6 ms·

Stephen Fry reads Nick Cave's stirring letter about ChatGPT and human creativity [video]

AIorNot 3y ago
[flagged]
doug_durham 3y ago
Tools are tools. ChatGPT is a tool just like a camera is a tool. I'm sure a lot of landscape painters in the late 1800's felt the same as Nick Cave does today. "Cameras take the effort out of rendering images of reality thus robbing humanity of the struggle that in the end equates to love." Tools like ChatGPT further open up the creative process to larger numbers of people. It removes the traditional gatekeepers which is why they are pushing back so hard.
- dorkwood 3y ago
  > Tools like ChatGPT further open up the creative process to larger numbers of people. It removes the traditional gatekeepers which is why they are pushing back so hard. In what way was the "creative process" closed off to those people before?
  - tukajo 3y ago
    I'm not the person you're replying to, but one can think of a myriad of ways. Our society is currently structured in a way where the time and money needed to "freely" pursue a creative endeavor is not afforded to most. I consider myself to be in a particularly "good spot" in my life. But as a new father, I oftentimes cannot afford the spare time between my societal obligations, and fatherhood. This means my creative endeavors take the back seat.
  - nosvince 3y ago
    Not op, but my answer to this would be years of practice and skills. Someone might have an amazing idea, but might have trouble putting their vision on paper. ChatGPT and generative art helps "idea people" concretize their vision more easily. The promise of generative AI is exactly this in my opinion; giving the ability to anyone to simply wish an idea into a concrete "thing"
    - morph123 3y ago
      Ideas are, will be, and always has been, worthless on their own.
      - peebeebee 3y ago
        Ideas can change the world. Memes (not the internet-images) are extremely powerful. But if you meant, an idea alone can't be packaged and sold. That's true...
      - jeremysalwen 3y ago
        As the GP was suggesting, ideas+generative ai is not worthless. That's what makes it significant.
handy2000 3y ago
I agree with Cave's perhaps overly dramatized response. But overall it's a response to a very early misinterpretation of what statistics-based models are for. Sure, they are capable of producing an output that looks like a product of human creativity, but so are e.g. chance-based techniques (dice rolling to pick a sequence of notes in a scale). LLMs should and will be used as tools, they won't replace human creativity in any meaningful sense.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
comment_ran 3y ago
After watching his speech, the first thing that came to my mind is one of the speeches that was given by James T. Kirk, which I had no idea which episode it was in, but I do remember the core meaning of that speech. So I use chatGPT to actually help me to find it by just single one question. And it works! And here's the thing I want to share with the the audiuence. "They used to say if man could fly, he'd have wings, but he did fly. He discovered he had to. Do you wish that the first Apollo mission hadn't reached the moon, or that we hadn't gone on to Mars and then to the nearest star? That's like saying you wish that you still operated with scalpels and sewed your patients up with catgut like your great-great-great-great grandfather used to. I'm in command. I could order this, but I'm not because Doctor McCoy is right in pointing out the enormous danger potential in any contact with life and intelligence as fantastically advanced as this, but I must point out that the possibilities - the potential for knowledge and advancement - is equally great. Risk! Risk is our business. That's what this starship is all about. That's why we're aboard her. You may dissent without prejudice. Do I hear a negative vote?" - James T. Kirk Return to Tomorrow (1968)
- jjeaff 3y ago
  Kirk gave his crew a vote or a choice. I don't recall getting my ballot about whether we should launch chatgpt.
- moritonal 3y ago
  Isn't that pretty ironic, given the speech leads to the spherical intelligences to take him for a ride, manipulate and trick him, and almost kill him and four of his men? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Return_to_Tomorrow?wprov=sfla1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Return_to_Tomorrow?wprov=sfla1
  - JamilD 3y ago
    How is that ironic? Saying "risk is our business" doesn't imply you'll be successful. It implies the risk is worth it, and you acknowledge the possibility of negative and dangerous outcomes.
  - serf 3y ago
progbits 3y ago
I don't find Cave's position convincing. Leaving aside the bits based on "soul" and "god" which don't move me at all, the rest seems to boil down to something along the lines of: content produced with ChatGPT lacks effort and sense of accomplishment, and somehow threatens the existence of other "pure" content so we have to fight ChatGPT's existence itself. This makes no sense to me. For example, wide spread and cheap book publishing, and later internet, means that the barrier to entry for writing has gone way down and probably 99% of stuff written is utter garbage: marketing copy, ghostwritten novellas following a cookie-cutter template, all sorts of crap. Yet no sane person today would argue this was a bad development. Once again this is the same story as with any technological progress. If we had a time machine and went back to the invention of the wheel I'm sure there would be a bunch of doomsayers trying to stop that too.
- handy2000 3y ago
  You are completely missing the point Cave is making. He is not arguing against ChatGPT as a technology. He is reminding songwriters that writing lyrics is not a meaningless obstruction standing between them and a commodity they are producing. The process of writing lyrics is what makes them songwriters. The attempt to "optimize" this process to such an extent that it removes the songwriter from it is a dead end.
  - Teever 3y ago
    A lot of people don't want to be songwriters, they want to be songsingers. There are a lot of talented people through out history who just wanted to perform, and they often performed songs that were written by other people. The reverse is also true. A lot of people don't want to be singers, they just want to be songwriters.
    - handy2000 3y ago
      Yes... and? Both Cave's letter and my comment are directed at songwriters.
      - 3y ago
djsjajah 3y ago
I can’t disagree with his point about song writing but I think ChatGPT is not going to alter the struggle that we face on a day to day basis. It is just going to amplify our accomplishments. The art that a single artist makes tomorrow might be the product of many lifetimes of human work yesterday.
POiNTx 3y ago
I understand the sentiment, but it's the wrong approach. Better to embrace and integrate than to bitterly fight what's inevitably coming. Every technology has had its negative impact, there's always something that dies and can't be replaced. But, something else takes it place and gets brought to life, and that's beautiful in it's own way.
- NateEag 3y ago
  If the technology replaces humans finding their own values and expressing them with a regurgitation of whatever's the most likely to follow a given set of letters in human writing so far... well, I for one find that repulsive. I may be nothing but a stochastic parrot, but my life experience doesn't feel like it, and I have less than no interest in consuming output generated by one.
  - neontomo 3y ago
    We may all be stochastic parrots, but we are individually so based on each of our experiences. AI however, is still a lot like getting answers from the same person only there's millions of users asking that person. I think once we have better open sourced models and greater ability for non-technical people to modify their AI's behaviour, we will see the innate human creativity shine through AI. My worry is that LLM's will influence how humans write (even while not using the tools), which will affect the models, which will change our writing styles and so on until languages are homogenised and local/personal linguistic quirks are all but gone.
  - POiNTx 3y ago
    What I'm trying to say is that people should integrate whatever is coming. You can't fight it. But one can invent a car and still ride a horse. What's lost is that everyone now rides a car and not a horse. You can still find your own values and express them in your own way, AI doesn't prevent that.
  - kian 3y ago
    The only way for this technology to replace humans is if people actively choose generative art over humanity's regenerative art. Do you think you'll be replacing your artistic consumption with mostly auto-generated fare? If not, then is this repulsion you speak of aimed at generative AI, or is it aimed at some hypothetical other people of less discriminating taste who would actively choose to consume it instead of human art? I guess I'm late to the party, but it is starting to feel as if complaints about generative art are actually complaints about other people. Damn kids and their rap music. Get off the lawn, right?
123yawaworht456 3y ago
for the past decade or more, the bourgeoisie and bohemian types have cheered and sneered along the lines of "if your job can be taken away by an immigrant, you aren't good at it". well, now their jobs are going to be taken away by computers who will do it for fractions of a penny, And That's A Good Thing, Here's Why.
gdubs 3y ago
Humans and our tools are, in my opinion, a singular thing. We evolved _with_ our tools — they afforded us greater access to food, which led to more intelligence, which led to more advanced tools, and on, and on. A lot of people take this kind of "other" view. Technology is "bad", when really it comes down to how we choose to use it. It's like Herbie Hancock said when talking about machines and music in the 1980s: an axe can be used to slaughter your neighbor, or it can be used to build a house. They're tools, and ultimately it comes down to what we choose to do with them.
- tambourine_man 3y ago
  That’s very true in a deep way. We have smaller guts and jaws because we tamed fire. We domesticated animals and plants to our needs. If we had to eat raw meat and the 50k year old wild variety of vegetables we’d be on the brink of starvation.
  - lacrimacida 3y ago
    > If we had to eat raw meat and the 50k year old wild variety of vegetables we’d be on the brink of starvation. We’d have been adapted to it, I doubt we’d be on the brink of starvation though we’d be a different species.
    - tambourine_man 3y ago
      Right, which is the point the grandparent was making, that our evolution is intertwined with our tools in a profound way.
- handy2000 3y ago
  A pretty important distinction between machines in the 1980s and ChatGPT is the amount of human effort that the output requires. It's unlikely that Herbie Hancock considers people who press "start" on a Casio synthesizer to play a factory programmed demo track real musicians. If someone incorporates a factory preset into a song - sure, nothing's wrong with that. That's when a machine is used as a tool, not as a substitute for human creativity.
tambourine_man 3y ago
Honestly, if you’re appealing to these kinds of arguments, you’ve already lost. It sounds a lot like “digital photography” is not art (or that photography itself is not art, before that).
- neontomo 3y ago
  The more honest argument is, "I don't like this type of art", rather than "it isn't art". Fair enough in that case.
a_wild_dandan 3y ago
Despite their conviction, the "difficulty is admirable" crowd sure do make a lot of exceptions.
Lerc 3y ago
There is a somewhat related issue in another thread on HN today. "what is the point of becoming a pro chess player in a world of computers?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38425172 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38425172 Doing something challenging has merit in and of itself. I am sympathetic with Cave's concern with the commoditization of works and it is easy to see how someone would have a poor opinion of machine assisted works when inundated with the mediocrity of half arsed efforts created by tools that are still in their infancy. I feel the issue at heart here is that is is easy to create something now that superficially resembles a quality work, but on anything beyond a glance are significantly flawed. People are doing this, for the most part I think they are aware of the flaws and are just exploring the possibilities, but a few get carried away or lack the ability themselves to distinguish between the superficial and the deep. If a machine could write a book that is better than Lord of the Rings, I would want to read it, and I think it would be dogmatic to dismiss it simply because it was generated by machine. To create such a work though, might require a sufficiently advanced AI that you might be able to meaningfully describe what it did to write it as effort. If it were to go further to a superhuman AI which could knock out books like this with ease on a daily basis, would that diminish those works? Isn't that akin to saying that books from talented authors are less worthy than those from untalented?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- aaron695 3y ago
  [dead]
crispyambulance 3y ago
Nick Cave certainly has his heart in the right place, but he is panicking a bit with that letter. It's certainly possible that creatives in literature, music and image-making can augment their output somewhat with AI and perhaps even more with AGI. This is going to be a problem for them as much as it is for tech workers. In the not-so-long-term it means fewer people will be able to produce "enough" output to drastically reduce the required headcount in places like script writer's boiler rooms, music and graphics production for advertising and in-house corporate productions. But there's definitely "a feel" to heavy-handed use of AI generated stuff. It's palpable. Much like that "uncanny valley" in robotics. I expect it will remain detectable by people who care far into the foreseeable future. I also expect there's going to to be an expanding long-tail market for authentic works that don't have that "whiff" of AI in them. Here's what Chat-GPT says: Nick Cave's concerns reflect a broader debate about the role of AI in creative industries. While AI can augment creative processes, there's a valid point regarding the unique qualities of human-made art. The “feel” or essence that distinguishes human creativity is often nuanced and deeply tied to the human experience. As AI technology advances, the challenge for creatives may not be to compete with AI, but to emphasize these human elements that machines cannot replicate. The market for authentic, human-created art may indeed flourish, as there will likely always be a demand for works that resonate with the human "touch." This dichotomy could create a new appreciation for human artistry, alongside the use of AI as a tool for expanding creative possibilities.
motohagiography 3y ago
In most arts the constraints yield the technique, where AI is removing constraints faster than most people can even begin to apprehend them. A lot of our meaning came from the constraints we accepted, where we were shaped by the forces we opposed and produced things that were expressions of that experience. If AI removes these, the effect (without competence) is that there's less to shape us. I see it as a kind of Great Decohering. Maybe we need to build an essential civilizational Arc or time capsule that could survive and be discovered in some future era when some variation of our species develops the technology again so they know there is a there here. Thinking the first major humanoid robot application should be to build moon pyramids.
newmagonia 3y ago
AGI might be a modern form of divine 'rest,' taking on the analytical legwork so we can engage more deeply with our creativity. It's mapping our collective subconscious—art, stories, dreams—not as a shortcut, but as a deep-dive tool. This could actually draw us closer together on a soul level, enhancing, not replacing, our collective human journey.
- handy2000 3y ago
  > AGI might be a modern form of divine 'rest,' AGI? Are you commenting from the future?
mentos 3y ago
Didn't The Beatles read lines out of a news paper for lyrics on a song? I see ChatGPT as just another tool/instrument along side a guitar.
- tim333 3y ago
  I think you may be thinking of A Day in the Life where "Lennon's lyrics were mainly inspired by contemporary newspaper articles." There was a lot of creativity in that song also though. >"A Day in the Life" became one of the Beatles' most influential songs, and many now consider it to be the band's greatest work. (Wikipedia)
unraveller 3y ago
I remain unstirred. Human creativity is just curation at a smaller scale, I mean to say that even freestyle artists practice and give us only their best stuff. The problem artists have now is that the vague or mysterious origins they once put up as the reason for their inspiration is being exposed as fraud. However powerful their muses were before AI run amok now they find that ambition has turned into dejection, an unwillingness to compete that hard for adulation. You love to see it. If you really value human creativity you should value when it is used to curate mechanized AI output as well as organic brain mush output. Even pure unfiltered Trump/Biden A.I. debate roasting is only funny for its potential to be further curated and shared, and because that is now easy it means the laughing it produces is less of a laugh? I don't think so.

[flagged]

Tools are tools. ChatGPT is a tool just like a camera is a tool. I'm sure a lot of landscape painters in the late 1800's felt the same as Nick Cave does today. "Cameras take the effort out of rendering images of reality thus robbing humanity of the struggle that in the end equates to love." Tools like ChatGPT further open up the creative process to larger numbers of people. It removes the traditional gatekeepers which is why they are pushing back so hard.

dorkwood 3y ago
> Tools like ChatGPT further open up the creative process to larger numbers of people. It removes the traditional gatekeepers which is why they are pushing back so hard. In what way was the "creative process" closed off to those people before?
- tukajo 3y ago
  I'm not the person you're replying to, but one can think of a myriad of ways. Our society is currently structured in a way where the time and money needed to "freely" pursue a creative endeavor is not afforded to most. I consider myself to be in a particularly "good spot" in my life. But as a new father, I oftentimes cannot afford the spare time between my societal obligations, and fatherhood. This means my creative endeavors take the back seat.
- nosvince 3y ago
  Not op, but my answer to this would be years of practice and skills. Someone might have an amazing idea, but might have trouble putting their vision on paper. ChatGPT and generative art helps "idea people" concretize their vision more easily. The promise of generative AI is exactly this in my opinion; giving the ability to anyone to simply wish an idea into a concrete "thing"
  - morph123 3y ago
    Ideas are, will be, and always has been, worthless on their own.
    - peebeebee 3y ago
      Ideas can change the world. Memes (not the internet-images) are extremely powerful. But if you meant, an idea alone can't be packaged and sold. That's true...
    - jeremysalwen 3y ago
      As the GP was suggesting, ideas+generative ai is not worthless. That's what makes it significant.

handy2000 3y ago

I agree with Cave's perhaps overly dramatized response. But overall it's a response to a very early misinterpretation of what statistics-based models are for. Sure, they are capable of producing an output that looks like a product of human creativity, but so are e.g. chance-based techniques (dice rolling to pick a sequence of notes in a scale). LLMs should and will be used as tools, they won't replace human creativity in any meaningful sense.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

comment_ran 3y ago

After watching his speech, the first thing that came to my mind is one of the speeches that was given by James T. Kirk, which I had no idea which episode it was in, but I do remember the core meaning of that speech. So I use chatGPT to actually help me to find it by just single one question. And it works! And here's the thing I want to share with the the audiuence. "They used to say if man could fly, he'd have wings, but he did fly. He discovered he had to. Do you wish that the first Apollo mission hadn't reached the moon, or that we hadn't gone on to Mars and then to the nearest star? That's like saying you wish that you still operated with scalpels and sewed your patients up with catgut like your great-great-great-great grandfather used to. I'm in command. I could order this, but I'm not because Doctor McCoy is right in pointing out the enormous danger potential in any contact with life and intelligence as fantastically advanced as this, but I must point out that the possibilities - the potential for knowledge and advancement - is equally great. Risk! Risk is our business. That's what this starship is all about. That's why we're aboard her. You may dissent without prejudice. Do I hear a negative vote?" - James T. Kirk Return to Tomorrow (1968)

jjeaff 3y ago
Kirk gave his crew a vote or a choice. I don't recall getting my ballot about whether we should launch chatgpt.
moritonal 3y ago
Isn't that pretty ironic, given the speech leads to the spherical intelligences to take him for a ride, manipulate and trick him, and almost kill him and four of his men? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Return_to_Tomorrow?wprov=sfla1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Return_to_Tomorrow?wprov=sfla1
- JamilD 3y ago
  How is that ironic? Saying "risk is our business" doesn't imply you'll be successful. It implies the risk is worth it, and you acknowledge the possibility of negative and dangerous outcomes.
- serf 3y ago

progbits 3y ago

I don't find Cave's position convincing. Leaving aside the bits based on "soul" and "god" which don't move me at all, the rest seems to boil down to something along the lines of: content produced with ChatGPT lacks effort and sense of accomplishment, and somehow threatens the existence of other "pure" content so we have to fight ChatGPT's existence itself. This makes no sense to me. For example, wide spread and cheap book publishing, and later internet, means that the barrier to entry for writing has gone way down and probably 99% of stuff written is utter garbage: marketing copy, ghostwritten novellas following a cookie-cutter template, all sorts of crap. Yet no sane person today would argue this was a bad development. Once again this is the same story as with any technological progress. If we had a time machine and went back to the invention of the wheel I'm sure there would be a bunch of doomsayers trying to stop that too.

handy2000 3y ago
You are completely missing the point Cave is making. He is not arguing against ChatGPT as a technology. He is reminding songwriters that writing lyrics is not a meaningless obstruction standing between them and a commodity they are producing. The process of writing lyrics is what makes them songwriters. The attempt to "optimize" this process to such an extent that it removes the songwriter from it is a dead end.
- Teever 3y ago
  A lot of people don't want to be songwriters, they want to be songsingers. There are a lot of talented people through out history who just wanted to perform, and they often performed songs that were written by other people. The reverse is also true. A lot of people don't want to be singers, they just want to be songwriters.
  - handy2000 3y ago
    Yes... and? Both Cave's letter and my comment are directed at songwriters.
    - 3y ago

djsjajah 3y ago

I can’t disagree with his point about song writing but I think ChatGPT is not going to alter the struggle that we face on a day to day basis. It is just going to amplify our accomplishments. The art that a single artist makes tomorrow might be the product of many lifetimes of human work yesterday.

POiNTx 3y ago

I understand the sentiment, but it's the wrong approach. Better to embrace and integrate than to bitterly fight what's inevitably coming. Every technology has had its negative impact, there's always something that dies and can't be replaced. But, something else takes it place and gets brought to life, and that's beautiful in it's own way.

NateEag 3y ago
If the technology replaces humans finding their own values and expressing them with a regurgitation of whatever's the most likely to follow a given set of letters in human writing so far... well, I for one find that repulsive. I may be nothing but a stochastic parrot, but my life experience doesn't feel like it, and I have less than no interest in consuming output generated by one.
- neontomo 3y ago
  We may all be stochastic parrots, but we are individually so based on each of our experiences. AI however, is still a lot like getting answers from the same person only there's millions of users asking that person. I think once we have better open sourced models and greater ability for non-technical people to modify their AI's behaviour, we will see the innate human creativity shine through AI. My worry is that LLM's will influence how humans write (even while not using the tools), which will affect the models, which will change our writing styles and so on until languages are homogenised and local/personal linguistic quirks are all but gone.
- POiNTx 3y ago
  What I'm trying to say is that people should integrate whatever is coming. You can't fight it. But one can invent a car and still ride a horse. What's lost is that everyone now rides a car and not a horse. You can still find your own values and express them in your own way, AI doesn't prevent that.
- kian 3y ago
  The only way for this technology to replace humans is if people actively choose generative art over humanity's regenerative art. Do you think you'll be replacing your artistic consumption with mostly auto-generated fare? If not, then is this repulsion you speak of aimed at generative AI, or is it aimed at some hypothetical other people of less discriminating taste who would actively choose to consume it instead of human art? I guess I'm late to the party, but it is starting to feel as if complaints about generative art are actually complaints about other people. Damn kids and their rap music. Get off the lawn, right?

123yawaworht456 3y ago

for the past decade or more, the bourgeoisie and bohemian types have cheered and sneered along the lines of "if your job can be taken away by an immigrant, you aren't good at it". well, now their jobs are going to be taken away by computers who will do it for fractions of a penny, And That's A Good Thing, Here's Why.

gdubs 3y ago

Humans and our tools are, in my opinion, a singular thing. We evolved _with_ our tools — they afforded us greater access to food, which led to more intelligence, which led to more advanced tools, and on, and on. A lot of people take this kind of "other" view. Technology is "bad", when really it comes down to how we choose to use it. It's like Herbie Hancock said when talking about machines and music in the 1980s: an axe can be used to slaughter your neighbor, or it can be used to build a house. They're tools, and ultimately it comes down to what we choose to do with them.

tambourine_man 3y ago
That’s very true in a deep way. We have smaller guts and jaws because we tamed fire. We domesticated animals and plants to our needs. If we had to eat raw meat and the 50k year old wild variety of vegetables we’d be on the brink of starvation.
- lacrimacida 3y ago
  > If we had to eat raw meat and the 50k year old wild variety of vegetables we’d be on the brink of starvation. We’d have been adapted to it, I doubt we’d be on the brink of starvation though we’d be a different species.
  - tambourine_man 3y ago
    Right, which is the point the grandparent was making, that our evolution is intertwined with our tools in a profound way.
handy2000 3y ago
A pretty important distinction between machines in the 1980s and ChatGPT is the amount of human effort that the output requires. It's unlikely that Herbie Hancock considers people who press "start" on a Casio synthesizer to play a factory programmed demo track real musicians. If someone incorporates a factory preset into a song - sure, nothing's wrong with that. That's when a machine is used as a tool, not as a substitute for human creativity.

tambourine_man 3y ago

Honestly, if you’re appealing to these kinds of arguments, you’ve already lost. It sounds a lot like “digital photography” is not art (or that photography itself is not art, before that).

neontomo 3y ago
The more honest argument is, "I don't like this type of art", rather than "it isn't art". Fair enough in that case.

a_wild_dandan 3y ago

Despite their conviction, the "difficulty is admirable" crowd sure do make a lot of exceptions.

Lerc 3y ago

There is a somewhat related issue in another thread on HN today. "what is the point of becoming a pro chess player in a world of computers?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38425172 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38425172 Doing something challenging has merit in and of itself. I am sympathetic with Cave's concern with the commoditization of works and it is easy to see how someone would have a poor opinion of machine assisted works when inundated with the mediocrity of half arsed efforts created by tools that are still in their infancy. I feel the issue at heart here is that is is easy to create something now that superficially resembles a quality work, but on anything beyond a glance are significantly flawed. People are doing this, for the most part I think they are aware of the flaws and are just exploring the possibilities, but a few get carried away or lack the ability themselves to distinguish between the superficial and the deep. If a machine could write a book that is better than Lord of the Rings, I would want to read it, and I think it would be dogmatic to dismiss it simply because it was generated by machine. To create such a work though, might require a sufficiently advanced AI that you might be able to meaningfully describe what it did to write it as effort. If it were to go further to a superhuman AI which could knock out books like this with ease on a daily basis, would that diminish those works? Isn't that akin to saying that books from talented authors are less worthy than those from untalented?

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
aaron695 3y ago
[dead]

crispyambulance 3y ago

Nick Cave certainly has his heart in the right place, but he is panicking a bit with that letter. It's certainly possible that creatives in literature, music and image-making can augment their output somewhat with AI and perhaps even more with AGI. This is going to be a problem for them as much as it is for tech workers. In the not-so-long-term it means fewer people will be able to produce "enough" output to drastically reduce the required headcount in places like script writer's boiler rooms, music and graphics production for advertising and in-house corporate productions. But there's definitely "a feel" to heavy-handed use of AI generated stuff. It's palpable. Much like that "uncanny valley" in robotics. I expect it will remain detectable by people who care far into the foreseeable future. I also expect there's going to to be an expanding long-tail market for authentic works that don't have that "whiff" of AI in them. Here's what Chat-GPT says: Nick Cave's concerns reflect a broader debate about the role of AI in creative industries. While AI can augment creative processes, there's a valid point regarding the unique qualities of human-made art. The “feel” or essence that distinguishes human creativity is often nuanced and deeply tied to the human experience. As AI technology advances, the challenge for creatives may not be to compete with AI, but to emphasize these human elements that machines cannot replicate. The market for authentic, human-created art may indeed flourish, as there will likely always be a demand for works that resonate with the human "touch." This dichotomy could create a new appreciation for human artistry, alongside the use of AI as a tool for expanding creative possibilities.

motohagiography 3y ago

In most arts the constraints yield the technique, where AI is removing constraints faster than most people can even begin to apprehend them. A lot of our meaning came from the constraints we accepted, where we were shaped by the forces we opposed and produced things that were expressions of that experience. If AI removes these, the effect (without competence) is that there's less to shape us. I see it as a kind of Great Decohering. Maybe we need to build an essential civilizational Arc or time capsule that could survive and be discovered in some future era when some variation of our species develops the technology again so they know there is a there here. Thinking the first major humanoid robot application should be to build moon pyramids.

newmagonia 3y ago

AGI might be a modern form of divine 'rest,' taking on the analytical legwork so we can engage more deeply with our creativity. It's mapping our collective subconscious—art, stories, dreams—not as a shortcut, but as a deep-dive tool. This could actually draw us closer together on a soul level, enhancing, not replacing, our collective human journey.

handy2000 3y ago
> AGI might be a modern form of divine 'rest,' AGI? Are you commenting from the future?

mentos 3y ago

Didn't The Beatles read lines out of a news paper for lyrics on a song? I see ChatGPT as just another tool/instrument along side a guitar.

tim333 3y ago
I think you may be thinking of A Day in the Life where "Lennon's lyrics were mainly inspired by contemporary newspaper articles." There was a lot of creativity in that song also though. >"A Day in the Life" became one of the Beatles' most influential songs, and many now consider it to be the band's greatest work. (Wikipedia)

unraveller 3y ago

I remain unstirred. Human creativity is just curation at a smaller scale, I mean to say that even freestyle artists practice and give us only their best stuff. The problem artists have now is that the vague or mysterious origins they once put up as the reason for their inspiration is being exposed as fraud. However powerful their muses were before AI run amok now they find that ambition has turned into dejection, an unwillingness to compete that hard for adulation. You love to see it. If you really value human creativity you should value when it is used to curate mechanized AI output as well as organic brain mush output. Even pure unfiltered Trump/Biden A.I. debate roasting is only funny for its potential to be further curated and shared, and because that is now easy it means the laughing it produces is less of a laugh? I don't think so.