BlueMonday1984

Adobe execs say artists need to embrace AI or get left behind [Jess Weatherbed, The Verge]

Adobe is going all in on generative AI models and tools, even if that means turning away creators who dislike the technology. Artists who refuse to embrace AI in their work are “not going to be successful in this new world without using it,” says Alexandru Costin, vice president of generative AI at Adobe.

Personally, I think this is gonna backfire pretty damn hard on Adobe - artists' already distrust and hate them as it is, and Procreate, their chief competition, earned a lot of artists' goodwill by publicly rejecting gen-AI some time ago. All this will likely do is push artists to jump ship, viewing Adobe as actively hostile to their continued existence.

On a wider note, it seems pretty clear to me Alexandru Costin's drank the technological determinist Kool-Aid and has come to believe autoplag's dominance is inevitable. He's not the first person I've seen drink that particular Kool-Aid, he's almost certainly not the last, and I suspect that the mass-drinking of that Kool-Aid's fueling the tech industry's relentless doubling-down on gen-AI. A doubling-down I expect will bite them in the ass quite spectacularly.

Okay, quick prediction/sidenote time:

• Melodio and Mureka are gonna get whacked with lawsuits like Suno and Udio did - Mureka's "reference clip" model sounds like a goldmine of uncleared samples, whilst Melodio is almost certainly gonna "accidentally" recreate a copyrighted track at some point.

• This is gonna produce another wave of musical slop that people are gonna have to wade through to find the good stuff, though with how thoroughly mediocre it is, people should hopefully recognise it quickly and tune it out (alongside anyone who tries passing it off as their own work)

• This is probably also gonna give more stock to a public notion of creativity being an inherently human thing - even in the "mashing existing stuff together" sense of art, so far only humans have managed to mash existing stuff together and make it sound/look good.

This is a malpractice lawsuit waiting to happen. And probably a product liability lawsuit, if this LLM's hallucinations lead to someone getting hurt.

I've already talked about the indirect damage AI's causing to open source in this thread, but this hyper-stretched definition's probably doing some direct damage as well.

Considering that this "Open Source AI" definition is (almost certainly by design) going to openwash the shit out of blatant large-scale theft, I expect it'll heavily tar the public image of open-source, especially when these "Open Source AIs" start getting sued for copyright infringement.

You did a damn good job spreading the Word of Ed.

The guy seems shrewd enough to know publicly supporting anything AI will shred his reputation - I suspect he might have been duped.

A pretty solid piece on how AI is closed-source by nature, and a solid takedown on the OSI's FOMO-fuelled dumpster fire of an Open Source AI definition.

I've also thought a bit about AI's relationship with open-source as well - to expand my views a bit, I view AI as having a hostile relationship with open source, stealing whatever it wants and damaging open-source projects when it quote-unquote "gives back", and I suspect that we will see a severe decline in the FOSS ecosystem because of it.

With AI bros treating "publicly available" to mean "theirs to steal" (sometimes openly saying it, oftentimes suggesting it with their actions) and more-or-less getting away with it for the past two years, people have been given plenty of reason to view FOSS licenses (Creative Commons, GPL, etcetera) as not worth the .txt files they're written in, and contributing to it as asking to have their code stolen.

The recently-released Stallman Report (which you mentioned) definitely isn't helping FOSS either - all the diversity initiatives and codes of conduct in the world can't protect against a PR nightmare on the magnitude of "your movement's unofficial face becomes the Jeffery Epstein of coding".

Baldur Bjarnason's also talked about open-source's rocky financial future - I'd recommend checking it out.

The thing is he seems careful to not mention that it is a gen ai product–he never says AI–rather a piece of software that helps making presentations.

The term "AI" damages sales when used in advertising - whatever script Boyle got was definitely written by people who knew that fact.

I also predicted something like this would happen (though within a very specific context) a while ago - seems my prediction's coming true.

This isn't the first time I've seen something like this, but its always nice to see someone actively piss all over AI in this manner.

A lawsuit that convinces the public and investors that LLMs are a dead end will kill most LLM companies.

To engage in some shameless self-promo, it'll probably destroy the concept of AI - the bubble's made "AI" synonymous with "LLMs and slop generators" in the public eye, so if LLMs get declared a dead end, AI as a whole will probably be written off alongside it.

Commander players are now freaking the hell out because they realized they’re absolutely next up on the shit-train to crapsville, but their response was to scream death threats to the one and only independent entity that could have made ANY sort of difference, resulting in said entity giving up and handing over full control to WotC.

Don't think I've seen a fandom self-destruct like this in a while.

Yeah.

Looking back at my quick-and-dirty thoughts about the suit, I feel like I handled it in a pretty detached way, focusing very little on the severe human cost that kicked off the suit and more on what it could entail for AI at large.