19 ms·

A quote I heard recently that really resonated with me: "Soon, asking a writer if they use AI will be like asking a photographer if they use Photoshop" – e.g.,

A quote I heard recently that really resonated with me: "Soon, asking a writer if they use AI will be like asking a photographer if they use Photoshop" – e.g., it's a foregone conclusion, and the best artists will generally adapt to using the best tools available

echelon 4y ago
Art will continue to evolve with AI. Another argument I keep hearing (most recently from pg), is that we'll always need non-AI training data. That, too, doesn't follow. Training new models on synthetic data does not mean we get stuck in a particular mode or style. We'll continue moving, improving, and trying wildly new things. Bootstrapping with synthetic data doesn't block evolution - it enables faster evolution, even. (I'm using synthetic data to train new models to great effect.) People are angry that we've lowered the opportunity cost barriers and so they're expressing their frustration. It's a good thing that life's choices no longer fence us in as much. Everyone should get a chance to learn how to express themselves through art with the new regime of tools. Despite changing economics, there will still be a top 1% that do better than the rest of us.
- can16358p 4y ago
  I think the same. Many artists hate because they feel threatened. I think the opposite: creating art (e.g. Drawing) was only for the ones who had drawing skills. Now, it's being democratized and everyone, regardless of being talented in drawing or not, can freely express their feelings and creativity. I think it's a great thing.
  - Riverheart 4y ago
    Hard disagree. Most people can draw if they put in the time but they don't. Artists did and bet their careers on it but now their effort is being trivialized by people who want a bot to "draw the owl". This is all explained well by "Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain". People apply their childhood drawing symbols to realistic art in their teenage years and get frustrated. They never learn to see with an artistic eye and quit.
    - bluefirebrand 4y ago
      I used to think I was not "talented" at drawing until a girl I was dating gave me that book to read. I was skeptical at first but after going through a couple of the drawing exercises I was convinced. They are so cleverly constructed to make you step outside of your normal brain and just draw, it's kind of amazing the results. I'm never going to be an artist professionally but I do actually draw as a pastime now and I have improved substantially. I think if I had practiced more as a kid and teen I may have pursued art professionally. Part of the problem is that adults see a kid upset that their drawing isn't very good and say things like "That's ok, you're just not an artist. Not everyone can draw" and people internalize that. It's supposed to make the kid feel better and it might cheer them up in the moment, but it also convinces them that they cannot learn to be better at things they are not immediately good at. Toxic Feel-Good shit.
  - 52-6F-62 4y ago
    Art is already the most democratically available act. Anyone can learn the skills involved. Its not a select few. It’s about expressing and finding yourself and developing a soul through creative action, not just a squirting out a picture that looks “correct”. You only shortchange your own soul’s development by trying to skip the hard steps that it takes to develop a skill like that. Because you can make an image on a computer that looks like it was drawn does not mean you can draw. Hell, I’m not even sure it means you can express yourself. The inputs you contribute when using an AI prompt are so minimal compared to the informational input required to create something in the physical space. Don’t let anyone convince you that it’s an exclusive act. Find a pencil and get at it.
    - Kim_Bruning 4y ago
      I disagree on the "entering a prompt" part. By a lot. I've been managing to get myself lost (and somewhat unlost) in latent space. Let me tell you, a latent space can be a big place all by itself, even if you stick to 1 seed. Ultimately though, I realize that trying to get everything what you want from a single prompt won't work. Tokens have implications, and they influence each other too much. Long term, one needs more than just single prompts, and the tools are still evolving to support that. Still, you'd be surprised at how much you can express even now.
      - 52-6F-62 4y ago
        I don't think I would be surprised. You're just removing your own inherent and vast set of input and modelling parameters from the equation and offloading it to a more rigid model. You're already the most complex model and model-maker—the procedure of developing a skill through a creative feedback loop and its output can be vastly more edifying for yourself and others. Don't take my word for it. You can only know by doing it. These models have their place as useful tools, but are in no way a replacement for the experience of creating and all its challenges. You can't climb a mountain by paying someone else to do it for you. That analogy begs the question—what is the true value in climbing a mountain? What is the value in creating?
        4y ago
  - cmoski 4y ago
    The problem you've identified is that using a skill is available only to those who have bothered to hone the skill. Why should we have to bother learning something? It's simply not fair. If I want to be an artist I shouldn't have to practise or educate myself. The simple desire to be an artist should be enough! Note: I don't really care if people use AI to generate anything but they should be forthright about doing so.
    - dwringer 4y ago
      > If I want to be an artist I shouldn't have to practise or educate myself. The simple desire to be an artist should be enough! IMHO this is absolutely the case, and has always been the case. Being paid as an artist, on the other hand, is something entirely different, or having one's art recognized as good by other people. But I am sure everyone remembers other more popular artists telling them they're "doing it wrong" in art class, on forums, or even all the way back to preschool coloring books if someone would deign to color outside the lines. There have always been those who seek to gatekeep what art is and who they view as legitimate participants in it. I suppose everyone does in some sense. But I am very excited by the prospect of art as a personal developmental journey becoming more open to everyone.
    - dinkumthinkum 4y ago
      It’s not fair? It’s not fair that should need to learn something? This is really a sad state. HN seems to be becoming a pretty sad group.
      - cmoski 4y ago
        It was said mockingly.
  - DrewADesign 4y ago
    In the US, your livelihood essentially justifies your existence. Disdainfully reducing someone to being a 'hater' when they react to that being threatened is exactly the reason many, if not most people find SV culture disgusting. They're not wrong. Beyond that, if you think AI algorithms will replace art, you don't understand art. It replaces much of the commercial utility of many artists and creating many types of images, but the idea that it threatens art, generally, is preposterous. People who think art school is only about learning to physically make art are like people who think computer science degrees are only about coding. Most of what you learn in art school is conceptual thinking, communication, really deeply seeing things in a way that most people don't, and stuff like that. Factories didn't replace potters when they started making pots and dishes or sculptors when they started making cheap home decorations-- it just meant the artisans no longer made money creating a commodity because most people were satisfied buying chintzy shit cheap. Many potters who lived through that change probably died in poverty because of it. Talk big numbers about the way industry shifts all you want, but not everybody can switch to an entirely different category of employment just because someone taught a computer to do it.
  - bluefirebrand 4y ago
    > I think the opposite: creating art (e.g. Drawing) was only for the ones who had drawing skills. Now, it's being democratized and everyone, regardless of being talented in drawing or not, can freely express their feelings and creativity. There was never anything stopping anyone from picking up a pencil and learning to draw. The idea there's some inborn "talent" for art is absurd. There is only people who practice and people who don't. What you are actually "democratizing" is the ability to produce finished products without ever putting in any kind of work. Which means you are absolutely devaluing the people who actually did put in the work. It is a terrible thing. A miserable race to the bottom of human expression.
    - AgentME 4y ago
      People used to have to learn HTML and about web hosting to be able to publish text on the internet for others to read. There was never anything stopping people from putting in the effort to do this. All that website builders, social media sites, and forums like HN do is allow people to accomplish this without putting in any kind of work. It's a terrible thing that's caused a race to the bottom in the web, reducing the variety and quality level of most people's browsing experiences.
      - bluefirebrand 4y ago
        I think you're probably trying to use this as a reframing of my logic to show that I am being absurd Jokes on you, I agree with everything you just said, fully unironically The web is way worse where people have to put zero effort into uploading their content The best places on the web are the places where people have crafted the page they want.
      - dinkumthinkum 4y ago
        I feel like you are trying to make an analogy and show the parents position as absurd but I think what you have said here is probably literally true. That said, there is a big difference from tools that reduce friction to do a task to those that eliminate the need to do the task.
  - rchaud 4y ago
    > I think the opposite: creating art (e.g. Drawing) was only for the ones who had drawing skills. Now, it's being democratized and everyone Drawing was for anybody who put in the work. You may as well say football wasn't democratized until the release of FIFA International Soccer in '94.
    - dinkumthinkum 4y ago
      I think people on HN would say a video game like that is ableist for those that take the time to learn how to play it. What they want is an AI to play it for them.
- erganemic 4y ago
  People aren't angry/worried because they don't have a competitive advantage any more--people are angry/worried because they sense (I think correctly!) that AI will eliminate the part of their work that they find enjoyable. Artists, by and large, don't do art because they enjoy having art--they do art because they like /the process/ of producing art. If that process can be done faster and better by AI, then yeah, sure, they /might/ be able to still do art for a living (some artists will be able to leverage their experience to maintain an advantage; other, less flexible ones will lose work)--but the work they do will likely not be commensurate to the work they were doing before, and will likely be less enjoyable to them. The thing that worries people about AI is that it'll make all creatives into middle-managers.
  - VLM 4y ago
    To me, creative fine woodworking is making a cool idea based on the world around me and experiences I've had that balances engineering needs with artistic form. Then I spend 95% of my hobby time tediously sanding boards and applying finish and this is NOT the fun part of my hobby. I will say the only time I've gotten compensation directly as been for the latter because nobody likes doing that stuff. I'd say AI will make creatives into micromanaging middle managers, the type that gets way too involved in a critique of your every decision is still going to micromanage, they'll just be harassing an AI instead of humans. Fundamentally the creative act of making book cover art has always been specification. You can say to an artist "make me a book cover looking like ..." or you can hire a guy and give him no direction and trust him to decide what to do. But the creative act was the specifying, not the mechanics of turning that idea into printing ready art. Another problem you run into is AI is as currently produced, a groupthink enforcement technology, and most people will be turned off by that. The blandest least offensive corporate dining experience is likely McDonalds. How much do hipster foodies prefer going to McDonalds over ... anywhere else on the planet? AI can only create the ideal big mac, and you can make money shipping big macs, but only selling to poor people, everyone else wants something else, even if in a strict corporate inhuman sense its inferior in every way to a big mac.
- brucethemoose2 4y ago
  Training ESRGAN, I quickly learned that AI sniffs artifacts humans can't see. And I got particularly funky results training a model on selected previous generation upscales. Hence I disagree. Even of the training data curators are perfect, there is a risk of "model inbreeding." And the curators are not perfect. In fact, they seem to prioritize (by necessity) volume and speed over quality and curation when training these LLMs and diffusion models.
- dinkumthinkum 4y ago
  I’m not sure what the last line says. Doesn’t the top 99% do better than the rest? I think you are making the common HN argument that it is “ableist” to think doing art should require any kind of skill or something. I don’t really agree that the AI is so good but let’s say it is, if that’s the case why do you think anyone will afford a computer to use the AI or even a house in which to type or say all these magic prompts?
julienreszka 4y ago
Cortes vs the Aztecs
- sho_hn 4y ago
  Aside: "1491" is an informative book that might dispense with that particular metaphor.
throwaway33381 4y ago
No, using AI to write is basically having it do everything for you. It's not a tool it's a replacement. In the years to come several hundreds of thousands of jobs will begin to disappear from copywriters to fiction and non fiction writers. Replaced by roles such as marketers to historians. It's not photoshop for photographers is just going to push the vast majority of people wanting to pursue these fields out of the market.
- galleywest200 4y ago
  Using it to write vs. using it to help you are two very different things. For example: sometimes I will pass a paragraph through an LLM and ask it to return it in a more "active voice". Then I _manually_ edit my original paragraph, if I wish, to make it seem more suitable for my current goals. This is sort of like Photoshop for photographers.
  - throwaway33381 4y ago
    On the other note, online submissions for publishers will be retroactively filled with spam due to the ease and ability to publish and submit content. It already happened with Clarke's World. The end is coming not a revolution. Just the end.
- brookst 4y ago
  I think nearly everything you said is likely wrong. AI doesn’t “do everything for you” any more than word processors, music sequencers, or CAD does. AI allows people to operate at higher levels of abstraction, is all. Yes, fewer people will type repetitive copy in to word processors. But that’s fine. You are mistaking activity for productivity. Few people go into writing because they enjoy typing. AI offers leverage, which is the most amazing thing for anyone interested in producing work. Ask any professional writer: revisions are a chore. Authors often say a novel is 10% writing, 90% rewriting, and they don’t enjoy the rewriting part. So, IMO, contrary to your doomer take, I think we will see more people producing better work because they can focus on the parts they love and not do the grind that was only ever a necessary evil. (The exception being those who love the grind and not the product)
mjr00 4y ago
Exactly, it's a tool. The skill floor, as in the minimum amount of skill to produce something passable, has been lowered -- dramatically lowered -- but the skill ceiling is now higher than ever as a result. It's similar to music. DAWs and samples didn't kill off music; instead, it made it easier than ever for a teenager with a computer and a passing interest in music to create a song and share it with a world. As a consequence, though, the standards for mixing and mastering have gone up massively; people don't really tolerate bedroom recordings with $10 mics any more. I imagine most amateur musicians in the 90s didn't know what a compressor actually did (I certainly didn't). Seeing the results of talented artists who are experimenting with AI[0] makes you realize that there's still going to be a massive gulf between skilled artists using SD etc as a tool, versus those who think they can be artists just by putting keywords into an image generation AI and calling it a day. [0] https://twitter.com/jamm3rd/status/1619896080619159553 https://twitter.com/jamm3rd/status/1619896080619159553 https://twitter.com/jamm3rd/status/1633758455952703488/photo/1 https://twitter.com/jamm3rd/status/1633758455952703488/photo... (moderately nsfw I guess)
- chii 4y ago
  > the skill ceiling is now higher than ever as a result the fear from the current professionals is that the new ai raised floor is good enough to be usable commercially, and thus, cut a chunk of economic value from the professionals. There is no fear that AI stops people with the intrinsic interest in creation to stop creating - their ceiling and productivity would sky-rocket as a result in fact. And it would be _these_ productions that wow an audience.
  - randcraw 4y ago
    Not if creators are paid nothing for their work. I think inescapably, the profession of writing is about to take a big hit from GPT-X, with the few remaining journalists paid considerably less than before. There will be an exodus of talent, leaving... Microsoft and Google to write our news for us?
    - zirgs 4y ago
_the_inflator 4y ago
Exactly, but the implication is different for me. I dislike all the filters and think this is the weirdest thing ever, to blur oneself on photos. People, who heavily use blurring to mask their wrinkles, produce - in my opinion - photos that look like grimaces. I find the pictures as well as the people using filters somewhat scary, because what happens if you meet them face to face? Use something like Google Glasses and real time filtering? For literature, it could be interesting, how authors use new tools, where and in what sense. Maybe have more conclusive plots? Less inconsistencies? Have AI imitate dead poets' style? We will value the classics more I guess, since they were done the old fashioned way.
ape4 4y ago
In a novel-writing application - you write the first paragraph and the AI can finish the chapter.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
chongli 4y ago
I feel a better comparison is like asking a painter if they use a camera. At some point we just say “you’re not a painter anymore, you’re a photographer.”
Sol- 4y ago
But then the AI is the writer and you're just an editor or curator. So perhaps don't call yourself a writer if the AI produced a significant amount of the content. Same goes for Stable Diffusion/Midjourney prompters who shouldn't really call themselves artists. (Things would of course change if they do significant postprocessing of the output, though I'd still think this is much easier than coming up with something novel on the spot.) Of course, it's not my place to say who should or shouldn't call themselves a writer, but I'll simply personally respect someone more if their stories aren't ghostwritten by the AI.
- zirgs 4y ago
  Are Pollock or Malevich real artists? Their work doesn't require great technical skill.
totetsu 4y ago
Feeling pretty stupid for all the time I invested in pinhole photography and darkrooms, 20ish years after photoshop was released, about now. Guess the best artist all have $5000 to spare for a MBP and monthly creative cloud subscriptions too…
jhanschoo 4y ago
I don't think an AI can do traditional art anytime soon :) robotics don't have the dexterity of human hands (yet), not at the cost of human artists
jaqalopes 4y ago
The "writers" who can benefit from AI are not artists. They might be bloggers or journalists or researchers. But there is no way that a generative AI can produce, say, your memoir for you. How could it? You have to say what happened. Your life experience can't be generated. Ditto for any sort of novel above the level of the most basic imitative genre stuff. I'm certain AI could spit out a perfectly passable airport paperback romance, for instance—but how could it possibly write Infinite Jest?
- mbauman 4y ago
  The key isn't that the "AI" writes the whole darn thing. It's a "get-out-of-writers-block-free" pass. I've successfully used chatGPT for exactly this process. I'm writing something — unique, by me! — and I want to link a few thoughts together in a succinct way. I outline what I want and ask the AI to generate some plausible prose. I almost never use the prose word-for-word, but goodness is it helpful.
- Veen 4y ago
  I’m not so sure an AI couldn’t, in theory at least produce a memoir if you fed it your diaries, emails, social media chats and histories, photos and videos from throughout your life, and so on.
  - jaqalopes 4y ago
    This feels like a good point. I am curious how the "feeding" would occur here. If there's an API to do this sort of thing right now I'm not aware of it. But I definitely believe that it's coming!
    - ayewo 4y ago
      The recently announced GPT-4 [1] now supports feeding it with more “context” when writing a prompt than previous models. It supports a context length of 32k tokens (approximately 25,000 words or about half a novel). 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35154527 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35154527
quitit 4y ago
There's more oil painters now than at any time in human history. New tools open doors, not shut them.
swatcoder 4y ago
Leaving out “soon”, there’s truth to that, but the immediacy really depends on how this generation of AI develops and where it encounters its limits. It’s not there yet and we actually don’t know how far these current advancements will take us. It’s tremendously useful technology for many domains already and you can see the stepwise refinements that will permeate many parts of our lives. Big money corporations are productizing those elements already. But to be as fair to the pessimists as the optimists, its actually still a very big leap from Modjourney and GPT-4 to something that becomes the next camera or typewriter in terms of ubiquity. Because we saw a huge leap recently, we feel close and excited — and we might prove to be in hindsight — but we also might see that there are some hard conceptual limits that we won’t see anyone break through for another fifty or hundred years.
lukko 4y ago
I don't think it's like any tool that has come before in that it can take much of the decision-making process away from the artist - it is much more like hiring someone to paint a picture than using Photoshop. For image-making, there is a decision in the prompt and selecting images, but that is very different to making a decision about each color and brushstroke, and working to finish a painting. It's orders of magnitude more difficult and why great masters are celebrated. Creating stuff with AI will suit certain people, I definitely don't think necessarily the 'best' will automatically use it. It does seem to take away a lot of the fun of making images and truly original work will always push quite far outside the training set.
xdennis 4y ago
> "Soon, asking a writer if they use AI will be like asking a photographer if they use Photoshop" – e.g., it's a foregone conclusion, and the best artists will generally adapt to using the best tools available The problem is that it automates the best parts and transforms the user into a curator/manager. Some people want that, but other enjoy the creative part more. To bring it back to photography, that's the problem with digital, you blast through hundreds of photos and spend most of your time selecting and editing at the computer. With analog, and especially wet plate or direct positive paper, it takes a while to compose your picture and you only have one chance to take it and develop it. It's very easy to mess anything which is what makes the process more meaningful. And you're left with a unique copy, not an artificially limited single copy.
- lukko 4y ago
  Yep, exactly - I think people generally regard artistic work as getting to a successful end result. When actually the process of creating something, and potentially wrecking something at any moment, is usually the most fun / exciting and fulfilling part. That magical process is lost with AI generation.
asdff 4y ago
There's shades to art of course. Not all photography is airbrushed digital stuff, and the mild stuff most people probably do, like changing the exposure curves around in photoshop or lightroom is basically akin to what photographers were doing when exposing prints from their negatives for the past 150 years, only with less time and no chemicals. Likewise, some people might be happy with AI generated fodder to read, others might want other things.
bloak 4y ago
In a test of verbal reasoning, photographer is to Photoshop as writer is to ...? I don't think "AI" is the way most people would complete that sentence. Perhaps "Word"? Or "LibreOffice" if "Photoshop" were replaced with "Gimp"? Personally I use Emacs or Vim. You could incorporate AI into any of those tools, but how exactly? And would it be a core part of the functionality? And would it be something that the best artists make much use of? If you used AI to make the spelling/grammar checker more reliable, probably most people would use that (assuming no privacy problems), but if there's an AI-driven autocomplete for sentences probably a lot of people, including the best artists, would turn it off, just like I turn off the autocorrect on a word processor today. If an AI can complete the sentence, then perhaps the sentence isn't worth completing, at least if we assume that the reader is as clever as the writer and has similarly sophisticated tools. Perhaps the AI-driven tool should instead put some kind of wavy line under the second half of the sentence to indicate that it's boring and obvious and doesn't need to be there.
munificent 4y ago
The problem with analogies is that you can pick one to say whatever you want. The analogy isn't necessarily true just because it feels right. Asking a photographer if they use Photoshop creates a framing where the artist still did went out and took a picture to create the work and then Photoshop only modifiers their original creation. But you could just as easily say "Soon, asking a writer if they use AI will be like asking a photographer if they have a camera". That sounds ludicrous, but that is exactly what generative AI offers: the ability to create content essentially ex nihilo.

echelon 4y ago

Art will continue to evolve with AI. Another argument I keep hearing (most recently from pg), is that we'll always need non-AI training data. That, too, doesn't follow. Training new models on synthetic data does not mean we get stuck in a particular mode or style. We'll continue moving, improving, and trying wildly new things. Bootstrapping with synthetic data doesn't block evolution - it enables faster evolution, even. (I'm using synthetic data to train new models to great effect.) People are angry that we've lowered the opportunity cost barriers and so they're expressing their frustration. It's a good thing that life's choices no longer fence us in as much. Everyone should get a chance to learn how to express themselves through art with the new regime of tools. Despite changing economics, there will still be a top 1% that do better than the rest of us.

can16358p 4y ago
I think the same. Many artists hate because they feel threatened. I think the opposite: creating art (e.g. Drawing) was only for the ones who had drawing skills. Now, it's being democratized and everyone, regardless of being talented in drawing or not, can freely express their feelings and creativity. I think it's a great thing.
- Riverheart 4y ago
  Hard disagree. Most people can draw if they put in the time but they don't. Artists did and bet their careers on it but now their effort is being trivialized by people who want a bot to "draw the owl". This is all explained well by "Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain". People apply their childhood drawing symbols to realistic art in their teenage years and get frustrated. They never learn to see with an artistic eye and quit.
  - bluefirebrand 4y ago
    I used to think I was not "talented" at drawing until a girl I was dating gave me that book to read. I was skeptical at first but after going through a couple of the drawing exercises I was convinced. They are so cleverly constructed to make you step outside of your normal brain and just draw, it's kind of amazing the results. I'm never going to be an artist professionally but I do actually draw as a pastime now and I have improved substantially. I think if I had practiced more as a kid and teen I may have pursued art professionally. Part of the problem is that adults see a kid upset that their drawing isn't very good and say things like "That's ok, you're just not an artist. Not everyone can draw" and people internalize that. It's supposed to make the kid feel better and it might cheer them up in the moment, but it also convinces them that they cannot learn to be better at things they are not immediately good at. Toxic Feel-Good shit.
- 52-6F-62 4y ago
  Art is already the most democratically available act. Anyone can learn the skills involved. Its not a select few. It’s about expressing and finding yourself and developing a soul through creative action, not just a squirting out a picture that looks “correct”. You only shortchange your own soul’s development by trying to skip the hard steps that it takes to develop a skill like that. Because you can make an image on a computer that looks like it was drawn does not mean you can draw. Hell, I’m not even sure it means you can express yourself. The inputs you contribute when using an AI prompt are so minimal compared to the informational input required to create something in the physical space. Don’t let anyone convince you that it’s an exclusive act. Find a pencil and get at it.
  - Kim_Bruning 4y ago
    I disagree on the "entering a prompt" part. By a lot. I've been managing to get myself lost (and somewhat unlost) in latent space. Let me tell you, a latent space can be a big place all by itself, even if you stick to 1 seed. Ultimately though, I realize that trying to get everything what you want from a single prompt won't work. Tokens have implications, and they influence each other too much. Long term, one needs more than just single prompts, and the tools are still evolving to support that. Still, you'd be surprised at how much you can express even now.
    - 52-6F-62 4y ago
      I don't think I would be surprised. You're just removing your own inherent and vast set of input and modelling parameters from the equation and offloading it to a more rigid model. You're already the most complex model and model-maker—the procedure of developing a skill through a creative feedback loop and its output can be vastly more edifying for yourself and others. Don't take my word for it. You can only know by doing it. These models have their place as useful tools, but are in no way a replacement for the experience of creating and all its challenges. You can't climb a mountain by paying someone else to do it for you. That analogy begs the question—what is the true value in climbing a mountain? What is the value in creating?
      - 4y ago
- cmoski 4y ago
  The problem you've identified is that using a skill is available only to those who have bothered to hone the skill. Why should we have to bother learning something? It's simply not fair. If I want to be an artist I shouldn't have to practise or educate myself. The simple desire to be an artist should be enough! Note: I don't really care if people use AI to generate anything but they should be forthright about doing so.
  - dwringer 4y ago
    > If I want to be an artist I shouldn't have to practise or educate myself. The simple desire to be an artist should be enough! IMHO this is absolutely the case, and has always been the case. Being paid as an artist, on the other hand, is something entirely different, or having one's art recognized as good by other people. But I am sure everyone remembers other more popular artists telling them they're "doing it wrong" in art class, on forums, or even all the way back to preschool coloring books if someone would deign to color outside the lines. There have always been those who seek to gatekeep what art is and who they view as legitimate participants in it. I suppose everyone does in some sense. But I am very excited by the prospect of art as a personal developmental journey becoming more open to everyone.
  - dinkumthinkum 4y ago
    It’s not fair? It’s not fair that should need to learn something? This is really a sad state. HN seems to be becoming a pretty sad group.
    - cmoski 4y ago
      It was said mockingly.
- DrewADesign 4y ago
  In the US, your livelihood essentially justifies your existence. Disdainfully reducing someone to being a 'hater' when they react to that being threatened is exactly the reason many, if not most people find SV culture disgusting. They're not wrong. Beyond that, if you think AI algorithms will replace art, you don't understand art. It replaces much of the commercial utility of many artists and creating many types of images, but the idea that it threatens art, generally, is preposterous. People who think art school is only about learning to physically make art are like people who think computer science degrees are only about coding. Most of what you learn in art school is conceptual thinking, communication, really deeply seeing things in a way that most people don't, and stuff like that. Factories didn't replace potters when they started making pots and dishes or sculptors when they started making cheap home decorations-- it just meant the artisans no longer made money creating a commodity because most people were satisfied buying chintzy shit cheap. Many potters who lived through that change probably died in poverty because of it. Talk big numbers about the way industry shifts all you want, but not everybody can switch to an entirely different category of employment just because someone taught a computer to do it.
- bluefirebrand 4y ago
  > I think the opposite: creating art (e.g. Drawing) was only for the ones who had drawing skills. Now, it's being democratized and everyone, regardless of being talented in drawing or not, can freely express their feelings and creativity. There was never anything stopping anyone from picking up a pencil and learning to draw. The idea there's some inborn "talent" for art is absurd. There is only people who practice and people who don't. What you are actually "democratizing" is the ability to produce finished products without ever putting in any kind of work. Which means you are absolutely devaluing the people who actually did put in the work. It is a terrible thing. A miserable race to the bottom of human expression.
  - AgentME 4y ago
    People used to have to learn HTML and about web hosting to be able to publish text on the internet for others to read. There was never anything stopping people from putting in the effort to do this. All that website builders, social media sites, and forums like HN do is allow people to accomplish this without putting in any kind of work. It's a terrible thing that's caused a race to the bottom in the web, reducing the variety and quality level of most people's browsing experiences.
    - bluefirebrand 4y ago
      I think you're probably trying to use this as a reframing of my logic to show that I am being absurd Jokes on you, I agree with everything you just said, fully unironically The web is way worse where people have to put zero effort into uploading their content The best places on the web are the places where people have crafted the page they want.
    - dinkumthinkum 4y ago
      I feel like you are trying to make an analogy and show the parents position as absurd but I think what you have said here is probably literally true. That said, there is a big difference from tools that reduce friction to do a task to those that eliminate the need to do the task.
- rchaud 4y ago
  > I think the opposite: creating art (e.g. Drawing) was only for the ones who had drawing skills. Now, it's being democratized and everyone Drawing was for anybody who put in the work. You may as well say football wasn't democratized until the release of FIFA International Soccer in '94.
  - dinkumthinkum 4y ago
    I think people on HN would say a video game like that is ableist for those that take the time to learn how to play it. What they want is an AI to play it for them.
erganemic 4y ago
People aren't angry/worried because they don't have a competitive advantage any more--people are angry/worried because they sense (I think correctly!) that AI will eliminate the part of their work that they find enjoyable. Artists, by and large, don't do art because they enjoy having art--they do art because they like /the process/ of producing art. If that process can be done faster and better by AI, then yeah, sure, they /might/ be able to still do art for a living (some artists will be able to leverage their experience to maintain an advantage; other, less flexible ones will lose work)--but the work they do will likely not be commensurate to the work they were doing before, and will likely be less enjoyable to them. The thing that worries people about AI is that it'll make all creatives into middle-managers.
- VLM 4y ago
  To me, creative fine woodworking is making a cool idea based on the world around me and experiences I've had that balances engineering needs with artistic form. Then I spend 95% of my hobby time tediously sanding boards and applying finish and this is NOT the fun part of my hobby. I will say the only time I've gotten compensation directly as been for the latter because nobody likes doing that stuff. I'd say AI will make creatives into micromanaging middle managers, the type that gets way too involved in a critique of your every decision is still going to micromanage, they'll just be harassing an AI instead of humans. Fundamentally the creative act of making book cover art has always been specification. You can say to an artist "make me a book cover looking like ..." or you can hire a guy and give him no direction and trust him to decide what to do. But the creative act was the specifying, not the mechanics of turning that idea into printing ready art. Another problem you run into is AI is as currently produced, a groupthink enforcement technology, and most people will be turned off by that. The blandest least offensive corporate dining experience is likely McDonalds. How much do hipster foodies prefer going to McDonalds over ... anywhere else on the planet? AI can only create the ideal big mac, and you can make money shipping big macs, but only selling to poor people, everyone else wants something else, even if in a strict corporate inhuman sense its inferior in every way to a big mac.
brucethemoose2 4y ago
Training ESRGAN, I quickly learned that AI sniffs artifacts humans can't see. And I got particularly funky results training a model on selected previous generation upscales. Hence I disagree. Even of the training data curators are perfect, there is a risk of "model inbreeding." And the curators are not perfect. In fact, they seem to prioritize (by necessity) volume and speed over quality and curation when training these LLMs and diffusion models.
dinkumthinkum 4y ago
I’m not sure what the last line says. Doesn’t the top 99% do better than the rest? I think you are making the common HN argument that it is “ableist” to think doing art should require any kind of skill or something. I don’t really agree that the AI is so good but let’s say it is, if that’s the case why do you think anyone will afford a computer to use the AI or even a house in which to type or say all these magic prompts?

julienreszka 4y ago

Cortes vs the Aztecs

sho_hn 4y ago
Aside: "1491" is an informative book that might dispense with that particular metaphor.

throwaway33381 4y ago

No, using AI to write is basically having it do everything for you. It's not a tool it's a replacement. In the years to come several hundreds of thousands of jobs will begin to disappear from copywriters to fiction and non fiction writers. Replaced by roles such as marketers to historians. It's not photoshop for photographers is just going to push the vast majority of people wanting to pursue these fields out of the market.

galleywest200 4y ago
Using it to write vs. using it to help you are two very different things. For example: sometimes I will pass a paragraph through an LLM and ask it to return it in a more "active voice". Then I _manually_ edit my original paragraph, if I wish, to make it seem more suitable for my current goals. This is sort of like Photoshop for photographers.
- throwaway33381 4y ago
  On the other note, online submissions for publishers will be retroactively filled with spam due to the ease and ability to publish and submit content. It already happened with Clarke's World. The end is coming not a revolution. Just the end.
brookst 4y ago
I think nearly everything you said is likely wrong. AI doesn’t “do everything for you” any more than word processors, music sequencers, or CAD does. AI allows people to operate at higher levels of abstraction, is all. Yes, fewer people will type repetitive copy in to word processors. But that’s fine. You are mistaking activity for productivity. Few people go into writing because they enjoy typing. AI offers leverage, which is the most amazing thing for anyone interested in producing work. Ask any professional writer: revisions are a chore. Authors often say a novel is 10% writing, 90% rewriting, and they don’t enjoy the rewriting part. So, IMO, contrary to your doomer take, I think we will see more people producing better work because they can focus on the parts they love and not do the grind that was only ever a necessary evil. (The exception being those who love the grind and not the product)

mjr00 4y ago

Exactly, it's a tool. The skill floor, as in the minimum amount of skill to produce something passable, has been lowered -- dramatically lowered -- but the skill ceiling is now higher than ever as a result. It's similar to music. DAWs and samples didn't kill off music; instead, it made it easier than ever for a teenager with a computer and a passing interest in music to create a song and share it with a world. As a consequence, though, the standards for mixing and mastering have gone up massively; people don't really tolerate bedroom recordings with $10 mics any more. I imagine most amateur musicians in the 90s didn't know what a compressor actually did (I certainly didn't). Seeing the results of talented artists who are experimenting with AI[0] makes you realize that there's still going to be a massive gulf between skilled artists using SD etc as a tool, versus those who think they can be artists just by putting keywords into an image generation AI and calling it a day. [0] https://twitter.com/jamm3rd/status/1619896080619159553 https://twitter.com/jamm3rd/status/1619896080619159553 https://twitter.com/jamm3rd/status/1633758455952703488/photo/1 https://twitter.com/jamm3rd/status/1633758455952703488/photo... (moderately nsfw I guess)

chii 4y ago
> the skill ceiling is now higher than ever as a result the fear from the current professionals is that the new ai raised floor is good enough to be usable commercially, and thus, cut a chunk of economic value from the professionals. There is no fear that AI stops people with the intrinsic interest in creation to stop creating - their ceiling and productivity would sky-rocket as a result in fact. And it would be _these_ productions that wow an audience.
- randcraw 4y ago
  Not if creators are paid nothing for their work. I think inescapably, the profession of writing is about to take a big hit from GPT-X, with the few remaining journalists paid considerably less than before. There will be an exodus of talent, leaving... Microsoft and Google to write our news for us?
  - zirgs 4y ago

_the_inflator 4y ago

Exactly, but the implication is different for me. I dislike all the filters and think this is the weirdest thing ever, to blur oneself on photos. People, who heavily use blurring to mask their wrinkles, produce - in my opinion - photos that look like grimaces. I find the pictures as well as the people using filters somewhat scary, because what happens if you meet them face to face? Use something like Google Glasses and real time filtering? For literature, it could be interesting, how authors use new tools, where and in what sense. Maybe have more conclusive plots? Less inconsistencies? Have AI imitate dead poets' style? We will value the classics more I guess, since they were done the old fashioned way.

ape4 4y ago

In a novel-writing application - you write the first paragraph and the AI can finish the chapter.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

chongli 4y ago

I feel a better comparison is like asking a painter if they use a camera. At some point we just say “you’re not a painter anymore, you’re a photographer.”

Sol- 4y ago

But then the AI is the writer and you're just an editor or curator. So perhaps don't call yourself a writer if the AI produced a significant amount of the content. Same goes for Stable Diffusion/Midjourney prompters who shouldn't really call themselves artists. (Things would of course change if they do significant postprocessing of the output, though I'd still think this is much easier than coming up with something novel on the spot.) Of course, it's not my place to say who should or shouldn't call themselves a writer, but I'll simply personally respect someone more if their stories aren't ghostwritten by the AI.

zirgs 4y ago
Are Pollock or Malevich real artists? Their work doesn't require great technical skill.

totetsu 4y ago

Feeling pretty stupid for all the time I invested in pinhole photography and darkrooms, 20ish years after photoshop was released, about now. Guess the best artist all have $5000 to spare for a MBP and monthly creative cloud subscriptions too…

jhanschoo 4y ago

I don't think an AI can do traditional art anytime soon :) robotics don't have the dexterity of human hands (yet), not at the cost of human artists

jaqalopes 4y ago

The "writers" who can benefit from AI are not artists. They might be bloggers or journalists or researchers. But there is no way that a generative AI can produce, say, your memoir for you. How could it? You have to say what happened. Your life experience can't be generated. Ditto for any sort of novel above the level of the most basic imitative genre stuff. I'm certain AI could spit out a perfectly passable airport paperback romance, for instance—but how could it possibly write Infinite Jest?

mbauman 4y ago
The key isn't that the "AI" writes the whole darn thing. It's a "get-out-of-writers-block-free" pass. I've successfully used chatGPT for exactly this process. I'm writing something — unique, by me! — and I want to link a few thoughts together in a succinct way. I outline what I want and ask the AI to generate some plausible prose. I almost never use the prose word-for-word, but goodness is it helpful.
Veen 4y ago
I’m not so sure an AI couldn’t, in theory at least produce a memoir if you fed it your diaries, emails, social media chats and histories, photos and videos from throughout your life, and so on.
- jaqalopes 4y ago
  This feels like a good point. I am curious how the "feeding" would occur here. If there's an API to do this sort of thing right now I'm not aware of it. But I definitely believe that it's coming!
  - ayewo 4y ago
    The recently announced GPT-4 [1] now supports feeding it with more “context” when writing a prompt than previous models. It supports a context length of 32k tokens (approximately 25,000 words or about half a novel). 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35154527 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35154527

quitit 4y ago

There's more oil painters now than at any time in human history. New tools open doors, not shut them.

swatcoder 4y ago

Leaving out “soon”, there’s truth to that, but the immediacy really depends on how this generation of AI develops and where it encounters its limits. It’s not there yet and we actually don’t know how far these current advancements will take us. It’s tremendously useful technology for many domains already and you can see the stepwise refinements that will permeate many parts of our lives. Big money corporations are productizing those elements already. But to be as fair to the pessimists as the optimists, its actually still a very big leap from Modjourney and GPT-4 to something that becomes the next camera or typewriter in terms of ubiquity. Because we saw a huge leap recently, we feel close and excited — and we might prove to be in hindsight — but we also might see that there are some hard conceptual limits that we won’t see anyone break through for another fifty or hundred years.

lukko 4y ago

I don't think it's like any tool that has come before in that it can take much of the decision-making process away from the artist - it is much more like hiring someone to paint a picture than using Photoshop. For image-making, there is a decision in the prompt and selecting images, but that is very different to making a decision about each color and brushstroke, and working to finish a painting. It's orders of magnitude more difficult and why great masters are celebrated. Creating stuff with AI will suit certain people, I definitely don't think necessarily the 'best' will automatically use it. It does seem to take away a lot of the fun of making images and truly original work will always push quite far outside the training set.

xdennis 4y ago

> "Soon, asking a writer if they use AI will be like asking a photographer if they use Photoshop" – e.g., it's a foregone conclusion, and the best artists will generally adapt to using the best tools available The problem is that it automates the best parts and transforms the user into a curator/manager. Some people want that, but other enjoy the creative part more. To bring it back to photography, that's the problem with digital, you blast through hundreds of photos and spend most of your time selecting and editing at the computer. With analog, and especially wet plate or direct positive paper, it takes a while to compose your picture and you only have one chance to take it and develop it. It's very easy to mess anything which is what makes the process more meaningful. And you're left with a unique copy, not an artificially limited single copy.

lukko 4y ago
Yep, exactly - I think people generally regard artistic work as getting to a successful end result. When actually the process of creating something, and potentially wrecking something at any moment, is usually the most fun / exciting and fulfilling part. That magical process is lost with AI generation.

asdff 4y ago

There's shades to art of course. Not all photography is airbrushed digital stuff, and the mild stuff most people probably do, like changing the exposure curves around in photoshop or lightroom is basically akin to what photographers were doing when exposing prints from their negatives for the past 150 years, only with less time and no chemicals. Likewise, some people might be happy with AI generated fodder to read, others might want other things.

bloak 4y ago

In a test of verbal reasoning, photographer is to Photoshop as writer is to ...? I don't think "AI" is the way most people would complete that sentence. Perhaps "Word"? Or "LibreOffice" if "Photoshop" were replaced with "Gimp"? Personally I use Emacs or Vim. You could incorporate AI into any of those tools, but how exactly? And would it be a core part of the functionality? And would it be something that the best artists make much use of? If you used AI to make the spelling/grammar checker more reliable, probably most people would use that (assuming no privacy problems), but if there's an AI-driven autocomplete for sentences probably a lot of people, including the best artists, would turn it off, just like I turn off the autocorrect on a word processor today. If an AI can complete the sentence, then perhaps the sentence isn't worth completing, at least if we assume that the reader is as clever as the writer and has similarly sophisticated tools. Perhaps the AI-driven tool should instead put some kind of wavy line under the second half of the sentence to indicate that it's boring and obvious and doesn't need to be there.

munificent 4y ago

The problem with analogies is that you can pick one to say whatever you want. The analogy isn't necessarily true just because it feels right. Asking a photographer if they use Photoshop creates a framing where the artist still did went out and took a picture to create the work and then Photoshop only modifiers their original creation. But you could just as easily say "Soon, asking a writer if they use AI will be like asking a photographer if they have a camera". That sounds ludicrous, but that is exactly what generative AI offers: the ability to create content essentially ex nihilo.