I don’t get this. AI bros talk about how “in the near future” no one will “need” to be a writer, a filmmaker or a musician anymore, as you’ll be able to generate your own media with your own parameters and preferences on the fly. This, to me, feels like such an insane opinion. How can someone not value the ingenuity and creativity behind a work of art? Do these people not see or feel the human behind it all? And are these really opinions that you’ve encountered outside of the internet?
What would be the point of AI replacing people to create art?
The essence of art is that it came from the mind and talent (or skill) from another human being. It’s a thread connecting our humanity through time and space.
No one will be looking back at AI art the same way we look back hundreds or thousands of years at paintings, sculptures, musical compositions, or even real photographs.
We might enjoy some AI generated content for the novelty, but it’s soulless.
Fully agree, but I’m afraid market forces will just allow the most common AI slop to exist. And I’m sure people will still consume it, and like it. Unfortunately.
There seems to be two ways of viewing generative AI. The first, which many anti-AI people take is that Generative AI will be captured by big business and will decimate the creatives financial streams. The outcome will be less art with less meaning and shallow profit seeking art will rule the world.
Then there is the flip side. Everyone in them has a story they want to tell. Everyone has a artistic vision they want to produce. Everyone has a song they want to write and sing. Everyone, if given enough time, talent, practice, resources, and yes, money, could produce something beautiful, deep, and unique to themselves. But they don’t. Why? Because there are barriers. Barriers among barriers. It is the hope of the “AI bros” that AI will tear down those barriers and allow more people to create.
But because these people have never created before, their work will obviously not be up to pair with professionals. Just give it time. In the words of Randall Munroe: If we want to write Ulysses, our generation might not be sexting enough.
My daughter (15f) is an artist and I work at an AI company as a software engineer. We’ve had a lot of interesting debates. Most recently, she defined Art this way:
“Art is protest against automation.”
We thought of some examples:
- when cave artists made paintings in caves, perhaps they were in a sense protesting the automatic forces of nature that would have washed or eroded away their paintings if they had not sought out caves. By painting something that could outlast themselves, perhaps they wished to express, “I am here!”
- when manufacturing and economic factors made kitsch art possible (cheap figurines, mass reprints, etc.), although more people had access to “art” there was also a sense of loss and blandness, like maybe now that we can afford art, this isn’t art, actually?
- when computers can produce images that look beautiful in some way or another, maybe this pushes the artist within each of us to find new ground where economic reproducibility can’t reach, and where we can continue the story of protest where originality can stake a claim on the ever-unfolding nature of what it means to be human.
I defined Economics this way:
“Economics is the automation of what nature does not provide.”
An example:
- long ago, nature automated the creation of apples. People picked free apples, and there was no credit card machine. But humans wanted more apples, and more varieties of apples, and tastier varieties that nature wouldn’t make soon enough. So humans created jobs–someone to make apple varieties faster than nature, and someone to plant more apple trees than nature, and someone to pick all of the apples that nature was happy to let rot on the ground as part of its slow orchard re-planting process.
Jobs are created in one of two ways: either by destroying the ability to automatically create things (destroying looms, maybe), or by making people want new things (e.g. the creation of jobs around farming Eve Online Interstellar Kredits). Whenever an artist creates something new that has value, an investor will want to automate its creation.
Where Art and Economics fight is over automation: Art wants to find territory that cannot be automated. Economics wants to discover ways to efficiently automate anything desirable. As long as humans live in groups, I suppose this cycle does not have an end.
Art is subjective, AI is a buzzword, if statements are considered AI, especially in the gaming world.
And the current state of LLMs and what are the smartest and brightest in the industry have only managed to produce utter trash, while sacrificing the planet and its inhabitants. I like your daughter more, she will create more value and at the same time not be a total corporate tool, ruining the planet for generations to come, mad respect.
(not calling you a tool, but people who work with LLMs)
I do work with LLMs, and I respect your opinion. I suspect if we could meet and chat for an hour, we’d understand each other better.
But despite the bad, I also see a great deal of good that can come from LLMs, and AI in general. I appreciated what Sal Khan (Khan Academy) had to say about the big picture view:
There’s folks who take a more pessimistic view of AI, they say this is scary, there’s all these dystopian scenarios, we maybe want to slow down, we want to pause. On the other side, there are the more optimistic folks that say, well, we’ve gone through inflection points before, we’ve gone through the Industrial Revolution. It was scary, but it all kind of worked out.
And what I’d argue right now is I don’t think this is like a flip of a coin or this is something where we’ll just have to, like, wait and see which way it turns out. I think everyone here and beyond, we are active participants in this decision. I’m pretty convinced that the first line of reasoning is actually almost a self-fulfilling prophecy, that if we act with fear and if we say, “Hey, we’ve just got to stop doing this stuff,” what’s really going to happen is the rule followers might pause, might slow down, but the rule breakers–as Alexander [Wang] mentioned–the totalitarian governments, the criminal organizations, they’re only going to accelerate. And that leads to what I am pretty convinced is the dystopian state, which is the good actors have worse AIs than the bad actors.
https://www.ted.com/talks/sal_khan_how_ai_could_save_not_destroy_education?subtitle=en
It’s because AI enthusiasts are genuinely proud and in awe of their work, and those that are still staunchly pro-AI are unaware of how much damage they have already done.
Two key facts:
- Generative AI is powerful and amazing
- Generative AI was immediately sold to the capital-owning class and is now being developed and guided by the motivations of profit
Freya Holmér does excellent analysis at around the 43:00 mark. She notes that AI represents a story of human triumph, and the innate quality or “coolness” that lies in that. But on the other hand, she explains how generative AI has quite quickly become entirely devorced from positively amplifying human expression. Exceptions to this exist, where people use AI creatively as an extension of themselves, but are exceptions only and not the rule.
I see other threads here discussing “is there even demand for authentic human art?” And those discussions ignore that yes, there is, and that authentic human art was scraped from copyright holders on the internet without their consent. “Is there even demand for human art?” is what is being asked, when the technology in question was immediately bought up and exploited by billion-dollar companies who are gaining immensely more value from generative AI than even the most lucrative AI-artist.
I encourage “AI bros” reading this to look around and engage with the art world. Genuinely. If you have always wanted to be a screenwriter or painter hobbyist, go engage with those stories. Go and see the human experiences, training and techniques that are visible in every line and brush stroke. Creativity is quite a wonderful and powerful thing and I always encourage it.
Then, after you have experienced these works to a new degree, look back. Don’t even ask “is AI good”—because we all agree, it’s an amazing feat. Instead ask “do I want this technology to be monopolized by corporate interests?”
Wonderful answer.
We don’t mourn the loss of blacksmiths who put time and skill into creating a pan or pot. We don’t care about the glass blowers who are no longer hired to blow drinking glasses. We don’t miss the portrait artists who painted not just for art, but to create an historical record.
History is filled with jobs performed by skilled labor that were made redundant with technology. AI is just a point in a long line.
There are still blacksmiths and portrait artists
Yeah, and I’m sure there will still be human writers and artists. There just won’t be as many of them employed compared to today.
I think the difference is that blacksmiths created things that were tangibly useful, that people needed, and that they needed in large quantities quickly and cheaply. The whole point of art is that it does not have real-world usefulness, past the enjoyment of it for the sake of the enjoyment of it.
For example, people frequently refer to cars as “art”, because they are beautiful, but “beauty” isn’t necessarily the same as “art”. Cars are beautiful because they invoke the principles of art, whatever they may be. The base principles themselves are complex and intangible, and you’d be hard-presses to find a book that explained what art actually is, because it is not well defined.
Only people can do art, as far as we know. AI can only produce things that resemble art, and they have only been able to do so by copying what real people have done. If real artists stop outputting material, there will never be an original artistic expression created ever again.
AI may be able to generate clip art and pretty text, but nobody is going to flock to the theaters, or attend auctions to acquire what is basically clip art.
This is not at all like creating a metal blade, imo. The tech bros just don’t understand art.
I mentioned painters as portrait artists and artists of historical record; their work has been replaced by photography.
Most animation today is done via a computer instead of being hand drawn. Some of the techniques to reuse sprites come from hand-drawn techniques from Hanna-Barbera.
Art Deco is filled with architectural elements that are mass produced with machines instead of created by skilled labor.
We’ve mechanized art to make its construction easier. AI is part of that.
I feel like this is a bad take but more importantly, nothing you’ve said answers the main question. Why would someone be happy to remove all of that art from people?
In every example you gave, nothing was being removed at any point, they were just being moved around and not even always… Historical record painters got replaced with the new profession of photography but people who can paint extremely accurately still exist and are now an extremely valued skill.
The question above is not about that process, one which is as old as invention, but more about the joy of removing those jobs.
Why are some AI people so incredibly overjoyed that artists are no longer making money? Why are they so happy that writers will have to find new work? What about all of this makes them think that it’s a good thing that human programmers will be replaced?
Art hasn’t been removed with AI. It is offering a lower quality substitution for a lower price. We aren’t smashing paintings to feed the electricity turbines to power AI. And I’ve provided examples of where people lost artistic work because of changes in technology.
And the joy is likely from being able to do more with less, which has been consistent when other technology was adopted. You don’t need to hire any one to make a drawing, you can do it on a computer. Sure, the drawing isn’t as good, just like how a photo isn’t as good as a portrait painting.
I’m someone who talks about AI a lot on lemmy, people might call me pro AI although I consider myself to be neither pro nor anti, but admittedly, optimistic about AI in general. I work with people in the creative industry, artists, writers, designers, you name it.
As others have mentioned already, your question to my knowledge does not reflect most people’s view on AI neither online and even less so in real life. And I talk and participate in communities that are overwhelmingly pro AI. The “AI bros” you mention sound like caricatures to me.
There are some who have become bitter by lies and misinformation spread about AI that are intentionally hateful as a kind of reverse gotcha, but thats about it. You have those on the anti AI side as well for different reasons.
I dont consider AI to be anywhere close to being a threat to the industry, other than indirectly through the forces of capitalism and mismanagement. Your question indeed seems very insane to me. Most people that use and talk about AI to me seem more interested in using it to make new creative works, or enhance existing works to greater depth in the same time. Creative people are human too and have limited time, and often their time is already cut short by deadlines and their work has been systematically undervalued even before AI.
AI as it currently stands on its own simply has no feeling of direction. Without much effort you can get very pretty, elegant, interesting, but ultimately meaningless things from it. This cannot replace anyone, because such content while intriguing doesnt capture attention for long. It also cannot do complex tasks such as discussing with stakeholders or remaining consistent across work and feedback.
With a creative person at the wheel of the AI though, something special can happen. It can give AI the direction it needs to bring back that meaning.
This is a perspective a lot of people miss, since they only see AI as ChatGPT or Midjourney, not realizing that these are proprietary (not open source) front ends to the technology that essentially hide all the controls and options the technology has, because these things are essentially a new craft on their own and to this day very little people are even in the progress of mastering them.
Everyone knows about prompts, but you can do much more than that depending on the model. Some image models allow you to provide your own input image, and even additional images that control aspects of the image like depth, layout, outlines. And text models allow you to pack a ton of pre existing data that completely guide what it will output next, as well as provide control over the internal math that decides how it comes to its guess for the next word.
Without a creative and inventive person behind the wheel, you get generic AI material we all know. And with such a person, you get material at times indistinguishable from normal material. These people are already plentiful in the creative industry, and they are not going anywhere, and new people that meet this criteria are always welcome. Art is for everyone, and especially those who are driven.
Really the only threat to the creative industry in regards to AI is that some wish to bully and coerce those who use the technology into submission and force them to reject it, and even avoid considering it altogether like dogma. This creates a submissive group that will never learn how to operate AI models. Should AI ever become neccesary to work in the creative industry (it currently doesnt look like it) these people will be absolutely decimated by the ones that kept an open mind, and more importantly, the youth of tomorrow that always is more open to new technologies. This is a story of the ages whenever new technology comes around, as it never treats those that reject it kindly, if it sticks around.
The loom and the Luddites, cars and horses, cameras and painters, mine workers and digging machines, human calculators and mechanical calculators, the list goes on.
So no, being pro AI doesnt neccesarily mean you are participating in the downfall of the creative industry. Neither does being anti AI. But spreading falsehoods and stifling healthy discussion, that can kill any industry except those built on dishonesty.
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This is not something taken out of thin air. While of course it’s an hyperbole, as we’re on the internet, it’s still an opinion that I’ve come across more than a handful times on e.g., reddit.
I see and understand your point of creatives using AI to alter/improve/whatever their own work. I have no problem with that. The thing I’m scared about, which I arguably could’ve phrased better in my initial post, is that we’ll reach a future where human-made work isn’t valued at all. That what we get when we go into bookstores, or stream music, or go to the cinema, is work that’s 99% made by an AI and only “tweaked” by humans. You say “Without a creative and inventive person behind the wheel, you get generic AI material we all know.”, but at the same time I’m seeing people literally saying: before 2030 we will have the first AI movie blockbuster made completely by an AI (even though maybe someone has put in a small prompt).
As I said in another reply, these are the things I’m worried about, especially when I see the act of creative creation being based on everything that have made us and shaped us in the past. Our experiences, memories and the paths we’ve taken. I feel like what makes something art, is the humanness poured into it. Complete AI works will promptly devalue the art of human creation and replace it with something else that I have no doubt people will buy into (as market forces and capitalism are just another side to this that’ll make this possible), but of which will degrade our society to begin looking like something from Brave New World. That consumption is the only thing that’ll matter. Now, on whether this is an intrinsic danger of AI or whether it’s a consequence of capitalism, I’d lean towards capitalism being at fault. But seeing as how our world is structured, I doubt the negatives will outweigh the positives once the technology develops and CEOs sees more possibility of “endless growth” using AI in this way.
Thanks for clarifying. I get your point, I honestly dont doubt someone or a group with such opinions exists out there, I just dont think it represents anywhere near a critical mass.
Sadly, when there’s big money to be made such as for blockbusters, even some human work before AI was already pretty ‘sanitized’ or ‘toned down’ in terms of human creativity, as it must be as uncontroversial and mainstream appealing as possible. So yes if AI got good enough it would definitely be used by some of those companies.
However, I dont see any path for current AI technology to get there without at least 1 or 2 breakthrough similar to the advent of current AI technology.
I also dont think it will replace anything beyond the works of companies with great profit incentive. We have a massive amount of communities where human creativity is central in all shapes and forms, producing works that arent appealing to everyone, but to the people it resonates with, it is so uniquely special that its irreplaceable. This kind of art thrives on it’s human creativity rather than it’s ability to make money. The human desire to produce and consume art that resonates with them is so strong it wont go anywhere as long as people have the time and ability to produce it.
Rest assured, there is basically no talk of replacing anyone with AI in my corner of the creative industry.
Should the day come that AI truly becomes that good it can compete with human creativity, its likely that AI will have become far more human in terms of how it creates art, and would start exhibiting the same tendencies to share human experiences and memories. Then the difference will start to fade and indeed we might go the way of the horses, but such a scenario is essentially sci-fi right now - we may never even get close and art might have made many radical shifts before we get there. And like the camera didnt kill hand painted portraits, there will still be a place for human creativity, just less.
But so long as the incentive is there, it might eventually happen. And so we should be ready to safeguard creativity in some manner along the way. But currently the most effective ways of doing so entail mostly to curb our capitalistic society, and not at the technology. Because doing so could in the worst case lock creatives out from the technology and start a race for the capability to keep up, and large companies would surely win out if we let them.
They have more means of doing things and more data than smaller creators, and AI does seem to pull some of that power back to smaller creators, hence why even thought it might seem big companies are all pro AI, dont be surprised if they are totally fine taking a powerful tool away so they can take it just for themselves.
These are people without talents who have to pay creatives for cool things. All they are thinking is that they’ll be able to get the creative assets themselves for free from now on, to run their businesses or whatever. That’s it. They don’t care about the cow when they believe they’re going to get the milk for free.
AI can only replace creative industries if the content it produces is better in which case it’s a win for the people consuming that content. When it comes to creators themselves, it’ll be harder to earn a living that way but on the other hand, none of the artists I know are making it for the money and they would continue making it even if AI was better. Myself included.
However, I don’t think it’s either-or situation. AI will just come alongside human made content. There’s a ton of content creators I’d continue following no matter how good AI would get.
Is it really a win for people to consume soulless AI poetry or prose? Even if the objective qualities (of which are hard to define anyway) makes it “better”, in the eyes of the masses than a human author like Baudelaire or Mary Oliver? One could say it’s up to the consumer, if they’d rather buy an AI work, then that “decides it”, but market forces are really bad at deciding what’s worth consuming or not.
These are the things I’m worried about, especially when I see the act of creative creation being based on everything that have made us and shaped us in the past. Our experiences, memories and the paths we’ve taken. I feel like what makes something art, is the humanness poured into it.
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I still hear you implying that, in one way or another, AI content wouldn’t be as good as - or better than - human-made content. If that’s the case, I agree with you: replacing human artists with AI would be a net negative. However, my point is that when the day comes that AI content genuinely surpasses human-made work on every metric we care about, resisting it simply because it’s AI-generated doesn’t make much sense to me.
I still empathize with human artists who may no longer be able to compete, but I see that as part of human evolution - some professions inevitably become obsolete.
That said, as I mentioned, this wouldn’t prevent anyone from continuing as an artist for the joy of it. It would just make it harder to monetize their work.
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Everything about this just feels really depressing. I’m guessing many people in the world are similar about only caring about consumption. As long as they deem it “good”, they don’t care how/when/where and by whom it was produced by.
Eh, I make my own music and somewhat play guitar, I don’t even use samples because it feels personally a bit like cheating myself out of the most challenging and interesting part, though ofc plenty way more talented and successful musicians sample all the way, so it’s just a personal stance.
I’d say actually it’s that experience, just making art as self-expression that has thoroughly inoculated me against artbro talking points.
I’m not against creative industries, nor am I pro corpos, but AI is just a tool and now that anybody can make images, the drawing people seethe, sorry not sorry, I’d rather make creativity more accessible than please egos of a select few rich kid narcissists.
My guy, we live in a world where we are required to have a job to live. Most of those jobs are not essential for society to function. Some of these jobs make people happy and passionate, many others are soul grating and awful. This technology makes some of those enjoyable jobs much less lucrative while the product becomes worse. We simply lose things that bring people joy and for what? Like seriously, I cannot think of something an ai can bring to the table that a human cannot in terms of art.
Why would you want to remove the jobs people enjoy and are passionate about just for the sake of it? Why would you campaign to strictly make people less happy? If it wasn’t for the horrible system we live in I’d be all for this kind of advancement, but it does not make life easier, it does not get us better things, and it almost exclusively makes life worse for millions of people with nothing to show for it.
I think this is the big contention point. In a world without a need for jobs, AI would be a neat alternative method of art generation, and a fascinating advancement of technology as a whole…
but UBI is not yet real and jobs still need to be had. Without some form of life-securement for those who provided the art to be trained off of, we’re just using tech to really fuck people over. It’s definitely a moral grey area - very dark grey.
We simply lose things that bring people joy and for what?
Why would you campaign to strictly make people less happy?
I disagree completely. Idk but creating brings millions of people joy, anything that democratizes it more accessible is a good thing. AI has absolutely brought many more people joy.
A world where a technology exists that can query the sum of human knowledge and skill to translate ideas into form but is gatekept because few people like feeling special is a horrifying dystopia and I can’t imagine how someone could be so fucking evil as to really wish for that.
Like really, I want to keep giving y’all benefit of the doubt that you simply don’t consider a perspective outside your own, but you don’t make it easy.
This technology makes some of those enjoyable jobs
Technology is what made those jobs enjoyable and accessible to those who do them now in the first place.
Nobody is forcing you to use AI or any technology, you can still farm goats and use them to make drums before you lay out a beat, people will probably be pretty impressed if you did that.
Why would you want to remove the jobs people enjoy and are passionate about just for the sake of it?
If they are passionate about their craft for the sake of it they will keep doing it, if they are doing it as a job then like with any other job market when new technologies or trends arrive they will have to adapt.
To put it in perspective with an analogy: It’s an absurd notion for instance that new programming languages should be banned not for their quality but simply because not every developer will learn them, and it’s an absurd notion that someone who loves programming in C for the sake of it cannot do so just because Java exists.
Having DAWs did not make it illegal to mess around with an old rompler and a step sequencer for the sake of it, nor did orchestra plugins eliminate violins, but market demands orchestral music done quicker, you either do this or don’t.
If it wasn’t for the horrible system we live in
This would be the case for every system that still has some market demands, even something like anarcho-communist cooperative based market economics would favour technological advancement and efficiency every time and some jobs would simply not be in demand any more.
There is simply no economic system that makes any sense where someone would need to hire an orchestra for every sting on kitchen nightmares instead of using a VST or sample library or now in the not too distant future - generating one.
I fully agree that we need to change the system to ensure when these technological advancements happen that people don’t end up on the street.
However, I’m sure most would agree that even though it was not fair to e.g. human computers, the move to electronic calculators is a net positive for society.
Similarly endlessly distributable digital copies of books etc. democratized media to a massive degree even if it put libraries at risk.
but it does not make life easier,
It definitely does make life easier for many artists, for instance you can upscale old media or restore media where the original was lost to time, game devs can use AI-generated assets for background stuff like adding nigh-infinite variety to textures that would be impractical for an indie dev to do or a sole dev can compensate for whatever skills they lack manually etc.
it does not get us better things
I think with regards to quality it’s completely value neutral, I’ve seen plenty of dogshit AI art, but also some really good unique stuff. I think it just follows Sturgeon’s Law as everything.
Maybe the real problem is the AI slop, which is really just humans being lazy.
In my immediate neighborhood there are two pastry bakeries. One has lines of people summoned by the TikTok/Instagram, who take videos of themselves eating. The other is known to locals, but never self promotes.
You can imagine, that the non-promoting one has amazing pastries. The best I’ve ever had. The TikTok one does have a trendy fancy interior, made for videos.
People want to be seen at a pastry place. That fake pastry place wants to be seen as an awesome bakery, even though really, without the marketing they are below average. Some guy wants to be seen as writing pop music, even though he can’t. Another wants to draw, even though I won’t spend the thousands of hours required.
Art is really about understanding the effort. Human effort.
Somehow, I can just imagine having AI slop music, and AI slop movies, and AI slop everything.
If a movie house is going to be Steve Jobs Pixar, they are going to hire the best real artists and the best real writers, and do something that means something to be human. They aren’t interested in slop.
If a movie house is going to be just for profit, are they going to even pay for the generative AI to do a few more iterations. I think they will keep it at slop.
Anyhow, a bit too much babble. Must sleep.
This is truly my exact worry.
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I honestly find it fascinating that you view artists as the “rich kid narcissists” in comparison to AI proponents as more of an everyman. My personal experience is those the most engaged in AI stuff are college educated, often in STEM fields, silicon valley with money types, whereas the generally the working artists I know come from middle income or poor backgrounds. I don’t say this trying to attack you, or invalidate your experience, I’m genuinely curious. Would you be willing to elaborate on why you view them this way?
My experience is simply the polar opposite of yours.
Most artists I’ve known are extremely upper class, at the very least they come from very privileged backgrounds, and usually had the safety net required to take gap years for unpaid apprenticeships or to start bands, have capital to invest and can afford to lose it, can live with parents and rely on them financially waiting for publishing deals or comissions money or adrev etc etc.
Come to think of it IRL I actually have never heard of a “working class” artist, other than in the strict Marxist sense in that they’re not an owner class.
Even if they work a low paying or shitty job part-time they almost always have very high QoL due to those privileged backgrounds. One guy who went into the arts I know has a day job that paid half mine out of the gate, but he had way more disposable cash because his parents paid his rent and bills.
Someone I know who’s in theatre just bailed out after school, took a gap year, did an unpaid apprenticeship and later got a day job as a theatre tech, now swimming in cash from being a manager and her published plays, she’s the second richest person I know.
I’m not saying that arts are just a passtime of the rich mind you, (though I do think the rabidly anti-ai types have a “fuck you got mine” streak) I think it’s survivorship bias ultimately, those who can be full-time or even decently part-time professional artists in some capacity are the ones who have privilege.
Meanwhile 99.9% of “Techbros” aka people in CompSci at uni were the hustler-grindset type working folks trying to escape poverty or otherwise move up the ladder, either real career chasers who are all about networking or grifters/scammers/shady characters you’d see betting on horses and hanging out in money laundering candy/barbershops.
They were in it for the money alone because they heard the money is good and that’s because they def needed the money.
Most people had at least 1 job just to afford rent, many had 2 (uni is pretty much free here in the UK).
The only rich people were drug dealers in blacked out BMWs and Chinese immigrants with Rolexes and extremely strong spice vapes and no knowledge of English.
The remaining 0.1% were genuinely gifted kids who pursued PhDs or less talented nerds (me) and they were all usually not super well off locals or they were immigrants from shithole countries of families who could afford to send their kids overseas and not much else, where they prolly didn’t need to work semester time but they couldn’t fuck around either (also me).
Idk about Silicon Valley, I’m not American nor have been, from what I’ve seen people who talk about the “bay area” on Mastodon are either insufferable cunts or some kind of weird internet people/hacking savants/furries though.
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But the prompt is the creative aspect. It’s always the idea, and the rest is convention and form. And lol, modern poor aren’t going to have access to charcoal, paper, time or a deathbed, but they’re going to have a smartphone, hence it does indeed make creative expression more accessible.
I’d never have even tried music if I couldn’t pirate a DAW, plugins etc etc. Sure, cheap eBay fender clones and bargain bin amps help too, but like AI, piracy met me where I was. Shit ain’t cheap but once you know how to sail the high seas the possibilities are endless and it encouraged me to explore more.
Heck I’d actually gotten better at drawing too thanks to AI, I don’t have the time or energy as a wageslave to hone those skills, I’m not a millionaire like PewDiePie, but I can at least draw some basic shapes now because using that with controlnets and img2img in SD to produce ideas from my imagination was just encouraging enough to get me going and more realistically attainable. As with music, it brought me great joy.
Creativity isn’t to be gatekept and those select few privileged enough to practice it in lieu of something more materially useful aren’t to be put on a pedestal, there’s no such thing as talent for most people, just barriers to entry and accessibility.
People being able to enjoy art and artistry, especially not just by brainless consumption, but by producing it themselves will always be a good thing in my book. That’s what generative AI does.
All the artbros seething are just landlords of the art world feeling their houses lose value to new buildings that belong to everyone.
All the arguments about power use are null and void because if it wasn’t this it’d be something else, most advances in computing would require more power, we need to solve that problem with nuclear & renewables, not by artificially placing a cap on scientific advancements.
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So do you have a rebuttal or? Because this is the way I see it, using music because it’s what I know more:
I get an idea in my head for a melody or piece of music -> I either lay it out on an instrument or in a DAW piano roll or on paper -> I tweak and refine and add/remove elements -> I export the file and upload to a website.
The actual creative spark is the first step, the rest is a matter of speaking the language and skills at using the tools of choice to convey ideas clearly. Both are skills in and of themselves but one is about technique, the other is about a well-trained imagination and analytical mindset.
Prompts in that case are just another language like notes and scales, used to put ideas into form.
Then you add onto that LoRAs, controlnets, refiner models, custom refines of existing models, embeddings, weights, sampling steps, classifier-free guidance scale, and it’s quite a lot to actually learn and use effectively.
I don’t see how it’s any less creative whatsoever. Less skilled? Sure, absolutely, it can be. No denying there. Understanding that notes fit into scales and what a key is in music is a much bigger learning curve than simply typing in what you want, but in both cases that’s not all there is to it.
Maybe you could say it’s also less intentional, but plenty of art has unintentional elements which doesn’t make it any less creative.
I’m sure every amateur musician had that one experience where you make a piece of music that you think is sad, show it to a friend and they say it sounds cheerful, it doesn’t happen because you’re uncreative, it happens because your ‘musical language’ needs work.
Eventually you make that one track with a clear intent and show it to someone and they tell you exactly what you meant by it and it is the best gosh darn feeling on earth.
Proompting may be goofy, but it’s just another language, and it doesn’t invalidate the creative spark that starts it all.
If I commission a human artist to paint me a picture or write me a song, did I create it? I gave them the prompt to generate the work with their skills, so I must be as creative and skilled as any work they return, right?
You’ve asked something else to make your art, and then claimed that because you were really specific with your request that you deserve the kudos for the creativity and skill of the art. Pick up a pen and stop stealing existing artists’ work in order to force a computer to stroke your delusional ego.
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Everyone already can be creative and make images you moron
Neither is true.
Elaborate
Why don’t they then? And why do they now that AI is around?
Almost as if there’s a barrier to entry there for most people that’s been removed.
People do make art and be creative still so I don’t know why you’re asking why they don’t.
And people still do it because making art is a thing humans do and like to do. People still sew even though they can just buy clothing.
Acting like there’s a barrier for entry to make art is a flat out delusion. Humans were making art on caves with chalk and dirt they found. You can make art with a stick. Acting like artists are rich elitists is the most ignorant and incorrect thing I’ve ever read on the Internet.
You do realise a barrier to entry doesn’t mean that something is literally impossible for everyone, but that it’s an obstacle for some?
It’s disingenuous comparing art someone would want to look at produced today to literal caveman drawings.
And yes artists are absolutely rich elites, the often very literal top 10%, feel free to look at my other comments ITT for why I’ve found this to be the case.
It’s legitimate to question why we would want to replace human artistry with AI. Somebody might have asked the same question about replacing hand tools with power tools. But I wouldn’t be a longtime amateur woodworker if all I had to work with was hand tools - the work would be far too time consuming and the learning curve much too high. Or ask content creators who are able to get their ideas in front of the public without learning HTML, CSS or Javascript, what they think of content creation tools. Was making MySpace etc. available 20 years ago a bad thing because it changed our view of programming?
Enabling millions of people to jump traditional entry barriers is a good thing, even if it means we no longer look at the creative process as being reserved for people with natural talent or years of training. TBH you might as well object to Bob Ross teaching people easier ways to paint, or to people who teach breadbaking on YouTube - it turns out bread is dead simple btw, you should try it.
But more to the point, the genie is out of the bottle, and no amount of objection is going to stuff it back in.
Enabling millions of people to jump traditional entry barriers is a good thing
Except often it’s not even traditional entry barriers. Look how bad Google search has gotten, overrun by AI blogposts and advertising slop. Those aren’t entry barriers, those are “hold up, is this even content?” barriers.
But more to the point, the genie is out of the bottle, and no amount of objection is going to stuff it back in.
We regulated the assembly line and gave laborers compensation and safety rights when power tools increased their capacity. So too, we could force OpenAI et al to compensate the copyright holders from whom they scraped data. No one is calling for the genie to go back in, only for the corporatists to stop being the ones with all the wishes.
So too, we could force OpenAI et al to compensate the copyright holders from whom they scraped data
Fuck expanding copyright’s power in any way. Effort better spent on making AI content illegal to sell or another way of ending corporate profit off of it
The invention of production lines didn’t mean that nobody appreciated hand-built cars any longer - it just meant a cheaper option was now available to more people.
The invention of phonographs, records, cd etc, didn’t mean that nobody appreciated live music anymore - it just meant that there was now a more accessible option available.
Every job in arts and engineering can, has and will be automated to some extent - it doesn’t mean the death of those industries, or a lack of appreciation for the creativity involved.
I think the real benefit comes from when the creatives use the tools to do the heavy lifting. Every new innovation sees a glut of low-effort money-saving cash-ins. After a while, however, these fall to the wayside as the people who actually have the skills take over again.
More than ten years ago, I wrote a song for my daughter. I recorded it, animated a little video, and uploaded it to youTube. I’d written several more songs for her, but had never found the time necessary to actually record the songs and create videos for them. Because of AI tools, I’ve finally been able to make significant headway on a couple of songs/videos that I’ve had rattling around in my head for years.
We’re just in a transition period. Like George Lucas’s over-reliance on CG in the prequels - although it looked pretty great at the time but now looks thoroughly artificial.
The invention of phonographs, records, cd etc, didn’t mean that nobody appreciated live music anymore
I’ll argue with this one. The only live music anyone appreciates now is going to see world famous commercial artists made popular by their records, cds, etc. And half of those shows is preprogrammed.
Live music used to be: if you have some friends over and want to liven it up, one of them plays the piano, or a pub has a live set of musicians who can read the room and play what people want at the tempo they want depending on if they want to dance or not. Read Little House on the Prairie and pay close attention to the scenes where Pa gets out his fiddle. Pure magic.
You can say that people still appreciate live music because some of them still go out to Taylotlr Swift concerts, but the world of handmade music from before was absolutely killed off by radio, records, etc. That world is alive in tiny pockets at best.
Remind me how much electricity production lines, phonographs and CGI use, or how much they rely on art theft simply to exist, or how they pose as an expert on a subject and feed people misinformation, or how they allow people to literally stop thinking and let it write everything and form every opinion for them?
They absolutely do all those things though? Like render farms consume fucktons of electricity and they absolutely rely on theft because every artist uses references not to mention asset packs etc. and you are absolutely posing as an expert on the subject feeding people misinformation without any AI (probably). I’m sure someone editing film would consider your optimised premiere shortcut stream deck a device for someone who’s “stopped thinking” as well, without any AI at all.
None of the things I mentioned are even close to as horrible as AI is in those ways. Either you’re being disingenuous bc you think you need chat gpt to think for you, or you just have no idea at all what “AI” is and really need to do a lot of research on how harmful it is. Comparing CGI render farms to AI servers? Comparing human inspiration and paid for asset packs to a computer rearranging existing, stolen art? You’re not serious are you?
bc you think you need chat gpt to think for you, or you
Woah woah turn down the projection man. I don’t use gippity lol.
or you just have no idea at all what “AI” is
I think I do, but feel free to enlighten me.
need to do a lot of research on how harmful it is
Are you a “do your own research” type, or are you going to state your case?
Comparing CGI render farms to AI servers?
Yes.
Actually I only advocate for locally run FOSS AI models because I’m anti-commercial-AI and broadly anti-capitalist as a whole.
So do tell me, how does my one gayming RTX GPU that can just about accommodate an LLM or SDXL compare to a render farm for Netflix/Hollywood slop powered by coal in third world country sweatshops they outsource to?
Comparing human inspiration and paid for asset packs to a computer rearranging existing, stolen art?
“Our glorious inspiration” “Their stolen art”
You don’t come off as mentally stable my friend, maybe log off and calm down for a bit?
BTW if you unironically think that original art inspired by previous works is actually comparable to a computer scraping and slapping random bullshit together, you don’t know jack shit about art or the “AI” you so desperately need
More projection. Why even respond if you have no counterpoint? If I’m such a nitwit gippity user, it shouldn’t be hard for you to enlighten us all, should it?
I’m not AI expert, but I understand the basic principles behind diffusers and I’ve written a few tiny image classifiers in python for fun before. Surely an expert like yourself can do better?
Hey if you can’t actually make a solid argument for why “AI” is actually fine, there’s always calling the other person insane :D your use of an LLM isn’t any better or less cringe just bc you don’t use chat gpt, you’re still outsourcing your thinking and decision making to a computer, and you still use a fuck of a lot more power than you should on something that is ultimately stupid and pointless. Your life was fine before “AI”, why are you acting like this is some good or helpful or necessary thing at all?
I’m not outsourcing anything, why would you assume so? Do you?
I don’t really use LLMs at all and I haven’t used SD in ages. Are you trying to say art is stupid and pointless?
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Everyone’s frame of reference is their own IQ…
So for some people AI seems as smart as their frame of reference, or even better.
They assume their frame of reference is everyone’s, so we’re in that weird period where dumb people are super excited about AI, and smart people still think it’s a gimmick.
Those people who find AI impressive, see it as a means to level the playing field, and it will eventually.
It just means the smarter you are, the longer it’s going to take to be impressive. Because your frame of reference is just a higher standard.
They’d never be as creative as a creative person, so to them it’s switching from relying on a person they have no control over or influence on, to a computer program that will do whatever is asked. To them it generates the same quality as a person, don’t forget the most popular media caters to the lowest common denominator, this is the same thing.
Like, it makes sense from their perspective. You just need to realize everyone has a different perspective.
It’s human variation
Pretty good points there, though i’d argue it’s not just pure numerical IQ, but mostly life experience. The more variety of life you experience, the more you know of human history, different cultures, ways of thinking and seeing the world - the harder it is for you to get impressed by something as shallow as AI.
Tech bros live in a bubble of their own creation and don’t understand the true richness of the human condition.
it’s not just pure numerical IQ,
We talk about IQ like it’s a single number, but it’s like SAT/ACT, a bunch of different specific scores averaged into one number. So yeah it’s not as simple as a single number. I was thinking mostly processing speed and associative memory, but obviously you need the general knowledge as well.
The more variety of life you experience, the more you know of human history, different cultures, ways of thinking and seeing the world - the harder it is for you to get impressed by something as shallow as AI.
This is a very specific and easily fixable problem. It’s trained by a certain class of people, so it’s going to regurgitate stuff from that class and ignore everyone who hadn’t trained it.
Tech bros live in a bubble of their own creation and don’t understand the true richness of the human condition.
Nobody is gonna argue with that tho
Creative is great, industry not so much.
Becau$e rea$ons.
Why do people who post loaded questions approve of pedophilia and torturing kittens?
approve of pedophilia and torturing kittens?
what the actual fuck?
Doesn’t sound like a denial - I thought so!!!
Probably put the TP on backwards, too.
