Because many other kinds of art require thousands of hours to learn before getting to the level of current AI
The real gate keeper to art isn't the cost of a pencil, it's the opportunity cost of learning how to use it
Some people have creative ideas they cannot realise and tools like AI help them do it. The more people that can realise their creative ideas the better it is for everyone.
There is a fundamental misunderstanding of creating going on here. There's a reason why people always talk about the work/journey/process rather than the end goal. That's what makes someone an artist--not the end result.
You are consuming, not creating.
Going outside and taking a photo requires you to be engaging with the scene around you. You are the actor doing the thing. When you prompt an AI, the AI is the actor doing the thing.
Not to mention that many directors also write the script for the film.
N.B. If directing people is the distinguishing factor, then animation directors are robbed of their claim to artistry as well, as is basically any solo artist in history
https://www.youtube.com/@NeuralViz
It would have cost millions. Now one person can do it with a laptop and a few hundred dollars of credits a month.
AI is 100% making filmmaking more accessible to creative people who otherwise would never have access to the kind of funding and networks required to realise their visions.
None of the videos I've clicked on required AI for the content to be good, and some of the randomness has no real reason to be there.
Also, they're painfully unoriginal. They're just grabbing bits that The Onion or shows like Rick & Morty have been doing and putting a revolting AI twist to it. It screams to me of 0 effort slop made for the sole purpose of generating money from morons with no creativity clicking on it and being bemused for 10 seconds
Other disapproval comes from different emotional places: a retreading of ludditism borne out of job insecurity, criticism of a dystopia where we've automated away the creative experience of being human but kept the grim work, or perceptions of theft or plagiarism.
Whether AI has worked well for you isn't just irrelevant, but contrarian in the face of clear and present value to a lot of people. You can be disgusted with it but you can't claim it isn't there.
I have seen what 99% of people are doing with this "clear and present value". Turns out when you give people a button to print dopamine they probably aren't going to create the next Mona Lisa, they're just going to press the button more. Even with AI, creating compelling art is still a skill that needs to be learned, and it's still hard. And why would they learn a skill when they just decided against learning a skill? Incentives matter, and here the incentives massively favor quantity over quality.
> Whether AI has worked well for you isn't just irrelevant
My point was that it's creatively restrictive, and that current models tend to actively steer away from creative outputs. But if you want to limit yourself to what corporations training the models and providing the cloud services deem acceptable, go ahead.
Gatekeeping commonly means excluding others from a group, a label, or an identity. That’s what they’re referring to.
Accessibility -- and I don't mean this in the sense particular to disability -- is highly personal; its not so much that it is more accessible, as that it is differentlly-accessible.
> I've tried AI image generation myself and was not impressed. It doesn't let me create freely, it limits me and constantly gravitates towards typical patterns seen in training data. As it completely takes over the actual creation process there is no direct control over the small decisions, which wastes time.
No offense, but you've only tried the most basic form of AI image generation -- probably something like pure text-to-image -- if that's what you are finding. Sure, that's definitiely what the median person doing AI image gen does, dumping a prompt in ChatGPT or Midjourney or whatever. But its not all that AI image generation offers. You can have as much or as little control of the small (and large) decisions as you want when using AI image generation.
Sometimes I feel like HN comments are working so hard to downplay AI that they’ve lost the plot.
It’s more accessible because you can accomplish amazing storytelling with prompts and a nominal amount of credits instead of spending years learning and honing the art.
Is it at the same level as a professional? No, but it’s more than good enough for someone who wants to tell a story.
Claiming that computer access is too high of a bar is really weird given that computers and phones (which can also operate these sites) are ubiquitous.
> Edit: another comment about a different meaning of accessibility: the flood of AI content makes real content less accessible.
No it does not. Not any more than another person signing up for YouTube makes any one channel less “accessible”. Everyone can still access the content the same.
I've tried AI image generation myself and was not impressed. It doesn't let me create freely, it limits me and constantly gravitates towards typical patterns seen in training data. As it completely takes over the actual creation process there is no direct control over the small decisions, which wastes time.
Edit: another comment about a different meaning of accessibility: the flood of AI content makes real content less accessible.