“Our primary conclusion across all scenarios is that without enough fresh real data in each generation of an autophagous loop, future generative models are doomed to have their quality (precision) or diversity (recall) progressively decrease,” they added. “We term this condition Model Autophagy Disorder (MAD).”
Interestingly, this might be a more challenging problem as we increase the use of generative AI models online.
Good!
Was that petty?
But, you know, good luck completely replacing human artists, musicians, writers, programmers, and everyone else who actually creates new content, if all generative AI models essentially give themselves prion diseases when they feed on each other.
To my mind this kind of confirms that generative AI is not the same as a human who learns by imitating other artists, and instead is simply a machine for stealing labor if it uses artwork created by humans who are not appropriately compensated.
A human can still create without input from other humans, it might take them longer, but a sufficiently observant person could eventually figure out the fundementals of art without ever looking at another artist’s work. An AI can only create if it is fed a diet of human-created data.
People argue it’s like the cotton gin or something and workers/artists just need to adapt, but a cotton gin doesn’t require the labor of all those same field workers in order to continue functioning.
That’s the major sticking point for me on generative AI – by all means, create an AI that’s sophisticated enough to learn how to create art, but if that can only be accomplished in an illusory way by feeding it other people’s hard work I don’t think it’s good for society.
I absolutely agree! I’ve seen so many proponents of AI argue that AI learning from artworks scraped from the internet is no different to a human learning by looking at other artists, and while anyone who is actually an artist (or involved in any creative industry at all, including things like coding that require a creative mind) can see the difference, I’ve always struggled to coherently express why. And I think this it. Human artists benefit from other human art to look at, as it helps them improve faster, but they don’t need it in the same way, and they’re more than capable of coming up with new ideas without it. Even a brief look at art history shows plenty of examples of human artists coming up with completely new ideas, artworks that had absolutely no precedent. I really can’t imagine AI ever being able to invent, say, Cubism without having seen a human do it first.
I feel like the only people that are in favour of AI artworks are those who don’t see the value of art outside of its commercial use. They’re the same people who are, presumably, quite happy playing the same same-y games and watching same-y TV and films over and over again. AI just can’t replicate the human spark of creativity, and I really can’t see it being good for society either economically or culturally to replace artists with algorithms that can only produce derivations of what they’ve already seen.