The A.I. Tech Fad Is Just Compulsively Shady (The Jimquisition) 

Just imagine: AI-generated voices, reading AI-generated scripts, with AI-generated art and animations, every single employee fired... and the executives will STILL say "Games are just so expensive to make, Boo-hoo, that'll be 70 dollars"

Fun Fact: The OpenAI legal team was recently quoted saying this to the British Parliament "It would be impossible to train today’s leading AI models without using copyrighted materials.", they also basically said they would go out of business if they were banned from doing so.

The most logical use of A.I in business to replace the CEOs. All they do is crack numbers and looking for keywords, and CEOs do the same. Unlike Kotick, A.I might understand that Call of Duty isn’t the only AAA game.

Early tech utopianists: In the future, the boring and alienanating labour will be automated, freeing up whole hours of the day to focus on arts and being creative Modern-day tech bros: We've taught machines how to create art so our serfs can spend as much time as possible on boring abd alienanating labour

I miss when Ai was just a term used for explaining how clever the enemies in games appeared to be.

I have a recurring nightmare that when the AI bubble breaks, companies will sell media to us at an extra premium cost and label it as "AI free" or "human sourced."

I'm an illustrator for a living. When I said that AI "artists" wouldn't be able to produce jack shit if the AI generator was taken away from them, I actually had an AI art bro try to tell me that _I_ wouldn't be able to produce anything, either, if my tools were taken away. After I retrieved my eyes from rolling into the back of my skull, I told them that I could still draw in the dirt with my fucking FINGER if I had to, because my tools don't produce the Thing for me. _I_ produce the Thing, because _I am the production tool._ Dealing with this shit right after dealing with all the NFT Bros just has me tired. _So tired._ 🤦‍♀️

Late-stage cAAAptialism always seems to come down to "How can we avoid paying people for their work, so that we as the investor class can continue to get wealthy without doing any work of our own?"

The frustrating thing is algorithms like this do have legitimate uses. There have been stories of medial advancements using AI models to analyze very large, complex sets of data. Identifying patterns that humans would take years to discover. They are great at doing tedious, non-creative work.

Not to be a "this is literally 1984" type, but I remember when I read it for the first time I thought it was so dumb that Orwell included a machine that created pop songs. It honestly was the one thing that took me out of the story because it seemed so stupid. I think about it every single time I see stuff about AI.

My favorite argument I've seen these AI bros use is how they're "democratizing art" by making it so the little guy can compete with the "Rich privileged artists" who apparently only got good by spending a shitload of money on expensive art schools supplies etc. And I'm like, "Nothing is stopping you from picking up a cheap pencil and paper pal"

The fact that I'm not at all surprised that they disregarded voice actors just shows how long and how intense the distain and under appreciation voice actors have always gotten within the greater world of acting is. Like what the hell was the strike for if they were just gonna give the companies what they wanted anyway?

They must have tried really hard to come up with a name as dystopian as "Replica'.

Oh my god! I bought you that straw. Amazing, thank you for putting it in the video.

The issue with "AI" is the genuine use cases are kinda...dull? In terms of business hype anyway. It can be used in medical fields, architecture, business modelling...a whole bunch of techy ways that can simplify work done by humans as an assistant, not a replacement. But then it butts heads with late stage capitalism, the need to get as much as possible for as little as possible. Slavery is a lost cause, and getting children back into the workplace has been a tough sell, so why not just get rid of workers completely? AI doesn't need breaks, doesn't need paying, feeding, sleep, and best of all won't unionise! So once again capitalism sets up the gallows and gets people to successfully line up to put their own heads on the block with the promise that this time you won't be the schmuck that could have bought stock in Apple in the 80s but didn't.

I'd be furious with SAG-AFTRA. The whole consent line is ridiculous coming from a union because the whole point of having one is that individual consent alone isn't enough and you need the whole group.

Just a headsup, generative AI *does* have a place (in science!). Just not in the arts! Broad language models have helped crack several tricky scientific problems including genome sequencing, protein folding, and reconstructing damaged historical texts. The issue with the way that tech companies are using them lies with corporate greed and incomitance, not with the technology itself. A well-trained, narrowly implemented model can be a useful tool for researchers.

I had a friend (note past tense) who started writing his own tabletop gaming system and world. When ChatGPT came out, he decided to use it to help him further expand the world by developing secondary NPC and location backgrounds. A year later, he's now just letting AI write literally the whole thing and plans to advertise it as "one of the first fully AI generated tabletop games." It's lazy as hell, and everyone he's asked to give him feedback has emphatically declined.

I was kinda willing to give AI the benefit of the doubt in the very beginning; I bought into it being potentially a tool in the repertoire OF the artist... but then as time progressed and the shadiness became ever-more apparent, I've actually changed my tune and, at this point, I think techbros have so thoroughly poisoned the well on AI that, even if they were to get the kicks worked out, no self-respecting creative would want to TOUCH that shit. Funny how techbros always seem to completely kill their grift faster than any of us ever could.

I think you were among the quickest to realize this new AI thing is literally just a redo of the NFTs thing. At first I had some disbelief about that, I knew some bits about AI and generative algorithms. But it took me a while to realize. The current AI craze has nothing to do with the tech. There's actually nothing new about the tech. What's changed is not the tech but the intentions with it, the claims about it. The cultists around it. It's not an innovation in tech, it's an 'innovation' in strategies to fuck people over. Much like NFTs it is indeed intrinsically shady. The AI bros just seem unable to do anything ethically. It's really amazing how much this is basically exactly the same as NFTs, but the thing about crypto, NFTs, AI, is not the tech, or the math, or the models, it's the bullshit. The intention to scam people with. To steal from people.

To all my fellow visual artists, keep an eye on the free program called Glazed and its upcoming extension, Nightshade. Not only can Glazed disguise your art style from AI, Nightshade can poison the AI models who steal it. And it only takes a few drops of poison to kill the monster.

I remember when computer chess engines were beating grandmasters, the proto-techbros said human chess is dead because because all we would want to watch is the perfect machine games. Right now, the only thing you'd use a chess engine for is to cheat or spice up some anal beads. Maybe they will make a perfect game, designed, written, coded, performed and monetized by AI. Infinite Content spewing from the depths of the AAA pit. Nothings changed, it's still BS. And the only good part is that fewer people are actively abused by it.

With a purposeful grimace and a terrible sound, she pulls the AI Art Tech Industry down. …See, because it’s a parody of the Blue Oyster Cult song called Godzilla.

Outsourcing to Artificial Intelligence, is only advocated by those with Artificial Integrity.

Steph, thank you for being so consistent with the uploads. I look forward to the show every monday

Protect yourself from unauthorized simulation of your voice by signing the contract to authorize us to simulate your voice? That sounds like racketeering. Al Capone would be proud...

It's all about doing as little work as possible (preferably none) to sell for as much as possible (preferably everything). But noone in "the industry" thinks about: Wait, where does the money come from? Who is going to buy if noone is earning money to spend? The entire system is unsustainable, unreasonable and ruled by the uncaring.

The "best" part of the AI fad following immediately upon the NFT fad crashing and burning? They are literally, fundamentally the same. The computers powering the NFT bubble were simply repurposed for the next big thing.

I once considered calling it Abominable Intelligence like in 40k, but it doesn't work because our "So called AI" isn't anything like it. The Tech Priests would probably be really annoyed that you wasted their time with this, and decree it not heretical.

"They're paving the way for the scorpions to come." *DJ, spin that Winds of Change*

I hate how homogenous AI art is, among it's other faults. Even the less shit specimens are all boring and weirdly overdetailed.

if i were a sag-aftra member, i'd be deeply concerned by the union leadership making these deals behind my back. imo this is very much grounds for union members to stage a vote of no confidence against the leadership.

TOP TEN SONGS FROM THE MOUNTAIN GOATS: 1. No Children 2. That one they did with Aesop Rock 3. Cubs in Five ... those are the only mountain goats songs I know, I'm sorry.

Holy shit, the Vicious Sipper unlocked a childhood memory. I had the same straw as a kid

what is frustrating is ai is notoriously bad at lateral thinking, image recognition, genuine innovation, coalescing multiple sources of different kinds of data and mediums. it's good for data analysis, respecting sets of rules, statistics, allocating ressources, inputs, oversight... so really it's the wall streets bros and other ghouls pushing this shit on artists. i feel that they're trying to do to us what would logically happen to them. they want us poor and submissive so we can't replace them with genuinely better beings. so they push for less effective uses of AI. also capitalism hates art. obviously.

Love the helps old people thing. If you suggested society spend money on care workers or stop exploiting family members to the point where they cannot engage with their elderly loved ones and that would be impossible, but sell them a creepy robot that's the answer.

There is about to be a huge wave of backlash against AI, not just because of exploitation, not just because it does things poorly, but because it's being used for things it *can't actually do*. Self-driving cars can't self-drive. LLMs are gibberish generators, not answer machines. Image generation is best used as one tool in an artists toolbox, like the clone brush, not as a replacement for artists. And so on.

A heartfelt thank you from someone inside the tech sector. As awful as it is to watch companies chase these obvious grifts from outside the sector, to be inside software development and have to push back on executives and other developers (who maybe aren't as skeptical as they should be) trying to pivot projects A, B, and C to include the new thing is equally draining. I held the line through the last two AI crazes, the Crypto/blockchain craze, and now back to AI again. It's exhausting, truly. I can't tell you how many hours I've spent in meetings trying to get people to understand the simple realities of one of these crazes so we don't end up spending months/years of dev time and hundreds of thousands of dollars working on something to chase one of these trends. The start of these crazes is always the scariest point when not enough people are being skeptical and the big pronouncements from uninformed media personalities and newspaper articles creates an avalanche of pressure to pursue it. It never seems to matter when I point back to the last handful of crazes they wanted us to chase because the current craze always seems different. So again, a sincere thank you. Keep pushing back on this crap. We need the help.

In all fairness to the gift-buyers, it's way easier to buy Godzilla merch than it is to buy you a pinball machine, or find pinball related merch :).

The other factor when it comes to generative AI - let's assume that _somehow_ someone actually does it ethically, and sources the training data with permission and consent. Who's going to give permission and consent? Only the people who've already made their fortunes and are ready to cash in their old voices, likenesses and talents. Now, let's assume that the tech does what it promises and delivers an excellent substitute for the artist or actor that sold their soul to the machine. This means that fresh talent now has to compete with the spectres of these old retirees. I personally know a couple of people who questioned the choice to cast Will Smith in the movies _I, Robot_ and _I Am Legend_ because they couldn't get over the fact that it was Will Smith, the same guy who starred in comedy films like Wild Wild West, Hancock and Hitch. He just seemed to be everywhere! And while he's a great actor, I don't really want his voice and his likeness to be used over and over well into the 23rd century. Let him be remembered respectfully, and respect the need for new actors and actresses to be given the stage and the spotlight! It's the same for voice actors and artists. There are so many of us, so much talent that deserves to be recognised by people. I have no faith that Generative AI will grant them the compensation required to make their vocations financially viable. Nor will AI allow them to decide where their work's likeness would be used, and where its use would be restricted. Gav from Miracle of Sound made it very clear in his ToS that he doesn't want his music used in support of political protests. I'd have to wonder what Scott Cawthon (developer of Five Nights at Freddy's and donator to Republican political campaigns) would say if his assets were used to produce propaganda to support a liberal agenda. MidJourney is fed a lot of copyright images from Marvel, which often reappears in its output when fed specific prompts, and the US courts (so far) have deemed AI generated arts to be "uncopyrightable" -- Marvel would be furious to know that Captain America's iconic costumes as shown in their movies are suddenly fair game for the whole internet! Here's a demonstration in action by Upper Echelon from a video released just 5 days ago: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-wMPGuBQLNBY.htmlfeature=shared&t=613 None of these entities would be fine with their works being used to mass produce assets in their styles that would threaten to become market replacements for their own products and services. The only artists and voice actors who would be fine with their works being used to effectively replace them as employable assets for a company are the ones who have no future for their careers and don't care what happens next. (They also might by young, dumb idiots who have seriously underestimated the value of their talents.) I consider those people who would give their permission and consent, the ones who would willingly make a deal with any company that supports generative AI, to essentially be signing a devil's bargain. They're not just signing over their name and integrity. They're signing away opportunities for their fellows in the industry. So, what are we really getting from these "ethically sourced data sets" for AI companies that operate "above board" as customers? If they're telling the truth, we're most likely getting the talents of people who are no longer in the industry or who probably won't be in the industry for much longer. It would be a service that would only ever produce assets of rapidly depreciating value. It doesn't sound like a sustainable practice. So I guess the only question left to ask is this: How long before the value of generative AI, dependant on ethical above-board contracts to function, returns zero?

No one : Ubisoft be like : "You can't be accused of harassement if there's no employees to harass!"

Can we please talk about Hank Green displaying enthusiasm for this copyright theft? His last Vlogbros vid attempted to explain that it "doesn't matter" when companies get caught using systems that thieve their sources.

I've been 1998 godzilla pinball table curious, but I'm not sure I'm brave enough to sip visciously in today's hostile political landscape. Thank(god)fully I have Stephanie's example to look up to.

Thanks for using the "Too Far" segment of "Beyond the Mind's Eye". I loved that series (well the first two anyway, the thrid and fourth seems to have missed the point). For those wondering, "Beyond the Mind's Eye" was a DVD of early CGI video back when the technology was new and people were still showing the things they could do with it. They took various clips from business presentations, the Lawnmower Man movie, tech demos, and even CBS Saturday Morning Cartoon commercial sign and set it to New Age music. They were sureal videos and fun to watch. IIRC the company made Animusic. But that's for another time.

my top ten songs from the mountaingoats are: 1. Autoclave 2. This Year 3. No Children 4. Lovecraft in Brooklyn 5. Rain in Soho 6. Up the Wolves 7. Foreign Object 8. Training Montage 9. Cry for Judas 10. Old College Try yes i did pause the viddo to type this

The new SAG/AFTRA contract is NOT a victory over the creative workers' threat from AI. It is just a 3 YEAR truce, that serves to allow the tech to (literally) evolve to the point where writers will actually not be necessary at all. Who's going to stop them at that point? Consumers? 😂😂😂

Good use of those 80's laserdisc 3D film shorts that were in such profusion. Many of them had an undeniable creep factor which fits in with your topic. And the switching off of the Pinbot pinball game was lovely. You might want to look at the Aluminum Can industries female robot commercial which was also on those Laserdisc's. I don't think you used that particular one in today's video but the backdrop of the Pinbot game board is a dead ringer for the character in the Aluminum Can video.

I reckon Starfield was made with 80% AI given how lazy it is, New Atlantis practically looks like something an AI would generate.

I feel like I'm in a very awkward "nobody likes me" minority here with my weird take on AI but... I can see the potential of the tech, I can see how it has some genuinely good uses both now and in later stages of its development. I'm a fan of classic Star Trek, I fully love the idea of being able to generate a half decent virtual holodeck envoronment with a few words of prompting rather than needing to learn programming languages and teach yourself an entire second career worth of skills. But I also do hate how it's actually being used to lay off a lot of people- and for some reason, the people doing the "fun" creative jobs, rather than setting it to work on sorting our recycling or unblocking sewers I think, ultimately, the problem isn't so much with the tech as it is with the fact we're still holding to the obsolete mindset that people should have to work in order to be allowed to eat and live somewhere with a roof. Most emerging technologies (and, in fact, almost every major worthwhile innovation) is fundamentally incompatible with this. And that's what I'm angry about. We could have- we *should* have- a world where developing AI is welcomed with fanfare and open arms because it saves us from our awful jobs. Instead, we meet it with dread, because *we* need the money it puts back in the pockets of our feudal lords.

Once again spot on. You make Mondays bearable.

It gets me just how blatant the use of other's work is with AI. I see ads for AI "services" and they are just straight up characters from things like My Hero Academia.

I want Steph to read quotes for now on in the voice of Fran. That was hilarious.

The Mario face from the Mario 64 startup screen, was better animated than that. And that was made on a silicon graphics workstation in the 90s.

I'm FAR more impressed with "The Machine - Bride of PinBot" than I am with Godzilla. Just saying.

Never heard an honest man use the word legit. Or ethical, it seems.

3:05: Snake oil, because no one wants an unoiled snake!

Remember when automation was all about humans being able to do less work and focus more on artistic pursuits and now it seems automation is all about taking over human artistic pursuits so we can work more

Oh man I love the sneaky inclusion of Billy Mitchell!! Brilliant.

"Lion's Teeth", "This Year", "Dark In Here"... No, wait, come back! I have 7 more Mountain Goats songs I have an excuse to force people to hear the names of! (No cap though, Lion's Teeth is so good.)

The idea of them pushing ahead for AI RIGHT AFTER having a huge protest against it is pure hypocricy.

Is anyone else starting to feel like we're living in some kind of dystopia? 'Cause I am.

What's funny about the AI art bros is they think they do amazing work with their word prompts but every single piece they churn out looks objectively worse than RL artists' work. They're just not artists so they don't realize how fucked the ai art is lol.

that spit take transition was amazing

2 second scorpions reference hits hard (not as hard as disapproving barbarian, of course) ... lord, I am aged.

Seeing panicky BoomX articles about how AI is going to cause massive job losses. 😂 This is going to be the biggest bubble burst ever as it takes all those tech bros with it. The workers won't tolerate, the consumers are rejecting it, and even the AI is starting to tell coders and execs to get bent sideways.

I feel you, I took my girlfriend to see Godzilla minus one and she got me the Godzilla 1998 soundtrack for christmas. It has an incredible remix of Brain Stew by Green Day, just look up Brain Stew - The Godzilla remix

THE BILLY MITCHELL CAMEO DURING 'SAFE TRUSTY ETHICS' MADE ME SPIT WATER ON MY KEYBOARD

Wow, I had 3 of the Mind's Eye tapes back when I was a teenager.... Now I have to go see if I can find a good source to watch them again

This may interest you in a massive flaw with AI Art; was at my D&D Session & a player told me of a flaw that may cause it to implode. "Inbreeding" which is where AI Art ends up copying from other AI Art

The stupid thing about all this is that AI art and generation are great tools to foster your own creativity; i use chatbots to roleplay to help flesh out my characters for my writing, and i know a bunch of people that generate images of dolls as inspiration for outfits they want to make for performing in or how they might want to customize their own dolls for their own use. But they don't market this stuff for that, because that wouldn't make people money. I honestly get so pissed off at the people that argue that actually you can sell stuff you "make" with AI and that actually it's totally ethical because no, it isn't.

One bad take that sticks with me--and, gallingly, this came from an actual artist--is that artists got "complacent" in thinking our skills couldn't be machine-replicated. Like we're the privileged elite withholding our trade secrets from the masses, or some shit. Meanwhile, I've been yelled at by entitled freebooters and have had at least one client just up and ghost me after I finished a commission. But sure, I'm the "arrogant" one for not wanting to be devalued even further.

I made the joke in a group chat that AI is tech bro tarot cards, but tech bros are also capitalists who think the free market makes the best ideas, so of course they think something that tells them what they want to hear is the highest form of intelligence.

I motion that we stop refering to it as AI and instead call it what it is - Generative Algorithmic Content. So whenever anyone does call it AI, you can just go "Oh, you mean GAC?"

2:37 I 100% beat Dr. Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine this week on the hardest difficulty. 10/10 game honestly.

afaik the concept the mario thing was proving was the hologram display itself and how it'd potentially be used to create virtual assistants in places like shopping centres. The AI was part of the display, but the thing they're actually showing off is the hologram.

My favourite illustration of why AI won't benefit games was some article getting all breathless and excited about the fact that an ingame NPC could talk to them about its ramen noodles. I didn't see the tech in action, so maybe it was the most realistic and non-robotic thing ever... but it still completely missed the point of *why* there are NPCs in games. Given what we've seen with AI so far, I just imagine a game with an NPC that sends the player on some generic fetchquest... which the AI has made up or "hallucinated" and doesn't actually exist in the game.

Reminder: AI is being forced so hard by its backers into the creative fields because at its current level of sophistication, it cannot be trusted to do anything requiring more precision or objectivity (see: how ChatGPT has a disclaimer telling you not to trust its output, because even when it is "hallucinating", it is functioning exactly as designed), and they are chasing the fastest way to realise a return on their investment. Wasn't the future promised to us that robots would be doing the drudge work, while humans would be able to turn our minds to the pursuit of leisure and nobler things, like art? Turns out, it's easier for AI to turn out simulacra of art than anything else, so the capitalists are going to snatch that away for themselves as well.

Corporations will blow more than they should for the hopes paying voice actors and developers less money or not pay them at all.

Something not covered in the video: AI is just as devastating to the environment as nfts are. A single AI image uses up absurd amounts of processing power to create, to the point that all those nft-farms are being converted to AI farms to try and sustain it.

Pretty much you can sum up anything that is being called "AI" right now as the exact same garbage of things they just last week called "smart devices".

can we just appreciate how we're using technology to wreck meaningful careers instead of menial jobs nobody wants to do

that new intro is great!

"MMM-pfft!" That was hilarious to me.😆

The new Netflix movie, "Lift", opens with the theft of an NFT auction, valued at $20 million. I thought to myself, "If anyone is still playing millions of dollars for NFTs, then that person deserves to be robbed." 😂

Hey Stephanie, if someone who does fiberwork ( crochet, in my case ) wanted to make something for you, what would you want the item to be?

Oh damn, got some Mind's Eye clips in there. Nothing to add, I just love those videos.

It’s telling that a lot of the twitter accounts of techbros shilling AI are the same people who were shilling NFTs a few years ago

This just proves that people's issue with AI isn't that a machine made it, it's that companies who use and make AI don't have any interest in pulling from the public domain. I don't think there would be push back if these people respected the creative process, and respected artists. Like the whole thing screams that they have the ability to care, but don't.

It will never surprise me that tech bros and many of the most wealthy are fans of AI, because they’ve always been fans of plagiarism. I mean, a lot of them who went to uni in the U.S. were members of fraternities and sororities. And you know what a lot of Greek organizations have? Essay banks (allegedly). None of this shocks me, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t sadden or anger me.

I actually just unlocked a memory from...it would have to be over 20 years ago. Listening to the radio, a segment about advances in computing included fully-computer-generated music, how wondrous, and here, listen to this, it's a computer's best attempt at a new Beethoven piece! ...and it sounded like a chaotic mashup of the most famous Beethoven pieces. Generative machine learning is never going to improve. It is always just going to be a ripoff machine.

It's particularly frustrating because LLMs are already failing and exposing the "AI" scam. Stuff like Chatgpt only "works" when the inputs are carefully controlled by the dev team. Simply by allowing the public to use it, with no changes to the backend, Chatgpt has become increasingly less useful and shitty to such a degree that there have been news stories about it for months. Once the programs start "learning" from the public interacting with them instead of just from data stolen from other places, they start to break.

Like button pressed. Now, to watch the video.

+20 points for using Beyond the Minds Eye music videos :3

5:16 .... where do you find these old adverts?

Can't wait for you to guest on Tech Won't Save Us pod to talk about the industry.

Goddamn those are some hot pinball machines.🥵

It's socialism for the rich, capitalism for the rest, as always. Before capitalism, human creativity was largely cumulative, a mass human-organized product. Homer's odyssey was a remix of all the common tales, a collage. Capitalism in America introduced copyright, pretending that all works of art are wholly independent of any influence so that they could be sold for cash and be connected to the individual and not the collective. Now with AI, which are trained entirely using the cumulative process, are being used to create art, but now all these artists who rely on the copyright system are rightfully worried about their income, and the wealthy corporations who own the AI are suddenly saying "what's yours is -mine- ours".

Bride of Pin-Bot starts piping up and the only response is to just switch it off. Kind of a metaphor for the whole situation, isn't it?

Thanks so much for the support Steph. 💜 The last year and a half has been a nightmare for creatives of all kinds. Feels good to hear some sense in all this.

Again: the difference between this AI trend and the previous nonsense around NFTs and crypto is one of genuine utility. No, AI won't be able to do everything, as evangelists claim - but it's capable of doing enough stuff on a background level for corporations to push the tech into any crack where it sufficiently fits to scrape a few savings. We are already past the thin end of the wedge. The Finals, for example, uses TTS for its arena commentators - and it's not flawless, but it's passable enough that few people who are concentrating on the gameplay will have noticed. Apparently that model was trained using consenting VAs, likely contacted independently, who are not accountable to other VAs in the way union leaderships are accountable to their members. I don't know the ins and outs of the SAG-AFTRA deal, or how they do/should handle their comms, but if unions don't get involved in regulating and contracting pretty damn sharpish then other parties (ie corporations) will be the ones setting all the precedents.