Re: crypto and this "The collapsing institutional monopoly on violence will yield a renewal of local and personal violence, and a very messy working-out of a hierarchy suited to the new conditions."
If prediction markets come to act as proof of life oracles- which they already have in a few cases- things get very dark very fast for everyone I reckon.
I feel like you condensed multiple paragraphs worth of thought into 2 sentences and I simply can't follow at all. Would you care to write it out in more detail?
I am guessing the idea is ubiquity of prediction markets -> there's a prediction market for the liveness of everyone/anyone -> financial incentive to kill anyone
combined with the idea of the proliferation of local/personal violence
Something like that- I'm an artist/creative and was working on a (Black mirrorish)story years back about this, thats were the thought comes from- a related ransom system would also be built into it- would create an offshoot of Defi known as DeathFi.
You aren't seriously suggesting that people will take out prediction market bets on people's death dates and then commit murder to rig the bet? How would a prediction market on anybody's death date get enough liquidity for this strategy to ever come close to breaking even?
They've already used prediction markets to bet on peoples death as in the case of Sinwar from Hamas. It seems like all the pieces are there and moving into place- I'm just an artist/creative imagining things though(shrug)
It would be one way to hire a hitman. A "bet" on the prediction market would effectively function as a bounty on the target's head.
E.g. "I bet $1,000,000 of BTC that [politician] won't be assassinated before the end of 2025. Anyone want to prove me wrong?"
That was effectively the idea behind the "Assassination Market" site that popped up in the early days of Bitcoin [0]. Obviously that was just some stupid fantasy site made by some libertarian crypto weirdo that never led to anything real. (As far as I'm aware, no-one has yet assassinated Barack Obama.) But there's a first time for everything.
Things get very dark in few dozen years anyway - see established mainstream science about global warming. We know and ignore this because it's unpleasant and if we take it seriously it cuts the short term profits.
Instead we worry about things that are more sexy and less inevitable.
> If prediction markets come to act as proof of life oracles- which they already have in a few cases- things get very dark very fast for everyone I reckon
"AI" is just a tool like any other- creatives will use these tools to make things they couldn't make before because of the limits of their budget and/or scale-
I just made an original animated feature film where I sang %75 of the roles by using an AI tool(audimee.com) to convert my voice into others- I couldn't do that before- we're now creating Portuguese and Russian language versions of the songs with a tool that has a $20 usd/month subscription! Couldn't do that before!
For creatives/artists- As long as we don't use AI to generate ideas we're good, human generated ideas are a must- bring on all the AI tools!
The whole built on theft thing- as a human film director I could rattle off endless examples just in cinema of human directors "stealing" premises, sequences, shots, styles etc from other filmmakers with no consequences- so why stop the AI now?
I see the "theft" as being democratized now- large studios/entities with large resources have always been able to legally "steal" so with these AI tools I guess we all can now?
I make original animated films, games, music, art etc etc and I feel no "threat" at all from AI-
I feel the opposite as I'm excited to see what things they will allow me to do next as a micro-studio with limited budgets but unlimited creativity.
Aesthetics are dead now imo because of generative AI as anyone can be any "style" so now it is all about ideas- original human ideas.
A majority of which will go to already rich people.
Its a sad state now, and a sad state in the future for humanity, where technology enables and accelerates accumulation of wealth, aided and abetted by the very consumers it consumes.
Regarding "we're now creating Portuguese and Russian language versions of the songs" - have you contacted any native speakers of those languages to listen to those songs? Since the translation part isn't that hard, making it actually sound native and nice is hard.
Native speakers are the ones doing the re-writing of the lyrics in those languages. The ai tool just converts the say Russian singer voice into different voices.
> I see the "theft" as being democratized now- large studios/entities with large resources have always been able to legally "steal" so with these AI tools I guess we all can now?
You don't see any issue with machine learning models trained on huge amounts of copyrighted and patented materials basically scraped from the internet. Yes you can make your animated film and audio but at the cost of hugely controversial and non-transparent generative models.
> Aesthetics are dead now imo because of generative AI as anyone can be any "style" so now it is all about ideas- original human ideas.
This argument kind of conflicts with itself, no? Aesthetics are inferred from ideas either inspired or original.
The proposition that "aesthetics is dead" because of [insert new thing here] is one of practically comical ignorance. I have never seen someone with at least a modicum of competence make it; it carries the same desperate, self-validating stench as "history is dead" or "truth is dead", etc.
No I don't see it as theft- in that I choose to not be a part of the formal film industry- I don't "monetize" any of my work- I have nothing that can be stolen but my aesthetics- but aesthetics are dead imo- they no longer have value- as an artist my ideas are what is valuable- and no ML/AI etc can "steal" my ideas as I haven't thought of them yet- my art and ideas are an expression of my soul- no machine will ever have a soul so I'm not threatened one bit my Ai etc
If I as an artist make a great piece of art, you don't think I should be compensated for it. If I complete a surgery or drive a truck which all of them are byproducts of ideas and knowledge I should be compensated for them, not just for thinking of them. You see the problem here? I don't want to pay for an idea of art, I want the complete and original piece made by the artist. As for if they generate the art using some machine learning model, they need to disclose that so I can make conscious choice.
Yes I do think we should be compensated for it, and we are- when we talk of compensation that usually refers to money- I'm referring to other forms of compensation-
I feel compensated on a spiritual level for my work- I do other things for money and my art can stay "pure" in a sense-
It's said that if you "sell your soul" you are unable to ever "buy it back"- so why sell it in the first place? Just so you can try to get "rich" and attempt to buy it back later because you are soulless and miserable? Doesn't make sense to me.
Maybe art is something higher? A higher cause? I was really inspired by the Rudolf Steiner book "The arts and their mission" early in my career- worth looking into if you are in the arts.
Why is that the line in the sand? And if someone did find inspiration and ideas from an AI, and made something popular with it, wouldn’t it be indistinguishable from any other piece of popular content?
Sure- as the AI is trained on the work of humans- so if someone had an idea "inspired by ai" its really just saying they were inspired by humans anyway- for me personally I'll never ask an LLM for "ideas" though-
The capabilities are interesting and useful, but the wider practical impact is that we're already being flooded with cheap cookie-cutter slop, while original artists' copyrights are completely disregarded.
If you're building tools to empower artists, this is antithetic to your mission, and simply unethical.
I do agree with the original artists work being disregarded but I think that has more to do with the aggregation and the lack of curation that is not motivated by $- as an unknown artist creating original work for 20+ years I'm optimistic about permission-less donation supported AI curators digging up unknown creative works and sharing them with humans.
The "just a tool like any other" perspective can't account for how much talentless slop is in practice created by AI.
Look at the work spotlighted by Google to promote their new Flow tool: https://x.com/GoogleLabs/status/1925596282661327073 . This is a garbage imitation of a Guy Ritchie film or a Jose Cuervo ad (maybe more the latter).
Instead of being a tool for creatives it has empowered a number of grifters to churn out more and more "content" bypassing any concern about craft and formal restrictions that help generate creative work. The work that is most often created with the help of AI is not creative, it's a bland, tasteless simulacrum of creativity.
I think we're really missing the forest for the trees here - which is that generative AIs completely obliterate truth. Like, as a concept.
We pretty much cannot prove what's real and what's not anymore. Who knows the consequences of this. At worst, we might transform to an abysmally low-trust third-world society.
I seriously doubt most of the money being made on this stuff is through consumption. There's a big pot of money by tech giants being used to commission and promote this kind of work to attract a user base.
For filmmakers- smart phones + cheap video cameras + free video editors + youtube monetization create what from my perspective is human made content slop. So to me slop is slop- it doesn't matter if a machine or a human "made" it. It's all slop and it all sucks haha.
Grifters will always grift- curation is what is important to sort through and ignore the slop- maybe there will be some systems with special fingerprinting algo's to "find" original human made non slop?
I regard this the same as the crypto/NFT people saying hate the practitioners not the technology. The only things people seem to do with the technology is to create more and more trash.
I've always been the hype person for everyone I know and have subsequently been allowed to have an amazing, thriving creative career while I've seen countless jealous, desperate, scarcity minded people fall by the wayside over the years.
Just released an original animated feature film musical where I did most everything myself with help from a few friends I hype https://www.imlivingmylife.com/
Is this a joke? No one is going to use this. This "music" was content slop ai music before content slop ai music- so people will just use real content slop ai music.
Still feels too much like Web 2.0 soulless template based sites- https://mmm.page/ is much better for unique human made sites- especially if you use the drawing tools.
Wow, first impressions of mmm.page are really good. I'm happy with my personal website but still signed up because I don't want to lose track of this cool little thing.
I as an artist will be happy to see all these useless talking head "content creators" get replaced by AI Avatars-
So then only real artists and ai will remain- these "content creator" human avatar golems were always transitory anyway- software can chase algo's/trends better than any human so good riddance-
If prediction markets come to act as proof of life oracles- which they already have in a few cases- things get very dark very fast for everyone I reckon.