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?
The general scene can do much more now. It’s a tool and silly to stick your head in the sand and pretend it doesn’t exist. Understandably, it brought up the bar for entry level work but it will bring up the quality and the sheer amount eventually.
All facets of gen ai are a real boon for things like indie video games and animations once you get past the constant pessimism. I’m insanely excited for llm driven npcs and things of that nature as well.
It also makes correcting documents a breeze work wise. I’d give a lot just for that tbh.
I’ve seen LLM NPC’s and whilst they’re still far from being convincing, I don’t imagine it’ll take too long for them to get there.
I can’t wait for a GTA style game (maybe even GTA itself) where I can just walk by someone on the street and have a completely normal dialogue with an NPC. Or even just start shit by yelling at people or causing beef between two of them by suggesting one insulted the other.
"Hey, there’s Evan. "He’s a young guy. “He likes the Stereophonics.”
There are people out there without any kind of conscience or memorse. If they can somehow make a profit, they’ll sell somehing to you or anyone who is willing to listen.
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
Hello,
Let me chime in as someone who would probably fall under your definition of an AI defender.
How do I defend AI? Well, I think AI really flips the world on it’s head. Including all the good and the bad that comes from it. I still think the industrialization is a good metaphor. Things changed a lot. A lot of people were pissed. Now we don’t mind as much anymore, because it’s the new normal, but at the time, most people weren’t happy about it.
Same with AI. I think overall it’s a plus, but obviously it comes with new pitfalls. LLM hallucinations, the need for more complex copyright and licensing definitions, impersonation, etc. . It’s not entirely great, but I totality, when the dust settles, it will be a helpful tool to make our lives easier.
So why do I defend AI? Basically, because I think it will happen, whether you like it or not. Even if the law will initially make it really strict, society will change their mind about it. It might be slowly, but it’s just too useful to outlaw.
Going back to industrialization metaphor, we adapted it over a longer period of time. Yes, it forever changed how most things are made, but it wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. It’s just a thing. And even though lots of logistics chains are streamlined, there’s always gonna be handmade things and unique things. Ofc, not everything is handmade, but some important things still are. And for both of them, there’s some stuff that’s totally fine to be automated, and then there’s some stuff that just loses it’s value if we just gloss over with automation.
Now I don’t want AI to just roam free (ofc not, there’s some really bad stuff happening and I’m not pretending that it’s not) but what we need is laws and enforcement against it, and not against AI.
Imagine if most countries outlawed AI. It would make all AI companies and users move operation to that one country that still allows it, making it impossible to oversee and enforce against. So we better find a good strategy to allow it for all the things where it doesn’t do damage.
Now let me address some specific points you brought up;
In the near future no one will “need” to be a writer
But isn’t this already how it’s going? Only people who wanna be a writer are one, anf it’s good that way.
Also, AI can only remix the art that’s already there, so if you’re doing something completely unique, AI won’t ever be able to replace you. I find that somehow validating for the people who make awesome and unique art. I think that’s how it should be.
Do these people not see or feel the human behind the art at all?
I do. And that’s the exact reason I’m not concerned. Everyone who puts in the work to make something very particular to them should not be impacted in any way.
Now there’s an argument to be made how consent for training data is given (opt-in / opt-out) and what licensing for the models can and should look like, but this is my very basic opinion.
Are these really opinions you have encountered outside of the internet?
I may have about one friend out of 30 who thinks like me.
I mean I am living proof we exist, but I can’t say this is a popular opinion, which is fair.
I don’t want people to mindlessly agree, I want them to come their own opinions because of their own research and presumptions.
I also don’t expect you to agree with me, but I hope some people will understand my perspective and maybe this brings a bit more nuance to this bipolar conversation.
In addition to this, the current state of AI is basically just advanced algorithms. Id would be extremely difficult, but in theory you could still trace the connections between bodes and run the optimization calculations yourself.
Soon enough, we will have AGI. Im not a big fan of LLMs, because theyre a fundamentally flawed idea. The only way to get that much data is without consent, and they will always be prone to hallucinations. AGI on the other hand is fundamentally different. It’s capable of learning just like a human, and capable of doing tasks just like a human. By all measurements it will be able to do anything a human can do, and by most measurements, it will do it better.
The issue most people have is that they do not understand that the current state of AI is like the OG printing press. It’s crazy to a layperson, and it has its uses, but since most everyone is illiterate farmers, its not that useful. But to claim that transcribing text is pointless is ignoring an entire world of possibilites, to the point where people who rail against AI almost seem malicious or willfully ignorant. Why do you not want us to be able to almost instantly diagnose new diseases? Or have a nursebot babysitter that is literally a better parent than you are, and doesnt have to sleep or eat? Whats the issue with making cars safer, making construction more efficient, and taking corruption out of the government? Why do people hate the idea of people no longer having to be alone, or having a therapist that is available at all times, perfectly tailored to help you with your specific issues and no biases?
Yes, these things are impossible with modern AI. But to claim that AI is useless… It’s either malice or ignorance.
I absolutely don’t agree with your perspective.
AI is just another way to ensure control of the means of production stays in the hands of capitalists.
It empowers the techno-feudalist monopolies to put further pressure on more industries. Not content to own a portion of every retail purchase, every digital payment, every house, and every entertainment property. They now get to own a portion of every act of creation, every communication that could possibly challenge their power.
They can subvert any act of independent impactful art by copying it and remanufacturing lesser versions over and over until the original’s impact is lost. And they can do it faster than ever before, cashing in on the original creative’s effort and syphoning returns away from creators into their own pockets.
You might think it’s inevitable and inescapable, but that’s what people once thought of the divine right of kings.
You’re basically saying AI can’t be used in any other way than it’s being used right now. I think you are the one who’s taking the current state of things as inevitable and inescapable.
There’s nothing wrong with opposing technology as it currently stands. Maybe there’s room for nuance in language, but that doesn’t break their argument.
As it currently stands, the user above is right, and the labor of human artists is being siphoned into corporate profit with zero compensation. In the same way, at the beginning of the industrial revolution the labor of children was siphoned into profit with low compensation and deadly work conditions.
The way the textile industry was “fixed” was by opposition: speaking about the issues related to the technical developments and advocating for better treatment of the laborers. The only way AI as it currently stands can be “fixed” is also by opposition. Being critical of AI doesn’t mean “turn it off,” it means speaking about the issues related to the new technology and advocating for better treatment of the laborers.
I mean, he basically said industrialization is bad. Not sure why he’s saying that online, via his computer.
Completely agree, I think of industrialization as well when comparing it.
Steel plow comes to mind.
That’s hype. AI is just another sort of hammer. In the hands of a talented artist, they can churn out masterpieces in hours instead of days. Polarising people is modern marketing. Threating peoples bread and butter is a good way to do that.
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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.
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.
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.
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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 no 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?
It was wrong of me to assume you were using it in the wasteful, mindless ways a lot of people use “ai” stuff, I’m sorry for being an asshole about it. Afaik you running stuff like that sometimes isn’t any more wasteful than you spending that time playing games that push your hardware to the max, and I hadn’t thought about that before those replies.
I’ve been really worried about how shady and powerful open ai is and how many people are starting to use it to write science papers and cheat through med school and shit, but other than all the ways corporate “AI” is horrible there’s a lot of cool and fun applications imo, and I’m sorry for assuming you were supporting sam altman’s shenanigans
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.
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
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.
The best example I can think of, and this is being very generous to the AI bros, is that they’re trying to compare it to obsolete creative positions. Think about animation. Each frame used to have to be hand drawn and colored entirely by hand. There was a lot of heavy lifting going on in the process that weren’t necessarily creative but still required for the final product. I think they’re trying to say that we’ll need less work like this.
I’m not sure I agree or how accurate their claims are.
Edit: I’m just explaining what I think their point of view is. It’s not my personal opinion.
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.
They’re high on their own supply.
People who are divorced from the fallout of their creation. More corporate-think where they chase the objective that costs jobs in favor of the bottom line, even if it’s a shitty idea, and just let it “sort itself out”. The “sorting out” part being not having to deal with any moral, emotional, or financial consequences personally for the result of their pursuits.
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.
