Forum - Banjo Ben Clark

Artificial Intelligence–Liberty, License, & Liability

#1

I’m creating this thread after I posted a brief (and hopefully not offensively-received) reply to @Bhive on the humor thread.

So, let’s open the topic, keeping it friendly, of course…authentic.

Disclaimer: I use AI every day in my business and am on the trajectory of using it more. However, I do not use it in content creation or content editing. As of right now, I am ethically opposed to doing so. However, I feel this is an issue of liberty. I’m not going to force my viewpoint on other “creators”. I’m still working out my thoughts and positions as technology keeps zooming into the horizon. I may never catch up, but one thing I know: I value human-created content more today than I did a year ago, or a month ago.

I don’t want to lose it, and I don’t think we will. I think AI will actually create a premium on authentically-created content/art. Therefore, what I view as my biggest “enemy” is the attempt to pass AI-created content off as authentic, human-created art. Let’s discuss.

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#2

I imagine most of us are on the same page here. AI has made me more valuable in my job. I’ve resolved so many problems I wouldn’t have otherwise been able to, or at least would have taken me many times longer to address. Pros and cons to that, though.

Aside from taking the humanity out of entertainment, I can also feel it robbing me of my IT skills. More than once I’ve asked AI to help me resolve an issue and then realized I knew how to correct that issue on my own. I was just being lazy.

If you’ve never seen the movie “Her” you should watch it. I believe we are in that reality now. Humans are going to be turning to AI for relationships more and more. It’s inherently designed to stroke our egos and keep us coming back for more. Grok is the worst at asking follow up questions at the end of each reply to keep you engaged.

Mostly I fear what the elite plan to do with it. There sure seems to be a hard push for a total surveillance state.

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#3

I’ll be honest I hate AI content. As an avid NEWS watcher I am inundated with AI videos, never sure if the content is real or fake.

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#4

I’m not a fan of AI. One of my life long hobbies has been drawing. As a kid, I always wanted to be a comic book artist. After I retired I made a graphic novel and independently published it. It took me over a year to do. Now you can create a graphic novel in a few minutes with AI, and very little skill.
Despite the impact on creativity, I’m even more concerned about the role AI will play in military and independent consciousness. There is a book called, “If Someone Makes it, Everybody Dies” that is pretty eye opening and scary.

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#5

I believe AI is like the emergence of calculators when I was in high school and then personal computers about a decade later. They both made life easier, but couldn’t replace human cognition—that gut feel a person has when they’ve developed a deep understanding of numbers and patterns. I’ve seen far too many examples of wayward analyses because folks blindly believed something that tech was spitting out. I think Mark hit the nail on the head, though. The major loss is our mental proficiency. It will become more and more difficult to find individuals who have developed their personal skills and intuition with AI available.

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#6

And here’s my reply in the humor thread to Ben’s original post there:

So much for my mental acuity. Take care all. Time to drop this screen and pull some weeds.

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#7

Like Ben, my biggest objection is those that pass-off AI created content as human created content. I believe it to be unethical to do that. Creators and those that publish or distribute creative works should be transparent and label how AI is involved. How it was used in both the creative and production process. And definitely, if AI voices or instruments are the ones doing the music, acting, performing, then that should be clearly stated and not pretend it is humans. I read a few days ago that Spotify is going to start requiring verification and labeling of content that is AI, and something about reducing royalties for AI generated content. Humans have something that no technology can replace, and that is a soul. And with humans, it our unique characteristics and quirks that has made great music for generations.

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#8

I’m mainly creatively offended by AI. It’s just not good. ChatGPT writing personality, Suno AI music, stereotypical AI generated graphics on Christian Facebook pages. It’s just cringe to me and I have a hard time taking it seriously. It’s called AI “slop” for a reason. The saving grace is that it’s often funny :joy:

That said, I think a lot of this just reveals a sad lack of human creativity; I’m peeved at music that sounds like it might as well be AI generated. I feel like someone making AI music and thinking it totally slaps probably just has a lack of creativity or taste. I hope these words aren’t too harsh!

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#9

Sorry, I got the title of the book I mentioned above wrong….it’s…

image
image.jpeg744×1164 86.7 KB

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#10

Watch the movie WarGames 1983 :cowboy_hat_face:

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#11

My thoughts.

I may not be able to totally avoid it but I intend to as much as I can.

I want to be creative on my own and don’t need the lazy and dehumanizing convenience of AI writing words for me, designing imagery for me, or certainly not creating music for me.

The “AI quick summarizing” at the top of a Google search may be a handy tool - I do appreciate that it links to which websites it gathered its information from. However, you won’t catch me ever having a conversation with an AI chat site or app. Not only is it a degrading mental habit and a waste of time, but it’s also dangerous - I won’t have my private information stored in the place where all this data is going. (Ultimately, I feel that it’s all part of the end times agenda. And for those who might remark that it’s no worse than Siri, I don’t spend time chatting with Siri either.) “But thou, O Daniel, shut up the words, and seal the book, even to the time of the end: many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased.” (Daniel 12:12)

I hope the AI takeover will die down, and I’m actually not too positive it won’t, because I’m already seeing a lot of disgust for it instead of the universal fascination there seemed to be a year or two ago. I think at first people thought it was brilliant, but now many are realizing that they’re more brilliant themselves. I 100% agree that people still crave authenticity and they always will. That’s because the human mind was created in God’s image and it doesn’t need any improvement by an artificial bot. Sure, we can benefit from using some tools, with balance and caution. But those tools can never replace our own God-given intelligence.

I finally have zero tolerance for all these fake bluegrass event flyers with their hideous 3D lettering, six-stringed banjos, and four-stringed mandolins. :joy: Maybe some people think it’s funny but as a designer and a writer myself, I don’t really.

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#12

When I was in high school I remember the first desktop calculator available for me to buy came out from Texas Instruments. I was not able to afford it and my parents wouldn’t buy it for me. So I continued to use my slide ruler and do math by longhand. At first schools did not allow them to be used for tests but that quickly changed by the '80s. I bought my first handheld scientific calculator in the early 1980s. I still have it. A lot of people said during that time that it would make students lazy and less likely to learn math properly. Time marched on and by the mid to late '80s desktop computers came out. I used one at my first major technical job with Allen Bradley. We would connect to the internet by way of a 9600 baud dial-up modem. I reminisce about all this because technology has always pushed the envelope and has advanced faster than I can keep up with it. Almost a year and a half ago I retired from Rockwall Automation. The day before I left, I received an email about my AI training. I knew that I had picked the absolute best time possible to leave the company and retire. I’m not necessarily against AI, I guess I’m at an age now that I really don’t find it necessary for me to be engaged as I was when I was working. I am concerned for my grandchildren who are going to be influenced by the technology to be drawn into a fantasy world. The video game era which has been going on for a long time has always influenced children generation after generation. But now with AI it’s going to be advancing even more rapidly. The best thing I can do is engage with my grandchildren to keep them more grounded in reality.

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#13

What a great time for me to poke my head in here!

All I’ll say on the subject is that I can tell that nobody here is involved in AI coding. As far as I’m concerned, AI image/video gen can burn in a dumpster fire, but for coding, it’s quickly cemented itself as a really useful (if imperfect) tool. For example, I was just using it to build an app for making sure I don’t only practice the same 2 songs and ignore the “less shiny” ones every time I pick up my guitar. There is absolutely zero chance that AI ever goes away based off the utter “AI psychosis” that has gripped every wannabe script kiddie (myself included…).

Anyway, not to hijack the AI hate session, but I hope this context is useful or interesting.

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#14

Code is pretty much the only use for AI where I’ve gone, “hey, this is really good!” I think it can excel at doing technical busy-work to allow humans to be more creative.

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#15

I’ve spent some time today thinking how to chip in on this, but all day I keep remembering my pastor’s sermon this morning and thinking about this part of what he said:

Mostly joy builds from the past, but it borrows from the future. The past can be a delightful place to visit but a dangerous place to live in. And I think that idea is right, because living exclusively in the past can cause us to miss a central truth: God does not change. Knowing how God has been faithful in the past should strengthen our confidence that he is faithful in the present, and that he will continue to be faithful in the future. The author of Hebrews tells us Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever. If we are going to be a joyful people, we need hope — but a hope grounded in God’s unchanging character and his unchanging promises.

What does that have to do with AI? AI, Social Media, the Internet, Networks, Computers, Calculators,TV, Radio… none of this stuff is a surprise to the Creator.

Myself, I tend to seek out humor without vulgarity. If AI has been used to produce it, I have not really cared. However, there are a lot of places where I do care. I dislike watching a YouTube video about history and realizing a few minutes in that it’s just “AI slop.” I dislike reading news articles and realizing halfway through… there’s no way a human wrote this. In the case of what I linked to, it was clear from the beginning it was AI. I’m sorry if that offended anyone.

Anyone thinking this through can imagine some pretty devastating consequences from AI within the next decade. Like @Tim_C I’m retiring next week, so I can say with confidence I will not lose my job to AI, but for a lot of the workforce it’s a scary time. But the God who knows the number of hairs we have on our heads will see us though. Sorry if I rambled.

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#16

FWIT- I’m afraid AI is here to stay, but probably not in the form it is today. People hate it, but are happy with it when they don’t know they are using it. For example, birdwatchers everywhere are now using the Merlin app from Cornell University to identify birds by their song. It’s great! And you will find tree-top species that you’ve heard but never seen, And it’s AI, but it’s in the background. There’s no interaction with a stupid animated cartoon “assistant” to frustrate you with erroneous chatter. This type of application is perfect for AI & people. The AI is a tool, not a tyrant.

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#17

Somebody somewhere is making a lot of money from AI. I have no intention of increasing their wealth from my tiny pension pot. I say we should all Boycott AI

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#18

I understand your sentiment, Archie, but that would go over as well as a boycott of the internet in the 90s, computers in the 80s, or even electricity in the early 1900s.

AI’s growth has happened too fast, so we’ll likely see a few big companies die off in the next couple of years. I just saw a news article yesterday talking about big tech companies like Microsoft realizing that AI costs more than expected. They’re starting to replace pure AI with junior level programmers to save money.

I expect to see a sharp sell off in the stock market soon for AI companies and their hardware suppliers, but when the dust settles, we’ll be left with the most resilient AI companies. I suspect they will prove to be as valuable to our productivity as the Internet.

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#19

I guess I’ll not be around long enough to see all those changes @Mark_Rocka. I just get a little cranky when my computer screen is full of AI junk. I have witnessed many tech changes in my lifetime, Valve and Transistor Radio, Telegraph & Teleprinter, B&W & Colour TV, Steam & High Speed Bullet Trains. Landline & Mobile Telephones, Desktop and IPad Computers. I have even operated a water powered floor mill in my teenage years. I am not opposed to change I generally embrace it.

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#20

That’s a good word, @Bhive

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