Curious for her thoughts on DALL-E, I pulled out my phone and invited her to generate some imagery. (I have early access via a family member at OpenAI.) She didn't skip a beat, and immediately started getting creative with it. We even did a "collaborative piece" à la Mad Lib.

I asked her if she felt threatened by DALL-E. Surprised by the question, she said: "No! I could see this really accelerating my process. Sometimes I'm blocked on an idea and I could see this being a great tool for finding inspiration. Can I get access to this?"

My take-away was that art is not zero-sum: someone's art isn't "less" because more entities are creating art. If computers can do it too — even if they're arguably more mechanical in the recombination of existing ideas (note: humans do the same) — nothing stops human art from being art.

An immediate thought is that locked-in people who can only communicate by text would be able to share their thoughts more expressively.

In terms of the creation loop, anyone can create a bunch of AI-generated images. Wombo is huge right now. The differentiating factors will be prompt design, commitment to iteration, aesthetic-driven curation of generated works and presentation.

Photographers take and process thousands of photos to create just one masterpiece.

Art is zero sum in that there are a limited number of artist residencies, exhibitions and funds available.

In this case, we will likely see further contraction in the number of artists able to support themselves. There will ofc always be the super stars and hobbyists.

Artists who are willing to direct their talents towards satisfying others' desires for art will find the world is very positive sum. Those that vie for a limited number of spots in a prestige game may find that it's zero or even negative sum, but those are not good games to play anyways.

Think long term. Eventually AI will be able to do most of human jobs. As a result, products and services will become cheaper. As a result, people will have to work less for a living. As a result, more people will be able to draw and paint for pleasure, and not necessarily to make a buck.

I think we've seen this play out before and instead of reducing work, our standards of living increase and people keep working about the same amount. See e.g. the post industrial world where homemakers had to scrub clothes, then got machines to do the scrubbing, but subsequently had to clean the clothes more frequently.

We might be able to reduce the overall amount of human work only through extremely successful social/political reforms similar to the ones that outlawed child labor and established the 40 hour work week. Assuming the technology will cause it to happen is bound to lead to disappointment.

This is ahistorical. The fact is that you must at least seem to produce more market value than your total compensation in order for a company to hire you. There will simply be less people who make a "livable" wage while those who own these automations will become increasingly wealthy. Depending on how the market changes, there may also be increasing unemployment. But why would that matter? Unless unemployment gets too high, the market will continue to work as usual.

There's simply no reason for the owners and inheritors of an increasingly automated economy to share the value increase with their workers. The worker's wages will be market-determined just as before. Perhaps if unemployment gets too high it will be in their interests to offer something like UBI, though no reason for anything beyond what's strictly necessary for the economy to function, and the minimum required to avoid excessive social turmoil.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300001

For women, since about 2000:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300002

Combined:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CIVPART

1) AI appears to have approximately zero chance of making housing and food and other basic needs cheaper.

2) Artists WANT to make money for creating art, music, etc.

Yeah some people are going to loose jobs over this, happens all the time. People are not isolated from the market, they function on it and need to take it into account.

Machines aiding in art is only a good thing, because it can maximize output and minimize input?

Makes art cheaper, more accessible, allows more people to create?

It is like how digital filmmaking has cracked the Hollywood monopoly on content.

I aldo don't think that it makes it "cheaper, more accessible, and allows more people to create". Digital art supplies being something readily available and relatively cheap to their classic counterparts is what makes things more accessible, and to make it more so would be to drive the cost down or something. Having the computer draw for you isn't exactly creating art.

And art isn't a commodity and I argue it shouldn't be a commodity. It's something, again, personal and special.

And this doesn't end at the visual arts, I think it applies too to writing. AI could write what's written in my journal word for word but my journal would have more value just by virtue of it being written by me.

I disagree. It is like using sampled music or an arpeggiator or drum track to compose music.

a gut wrenching image of innocents being beat by police is gut wrenching because it's something that exists in the real world

Can't a painting be gut wrenching? It doesn't exist in the real world.

People look at the objective reality, provided by the sources that should have the most credibility, and just shrug it off.

If I saw a masterfully crafted video of vaccines actually being implanted with microchips, wouldn't I believe it? I'm not an expert on identifying deepfakes, nor should I be just to consume media. I think this is a valid cause for concern and will make things worse rather than keep it the same.

I wouldn't believe a masterfully crafted video of vaccines actually being implanted with microchips unless the video were authenticated by at least one reputable news source. Provenance matters, and just like we don't believe extraordinary things based on single out-of-context photograph, we shouldn't believe extraordinary things based on a single out-of-context video.

You pretend as if the news actually bothers to corroborate everything it prints. Sometimes, they actively disengage from corroboration or critical thinking, particularly when it's favorable to their party or unfavorable to their party (ALL news sources are biased).

The news is also entirely corruptible. They already have been for some time.

If the incentives are there for the owners of the media to craft a fiction, or to support a fictional or exaggerated narrative, they will do it.

But even if some imaginary world existed where the media was actually incorruptible, suppose they got duped and ran a deep fake video as if it were real news. Human psychology is such that the video could still take root in the popular imagination and influence real world outcomes as a result. Even after being demonstrated of a video's inauthenticity.

I'm deeply worried that we don't have the proper psychological immune systems to weed out deeply fake audiovisual productions and prevent them from influencing our decision making or perception of reality.

Maybe more people can be game developers with access to free original artwork at their fingertips.

I don’t see it as replacing artists, I see it as amplifying artists.

you can't demand some technology not to be used when it is not a weapon

there isn't a reason to believe that our current world is in a stage that is free from changes, in fact our world become what it is due to invention of disruptive technologies, regardless you like it or not.