As with most things, I think the true value of LLMs will come from use in moderation. In theory, having AI write an annoyingly polite email to a frustrated customer saves emotional and artistic capital that a knowledge worker can spend later on their own pursuits.

It makes me think of something Brandon Sanderson wrote that has been bouncing around in my head a lot lately:

"Physical labor is great for the mind, as it leaves all kinds of time to consider the world. Other work, like accounting or scribing, demands little of the body—but siphons energy from the mind.

If you wish to become a storyteller, here is a hint: sell your labor, but not your mind. Give me ten hours a day scrubbing a deck, and oh the stories I could imagine. Give me ten hours adding sums, and all you’ll have me imagining at the end is a warm bed and a thought-free evening.”

> It makes me think of something Brandon Sanderson wrote that has been bouncing around in my head a lot lately: "Physical labor is great for the mind, as it leaves all kinds of time to consider the world. Other work, like accounting or scribing, demands little of the body—but siphons energy from the mind. If you wish to become a storyteller, here is a hint: sell your labor, but not your mind. Give me ten hours a day scrubbing a deck, and oh the stories I could imagine. Give me ten hours adding sums, and all you’ll have me imagining at the end is a warm bed and a thought-free evening.”

While I understand the theory, it doesn’t work in practice most of the time. Labour work doesn’t let you think that much in reality.

i suspect sanderson didn't spend 5 years scrubbing decks. having done a good bit of physical work, when i'm done i'm not channeling stories i'm trying to ice my aching joints and worrying about how i'd make rent.

Not an artist, but many people refer to the creative part of making software as an “art”, so here’s a take. ChatGPT allows for rapid iteration of ideas. I have an idea, I get ChatGPT to flesh it out, I iterate. The value ChatGPT is providing is not to be the source of creativity, it’s in speeding up the process from idea to concrete implementation. It’s a tool. In software development and engineering more generally, we are used to using all kinds of tools to accelerate the process of idea -> reality. Is a song writer not allowed tools to help do the same?

Art, at least how I understand it, is about sharing emotions and experiences. We know artists (as opposed to programmers) because we are curious about the person that put a part of themselves into the thing that evoked some emotion in us or gave us an interesting experience.

Software can be a tool to create art (games for example), but mostly it's about problem solving. Sometimes creative problem solving, sure. But listening to a machine generated song is like the ultimate soulless A/B tested local maximum entertainment whose only goal is to make money. We had enough of that without generative AI, it's not gonna get better I wager.

I don't care much who wrote the code I'm running or if it was AI generated. There's nothing human being shared there, it solves a problem, and all that really matters is that it solves the problem well.

It is relatively rare, but software itself (not just the resulting program, such as "a game") can be art. Most examples of this focus on using code to communicate something humorous about the culture surrounding software. I cite FizzBuzz Enterprise Edition [0] as a notable example. There's also code poetry, which encompasses quite a bit more than just humor.

[0]: https://github.com/EnterpriseQualityCoding/FizzBuzzEnterpris...

Nice example! I also did some reading in the mean time, and I guess for a 17th century definition of "art", a well-written algorithm that does the job efficiently and is easy to reason about would even classify as art. I quite enjoyed the book "Beautiful Code" for this kind of stuff.

> Art, at least how I understand it, is about sharing emotions and experiences. We know artists (as opposed to programmers) because we are curious about the person that put a part of themselves into the thing that evoked some emotion in us or gave us an interesting experience.

What is art? That’s a rhetorical question, because this is a highly debated topic and the answers have changed over time. There was a thousand years where art could not be separated from religious expression. There was a period where only technical mastery was considered important and the artist relatively unimportant. It varies by culture, time period, and even down to the individual.

And once you can agree on something that should be art; there will be disagreements as to whether a particular example is worthy of the title. Is Nick Cave’s “Into my Arms” art? Is the Spice Girls “Wannabe”?

Many years ago at the start of my career I was an engineer of the traditional variety working for a Smart Metering company. There was one analog electrical engineer there who I would best describe as a “mad genius”. His designs were constrained to solve a very boring practical problem, yes, but they were also creative, beautiful, and I would argue, art. Yes you need a degree in electrical engineering to appreciate them, but I guarantee that any such engineer would not fail to be moved by the beauty and elegance of his designs.

> I don't care much who wrote the code I'm running or if it was AI generated. There's nothing human being shared there, it solves a problem, and all that really matters is that it solves the problem well.

Much like with my example of the Smart Meter, the tradesmen installing it could care less about the beauty within. However I do appreciate beautiful elegant code, rare as it is. But name for me any human creative endeavour that is not 99% meaningless, repetitive, soulless drivel?

Fair, the term "art" definitely changed meaning over time and is not quite universally agreed upon. What you made me think is that it's indeed a term where the goal posts are up for moving, just like "AI", the only timeless definition of which I can think of being: "Anything people recently thought only humans can do, but it turned out computers can do them".

As for your last question: With games, I see a pretty clear distinction between those designed to quickly make lots of people addicted to the point where they spend as much money as possible, and those that primarily aim to transmit experiences or emotions.

Thinking about other businesses, I guess there's also a distinction between the short term revenue optimising ones, and those that focus on delighting the customer. Thinking about it, I should probably also consider that art, as I think parent suggested. Anything that's being created for a primary purpose other than short term revenue possibly.

So in summary, I suppose whether or not something is art is better decided based on the intentions of the creator, not the tools they use for creation.

Coding is not art, it is a learned and trained skill.

Even though, I believe that the use of ChatGPT or any other AI assistant will eventually lead to the creation of inexperienced and unskilled generations of developers.

Using AI to generate "art" will just kill human creativity. Not only will it do that, it will create a new normal, where this AI art will be viewed as standard. Just as we currently have an over-monetized, synthetic music industry completely devoid of quality.

Coding is technique, just like writing prose or laying down brush strokes on canvas or whatever else. All are learned skills, all can be used in the process of artistic creation.

> Using AI to generate "art" will just kill human creativity.

Did the photograph “kill” art? I’m sure this has been asked before, but what is so fundamentally different about AI that puts it into a different category of tool? That’s my argument; not that software development is art, but that tools accelerate the act of creation.

In my head, I keep making this comparison to photography.

I like to take pictures. Usually, I take many, many -- hundreds -- of pictures for a project and I'll find one or two that I like most in that bunch. I think this is a pretty common practice in photography, euphemistically referred to as portfolio editing.

I see a strong analogy between portfolio editing and operation of AI like ChatGPT. The camera and the AI are both machines being operated by humans who have developed enough expertise with their respective machine to get the output that they want. If the camera can produce art, why can't the AI?

How about instead of taking the camera, telling the AI to generate a statistically likely picture for you?

For me, a guy with a master of fine arts and a photographer, filmmaker and musician, the problem with AI isn't, that it is a automated process that creates stuff, but that the stuff it creates isn't usually the kind that will suprise yourself. My best pieces of music, film scenes and pictures always came from very special and memorable circumstances, or by tweaking a many factors for a long time, and by reflecting on the results a magnitude longer.

Beginner artists are already amazed at the fact that they managed to make a film, a drawing, a piece of music, a decent photograph. More advanced artists are much more about exploring the medium and figuring out what is possible.

My fear is that AI will make art much less personal and much less explorative. Or maybe it will just have the opposite effect? At the dawn of photography all the painters started to become abstract for a reason — why mimic, what the apparatus does better?

Taking a picture is deterministic. You aim at something, configure the settings and the cells / CMOS will capture that light in the right manner. You can argue that autofocus and portrait-mode are eroding this but ultimately, if you, the human are not pointing at something good in the first place, well you’ll very likely not have a very good picture. I feel like with AI and a random seed you can ask a question of which you have added none of your own reflection into and it will produce something somewhat in the ballpark that may pass as real. I.e. you don’t even have to point the camera at anything good …

Edit: not to say you can’t use it as a muse or for inspiration, but it isn’t a prerequisite.

You do have to provide novel input though, otherwise it's just a vending machine for motel art. Everybody is capable of generating the same generic crap by default, but if you're sufficiently creative in your prompt, it's no different than an artist having an assistant.

The real problem is the long tail. You found a unique form of expression? Your work gets trained on and you get cut out of your own agency.

I fully expect deliberately-bad art will become a thing, because it would be ruinous to datasets to be trained on, will stand out in a sea of KincaidDiffusions, and go generally unexamined by AI crawlers. Lomography was ahead of its time.

I think it's fair to say that conceiving of a prompt and iterating it toward a desirable output can be artistically expressive. Where the comparison with cameras falls down for me is a) at least to date, writing prompts feels a lot less intentional and a lot more random (AI people themselves make heavy use of the term "cargo culting") than [arranging and] composing a photograph, and b) your camera can function from first principles without requiring the work of other photographers to be blended into an information slurry and loaded into its memory.

You'll note that "photography" as an art has its own name and is considered a different art than painting or drawing. And if you took a photo and then said "I drew this", people would say you were lying.

So personally I have no problem with considering GPT stuff "art", but I think it should be considered a separate art form and given a different name.

Why oes it matter if we call it "art" or not?

AI creations are going to be enjoyed or not, used or not, given attention or not, just like human creations, regardless of what we call them.

More and more I'm leaning towards seeing the whole category of "art" as nothing more than gatekeeping.

I explicitly said that I don't mind calling it "art". I meant that things like "AI songwriting" should be given a different name than "songwriting" like "photography" has a different name than "painting", even though all of these things are considered "art". The name could be just "AI songwriting", or it could be some fancier name (like "photography" has a fancy name).

Giving it a different name would also imply that you shouldn't submit AI songs to a songwriting competition, much like you wouldn't submit a photograph to a painting competition, but you could have separate competitions for AI songs, and separate competitions that accept anything, and so on.

>So personally I have no problem with considering GPT stuff "art", but I think it should be considered a separate art form and given a different name.

That name already exists - generative art.

The encoding of information isn't specific to humans or "human spirit" is it?

Encoding happens.

We seem to be the first local observers of encoding, but we didn't initiate encoding.

In fact, we're entirely the result of (and dependent upon) an information encoding process we had no role in creating.

"AI" is simply another encoder within an encoder within an encoder... etc.

The value of discovering and propagating valuable/useful/potent encodings is the underlying pressure producing all encoding systems. Look there for "spirit"?

If the human spirit is really that fragile, then perhaps it deserves to erode and die. Yet, the human spirit has been subjected to much worse, and it survived. Maybe there are some qualities in the creative process that ChatGPT simply cannot emulate.

As a premise I agree with this argument, however, in my own practical use of Chat GPT, I find that it often inspires — not replaces - my own creativity.

It can give a good skeleton for how an idea can end up looking - which is often exactly what I need to implement the vision I have.

Perhaps this is still skipping a vital part of the ideation process, but it doesn’t seem to me like it’s completely devoid of creative struggle.

I strongly disagree. Even as imperfect as the current crop of LLMs are, I'm doing things today that year-ago-me would have considered firmly in the realm of science fiction. It's reinvigorating my creative drive across the board, and I love it. I'm getting to make the Interesting Choices that lead to Art faster and more freely than ever.

Others will feel differently, and that's ok. I find myself not even mad at such florid proclamations as to the death of the human spirit. Such sanctimonious proclamations were made by portrait artists at the advent of photography as well, and yet here we are, Art intact, all these decades later.

> I'm doing things today that year-ago-me would have considered firmly in the realm of science fiction.

I've read an infinite amount of comment about that but never heard of a single convincing example

Having a fully-grammatical, open-ended conversation in a natural language with a computer was 100% science fiction until now.

Strong agree. I started writing a comic series in 2016, but had to stop in part because commissioning the art was prohibitively expensive. AI image generation is quickly erasing that ability gap.

Most publically consumed art is made by large teams, which naturally leads to a dilution of a singular artists vision. With the current quality mass media, I'm excited to see singular geniuses with the power of whole production companies at their finger tips.

Those "singular geniuses" aren't producing anything truly creative or unique, they're just typing "x in the style of Joe Quesada" (or whomever) into a textbox. AI isn't erasing the gap, it's just making the theft of other artists' work easier, and putting the artists themselves out of business. All for software that doesn't even allow real freedom of creative control, or autonomy of vision - the best you can ever do is hope to get an approximation of a concept that probably still has to be run through Photoshop or something to keep everything on model and fix all of the six-fingered hands.

If you can't afford to pay real artists to draw for your comic book, maybe you shouldn't be in that business?

You're responding to your own argument here, not mine. I'm saying the next generation of artists will be blessed with tools that greatly expand their capabilities. Arguing otherwise, is like saying Photoshop, or VFX, did nothing to push art forward over the last 40 years.

Obviously, AI training data is a touchy topic. I completely agree artist should be compensated. To what degree is a hard question.

As to whether or not I should be making comics- I have story to express and there are tools available to express it. I really don't care what you or anyone else thinks about the validity of that expression. That's what makes it art. You talk like someone who has never produced art.

Humanity is just starting to get some competition.

Some people just can't deal with that.

If genuine, unaided human creativity is so great then AI generated creations should not be much of a challenge.

The sad fact, though, is that a lot of human creation is really not that good in comparison, or at the least is slow and expensive, while AI creations are often cheap, fast, and good -- you can have all three.

Eh if you understand the history of the Luddites you may see their position better.

If there is 'cheap' digital competition then a huge number of people end up with no way to survive in our current paradigm.

I see it as any other technology - you can either use it as a crutch or as a stepping stool. Inevitably we're going to see a lot of both, but the former are not going to get very far, because they're going to be vastly outshined by the latter.

I agree. AI is a tool. A hammer. Those who do not wish to use the hammer and go on strike because the hammer workers are faster or better, will be left behind.

Takes like this confuse me. ChatGPT is not stopping anyone from making art. It may stop you from profiting off of your artistic labors. Though, if you need a profit motive to make art, were you really making anything truly expressive and creative to begin with?

We're seeing the same thing with the actors and writers striking. Sorry folks, if you're making me choose between embracing neoluddism or living with some artsy folks not having their dream job, I'm going to pick you being out of a job. I do not care that background actors are going to be replaced by AI and I do not care that AI is going to let 1 writer do the work of 5. Background acting is not anyone's passion and writing predictable soapy sitcom stories is probably not anyone's passion, either.

AI is going to give us better creative work not because AI will become super creative, but because people who actually have creative thoughts worth expressing will just do that instead of being crowded out by humans chasing the lowest common denominator. Now we have computers chasing the lowest common denominator, something they are very good at, and we have humans who will create when they feel compelled to create, not because they want to make money but because their creativity compels them to act, make, and do.

If a songwriter is being replaced by an AI, their skills are not something we're going to miss. Sorry, not sorry. Artistic sensibilities have arguable never been the driver of what music is popular and I don't see the issue in having AI replace the bubblegum rubberstamp dime-a-dozen trash that the modal artists must produce to make money. Again, now you are totally outmatched by the AI and you can actually focus on creating an authentically human work without being distracted by the needs of industry. If there is no market for that then it is not because of AI but because of our own preferences.

The "human spirit" is just a story we tell ourselves to justify our dominion over everything we see. I'd be more than happy to see it die. Humanism is great if you're a human, but life is moving in other directions and we can either adapt to the notion that our primate brains aren't magical engines of wonder or die alongside our brittle egos.

There is nothing un-artistic about wanting to both make art and to be able to afford rent, dinner, and pants.

There is a difference between "making money and making art" and "making money by making art". No one is entitled to having other people value their artistic output. I would argue that art created for the marketplace is less creative than art produced by a human's need to create for creation's sake. It's not un-artistic, but it is the kind of art that an AI can make better, faster, and cheaper.

Give an example of a work of art produced by a human's need to create for creation's sake alone, and not at all for the marketplace, that outclasses any classical works of art, music, literature or anything else that the creator was paid for. Michaelangelo didn't paint the Sistene Chapel ceiling for free. The Rolling Stones and the Beatles didn't perform for free. Shakespeare didn't write for free. That indie band you like so full of passion and verve would probably kill to be able to at least make ends meet on tour, because if they don't, they just break up and get "real" jobs. Even Banksy sells his work.

All art is work. Any art worth doing is work. It's time and experience and probably student loans and equipment and people. And under capitalism, work must either be done in the service of profit or else it doesn't get done. To expect artists alone to suffer for the purity of their craft and do everything they do for free is perverse.

Although you are correct - AI will put a lot of those people out of business. But not because they let themselves be tainted by commercialism. Rather the opposite, because commerce no longer finds value in the artist.

Simply look at the career of Van Gogh or any "Bohemian starving artist". Listing only the most popular, most influential artists proves my point: for most people art is an untenable career. In that regard AI, has virtually no impact on those who want to create. They will find a way to make something unique and valuable or they will fail like millions of artists already do in the world we have today.

There are many artists in my family and all of them have day jobs to support their creative passions. Mosts artists fail to make money; it really should go without saying that not everyone can be Helen Mirren or Paul McCartney. If requiring a day job makes you give up art, you probably didn't have the drive to create anything people really wanted. For most artists creation is a need, not something that is pursued for monetary reasons. Everyone tries to make money on their art, but again, even without AI the vast majority of artists fail to do so.

>Listing only the most popular, most influential artists proves my point: for most people art is an untenable career.

That wasn't your point. Your point was that no artist who makes a living with their art can be considered a "true" artist. I pointed out popular and influential artists because the quality of their work, despite having been being done by working artists, disputes your thesis that no art done for money has real value.

>In that regard AI, has virtually no impact on those who want to create.

AI has already been used to steal the commissions of working artists and fabricate CVs, and plenty of jobs are being outsourced entirely to AI. I guarantee you the artists who lost that work have plenty of passion for their craft.

>Mosts artists fail to make money; it really should go without saying that not everyone can be Helen Mirren or Paul McCartney.

Why are you trying to equate working artists with celebrities. Most working actors aren't Helen Mirren or Paul McCartney. Most writers aren't Tom Clancy or Stephen King. You've never heard of anyone working in VFX, or many people involved in comics or game art.

Again, you just keep restating your argument, but never proving it. Why are none of these people real artists, and why do none of them deserve to make a living? Why are the only "true" artists your friends who make macaroni collages or paint portraits on the boardwalk, and not the people who had the commitment to master their craft and do it full time?

>For most artists creation is a need, not something that is pursued for monetary reasons.

Here's the flaw in your reasoning, you assume that artists who work for a living are only interested in monetary gain. For the vast majority of working artists, creation is a need, and that's why they pursue a living at it. You seem to be assuming the only artists being replaced by AI are low-talent bottom feeders, but markets aren't optimizing for talent, they're optimizing for cost and replacing their entire creative pipeline with AI where feasible.

A lot of modern creative work involves years of effort, material, and investment. Small bands can't tour if everyone also has a full time job, and they never charge for tickets and only ever give their music away for free. Indie game studios couldn't publish games that way. A lot of art just ceases to exist when your only option is to squeeze it in during free time when you're already working 40, 50 or 60 hours just to feed yourself.

Optimizing/maximizing the output of art is an awfully mechanical way of looking at ART.

In a way chatgpt is just the prolongation of humans laziness and quest for leverage.. but the effect are not linear. what we benefited from not having to carry weights and lift stuff all day long is not the same as not having to think, imagine, dream .. and society has a strange response to cultural productions because if it's too often, too easy, too obvious (and when people don't try hard, they will repeat the same things, it's inherent to that structure) it has no value.

The entire argument shifts if you think back to the spirit of say, file-sharing in a college dorm in the late 90s.

A bunch of kids running local LLMs to generate art and entertainment doesn't sound dreary or scary in the least.

I’m taken aback by the idea of the integrity of the human spirit being kept together by songwriting and other artistic practices that AI threatens.

If anything, AI is proving how trivial certain aspects of art can be; that human beings have mechanized them at a scale that more vital aspects of life have yet to experience.

I have been a professional writer for over 40 years. ChatGPT is useful, but I never come close to using it's unedited results, even as I use ever more advanced prompt sequences. But if you're new to something that ChatGPT can help you with, I don't see how it can be resisted. What value is there to you to not use it?