Bring back the DST

This is a crisp answer, nice one.

sigh

You said it doesn’t matter if we can tell how something was made.

This conversation is over. Thanks

I didn’t say that Marxism is insufficient, I said your particular orthodoxy is, and I was very careful to phrase it that way.

And the fact that you’ve just compared calculation to thought proves my point yet again.

Then you take a phrase out of the context of the conversation and article and call me a reactionary, which is absolutely wild.

I made the other post to try to get different perspectives, not to have you follow me around.

Kindly stop with all this.

Ah to be fair i did misinterpret your previous statement.

But no, I am arguing that we are not able to ignore knowledge of the production process. Nothing mystical about that.

That’s not a rejection of what I said, so I assume you agree.

The overarching argument in the piece is that struggle is what makes us human.

By outsourcing cognitive tasks to these machines (which, kncidentally, we agree cannot do what they say on the tin), we are losing a central part of what we are.

You’ve called me silly, weird, shallow, dishonest, you’ve continually deflected, and you have followed me around these forums to do it. All while clinging to a rigid orthodoxy around a theory of production and consumption that is clearly insufficient to describe this moment in history.

The author gave zero examples, so I have to assume it was rhetorical. Either way I’m not required to agree with every single statement they made. My takeaway is as I have described.

No, I’m saying we can no longer meaningfully separate the product and the process.

I am saying that we can no longer meaningfully separate the two things.

See my edits which I was still typing when you replied

First you said “it doesn’t matter if we can tell or not”, which I responded to.

So I’m confused by your reply here.

This argument strikes me as a tautology. “If we don’t care if it’s different, then it doesn’t matter to us”.

But that ship has sailed. We do care.

We care because the use of AI says something about our view of ourselves as human beings. We care because these systems represent a new serfdom in so many ways. We care because AI is flooding our information environment with slop and enabling fascism.

And I don’t believe it’s possible for us to go back to a state of not-caring about whether or not something is AI-generated. Like it or not, ideas and symbols matter.

You highlight the first paragraph but then ignore the third one

Anyway I have never once said that AI is capable of thinking. The problem is the effect it clearly has on its users.

And no, the article does not specify use cases. It seems likely to me that they are trying to de-program, as it were, AI believers in order to allow a proper analysis, and so underplaying the argument in order to allow the reader a mental off-ramp for their unfounded beliefs. Or at least, I hope so, because GenAI has in fact been complete garbage at anything it’s been tasked with.

So, as I said right from the beginning, the upshot is: using AI images for a banner instead of literally anything else sends the message to community members that the admins/mods do not value human cognitive and creative work differently from Markov chains or diffusion models.

I was not trying to call you stupid, but apologies regardless.

My point was meant to be that the self-perception of human cognition is changed through the use of AI systems, in such a way that one believes them to be able to replace human cognition.

As for the pixel-perfect recreation, I entertained that idea as a pure hypothetical, but it’s not something these systems are actually capable of, and they never will be.

It absolutely backs my case up. The only reason for the existence of AI systems is to offload cognitive and creative effort. That is why the linked piece was written, to push back against the idea that it is possible! The fact that they can’t do that makes no difference to the fact that using them is only done for that purpose.

Literally the only thing you have consistently tried to argue that AI systems might theoretically be able to automate is ‘some stock images’.

Meanwhile, mountains of evidence pile up that what I am saying is true in practice.

The purpose of a system is what it does. These systems act as if they replace cognition (as argued in the piece) but fail to, and cause cognitive harm as a result.

The fact that you think that AI can create the equivalent of any human output means you yourself are a cognitive casualty of AI

Here, again:

https://aeon.co/essays/can-computers-think-no-they-cant-actually-do-anything

If you can tell it was produced in a certain way by the way it looks, then that means it cannot be materially equivalent to the non-AI stock image, no?