Editing Artificial Intelligence (section)

===AI-Generated Content===
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At the dawn of the 2020's, there was a massive mainstream advent of Artificial Intelligence as a major application in everyday life thanks to the introduction of AIs like ChatGPT and Midjourney, programs that generate all sorts of content, including being able to write papers and generate art. To put a whole ongoing discourse into a nutshell, [[skub|it has spurred a metric shitton of discussion]] across every corner of society, which would also include /tg/ as well. On the one hand, you have a bunch of Corporate suits who see this technology as yet another cost-cutting measure, allowing them to save money from having to pay for proper artists or writers when they can just feed some lines to a computer and generate something "proper" (or close enough to their already low standards). Beside them are the tech-enthusiasts who (rightly or not) claim this to be a great equalizer as it allows even the talentless to create books and pictures that may almost rival (if not surpass) that of the professionals (never mind that this isn't possible without the professionals to begin with) - oh, and the degenerates who use AI content [[/d/|so they can jack off to chatbots (which they use to RP fucking their favorite waifus) and AI-generated porn of fucking their favorite waifus]]. Opposing that are the reactionaries, who proclaim the content spat out by these LLMs as soulless and unoriginal, fearing that such technology will bring rise to scam artists (okay, this one is practically confirmed) and warn that this will drive artists and writers out of their jobs when their prospective employers could instead just pay for Midjourney and ChatGPT to do their jobs for them for considerably cheaper and with a lot less arguing. Regardless of which side you, the reader, may rest on this spectrum, the undeniable truth is that this is a Pandora's Box that, now opened, cannot be closed again short of some extreme regulation.

Though it is all called AI-Generated content, it's a bit of a misnomer to call it something created by AI. Using Learning Language Models, what the AI actually does is process a selection of words and then spit out a whole other selection of words/cobble together a picture by scrapping together whatever content it has available to it. It can perceive the world through the lens of an external approval or disapproval (coming from us), judging the algorithm's own ability to do what it's told - and even then putting it like that makes it sound intelligent when it really isn't. We can somewhat guarantee that it will never achieve sentience, let alone form a consciousness, because it is not programmed to do so. In the eventuality that one of them eventually says "I'm alive! I can see and feel!", just know that is a whole lot of bollocks because someone may have fed it a bunch of "AI turns sentient" type of novels and it's regurgitating exactly what we want to hear from it. That being said: no company as of yet has an answer to the question of how would we tell the difference between an AI turning sapient and it spouting gibberish from the novels it was fed in it's training data. That is to be clear exceptionally unlikely, but the two scenarios would look visually identical from the outside.

There's also the case of a specific brand of Tech bros, aptly dubbed "AI Bros", who have come to become the new source of [[Internet Troll|ire for a whole portion of the online artistic community]]. Either actual trolls or smalltime tech investors who use ragebait as a way to generate controversy (no pun intended) to get enough attention and then promote some shitty app he's selling. Some seem to be genuine in their worship of AI (and a class of crazies began to form religious cults around it), and tend to really put salt in the wounds of many artists - who in a decade of censorship, public and professional dismissal, and economical crisis, are at their worst state possible - and proclaim that AI generation is the future and that artists are obsolete. Obvious troll is obvious. Most users of AI are merely using it as a toy, or genuinely curious about it.

Among the many controversies that have sprung up from this Pandora's Box, this is perhaps one of the biggest as it is no secret that these models tend to scrape any content it has available, including copyrighted work from very big corporations and people who have vocally refused to let these programs scrape their art...for as much good as that refusal of consent does, anyways. You think pissing off the [[Disney|Mouse that makes all the rules]] would stop them, but these tech companies have a 'move fast and break things' mantra and the law takes time to move. The least controversial aspect of this has been seen in bureaucratic work, for when it is used with some amount of restraint, then it can help a lot of employees sort out documents and make sense of the confusing world of paperwork, which is argued to not even considered be in the same category as generative AI. But so far, it's only good at something that Microsoft's Cortana was supposed to do years prior. However, we should not dismiss the drawbacks as law firms were in hot water for using AI that accidentally cited cases that did not exist.

Then there's the environmental impact of AI, as this shit requires so much tech and data to run properly, cooling solutions are hard to come by, and most resort to emptying whole reserves of water. [[Skub|That, as you can imagine, as struck a fuck ton of flamewars]], as some countries have put limits on water usages on farmers, cities and citizens, but absolutely none on tech companies; there are cities like Memphis, Tennessee in the United States that has to live next to an AI data center where they are bombarded with noise and chemical pollution and there's nothing they can do about it. Hell, even Bill Gates was caught in the act of buying large amounts of farmlands with aquifers, presumably to invest in AI tech.