Is The Chaser saying their authors can be replace by an IQ 88 entity?
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I do not want this comment to be taken as claiming that this technology is not revolutionary. It is! But don’t be blinded by the hype. Do not focus on unbounded extrapolating, as that virtually never works. I expect smortnets will bring huge changes, but I would focus more on the philosophical side of it and how everything around smortnet deployment affects society.
At the current state of machine learning development, smortnets are as capable of replacing artists as calculators are capable of replacing mathematicians. Maybe in the future, but not yet. Being an artist is not about merely creating an image (or other work). It’s about being the taste. Aesthetics, conveying the message, connecting emotionally to other humans — choose whichever you want, smortnets can’t do that yet.
We are not going through anything new. The same old story, just with different characters. For now smornets speed up a mechanical, tedious process that has little to do with artistic expression. My great grandfather was drawing posters for money. He did that, because printing small batches of graphics was prohibitively expensive, and because people had no tools to quickly stich a few images and text in a text editor. Offset printing
(1) and DTP made that kind of job obsolete. Equally, photography made commercial portrait painting no longer needed. But neither of this affected actual artistic work. Of course it made it impossible to earn money on doing that boring, skillful job other people were not willing to master. It also nuked the market of people, who lacked any artistic skills (and often any skills), but served customers with very limited requirements. And I suppose smortnets will have a similar effect. But be aware that artists are already jumping to use generated pictures and that still requires their artistic skills: because they still must use their critical thinking to tell which images they want and how they want to affect it. It is already confirmed in legal cases: while smortnet-generated image is not a subject to copyright in US, the mere process of selection by the artist makes the selected picture a copyrighted artwork.
The reason machine learning is unable to replace artists is the same it can’t replace software developers, writing valuable essays or producing documentaries. I do realize smortnets seem magical, but please recognize that: those are nothing more than glorified statistics. Just much less understood and delivering more accurate predictions for arbitrary data. They seem to do much more than that because… imperfection of human brains. Not only there is a strong selection bias in reports/exposure, your brain is “patching bullshit”. It’s no different than people seeing faces on Mars or TA “experts” describing market behavior from random walk. The brain loves patterns and ignores elements that don’t fit. To the point that people were fooled to talk to a markov bot on mailing lists, despite it should be obvious it’s not a human. With smortnets this goes to extreme.
In the nutshell, the best they can currently do is performing very complicated mapping between two pieces of information. Which permits them to replicate a single, separated feature of a “thinking” system. But for now they miss the ability to emulate such a system. In particular, and that is of uttermost importance, they lack ability to be critical of their own outputs. I am pretty sure they will acquire that ability in the future, but in 2022 it’s not there. And that is the primary limiting factor for now. A smortnet may write you a simple program, but in many cases it will will be “not exactly right” and the algorithm has absolutely no way of telling that.
Finally, what smortnet operators do not tell you: the energy usage of most advanced algorithms is insane compared what a human uses for the same task. That’s why — aside from having control — ML based mobile apps are usually offered as service running on a remote server and why self-driving cars are employing solutions that are way behind what is supposed to be the current state of the art.
(1) Early offset printing was invented during his childhood, but it didn’t reach widespread commercial use in Poland during his lifetime.