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Comment by manibus | Hacker News Reader

If you think just because an inanimate computer program can render an interpolation between pre-existing data, that there is no point in creating art, then maybe you didn’t really understand why many practice art. Art is not some kind of competency test, not something “a robot could do better”. By your same logic we should stop children from making finger paintings, “just stop sweetie, Leonardo Da Vinci already did it better 500 years ago.” I see these kinds of opinions often now and to me they seem to come from a place of completely misunderstanding what art is, why we do it, and why it has value to us.

You are coming from a position that you only value expressing yourself into an artefact if that artefact can be “the best” (whatever that means), who is the nihilist again? That we devote our energy to creating only has worth if it can somehow be better than others? Idk, those positions to me are pretty dark and nihilistic.

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>You are coming from a position that you only value expressing yourself into an artefact if that artefact can be “the best” (whatever that means), who is the nihilist again?

That's not how I read their post.

Children do not produce for currency, adults do. GP, as I read them, is concerned about the hyper-inflation of that currency. Should adults be confined to the economies of children? That's a dark omen for the future.

This disagreement seems to hinge on is art solely a commodity, and the obvious answer to me is no. In my experience, the more that the artists care about how much currency they are going to reap from a work, the less likely it is to be compelling or have any kind of long term emotional value.

Judging this entire scenario only by the economic value of art is why I found what they wrote to be nihilistic. Put aside the economics of this transition for a second and think hard about how the generative pieces really make you FEEL, which artworks you have found the most compelling in your life, and why that was.

>In my experience, the more that the artists care about how much currency they are going to reap from a work, the less likely it is to be compelling or have any kind of long term emotional value.

The problem I'm pointing out isn't one's drive, so much as the second-order effects of presumed improvement in generative art. We presume that hand-made art will increase in value but we don't have reason to assume that without first knowing the ceiling of generative art, which I am presuming we have not reached, so appeals to immediate affectation aren't a limit. The threat is that art will just be something people do out of exuberance, as children do. Its not about motivation, but the ceiling for social registration. People desire to be recognized before we even start talking about renumeration.

So returning to your original analogy and my criticism of it, we're facing a bifurcation of economies, an official economy of automated production and an underground of human artifact and these may or may not interact save for the purposes of 'training'. Even with the over-saturation of artistic production we live in without generative art, we at least don't have this complete bifurcation, things can still cross . Adults, as children do, will create out of exuberance, but that may also be all there is to it. That's my fear. Perhaps its overstated.

Yeah, but professional artists rely on people finding value on their artistic production. If AI can produce such a high quality output, then this is going to devalue their skills. Sure, they can still do it for the pleasure of producing art, but that's more like a hobby than a job.

Perhaps there should not be professional artists? Maybe they are landlords, but instead of hogging land, they are hogging time for self improvement, but both are produced by the same inheritance?

Sure, but "generative AI is going to make certain artistic careers less lucrative" is a different argument than "AI is making us all nihilistic". Lots of jobs were already wiped by progress of technology, and no doubt it sucked for people who couldn't reorient themselves. But we're better off than people living before the industrial revolution.

Professional artists create way more than they sell - in fact they don't sell like 90%+ what they make.

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