5 ms·

> It reminds me of what GarageBand or iMovie and YouTube and such did for making music and videos so accessible to people who didn’t go to school for any of tha

> It reminds me of what GarageBand or iMovie and YouTube and such did for making music and videos so accessible to people who didn’t go to school for any of that, let alone owned complex equipment or expensive licenses to Adobe Thisandthat. It’s worth reading William Deresiewicz‘ The Death of the Artist. I’m not entirely convinced that marketing that everyone can create art/games/whatever is actually a net positive result for those disciplines.

taurath 1y ago
If people are making art to get rich and failing, it doesn’t kill artists, who’d be making art anyway, it kills the people trying to earn money from their art. Do we need Quad-A blockbuster Ubisoft/Bethesda/Sony/MS/Nintendo releases for their artistic merit, or their publishers/IP owners needs to make money off of it? Ditto the big4 movie studios. Those don’t really seem to matter very much. The whole idea of tastemakers, who they are and whether they should be trusted (indie v/s big studio, grass roots or intentionally cultivated) seems like it ebbs and flows. Right now I’d hate to be one of the bigs, because everything that made them a big is not working out anymore.
- iamacyborg 1y ago
  People are wanting to make a living by making art, not to get rich. I highly recommend reading the book I mentioned as you don’t seem to have a particularly nuanced understanding of the actual struggles at play. Perhaps an analogy you’ll understand is what happens to the value of a developer’s labour when that labour is in many ways replicated by AI and big AI companies actively work to undermine what makes your labour different by aggressively marketing that anyone can so what you so with their tools.
  - squigz 1y ago
    Isn't this just a result of technological progress? Technology has displaced entire fields of labor for... well, ever. I'm not unsympathetic to the problems this introduces to those workers, but I'm really not sure how it could be prevented; we can of course mitigate the issues by providing more social support to those affected by such progress. In the case of artistic expression becoming more accessible to more people, I have a hard time looking at it as anything but a net positive for society.
    - iamacyborg 1y ago
      > In the case of artistic expression becoming more accessible to more people The problem is that folks seem to be confused between artistic expression and actually good art. Let alone companies like Spotify cynically creating “art” so that they can take even more of the pie away from the actual artists.
      - squigz 1y ago
        Well putting aside the simple question of "who are you to say what is 'good' art"... are they really? GP says > Mind you this is barrier to entry. These are shovelware quality assets and I’m not running a business. But now I’m some guy on the internet who can fulfil a hobby of his and develop a skill. Who knows, maybe one day I’ll hit a goldmine idea and commit some real money to it and get a real artist to help! So apparently they recognize what's going on. In the same vein as me being able to enjoy silly crude animations on YouTube while also enjoying high-quality animations like Studio Ghibli; we can do both. As for how companies will use AI to enrich themselves whenever possible; absolutely agree, but that's a separate discussion.
pixl97 1y ago
>is actually a net positive result for those disciplines. This is an argument based in Luddism. Looms where not a net positive for the craftsman that were making fabrics at the time. With that said, looms where not the killing blow, instead an economic system that lead them to starve in the streets was. There are going to be a million other things that move the economics away from scarcity and take away the profitability. The question is, are we going to hold on to economic systems that don't work under that regime.
- iamacyborg 1y ago
  > There are going to be a million other things that move the economics away from scarcity and take away the profitability. What we’re really talking about here is the consolidated of power under a few tech elites. Saying it’s a luddite argument is a red herring.
  - ragequittah 1y ago
    A whole lot of what I use every day especially for images and audio is open source. The open source AI video is getting pretty good these days as well. Better than the sora that I pay for anyways. Granted not nearly as good as veo3 yet. So long as Nvidia doesn't nerf their consumer cards and we keep getting more and more vram I can see open source competing.
    - iamacyborg 1y ago
      I’m yet to see these models produce anything actually good yet, paid or otherwise. On the bright side the movie industry seems to have actually been smart and still makes extensive use of unions which should help protect actual artists.
      - ragequittah 1y ago
        I guess everyone's definition of good is different. The fact that an AI won an art competition [1] back in 2022 and it's now way better than that says something. I'm almost positive if you got some great AI artists and put them up against some great real artists you'd have a very hard time telling the difference / picking the winners. This is the kind of bias we're taught not to have as young children (blind hatred of x because x is bad) but I see all too often right now. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/02/technology/ai-artificial-intelligence-artists.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/02/technology/ai-artificial-...
morkalork 1y ago
It shifted the signal to noise ratio but its not a net negative either. There's whole new genres of music that exist now because easy mixing tech is freely available. Do you or I like SoundCloud mumble rap? No, probably not. But there's enough people out there that do
hackable_sand 1y ago
I make a rap album because anybody can My contribution to this scam
Den_VR 1y ago
This reminds me of my preferred analogy: are digital artists real artists if they can’t mix pigment and skillfully apply them to canvas? Not sure why digital artists get mad when I ask. They’re no Michelangelo.
- jampekka 1y ago
  Are assembly programmers real programmers if they can't implement their algorithms by soldering transistors?
- billypilgrim 1y ago
  It may be maddening to them because you are implying that physical color mixing is somehow that one defining thing that makes it art. Imagine someone said that about writing a book: if you don't write it by hand but use Microsoft Word instead, it's not a real book. How would that even be the case? The software is not doing the work for you (unless it's AI). I can tell you with confidence that physical color mixing itself is a really small part of what makes a good traditional artist, and I am indeed talking about realistic paintings. All the art fundamentals are exactly the same, wether you do digital art or traditional oil, there are just some technical differences on top. I have been learning digital painting for a few years and the hardest things to learn about color were identical to traditional painters. In fact, after years of learning digital painting and about colors, it only took me a couple of days to understand and perform traditional color mixing with oil. The difficult part is knowing what colors you need, not how to get there (mixing, using the sliders, etc.) And just to add a small bit here: digital artist also color mix all the time and need to know how it works, the difference here is that mixing is additive instead of subtractive.
- topaz0 1y ago
  If they get mad it's because you're saying this explicitly to be an asshole. The essence of art doesn't have much to do with the mechanical skills for assembling pieces into a whole, though that part isn't trivial. Rather, it's about expressing human thoughts and feeling in a way that inspires their human audience. That's why AI-generated "art" is different in kind from a skilled digital artist and why it really cannot be art.

taurath 1y ago

If people are making art to get rich and failing, it doesn’t kill artists, who’d be making art anyway, it kills the people trying to earn money from their art. Do we need Quad-A blockbuster Ubisoft/Bethesda/Sony/MS/Nintendo releases for their artistic merit, or their publishers/IP owners needs to make money off of it? Ditto the big4 movie studios. Those don’t really seem to matter very much. The whole idea of tastemakers, who they are and whether they should be trusted (indie v/s big studio, grass roots or intentionally cultivated) seems like it ebbs and flows. Right now I’d hate to be one of the bigs, because everything that made them a big is not working out anymore.

iamacyborg 1y ago
People are wanting to make a living by making art, not to get rich. I highly recommend reading the book I mentioned as you don’t seem to have a particularly nuanced understanding of the actual struggles at play. Perhaps an analogy you’ll understand is what happens to the value of a developer’s labour when that labour is in many ways replicated by AI and big AI companies actively work to undermine what makes your labour different by aggressively marketing that anyone can so what you so with their tools.
- squigz 1y ago
  Isn't this just a result of technological progress? Technology has displaced entire fields of labor for... well, ever. I'm not unsympathetic to the problems this introduces to those workers, but I'm really not sure how it could be prevented; we can of course mitigate the issues by providing more social support to those affected by such progress. In the case of artistic expression becoming more accessible to more people, I have a hard time looking at it as anything but a net positive for society.
  - iamacyborg 1y ago
    > In the case of artistic expression becoming more accessible to more people The problem is that folks seem to be confused between artistic expression and actually good art. Let alone companies like Spotify cynically creating “art” so that they can take even more of the pie away from the actual artists.
    - squigz 1y ago
      Well putting aside the simple question of "who are you to say what is 'good' art"... are they really? GP says > Mind you this is barrier to entry. These are shovelware quality assets and I’m not running a business. But now I’m some guy on the internet who can fulfil a hobby of his and develop a skill. Who knows, maybe one day I’ll hit a goldmine idea and commit some real money to it and get a real artist to help! So apparently they recognize what's going on. In the same vein as me being able to enjoy silly crude animations on YouTube while also enjoying high-quality animations like Studio Ghibli; we can do both. As for how companies will use AI to enrich themselves whenever possible; absolutely agree, but that's a separate discussion.

pixl97 1y ago

>is actually a net positive result for those disciplines. This is an argument based in Luddism. Looms where not a net positive for the craftsman that were making fabrics at the time. With that said, looms where not the killing blow, instead an economic system that lead them to starve in the streets was. There are going to be a million other things that move the economics away from scarcity and take away the profitability. The question is, are we going to hold on to economic systems that don't work under that regime.

iamacyborg 1y ago
> There are going to be a million other things that move the economics away from scarcity and take away the profitability. What we’re really talking about here is the consolidated of power under a few tech elites. Saying it’s a luddite argument is a red herring.
- ragequittah 1y ago
  A whole lot of what I use every day especially for images and audio is open source. The open source AI video is getting pretty good these days as well. Better than the sora that I pay for anyways. Granted not nearly as good as veo3 yet. So long as Nvidia doesn't nerf their consumer cards and we keep getting more and more vram I can see open source competing.
  - iamacyborg 1y ago
    I’m yet to see these models produce anything actually good yet, paid or otherwise. On the bright side the movie industry seems to have actually been smart and still makes extensive use of unions which should help protect actual artists.
    - ragequittah 1y ago
      I guess everyone's definition of good is different. The fact that an AI won an art competition [1] back in 2022 and it's now way better than that says something. I'm almost positive if you got some great AI artists and put them up against some great real artists you'd have a very hard time telling the difference / picking the winners. This is the kind of bias we're taught not to have as young children (blind hatred of x because x is bad) but I see all too often right now. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/02/technology/ai-artificial-intelligence-artists.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/02/technology/ai-artificial-...

morkalork 1y ago

It shifted the signal to noise ratio but its not a net negative either. There's whole new genres of music that exist now because easy mixing tech is freely available. Do you or I like SoundCloud mumble rap? No, probably not. But there's enough people out there that do

hackable_sand 1y ago

I make a rap album because anybody can My contribution to this scam

Den_VR 1y ago

This reminds me of my preferred analogy: are digital artists real artists if they can’t mix pigment and skillfully apply them to canvas? Not sure why digital artists get mad when I ask. They’re no Michelangelo.

jampekka 1y ago
Are assembly programmers real programmers if they can't implement their algorithms by soldering transistors?
billypilgrim 1y ago
It may be maddening to them because you are implying that physical color mixing is somehow that one defining thing that makes it art. Imagine someone said that about writing a book: if you don't write it by hand but use Microsoft Word instead, it's not a real book. How would that even be the case? The software is not doing the work for you (unless it's AI). I can tell you with confidence that physical color mixing itself is a really small part of what makes a good traditional artist, and I am indeed talking about realistic paintings. All the art fundamentals are exactly the same, wether you do digital art or traditional oil, there are just some technical differences on top. I have been learning digital painting for a few years and the hardest things to learn about color were identical to traditional painters. In fact, after years of learning digital painting and about colors, it only took me a couple of days to understand and perform traditional color mixing with oil. The difficult part is knowing what colors you need, not how to get there (mixing, using the sliders, etc.) And just to add a small bit here: digital artist also color mix all the time and need to know how it works, the difference here is that mixing is additive instead of subtractive.
topaz0 1y ago
If they get mad it's because you're saying this explicitly to be an asshole. The essence of art doesn't have much to do with the mechanical skills for assembling pieces into a whole, though that part isn't trivial. Rather, it's about expressing human thoughts and feeling in a way that inspires their human audience. That's why AI-generated "art" is different in kind from a skilled digital artist and why it really cannot be art.