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I have to admit that I did not see it coming. Ignorant of AI's capabilities, I always imagined it to automate away our boring, mechanical, repetitive stuff. Whi

by fleddr 4y ago

I have to admit that I did not see it coming. Ignorant of AI's capabilities, I always imagined it to automate away our boring, mechanical, repetitive stuff. Which in some hopeful utopian scenario would mean that we could focus on the humanities: family, health/sports, culture and anything creative. For AI to come for art, at the very core of our humanity (the oldest cave painting is 64K y/o) is quite the confrontation indeed. One that will rapidly escalate more broadly (poetry/writing, photography, cinema, music) and more deeply. The amount of AI art will explode, in turn serving as input for even more AI art. The speed at which this will happen suggests to me we need to be far more alarmist in coming up with answers to many questions. Philosophical, legal, socio-economical, etc. I really think the attitude "I'm not an artist so this will only benefit me" is shortsighted, and I'm saying that as a non-artist myself. It's like we're at the beginning of a very short and steep exponential curve of total disruption.

ramoz 4y ago
> The amount of AI art will explode, in turn serving as input for even more AI art ... The speed at which this will happen suggests to me we need to be far more alarmist in coming up with answers to many questions ... I agree. I don't want to live in a AI-hamster-wheel future. Human creativity is driven by emotion, curiosity, intuition... etc. AI creativity is basically an advanced form of copy-paste/blend using context -- all of which is learned from human content. We should be working harder to empower human-creativity... which is an argument AI artists often make in favor of generative creativity... however this narrative falters when money gets cheap and automation disrupts whatever economies exist for creatives (esp writers and artists).
- trention 4y ago
  Brynjolfsson and McAfee made a simular argument a decade ago - we will use automation to replace rather than augment human labor, the result being a local optimum far from the global one (that's in terms of results, the dystopian disempowerment of humanity is another story.
LampDrewNear 4y ago
This is how I feel as well. I'm a software engineer by trade, but I'm really much more interested in writing music and stories. I always imagined myself retiring the day I have saved up enough money so I could focus on art and creativity. My life certainly has felt much less meaningful since I saw what DALL-E 2 can produce. And my main concern is not that of professional artists' financial situations. I'm mainly worried about how the massive influx of computer-generated content will inflate away the meaning of human-created art. And I'm afraid that when art becomes so good and so customized to each individual consumer, we won't have much common culture left. I think this Penny Arcade strip well puts into words how I feel: https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2022/06/06/dalliance https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2022/06/06/dalliance In a way, I'm so mad at my fellow engineers. There's so much good we could do, is really killing the creative arts the right thing to do? And I don't believe for one second this talk about AI just being a tool, and prompt-engineering being a new craft for artists to learn. I think this kind of interface will quickly go away, and soon enough AI apps will look much more similar to TikTok or YouTube than they do today.
- fleddr 4y ago
  We seem to have some things in common. I'm also a software engineer with a creative hobby: wildlife photography. In that space, there's already a kind of abundance problem. It's saturated. So even in the case of a "hit piece", the appreciation lasts about a few hours. A bunch of likes and some shallow comments. That's it. If I were to base my meaning on that, I'd say it has no meaning. That's why I find meaning in my deep love for my subjects, as well as the process of photography itself. I decouple external validation from my intrinsic motivation. Few photographers do this, they crave the attention, which is why they're restless and miserable. They would surely feel even worse in an AI world where current saturation levels will do a 1000x. The above you can probably apply to lots of other creative endeavors. For example, creative writing on a blog. You already can't get noticed today, imagine the avalanche of AI writing making this problem exponentially worse. So we will have little shared meaning, at best personal meaning, but only for the strongly intrinsically motivated, the rest may stop altogether. On top of that, the new "creators" will also experience little meaning. You can generate the most beautiful piece of AI art, but can't seriously claim: I made that.
nitwit005 4y ago
> I always imagined it to automate away our boring, mechanical, repetitive stuff Which includes most art produced. Do a google image search for something stock-photo-y like "man in business suit kicking". You'll find a staggering number of photographs and cartoons designed to be used in power point slides. If you play around, you'll find any variation of "man in business suit" paired with an action will produce similar results. People were paid to make all of those, but it's so repetitive that it's not hard to see how an AI could find the pattern.
- fleddr 4y ago
  I get what you're saying, but that would be the bottom tier of the creative industry, which is just one portion of the whole.

by fleddr 4y ago

ramoz 4y ago

> The amount of AI art will explode, in turn serving as input for even more AI art ... The speed at which this will happen suggests to me we need to be far more alarmist in coming up with answers to many questions ... I agree. I don't want to live in a AI-hamster-wheel future. Human creativity is driven by emotion, curiosity, intuition... etc. AI creativity is basically an advanced form of copy-paste/blend using context -- all of which is learned from human content. We should be working harder to empower human-creativity... which is an argument AI artists often make in favor of generative creativity... however this narrative falters when money gets cheap and automation disrupts whatever economies exist for creatives (esp writers and artists).

trention 4y ago
Brynjolfsson and McAfee made a simular argument a decade ago - we will use automation to replace rather than augment human labor, the result being a local optimum far from the global one (that's in terms of results, the dystopian disempowerment of humanity is another story.

LampDrewNear 4y ago

This is how I feel as well. I'm a software engineer by trade, but I'm really much more interested in writing music and stories. I always imagined myself retiring the day I have saved up enough money so I could focus on art and creativity. My life certainly has felt much less meaningful since I saw what DALL-E 2 can produce. And my main concern is not that of professional artists' financial situations. I'm mainly worried about how the massive influx of computer-generated content will inflate away the meaning of human-created art. And I'm afraid that when art becomes so good and so customized to each individual consumer, we won't have much common culture left. I think this Penny Arcade strip well puts into words how I feel: https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2022/06/06/dalliance https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2022/06/06/dalliance In a way, I'm so mad at my fellow engineers. There's so much good we could do, is really killing the creative arts the right thing to do? And I don't believe for one second this talk about AI just being a tool, and prompt-engineering being a new craft for artists to learn. I think this kind of interface will quickly go away, and soon enough AI apps will look much more similar to TikTok or YouTube than they do today.

fleddr 4y ago
We seem to have some things in common. I'm also a software engineer with a creative hobby: wildlife photography. In that space, there's already a kind of abundance problem. It's saturated. So even in the case of a "hit piece", the appreciation lasts about a few hours. A bunch of likes and some shallow comments. That's it. If I were to base my meaning on that, I'd say it has no meaning. That's why I find meaning in my deep love for my subjects, as well as the process of photography itself. I decouple external validation from my intrinsic motivation. Few photographers do this, they crave the attention, which is why they're restless and miserable. They would surely feel even worse in an AI world where current saturation levels will do a 1000x. The above you can probably apply to lots of other creative endeavors. For example, creative writing on a blog. You already can't get noticed today, imagine the avalanche of AI writing making this problem exponentially worse. So we will have little shared meaning, at best personal meaning, but only for the strongly intrinsically motivated, the rest may stop altogether. On top of that, the new "creators" will also experience little meaning. You can generate the most beautiful piece of AI art, but can't seriously claim: I made that.

nitwit005 4y ago

> I always imagined it to automate away our boring, mechanical, repetitive stuff Which includes most art produced. Do a google image search for something stock-photo-y like "man in business suit kicking". You'll find a staggering number of photographs and cartoons designed to be used in power point slides. If you play around, you'll find any variation of "man in business suit" paired with an action will produce similar results. People were paid to make all of those, but it's so repetitive that it's not hard to see how an AI could find the pattern.

fleddr 4y ago
I get what you're saying, but that would be the bottom tier of the creative industry, which is just one portion of the whole.