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> How else do you get influence and inspiration without feeding other people's work into your own brain? Do you know a single artist, writer, or musician who ha

> How else do you get influence and inspiration without feeding other people's work into your own brain? Do you know a single artist, writer, or musician who hasn't seen other artists' paintings, read other writers' books, or listened to other musician's music? Ingesting content is the core of how influence, inspiration, and learning work I am a human, alive and sentient. I can be held responsible if my “inspirations” stray into theft. A machine cannot, and it’s increasingly looking like the companies that operate the machines can’t either. I also can’t churn out my inspired works at a rate that displaces potentially everyone who has ever influenced me. > It's made creative pursuits accessible to billions who previously didn't have the skill or time to do them well, or the money to hire others. As a random example, I have friends using ChatGPT to compose creative and personalized poems and notes about each other. Not something they were doing before How on earth is using a machine to spit out a poem a creative pursuit? There’s no more creativity there than watching a movie someone else made. It’s entertaining, yes, but it’s not creativity. > The camera lessened the need of people to go to plays and pay for tickets to see things in person. Just like records, CDs, and mp3s lessened the need to go to concerts and shows This doesn’t hold water. Cinema did not eliminate theatre just as records did not eliminate live music. In fact, both are arguably as big now as they have ever been. The technology here filled a new space, it didn’t threaten to throw everyone out of an existing one.

l33tman 3y ago
I can't know if you've actually used these tools, but it requires a pretty high level of creative mind to get them to produce the content you're looking for. Maybe you as a user of an LLM you don't need to be creative in the writing of words for example, but you instead need to be creative in how you control the tools and pick the right outputs, feed it back, copy/paste/cut it, change stuff, extend it.. and the same with the image generators. There's a HUGE amount of creative accessories around them to manipulate and steer the process. There might be less creativity needed with the pen, but it's needed in other ways.
- jitix 3y ago
  I don’t see the advent of generative art any different than when we moved from paper to photoshop. For those unaware the vast majority of graphic artists start their projects with assets and base images that they themselves don’t create. With generative ai you’re simply going one step further and have another new tool create a more polished version that you can edit to remove extra fingers, etc. It’s simply moving the baseline from 20% done to 60% done, which will result in artists producing even higher fidelity and more detailed art. For example an artist could generate a bunch of scenes using Sora and create a collage of them for a larger piece of art, something that is prohibitively time consuming right now.
ben_w 3y ago
> I am a human, alive and sentient. I can be held responsible if my “inspirations” stray into theft. A machine cannot, and it’s increasingly looking like the companies that operate the machines can’t either. 150 years ago, Bertha Benz wasn't allowed to own property or patents in her own right, because the law said so. The specific reason a machine cannot be held responsible today is because the law says so. Also, dead humans' copyright is respected in law, so "alive" isn't adding value to your argument here. > I also can’t churn out my inspired works at a rate that displaces potentially everyone who has ever influenced me. I can't run faster than every athlete who has ever inspired me, this argument does not prevent motor cars. I can't write notes faster than the world record holder in shorthand, this argument does not prevent the printing press. I can't play chess or go at even a mediocre level, this argument does not prevent Stockfish or Alpha Go. I can't hear the tonal differences in Chinese well enough to distinguish "hello" from "mud trench", 这个论点并没有阻止谷歌翻译学习 “你好” 和 “泥壕” 之间的区别。 I can't do arithmetic in my head faster than literally all other humans combined even if they hadn't been trained to the level of the current world record holder, this argument does not prevent the original model of the Raspberry Pi Zero. "The machine is 'better', in one or more senses of the word, than a human" is, in fact, a reason to use the machine. It's the reason to use a machine. It's why the machine is an economic threat — but you can't just use "my income is threatened by this machine" as a reason to prevent other people using the machine, just as I as a software developer can't use that argument to stop other people using LLMs to write code without hiring me. > Cinema did not eliminate theatre just as records did not eliminate live music. In fact, both are arguably as big now as they have ever been. You can argue that, but you'd be wrong. Shakespeare wrote for normal everyday people, his stuff fit into the category that today would be "TV soap opera", where the audience was everyone rather than just the well-off, where the only other public entertainment was options were bear-baiting and public executions, where the actors have very little time to rehearse, and where "you're ripping off my ideas" was handled by rapidly churning out new content. Live music, without amplification, used to be the only way to listen to music. Now, even if you see a live performance, you can have 10k people in a single venue listening to a single band… and if you want music in a pub or a dance club, the most likely performance is from a DJ rather than a band, and the "D" stands for "disk" because the actual content is pre-recorded — and that's not to say I would deny that DJ work is "creative", but rather that it makes DJing exactly what critics accuse GenAI of being, remixing of other people's work. Which, now I think about it, is a description that would also apply to all the modern performances of Shakespeare: simply reusing someone else's creation without paying any compensation to the estate. But I know that will tickle you the wrong way, I know that art is the peacock's tail of humans: the struggle, the difficulty, is the point, and it has to be because that's how we find people to start families with. Because of that, GenAI is like being caught wearing a fake Rolex watch, and you can't actually defend that with logical reasons such as "real Rolex watches aren't very good at keeping time compared to even a Casio F-91W let alone the atomic clock synchronising with my phone", because logic isn't the point, and never was the point.
eric_cc 3y ago
Reading your opinion on the subject, I believe you’re struggling to make sense of what is happening. I suspect there is a combination of factors here: you are reinforcing a bias, can’t wrap your head around it, don’t have much experience working with AI, haven’t deeply considered the evolution of the universe. My recommendation: zoom out a little bit. Every step in history is so brief and nothing is normal for long. Even humanity is a blink. Comments like: “how is using a machine to spit out a poem creative”. Really? How is using a digital camera creative compared to painting. How is a painting creative compared to etching? And on and on evolution goes..
- throw10920 3y ago
  > Reading your opinion on the subject, I believe you’re struggling to make sense of what is happening. I suspect there is a combination of factors here: you are reinforcing a bias, can’t wrap your head around it, don’t have much experience working with AI, haven’t deeply considered the evolution of the universe. Please don't try to profile other HN users.
  - eric_cc 3y ago
    I agree. I could have expressed my thoughts better in this case. It wasn’t just OP I was considering. I was thinking of a common AI take that I’ve seen when I wrote my comment. Regardless, will do better to express my thoughts and agree that we shouldn’t profile each other here.
    - throw10920 3y ago
      Thank you! I appreciate and admire your humility and willingness to change. You're an inspiration to me to better express my thoughts too.
caeril 3y ago
> I also can’t churn out my inspired works at a rate that displaces potentially everyone who has ever influenced me. I'm with you, man. I'm still trying to find a lawyer who will sue Kubota and John Deere for moving dirt at a rate far superior to me and a shovel, but nobody will take my case. > How on earth is using a machine to spit out a poem a creative pursuit? 100%, man. Nobody is mentioning the magical fairy dust in human brains that makes us superior to these models. When I really like fantasy novels, and then train my neurons on thousands of hours of reading Tolkien, Terry Brooks, Brandon Sanderson, etc, and then I get the idea to write my own fantasy series, my creative process doesn't draw on my own model's training data at all. It's 100% "creative", and I would produce exactly the same content if I were illiterate. But these goddamned machines, man. They don't have our special human fairy dust. When we discovered the universal law of gravitation, and realized that the laws of physics are omnipresent in our universe, we put a giant asterisk to note that the laws of physics are different inside humans. The epidermis is a sort of barrier to physics, and within its confines, magic happens, that these pro-AI people conveniently "forget". To paraphrase the eminent Human Unique Creative Person Roger Penrose: "There's magical quantum shit goin down in the microtubules. It's gotta be the microtubules. I think, right? I can't prove it, but as a scientist, we don't need proof. Making sure we think we are superior is more important."

l33tman 3y ago

I can't know if you've actually used these tools, but it requires a pretty high level of creative mind to get them to produce the content you're looking for. Maybe you as a user of an LLM you don't need to be creative in the writing of words for example, but you instead need to be creative in how you control the tools and pick the right outputs, feed it back, copy/paste/cut it, change stuff, extend it.. and the same with the image generators. There's a HUGE amount of creative accessories around them to manipulate and steer the process. There might be less creativity needed with the pen, but it's needed in other ways.

jitix 3y ago
I don’t see the advent of generative art any different than when we moved from paper to photoshop. For those unaware the vast majority of graphic artists start their projects with assets and base images that they themselves don’t create. With generative ai you’re simply going one step further and have another new tool create a more polished version that you can edit to remove extra fingers, etc. It’s simply moving the baseline from 20% done to 60% done, which will result in artists producing even higher fidelity and more detailed art. For example an artist could generate a bunch of scenes using Sora and create a collage of them for a larger piece of art, something that is prohibitively time consuming right now.

ben_w 3y ago

> I am a human, alive and sentient. I can be held responsible if my “inspirations” stray into theft. A machine cannot, and it’s increasingly looking like the companies that operate the machines can’t either. 150 years ago, Bertha Benz wasn't allowed to own property or patents in her own right, because the law said so. The specific reason a machine cannot be held responsible today is because the law says so. Also, dead humans' copyright is respected in law, so "alive" isn't adding value to your argument here. > I also can’t churn out my inspired works at a rate that displaces potentially everyone who has ever influenced me. I can't run faster than every athlete who has ever inspired me, this argument does not prevent motor cars. I can't write notes faster than the world record holder in shorthand, this argument does not prevent the printing press. I can't play chess or go at even a mediocre level, this argument does not prevent Stockfish or Alpha Go. I can't hear the tonal differences in Chinese well enough to distinguish "hello" from "mud trench", 这个论点并没有阻止谷歌翻译学习 “你好” 和 “泥壕” 之间的区别。 I can't do arithmetic in my head faster than literally all other humans combined even if they hadn't been trained to the level of the current world record holder, this argument does not prevent the original model of the Raspberry Pi Zero. "The machine is 'better', in one or more senses of the word, than a human" is, in fact, a reason to use the machine. It's the reason to use a machine. It's why the machine is an economic threat — but you can't just use "my income is threatened by this machine" as a reason to prevent other people using the machine, just as I as a software developer can't use that argument to stop other people using LLMs to write code without hiring me. > Cinema did not eliminate theatre just as records did not eliminate live music. In fact, both are arguably as big now as they have ever been. You can argue that, but you'd be wrong. Shakespeare wrote for normal everyday people, his stuff fit into the category that today would be "TV soap opera", where the audience was everyone rather than just the well-off, where the only other public entertainment was options were bear-baiting and public executions, where the actors have very little time to rehearse, and where "you're ripping off my ideas" was handled by rapidly churning out new content. Live music, without amplification, used to be the only way to listen to music. Now, even if you see a live performance, you can have 10k people in a single venue listening to a single band… and if you want music in a pub or a dance club, the most likely performance is from a DJ rather than a band, and the "D" stands for "disk" because the actual content is pre-recorded — and that's not to say I would deny that DJ work is "creative", but rather that it makes DJing exactly what critics accuse GenAI of being, remixing of other people's work. Which, now I think about it, is a description that would also apply to all the modern performances of Shakespeare: simply reusing someone else's creation without paying any compensation to the estate. But I know that will tickle you the wrong way, I know that art is the peacock's tail of humans: the struggle, the difficulty, is the point, and it has to be because that's how we find people to start families with. Because of that, GenAI is like being caught wearing a fake Rolex watch, and you can't actually defend that with logical reasons such as "real Rolex watches aren't very good at keeping time compared to even a Casio F-91W let alone the atomic clock synchronising with my phone", because logic isn't the point, and never was the point.

eric_cc 3y ago

Reading your opinion on the subject, I believe you’re struggling to make sense of what is happening. I suspect there is a combination of factors here: you are reinforcing a bias, can’t wrap your head around it, don’t have much experience working with AI, haven’t deeply considered the evolution of the universe. My recommendation: zoom out a little bit. Every step in history is so brief and nothing is normal for long. Even humanity is a blink. Comments like: “how is using a machine to spit out a poem creative”. Really? How is using a digital camera creative compared to painting. How is a painting creative compared to etching? And on and on evolution goes..

throw10920 3y ago
> Reading your opinion on the subject, I believe you’re struggling to make sense of what is happening. I suspect there is a combination of factors here: you are reinforcing a bias, can’t wrap your head around it, don’t have much experience working with AI, haven’t deeply considered the evolution of the universe. Please don't try to profile other HN users.
- eric_cc 3y ago
  I agree. I could have expressed my thoughts better in this case. It wasn’t just OP I was considering. I was thinking of a common AI take that I’ve seen when I wrote my comment. Regardless, will do better to express my thoughts and agree that we shouldn’t profile each other here.
  - throw10920 3y ago
    Thank you! I appreciate and admire your humility and willingness to change. You're an inspiration to me to better express my thoughts too.

caeril 3y ago

> I also can’t churn out my inspired works at a rate that displaces potentially everyone who has ever influenced me. I'm with you, man. I'm still trying to find a lawyer who will sue Kubota and John Deere for moving dirt at a rate far superior to me and a shovel, but nobody will take my case. > How on earth is using a machine to spit out a poem a creative pursuit? 100%, man. Nobody is mentioning the magical fairy dust in human brains that makes us superior to these models. When I really like fantasy novels, and then train my neurons on thousands of hours of reading Tolkien, Terry Brooks, Brandon Sanderson, etc, and then I get the idea to write my own fantasy series, my creative process doesn't draw on my own model's training data at all. It's 100% "creative", and I would produce exactly the same content if I were illiterate. But these goddamned machines, man. They don't have our special human fairy dust. When we discovered the universal law of gravitation, and realized that the laws of physics are omnipresent in our universe, we put a giant asterisk to note that the laws of physics are different inside humans. The epidermis is a sort of barrier to physics, and within its confines, magic happens, that these pro-AI people conveniently "forget". To paraphrase the eminent Human Unique Creative Person Roger Penrose: "There's magical quantum shit goin down in the microtubules. It's gotta be the microtubules. I think, right? I can't prove it, but as a scientist, we don't need proof. Making sure we think we are superior is more important."