Do you use AI?
- ️Sun Nov 17 2024
NO. Fuck Generative AI!
I’ve been into computers and Tech for as long as I can remember, we didn’t own one at home when I was a kid in the 70s-80s but my parents had friends and co-workers who home built desktop PCs in the early 80s, and one of my neighborhood buddies had a Commodore we played games on. I was very into all that and I went to computer camp around the late 80s to get more hands on time with them.
I did some basic programming on early desktop units at camp that were less than a year old, cutting edge stuff at the time and thought it was pretty funny when I got to high school a year later and the computer class there [ one week out of our maths course ] involved programming with Punch Cards and a big mechanical unit that was probably 20 years old by then. That felt pretty retro.
I bought my first computer system at 21 in ’92, it cost me about 7 Grand CND for something less powerful than my phone is today and the system install came on over 7 disks. But I thought this stuff was going to be big enough of a deal that I spent the last of a small inheritance left to me on that after having used the rest to float my cost of living for 3 years after leaving home at 18.
I never really got into programming hardcore, just some basic stuff but mostly I used it to do graphic design work and typesetting, and some of the first uses of Photoshop and a comic book! The WWW wasn’t launched for a few more years but there was UseNet and BBS. And I could edit audio for my radio show on it too. And some kind of computation has been part of my creative work ever since.
So all to say I’ve been so close to Tech my whole life and I’m also a science nerd. That’s part of why I was listening to a Nature podcast over a decade ago interviewing a researcher, who was feeding thousands of x-rays of tumours and normal healthy tissue along with reams of medical records they were connected to, cross referenced through tagging systems to train a medical AI vision system.
The machine learning algorithm taught itself how to recognize cancer tumours and x-rays, a fair bit earlier than human eyes could often spot them and when used in tandem with a human doctor to verify its findings to weed out false positives, it resulted in a much higher rate of early diagnosis while saving human doctors a fair bit of time.
An unexpected Boon is that it started identifying other health issues based on data in the medical records and things that saw in the x-rays. Just by drawing correlations between these things!
This Tech is now actually out in the field and it’s been very useful and saved a lot of lives. I had a retina scan about 5 years ago the employed the same kind of system.
During the interview with the researcher back then though, they were explicitly asked about data security, privacy, and whether or not the AI that had been created could be compromised so that people’s private information might be pulled out of it.
And this is the first time I heard about how when you train a machine learning based computer vision system this way, the compiled resulting algorithm doesn’t actually have any of the training data contained directly within it in a literal sense. It would be impossible to pull out a specific medical file or an X-Ray that it has studied.
But the same researcher then went on to say that part of the security here was that it was only looking at new images and rendering a verdict about whether there was a tumour in them.
But if you reversed the system they had created with this king of trained algorithm to generate new images, the whole question of privacy would have to be Revisited because while it didn’t have specific records in it, it can approximate close recreations of some of what it was trained on essentially, especially if constrained through a process called overfitting.
They talked about how this was a pretty serious ethical problem that people in the AI programming field we’re talking a lot about at the time, anticipating that using this kind of generative system would be something people would want to utilize what they had come up with for.
I continue to hear stories about this sort of development, there was a distinct jump that happened when OpenAI and other companies a few years back announced that they had generated machine learning based image generation platforms using the same process run in reverse, just like that researcher had discussed.
And within a few days of hearing about that and doing a little research it became clear that the specific issue cited by that researcher had essentially been ignored by OpenAI and others.
And they can not claim it hadn’t crossed their minds, they made a choice not to do the things people were talking about needing to do, years beforehand.
I’m not anti tech, though I do identify as a neo-Luddite I’m quite interested in the potential for tech including AI-powered tools in the arts but only if they’re used to empower artists and others to do what they want to do rather than disenfranchise us through labour displacement, especially when trained without consent on the human artists whose labor they will displace.
So I would say that I am not anti AI as some sort of universal essentialist phobia of the tech.
In the first month or two of the launch of some of these Generative Image platforms I experimented with them a bit to get a feel of what they were capable and how they work. I saw potential there, though at this stage real utility in a commercial workflow seemed limited.
IF ethically trained/developed, and deployed as tools for creatives to use they have some potential for sure. But that’s a BIG if. And the ecological footprint of any of this is a huge issue we can not gloss over either.
I’m ALWAYS anti the unequitable exploitation of labour, so certainly using artists work without consent or licence, as a training tool to generate an automated system that can displace my means of earning an income having used my work, in ways that infringe, engage in unfair competition aspects of copyright law, and otherwise disable my ability to hear a living while empowering the the hyper rich corporations that platform them to take my job?
This is a non starter for me. Training AI on our work should only be done if and when we licence our work for it to be trained on and we are compensated for the profit generated by that algorithm.
I believe strongly that not just artists, but all labour sectors are going to be impacted heavily by AI-powered automation, we all need protective regulation in place to ensure that either human labour is empowered rather than displaced – or that our need to earn a living is simply removed through something like a total overhaul of or society away from Capitalism to a anti statist and commerce, to a radical social collectivist model.
This whole issue of automation is a call to Arms for humans globally to work together to shift ourselves away from the capitalist models that we’ve been living under for the last hundred years.
Labour protection measures that were brought in place at the beginning of that, are quickly being undermined and scrapped. And if we don’t change the paradigm we’re going to be in a position where we continue to require the ability to earn income from our labour in order to survive: Eating, keeping a roof over our head and all the rest costing us money we need to earn through selling our time and work.
Meanwhile corporations are making ridiculous profit margins and the hyper-rich are hoarding all the income while doing everything they can to reduce the Avenues with which wealth is distributed.
We need to displace the requirement to earn a living with UBI, Universal housing, access to healthy food and education [and more probably] so that we are freed to choose when and who we sell our time and labour to and only if we wish to. Not because we must.
This goes hand in hand with caps on Market values for homes food and all of the key inputs that go along with that. In some cases the simplest solution would be a community-based housing system where you don’t need to rent or buy, simply being a citizen and part of the system [like paying taxes and etc] entitles you to housing.
This is actually in line with the propaganda some of the AI Utopists talk about, but the problem with them is that they are rushing to produce the technology before the social systems are in place and they don’t seem to take very seriously the energy that will be required to make such intense Paradigm shifts in the way Western culture operates. Which is ass backwards.
But, we’re humans so nothing less can be expected. We do most things ass backwards.
I think it’s notable that we didn’t always have capitalist or barter systems, early humans existed through what’s called gift economies.
We shared the surplus of what we had with our immediate Neighbours, there was no over trade but it was understood that they would share what they could spare with us. A village supported each other this way, there was some overt trade but most of the time it was communal effort that kept us alive.
Barter didn’t really come until after the Advent of money and debt, which were largely the product of larger City/Kingdom scale societies, and a means by which rulers could indenture both people and their military to them.
The first coins were given to the Troops and the Kings military, to be spent in the community and then used to pay for goods from other merchants or taxes to the king. This made the king and his wealth centrally critical to the economy that they hosted.
We’ve come to take it for granted but it’s definitely not the only way things could work, and it’s not how we did things at first at all.
All of this is informed by a lot of study in this topic, all historically verified. But also a lifetime commitment to what a lot of people would consider radical left politics, particularly around labour economics and social infrastructure.
Being the son of a social anarchist and a liberal feminist it’s a product of the culture of my childhood.
So, no, I don’t use AI and I will not use it or condone it’s use until it’s trained ethically, and deployed ethically.
I feel the future requires the profesional arts to organize around labour groups, Guilds Unions and Mutual Aid societies, is there’s not one in your sector then consider looking into what it would take to form one?
I was paying dues for a short time as a member of UNIFOR’s Freelancers Union, as a supervisor right now I’m not freelancing anymore or eligible I think as a designer for IATSE Local 938, the Canadian Animators Union. I’ve used the resources of the GAG, The Graphic Artists Guild in the US. And the Illustrators Association in QC. And I’m planning to become a member of Cartoonist Cooperative and reading up on my future options.
May of 2024, I participated in an event I planed with the other members of the ‘Human Made Arts‘ group called #ThisMAIfreeArt.
There was an art challenge with two kinds of daily prompts, and some information sharing. It was a first attempt at the whole thing if we do it again we’ll want to start planning and promoting it WAY sooner not the month before like this time.
But Eduardo Valdes created a set of badges people could use to mark their work as containing no AI, and I curated the prompts and posted them to our social media, and did the daily challenges as much as I could.
Here’s the set of prompt cards I made, and the main prompt list! The list is pretty typical for an art challenge, I invited the rest of the group to pitch ideas and shared some of mine, and then a few of us used those to curate proposals. I was down with posting them all but folks seemed to like mine and made it the official event list! Then I also took inspiration from Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt’s Oblique Strategies cards. A pretty cool tool for promoting human creativity, and made a set of Counterpoint Prompt Cards that posted each day of the month to act as foils to the main prompt list, or as stand alone prompts.
I got off to a good start for the challenge, but I also attended TWO multi day festivals in may, and what I had planned for my run at the art challenge during those didn’t pan out. That and just not really being able to juggle quite that much + the day job and I lost steam later. I still have a some panels I started by haven’t finished for this but I am happy with what I did get done and plan to finish and publish it later! Here’s the fist 8 days worth, but only 1-5 were done on their correct corresponding days.
3-23-2024