I think moral choices have nothing to do with utility or result. They are choices of principle. It doesn't matter if the world goes against you.


Do you prefer to be seen as stupid by some people or as a piece of shit by others? that's the difference. (I'm not talking about you, of course, but in general, also because I don't think you really believe that)

Hmm interesting points. In this regard then I feel like moral choice is a luxury not everyone can affoard, right? People use technologies (and some times actions such as stealing etc) to survive. Like someone brings food to the table with Midjourney, or the "I made this ART with an AI< Im an ARTIST" bullshit, probably can not judge them both the same way... Though honestly I still don't feel like I see the whole picture clearly.

By this logic more people should be racist then because it's easier and more convenient to concede to the status quo.

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No, of course not. Just because it is a luxury you can affoard, does not mean it loses it's significance. I don't see how you got to this conclusion. Can you maybe give me a better example so I understand it?

Racism and MJ will differ and their status quo will also differ. I can't really come up with a situation where being racist will get you out of poverty on one hand while simultaneously not being racist would not change anyone's life. It's because racism does not make money most of the time (afaik?) and most of the time you will directly cause a negative impact to someone elses life.
While using MJ, people can definitely get out of poverty or make money, and on the other hand if they (the few ppl who use it to get out of poverty that is, the few people who can NOT affoard this "luxury" do not do it that will absolutely not stop MJ.

While we are at it, what is your thought of the significance of money in regards to someone's status of wealth?
Do you think if Midjourney would theoretically (!) enable 1000 poor humans to get out of poverty and feed their families, at the cost of 1000 artists losing their job and moneytary status in this world, it is considered a "bad" thing? What about 10 000 to 1000?
Or is this a subject sensitive enough that will lead me to a ban instead of exploring these phyilosophical concepts? Because some friends of mine on this place are deeply hurt by this, I would like to get a better understanding of the situation. But that will inevitably lead me to ask or say stuped and innacurate things and change my views on them aswell. I think that's part of growing in life, and the Nexus always supported it, and would love to be able to go through with it here. So as MAGMA said, I don't really have a strong stance on things, and if I do and is proven to be wrong I'll be glad to change my view

Apologies and full disclosure, I'm not in the best of moods today and am getting ready to start work.

My point has nothing to do the utilitarianism (the examples you gave about people making their way out of poverty). It's specifically directed at the sentiment that morality is a luxury. If one is treating it as a luxury then they're not really morals. One stands by their morals regardless of convenience, ease, or luxury.

To extend the racism example, I keep hearing people say things related to "it's here already, just accept it" with AI art. Let's use the same statement but have it be about slavery and racism 200 to 400 years ago. It was prevalent, it wad "here," so does that mean people shouldn't have risen up against it.

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Thanks for your reply, justB. I myself come from a family of teachers and even back when I went to school, programs existed that figured out whether google has been used or not. However just changing the sentence structure a bit allowed people to get away with it. I wonder how a program detects that AI has been used. Isn't the generated outcome always unique in some ways?
If you as a teacher suspect a student wasn't the author, but you can't prove it other than saying that it's a different style, would that provide you with enough leverage/evidence for the student to fail?


I am 100% with you here and I hope you didn't misunderstand me. I want to highlight that usually everything has good and bad sides and the better the one aspect of a thing, the worse the downsides tend to be. Look at nuclear energy for example.
AI can be used to solve many problems. If it saves or improves lives I am all for it. What I was trying to convey is the following: Who would want to study anything like medicine, if AI can do it just as good. The whole system we have established over millenia would be turned upside down. I don't know if that would be a good thing. Maybe it is, who knows.


If you want to use it, I am in no position to tell you not to. I just want to put out my perspective on this topic.

I really enjoy following this debate. It's good to see this is a place that allows a civilized discussion.

Thank you for being so generous with the last point. A whole lot of people I feel like live a very privlidged life and don't understand poverty deep enough to judge such a situation properly.

As for the first point, I use a sey of systems consisting of other measurements to determin if a student fails or not, and at the end of the day I can double check evereything without giving a prior notice. What I mean by the first part is, we use written tests sometimes, and sometimes we talk with students, and sometimes we give group sessions, and homeworks. All of this is evaluated and one chat gpt that can write them the written part (where I am not present) is faaaar far away from letting them truly cheat hahaha The second part of course is, why would you tell the student they failed if you suspect they cheated? Why don't you just make them rewrite it as flawlessly as they can the next class =) I'm sure after writing that splendid remarkable (ChatGPT) essay, it takes no effort to them to recreate it live, hehehe.

The 2nd point is way more tricky. All I can say is that we need scientists and researchers to develop our society. And they need to go through all kinds fo schools from elementary to university, can not really skip a step. And AI can not take over research yet.
Think of it like this. First life unvails a problem > Then the upmost scientist tries to debunk it > then AI learns how to debunk it. After the AI has learned the research, our scientist is already debunking lifes next endevour
May be after a point AI can do it automatically? I don't know, that'd be a treat to watch hahaha and I have no clue where it would go.
As for other jobs right now AI can only be a sidekick, people need to manage and use them like other tools and I don't know at what point they can take over, but someone will need to develop and manage things so I don't feel like people will just stop learning.
Heck even now most ppl are un educated let's be honest. And it aint such a catastrophy. Most of my friends are bakers and farmers, they don't like books and use a traktor. We live happily




No need to apologise to me man, friends can rarely hurt me It's just that I come to this place to learn and grow, and those things take a bunch of failure that make me look arrogant and such.


It just feels like these people don't play by the rules and when their opposition tries to do that we always fail. Like politics, write down your own rules and play by them. You can not lose. If I was a corporate entity and my opposition was functioning on feelings of morality, I could target that and thus would have an easier time overcoming them. This is why I'm leaning more towards destroying them in any way possible and disregarding the moral stance on it. The will to destroy a toxic corporation is more valuable than the representation of the moral stand against it, and should it interfere with the process, one should temporaily hide or disguise it. I think we can agree on this right? You would use midjourney to destroy it.

I don't know man. Trying to look it from a different perspective, you pretty much use a belief system to create a set of rules, that do not impact the problem at hand at all, and possibly degrade your state of life aswell (which might negatively impact your ability to solve or go against the problem lol), in turn for some mental imaginary satisfaction.

Don't want to sound rude but When understanding something I think trying to describe it in different perspectives and try to figure out which one is correct... But the more we talk of morality the more I lean to the other side lol
It's disturbing that I can go and sign the lawsuit, do everything in my power to destroy this thing, and yet if I use it myself other people look down on me, even though I exhausted everything I possibly can to aid their cause. Just does not feel right. The moral standpoint in this instance is just a set of rules that you find suitable for your life and will judge others by it. The morality feels like is breaking a friendship with someone that did everything they could to prevent the problem and join the cause, but do not follow things that do not have an impact in it. It just does not feel right to me and if someone could explain it a bit better I would gladly read it.

The racism part I still do not get it. Are you comparing racism to the unethical part of the AI art, or the whole of it? Because people are right you know, even if we stop midjourney and the problematic part discussed here, developers will do it by the book and develop these systems the legal and ethical way. We are slowly developing other technologies as well, there is a lot of talk on quantum computers which would be way faster than what we currently use (like seriously, next level technology). Pair that with AI models that are way more developed than ours, and thats where you truly get the idea of were things are heading.

Thank you so much for understanding

Would we not be trying to destroy it because of the moral implimplications we feel about it?

Yes, many parts of morality are not cut and dry and are also subjective. We could also start breaking this down into dichotomies such as deontology and consequentialism. But we're somewhat detracting from the point about why some of us are having a moral issue: people who worked hard on something are having it used to make money and receive things like credit without permission and compensation. I'm not saying people shouldn't use it at all and never have.

Again, my comments about racism are an analogy. I'm reframing the situation in order to view our perspectives and stances from a different vantage by using a scenario that has similar fundamental aspects within this context.

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Thank you for being patient with me, and all the mods for not locking.

In the end I don't really mind if we use midjourney art here, or we ban it, but let me know so I can moderate the chat accordingly with my fellow regular seniors

I appreciate you saying that because I don't feel like I've shown it much in the last few days.

And I don't really think we can ban it. We can state it's banned but there's no way to enforce such a rule. I think that we should perhaps have a statement saying why we disagree with it as it presently stands, as well as continuing to voice our opinions and stances in balanced and informative manners.

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I think that anyone who can't envision a landscape dominated by AI movies, books and music is a little naive at this point. Look up the author Mari Silva, who has released approximately 50 books (that I can find) in a very short amount of time, on basically all the religions of the world. There is no online information whatsoever about her, and many of the books have co-authors listed, so my assumption is that these are AI written, and the co-authors' jobs are just to clean up syntax and edit out whatever nonsensical AI "noise" that shows up in the text. And they're selling. It's big business, and so it will continue until legislation/litigation forces it to stop.

Five years from now there WILL be complete feature films written by AI and populated with virtual actors. This really isn't a maybe. The machine is learning at such a rapid pace. How long do you think it will be before you can type in prompts like "heist movie set in the Star Wars universe" and then get a ready made feature film delivered to your home computer? Plus, it will know your tastes and consumer habits, so you'll get plenty of product placement to keep you perpetually spending. And eventually, you won't even need to enter prompts. Your computer will just surprise you in the morning with the gift of a movie constructed around your consumer preferences, informed by your recent internet travels, emails, texts and phone calls.

As for open source, Stable Diffusion is already open source, so that ship has sailed.

And as for people monetizing the "art" to pull themselves out of poverty... They're likely in for a rude awakening. Look at how David Holz, Midjourney founder seeks to weasel out of corporate responsibility. This last screen shot is from Midjourney's terms of service.

I say fuck. them. all. I hope the companies are bankrupted, the founders are bankrupted, and all thieving end users who've made any money whatsoever are bankrupted.

And as for the "what about the disabled" argument... Well, you know where I stand on that. It's such a specious, cynical, bullshit rationalization that I just can't engage with it at all. No one making this stupid argument gives a single, solitary shit about the disabled; they're just a convenient class of people being used to bolster the lie that this is all somehow about democratization.

I think none of us have the crystal ball.
For me it is instead naive to think that an AI can replace man in arts such as cinema, music and literature.

Maybe they will be able to do something, but don't worry there will never be a Kubrick/Tarkovsky/Kurosawa/Bergman-AI.
They'll make shitty movies and make some money (maybe). But as I am ignoring human shitty movies, I can ignore these too.

Unfortunately painting is the most fragile art in that. I don't see the same possibility for the other arts. Giving as an example people not even known by their own mother doesn't seem like an imposing argument to me.

I think that it can potentially be prevented, but it's somewhat already in the works with the nature of deepfakes. Based on how AI works, I dont feel that it's an impossibility. What is being discussed in regards to visual art in this context could very well just be the beginning.

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For me it is a mechanistic view of art. Nobody really knows what's behind the human artistic impulse and doing, it's not said that everything we do can be replicated.

Naturally, and I don't disagree, I'm just considering the nature of growth and development possible within ML. I won't be surprised if it rises to our level in some things and not others, and otherwise.

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Maybe. I think it could also be that the novelty wears off, and we'll eventually just learn to pick up the tells that something was made by an AI.

I remember that in the 90's, i used to be easily impressed with CGI in movies. And it was used excessively as well. Now, it just looks boring to me. The moment you start seeing that something it's just CGI, a movie loses my suspension of disbelief. The novelty, the "hey, look what we can do that you could never do with a real camera, real actors or real sets" has gone.

Yeh the hype dies off usually.

Though, I think AI movies and videos are pretty close. Already heard some stuff about short videos about characters, or animes.

Honestly, though. If the ai would see I'm sad, and ask to create a film, that would be the ultimate annoying popup ad that would just break my nerves on so many levels hahahaha

So long as there is dmt experience though, I don't think the AI can create anything even remotely close to what I want to experience and how I want to grow/enjoy my time in this life

Yeah, I'm just observing what i can see as feasible.



Amen!

Screw all this, lets just SMOALK MOAR!

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Yes, there are several things that machines, computers or software already do better than human beings. I just think that with art it will not be possible to get close. For example, how do we make an algorithm of the poetic vision of things? we don't even know how it works or where it comes from.

Then, I'm sure someone will be able to make money with this...definitely.


Surely. Also because it is not the essence of cinema. CGI can be a nice (or not) addition to a movie, but it's not something we should base our judgment on a work.
Many times the only parameter many people use is "likelihood" to make a judgement. Just look at a film by Kurosawa, which I mention again, to understand that this has nothing to do with artistic expression. He explicitly called for completely theatrical and "over the top" acting, which is anything but the way people act in real life.

Tomorrow, too, if I want, I can release a film made from my phone. This doesn't mean I am making art.