Brian Eno: “The biggest problem about AI is not intrinsic to AI. It’s to do with the fact that it’s owned by the same few people”
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The problem with AI is that it pirates everyone’s work and then repackages it as its own and enriches the people that did not create the copywrited work.
That's what all artists have done since the dawn of ages.
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Reading the other comments, it seems there are more than one problem with AI. Probably even some perks as well.
Shucks, another one or these complex issues huh. Weird how everything you learn something about turns out to have these nuances to them.
most of the replies can be summarized as "the biggest problem with AI is that we live under capitalism"
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AI will become one of the most important discoveries humankind has ever invented. Apply it to healthcare, science, finances, and the world will become a better place, especially in healthcare.
Hey artist, writers, you cannot stop intellectual evolution. AI is here to stay. All we need is a proven way to differentiate the real art from AI art. An invisible watermark that can be scanned to see its true "raison d'etre".
Sorry for going off topic but I agree that AI should be more open to verification for using copyrighted material. Don't expect compensation though.Apply it to healthcare, science, finances, and the world will become a better place, especially in healthcare.
That's all kind of moot if we continue down the capitalist hellscape express. What good is an AI that can diagnose cancer if most people can't afford access? What good is AI writing novels if our homes are destroyed by climate change induced disasters?
Those problems are mostly political, and AI isn't going to fix them. The people that probably could be replaced with AI, the shitty "leaders" and such, are not going to voluntarily step down.
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Ollama and stable diffusion are free open source software. Nobody is forcing anybody to use chatGPT
Ollama is FOSS, SD has a proproprietary but permissive, source-available license, but it is not what most people would associate with "open-source"
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Just so you know, still pedantic.
The irony of choosing the most pedantic way of saying that they’re not pedantic is pretty amusing though.
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And those people want to use AI to extract money and to lay off people in order to make more money.
That’s “guns don’t kill people” logic.
Yeah, the AI absolutely is a problem. For those reasons along with it being wrong a lot of the time as well as the ridiculous energy consumption.
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Eno does strike me as the kind of person who could use AI effectively as a tool for making music. I don’t think he’s team “just generate music with a single prompt and dump it onto YouTube” (AI has ruined study lo fi channels) - the stuff at the end about distortion is what he’s interested in experimenting with. That is a possibility, even if in effect all that’s going to happen is music execs thinking they can replace songwriters and musicians with “hey siri, generate a pop song with a catchy chorus” while talentless hacks inundate YouTube and bandcamp with shit.
Yeah, Eno actually has made a variety of albums and art installations using generative simple AI for musical decisions, although I don't think he does any advanced programming himself. That's why it's really odd to see comments in an article that imply he is really uninformed about AI...he was pioneering generative music 20-30 years ago.
I've come to realize that there is a huge amount of misinformation about AI these days, and the issue is compounded by there being lots of clumsy, bad early AI works in various art fields, web journalism etc. I'm trying to cut back on discussing AI for these reasons, although as an AI enthusiast, it's hard to keep quiet about it sometimes.
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And those people want to use AI to extract money and to lay off people in order to make more money.
That’s “guns don’t kill people” logic.
Yeah, the AI absolutely is a problem. For those reasons along with it being wrong a lot of the time as well as the ridiculous energy consumption.
The real issues are capitalism and the lack of green energy.
If the arts where well funded, if people where given healthcare and UBI, if we had, at the very least, switched to nuclear like we should've decades ago, we wouldn't be here.
The issue isn't a piece of software.
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Yeah, Eno actually has made a variety of albums and art installations using generative simple AI for musical decisions, although I don't think he does any advanced programming himself. That's why it's really odd to see comments in an article that imply he is really uninformed about AI...he was pioneering generative music 20-30 years ago.
I've come to realize that there is a huge amount of misinformation about AI these days, and the issue is compounded by there being lots of clumsy, bad early AI works in various art fields, web journalism etc. I'm trying to cut back on discussing AI for these reasons, although as an AI enthusiast, it's hard to keep quiet about it sometimes.
Eno is more a traditional algorist than "AI" (by which people generally mean neural networks)
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The government likes concentrated ownership because then it has only a few phonecalls to make if it wants its bidding done (be it censorship, manipulation, partisan political chicanery, etc)
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Techno-Feudalism
I'll say it, yet again. It's just feudalism. "Techno-Feudalism" has nothing different enough to it to differentiate it as even a sub-type of feudalism. It's just the same thing all over again, using technological advances to improve the ability to monitor and impose control over the populace. Historical feudalists also leveraged technology to cement their rule (plate armor, cavalry, crossbows, cannon, mills, control of literacy, etc).
Techno-Feudalism is a specific idea from Yanis Varifakous, about places like Amazon, Ebay, AliExpress, Steam, Facebook, even YouTube to some extent. It has to do with the Market Place controlling which prices are promoted to buyers and sellers, and is about price fixing and capturing industries that the bulk of the population required to do commerce.
This is a very important concept to note and understand because it relates to the end of two party Capitalism (where buyers and sellers negotiate prices with each other).
So no, the use of fuedalism isn't to indicate something about old school mechanisms of crowd control, brutality and repression. It's a reference to the serfdom and economic aspects.
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Same as always. There is no technology capitalism can't corrupt
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Eno is more a traditional algorist than "AI" (by which people generally mean neural networks)
Sure. I worked in the game industry and sometimes AI can mean 'pick a random number if X occurs' or something equally simple, so I'm just used to the term used a few different ways.
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If you studied loads of classic art then started making your own would that be a derivative work? Because that's how AI works.
The presence of watermarks in output images is just a side effect of the prompt and its similarity to training data. If you ask for a picture of an Olympic swimmer wearing a purple bathing suit and it turns out that only a hundred or so images in the training match that sort of image--and most of them included a watermark--you can end up with a kinda-sorta similar watermark in the output.
It is absolutely 100% evidence that they used watermarked images in their training. Is that a problem, though? I wouldn't think so since they're not distributing those exact images. Just images that are "kinda sorta" similar.
If you try to get an AI to output an image that matches someone else's image nearly exactly... is that the fault of the AI or the end user, specifically asking for something that would violate another's copyright (with a derivative work)?
Sounds like a load of techbro nonsense.
By that logic mirroring an image would suffice to count as derivative work since it's "kinda sorta similar". It's not the original, and 0% of pixels match the source.
"And the machine, it learned to flip the image by itself! Like a human!"
It's a predictive keyboard on steroids, let's not pretent that it can create anything but noise with no input.
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Idk if it’s the biggest problem, but it’s probably top three.
Other problems could include:
- Power usage
- Adding noise to our communication channels
- AGI fears if you buy that (I don’t personally)
Power usage probably won't be a major issue; the main take-home message of the Deepseek brouhaha is that training and inference can be much more efficiently than we had thought, based on well-funded Western companies that didn't have to bother with optimization.
AI spam is an annoyance, but it's not really AI-specific but the continuation of a trend; the Internet was already drowning in human-created slop before LLMs came along. At some point, we will probably all have to rely on AI tools to filter it out. This isn't something that can be unwound, any more than you can undo computers being able to play chess well.
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AI has a vibrant open source scene and is definitely not owned by a few people.
A lot of the data to train it is only owned by a few people though. It is record companies and publishing houses winning their lawsuits that will lead to dystopia. It's a shame to see so many actually cheering them on.
So long as there are big players releasing open weights models, which is true for the foreseeable future, I don't think this is a big problem. Once those weights are released, they're free forever, and anyone can fine-tune based on them, or use them to bootstrap new models by distillation or synthetic RL data generation.
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Yah, I'm an AI researcher and with the weights released for deep seek anybody can run an enterprise level AI assistant. To run the full model natively, it does require $100k in GPUs, but if one had that hardware it could easily be fine-tuned with something like LoRA for almost any application. Then that model can be distilled and quantized to run on gaming GPUs.
It's really not that big of a barrier. Yes, $100k in hardware is, but from a non-profit entity perspective that is peanuts.
Also adding a vision encoder for images to deep seek would not be theoretically that difficult for the same reason. In fact, I'm working on research right now that finds GPT4o and o1 have similar vision capabilities, implying it's the same first layer vision encoder and then textual chain of thought tokens are read by subsequent layers. (This is a very recent insight as of last week by my team, so if anyone can disprove that, I would be very interested to know!)
It's possible to run the big Deepseek model locally for around $15k, not $100k. People have done it with 2x M4 Ultras, or the equivalent.
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I would agree with you if the same companies challenging copyright (protecting the intellectual and creative work of "normies") are not also aggressively welding copyright against the same people they are stealing from.
With the amount of coprorate power tightly integrated with the governmental bodies in the US (and now with Doge dismantling oversight) I fear that whatever comes out of this is humans own nothing, corporations own anything. Death of free independent thought and creativity.
Everything you do, say and create is instantly marketable, sellable by the major corporations and you get nothing in return.
The world needs something a lot more drastic then a copyright reform at this point.
It's seldom the same companies, though; there are two camps fighting each other, like Gozilla vs Mothra.
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AI scrapers illegally harvesting data are destroying smaller and open source projects. Copyright law is not the only victim
https://thelibre.news/foss-infrastructure-is-under-attack-by-ai-companies/
That article is overblown. People need to configure their websites to be more robust against traffic spikes, news at 11.
Disrespecting robots.txt is bad netiquette, but honestly this sort of gentleman's agreement is always prone to cheating. At the end of the day, when you put something on the net for people to access, you have to assume anyone (or anything) can try to access it.
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Two intrinsic problems with the current implementations of AI is that they are insanely resource-intensive and require huge training sets. Neither of those is directly a problem of ownership or control, though both favor larger players with more money.
