6 ms·

Trading quality for price has been happening everywhere for long enough that it is easy to see how unfortunately it will now play out in the arts as well. I mea

Trading quality for price has been happening everywhere for long enough that it is easy to see how unfortunately it will now play out in the arts as well. I mean, not that long ago all clothes you wore were custom made by a tailor, all the music you listened to was played live by musicians, all stories were brought to life in front of you by theatre actors: now all of those while still available are significantly more expensive and niche than the mechanized (production or reproduction) equivalents. ChatGPT, stable diffusion and I am sure upcoming music models will enable this mechanization in the arts, where great artists will be unaffected but making it nearly impossible for “good enough” artists to compete while also pushing up the floor of what is an acceptable competency level that merits being paid for making it more difficult for people to support themselves while improving their skills.

yamtaddle 4y ago
Yep. Recording and photography killed almost all the value (social and financial) of middling artistic talent in music, storytelling, and visual arts, which may well have been what gave a lot of people a significant part of their sense of self-worth before that—plus, maybe, some income. Now AI's coming for most of those who survived that first culling. And not just the middling-talent folks this time.
- Gare 4y ago
  Most people can't afford top talent to play live music at their wedding or photograph it.
  - apocalypstyx 4y ago
    I'm sort of sick of the top talent argument. My grandfather and group sang. From what tapes I have heard of them, they didn't sound worse than any other group of Appalachian gospel/blue grass singers. My parents' wedding photos weren't 'professional' and I think they came out pretty well, perhaps even charming. Sometimes I think people are putting too much stock in the notion of a 'perfect' life, rather than a lived one.
    - Gare 4y ago
      Exactly, that's my point. I'd rather listen to a "good enough" local band performing live than some "World's best" recorded performance.
      - fullstackchris 4y ago
        I mean the whole concept of "world's best" in terms of art doesn't even make sense. It rarely, if ever, makes sense in other areas or fields as well. (even sports, where it is is sometimes objective, records and acheivements are broken all the time again and again)
      - ipaddr 4y ago
        Most people wouldn't and millions of the cds are sold from the most popular bands (world best is subjective). When it comes to live most people would pay 10x times more to sit 100x further away to see world class vs a cover band playing the same music. This is going to push us back to making our own music like we use to. Singing/playing should be a fun group activity rather a performance given to a group of non performers. We are all artists.
- badcppdev 4y ago
  That's an interesting set of transition that I hadn't really comprehended. People used to be entertained by live performers in their local area. Printing, photography, radio, film, television, etc have all increased the availability and 'quality' of entertainment available at the same time as reducing the number of creators involved. (Obviously there is some debate possible around quality)
  - s1artibartfast 4y ago
    That kind of assumes people consumed the same amount of entertainment throughout history, which I don't think is correct. It also assumes that they were constrained to local creators. It is possible that people simply did other activities that don't involve a creator. Another possibility is that most people consumed content from a small set of non-local creators, like authors with wide distribution.
  - yamtaddle 4y ago
    It's Vonnegut's observation. He brings it up in a couple books or stories, IIRC, but like nearly all his themes or messages, it's included in Bluebeard. Being a half-competent folk musician or good storyteller or being able to sketch pretty well used to be super valuable to your family and community. Not so much anymore. Expressions of those sorts of skills are more often tolerated than genuinely looked-forward-to, now. The need is gone. People on this site complain about folks being consumers and not producers, not being creative—well, for a large swath of the arts, that's where it started. Recording and photography. Took it from something that was strongly socially encouraged & rewarded to something private. You can't fix that with "maker" movements—not in any major way. Technology changed the social context and wiped out the external motivation & encouragement for a bunch of kinds of creative expression that were accessible to & achievable by the masses. AI is more of the same.
- alcover 4y ago
  Still many people are delighted if you offer them a drawing you made specially for them or if someone handles his guitar and begins to play.
- vlunkr 4y ago
  On the other hand, this is a great opportunity for new artists to embrace AI and make a career out of it, instead of cowering in fear. There's a popular youtuber named Joel Haver who films videos, then uses an AI tool to convert them into animations, so they can be magically put into a space or fantasy setting. AI dungeon is an text adventure where the content is AI-generated. I also imagine tools similar to Github Co-pilot for other markets. Some AI could generate music or video games levels based on inputs from a user, then the user can take or modify the best bits. The goal hopefully being that they get something no human could have thought up, instead of just generating a bunch of mediocre content.
  - Cipater 4y ago
    >There's a popular youtuber named Joel Haver who films videos, then uses an AI tool to convert them into animations, so they can be magically put into a space or fantasy setting. Hang on, AI tool? Joel Haver converts every frame manually. His method is the literal opposite of using an AI tool. It's incredibly painstaking. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tq_KOmXyVDo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tq_KOmXyVDo
    - vlunkr 4y ago
      Uh no. Did you watch the video you posted in full? He uses software called “ebsynth”. He draws over a couple of frames in a scene and feeds the rest to the software, which attempts to match the style. It’s not perfect, which is why you see some weird glitches in the videos.
stavros 4y ago
> now all of those while still available are significantly more expensive and niche than the mechanized (production or reproduction) equivalents. No, they cost exactly as much as they always had. Before machines, people didn't have wardrobes full of tailor-made clothes. Each person had, give or take one, exactly as many tailor-made clothes as we have today.
- pdonis 4y ago
  > Each person had, give or take one, exactly as many tailor-made clothes as we have today. Many, perhaps most, people don't have any tailor made clothes because they can't afford a tailor. Which has indeed always been the case. But before machines, people who couldn't afford a tailor had no other option for clothes except homemade. Now, with machines, they do.
  - simonh 4y ago
    That’s exactly what stavros is is saying.
- gaterin 4y ago
  Supporting industries losing economies of scale drives up costs. If you have fewer tailors, local cloth suppliers become insolvent. This leads to the few tailors having to import cloth and increase prices.
  - stavros 4y ago
    That makes sense, thanks. I guess the high end becomes slightly more expensive, while the low end becomes massively cheaper.
    - jerf 4y ago
      Closely related to Baumol's cost disease: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol%27s_cost_disease https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol%27s_cost_disease If one option becomes many multiples cheaper, anything that can't also get that cheap will almost inevitably rise in expense as a result.
jerf 4y ago
Also have to consider the kicking of the ladder away. Nobody gets to excellent without passing through the lower stages. Hard to stay motivated if it'll be 5 years just to see if maybe you have something a computer can't offer. Not impossible, but definitely a raising of the bar.
- bolasanibk 4y ago
  This. How are people going to learn/become better if all the base work is being done by an AI. Reminds of the Empire in Asimov's Foundation where they knew just enough to keep the current tech running, but not enough to fix it if something major breaks or create new tech. When the AI breaks something, we will be missing the people who knew how all this s$%T works.
  - CatWChainsaw 4y ago
    The Machine Stops eventually.
- ipaddr 4y ago
  Reminds me of the guy who built his own os but took 17 years so the UI is terrible but a few years ago he finally finished. Someone will but that person isn't following a typical or even sane life and the results will be brilliant messes.
  - red-iron-pine 4y ago
    Yeah but Terry had manic-depression, schizophrenia, and possibly God, on his side.
    - ipaddr 4y ago
      Reminds me of many great musicians
  - twiss 4y ago
    For a somewhat more "normal" example, see https://serenityos.org/ https://serenityos.org/. Started by one person, though there are many other contributors now.
brickteacup 4y ago
> all the music you listened to was played live by musicians, all stories were brought to life in front of you by theatre actors well, no, you probably didn't listen to much music or see many stories at all because the average person couldn't afford to experience such things more than a few times in their life. shocking that Luddites are still a thing in the 21st century, especially here.
- wildgartopia 4y ago
  I think this misses the point that _everyone_ used to sing and tell stories. What do you all think families did in the winter around a fire? Where do "folk tales" come from? It's as if you think joy in sharing stories and music is restricted to a monetary transaction. Sure, some people were better story tellers than others, or more beautiful singers than others, but that gave reason for communities to exist, to share food and company; not for money, but because once you have shelter and food, what more than that do you really need? And also, without community, can you even have shelter and food? The vast majority of humans that have lived, let's say since spoken language developed, have shared stories and music as a gift. It wasn't until very recently (relatively) that sharing these things became transactional. Sorry that was a ramble, please take no offense.
- ghaff 4y ago
  I think you'd be surprised at the degree to which the "little people" did experience live entertainment before the advent of mass market recordings. Festivals, traveling troubadours, other traveling performers...
  - NoGravitas 4y ago
    Yeah, I guess all those groundlings standing around eating oranges and laughing at the dirty jokes at the Globe Theater in Shakespeare's day just didn't exist in this guy's universe.
- leadingthenet 4y ago
  > more than a few times in their life Whereas now we have the complete opposite problem, we're inundated by (much) lesser variants of these things to the point of saturation, addiction, and emotional depletion. I'm not sure either one of the extremes is particularly desirable, nor how acknowledging issues that mass-market consumerist societies currently visibly suffer from makes one a Luddite.
pdonis 4y ago
> Trading quality for price Means that many, many more people can have something of passable quality. For example: > not that long ago all clothes you wore were custom made by a tailor If you could afford a tailor; otherwise you had to make do with homemade rags that constantly needed mending and looked terrible. > all the music you listened to was played live by musicians If you could afford to go to concerts. > all stories were brought to life in front of you by theatre actors If you could afford to go to the theatre. > now all of those while still available are significantly more expensive and niche than the mechanized (production or reproduction) equivalents Which the vast majority of people can afford, and which significantly improves their quality of life. Now they can buy clothes at Walmart or Target instead of having to wear homemade; sure, not the same as a custom tailored suit, but good enough. Now they can buy digital recordings of world class musicians and theatre actors for much, much less than it would cost to see them live. > ChatGPT, stable diffusion and I am sure upcoming music models will enable this mechanization in the arts That already happened decades ago, as soon as mass produced recordings became widely available. It's already next to impossible for any artist who isn't world class (or, more precisely, is not publicized so that people think they're world class) to make a living at their art. ChatGPT and the equivalent in other arts aren't going to affect that much.
- analog31 4y ago
  Society was awash in music for centuries before recording and radio.
  - mixedCase 4y ago
    If by "awash" you mean "significantly less present in regular people's life by orders of magnitude", then yes. Not to mention the degree of control over what music is actually being played.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - mantas 4y ago
namdnay 4y ago
I’m not sure tailored clothes have become more expensive at all. You can have a tailored suit for what, a couple of thousand? So 1-2 months of the average wage? That’s peanuts historically

yamtaddle 4y ago

Yep. Recording and photography killed almost all the value (social and financial) of middling artistic talent in music, storytelling, and visual arts, which may well have been what gave a lot of people a significant part of their sense of self-worth before that—plus, maybe, some income. Now AI's coming for most of those who survived that first culling. And not just the middling-talent folks this time.

Gare 4y ago
Most people can't afford top talent to play live music at their wedding or photograph it.
- apocalypstyx 4y ago
  I'm sort of sick of the top talent argument. My grandfather and group sang. From what tapes I have heard of them, they didn't sound worse than any other group of Appalachian gospel/blue grass singers. My parents' wedding photos weren't 'professional' and I think they came out pretty well, perhaps even charming. Sometimes I think people are putting too much stock in the notion of a 'perfect' life, rather than a lived one.
  - Gare 4y ago
    Exactly, that's my point. I'd rather listen to a "good enough" local band performing live than some "World's best" recorded performance.
    - fullstackchris 4y ago
      I mean the whole concept of "world's best" in terms of art doesn't even make sense. It rarely, if ever, makes sense in other areas or fields as well. (even sports, where it is is sometimes objective, records and acheivements are broken all the time again and again)
    - ipaddr 4y ago
      Most people wouldn't and millions of the cds are sold from the most popular bands (world best is subjective). When it comes to live most people would pay 10x times more to sit 100x further away to see world class vs a cover band playing the same music. This is going to push us back to making our own music like we use to. Singing/playing should be a fun group activity rather a performance given to a group of non performers. We are all artists.
badcppdev 4y ago
That's an interesting set of transition that I hadn't really comprehended. People used to be entertained by live performers in their local area. Printing, photography, radio, film, television, etc have all increased the availability and 'quality' of entertainment available at the same time as reducing the number of creators involved. (Obviously there is some debate possible around quality)
- s1artibartfast 4y ago
  That kind of assumes people consumed the same amount of entertainment throughout history, which I don't think is correct. It also assumes that they were constrained to local creators. It is possible that people simply did other activities that don't involve a creator. Another possibility is that most people consumed content from a small set of non-local creators, like authors with wide distribution.
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  It's Vonnegut's observation. He brings it up in a couple books or stories, IIRC, but like nearly all his themes or messages, it's included in Bluebeard. Being a half-competent folk musician or good storyteller or being able to sketch pretty well used to be super valuable to your family and community. Not so much anymore. Expressions of those sorts of skills are more often tolerated than genuinely looked-forward-to, now. The need is gone. People on this site complain about folks being consumers and not producers, not being creative—well, for a large swath of the arts, that's where it started. Recording and photography. Took it from something that was strongly socially encouraged & rewarded to something private. You can't fix that with "maker" movements—not in any major way. Technology changed the social context and wiped out the external motivation & encouragement for a bunch of kinds of creative expression that were accessible to & achievable by the masses. AI is more of the same.
alcover 4y ago
Still many people are delighted if you offer them a drawing you made specially for them or if someone handles his guitar and begins to play.
vlunkr 4y ago
On the other hand, this is a great opportunity for new artists to embrace AI and make a career out of it, instead of cowering in fear. There's a popular youtuber named Joel Haver who films videos, then uses an AI tool to convert them into animations, so they can be magically put into a space or fantasy setting. AI dungeon is an text adventure where the content is AI-generated. I also imagine tools similar to Github Co-pilot for other markets. Some AI could generate music or video games levels based on inputs from a user, then the user can take or modify the best bits. The goal hopefully being that they get something no human could have thought up, instead of just generating a bunch of mediocre content.
- Cipater 4y ago
  >There's a popular youtuber named Joel Haver who films videos, then uses an AI tool to convert them into animations, so they can be magically put into a space or fantasy setting. Hang on, AI tool? Joel Haver converts every frame manually. His method is the literal opposite of using an AI tool. It's incredibly painstaking. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tq_KOmXyVDo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tq_KOmXyVDo
  - vlunkr 4y ago
    Uh no. Did you watch the video you posted in full? He uses software called “ebsynth”. He draws over a couple of frames in a scene and feeds the rest to the software, which attempts to match the style. It’s not perfect, which is why you see some weird glitches in the videos.

stavros 4y ago

> now all of those while still available are significantly more expensive and niche than the mechanized (production or reproduction) equivalents. No, they cost exactly as much as they always had. Before machines, people didn't have wardrobes full of tailor-made clothes. Each person had, give or take one, exactly as many tailor-made clothes as we have today.

pdonis 4y ago
> Each person had, give or take one, exactly as many tailor-made clothes as we have today. Many, perhaps most, people don't have any tailor made clothes because they can't afford a tailor. Which has indeed always been the case. But before machines, people who couldn't afford a tailor had no other option for clothes except homemade. Now, with machines, they do.
- simonh 4y ago
  That’s exactly what stavros is is saying.
gaterin 4y ago
Supporting industries losing economies of scale drives up costs. If you have fewer tailors, local cloth suppliers become insolvent. This leads to the few tailors having to import cloth and increase prices.
- stavros 4y ago
  That makes sense, thanks. I guess the high end becomes slightly more expensive, while the low end becomes massively cheaper.
  - jerf 4y ago
    Closely related to Baumol's cost disease: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol%27s_cost_disease https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol%27s_cost_disease If one option becomes many multiples cheaper, anything that can't also get that cheap will almost inevitably rise in expense as a result.

jerf 4y ago

Also have to consider the kicking of the ladder away. Nobody gets to excellent without passing through the lower stages. Hard to stay motivated if it'll be 5 years just to see if maybe you have something a computer can't offer. Not impossible, but definitely a raising of the bar.

bolasanibk 4y ago
This. How are people going to learn/become better if all the base work is being done by an AI. Reminds of the Empire in Asimov's Foundation where they knew just enough to keep the current tech running, but not enough to fix it if something major breaks or create new tech. When the AI breaks something, we will be missing the people who knew how all this s$%T works.
- CatWChainsaw 4y ago
  The Machine Stops eventually.
ipaddr 4y ago
Reminds me of the guy who built his own os but took 17 years so the UI is terrible but a few years ago he finally finished. Someone will but that person isn't following a typical or even sane life and the results will be brilliant messes.
- red-iron-pine 4y ago
  Yeah but Terry had manic-depression, schizophrenia, and possibly God, on his side.
  - ipaddr 4y ago
    Reminds me of many great musicians
- twiss 4y ago
  For a somewhat more "normal" example, see https://serenityos.org/ https://serenityos.org/. Started by one person, though there are many other contributors now.

brickteacup 4y ago

> all the music you listened to was played live by musicians, all stories were brought to life in front of you by theatre actors well, no, you probably didn't listen to much music or see many stories at all because the average person couldn't afford to experience such things more than a few times in their life. shocking that Luddites are still a thing in the 21st century, especially here.

wildgartopia 4y ago
I think this misses the point that _everyone_ used to sing and tell stories. What do you all think families did in the winter around a fire? Where do "folk tales" come from? It's as if you think joy in sharing stories and music is restricted to a monetary transaction. Sure, some people were better story tellers than others, or more beautiful singers than others, but that gave reason for communities to exist, to share food and company; not for money, but because once you have shelter and food, what more than that do you really need? And also, without community, can you even have shelter and food? The vast majority of humans that have lived, let's say since spoken language developed, have shared stories and music as a gift. It wasn't until very recently (relatively) that sharing these things became transactional. Sorry that was a ramble, please take no offense.
ghaff 4y ago
I think you'd be surprised at the degree to which the "little people" did experience live entertainment before the advent of mass market recordings. Festivals, traveling troubadours, other traveling performers...
- NoGravitas 4y ago
  Yeah, I guess all those groundlings standing around eating oranges and laughing at the dirty jokes at the Globe Theater in Shakespeare's day just didn't exist in this guy's universe.
leadingthenet 4y ago
> more than a few times in their life Whereas now we have the complete opposite problem, we're inundated by (much) lesser variants of these things to the point of saturation, addiction, and emotional depletion. I'm not sure either one of the extremes is particularly desirable, nor how acknowledging issues that mass-market consumerist societies currently visibly suffer from makes one a Luddite.

pdonis 4y ago

> Trading quality for price Means that many, many more people can have something of passable quality. For example: > not that long ago all clothes you wore were custom made by a tailor If you could afford a tailor; otherwise you had to make do with homemade rags that constantly needed mending and looked terrible. > all the music you listened to was played live by musicians If you could afford to go to concerts. > all stories were brought to life in front of you by theatre actors If you could afford to go to the theatre. > now all of those while still available are significantly more expensive and niche than the mechanized (production or reproduction) equivalents Which the vast majority of people can afford, and which significantly improves their quality of life. Now they can buy clothes at Walmart or Target instead of having to wear homemade; sure, not the same as a custom tailored suit, but good enough. Now they can buy digital recordings of world class musicians and theatre actors for much, much less than it would cost to see them live. > ChatGPT, stable diffusion and I am sure upcoming music models will enable this mechanization in the arts That already happened decades ago, as soon as mass produced recordings became widely available. It's already next to impossible for any artist who isn't world class (or, more precisely, is not publicized so that people think they're world class) to make a living at their art. ChatGPT and the equivalent in other arts aren't going to affect that much.

analog31 4y ago
Society was awash in music for centuries before recording and radio.
- mixedCase 4y ago
  If by "awash" you mean "significantly less present in regular people's life by orders of magnitude", then yes. Not to mention the degree of control over what music is actually being played.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - mantas 4y ago

namdnay 4y ago

I’m not sure tailored clothes have become more expensive at all. You can have a tailored suit for what, a couple of thousand? So 1-2 months of the average wage? That’s peanuts historically