I think the difference here is the sort of work that some folks are looking to replace with things like ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion is that it is inherently dependent on continued output by people to some extent. i.e. I can’t ask ChatGPT about research it’s never been trained on or software techniques it’s never seen on Stack Overflow. I can’t ask Stable Diffusion to mimic an artist not in its dataset. And new training data needs to be tagged by a bunch of low wage workers in the global south, apparently. So it’s not exactly clear to me what companies expect to get by replacing writers and artists in the long term, other than a race to the bottom in both price and quality.
But I don’t think we fully know what this all means yet, for sure. My own issues with ML tends to be the fact that we don’t seem to have as good an understanding of these black boxes we have been building as we need in order to make reasonable decisions as to where to apply it or how to improve it other than just throwing more data at it. Or the fact that we’re building black boxes that spit out the same biases we’ve created in our datasets, which to deal with requires a great deal of low wage work.
So are we producing white collar work like PCs tended to? Or are we producing unskilled labor work? So far it seems more like the latter, as very few people are involved with designing models, or the training frameworks, and instead tagging data is where the demand is for now.
Progress is not always going to propel us forward, and ultimately it is a choice of society
how we apply this new technology, or what we do to
mitigate the harms it can bring.
There is a veil of snake oil here it feels like. Has been for a few years now, but ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion make it easy to leap the gap and imagine a future we’re not at yet. Partly because of how convincing some of the output is. To the point that you have folks arguing in favor of ChatGPT being able to “reason” based on that output. If we’re being fooled, we are doing it to ourselves.
And then you realize how much of the output is still akin to a wild acid trip:
https://privateisland.tv/project#synthetic-summer