Read on Reddit that people love AI because it's "democratizing creativity". Let that sink in. People want to be dropped on the top of the mountain and be called an alpinist.
I think it’s more like people want to enjoy the view without having to learn how to climb, which is a perfectly reasonable thing to want, even if it cheapens the experience somewhat.
The cheapening of the experience is the whole point though. People are robbing themselves of the joy that can only come from putting yourself through hardship in pursuit of a goal.
It’s not a moral judgement, that’s just how humans are wired. The lows make the highs higher.
To continue this metaphor, a while back my girlfriend and I went to Machu Picchu. We were taking a bus to the summit, but there was a landslide near the bottom of the mountain so everybody had to climb most of the way up. This led to it being eerily empty until people started trickling in, which certainly made it a better experience than the normal tourist swarm would have been.
I can imagine AI art having a similar effect (creating a glut of images/logos/whatever that devalues ones made with care) but am hopeful that we'll get better at filtering the cream of the crop. In 5 years tons of things will have AI logos that would have been made by a graphic designer (or simply not made) in the past. That sucks for graphic designers who are out of a job, is good for people who get cheaper logos, and TBD for overall society who now has lots more "custom" logos etc to wade through.
This discussion reminds me of Edward Abbey in Desert Solitaire advocating for not building roads in national parks to preserve the experience of true wilderness.
Obviously having roads is a great boon to a park's accessibility, and the ability of people with different mobility needs to appreciate nature. But it also made me thoughtful to imagine the feeling of wonder at seeing bridalveil fall after hiking for days into a roadless yosemite valley; how much more special and impressive it would seem after that journey?
This metaphorical tangent is pretty far removed from the original discussion, but how do you weigh the accessibility of a thing against how that accessibility changes its nature?
> People are robbing themselves of the joy that can only come from putting yourself through hardship in pursuit of a goal.
This is such an old man “I used to walk uphill both ways” take.
Not everybody has the TIME COST to pursue being an expert in art or code or whatever. But if they have an amazing idea and can now use AI to produce the idea then that is a beautiful thing!
For example: Having an idea for a cartoon used to be a dead end. It would die in your head because most people cannot stop their life and dedicate a substantial amount of time, effort, and sacrifice to produce the single cartoon idea.
>Having an idea for a cartoon used to be a dead end.
What's the point in having an idea for a cartoon in your head if an LLM can just write an infinite amount of cartoon ideas in a heartbeat, and probably a better one than you came up with.
Because it's your own? And previously that creativity of yours was hamstrung by your lack of ability in another domain (drawing), that the AI can help you with.
>> Having an idea for a cartoon used to be a dead end
But drawning a cartoon isn't very challenging. Most of my peers could draw someone from South Park in a junior school.
The hardship in making cartoons is the amount of choices you need to make and the amount of knowledge how those choices would impact a viewer.
If you delegate all of that, the cartoon wouldn't be simply blunt, it would be self-contradicting. And we already had a way of making cartoons, that allow your writing to shine through bland animation – since flash, actually. It might actually be even faster then using generative AI
I agree. Toil itself is not valuable or noble. We, as a society, should work towards reducing the training, skill level, and manual effort needed to achieve things. There is no need to artificially gatekeep activities behind needless toil.
This kind of mentality would ban Star Trek replicators, should they be invented one day. "In my day, you had to actually make things, we didn't get to replicate them, so we shouldn't, even if it's possible!"
I disagree re toil. The original idea that brings a creative work into existence is only a tiny part of how that work evolves with every step. For example absolutely no writer starts off writing their final draft. They write & through writing their ideas are clarified & new ideas form, that they did not previously have, all due to the 'toil' of writing the previous drafts. Skipping all the steps that are required to create significant work leads to shallow work born from instant gratification, exactly like the Ghibli slop. It's not 'gatekeeping' that something requires time & effort. All that Ghibli slop is already forgotten, despite saturating social media only a few days ago, because it so shallow. The story & characters & intent is what gives Ghibli films meaning & human resonance.
What cheapens the experience is the insistence of being called a "mountaineer" when a helicopter dropped you at the peak. This goes for "AI artists" and "astronauts" on commercial launches who glom on to unearned titles whose prestige was forged by countless professionals working very hard.
I think people who are using these models and trying to claim they are artists for clout are not a very large group. Have you really seen a significant number of people doing this? Otherwise it just feels like you're nutpicking
Tale as old as time... today's "bakers" are nothing like the bakers of 100 years ago. With their digital temperature gauges, global recipe and ingredient sourcing, cold storage, and more advanced food science.
Today's musicians have far greater access to lessons, recording equipment, inspirational material than 100 years ago.
Mountain biking (80s single speed with no gears, suspension, etc.) versus modern e-bikes with radial tires and hydraulic brakes.
Who cares? Value your own experience as you do. The less we all think about prestige, the more it will go away.
I actually disagree completely. Mastering the piano is different from mastering digital synthesis no doubt, but there are also distinctive commonalities that make and mark a master in both. A disproportionate investment of time or the effortlessness with which one can generate sounds imagined or perceived, as though the machine were a part of one’s own body, are attributes shared by both. Certainly someone could spend thousands of hours mastering different digital synthesis techniques, and I don’t think that’s easier than mastering the piano. There’s a fundamental competitive aspect to things like music that keeps mastery difficult to attain. If it weren’t difficult then it wouldn’t be as valuable and scarce. Once things become common and accessible, they quickly become boring and new genres are invented.
People thought "canned music" (aka prerecorded music) would be the death of music, and art in general
>The time is coming fast when the only living thing around a motion picture house will be the person who sells you your ticket. Everything else will be mechanical. Canned drama, canned music, canned vaudeville. We think the public will tire of mechanical music and will want the real thing. We are not against scientific development of any kind, but it must not come at the expense of art. We are not opposing industrial progress. We are not even opposing mechanical music except where it is used as a profiteering instrument for artistic debasement.
It kinda was the death of music - reasonably-skilled musicians used to make money performing live, and now they can't. The market got eaten up by recordings of really good artists, who, ironically, treat music more as industry than art.
AI generated images are only an extension of what e.g. photography has experienced in the last decades. We’ve had film cameras, then digital cameras, then smartphones, each of these commoditized image creation by a then-unthinkable factor.
It’s an ongoing process, even if this leap seems especially big.
Technological progress does not directly result in posers. As you noted, smartphones allowed anyone to record videos, but I'm yet to see any influencer or YouTuber call themselves a director or cinematographer.
I suspect the wannabees exist in the narrow window when technology has expanded enough for non-professionals, but hasn't seen wide enough adoption that the man on the street will recognize the pretentious self-aggrandizement.
> As you noted, smartphones allowed anyone to record videos,
No, I was talking about photography - and people replacing a digital camera with a smartphone. For most this substitution works very well; and the whole digital camera industry has shrunk significantly[1].
The photography community has been discussing wannabe photographers ever since my uncle bought a dslr and started taking photos at family weddings.
Also look at the production quality that a single person can achieve today.
Go to Amazon and drop a few grand on mics, lights, cameras and lenses. The result is production quality beating any 90s talk show, which would have taken a whole team to do.
Not everyone who engages in AI-assisted creative work is patting themselves on the back and being tone deaf and denigrating people that actually have creative skill... but some certainly are. While I don't support a moral absolutism when it comes to the use of GenAI, I do support putting these idiots in their place.
That thinking is time honoured and never found much traction. For example, pretty much nobody knows how to grow their own food, make their own clothes, carve their own furniture or even drive a manual car. Hordes of tourists circle the globe bringing disrepute to all sorts of time honoured monuments of history's greatest. Skills and challenges which aren't needed get forgotten and are generally not missed.
None of those things you mention have been forgotten. Many people do all of those things not because they have to but because it is incredibly rewarding to learn and grow these skills. Convenience doesn't bring happiness. People will actively seek out challenges even when they seemingly have none.
The trouble with things like climbing is there are only so many mountains to go around. We already can't walk in many places because of cars. I don't look forward to the day that similar vehicles can go up mountains. The existence of mass-produced clothing doesn't affect your ability to do your own knitting, though.
I'm replying almost solely to observe that inconvenience also doesn't bring happiness. Happiness is achieved precisely by feeling happy in the setting that you find yourself in. People can train themselves to only feel happy when inconvenienced but that is doing a major disservice to themselves and those immediately around them. But that is something of a tangent and so I have a cover story for why I'm typing!
> The trouble with things like climbing is there are only so many mountains to go around.
This is taking the metaphor far too far. Nobody is literally taking mountains away from people.
I think the majority of people still know how to grow their own food. We only passed 50% of the population living in cities a few years ago. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.RUR.TOTL.ZS says 43% of the population is still rural, and I'm guessing about 80% of that 43% (32%) knows how to grow their own food. So do all the people who have moved from the country to the city over the last 40 years.
There's a big gap between "pretty much nobody" and the reality, which is somewhere between one third and two thirds of everybody. You might want to reflect on exactly how your perception diverged so radically from reality.
Do people in cities suffer from not being able to grow their own food and make their own clothes? I don't know for sure, but official statistics claim that, even today, they commit suicide at much higher rates despite having much less material scarcity. Robinsonades have been a popular genre of fiction for centuries, suggesting that people long for that kind of autonomy. Today, we also have zombie apocalypse fiction, RPGs, and preppers.
From another angle, sports consist entirely of skills and challenges which aren't needed and never have been, suggesting that they don't get forgotten. Hobbies also consist of skills and challenges which aren't needed.
Um, no, that quotation means literally the opposite: it is about the climbing, it's not about getting to the top of any particular mountain. What Hillary was getting at is we get satisfaction from learning, training, overcoming difficulties and limitations, and ultimately pushing ourselves to our limits. His limit was Everest, your limit might be Snowdon, but it's climbing it that matters, not just taking the train to the top and taking a selfie.
He's saying that you can substitute any activity that combines danger, skill, and willpower for the mountain. It's literally not about the mountain, it's about how far you push yourself to reach a goal.
Does it though? We are all constrained by the time cost of everything we do. Not everybody with a quick creative spark cares enough to sacrifice opportunities, dedicate time, skip sleep or whatever it may take to gain the skills needed to act on the creative spark. AI empowering the output is a beautiful thing.
We have no right to tell people they have to learn to climb to get to top of the Everest.
I can't draw but I want to create my Art using AI. What I now see is a bunch of people who associate their self worth with a rare talent and don't want others to join the party. I want to resolve the issues around copyright for training, but once this is out of the way I want to draw exclusively through AI because it's the only way I can do it. And I LIKE IT.
I'm a skilled pianist. The funny thing is that I heard similar criticisms about computer music a couple decades ago. "No playing skill needed". Despite knowing how to play, I'd rather do computer music nowadays anyway. Please stop telling me what I can and can't do!
I'm not disagreeing with "let them do it", but the comparison with computer music isn't really fair.
Computer music, as it existed a couple decades ago, still played exactly what you asked it to, and it wasn't filling areas where you underspecified the music with a statistical model of trillions of existing songs. And that's the difference, for me: the ability to underspecify, and have the details be filled in and added in a way that to the audience will be perceived as intentful, but which is not.
Agreed - computer music compared to live music is what, say, Adobe Illustrator is to drawing. Or a Wacom drawing table, but definitely not prompting AI to draw for you.
Whether drawing (writing etc.) through AI counts as drawing (as making art) is a debate we have to resolve in the upcoming future.
It is possible to very critical of something without "not allowing people to do it".
Dismissing the argument that we are losing something in this "democratization of creativity" by fighting a strawman that says you are not allowed to participate instead is a bit lazy
>We have no right to tell people they have to learn to climb to get to top of the Everest.
My, my, you really took the worst example to defend your point. The Everest is now an overcrowded dumping ground full of cadavers, shit and trash, with idiots putting not only themselves but their sherpas and other mountaineers in danger due to their arrogance, lack of ability and shittiness.
>What I now see is a bunch of people who associate their self worth with a rare talent and don't want others to join the party.
What I see is a bunch of people creating digital doubles of existing artists without their consent and using it to make money.
Tangentially, what does enshittification mean now? Quoting Wiktionary, at one point it meant "The phenomenon of online platforms gradually degrading the quality of their services, often by promoting advertisements and sponsored content, in order to increase profits" (coined by Doctorow), but now people seem to use it to mean... things becoming shit?
> Second: the fact that a neologism is sometimes decoupled from its theoretical underpinnings and is used colloquially is a feature, not a bug. Many people apply the term "enshittification" very loosely indeed, to mean "something that is bad," without bothering to learn – or apply – the theoretical framework. This is good. This is what it means for a term to enter the lexicon: it takes on a life of its own. If 10,000,000 people use "enshittification" loosely and inspire 10% of their number to look up the longer, more theoretical work I've done on it, that is one million normies who have been sucked into a discourse that used to live exclusively in the world of the most wonkish and obscure practitioners. The only way to maintain a precise, theoretically grounded use of a term is to confine its usage to a small group of largely irrelevant insiders. Policing the use of "enshittification" is worse than a self-limiting move – it would be a self-inflicted wound.
There was a very similar discussion when photography was made easily accessible. Baudelaire thought that photography was the killer of art by allowing non-artists to crate something that was very much like art, mechanistically, without having a good insight into what they were doing.
And, in some ways he was right... but also not. What eventually happened is that art education that would be required for any aristocrat or an aspiring aristocrat became optional. Most intellectual elite today would be unable to draw much beyond a stick figure diagram. Art, at least where it concerns drawing or painting became a narrowly specialized field. And so, most people today don't understand and don't appreciate art.
But, art didn't die. Instead, artists started asking themselves more questions about the nature and philosophy of art, figuring out which aspects are essential, experimenting more. In retrospect, it's sad that fewer people today have decent access or understanding of art, but while more common before, the understanding was often very superficial anyways.
I can't really speak for other people, but I think the "democratizing creativity" part comes in in places where the specific creative part that the AI replaces is not a core part of the creative experience.
Take a look at Super Auto Pets, a pretty successful and fun auto-battler game. It literally uses a free emoji pack for its core art. It doesn't really matter that they didn't hire an artist for those (though I think they did hire an artist after finding success) since a free emoji pack was enough for the creative product they wanted to create. If they had AI generated emoji instead, it wouldn't have really mattered much for the final result (creatively at least, I assume audiences would respond poorly due to GenAI's reputation). At the same time, the ability to create their product without paying a lot of money for artists was critical to make it in the first place.
This is what it means to me to "democratize creativity", to allow creatives to realize their creative ambitions in an area they are proficient at (e.g. video games) without requiring a lot of creative skill in adjacent areas that aren't critical to the experience they are trying to make.
I think there's a reason people would respond more poorly to generated art than to emojis: the contentlessness of emojis is broadly understood. We look at an emoji and we know what it is intended to signify. With "AI" art, there is an ambiguity: which aspects of the artwork are intentional, and which aspects are the creator accepting whatever the "AI" churned out?
If the art isn't critical to the game, then use simple art. It doesn't matter if the simple art is or isn't AI generated, what matters (in my opinion) is that it doesn't lead us into looking for meaning that isn't there.
> If the art isn't critical to the game, then use simple art.
However, complex art is needed to fit with genre tropes to attract the expected audience. It's like Apple shoving AI into their products needlessly—not a core part of the experience, but needed so Wall Street doesn't throw a hissy.
> looking for meaning when none is there
Or you generate your own meaning. Art is analysis for the audience.
> People want to be dropped on the top of the mountain and be called an alpinist.
No, people want to see their ideas come to life, previously this required effort in mastering a skill, now... it takes less and/or different amount of work.
If it has value to them, what do you care? Does the value in your mind of <artpiece> drop when somebody creates <artpiece 2 in the style of artpiece>? If so, you might benefit from focussing more on your own life. I mean this lovingly, as I myself am going through the same thing right now; I realize I'll never be happy if I stay grumpy like this. You can't protect the world from itself.
> If it has value to them, what do you care? Does the value in your mind of <artpiece> drop when somebody creates <artpiece 2 in the style of artpiece>?
> no, you cannot copyright the Studio Ghibli art style itself. Copyright law doesn’t protect styles, techniques, or general aesthetics—like the hand-drawn, watercolor-inspired look with soft colors, detailed natural backgrounds, and whimsical vibes that Studio Ghibli is known for. It only protects specific, original works, like an individual film frame or character design from Spirited Away or My Neighbor Totoro.
And your answer... Doesn't seem to cover my question, I think. So the point of copyright is that the value of the style doesn't degrade?
Yes, of course! By all means, update the law. I don’t think anyone misses that part of being a human. Any concept we think of is fabricated.
But here’s the real meat of the issue I guess, how far do we wanna go? At what point SHOULD something be un-copyrightable? What describes a certain “style”? My style is black&white, can I copyright that?
Intellectual property is a consequence of capitalism, a sometimes necessary evil that is used to compel the consumers of intellectual output to pay into a system which produces it but which doesn't have any mechanism for compensating people for things that are not scarce in any way.
If we valued and supported artists without just seeing them as laborers, we could have a remix culture where no one really owns anything and no rights are reserved.
Because it discourages people from trying. It's hard enough to survive as an artist, and now there is even less sense in trying to start. This will hurt art, and humanity.
It's like pupils using an LLM to do their homework. They get the grade, but Idiocracy is awaiting.
Disagree. I think many people will actually be encouraged to try as the barrier to creating art has dropped and some of those people will decide to become more proficient at art.
Wow. I've pointed this out before - but this is just a TERRIBLE take.
Comparing systems like DALL-E 3 and Midjourney to modern illustration software is a fool's errand. Even with advanced graphic design tools like Photoshop you still have to employ the same artistic skills that have been handed down for generations: 3-point perspective, shading, basic poses, and sketching, etc.
If you can't draw, the fanciest graphic manipulation software isn't going be of much help to you.
As opposed to some doofus who has the ability to type in the words "3D", "trending on artstation", "hyper-realistic,", and "4K" and then proceed to churn out thousands of images in a single day. Stable diffusion is more like the equivalent of having your own personal artist on permanent retainer.
And photography initially had lower quality and performance ceilings compared to portraitists and artists of the day. And today, photographers win awards for their work.
New tools and techniques that lower the barrier to entry always get over used, over hyped and bring in masses of people making everything from impressive new things to absolute cheap garbage. And then people learn the limitations, the tools get better and a lot of people stop using the tools because they realize there are still skills that go into the process and they aren’t interested in learning those skills. The tools find their place, and new masters rise into the new world. And then a new tool is created and we start the process all over again.
Well, there's less money in it now, since production and consumption of whatever you think you want to see or hear is easier and cheaper than ever. So there will be less attempting. QED, I suppose.
Well, it's a Pandora's Box. It's irreversible, so we as humanity should learn to cope with it. That's just reality. What's the alternative? Banning LLMs? Good luck because I have a few on my hard disk. And even if you make it illegal, how would you detect it? I could've used an LLM to write this comment, would you know?
I agree though that schools are even more in trouble now. But my point still stands: we have NO CHOICE. We must adapt, or Idiocracy awaits ;)
Outlawing LLMs would certainly work. You may have them on your harddrive, but almost nobody else has, and they certainly don't know how to use it, nor do they have the capacity to run anything like it.
Schools definitely have to adapt, but there's so much inertia there, and in many countries, schools have a perverse stimulus to make as many pupils graduate as they can. It'll take another lost generation, I'm afraid. And the makers and exploiters of LLMs can take the blame for that.
It is now possible for people to value "doing the dishes" over "producing art of a high enough quality" and still get results. If people care more about doing the dishes than spending the hours required to make an equivalent piece by hand, then people will choose doing the dishes and leave the rest to AI. Now that the tech is out there, reducing the effort required to a button press, it has become a matter of people's priorities.
In my view, the people who want to be dropped off at the apex of the mountain the most always dreamed of this outcome for a long time, even if only a little bit. They dreamed of the day they would be freed from the toil of having to study for years and years to produce art that satisfied their tastes, because they would not lower their tastes to make the process less stressful, or had other priorities so could not devote time to practice.
Now the market has innovated and their dream has come true. To people not serious about coming manual artists, there is nothing wrong with this picture. The market need is being fulfilled.
We have to ask where this market need to produce art at such a low level of effort comes from.
In your view, these people have always been cheapskates up in their minds, we just didn't realize it until their preferences were revealed by AI becoming available. If it hadn't, they just wouldn't be artists of any kind and we'd never understand they had any artistic ambitions at all.
At the end of the day, for whatever reason, these people want art they can call their own - it's just a matter of how much effort is required to realize their ambitions.
If these people are to reject AI, yet still care enough about creating art of some kind for a sustained period of time, you basically have to convince them that learning a hard artistic skill is more important than "doing the dishes"/whatever else occupies the rest of their time instead. Maybe a grueling 9-5 work schedule, for example. That is simply how the nature of practice/10000 hours-type advice works out.
If people for some reason just don't want to put in the time, but still want to produce quality art, then they'll choose AI. These two desires are no longer contradicting. They would have been 10 years ago, when you could just retort with "you're going to have to put in the effort, there's no other way." It's clear that that virtue of work-ethic being one's only path to results has been obliterated by AI, and to the new converts it sounds like gatekeeping in hindsight.
Cultivating new interest in learning a skill when it doesn't already exist is way harder than it seems. That gets into mental well-being and existentialist issues that many people in today's society find difficult to reflect about deeply.
We all say "they have no _idea_ what they're doing" in English. Creativity basically equals skill. Those with less skills has less to express.
I mean, everyone knows it takes a programmer to spec an app. The "different" skill needed for vibe coding is regular old coding skillset. Only difference with image AI is that it doesn't do "vibe drawing" well.
AI art experiment is over. It's been long over, like camera based self driving was by the time some large orgs started embracing the technology. And it's taking longer for some to understand that it's over, just like that time.
I heard a good one. AI isn't art, AI is content. People don't want to create art per se, they want to generate images for e.g. memes or filler / illustrative images on their blog, replacing or being an addition to stock images.
No shade on stock photographers / illustrators, but that's where I see image generation end up at. And you could already get custom illustrations made for cheap on sites like fiverr. The real long term question will be whether an AI generated image can compete with services like that. (my guess: probably, AI images are higher resolution/quality and generated faster, but I don't know the real total cost of them nor that of cheap illustrators or stock images)
People kind of did. Before the radio it was much, much more common for middle class and even fairly poor homes to have musical instruments, pubs to have pianos and so on. There were whole traditions of self-entertainment of which only fragments survive now.
I don't think that rises to the level of "mass media has made the world worse", but it certainly has made it different and lost a few things.
>it was much, much more common for middle class and even fairly poor homes to have musical instruments, pubs to have pianos and so on
That's exagerrated by movies. There were folk songs, but instruments - and players - have always been rare, and played by those who had enough time to learn to play - the poorest of the poor, the crippled and the blinds...
Note that at that time, either there was already a copyright to protect musical partitions, or if learning by ear the teachers had total discretion on who they taught and for how much. There were still barriers to knowledge.
And outside of Europe, any ceremonial/religious music was only taught to the initiated and played on rare occasions (there are interesting stories of Americans, etno-musicologists or even just musicians looking for new musical construction in the vein of Steve Reich, in the 60s, going to Africa to learn rythms with e.g. Nigerians, staying there for years, fully integrated - or so they thought - and bam! for a rare ceremony their hosts suddenly play something they never showed them before and refuse to discuss it afterwards)
It's more difficult today, but if you get a chance, try visiting an impoverished rural area and hanging out with the locals during casual sit-down, dinner, outing, etc. People will sing, people will dance. And not just those who are good at it.
There are instruments that can be made cheaply and there are those that can master them enough to be called music. No need to have a grand piano and years of teaching to be able to produce music.
People want to express their creativity stuck in their head without having the skill or training (privilege of the training) to be a legit artist. I think it’s awesome that this removes the barrier and empowers people to be creative in ways that they previously could not.
Your definition of creativity is flawed. Imagining something is a small part of the process. Developing the skill and technique to express that imagination is the most important part.
So if I have a great idea for a cartoon, but my life is filled to the brim and I can’t spend months or years to learn the craft, the idea should die in my head? All because of some idealist opinion?
Come on, you're a tech person aren't you? Maybe a programmer? How many times have you had an idea guy come to you with a "great idea for an app" if only they could find someone to program it for them?
Sorry, but most ideas aren't great. It's the painful process of refinement, hard work, and iteration that results in something great.
> How many times have you had an idea guy come to you with a "great idea for an app" if only they could find someone to program it for them?
Many. And I love it when those people code something up with Scratch, Matlab, or even Excel. Even though I personally would dislike the aesthetics of the result, I’m much happier to see other people enjoying computers the same way I enjoy them (i.e., by using them to solve interesting problems) than if I insisted everyone do so using my preferred “real” programming languages.
This is ableism. A big part of this 'democratization' is that people unable to develop the skill and techniques can now express that imagination. There are physical, mental and financial impediments. They may never be a traditional craftsman, but they can certainly be artists (and not just conceptual artists).
Do you also object to people paying money to have other people's art in their homes? Is the moral damage from getting an artwork in your home that you didn't create inversely proportional to your monetary investment?
I notice you say "something" and not "someone". With humans, contribution varies. I could commission a piece and have a great deal of input on the final result, or I could just have exercised judgement to choose the piece. Many people descibe their clothing choices or home decor choices as "creative" or "creative expression".
Artists' main objection to AI seems to be that they think that people who use it are posers who are trying to claim that they're just as good as Rembrandt because they can type "beautiful painting, style of Rembrandt" into Midjourney.
I don't think this is very true, I don't often see anyone bragging about their skills and demanding their outputs get put in a gallery and judged on equal merits as the old masters.
I'm not much of an artist and whenever I use an image generator to generate something, I don't do it to show off my artistic talent or whatever - if I was to do it before AI I would've commissioned an artist for it (which I probably wouldn't have done because it was too expensive, so I would forgo it) - the work the artist does would actually have even less of my own input than the AI's, since I'm giving them less description to go off - it's all the artist's, based on their own experiences.
I don't know where you hang out on Reddit but on my subs people are almost invariably hostile to AI. AI art, even stuff that looks great, gets down voted to oblivion.
The real problem is not the effort (or lack thereof), it’s the perception that modern AI is dropping them off at the peak of Everest, when in reality they’re being stood on a plastic-molded crag at a sea-level tourist trap.
Creative vision is not being realized, it’s being stunted.
I've been suspecting the subtext of that was "take back anime from Japanese", except what they made was a death trap welded stuck in reverse. Now they must climb with what they have, for that they are closer to the top from there than to where they came from.
I think it's less about wanting to be called an artist and more about wanting to be able to get the results of making things more easily. And there is a good case that we can have a successful boom from this sort of thing.
People don't click buttons on Guitar Hero controller to be called musicians. They do it to briefly feel how they imagine a musician might feel sometimes.
I disagree. I don’t care about a “marathon” I just need to cover 42.2k. If you wanna make a game out of it and run that distance that’s fine, but I have errands to do and just need to cover the distance.
If you wanna draw for the feeling of creative satisfaction that’s great. I just need an image on a page in service of something else.
Sure, but mostly people doing or using AI art are also not saying they drew every line, they say “I made this” in the same way I say “I coded this” even though I wrote it in a high level language and got the interpreter and compiler to do a lot of work.
> we’re exiting the scarcity economy of visuals & entering something weirder—where aesthetics become ambient infrastructure, like wifi.
AI is democratizing _execution_, not creativity. The advent of the smartphone camera era allowed for the average person to take vastly more photos than ever before, and yet the photos I personally find noteworthy are either remarkable in their context or aesthetic quality (e.g. [0]) or personally meaningful.
Alternatively put, "culture" values a proof-of-work that is creativity + execution. Taking a photo of a lunar eclipse setting over a crater has global value, because of the effort in planning and taking the shot (read [0], it's great). Me shitposting a meme for my game night groupchat neatly summarizing what happened in our last session of Pandemic: Legacy has local value, because of the creativity in adapting a meme format to our particular context and the execution of the edit, but nobody besides us would find it as funny.
(Interesting aside — I personally think that the photo in [0] is more impressive than someone going all that way to _paint_ the same scene en plein air, because of the split-second precision of the execution. Even though photography may have devalued a lot of the technical execution of capturing a scene, it has opened up new ways in which said execution can be valuable.)
So AI decouples creativity and execution in a way that is, like every innovation before, unlike every innovation before. The Ghibli aesthetic is the soft pastels of the color palette [1] and the comfortable, nostalgic character design [2] but also the restful rhythm of "ma" [3] and the detail lovingly lavished to background characters [4]. GPT-4o devalues some of those things, but it another sense it just re-weights our cultural proof-of-work valuations back towards human effort.
