> "you now have an appointment scheduled for around five pm"

That's the evil corporate AI's that arrange meetings at 5pm.

Not prioritizing safety at this stage results in a PR nightmare.

We don't yet have the compute for civilization ending ASI.

so are you saying it's because of the absurdity (if so, would it be theoretically possible to have a normal enough president (perhaps the closest candidate you'd support) to shift us back/retroactively affect our nature) or that a weird thought experiment joke based on something absurd from our world about that being part of a simulation proves we're in that simulation being joked about

This was written during the AI winter.

People are about to think GPT4 is AGI so it seems like the number is likely to be high

ChatGPT summary :

The writer has shifted their belief away from the idea that synthetic media will completely destroy the human entertainment industry. They have come to appreciate human-created media more because of the abilities of AI and the intrinsic value of knowing that humans crafted something specific. They don't believe that human creativity will be rendered obsolete by perfect generative AI due to human irrationality and the freedom of choice to seek out human-created art. The writer expects low-level artists to suffer but higher-level artists will eventually adapt and push back against the shift to automation.

cool question op

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: humans will never stop being creative. we will always do art, its baked into our species.

with that said, the JOB of artist will go away. no company or average person would pay out the nose for art from a human (unless you are rich), when the synthetic media machine can do it much "better", faster, and for free.

humans will literally be too busy to care about all this though. because its not just art that AI is going for, its all jobs. we are all about to be in the same boat. how do people deal with a post money world? how would you get an artist to make your idea if they don't want to without money? heck if I know...maybe you can't...

I do think it will be hard singularity and I think people will probably be too busy freaking out about the super intelligence talkin to them than whether or not art is still a thing people may do anymore.

definitely

If it's publicly released then I assume many people regular people who don't know much about AI will use it like with ChatGPT, in which case most users probably won't really know what AGI is.

To put it another way, it's like how the best chess AIs are so stupidly superhuman that no biological organism could even conceivably defeat the best ones available. The result of this on chess as a game industry? It's actually made humans better players.

It's not a 1:1 comparison because playing a game isn't the same as "the application of higher cognition for entertainment." But I am starting to seriously think that I vastly overcalled the death of the entertainment industry. I suppose I should have been more nuanced, as I still think that the industry as it is now is horribly bloated and exploitative and AI will end that aspect of it.

But, see if you can follow me here, if I had the ability to generate a movie on my computer that looks like it had the entire GDP of Earth put into its budget (but only cost a few cents to generate), and I heard that some filmmakers dedicated to doing things the old-fashioned way were setting out to make movies with actual human actors and practical effects/legacy CGI.... I'd actually set out good time in the day to watch that movie too. Even if I could recreate that exact movie, frame by frame, on my computer.

Even if that movie was terrible, I'd still watch it if I knew it was genuinely human-crafted. Sort of like how I'd pay money even for a crappy glass if it was hand-crafted by a human.

It's nowhere near enough to sustain the industry as it exists now, hence why I have to say "expect downsizing," but I'm completely cutting out my earlier predictions that the entertainment industry is doomed. Even art as career isn't going to die.

All this is really meant to be a reassurance to artists fearing their obsolecense. If "The Synthetic Media Guy" is saying "Lol actually plenty of you are gonna be alright," I'd start calming down.

I like to think of it as a bell curve. On the left end, the uneducated broke take is that "AI will never replace humans completely, even if it's perfect." In the middle, as a result of knowledge and enlightenment and awareness, there's "AI is going to replace creatives first, and the human entertainment industry is going to die, and everything ever will be an anime tailored to my tastes and I'll never look back." And on the right, following the come-down and when you achieve nirvana, there's "AI will never replace humans completely, even if it's perfect." Just expect a lot more AI-generated stuff in the coming years regardless.