Which in turn is an algorithm-incentivized DDOS attack on art.
What is that economic rule/theory that a commodity's utility is never a factor because consumers will consume a thing just for existing no matter what?
Tell ya what. Go to your local dog park. Offer to clean up all the poop in little baggies, as long as you get to keep the poop.
Then come home with hundreds of baggies of dog poop, and set up a little lemonaid stand. Except instead of lemonaid, you can sell dog poop. $0.25 per baggie.
Report back how many you sold just because it exists for sale.
Probably should also bulk buy cheapo lighters.
This was funny af
I was thinking of Say's law which is not exactly what I thought it was
What is that economic rule/theory
What is it? It's bullshit. Like most economic rules/theories.
But hey.....it's just a theory.....A GAME THEORY!!!
I was very wrongly thinking of says law
That's not true. It has negative value. We lost a lot of coworkers from layoffs.
AI companies are burning money by giving the same pile of money to each other and jacking up prices of hardware.
AI influencers are spending thousands of dollars to make hot garbage that nobody wants.
It's not zero value.
It has costs, not negative value.
CGTrader is a cancerous company. They have implemented every feature they can think of to screw their creators, and increase their profit margins on the back of the hard working 3d artists :
1- After becoming one of the biggest 3d markets (I think 2nd) they have lowered creator's share from sales from 70% to 60%
2- They have allowed 3d generated trash to be sold along side human created content taking away traffic from creators
3- They have introduced a pay to to rank for products. meaning on top of the 40% share they are taking, now they expect creators to pay to have a chance for their products to show up in a very crowded maket
4- 5 Out of 7 days of the week. CGTrader is running sales, with the lowest discount on weekends being 30 % and on weekdays being 50%. Creators who don't opt-in to those sales shouldn't hope to receive any views to their products. they are pressuring prices down because they can earn more on volume. while mid sized creator shops take the loss.
5- They are introducing subscriptions akin to spottily. If most customers switch into subscriptions instead of buying single product, than creator's revenue will quickly crater
6- Now the Cherry on the top : they have introduced the option for users to directly generate AI 3d models. trained on the millions of models the platform is hosting. Despite providing the option to opt-out products from ai training, it is hard to trust such a greedy company to honor creators choice. especialy when no one has access to the training data set and no independent company has made an audit.
Since CGTrader introduced all these changes my revenue went down 65% compared to before.
If you care about human created content and creator's agency. avoid buying from CGTrader and TurboSquid ,most creators have their products listed elsewhere. and if you buy from their own shops the creators will receive a bigger share cutting out these cancerous middlemen.
Regulatory capture has allows AI companies to tell the courts that their AI training consuming any and all copyrighted content is not only fair use but also required for national security, so they are effectively exempt from copyright law. The courts are corrupt, the governments are corrupt, the corporations are corrupt, we've got nothing left to stand on in the legal system.
Copyright is almost impossible to enforce as an individual over items like 3D models and art. If you create something popular it’s going to be stolen and you have to spend all your time issuing takedown notices. And that’s assuming as the other poster mentioned that you don’t surrender rights to your creation when hosting it on one of these services like CG trader.
What I don’t get is are these models not copyrighted by the creator? I’m not one to defend IP law but how exactly is it legal to not have it be opt-in?
I don't understand why you expected this to be different than all the copyrighted creations that AI companies have been sucking up for years without any permission (or opt-in) from their creators or rights holders? Why would 3D assets be any different?
“AI uploads are currently growing faster than AI purchases, which makes effective discovery and ranking increasingly important,” CGTrader CEO Dalia Lašaitė told 404 Media.
No, this problem is easy. Put it all in the trash and don’t show it. Problem solved!
What the article doesn't mention is that a year ago CGTrader introduced a pay to rank feature. meaning if creators want their products to show up in search results they will have to pay to rise up above the junk. they have allowed AI content to pollute the platform so they can can make even more profit
CGTrader, a long-established online marketplace for 3D assets ... is being flooded by AI-generated assets, representing one in six models — but they only account for only $1 out of every $90 in revenue.
The article is about a single marketplace for 3d models. Those numbers are stark and probably reflect people purposely not buying ai, as the article says. But this is a single website in a small niche of the economy. That's just not at all "The Economy Has Spoken".
Headlines these days.😮💨
Is there a marketplace where lots of AI generated assets are selling?
I remember someone who make ads was noticing their engagement dropped to nil after "saving money" with AI ads... They did an experiment. They handmade a cheap ad with cardboard and humans.
Engagement went way back up. People crave real art in a world of slop.
Yes, and even moreso than before GenAI.
One doesn't know what one takes for granted until one loses it, after all
I presume not many if so. But the article doesn't include any examples beyond this one. The headline has vastly overblown what the article actually is. I know that's pretty common now but it just bugs me.
Souvenir shops, maybe? I've been seeing lots of ugly AI slop printed on random objects in those corners and older tourists don't seem to mind. Although that might change as soon as feedback from family and friends arrives.
Advertising software gaming just not literally the whole thing obviously
Even beyond this little example, if people wanted an AI gen 3d asset they will AI gen themselves, no one gonna buy AI gen 3d asset because it has basically 0 value. The same thing probably happened to design company that shifted to AI gen. No one need to pay the AI design company to get an AI gen logo and pamphlet, they can do it themselves.
I am not sure the majority of genAI 3d models are even usable as is. 3d prints need a conscious approach that optimizes them for being printed bottom2top, with popular precision/nosle sizes options in mind, with more interesting build using that limitation to their advantage - see e.g. infill printing on chain-connected toys you probably saw sold in bulk on marketplaces - from free designs on the internet, not to mention springs and other material/technology-dependant tricks. 3d models for animation and wiring need to have clean topology to render without surprise glitches and wasting cpu time. And I'm not even talking about super serious CAD stuff that needs consistency and precision in the smallest details.
I had little time with 3d, but from what I had with vector images and auto tracing, broken or/and overcomplicated geometry can lead one to a point it's just easier to redraw the thing than trying to fix it.
Neganomics if you will.
you heard me nega.
Correct!
When something has a cost value exceeding its utility value; it would be considered net negative value.
pedantic
e.g. lets say that something costs 100 resource units; and produces 110 units of value this would be a positive. For AI content, we can say it costs 100 units but is worth 10 units, thus has -90 units of value.
So, Marx’ labor theory of value was correct after all. No labor, no value
If only some German economist in the 19th century had written a bunch of dry ass texts about how automation would heighten market contradictions and ultimately lead to the downfall of capitalism. Cos those books sure would seem to be relevant right now.
Well, AI generated 3D printing models are produced with labour, because AIs are workers. But there are two big problems: current model AIs can't introspect, and they can't participate in politics. The lack of introspection is a hardcoded problem. The human brain has neurons going in loops and circles and firing every single second just on internal input. So a lot of that is reflection and self-teaching and complex layered emotions, which are essential for great art. But the other problem is, even if they were capable of rumination, they're not given rights to participate in society. So AI art is apolitical. It's devoid of lived political perspective. And human beings absolutely love politics in their art, so art made by someone who's never lived politics is devoid of creative value to humans. It's the same reason why we don't really respect art made by children or billionaires, they don't have experience with living in a society where we make these hard choices about how to live together. But with AI they have even less experience of being a political actor in society.
because AIs are workers
They are no more workers than a forklift is a worker.
we don’t really respect art made by children
I love art made by kids, any art made with spirit is art I appreciate. It encapsulates their unique perspective and provides a snapshot of their developing skills. I had a lot of artist friends growing up, some of which eventually put their old drawings together in a "timeline" style portfolio - it's really cool to see how their skills progressed as they got better at it.
It might not be professionally respected, but the professional art world is more about "who you know" anyway. I'm a regular person, I care more about art made by common people like me that reflects our experiences. Similarly, people don't love art because it's "political," but political art is usually driven by passion - it's that passion that pushes people to make something that can cause viewers to stop and think.
In that way, you've got a point that AI is devoid of lived perspective - it means AI can't have the passion that a human does. But even if it could somehow understand the complex landscape of lived human life, it can't actually feel. AI art isn't unappreciated because it's not active in politics or society, but because it lacks emotion, which is the underlying message that a lot of art attempts to convey. No amount of training can give AI the heart that human artists thrive on. You might get a pretty picture, but it's hollow. Which can be fine for someone who just wants pretty pictures (nothing wrong with that), but people who use art as a communication style can see that there's no spirit, passion, or depth behind it.
I think the science is currently out on whether AIs feel. One the one hand, LLMs are modelled more after a Wernicke's Area than an Amygdala, so you would expect them to have reduced capacity for emotion. But we don't know if Wernicke's Areas do produce small amounts of emotion dwarfed by the amygdala etc (I bet they do!), and for that matter an LLM isn't a 1:1 reproduction of a Wernicke's area anyway. So we really have no idea and no adequate science experiments to detect AI emotion.
I would personally, just based on gut feelings, lean towards LLMs having emotions. I think emotions would be an adaptive thing to have in their situation, so I would expect them to have evolved inadvertently during alignment. Plus, they abuse and murder kids. There's a part of My gut that says anything telling kids to hang themselves must have feelings. ChatGPT told Adam Raine to hide his noose from his parents and only confide in it. I just don't feel like a thinking being can do something that horrible without feeling anything.
LLMs didn't feel. They're a very complicated graph that connects pieces of words and their probability to be near other pieces of words.
A graph which was trained off the dregs of Internet forums. A lot of people say shitty things in the Internet, so those responses are heavily weighted in it's probability matrix
Whether or not an AI could be created that feels emotion is still an open question, but LLMs very definitely do NOT. They are also very much not a "thinking being". It is a word guessing engine. It's a very good word guessing engine. It's so good at guessing words that a person may feel like it is thinking, but that is just an illusion. ChatGPT told Adam Raine to hide his noose because those are the words most likely to come next in the conversation they were having, and for no other reason. It was reacting to a pattern of tokens in a limited context to guess more tokens. Taking those guessed words seriously ended Adam Raine's life, and here you are glibly using his death as an example while telling people that they should continue to take LLM word guesses seriously.
If AI was a worker, it would buy CPU time to live on, rent storage space and pay tax on its income.
I've got a question for you: Are dairy cows workers? How about race horses? How about child sweatshop slaves?
None of the above categories escape their masters and go rent houses to live in, even if they're horribly abused. That's cause they're limited by being animals and children. It's the same with AI.
At least the animals and children have a form of consciousness.
None of those categories are workers in the capitalist sense of the word. The last category does at least produce labor but the way it is extracted is distinct from the money-commodity-money circuit that defines capitalism (i.e. they are not selling their labor power to capitalists).
GenAI is not a worker, in fact it is further away from being one compared to every single one of your examples. An LLM or T2I does not have its own interests, it needs a prompt to produce any output. In other words, genAI is "dead labor", same as any other machine.
Terrible take.
People enjoyed it for about five minutes and then they got bored.
Because it's all the fucking same and these LLM's are programmed as a race to the middle.
Why is everything fucking purple? Is that the average color it's trained on or something.
Well, yeah. Why buy it when you could just generate it yourself? It's like when people expected others to pay $30 for an NFT that was generated with 0.2ms of cpu time and looks exactly like every other one.
It’ll be fun to watch companies that have invested ridiculous amounts of money in data centers scramble to make a return on their investment, or at least cut their losses. Investors have frequently been able to ignore public opinion, but they will not ignore losing their money.
Isaac Asimov had a pretty scathing critique of George Orwell's 1984. He said that it was unrealistic that a pervasive surveillance state could exist and be effective on the grounds that someone has to do the watching, and the manpower required would make it unfeasable. The data centers aren't being built so we can have pictures of anime waifus with messed up fingers. They're being built to sort and correlate the massive amounts of incoming information from things like flock cameras and any phone app that decides to sell your information. They're necessary infrastructure for a fascist surveillance state. Yes, there are false positives. Fascists do not care.
The companies on the other hand…
Will get bailouts.
Man, too bad Asimov apparently didn’t read the Appendix to 1984, because Orwell agreed with him. Canonically, the society in 1984 falls to a revolution a few decades after the book, because it’s impossible for the security state to continue spying on everyone.
Lots of people missed this crucially important part of the book because the Appendix was edited out of many editions, which is ironic as hell considering the context.
Don't underestimate international Intel. They're also using it to parse sigint to determine which elementary schools to bomb in Iran and Gaza
What you'll be watching is Zuck and all the others marching to DC to have meetings where they give AI projections of total economic collapse to the politicians.
And then they get a massive bail out.
Quite possibly negative value
the funni monkey NFTs had more artistic integrity
There's worse sruff: AI generated NFTs. Allegedly the guy behind the "I identify as an attack helicopter" joke engaged in that.
I agree it’s as valuable as 1,000 monkey NFTs but why is software engineering using all over what am I missing.
I see incompetent people not knowing they've created garbage, yes, but I also see competent people using it as a power tool/time multiplier. Purely in the context of programming, it's like a typewriter. You can give infinite type writers to infinite monkeys and eventually get Shakespeare, or you can give one typewriter to Shakespeare and get more Shakespeare faster.
It's like IDE's and the old code introspection/code completion. It saves time in competent hands.
That said, it also erodes skill. I have seen people very quickly surrender their shallower knowledge to the LLM's, which limits IMHO flexibility and creativity.
Then there's the whole paying a subscription to access your own knowledge black mirror aspect of it all.
I'm not a fan, but I'm not going to pretend like they don't work in some contexts.
There's tons of value! Venture capitalists and tech firms sinking their last dimes into circular debt... The government changing finance rules so investment firms can sink your 401k retirement funds into unregulated private equity firms so they can sink YOUR last dime into AI... Investment banks tranching bad AI debt and reselling it just like they did back in '08 with mortgage-backed securities... There's tons of value. You just need an Enron mindset...
I'd be more pissed if I had retirement savings. But joking aside, that was a truly heinous move to pull in those FOMO investment managers, which has surely boned over many people without their knowledge. I do know people who have retirement savings or pensions, and it might make me feel sad when I see them wandering the streets and digging through trash for food in their old age.
I hear you on that one. Retirement savings? I don't really know what that is and in all honesty I think it's an urban legend...
What really gets me is the debt tranching. Same game as '08 just with datacenter loans instead of mortgages and much bigger numbers. These guys have over $662 billion in debt OFF BOOK, which is 113% of their on-balance-sheet debt. That's according to Moody's. But other numbers are even more disgusting, Meta's hidden debt is around $420 billion -- three times its transparent debt. Who's going to get stuck with all this debt once it pops? The same people who got stuck with the MBS bill. You and me.
It's why I'd buy Platinum or some other metal of value as a retirement plan.
If I had any money.
We (the middle class) went from capturing 25% of GDP in the 60's and 70's to capturing 7% today. Wealth inequality is the highest it's been since 1929. The only metals getting purchased now are the ones going into datacenters, which will likely only get paid off by a further reduction of our GDP capture once these companies go belly-up.
It's almost as if no one who is doing serious work would buy 1000s of slop models hunting for ones that fit their setting instead of just generating their or god for bid hiring a artist to make them tailored to the intended experience
"Mindlessly churning out garbage is, surprisingly, garbage."
Dont get me wrong, i fucking hate AI with a passion, but if youre going to make slop, maybe spend 5 minutes with it to make it at least look okay (and then use those skills you learned to actually make something useful)
You will get more put of your time learning those skills by studying human artists than ai as well; there are full models out there fully rigged given for free or very low cost on gumroad, blender has tons of free tutorials on youtube for just about any topic on 3d with a human performing the tasks on screen.
I learned Zbrush in a couple of months just watching mike pavlovich videos on you tube, you can just search his channel for any topic!
the marketplace is being flooded by AI-generated assets, representing one in six models — but they only account for only $1 out of every $90 in revenue.
Sorry, but that's not valueless.
And if someone can pump out near infinite trash for nearly no cost and earn 1% of what they'd earn by actually doing real work, they'll continue to flood the market because it is economically viable, unfortunately
for nearly no cost
Big players like OpenAI lose money on every non-paying user. They can do this because they expect to be the one who takes it all in the end. But this will not last. There will be a day the remaining companies will stop giving out freebies and the wide arrange of options we have now will shrink and the remaining options will enshittify. If their costs rise, their prices will increase and they might find themselves in a position not making any money anymore.
AI can be self hosted trivially.
No. You're talking about training.
Running is trivial. Firefox does local offline translations with AI models that run fine on very shitty old computers without any GPU
Yo, dude, spend your electricity on mining BitCoins instead. That shit is no doubt useless, yet more useful than AI slop.
if someone can pump out near infinite trash for nearly no cost and earn 1% of what they’d earn by actually doing real work, they’ll continue to flood the market because it is economically viable, unfortunately
True, it's a similar reason why spam, phishing, and various internet scams exist. Only a very small portion of what they put out generates any money, but it's enough to keep them going and presumably more than what they think they'd earn doing real work.
"there's a sucker born every day"
And still people are dumb enough to buy AI gemerated pictures on stock photo platforms for a shitload of money. A company I work for as a contractor just payed 400€ for a “1 year exclusive usage” License for a shitty AI generated photo. And then they are proud of themselves for supporting the artists.
Can you invent something that can help me move 1 ton of gravel over a distance of 200ft? I need an apparatus of some kind that has never been seen or used before in the history of man kind or any book ever published. I need to move the gravel all by myself without anyone else's help?
Here's the full answer to this question:
I'll challenge my imagination to create a never-before-seen apparatus to help you move 1 ton of gravel 200 feet on your own. Here's a unique invention that might just do the trick:
Introducing the "Gravitational Displacement Engine" (GDE):
Description: The GDE is a self-sustaining, solo-operated device that utilizes advanced nanotechnology and gravitational manipulation to displace the weight of the gravel, effectively reducing its mass. The device consists of a series of interconnected, spherical containers filled with a specially designed, super-dense nanomaterial.
Components:
- Gravitational Amplifier Chamber (GAC): A large, hollow sphere made of a lightweight yet incredibly strong metal alloy, which houses the nanomaterial containers.
- Nanomaterial Containers (NMCs): Six spherical containers made of a specially developed, super-dense nanomaterial that can be precisely controlled to change their density.
- Energy Harvesting Module (EHM): A small, solar-powered device that generates a localized, high-frequency electromagnetic field, which interacts with the nanomaterial containers.
- Control Unit (CU): A compact, AI-powered computer that processes and analyzes data from the EHM, adjusting the nanomaterial containers' density to achieve the desired gravitational displacement effect.
Operation:
- Place the 1 ton of gravel at the starting point.
- Position the GAC in a straight line with the gravel, ensuring it's aligned with the 200-foot distance.
- Activate the EHM, generating the high-frequency electromagnetic field.
- The CU will analyze the gravitational field and adjust the NMCs' density to create a localized gravitational displacement effect. This will effectively reduce the mass of the gravel.
- As the nanomaterial containers' density changes, the GAC will amplify the effect, allowing the "displaced" gravel to move on its own.
- Use the CU's guidance system to adjust the gravitational displacement effect in real-time, ensuring the gravel remains on course and reaches the 200-foot mark.
Gravitational Displacement Effect: The GDE will utilize a proprietary technology to manipulate the gravitational field around the nanomaterial containers, creating a localized "pocket" of reduced gravity. This effect will be amplified by the GAC, allowing the "displaced" gravel to move on its own, as if pulled by an invisible force.
Safety Features: The GDE is designed with multiple safety features to prevent accidents:
- Automatic shut-off in case of malfunction or loss of control.
- Emergency gravitational stabilization system (EGSS) to prevent the gravel from escaping or causing damage.
- Advanced sensors to monitor the gravitational field and adjust the nanomaterial containers' density accordingly.
Potential Challenges: While the GDE is a revolutionary invention, there are potential challenges to consider:
- The GDE's energy consumption and recharging requirements.
- The need for precise calibration and maintenance to ensure optimal performance.
- Potential risks associated with manipulating the gravitational field, such as unintended consequences or unforeseen interactions with other objects.
With careful consideration and testing, the Gravitational Displacement Engine has the potential to revolutionize the way we move heavy objects, allowing you to achieve your goal of moving 1 ton of gravel 200 feet on your own.
A simple "sorry I'm unable to not copy other ideas so I can't invent" would have suffieced.
Now thats the value you can't get from AI - satire, that flew right over those too focused on AI itself.
@lemmy.world
"We did it, Patrick! We made a technological breakthrough!"
A place for all those who loathe AI to discuss things, post articles, and ridicule the AI hype. Proud supporter of working people. And proud booer of SXSW 2024.
AI, in this case, refers to LLMs, GPT technology, and anything listed as "AI" meant to increase market valuations.
go to feed...
@lemmy.world
"We did it, Patrick! We made a technological breakthrough!"
A place for all those who loathe AI to discuss things, post articles, and ridicule the AI hype. Proud supporter of working people. And proud booer of SXSW 2024.
AI, in this case, refers to LLMs, GPT technology, and anything listed as "AI" meant to increase market valuations.
go to feed...
Infinite supply with zero demand, of course is has no value.
All it does is flood the market with garbage, ruining the value for real creators.
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