4 ms·

You aren't wrong, especially about motivations. The "current consumer focus" has had some weird results, too - particularly in the image/video generation space,

You aren't wrong, especially about motivations. The "current consumer focus" has had some weird results, too - particularly in the image/video generation space, it's the consumers, or rather the OSS community, that actually did 90% of the work of turning AI research output into product prototypes - which many a startup now just pick, polish and scale up. Not to dismiss that work, either, but that's mostly the old-school SaaS building work; the hot AI part is already there on Github, packaged into ComfyUI nodes for people to play with. Full video is a slightly different story because of compute demands, but image generation is basically the infamous Dropbox comment situation - any fancy image generation task you see offered as a service, a moderately tech-savvy person could replicate for personal use with ComfyUI over a weekend. That applies to interactive portraits too - the nodes are but a click away, models run fast enough for local use on an average PC. I'd like to challenge you on your conclusion, though: > These tools are purely intended for superficial people who are not interested in creating things, they are only interested in outputs and end results. But this is exactly how progress is made. Quoting Alfred North Whitehead[0]: "Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them." Where for one craftsman, the process is the most important part of their creative work, another craftsman only cares about the output of the former, because it's an input to their creative work. That doesn't make the latter person "superficial", they're just one level up the dependency graph. -- [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_North_Whitehead https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_North_Whitehead

skydhash 2y ago
> Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them. That's for mass production of useful tools. For decades, it's been easy to produce music, write a book, and draw with digital means. The actual truth is that people don't want to invest the time to learn how. Now they can pose as if they've done so, but the result never survives close inspection.
- TeMPOraL 2y ago
  True, if you evaluate the new in context of the old. Anyone can summon a story with an LLM now, but it ain't gonna be as good as one written by an author pouring their heart and sweat into every word. Same with digital images. However, the exact same technology is just a small bit plumbing away from allowing people to summon immersive stories in interactive 3D environments, and iteratively sculpt them from within, in the same way people in Star Trek did with the Holodeck (sans the actual holograms, but VR will do as a substitute). The building blocks are all there today, and are up to spec - what's missing is some glue and ironing out a kinks; I expect multiple attempts at this succeeding within next year or two. And this is a new kind of creative field, which will breed new mode of creating art (not just by chatting with a computer - there's a need for fine manual touch, too). In the end, some things will be diminished, but new things will become possible. I'm mildly positive about it, but I guess we'll soon whether we'll gain more than we lose.
  - skydhash 2y ago
    What you wrote can be summarized as: 1 Write Prompt 2 ... 3 Have a complete work Let's take step 2. Drawing is easy to learn, but it's very hard to master. Why because, it derives from understanding and muscle controls. People fails to draw a simple cube because they don't understand the thing they see. Yes, they probably know that it has 6 faces that are square, but they haven't learned to see it. Knowledge is important, but it's just the initial step. You then have to understand how it all fits together (extract the rules), then apply that understanding. Same with writing. Everyone has a story, but not everyone can tell it because they don't know how to. You have to learn the techniques, then apply it until you have a complete understanding, then you can create as much as you want to. With no understanding, there's no creation. And generative AI won't help, because it can't feel the world as you and I do.
    - ben_w 2y ago
      I'm reminded of my time in secondary school back in the late 90s. I was trying to figure out how to make an FPS game of my own — from first principles given there was no internet for me to be advised by. One of my peers suggested using flood fill as per photoshop, and I couldn't get him to understand that this didn't do perspective even with an example. (A real life "these cows are small, those cows are far away" moment). Or that "Dulce et Decorum est" was required study material in the English Literature classes. Neither I nor anyone else in the school knew what it was really like to experience the horrors of war described in that poem, as the use of chlorine gas was banned before anyone under retirement age had been born. Shakespeare is held in such high esteem, but how many of those who enjoy it today would have enjoyed an original performance of The Tempest in 1611 with actors who had little chance to memorise their lines, an audience who vocally participated, no light beyond what a fire could provide, no sound system beyond the cannon that accidentally burned The Globe theatre down? Can the works even be fully comprehended given that today the questions are "is Shylock an unfair and antisemetic stereotype?" and "why is The Taming of the Shrew even counted as a comedy rather than a tragedy?" and "why 'eye of newt'?"
voidhorse 2y ago
Always nice to see Whitehead show up. That is true, and that makes a lot of sense for supplying the outputs for our vital needs, like shelter, food, etc. But I would argue that creative work is different. Creative work is typically more about the process, not the immediate output, and in fact, it is usually only during the process itself that we figure out what we really want to express in a creative work. Art: "purposefullness without purpose". So, unless you are producing creative works as mere entertainment to fill laborers' time while they recover for the next day of work, and not as a mode of expression, I don't believe a productive optimization argument makes much sense here. We'll see, I could be wrong, the LLM might become a new paintbrush, but I think the inherent stochasticity might prevent that. Regardless, there's a reason all of our analog tools have stuck around for art making in spite of the existence of their highly efficient digital counterparts. And I think the author of Process and Reality might agree with me.
- inhumantsar 2y ago
  > there's a reason all of our analog tools have stuck around for art making As an early adopter of digital cameras and convert to film photography, I agree... to a point. Producing creative work can be entirely about the output and those outputs can be as Fine as any Fine Art, not "merely entertainment". Take writers for example. As a business and as a creative pursuit, writers have (on the whole) enthusiastically adopted every technology that's come their way. In large part that's because it helped them stop thinking about certain critical operations. eg: dealing with ink and nibs and loose papers. And while I'd imagine most writers derive a lot of fulfillment from the process, none of that compares to the feeling they get when others read and enjoy their work. Do some writers still use pen and paper? Absolutely, but does that mean their art is better or more Fine or more authentic? Those analog tools might still be around, but it's largely because there are people who still enjoy those mediums, not because their modern alternatives are inherently Less in some way. If they were then all the paintings in your local gallery would have been done in tempera.
  - TeMPOraL 2y ago
    > As an early adopter of digital cameras and convert to film photography, I suppose this is a very good example. Analog photography killed the market for portraits and landscapes, making them available to commoners - first by letting professional photographers make them much cheaper and faster than artists, and eventually by cameras getting cheap enough even commoners could afford them. Yes, this hurt artists a lot. Turns out, the people wanting portraits never actually cared about the process, just the outcome, and from their point of view, analog photographs were not only cheaper but also better quality than portraits and sketches made by artists. But I want to focus on something else entirely - on what analog photography gave us. It wasn't just portraits for everyone. It gave even the poor the ability to hold on to few of most cherished memories in physical form - think e.g. large family gatherings, weddings, graduations, etc. would have someone with a camera there, making photos. Think of your grandparents' photos of their parents, all in sepia or black and white. There were no earlier version of that available to the everyman. Analog photography also gave us photographic evidence, boosted importance of journalism. On the art side, it gave us cinematography and everything attached to it. It created cinemas, and then it created TVs. But there's one more thing. Analog photography gave us a good half of scientific and engineering progress in the late 19th and most of the 20th century. I'd dare to say it directly gave us nuclear physics and quantum physics, because it allowed to observe things we previously couldn't see, or wouldn't notice if we could. E.g. many people probably saw flashes in their eyes as some high-energy particle briefly oversaturated a rod cell. But those same particles leaving permanent traces on a photographic film, for us to see and study at our leisure? That's another game. Now, digital photography. Digital photography killed the market for all the auxiliary services around analog photography. It hurt the still fresh art named "photography", and all but killed the dark room. But it gave us something as important as the previous step - it turned photography from expensive craft to basic human activity. Today, it's completely normal to casually take pictures of bills, papers, posters; it's normal to snap a label at the back of some device, because you'll need to type that number somewhere else in 2 minutes and you don't want to force yourself to memorize it. Science and engineering-wise, digital photography gave us a lot, too, if perhaps less obvious. Most of it is pedestrian. So many daily practices, so many production process, involve digital cameras somewhere in the pipeline, in ways that weren't possible with analog cameras. I could go on. Point is, what the new tool does to artists is usually separate them from their source of income. Artists obviously want to have the two intertwined, but then again, can they talk about heart of the craft when taking commission for it? It's a complex topic. But either way, the new doesn't just mess up with the old, in many cases it's transformative well beyond anyone's imagination. True progress. Will generative AI turn out to be like analog and digital photography in this regard? I don't know. I'm mildly convinced it will.

skydhash 2y ago

> Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them. That's for mass production of useful tools. For decades, it's been easy to produce music, write a book, and draw with digital means. The actual truth is that people don't want to invest the time to learn how. Now they can pose as if they've done so, but the result never survives close inspection.

TeMPOraL 2y ago
True, if you evaluate the new in context of the old. Anyone can summon a story with an LLM now, but it ain't gonna be as good as one written by an author pouring their heart and sweat into every word. Same with digital images. However, the exact same technology is just a small bit plumbing away from allowing people to summon immersive stories in interactive 3D environments, and iteratively sculpt them from within, in the same way people in Star Trek did with the Holodeck (sans the actual holograms, but VR will do as a substitute). The building blocks are all there today, and are up to spec - what's missing is some glue and ironing out a kinks; I expect multiple attempts at this succeeding within next year or two. And this is a new kind of creative field, which will breed new mode of creating art (not just by chatting with a computer - there's a need for fine manual touch, too). In the end, some things will be diminished, but new things will become possible. I'm mildly positive about it, but I guess we'll soon whether we'll gain more than we lose.
- skydhash 2y ago
  What you wrote can be summarized as: 1 Write Prompt 2 ... 3 Have a complete work Let's take step 2. Drawing is easy to learn, but it's very hard to master. Why because, it derives from understanding and muscle controls. People fails to draw a simple cube because they don't understand the thing they see. Yes, they probably know that it has 6 faces that are square, but they haven't learned to see it. Knowledge is important, but it's just the initial step. You then have to understand how it all fits together (extract the rules), then apply that understanding. Same with writing. Everyone has a story, but not everyone can tell it because they don't know how to. You have to learn the techniques, then apply it until you have a complete understanding, then you can create as much as you want to. With no understanding, there's no creation. And generative AI won't help, because it can't feel the world as you and I do.
  - ben_w 2y ago
    I'm reminded of my time in secondary school back in the late 90s. I was trying to figure out how to make an FPS game of my own — from first principles given there was no internet for me to be advised by. One of my peers suggested using flood fill as per photoshop, and I couldn't get him to understand that this didn't do perspective even with an example. (A real life "these cows are small, those cows are far away" moment). Or that "Dulce et Decorum est" was required study material in the English Literature classes. Neither I nor anyone else in the school knew what it was really like to experience the horrors of war described in that poem, as the use of chlorine gas was banned before anyone under retirement age had been born. Shakespeare is held in such high esteem, but how many of those who enjoy it today would have enjoyed an original performance of The Tempest in 1611 with actors who had little chance to memorise their lines, an audience who vocally participated, no light beyond what a fire could provide, no sound system beyond the cannon that accidentally burned The Globe theatre down? Can the works even be fully comprehended given that today the questions are "is Shylock an unfair and antisemetic stereotype?" and "why is The Taming of the Shrew even counted as a comedy rather than a tragedy?" and "why 'eye of newt'?"

voidhorse 2y ago

Always nice to see Whitehead show up. That is true, and that makes a lot of sense for supplying the outputs for our vital needs, like shelter, food, etc. But I would argue that creative work is different. Creative work is typically more about the process, not the immediate output, and in fact, it is usually only during the process itself that we figure out what we really want to express in a creative work. Art: "purposefullness without purpose". So, unless you are producing creative works as mere entertainment to fill laborers' time while they recover for the next day of work, and not as a mode of expression, I don't believe a productive optimization argument makes much sense here. We'll see, I could be wrong, the LLM might become a new paintbrush, but I think the inherent stochasticity might prevent that. Regardless, there's a reason all of our analog tools have stuck around for art making in spite of the existence of their highly efficient digital counterparts. And I think the author of Process and Reality might agree with me.

inhumantsar 2y ago
> there's a reason all of our analog tools have stuck around for art making As an early adopter of digital cameras and convert to film photography, I agree... to a point. Producing creative work can be entirely about the output and those outputs can be as Fine as any Fine Art, not "merely entertainment". Take writers for example. As a business and as a creative pursuit, writers have (on the whole) enthusiastically adopted every technology that's come their way. In large part that's because it helped them stop thinking about certain critical operations. eg: dealing with ink and nibs and loose papers. And while I'd imagine most writers derive a lot of fulfillment from the process, none of that compares to the feeling they get when others read and enjoy their work. Do some writers still use pen and paper? Absolutely, but does that mean their art is better or more Fine or more authentic? Those analog tools might still be around, but it's largely because there are people who still enjoy those mediums, not because their modern alternatives are inherently Less in some way. If they were then all the paintings in your local gallery would have been done in tempera.
- TeMPOraL 2y ago
  > As an early adopter of digital cameras and convert to film photography, I suppose this is a very good example. Analog photography killed the market for portraits and landscapes, making them available to commoners - first by letting professional photographers make them much cheaper and faster than artists, and eventually by cameras getting cheap enough even commoners could afford them. Yes, this hurt artists a lot. Turns out, the people wanting portraits never actually cared about the process, just the outcome, and from their point of view, analog photographs were not only cheaper but also better quality than portraits and sketches made by artists. But I want to focus on something else entirely - on what analog photography gave us. It wasn't just portraits for everyone. It gave even the poor the ability to hold on to few of most cherished memories in physical form - think e.g. large family gatherings, weddings, graduations, etc. would have someone with a camera there, making photos. Think of your grandparents' photos of their parents, all in sepia or black and white. There were no earlier version of that available to the everyman. Analog photography also gave us photographic evidence, boosted importance of journalism. On the art side, it gave us cinematography and everything attached to it. It created cinemas, and then it created TVs. But there's one more thing. Analog photography gave us a good half of scientific and engineering progress in the late 19th and most of the 20th century. I'd dare to say it directly gave us nuclear physics and quantum physics, because it allowed to observe things we previously couldn't see, or wouldn't notice if we could. E.g. many people probably saw flashes in their eyes as some high-energy particle briefly oversaturated a rod cell. But those same particles leaving permanent traces on a photographic film, for us to see and study at our leisure? That's another game. Now, digital photography. Digital photography killed the market for all the auxiliary services around analog photography. It hurt the still fresh art named "photography", and all but killed the dark room. But it gave us something as important as the previous step - it turned photography from expensive craft to basic human activity. Today, it's completely normal to casually take pictures of bills, papers, posters; it's normal to snap a label at the back of some device, because you'll need to type that number somewhere else in 2 minutes and you don't want to force yourself to memorize it. Science and engineering-wise, digital photography gave us a lot, too, if perhaps less obvious. Most of it is pedestrian. So many daily practices, so many production process, involve digital cameras somewhere in the pipeline, in ways that weren't possible with analog cameras. I could go on. Point is, what the new tool does to artists is usually separate them from their source of income. Artists obviously want to have the two intertwined, but then again, can they talk about heart of the craft when taking commission for it? It's a complex topic. But either way, the new doesn't just mess up with the old, in many cases it's transformative well beyond anyone's imagination. True progress. Will generative AI turn out to be like analog and digital photography in this regard? I don't know. I'm mildly convinced it will.