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Read on Reddit that people love AI because it's "democratizing creativity". Let that sink in. People want to be dropped on the top of the mountain and be called

• emblaegh 2y ago
  I think it’s more like people want to enjoy the view without having to learn how to climb, which is a perfectly reasonable thing to want, even if it cheapens the experience somewhat.
  • dxuh 2y ago
    I'm afraid that in time people will forget that it's all about learning to climb.
    • roenxi 2y ago
      That thinking is time honoured and never found much traction. For example, pretty much nobody knows how to grow their own food, make their own clothes, carve their own furniture or even drive a manual car. Hordes of tourists circle the globe bringing disrepute to all sorts of time honoured monuments of history's greatest. Skills and challenges which aren't needed get forgotten and are generally not missed.
      • deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
      • globular-toast 2y ago
        None of those things you mention have been forgotten. Many people do all of those things not because they have to but because it is incredibly rewarding to learn and grow these skills. Convenience doesn't bring happiness. People will actively seek out challenges even when they seemingly have none. The trouble with things like climbing is there are only so many mountains to go around. We already can't walk in many places because of cars. I don't look forward to the day that similar vehicles can go up mountains. The existence of mass-produced clothing doesn't affect your ability to do your own knitting, though.
        • roenxi 2y ago
          I'm replying almost solely to observe that inconvenience also doesn't bring happiness. Happiness is achieved precisely by feeling happy in the setting that you find yourself in. People can train themselves to only feel happy when inconvenienced but that is doing a major disservice to themselves and those immediately around them. But that is something of a tangent and so I have a cover story for why I'm typing! > The trouble with things like climbing is there are only so many mountains to go around. This is taking the metaphor far too far. Nobody is literally taking mountains away from people.
      • kragen 2y ago
        I think the majority of people still know how to grow their own food. We only passed 50% of the population living in cities a few years ago. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.RUR.TOTL.ZS https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.RUR.TOTL.ZS says 43% of the population is still rural, and I'm guessing about 80% of that 43% (32%) knows how to grow their own food. So do all the people who have moved from the country to the city over the last 40 years. There's a big gap between "pretty much nobody" and the reality, which is somewhere between one third and two thirds of everybody. You might want to reflect on exactly how your perception diverged so radically from reality. Do people in cities suffer from not being able to grow their own food and make their own clothes? I don't know for sure, but official statistics claim that, even today, they commit suicide at much higher rates despite having much less material scarcity. Robinsonades have been a popular genre of fiction for centuries, suggesting that people long for that kind of autonomy. Today, we also have zombie apocalypse fiction, RPGs, and preppers. From another angle, sports consist entirely of skills and challenges which aren't needed and never have been, suggesting that they don't get forgotten. Hobbies also consist of skills and challenges which aren't needed.
        • deleted 2y ago
          [deleted]
    • s_dev 2y ago
      "It is not the mountain we conquer but ourselves." - Edmund Hillary. It's not about climbing.
      • globular-toast 2y ago
        Um, no, that quotation means literally the opposite: it is about the climbing, it's not about getting to the top of any particular mountain. What Hillary was getting at is we get satisfaction from learning, training, overcoming difficulties and limitations, and ultimately pushing ourselves to our limits. His limit was Everest, your limit might be Snowdon, but it's climbing it that matters, not just taking the train to the top and taking a selfie.
        • mavhc 2y ago
          Should we ban people from taking the train? They get a different experience, but they still get an experience
          • overfeed 2y ago
            No, but we should mercilessly laugh at them for calling themselves mountaineers when they are train-riders.
        • sdwr 2y ago
          He's saying that you can substitute any activity that combines danger, skill, and willpower for the mountain. It's literally not about the mountain, it's about how far you push yourself to reach a goal.
    • fy20 2y ago
      I wonder if explorers from a few hundred years ago would say the same thing.
  • bspammer 2y ago
    The cheapening of the experience is the whole point though. People are robbing themselves of the joy that can only come from putting yourself through hardship in pursuit of a goal. It’s not a moral judgement, that’s just how humans are wired. The lows make the highs higher.
    • mgfist 2y ago
      What's better, seeing a beautiful view from the mountain after being driven up, or never seeing the view at all?
      • going_north 2y ago
        Maybe torturing the metaphor, but building a road up the mountain often ruins the view.
      • mrWiz 2y ago
        To continue this metaphor, a while back my girlfriend and I went to Machu Picchu. We were taking a bus to the summit, but there was a landslide near the bottom of the mountain so everybody had to climb most of the way up. This led to it being eerily empty until people started trickling in, which certainly made it a better experience than the normal tourist swarm would have been. I can imagine AI art having a similar effect (creating a glut of images/logos/whatever that devalues ones made with care) but am hopeful that we'll get better at filtering the cream of the crop. In 5 years tons of things will have AI logos that would have been made by a graphic designer (or simply not made) in the past. That sucks for graphic designers who are out of a job, is good for people who get cheaper logos, and TBD for overall society who now has lots more "custom" logos etc to wade through.
      • augzodia 2y ago
        This discussion reminds me of Edward Abbey in Desert Solitaire advocating for not building roads in national parks to preserve the experience of true wilderness. Obviously having roads is a great boon to a park's accessibility, and the ability of people with different mobility needs to appreciate nature. But it also made me thoughtful to imagine the feeling of wonder at seeing bridalveil fall after hiking for days into a roadless yosemite valley; how much more special and impressive it would seem after that journey? This metaphorical tangent is pretty far removed from the original discussion, but how do you weigh the accessibility of a thing against how that accessibility changes its nature?
  • aredox 2y ago
    People want to take a selfie at the top. No one is "enjoying the view" anymore - certainly not the shallow masses. It is enshittification.
    • creata 2y ago
      > enshittification Tangentially, what does enshittification mean now? Quoting Wiktionary, at one point it meant "The phenomenon of online platforms gradually degrading the quality of their services, often by promoting advertisements and sponsored content, in order to increase profits" (coined by Doctorow), but now people seem to use it to mean... things becoming shit?
      • aredox 2y ago
        Things turning to shit? The word coined by Doctorow is new, but the phenomenon itself isn't (just talk to any car enthousiast).
      • hangsi 2y ago
        You are right. The grandparent post ironically uses word this in a cheapened, shallow way when they can use it freely in their own writing. You could argue this is the very sort of activity they were criticising when they posted! We are all vulnerable.
      • cdoctorow 2y ago
        See: https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/14/pearl-clutching/#this-toilet-has-no-central-nervous-system https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/14/pearl-clutching/#this-toi... > Second: the fact that a neologism is sometimes decoupled from its theoretical underpinnings and is used colloquially is a feature, not a bug. Many people apply the term "enshittification" very loosely indeed, to mean "something that is bad," without bothering to learn – or apply – the theoretical framework. This is good. This is what it means for a term to enter the lexicon: it takes on a life of its own. If 10,000,000 people use "enshittification" loosely and inspire 10% of their number to look up the longer, more theoretical work I've done on it, that is one million normies who have been sucked into a discourse that used to live exclusively in the world of the most wonkish and obscure practitioners. The only way to maintain a precise, theoretically grounded use of a term is to confine its usage to a small group of largely irrelevant insiders. Policing the use of "enshittification" is worse than a self-limiting move – it would be a self-inflicted wound.
  • creata 2y ago
    It cheapens the experience a lot, but oh well, at least the experience is still there for the people who want it.
    • eric_cc 2y ago
      Does it though? We are all constrained by the time cost of everything we do. Not everybody with a quick creative spark cares enough to sacrifice opportunities, dedicate time, skip sleep or whatever it may take to gain the skills needed to act on the creative spark. AI empowering the output is a beautiful thing.
    • alickz 2y ago
      is art being cheap really such a problem? is it a net negative to society if the average person could produce so much art that it becomes post-scarce?
  • overfeed 2y ago
    What cheapens the experience is the insistence of being called a "mountaineer" when a helicopter dropped you at the peak. This goes for "AI artists" and "astronauts" on commercial launches who glom on to unearned titles whose prestige was forged by countless professionals working very hard.
    • thih9 2y ago
      Such is technological progress. AI generated images are only an extension of what e.g. photography has experienced in the last decades. We’ve had film cameras, then digital cameras, then smartphones, each of these commoditized image creation by a then-unthinkable factor. It’s an ongoing process, even if this leap seems especially big.
      • overfeed 2y ago
        Technological progress does not directly result in posers. As you noted, smartphones allowed anyone to record videos, but I'm yet to see any influencer or YouTuber call themselves a director or cinematographer. I suspect the wannabees exist in the narrow window when technology has expanded enough for non-professionals, but hasn't seen wide enough adoption that the man on the street will recognize the pretentious self-aggrandizement.
        • jakefromstatecs 2y ago
          > I'm yet to see any influencer or YouTuber call themselves a director or cinematographer You must not be looking very hard. There are many youtubers or influencers making indie films or shows. NigaHiga, Annoying Orange and Shane Dawson all made movies. Freddie Wong started out as a Youtuber and created Video Game High School.
          • fy20 2y ago
            Also look at the production quality that a single person can achieve today. Go to Amazon and drop a few grand on mics, lights, cameras and lenses. The result is production quality beating any 90s talk show, which would have taken a whole team to do.
• j-bos 2y ago
  Hasn't that been true since the dawn of mass media? A book does not demand you share your own stories, the radio does not require you carry a tune
  • aredox 2y ago
    Didn't know that before books and radios you had to share your own stories and carry your own tunes
    • pjc50 2y ago
      People kind of did. Before the radio it was much, much more common for middle class and even fairly poor homes to have musical instruments, pubs to have pianos and so on. There were whole traditions of self-entertainment of which only fragments survive now. I don't think that rises to the level of "mass media has made the world worse", but it certainly has made it different and lost a few things.
      • aredox 2y ago
        >it was much, much more common for middle class and even fairly poor homes to have musical instruments, pubs to have pianos and so on That's exagerrated by movies. There were folk songs, but instruments - and players - have always been rare, and played by those who had enough time to learn to play - the poorest of the poor, the crippled and the blinds... Note that at that time, either there was already a copyright to protect musical partitions, or if learning by ear the teachers had total discretion on who they taught and for how much. There were still barriers to knowledge. And outside of Europe, any ceremonial/religious music was only taught to the initiated and played on rare occasions (there are interesting stories of Americans, etno-musicologists or even just musicians looking for new musical construction in the vein of Steve Reich, in the 60s, going to Africa to learn rythms with e.g. Nigerians, staying there for years, fully integrated - or so they thought - and bam! for a rare ceremony their hosts suddenly play something they never showed them before and refuse to discuss it afterwards)
        • 2y ago
• numpad0 2y ago
  I've been suspecting the subtext of that was "take back anime from Japanese", except what they made was a death trap welded stuck in reverse. Now they must climb with what they have, for that they are closer to the top from there than to where they came from.
• Adverblessly 2y ago
  I can't really speak for other people, but I think the "democratizing creativity" part comes in in places where the specific creative part that the AI replaces is not a core part of the creative experience. Take a look at Super Auto Pets, a pretty successful and fun auto-battler game. It literally uses a free emoji pack for its core art. It doesn't really matter that they didn't hire an artist for those (though I think they did hire an artist after finding success) since a free emoji pack was enough for the creative product they wanted to create. If they had AI generated emoji instead, it wouldn't have really mattered much for the final result (creatively at least, I assume audiences would respond poorly due to GenAI's reputation). At the same time, the ability to create their product without paying a lot of money for artists was critical to make it in the first place. This is what it means to me to "democratize creativity", to allow creatives to realize their creative ambitions in an area they are proficient at (e.g. video games) without requiring a lot of creative skill in adjacent areas that aren't critical to the experience they are trying to make.
  • creata 2y ago
    I think there's a reason people would respond more poorly to generated art than to emojis: the contentlessness of emojis is broadly understood. We look at an emoji and we know what it is intended to signify. With "AI" art, there is an ambiguity: which aspects of the artwork are intentional, and which aspects are the creator accepting whatever the "AI" churned out? If the art isn't critical to the game, then use simple art. It doesn't matter if the simple art is or isn't AI generated, what matters (in my opinion) is that it doesn't lead us into looking for meaning that isn't there.
    • BeFlatXIII 2y ago
      > If the art isn't critical to the game, then use simple art. However, complex art is needed to fit with genre tropes to attract the expected audience. It's like Apple shoving AI into their products needlessly—not a core part of the experience, but needed so Wall Street doesn't throw a hissy. > looking for meaning when none is there Or you generate your own meaning. Art is analysis for the audience.
• baq 2y ago
  > People want to be dropped on the top of the mountain and be called an alpinist. No, people want to see their ideas come to life, previously this required effort in mastering a skill, now... it takes less and/or different amount of work.
  • thefz 2y ago
    So everything is cheap, nothing has value.
    • baq 2y ago
      Universe is a prison.
    • jeffhuys 2y ago
      If it has value to them, what do you care? Does the value in your mind of <artpiece> drop when somebody creates <artpiece 2 in the style of artpiece>? If so, you might benefit from focussing more on your own life. I mean this lovingly, as I myself am going through the same thing right now; I realize I'll never be happy if I stay grumpy like this. You can't protect the world from itself.
      • tgv 2y ago
        Because it discourages people from trying. It's hard enough to survive as an artist, and now there is even less sense in trying to start. This will hurt art, and humanity. It's like pupils using an LLM to do their homework. They get the grade, but Idiocracy is awaiting.
        • pizzly 2y ago
          Disagree. I think many people will actually be encouraged to try as the barrier to creating art has dropped and some of those people will decide to become more proficient at art.
          • jeffhuys 2y ago
• glimshe 2y ago
  I don't know where you hang out on Reddit but on my subs people are almost invariably hostile to AI. AI art, even stuff that looks great, gets down voted to oblivion.
  • thefz 2y ago
    The comment was in /r/chatgpt.
• crabbone 2y ago
  There was a very similar discussion when photography was made easily accessible. Baudelaire thought that photography was the killer of art by allowing non-artists to crate something that was very much like art, mechanistically, without having a good insight into what they were doing. And, in some ways he was right... but also not. What eventually happened is that art education that would be required for any aristocrat or an aspiring aristocrat became optional. Most intellectual elite today would be unable to draw much beyond a stick figure diagram. Art, at least where it concerns drawing or painting became a narrowly specialized field. And so, most people today don't understand and don't appreciate art. But, art didn't die. Instead, artists started asking themselves more questions about the nature and philosophy of art, figuring out which aspects are essential, experimenting more. In retrospect, it's sad that fewer people today have decent access or understanding of art, but while more common before, the understanding was often very superficial anyways.
• TiredOfLife 2y ago
  Or get a book without having to wait for a Monk to copy one
• leokennis 2y ago
  People want to write Java code and have a compiler translate it into machine code and be called a programmer. People want to run marathons on shoes with padded soles and be called an athlete.
  • z3phyr 2y ago
    A slope has two ends, even when it's slippery. People want to claim submarines swim, but they do not.
    • fenomas 2y ago
      If you hold a strong opinion about whether or not submarines swim, you might want to look up the source quote and think about it a second?
  • thefz 2y ago
    This equates more to being carried to the finish line by car, doing the last three steps and call it a marathon. Anyway plenty of people can't even finish 1K, so 42.2K in padded shoes is still impressive.
    • _aavaa_ 2y ago
      I disagree. I don’t care about a “marathon” I just need to cover 42.2k. If you wanna make a game out of it and run that distance that’s fine, but I have errands to do and just need to cover the distance. If you wanna draw for the feeling of creative satisfaction that’s great. I just need an image on a page in service of something else.
      • noitpmeder 2y ago
        Sure, just don't go around telling people you ran a marathon
        • _aavaa_ 2y ago
          Can I go around telling people I program if I don’t write directly in binary?
• chthonicdaemon 2y ago
  Do you also object to people paying money to have other people's art in their homes? Is the moral damage from getting an artwork in your home that you didn't create inversely proportional to your monetary investment?
  • thefz 2y ago
    If something else created it for you, is that your art?
    • Jedd 2y ago
      Yes in the sense of ownership, no in the sense of authorship.
    • chthonicdaemon 2y ago
      I notice you say "something" and not "someone". With humans, contribution varies. I could commission a piece and have a great deal of input on the final result, or I could just have exercised judgement to choose the piece. Many people descibe their clothing choices or home decor choices as "creative" or "creative expression".
  • vhantz 2y ago
    What exactly is creative about buying art? Nonsensical comparison, unsurprising for HN though.
• Cthulhu_ 2y ago
  I heard a good one. AI isn't art, AI is content. People don't want to create art per se, they want to generate images for e.g. memes or filler / illustrative images on their blog, replacing or being an addition to stock images. No shade on stock photographers / illustrators, but that's where I see image generation end up at. And you could already get custom illustrations made for cheap on sites like fiverr. The real long term question will be whether an AI generated image can compete with services like that. (my guess: probably, AI images are higher resolution/quality and generated faster, but I don't know the real total cost of them nor that of cheap illustrators or stock images)
• jcalx 2y ago
  > we’re exiting the scarcity economy of visuals & entering something weirder—where aesthetics become ambient infrastructure, like wifi. AI is democratizing _execution_, not creativity. The advent of the smartphone camera era allowed for the average person to take vastly more photos than ever before, and yet the photos I personally find noteworthy are either remarkable in their context or aesthetic quality (e.g. [0]) or personally meaningful. Alternatively put, "culture" values a proof-of-work that is creativity + execution. Taking a photo of a lunar eclipse setting over a crater has global value, because of the effort in planning and taking the shot (read [0], it's great). Me shitposting a meme for my game night groupchat neatly summarizing what happened in our last session of Pandemic: Legacy has local value, because of the creativity in adapting a meme format to our particular context and the execution of the edit, but nobody besides us would find it as funny. (Interesting aside — I personally think that the photo in [0] is more impressive than someone going all that way to _paint_ the same scene en plein air, because of the split-second precision of the execution. Even though photography may have devalued a lot of the technical execution of capturing a scene, it has opened up new ways in which said execution can be valuable.) So AI decouples creativity and execution in a way that is, like every innovation before, unlike every innovation before. The Ghibli aesthetic is the soft pastels of the color palette [1] and the comfortable, nostalgic character design [2] but also the restful rhythm of "ma" [3] and the detail lovingly lavished to background characters [4]. GPT-4o devalues some of those things, but it another sense it just re-weights our cultural proof-of-work valuations back towards human effort. [0] https://lrtimelapse.com/news/total-lunar-eclipse-over-teide-crater-tenerife/ https://lrtimelapse.com/news/total-lunar-eclipse-over-teide-... [1] https://designmadeinjapan.com/magazine/graphic-design/the-rich-colors-of-studio-ghibli/ https://designmadeinjapan.com/magazine/graphic-design/the-ri... [2] https://stylecircle.org/2020/09/the-studio-ghibli-closet/ https://stylecircle.org/2020/09/the-studio-ghibli-closet/ [3] https://screencraft.org/blog/hayao-miyazaki-says-ma-is-an-essential-storytelling-tool/ https://screencraft.org/blog/hayao-miyazaki-says-ma-is-an-es... [4] https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/great-movie-spirited-away-2002 https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/great-movie-spirited-away...
• salomonk_mur 2y ago
  I wonder if when commercial airplanes were invented, someone like you thought that the magic of traveling had been lost to technology.
• TimPC 2y ago
  I think it's less about wanting to be called an artist and more about wanting to be able to get the results of making things more easily. And there is a good case that we can have a successful boom from this sort of thing.
• eric_cc 2y ago
  People want to express their creativity stuck in their head without having the skill or training (privilege of the training) to be a legit artist. I think it’s awesome that this removes the barrier and empowers people to be creative in ways that they previously could not.
  • mostlysimilar 2y ago
    Your definition of creativity is flawed. Imagining something is a small part of the process. Developing the skill and technique to express that imagination is the most important part.
    • eric_cc 2y ago
      So if I have a great idea for a cartoon, but my life is filled to the brim and I can’t spend months or years to learn the craft, the idea should die in my head? All because of some idealist opinion?
      • mostlysimilar 2y ago
        Come on, you're a tech person aren't you? Maybe a programmer? How many times have you had an idea guy come to you with a "great idea for an app" if only they could find someone to program it for them? Sorry, but most ideas aren't great. It's the painful process of refinement, hard work, and iteration that results in something great.
        • bentley 2y ago
          > How many times have you had an idea guy come to you with a "great idea for an app" if only they could find someone to program it for them? Many. And I love it when those people code something up with Scratch, Matlab, or even Excel. Even though I personally would dislike the aesthetics of the result, I’m much happier to see other people enjoying computers the same way I enjoy them (i.e., by using them to solve interesting problems) than if I insisted everyone do so using my preferred “real” programming languages.
• nitwit005 2y ago
  There are elevators up mountains: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bailong_Elevator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bailong_Elevator
• blargey 2y ago
  The real problem is not the effort (or lack thereof), it’s the perception that modern AI is dropping them off at the peak of Everest, when in reality they’re being stood on a plastic-molded crag at a sea-level tourist trap. Creative vision is not being realized, it’s being stunted.
• joegibbs 2y ago
  Artists' main objection to AI seems to be that they think that people who use it are posers who are trying to claim that they're just as good as Rembrandt because they can type "beautiful painting, style of Rembrandt" into Midjourney. I don't think this is very true, I don't often see anyone bragging about their skills and demanding their outputs get put in a gallery and judged on equal merits as the old masters. I'm not much of an artist and whenever I use an image generator to generate something, I don't do it to show off my artistic talent or whatever - if I was to do it before AI I would've commissioned an artist for it (which I probably wouldn't have done because it was too expensive, so I would forgo it) - the work the artist does would actually have even less of my own input than the AI's, since I'm giving them less description to go off - it's all the artist's, based on their own experiences.
• scotty79 2y ago
  People don't click buttons on Guitar Hero controller to be called musicians. They do it to briefly feel how they imagine a musician might feel sometimes. There's nothing wrong with that.