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Comment by ilkke | Hacker News Reader

Initially I had similar misgivings (I make visual art professionally and music as a hobby) but then I realised AI will not prevent me from creating my own stuff, it might just give me more options to use. A big part of my motivation is enjoying the artistic process itself, and I still get to choose my process. In terms of a productivity boost, it can give me the same boost as everyone else. Possibly even more as I have decades of experience. The biggest negative effect I anticipate is an endless stream of low effort content, bit TBH I think we were already there before the AI arrived. I feel this is more a matter of mental hygiene and culture and how we use technology, rather than the technology itself.

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The silver lining is I guess that the low-effort content is of much higher technical quality than it was before, for better or for worse.

I can't talk about visual arts, but music market is actually appreciating a step back to a more organic/human sound. Although I must say it's actually a mixture of musicianship, recording techniques, better and fair use of electronics sounds and so on... So it actually might be like you said, that technology could empower artistic process. But, if we're already in an endless stream of low effort content(and I agree), how would you make yourself get noticed in an ocean of good enough crap once AI hits the public?

>appreciating a step back to a more organic/human sound. Although I must say it's actually a mixture of musicianship, recording techniques, better and fair use of electronics sounds and so on..

its funny, people have been saying this every few years since the 1980s

If it's "good enough", is it really crap?

I consider "good enough" stuff to be decently suitable for the general public not for the excellence

> In terms of a productivity boost, it can give me the same boost as everyone else.

Be careful with that, you may end up being more productive but also be expected to do more with fewer human resources or teammates. This will definitely work for some but I can't see this not becoming a race to the bottom for the creators. There will be tons of benefits too but just like with automation, it could be a double edge sword.

Yes.

I used to work in the animation industry. My friends who are still in it tell me that there is constant pressure from the studios to combine multiple roles into one, without any increase in pay. They've got a strong union so there's a lot of pressure to keep union shops as places with a lot of ways for you to bounce around and spend a year really delving into the fine details of one particular part of the craft, while still being able to afford to live in LA.

I have been thinking a lot about low effort content. Because low effort is quick, dirty and might be akin to junk food. Will people gobble it up or go meh after the initial honeymoon period?

There's gonna be a lot of 'meh', mostly because of lack of intentionality, but also through oversaturation. Basically people will gobble it up until they choke, and then will feel sick and blame it on all art, not just AI art.

I'm in an odd position on the subject myself: I've long wanted to get facile and slick in my art creation, able to do any genre or style, but it backfires. The only thing that keeps me going is, pursuing really eccentric pursuits. Now I think that's a blessing, because ability to be facile is seriously devalued now.

If you're a human artist very derivative of Greg Rutkowski right now, you're more screwed than I could possibly imagine. And yet, the reason someone would do that is because the style is popular on an extremely basic level: a far cry from trying to be a Basquiat from scratch.

I think a very real concern is, can AI adopt and popularize a trending style so fast that it obscures the initial artist from which the AI is trained? If novelty is what's needed, how small of a seed is enough to spawn 10000 AI derivatives, which may themselves be popularizations of the original concept?

Maybe the future of AI is to proliferate any new innovation so profusely that it inevitably chokes out the innovator and hybridizes with 'what's commonly popular' which is the guts of the neural network that makes AI what it is.

Maybe in some fields this has already begun to happen with a little assistance from AI-guiding humans. Take it up a level: what about AI prompt crafting? Can you define, not just what will be commonly accepted as popular, but what will be innovative and trendy, in a neural network?

Yeah. A bunch of interesting points. You also seem to describe a sort of future trendwatchers.

In Star Trek there still seem to be writers and creators of holo deck programs, even though you could probably have the computer serve a blend of different stories. Perhaps “a craft” will still be seen as admirable.

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