#anti computer-rendered artificial pictures

[the-starlight-mistress]

I always love lavendertowne and she absolutely knocked it out of the park with this video. It’s honestly a great link to share with people you no longer feel like arguing with 😆 😅

[dancer-through-a-gilded-meadow]

Mosstown

Created on procreate

[dancer-through-a-gilded-meadow]

It’s super easy not to use AI and super unethical when you do. Ofc I’m not going to use it. And ofc I’m going to educate my writer friend to make sure they don’t either.

a writing competition i was going to participate in again this year has announced that they now allow AI generated content to be submitted

their reasoning being that "we couldn't ban it even if we wanted to, every writer already uses it anyway"

"Every writer"?

come on

[sillyanimegamingroad]

Essay written by AI

Do you like to read an essay written by AI then you are at right place. An article in Substack discusses the possible social and psychological consequences of immortality; the surprise is that the text has been written by an artificial intelligence without help or corrections.

OpenAI is a private research center in San Francisco, California whose stated mission is to ensure that “artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. Aware of the risks that the use of highly advanced artificial intelligence systems could have if monopolized by companies or governments, OpenAI makes these systems available to everyone.

One of the OpenAI projects is called GPT-3 — OpenAI, and it is a natural language engine in English. You can ask questions and respond appropriately, looking for the information you need on the Internet.

The author of the Perceptions newsletter provided a simple introduction to the system so that from there he began to compose the text:

“What follows is an essay on immortality and its consequences on human society. Much of our world is based on the fact that one day we are going to die. What if one day, suddenly, we couldn’t die? What would change? These are the questions that Balaji Srinivasan tries to answer in this essay. Here is the essay written by AI.

Immortality and Its Consequences

Biotechnology and nanotechnology have great potential to disrupt all man-made systems we have today, including death. Below is a game-like example of how immortality would completely change the structure of society, an example so simple it may sound silly, but it clearly illuminates the principles.

Imagine that a pill has been discovered that can make you live forever, in perfect health, without aging. How would that pill change society?

Consider the different types of postures available to humans in our society.

Some are valued for the intrinsic reward. If the pill works, you could spend a lifetime collecting pictures, for example, and you’ll have all the time in the world to do it. That is the way to “enjoy your passions,” and there is no point in using money as a measure here. As time becomes effectively infinite, all previous time-based calculations, such as interest and wages, lose their meaning. And you don’t have to worry about running out of resources: if people care about paintings, you can clone yourself a few million times, paint a bunch of paintings, and then rent your clones as painters.

There is also a path to “work hard and climb the corporate ladder” where people compete to rise to the top of hierarchical organizations. What kind of corporate hierarchy would make sense in the world of immortality? One that is much more merit-based and more egalitarian than any we’ve seen so far. The fact that you live forever can make social status much less important. In this type of world, education would be open and free. A child born with an incredible natural talent could outperform any adult, just as a child born with a disability might need extra help. Hierarchies that are based more on merit could offer more autonomy to those at the top. They would have a higher rate of professional satisfaction compared to professional boredom. They could be in charge of their own wages.

Those who choose this path would have tremendous motivation to work hard and learn new skills, just to keep up with changing times.

There is also a third type of path: a path that leads to assuming power and controlling others. Again, this path would probably be less attractive in a society with immortality. You would still have resources, but there would be no point in following this path in the same way.

In a world without death, competition would be based on speed of execution. For example, if someone invents a cure for cancer, we could run to raise the money to mass-produce it. This would likely create a new type of “go go go” society, with no time for politics or outdated methods of persuasion, and more hierarchies based on merit.

An immortality pill would render most “job” jobs obsolete. The remaining “job” jobs will be less merit-based and will be things like the government jobs that exist today, a few types of hard-to-automate professions (like surgeons), and rare jobs like the pest exterminator job. . In a society where work could be effectively taken over by AIs, the government would probably have less power, but there would still need to be government institutions to prevent abuse, or else what incentive would someone have to take the pill? ?

How could markets change in a society with immortality? If markets are to continue to exist, in an eternity in which money has lost all meaning, they will likely have to change their approach to maintain any utility. One could imagine a scenario where there is a limit to the amount of wealth one can have in this society. There is also likely to be a zero interest rate, because time becomes effectively infinite. In this scenario, one could imagine a model where if you invent a new technology that is considered an existential risk (for example, AI), it might be necessary to pay some kind of fee to protect yourself from that risk.

Let’s consider an existing form of market that could become extremely relevant in a society with immortality: the marriage market. It is likely to become much more important since status is no longer something that can be achieved by earning a lot of money. In fact, a successful husband would be someone who can support the woman of her dreams in a world where there are effectively no resource constraints.

There are also a number of political implications. In particular, a society with a large fraction of people taking the pill would create a large constituency for pro-rejuvenation policies, including anti-aging research, health care, and even extra spending on curing congenital disabilities.

What about the problem of free will? Isn’t this drug effectively slavery? If people cannot die, they cannot withdraw from a life they no longer want to lead. In fact, some people who take the pill may continue to do so out of pure sense of duty or inertia. Without death, they will no longer have the escape offered by dying. In this sense, immortality is much more insidious than slavery, which at least allows the slave to escape. If there is no way for someone to escape from a situation that they no longer consider desirable, the power dynamic between them and the world around them can become very unbalanced.

Imagine the position of someone who is dissatisfied with their life in a world where they cannot die. If you cannot die, there is no escape. In a way, the only option is to remove your thoughts from your current world. And the only way to do it is through mental states like meditation or psychedelics. If you want to get out of the world of work, instead of burning yourself, maybe you could turn to recreational drugs. But that could carry its own problems, because some of these drugs have side effects, and even cause death. The arrival of an immortality pill would also have far-reaching implications for human society. How might our current definition of “human” change? Our concept of human is that of a fragile bag of water, a machine that takes food and turns it into fuel. How many people want to stay in that fragile machine state indefinitely?

Wouldn’t they rather become cyborgs, or AI? In an immortality society, there is no need for those types of machines, and everyone will choose to become a different type of machine, a stronger type. People could choose to merge with their computers and remove their biological brains, because biological brains will be meaningless. This would change the meaning of life, and change humanity in ways that we cannot predict. Even now, some people are in a hurry to “become trans human” through technologies such as consciousness unloading and nootropics. An immortality pill would make that choice much easier. If we had an immortality pill, a true cyborgs immortal world would be just a matter of time. In short, if there is an immortality pill, there are likely to be fewer jobs, more competition on the market, faster change in corporate hierarchy, a new type of merit-based society, the advent of a new type of go-go-go society, a new type of marriage market, and a much larger electorate pushing for a rejuvenation pill. All of these changes would likely be accompanied by a sense of wonder and admiration as the world continues to change.

If you are young, it is important to understand these changes to prepare yourself. As things stand, we are not prepared for the world we live in, and you may find yourself trapped in a suboptimal position. However, if you have a good plan of where the world is headed, you can plan ahead for that future. For example, a high IQ would be very valuable in a society of immortality.

The post Essay written by AI appeared first on Technoeager- tech blogs and articles.

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[etechwire-blog]

Nvidia announces the Turing architecture and its first ray tracing GPUs

New Post has been published on https://www.etechwire.com/nvidia-announces-the-turing-architecture-and-its-first-ray-tracing-gpus/

Nvidia announces the Turing architecture and its first ray tracing GPUs

Nvidia’s long-rumored Turing GPU architecture for next-generation graphics cards is finally official, and it’s more than we could have hoped for.

Turing incorporates a number of new features and technologies, chief among them are new RT Cores that power real-time ray tracing. These specialized cores essentially compute how light and sound travel in a 3D environment at a rate of up to 10 GigaRays.

That might sound like a made up unit of measuring performance, but Nvidia claims Turing can process real-time ray tracing 25-times faster than the previous Pascal architecture. The technology firm also noted that its GPU nodes can outperform CPU nodes by 30 times when used for final-frame rendering for film effects.

On top of this specialized ray tracing technology, Nvidia has also integrated the Tensor Cores seen in Volta to inject artificial intelligence into this GPU architecture. These Tensor Cores will essentially deliver up to 500 trillion tensor operations a second and accelerate deep learning training and inferencing.

AI will in turn help power new rendering methods such as deep learning anti-aliasing, which promises a high-quality image rendering complete with de-noising, resolution scaling and video re-timing.

A bold new world for graphics

Nvidia Turing will combine both its RT Cores and Tensor Cores to usher in a new form of hybrid rendering that includes both simulation and enhanced rasterization. Team Green announced this technology will first power media production in the visual effects industry to create cinematic-quality interactive experiences.

To that end, Nvidia also introduced three new Quadro RTX graphics cards featuring up to 48GB of GDDR6 memory, 4,608 CUDA Cores and 576 Tensor Cores built upon the Turing architecture.

Although Nvidia made no mention of Turing-based GeForce graphics cards, this is the clearest picture thus far of what they could end up looking like. We’re almost certain that we’ll see the Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 or Nvidia GeForce GTX 1180 by the end of the month.

Never heard of ray tracing? We’ve got just introductory guide you’re looking for

[shamebats]

This comment is also pretty good I think:

"It's absurd, this situation. That AI art debate is completely ruined by the (sometimes wilful) ignorance of the participants. On one side, you have artists with understandable fears, but who refuse to get informed and still think the algorithm has a bunch of images saved and then cuts them up and makes collages of them. On the other side, you have the so-called AI Bros who think they have an artificial general intelligence in their hands who can do everything a human artist can do but faster and cheaper, and the act of drawing is now obsolete.

If I have to be labeled with a side, I would get the anti-AI label, but that would be a complete misrepresentation of my position forced by this idea that everyone must pick one of two clearly delineated sides. My thoughts are much more nuanced. I am in a privileged position where I both understand the artistic process and how computers work behind the hood. I know how a machine learning model works, and its limitations.

AI algorithms of the sort we use today will never be able to fully replace human artists, no matter how perfected they are. The problem lies not with efficiency, but with the fundamental way in which they work, and only the development of an entirely new model of AI from scratch would change that, not the incremental improvements to an existing model we're seeing. Like almost all computer programs, it amounts to a very advanced calculator. It doesn't understand concepts, it only solves equations. The words you prompt it with have no meaning to it. It doesn't know what a cat is, it just knows the statistical average of what pictures of cats look like, and approximates something to it with some random noise added in the process.

3D artists have been using AI as part of their workflow for over a decade, in order to help generate textures and greebles. Just check out Substance Painter, and how it makes the texturing process much quicker and more intuitive. There is nothing wrong with 2D artists finally getting the tools to catch up. This is how AI should be used, as an auxiliary, not a replacement. Illustrations are often filled with repeating organic patterns that would be painstaking to paint manually for little gain. Provided the artist manually edits these textures to correct any errors that will inevitably show up and make it fit the overall composition better, this is an acceptable, and even desirable use of AI. The deadline being the same, less time spent painting individual leaves on a tree is more time that can be dedicated to the main focus of the piece. It's a tradeoff. The artist is willing to give up some control in less important parts of the illustration in order to achieve greater control on more important ones. There is a skill in knowing which parts of the workflow can be automated for the least loss of control relative to the gain of time, resulting in a net gain of control, because more time lets you fine tune your work more.

This is even more of a pain in the ass because it's not only the anti-AI side that misunderstands the nuance at work here. I've seen many "prompt engineers", computer enthusiasts with no art training, who see the ability to generate an image using AI and are quick to call it the future of art production and say that drawing is obsolete. They are enthralled by the textures rendered in high detail and can't see the egregious errors in the fundamental composition of the piece. It's a trainwreck. Sometimes literally, I remember a piece being touted as the future here where the trains featured in it would derail catastrophically if the static image were ever to be set in motion.

This was a stream of consciousness post where I probably repeated myself and could be organized better, but that's my thoughts. You correctly identified the proper use case for AI in an illustrator's workflow, and it's disappointing that you're getting shit for it."

If anyone wants to see a different take on AI use in art by a professional artist who's firmly on the pro side, I recommend this Reddit thread:

Text copied under read more:

"I've been a professional artist and illustrator for decades. Like most artists, I was concerned when AI image generators hit the scene. But since they sucked at first, I wasn't all that worried... but then they started to get much better, really fast. I figured I should look a bit closer to see if I should be worried.

What I found was that they really are a powerful tool if used creatively, but they are *nowhere near* a replacement for human artists. They don't understand context, they spit out a lot of garbage that needs a ton of work to refine into something useful, and you still need an artist's eye to know how to direct them to make anything that's actually good. This is why you see so many people complaining about all the bad AI art. Because there really is a lot of bad AI art out there. The good AI art? People don't even know it's AI in many cases.

But as an artist who has been around since before the days of computer art, I have had to adapt to many changes. I adapted to using a computer to make my illustrations to keep up with the times. I learned to use Photoshop. I learned to use Blender (although admittedly not very well). I see this as necessary in a world where technology is constantly evolving; you need to evolve and adapt with the tech, or you will get left behind. So naturally I looked into ways to use AI generators to help in my work flow.

I started out by using it to create textures. One thing I have always done is use a blend of photo textures in my digital paintings to create visual noise and interest. It's a great technique that's been around for years. Being able to generate my own textures with AI means that I can get exactly the texture I want, much quicker than looking through stock images or going out with a camera trying to find new textures.

As AI image generators improved, and as my prompt skills improved, I started using them to generate thumbnail images to work off of, and to generate models to use as reference, etc.

I have always been very open with my clients about my work flow, and I've never had a problem with that. If I have a client who is opposed to my use of AI, then I don't use it when working for that client. No big deal. I have some clients who actually prefer that I use AI in my work flow, as it helps smooth the process along, gives me more flexibility, and they believe that the end product can be better. Again, I'm happy to accommodate.

Well I had one such client hire me to do a book cover. They suggested I use AI to help because the cover included multiple human figures, and without AI I would have to get some very specific photo references which would cost a lot of time and money. The whole image was completely created by myself, a product of my own mind, but there were some AI elements remaining in the final image.

The client was very happy with the end result. The author of the book was especially excited. They shared it with their audience and they got a ton of positive feedback. No negative feedback at all. Just another job well done then, right?

Well, no. Apparently another artist who also does book covers decided to run it through AIorNot and it came back saying it was likely AI generated. Well, of course it did. If you so much as look at AI while creating an image, AIorNot will say that the whole thing was made by AI.

And often even if you don't.

It will say that my old abstract acrylic paintings are AI generated more often than not. That software is seriously flawed. But no matter, as in this case, I actually did use AI elements in the illustration, and my client was well aware of this. No big deal.

Well, no, it turns out that it *was* a big deal. This artist contacted the book's author who, apparently, had not been made aware that I would be using AI in my work flow on this piece. It turns out that this author is extremely anti-AI, not just for images, but in general. For him it is a moral issue, and anyone who uses AI is not fit to be employed.

My client, the publisher, explained to him that I made the image, but only used AI elements as part of the process, but the author wasn't having it. They refused not only to use the cover, but refused to allow me to paint a new cover without the AI elements in it. In fact they strongly pressured the publisher to cut off all ties with me. The publisher obviously wasn't going to do this, as they are very happy with the work I do. In fact they still paid me for the cover art, even though they can't use it now, because they loved the cover and I did the work they asked of me.

But still, the publisher had no choice but to pull the cover art.

The author put out a social media post about it, essentially accusing me of being dishonest. People are jumping on the bandwagon, calling me an art thief, telling him how morally superior he is, etc. It's a truly nauseating display. This is not a matter of creative differences to these people; it's about good vs. evil. And because I dared to try and stay relevant in a changing world, I apparently picked the side of evil. And there is no arguing with them about it being art theft. They have no idea how these generators work, and they don't actually want to know, or they wouldn't keep pushing that obvious falsehood.

I have reached the frightening conclusion that if AI generators don't put artists out of work, then they may very likely do it to themselves when the community implodes. The way I see it, you can either try to stay competitive, or you can choose to be a Luddite and fall behind, because AI image generators aren't going away. They simply aren't. And in a few years, only the zealots will remain, beating their drums in a small echo chamber where only other zealots will hear them, because everybody else will be over it and bored sick of the drama. In the meanwhile, they are only making it more difficult for artists to stay employed in this new world with AI generators, by punishing those who try to adapt!

Any artist who runs art through an AI image detector, which actually uses AI to operate, is committing extreme hypocrisy.

The irony is completely lost on them, that due to their panic about AI potentially putting artists out of work, they themselves are using AI to track down and punish artists by threatening their livelihood.

AI will put artists out of work, because artists are making it happen.

So now, my client is in a bit of a panic and adding a disclaimer that relevant covers are made with AI on all the Amazon links because, even though Amazon claims that no such disclaimer is needed in cases where AI is merely used as an assist, he is worried that people will complain about them, and they could lose their Amazon affiliate shop, which would be death to their company. So even the images that merely had a texture overlay somewhere on it now have to be labeled as being ENTIRELY GENERATED BY AI. Even though according to Amazon's own terms they were in full compliance already. And the issue there is that if an Amazon affiliate has too many products which are listed as made by AI, apparently (I'm not sure exactly) they get put in a different category or something. So even though Amazon claims that AI assistance and editing is fine in their rules, in actual practice it is not. You can't take that chance because of the witch hunt that is happening right now.

And I'm still perfectly happy to work with or without AI. I have done without it for many years. But my clients still want me to use it, because they also don't want to fall behind. So that puts me in a difficult position of feeling like I need to choose a side on an issue that I don't even think should be an issue in the first place.

TL/DR: AI image detectors, which use AI to function, are being used by artists to track down other artists and endanger their jobs. And I really hate this stupid war."

[dancer-through-a-gilded-meadow]

The Final Use of Those Long Dead Gods

Created on procreate

[the-starlight-mistress]

Wanted to hop on the starter pack train!!

[dancer-through-a-gilded-meadow]

Song: misery meat-by sodikken

[dancer-through-a-gilded-meadow]

Rebloging from my main. Idk why I posted it there first 😆

Wanted to hop on the starter pack train!!