6 ms·

Did washing machine devalue the work of people washing by hand? Did cameras devalue the work of portrait artists? ATMs to bank tellers? Tractor to farmer? Car

by bko 2y ago

Did washing machine devalue the work of people washing by hand? Did cameras devalue the work of portrait artists? ATMs to bank tellers? Tractor to farmer? Car to horses? Again, it's technology. I guess I shouldn't have said I never heard an argument. I just never heard a good one that can't be applied to pretty much any other technology that came before.

mrkpdl 2y ago
These are false equivalences, or whataboutisms. The hand washers provided a very different ‘thing’. To that of artists. You mention things like getting clean clothes, getting from a to b in a car or on a horse, getting cash from an ATM instead from the teller at a bank branch. These are all completely different to the work of an artist or craftsperson that expresses something. So it’s very reasonable for people to seek insight/inspiration/catharsis/etc from things that they understand to be fully crafted by human minds and hands.
- signatoremo 2y ago
  Do photographers express less than painters? Paint and brush are technologies. They enhance paintings. I expect there will be AI based art, not sure in which form, and people will still find joy in it.
  - xkqd 2y ago
    Considering a significant portion of art appreciation revolves around the artist themselves, the talent and story they possess, and the level of effort and expression that went into the piece… I don’t know about that. There’s plenty of visually impressive AI art out there right now. No one is celebrating it.
    - zztop44 2y ago
      Some is also conceptually interesting and celebrated, for example the niceaunties project out of Singapore: https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/jul/19/auntieverse-art-niceaunties-surreal-fantasy-older-women https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/jul/19/auntie...
      - rossriley 2y ago
        This is awesome, thanks for the link.
      - iamacyborg 2y ago
        A quick glimpse and it seems wildly uninteresting, conceptually and visually.
  - mrkpdl 2y ago
    > Do photographers express less than painters? Paint and brush are technologies. They enhance paintings. I didn’t mean to imply artists don’t use technology. And certainly include photography in my definition of things made by the hands and minds of craft people. I have a degree in photography to back that up. But as with all technologies individuals will choose where their line of interest is drawn. There will be AI based art, and their will also be an audience who don’t want it.
- dragonwriter 2y ago
  > These are all completely different to the work of an artist or craftsperson that expresses something The thing is, as was the case with many goods where individual craftspeople were largely displaced by industrialized mass production, the expression of the individual artist or craftsperson was often not what the market was paying for anyway. They were paying for something utilitarian, but limited by the available methods of production.
- farts_mckensy 2y ago
  Its not any different in principle than any other technological innovation. Arguments to the contrary amount to special pleading. The jobs of many, many craftspeople were displaced in the wake of industrialization and the digital revolution. We all buy and consume things that are mass produced all the time and don't bat an eye. Some artisianal version of these things is available in many cases. You're free to buy the mass produced version or the artisianal version. Technological progress is the engine of capitalism. History shows that you can't stop it, and slowing it just enables competitors to swoop in and eat your lunch. But Capitalism has a shelf life. Feudalism came to an end, and so will the market system. In practice, the implementation into all aspects of production will lead to an insurmountable economic crisis. What comes after is up to us.
shit_game 2y ago
Things like washing machines and cars liberated people from labor and saved their time, which they couldn then use to persue other goals. For many, making art is their goal - generative AI isn't liberating people from the burden of making art, it's making art a non-viable endeavour for millions of people.
- echelon 2y ago
  Generative AI lets me make films from my desk instead of 7 AM call times, steep bills at the rental houses, and unreliable post editors who fail to meet deadlines. This isn't just a net win, this puts power in my hand I've never had before. It's still work and art. No LLM is going to make a compelling story or make the right artistic choices. I do that. But now I get to control way more myself and I'm empowered to see the entire vision though.
  - totallymike 2y ago
    I always felt that the beauty of film is in the collaboration between all the people involved to create something larger than themselves. Everybody in the credits brings something irreplaceable to a film, and together they transcend a singular vision to build a work of art. This generative stuff feels reductive to me. There are no actors, no set designers, prop masters, musicians. Nobody’s bouncing ideas off a colleague or working with three other departments to bring a scene together. It feels less like art when it’s a computer using models based on real stolen art to generate content off of a prompt.
  - oofdere 2y ago
    > But now I get to control way more myself is this a good thing? to some extent sure but I feel like limitations and collaboration leads to better art in many instances
  - newprint 2y ago
    > But now I get to control way more myself. You are not, the LLM makes bulk of work for you and will choose a lot of things for you for the movie you are making. >I'm empowered to see the entire vision though. I think you fail to grasp one important thing about art in general - it is non-verbal by it's nature. You can't go and explain in LLM input some famous painting, it not how it works.
komali2 2y ago
My argument is this: technology has been driving down the market value of human labor for the last century at least, and soon the market value of human labor will be pennies. I specifically use market value because the market valuation mechanism is irrational and its meaning of "value" is different from what people often mean when they talk about value. E.g. the contributions of a fireman are far more valuable to a society than those of a mutual fund manager, but the market value of the fireman's labor is far lower. Anyway I don't know when it'll happen but the cost of doing many things with AI, automation, etc will soon be very low, and having a human do the thing maybe worse maybe better, will be prohibitively expensive. Even if you argue that in the past new technologies have created new jobs, one can look at the labor market value trend of the last 70 years to see that it seems we've passed some turning point where human labor market value in emerging skillsets can't surpass the ability of technology to make them redundant - by which I mean take a look at them wages, they are slip sliding into oblivion. Maybe not all jobs, but if even 20% of people can't justify their existence under capitalism with labor in a way that feeds and houses them, that's a historic national crisis. Stopping technological development probably isn't the long term solution. Unions are great but also just a bandaid on a broken system - don't we want to enjoy the benefits of decreased scarcity? It's time to start having real conversations about how to organize our society as scarcity diminishes to near 0, or if you don't like that, how to organize our societies with the expectation that 20% of people or more simply won't be able to justify their existence through labor. If you can think of a way to make capitalism work in such a way without enforcing artificial scarcity, I'm all ears, but I'm skeptical. Probably we need to stop requiring people to justify their existence with labor and just let people have food, shelter, medical care etc in return for nothing at all. We almost certainly already have the resources to allow this, and if we don't today we definitely will in 50 years.
intended 2y ago
Human attention doesn’t get freed up by creating more content. It gets consumed. In all your examples - 1) Yes. It was a good thing 2) Yes. It is now a thing done to learn how to draw, and a niche skill 3) Yes, yes, yes. IF people are bemoaning the devaluing of certain activity, yup it’s true. It happens. There are fewer horses than there were yesterday. Certain forms of activity get devalued. They are replaced by an alternative that creates surplus. But life goes on to bigger things. The same with GenAI. Content is increasingly easy to create at scale. This reduced cost of production applies for both useful content and pollution. Except if finding valid information is made harder, - then life becomes more complex and we don’t go on to bigger and better things. The abundance of fabricated content which is indistinguishable from authentic content means that authentic content is devalued, and that any content consumed must now wait before it is verified. It increases the cost of trusting information, which reduces the overall value of the network. It’s like the cost of lemons for used cars. This is the looming problem. Hopefully something appears that mitigates the worst case scenarios, however the medium case and even bad case are well and truly alive.
- flamedoge 2y ago
  who's stopping you from Amish lifestyle? problem seems to be that people want authentic, hand-made 'art' but with price of a mass manufactured tech.
  - intended 2y ago
    For art - I can get the dissonance. It’s inherently subjective. I’m concerned with facts and science. I have to talk past a litany of falsehoods about mental health with my dad before I can get to the actual science that will help him. I have to remind people about things they studied in the 6th grade about history, to counter whatever hate group BS that has whatsapped itself into their heads. This is what I am concerned about. If it was cheaper to create true content, and more expensive to create non factual content, I wouldn’t be arguing about this with people who write code. It’s just cheaper to create content and more expensive to identify content.
traceroute66 2y ago
> Did cameras devalue the work of portrait artists? Actually yes. Ask any professional photographer what they think of the selfie generation. Yes, you can argue "the best camera is the one you have with you". But ultimatley it has devalued the value of the professional photographer. I know photographers who, for example, spend their life swatting away phone camera users who turn up behind them at the spot where they've setup their camera etc. Its like, I've taken the time to find the spot, the angle, the light and you turn up and devalue all that....
- Eisenstein 2y ago
  I don't understand. Why would people taking pictures for themselves devalue the work of a professional photographer?
  - latexr 2y ago
    Think of anything you can do well and with nuance. People pay you to do it professionally and properly. Now imagine there’s a tool that kind of does what you do, for free but sloppily. Suddenly people no longer pay you to do what you did, and all around you see the output of that subpar tool and the inferior result it produces. Your work has been devalued. No one is paying for it and most don’t understand why it was better, despite the fact that it was. Have you ever seen those “graphic design is my passion” memes? That’s a good analogy. Effective graphic design isn’t just plastering some words on a page, it’s understanding where those words go, where to break the lines, which font to use, what background is balanced… All things the tool doesn’t do for you but that affect the final result and how it’s perceived at a subconscious level. There is a difference between a good and a bad poster. Even if both have the same information, one of them will be better at its job (e.g. making people pay attention and pay for the concert ticket) even if the bad designer doesn’t understand what or why.

by bko 2y ago

mrkpdl 2y ago

These are false equivalences, or whataboutisms. The hand washers provided a very different ‘thing’. To that of artists. You mention things like getting clean clothes, getting from a to b in a car or on a horse, getting cash from an ATM instead from the teller at a bank branch. These are all completely different to the work of an artist or craftsperson that expresses something. So it’s very reasonable for people to seek insight/inspiration/catharsis/etc from things that they understand to be fully crafted by human minds and hands.

signatoremo 2y ago
Do photographers express less than painters? Paint and brush are technologies. They enhance paintings. I expect there will be AI based art, not sure in which form, and people will still find joy in it.
- xkqd 2y ago
  Considering a significant portion of art appreciation revolves around the artist themselves, the talent and story they possess, and the level of effort and expression that went into the piece… I don’t know about that. There’s plenty of visually impressive AI art out there right now. No one is celebrating it.
  - zztop44 2y ago
    Some is also conceptually interesting and celebrated, for example the niceaunties project out of Singapore: https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/jul/19/auntieverse-art-niceaunties-surreal-fantasy-older-women https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/jul/19/auntie...
    - rossriley 2y ago
      This is awesome, thanks for the link.
    - iamacyborg 2y ago
      A quick glimpse and it seems wildly uninteresting, conceptually and visually.
- mrkpdl 2y ago
  > Do photographers express less than painters? Paint and brush are technologies. They enhance paintings. I didn’t mean to imply artists don’t use technology. And certainly include photography in my definition of things made by the hands and minds of craft people. I have a degree in photography to back that up. But as with all technologies individuals will choose where their line of interest is drawn. There will be AI based art, and their will also be an audience who don’t want it.
dragonwriter 2y ago
> These are all completely different to the work of an artist or craftsperson that expresses something The thing is, as was the case with many goods where individual craftspeople were largely displaced by industrialized mass production, the expression of the individual artist or craftsperson was often not what the market was paying for anyway. They were paying for something utilitarian, but limited by the available methods of production.
farts_mckensy 2y ago
Its not any different in principle than any other technological innovation. Arguments to the contrary amount to special pleading. The jobs of many, many craftspeople were displaced in the wake of industrialization and the digital revolution. We all buy and consume things that are mass produced all the time and don't bat an eye. Some artisianal version of these things is available in many cases. You're free to buy the mass produced version or the artisianal version. Technological progress is the engine of capitalism. History shows that you can't stop it, and slowing it just enables competitors to swoop in and eat your lunch. But Capitalism has a shelf life. Feudalism came to an end, and so will the market system. In practice, the implementation into all aspects of production will lead to an insurmountable economic crisis. What comes after is up to us.

shit_game 2y ago

Things like washing machines and cars liberated people from labor and saved their time, which they couldn then use to persue other goals. For many, making art is their goal - generative AI isn't liberating people from the burden of making art, it's making art a non-viable endeavour for millions of people.

echelon 2y ago
Generative AI lets me make films from my desk instead of 7 AM call times, steep bills at the rental houses, and unreliable post editors who fail to meet deadlines. This isn't just a net win, this puts power in my hand I've never had before. It's still work and art. No LLM is going to make a compelling story or make the right artistic choices. I do that. But now I get to control way more myself and I'm empowered to see the entire vision though.
- totallymike 2y ago
  I always felt that the beauty of film is in the collaboration between all the people involved to create something larger than themselves. Everybody in the credits brings something irreplaceable to a film, and together they transcend a singular vision to build a work of art. This generative stuff feels reductive to me. There are no actors, no set designers, prop masters, musicians. Nobody’s bouncing ideas off a colleague or working with three other departments to bring a scene together. It feels less like art when it’s a computer using models based on real stolen art to generate content off of a prompt.
- oofdere 2y ago
  > But now I get to control way more myself is this a good thing? to some extent sure but I feel like limitations and collaboration leads to better art in many instances
- newprint 2y ago
  > But now I get to control way more myself. You are not, the LLM makes bulk of work for you and will choose a lot of things for you for the movie you are making. >I'm empowered to see the entire vision though. I think you fail to grasp one important thing about art in general - it is non-verbal by it's nature. You can't go and explain in LLM input some famous painting, it not how it works.

komali2 2y ago

My argument is this: technology has been driving down the market value of human labor for the last century at least, and soon the market value of human labor will be pennies. I specifically use market value because the market valuation mechanism is irrational and its meaning of "value" is different from what people often mean when they talk about value. E.g. the contributions of a fireman are far more valuable to a society than those of a mutual fund manager, but the market value of the fireman's labor is far lower. Anyway I don't know when it'll happen but the cost of doing many things with AI, automation, etc will soon be very low, and having a human do the thing maybe worse maybe better, will be prohibitively expensive. Even if you argue that in the past new technologies have created new jobs, one can look at the labor market value trend of the last 70 years to see that it seems we've passed some turning point where human labor market value in emerging skillsets can't surpass the ability of technology to make them redundant - by which I mean take a look at them wages, they are slip sliding into oblivion. Maybe not all jobs, but if even 20% of people can't justify their existence under capitalism with labor in a way that feeds and houses them, that's a historic national crisis. Stopping technological development probably isn't the long term solution. Unions are great but also just a bandaid on a broken system - don't we want to enjoy the benefits of decreased scarcity? It's time to start having real conversations about how to organize our society as scarcity diminishes to near 0, or if you don't like that, how to organize our societies with the expectation that 20% of people or more simply won't be able to justify their existence through labor. If you can think of a way to make capitalism work in such a way without enforcing artificial scarcity, I'm all ears, but I'm skeptical. Probably we need to stop requiring people to justify their existence with labor and just let people have food, shelter, medical care etc in return for nothing at all. We almost certainly already have the resources to allow this, and if we don't today we definitely will in 50 years.

intended 2y ago

Human attention doesn’t get freed up by creating more content. It gets consumed. In all your examples - 1) Yes. It was a good thing 2) Yes. It is now a thing done to learn how to draw, and a niche skill 3) Yes, yes, yes. IF people are bemoaning the devaluing of certain activity, yup it’s true. It happens. There are fewer horses than there were yesterday. Certain forms of activity get devalued. They are replaced by an alternative that creates surplus. But life goes on to bigger things. The same with GenAI. Content is increasingly easy to create at scale. This reduced cost of production applies for both useful content and pollution. Except if finding valid information is made harder, - then life becomes more complex and we don’t go on to bigger and better things. The abundance of fabricated content which is indistinguishable from authentic content means that authentic content is devalued, and that any content consumed must now wait before it is verified. It increases the cost of trusting information, which reduces the overall value of the network. It’s like the cost of lemons for used cars. This is the looming problem. Hopefully something appears that mitigates the worst case scenarios, however the medium case and even bad case are well and truly alive.

flamedoge 2y ago
who's stopping you from Amish lifestyle? problem seems to be that people want authentic, hand-made 'art' but with price of a mass manufactured tech.
- intended 2y ago
  For art - I can get the dissonance. It’s inherently subjective. I’m concerned with facts and science. I have to talk past a litany of falsehoods about mental health with my dad before I can get to the actual science that will help him. I have to remind people about things they studied in the 6th grade about history, to counter whatever hate group BS that has whatsapped itself into their heads. This is what I am concerned about. If it was cheaper to create true content, and more expensive to create non factual content, I wouldn’t be arguing about this with people who write code. It’s just cheaper to create content and more expensive to identify content.

traceroute66 2y ago

> Did cameras devalue the work of portrait artists? Actually yes. Ask any professional photographer what they think of the selfie generation. Yes, you can argue "the best camera is the one you have with you". But ultimatley it has devalued the value of the professional photographer. I know photographers who, for example, spend their life swatting away phone camera users who turn up behind them at the spot where they've setup their camera etc. Its like, I've taken the time to find the spot, the angle, the light and you turn up and devalue all that....

Eisenstein 2y ago
I don't understand. Why would people taking pictures for themselves devalue the work of a professional photographer?
- latexr 2y ago
  Think of anything you can do well and with nuance. People pay you to do it professionally and properly. Now imagine there’s a tool that kind of does what you do, for free but sloppily. Suddenly people no longer pay you to do what you did, and all around you see the output of that subpar tool and the inferior result it produces. Your work has been devalued. No one is paying for it and most don’t understand why it was better, despite the fact that it was. Have you ever seen those “graphic design is my passion” memes? That’s a good analogy. Effective graphic design isn’t just plastering some words on a page, it’s understanding where those words go, where to break the lines, which font to use, what background is balanced… All things the tool doesn’t do for you but that affect the final result and how it’s perceived at a subconscious level. There is a difference between a good and a bad poster. Even if both have the same information, one of them will be better at its job (e.g. making people pay attention and pay for the concert ticket) even if the bad designer doesn’t understand what or why.