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?
My guy, we live in a world where we are required to have a job to live. Most of those jobs are not essential for society to function. Some of these jobs make people happy and passionate, many others are soul grating and awful. This technology makes some of those enjoyable jobs much less lucrative while the product becomes worse. We simply lose things that bring people joy and for what? Like seriously, I cannot think of something an ai can bring to the table that a human cannot in terms of art.
Why would you want to remove the jobs people enjoy and are passionate about just for the sake of it? Why would you campaign to strictly make people less happy? If it wasn’t for the horrible system we live in I’d be all for this kind of advancement, but it does not make life easier, it does not get us better things, and it almost exclusively makes life worse for millions of people with nothing to show for it.
I think this is the big contention point. In a world without a need for jobs, AI would be a neat alternative method of art generation, and a fascinating advancement of technology as a whole…
but UBI is not yet real and jobs still need to be had. Without some form of life-securement for those who provided the art to be trained off of, we’re just using tech to really fuck people over. It’s definitely a moral grey area - very dark grey.
I disagree completely. Idk but creating brings millions of people joy, anything that democratizes it more accessible is a good thing. AI has absolutely brought many more people joy.
A world where a technology exists that can query the sum of human knowledge and skill to translate ideas into form but is gatekept because few people like feeling special is a horrifying dystopia and I can’t imagine how someone could be so fucking evil as to really wish for that.
Like really, I want to keep giving y’all benefit of the doubt that you simply don’t consider a perspective outside your own, but you don’t make it easy.
Technology is what made those jobs enjoyable and accessible to those who do them now in the first place.
Nobody is forcing you to use AI or any technology, you can still farm goats and use them to make drums before you lay out a beat, people will probably be pretty impressed if you did that.
If they are passionate about their craft for the sake of it they will keep doing it, if they are doing it as a job then like with any other job market when new technologies or trends arrive they will have to adapt.
To put it in perspective with an analogy: It’s an absurd notion for instance that new programming languages should be banned not for their quality but simply because not every developer will learn them, and it’s an absurd notion that someone who loves programming in C for the sake of it cannot do so just because Java exists.
Having DAWs did not make it illegal to mess around with an old rompler and a step sequencer for the sake of it, nor did orchestra plugins eliminate violins, but market demands orchestral music done quicker, you either do this or don’t.
This would be the case for every system that still has some market demands, even something like anarcho-communist cooperative based market economics would favour technological advancement and efficiency every time and some jobs would simply not be in demand any more.
There is simply no economic system that makes any sense where someone would need to hire an orchestra for every sting on kitchen nightmares instead of using a VST or sample library or now in the not too distant future - generating one.
I fully agree that we need to change the system to ensure when these technological advancements happen that people don’t end up on the street.
However, I’m sure most would agree that even though it was not fair to e.g. human computers, the move to electronic calculators is a net positive for society.
Similarly endlessly distributable digital copies of books etc. democratized media to a massive degree even if it put libraries at risk.
It definitely does make life easier for many artists, for instance you can upscale old media or restore media where the original was lost to time, game devs can use AI-generated assets for background stuff like adding nigh-infinite variety to textures that would be impractical for an indie dev to do or a sole dev can compensate for whatever skills they lack manually etc.
I think with regards to quality it’s completely value neutral, I’ve seen plenty of dogshit AI art, but also some really good unique stuff. I think it just follows Sturgeon’s Law as everything.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon's_law
Maybe the real problem is the AI slop, which is really just humans being lazy.
In my immediate neighborhood there are two pastry bakeries. One has lines of people summoned by the TikTok/Instagram, who take videos of themselves eating. The other is known to locals, but never self promotes.
You can imagine, that the non-promoting one has amazing pastries. The best I’ve ever had. The TikTok one does have a trendy fancy interior, made for videos.
People want to be seen at a pastry place. That fake pastry place wants to be seen as an awesome bakery, even though really, without the marketing they are below average. Some guy wants to be seen as writing pop music, even though he can’t. Another wants to draw, even though I won’t spend the thousands of hours required.
Art is really about understanding the effort. Human effort.
Somehow, I can just imagine having AI slop music, and AI slop movies, and AI slop everything.
If a movie house is going to be Steve Jobs Pixar, they are going to hire the best real artists and the best real writers, and do something that means something to be human. They aren’t interested in slop.
If a movie house is going to be just for profit, are they going to even pay for the generative AI to do a few more iterations. I think they will keep it at slop.
Anyhow, a bit too much babble. Must sleep.
This is truly my exact worry.
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