jplusequalt
You're phrasing this like third world countries have similar labor markets to the US, where anyone and anybody can go and find a high paying, "comfy" job.
Third world countries provide the convenience that first world countries like the US have come to expect. The cost of providing that "convenience" is that millions of people in India/China/Africa/Southeast Asia work for almost nothing to produce cheap crap that people buy in the US and then dispose of like it's nothing.
There have been no signs of "super productivity" in the larger economy due to AI. Boosts in productivity have, so far, been seen exclusively in sectors like tech.
AI recently told me that my oven was broken because a part that doesn't exist on the oven I own was malfunctioning. A bunch of people poking around with electronics, motors, etc. because they think their AI chatbot can fix anything and everything is going to lead to injuries, deaths, and most assuredly more money in the long haul.
Are you aware of some StarTrek like technology that can create everything society needs and wants? If not, then scarcity still exists.
It may not for you, but obviously it does impact lots of artists ability to make a living off their art, to find community in their art, and on a longer time scale it could even change how society values art.
I also said "most artists" not "all artists". I'm not terribly surprised that a poster on Hacker News tends to think differently than most artists, seeing as this community tends to attract the sort of person who is pro-AI.
Well, your analogy assumes people consume art and food for the same reasons. Does the desire to experiencing a new piece of art come from the same place that makes you crave for a slice of pizza?
Of course not.
Another disconnect I often see in these discussions is that there seems to be a misunderstanding about what most artists conceive as "creating art." "Creating art" is not primarily about consuming or satiating some part of our brains. To use your analogy, we're not baking pizzas purely because we wish to eat them, but because we value the process of baking the pizza itself!
When artists have these sorts of conversations with people, it tends to turn into frustrating arguments due to this misunderstanding. When I question whether you're "creating" art, its not me trying to scold you and others who like to ask AI to generate a pictures you thought up. It's that I'm seeing people misinterpret the end result of creation with the act of creation itself.
Again, for artists these are two separate things!
You can't define art for the same reasons you can't define what it is to be human. But most people can easily recognize what is/behaviors that are inhumane.
For me, it's not about invalidating others opinions. In the same way I hold my doctors opinions of my health in higher regard than a random person on the internet, I hold the opinions creatives/artists/etc. on the subject of creation in higher regard than people who use generative AI.
So you can have your opinions, but it's not "elitism" for those of us who actually have experience doing a thing to state our opinions as well.
Subjectivity is not a shield that protects a work from criticism, and disliking a piece of art does not necessarily mean you are closed minded. It could simply be that you don't find it interesting, or that you find the values of the artist reprehensible, or that you find it overly derivative, etc.
I don't believe they are. Searching and prompting are far more akin to a customer asking their artist to tweak the commission.
No man is an island. I've been watching my love for programming die as I've seen so many of my peers and engineering heroes turn into vibe coders.
Community is a powerful thing.
The big issue here is that through all of human history, effort was a necessary prerequisite to making art. Whether that effort came from mixing paint together before sitting down in front of an easel, hiking through the back country to find the perfect spot for a photograph, or fixing n-gons in Blender all evening. If you created a piece of art, there was a shared understanding amongst other artists that you cared enough to put in the work to make something. For most artists, it's the work/journey/process they cherish, not just the end goal. Putting in the work to make your art is usually the only "gatekeeping" that happens in the art community.
But AI is allowing people to short circuit the path from idea -> creation, which begs the question: is that actually creating? Is prompting for a picture substantially any different than tweaking your search on Google images until you find a photo that resembles what you had in mind? Is creating just having a shiny new picture, or is it the hours/weeks/months of effort, failure, and successes that happened leading up to the picture?
Point is: you can call it "gatekeeping" if you want, but all we're really saying is that creation != ideation.
Again, it's hard to quantify or validate. One thing I will say is that people can often misinterpret the things that make a certain piece of art work. It's often the little details, or even the absence of detail that make or break it. This is the sort of stuff that requires you to train your eye to notice.
For example, Da Vinci is often heralded as a master of the human form and proportions (the Vitruvian man). But many of his later works often eschewed realistic proportions, with his figures often being 10-11 heads tall. This is a subtle detail that influences how a piece feels, and yet most people would completely miss it!
It's not about placing bets on the ability of AI.
"Taste" can also include the human behind the piece. For example, I love listening to black metal. My "taste" as a consumer of black metal includes sombre atmospheres, oppressive walls of noise, dissonant, angular rhythmic guitar sections, etc.
But my "taste" in black metal extends to the artists behind the music. Black metal has a huge issue with racism and white supremacy. There is a lot of sonically interesting music made by hateful individuals in the black metal scene that I don't listen to because the artists values are antithetical to my own.
In a similar manner, art made primarily through generative AI may technically resemble art that normally matches my "taste", but I find myself wholly uninterested in it because the artists behind it have values that are antithetical to my own.
PS: I'm not trying to say "AI artists = nazis". I'm trying to say that your own motivations and world view behind the art you create influence whether I'll engage with it or not.
I keep putting quotes around "taste" because its hard to properly describe. Whatever it is, it seems like a mixture of observing what has worked for others, personal preference, worldview, etc. "Getting good at" taste is therefor hard to quantify.
Furthermore, having good "taste" in the art you consume doesn't translate to having good "taste" in the art you create. There exists a gap between the appreciation and application of said "taste", and you need to practice creating a lot of stuff to shorten that gap. And again, these two sides of "taste" are deeply intertwined. The kind of art you consume tends to change as you hone your creative skills and begin to see the technique behind it all, and that in turn influences the kind of art you may wish to create.
99.8% of artists all start out at a similar place. They have good "taste", but they suck at making art. Only through practice and feedback from other artists were they able to improve their skills and creative sight, and these things in turn further developed their "taste" in art.
The art pieces that people enjoy are the culmination of an artist spending countless hours practicing, failing, retrying, and experimenting with different ideas. You don't get a Zdzislaw Beksinski without endlessly iterating and honing your craft.
This is one of by biggest gripes with AI: it creates an incentive for people to skip all the hard work that results in great art. Why spend thousands of hours developing your art skills and your unique artistic fingerprint when you can press the instant gratification button right now? I know its not something you can blame a single individual for, but when society as a whole starts taking shortcuts that's when we'll really see a degradation in art.
Style permeates all aspects of writing: word choice, sentence structure, literary devices, pacing, plotting, characterization, dialog, theme, etc. Its a culmination of these things that is reinforced over again every sentence, paragraph, and chapter for potentially hundreds/thousands of pages.
I don't see how a prompt could reliably "tune" all of those different variables over such a large context window without it feeling like a surface level facsimile at best.
Human language isn't verifiable. If I ask for something "dark and gritty", there are endless outputs that are indeed "dark and gritty" yet completely miss the style I had in mind.
No, I prefer to talk to people.
Maybe not for you.
>"Just because you can___doesn't mean you should," I agree with you, as I wish this didnt exist, but it does and times always change. I'm personally embracing this new change!
You can embrace AI agents all you want, but don't risk other peoples lives by distracting yourself while driving.
Why do you assume this to be the case? Look at your own company culture--has it not become increasingly siloed as people look to their own agents for most questions, tasks? What relationship skills are you building while talking to your chatbot all day?
>the trajectory leads us to all becoming mini-ceos directing our company of agents
Only if you completely misunderstand how business and economics works. The price of code is falling because it's turning into a commodity. The amount of people needed to produce it is drastically decreasing.
We consume more food than ever, but the % of people who work to produce food is far smaller than it was 150 years ago.
The amount of brain power most people use while having a passing conversation is << than the brain power people use while trying to solve a problem, or reason about engineering abstractions.
I don't think this is a responsible thing to be doing unless you've completely relinquished all control of how things are built/designed/implemented to the AI.
Just because you __can__ does not mean you __should__.
What a nightmare of a sentence.
Software has been saturated for a long time.
There are a bajillion apps on the app store that get little to no recognition. Most software startups fail to find a foothold and go under. An uncountable number of FOSS projects have been seen by at most a handful of people, and even fewer who have used/cloned the code.