Solarpunk technology

I am tired of correcting the same misconceptions and I love Le Guin too much to give her crap about it. I'll just make general remarks.

The reason we all (AI researchers and engineers) are excited about LLMs is not that they can mash up and merge existing piece of work. It is because they can recognize very high level abstraction patterns, understand these, merge them with others and create coherent outputs based on these new patterns.

Even if fed only sexist and capitalist literature, it is capable of imagining things that go beyond that. It can extrapolate the notion of freedom expressed by a rich male narrator into freedom for poor women. I would argue that this is very similar to the way human authors explore new horizons: adapt known patterns to new objects. New patterns are learned from our dataset. Right now for LLMs it is only text, but 2024 is looking like it will be the year of the AI-enhanced humanoid robot. Get ready for a ton of subjective experience datasets.

Yes, we can use it to produce unimaginative works mimicking those produced by the entertainment "industry". Fun fact: these models will soon run on your local machines (for images they already do) and these industries will be destroyed by the post-scarcity the generative model actually cause.

The great surprise of the AI revolution is that it is barely capitalistic, despite what the dystopians say. Companies communicate a lot about their private models, but in a scenario that no SciFi author would have dreamed, it turns out that research in the field is pretty open and that open source models are on the tail of private ones.

Software is probably the domain that is the most advanced in terms of post-capitalism: open source provides non capitalistic post-scarcity, and AI spawns from this domain.

People should not be blind to this fundamental aspect of the field.

Once again, the "plagiarism machine" misunderstanding of how LLMs operate. It's simply not true. They don't "mash up" their training material any more than a human "mashes up" their training material. They learn patterns from their training material. Is a human author who writes yet another round of the Hero's Journey creating a "plagiarized mash-up" of past stories? When a poet writes yet another sonnet, are they just aping past poems they've seen?

And even if it were so, complaints like these are self-contradictory. If LLM output really is just boring old retreads of stuff that went before, why are they a "threat" to skilled human authors who can produce new material? If those human authors really are inherently better than the LLMs, what's the big deal? It's not like it's a new thing for there to be content farms and run-of-the-mill stories churned out en mass. Creative authors have always had to compete with that kind of thing. Nobody's "curtailing" them, they're just competing with them. Go ahead and compete right back.

If you want to create really good art that is as close as it can be to the truth or your heart, you cannot be too caught up in having to earn enough for food and shelter. That is what gets more difficult for more people in a hyper capitalist society.

It's not so much that tech is used to create art. I don't mind CGI, AI-generated stuff, drum computers .... all can be used to create great art.

But very little great art is created these days. Every movie seems the Xth derivative of some superhero shit. Almost like a super-in-your-face-hero-narrative pushed to the extreme. There is a distinct lack of new narratives in mainstream, it all seems so dystopianly tired and worn-out.

Or is the better content just hard to find between all the junk that's out there? I don't think the tech is directly responsible, but the artist being forced into thinking of himself as the creator of a product that has to satisfy n people, or alternatively having to be the creator of a product of his liking that might never be completed as the artist has to work to finance his passion.

What the use of complex tech can to some people: it discourages them from creating earnest art with simpler means, because they believe it can't complete with the 'real' or the 'big' stuff. These days I kind of force myself to draw with pencils and play acoustic instruments just to get back to something really simple and screen-less, and it has been a delight, but I've also gotten stuck in some 'got-to-buy-more-to-get-better' kind of loop in art and hobbies. Some feel the pressure to 'generate enough content' so as to not be drowned out by faster creators, but that turns art into a race and is rather silly.

A passionate and well cared for artist can create great art using a stick and/or AI, anyways, and the art just happens to take the time it needs to be created. We could do with a little less capitalism to take the pressure of the artist.

Sorry if this is a little off topic, but it's something I've been thinking a lot about lately. I think the way I make my photobashes is closer to how people think AI works than the AI actually is. The nature of a photobash is that everything has been cut from photographs, I make my art by cutting up other people’s art (if you consider free textures, stock photos, and home depot, lowes, and amazon advertisements to be art, though I often do grab bits and pieces from farther afield than that) and I've kind of been expecting some backlash for awhile now, especially over on the solarpunk subreddit where they really seem to hate AI for the 'plagiarism machine' reasons. I think some folks who make collages really enjoy the bits of context the different elements bring with them, but I’m kind of the opposite. I like the way this process strips the bits and pieces of their original context and remixes them into something new. I feel like this is how I've always made things, even writing. Nothing is spun into existence out of thin air. I pull concepts, plot beats, character traits and more out of stuff I love, or often stuff that I think had potential but missed the mark, and jam it together into something new.

Maybe because of that, or because I never had it make the whole scene, AI never felt like a huge departure from my processes, just another tool in the toolbox. If it's borrowing styles, rules of design, or color pallets, at least it's not cutting the source up directly. I've used a friend's midjournybot a few times in the photobashes, to generate bits and pieces I couldn't find or wouldn't use, mostly for in-world artwork. I think it's pretty amazing, the things it comes up with, and though I wouldn't use it to generate a whole scene because it wouldn't get the details right, it's really useful when I want to include a type of art in a scene but don't have specific design in mind. I've had it make wood panels carved with leaves and stained glass windows for the kitchen, and a spraypaint mural and a mandala pattern for the parking garage scene. I take what it makes, cut it up, transform it as necessary, and layer it into the scene. I think I mostly use it for in-world art because, like I said, I like the way this process cuts bits out of one picture and gives them a new job in a new picture. But I can’t do that with artwork – to include a carving or a stained glass window would be to include the whole thing, rather than just a piece of it, and dropping the whole thing into a new context feels a lot more like actual theft, or like it could change the original in some way. I don't know.

I guess my point is that imagination has always felt like this to me? And that people will keep imagining better futures, no matter what tools they coexist with? Heck I'm making my depictions of the future entirely out of photographs of things that exist now. I don't doubt that there are billionaires and tech types who'd love to remove the artists from the production of art, in order to gain full control over the messages it conveys. But there's already plenty of lowest-common-denominator mass-consumption art being cranked out by their companies. And they'll use their money to produce dross or propaganda whether there are other humans in the loop or not. Like a tattoo artist told me once, 'some days you make art, some days you make rent.'

(I don't honestly know if this will reduce the motivation for people to learn to draw in order to get the scenes in their heads out where people can see them, I've been using image manipulation tools since I was a kid, but I still started teaching myself to draw in college.)

I don't love when the arguments against AI still treat art like a product, though I acknowledge that in the world we live in, everything is a product. It just feels like another flavor of the kind of capitalist thinking that treats artists as replaceable parts. At the same time, I understand that people need money to survive and to keep learning and improving so they can put art they love out in the world. I know I'm biased because my career isn't on the line here. I've got the luxury of doing this for free, and releasing it for free because I'm not dependent it for an income. I can make the solarpunk photobashes CC-BY because there's no opportunity cost there, and it might help them to spread around and influence the overall messaging of solarpunk art and the first impressions people get of the genre. I've made sure not to tag it in any way that prevents AI from consuming it, because if I can infect its perception of solarpunk so the things it makes include values like reuse, so much the better.

If I'd want any one person to design our future, it would have to be Le Guin. She was such a great person, and her stories are those rare ones that expand both your mind and your heart.

Pretty big to assume humans are capable of genuinely new thought. Seems to me people also just modify and regurgitate shit they heard other people say.

'previous waves of digital tech were used to deskill workers and defang smaller companies' just isn't even close to true, it's far easier to access learning resources, tools, and a final market for your product or skills than it ever has been.

I hate when people look back and say things like 'technology took away jobs' when the reality is it's what ended the brutal privation and poverty as described in works like Jude the Obscure and Ragged Trousered Philanthropists - imagine how different Jude or Robert Tressell's lives would have been with access to the educational and community organisation resources we all take for granted. Neither of those people had the slightest chance to reach their potential and that was the reality of working class life in those eras, today we all have free access to almost endless learning resources on any subject - we have for many things the tools freely available or at cost thanks to open source; coding, digital art, writing, publishing, film-making... If Joel Haver had been born Robert Tressell or Jude the Obscure then he'd certainly have never made a movie (anachronism aside) but today he and a million other normal people from average lives are able to create art and express themselves freely.

If anything tech has given fangs to little companies and independent creators, i've watched more Joel Haver movies than Marvel movies - one guy and his friends using hobby grade gear, home computers and a lot of passion is enough to make something that people all over the world can enjoy - tech has been fantastic for creators.

and when creators are able to use AI tools to make that even easier and to increase the scope of their creations it'll be the big companies that suffer not the small creative groups full of passion, ideas and strong connection to the world they live in.

Sorry Ursula - you are the past now.