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Top-level
 The only reason bosses want to buy robots is to fire humans and lower their costs. That's why "AI art" is such a pisser. There are plenty of harmless ways to automate art production with software - everything from a "healing brush" in Photoshop to deepfake tools that let a video-editor alter the eye-lines of all the extras in a scene to shift the focus. 25/ 6 comments
They're pitching a world where the robots get to do all the creative stuff (badly) and humans have to work at robotic pace, with robotic vigilance, in order to catch the mistakes that the robots make at superhuman speed. Reverse centaurism is *brutal*. That's not news: Charlie Chaplin documented the problems of reverse centaurs nearly 100 years ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_Times_(film) 27/ As ever, the problem with a gadget isn't what it does: it's who it does it *for* and who it does it *to*. There are plenty of benefits from being a centaur - lots of ways that automation can help workers. But the only path to AI profitability lies in *reverse* centaurs, automation that turns the human in the loop into the crumple-zone for a robot: https://estsjournal.org/index.php/ests/article/view/260 28/ I'm touring my new, nationally bestselling novel *The Bezzle*! Catch me in Boston with Randall "XKCD" Munroe (Apr 11), then Providence (Apr 12) and beyond! https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/16/narrative-capitalism/#bezzle-tour eof/ @pluralistic Adding this to my list of perfect turns of phrase that also fucking suck.  |
Gregory's Server
A graphic novelist who models a room in The Sims and then moves the camera around to get traceable geometry for different angles is a centaur - they are genuinely offloading some finicky drudgework onto a robot that is perfectly attentive and vigilant.
But the pitch from "AI art" companies is "fire your graphic artists and replace them with botshit."
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