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Comment by spikeagally | Hacker News Reader

Does anybody else find the whole AI art generation thing both amazing and incredibly depressing at the same time? I’ve played around with it and it’s lots of fun. But I can also see a deluge of mediocre “content” taking over the internet in the near future. “Real art” will become a niche underground discipline. Most popular music will be AI generated and will have fake performers also generated to go along with it. And most people will be fine with that.

I don’t think “real art” will disappear. People will always want to create (although monetising that will now be exceedingly more difficult).

It feels like we are ripping the humanity out of life on a greater and greater scale with tech. Instead of replacing crappy jobs and freeing up peoples time to enjoy their life, we’re actually automating enjoyable pursuits.

NB: when I’m referring to art I mean of all types as that’s where we are heading.

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I've been complaining about this with AI generated content in general as well, especially Twitter and blog posts. I worry that we're in a sort of downward spiral, creating a feedback loop of bad content. Eventually models will get trained on this badly generated content, and it will reduce the overall vocabulary of the Internet. Take this to the extreme, and we'll keep going until everything is just regurgitated nonsense. Essentially sucking the soul out of humanity (not that tweets and blog posts are high art or anything). I know that sounds a little drastic but I really think there's a lurking evil that we don't have our eye on here, in terms of humanity and AI. We've already seen glimpses of it even with basic ad targeting and various social media "algorithms".

Considering the level of discourse in almost any Twitter thread on any popular topic, it’s hard to be sure it hasn’t already happened.

>we'll keep going until everything is just regurgitated nonsense.

I feel like this about the mostly-human-created fashion. In my not so long lifetime I've seen everything from the 90s making a comeback. Ultimately I guess in terms of clothing that is practical with the materials that are available, we've already cycled through every style there is, such that the cycle time is now <30years.

I've been thinking the same thing. I wonder if this might give rise to some kind of analog renaissance as people get sick of all the digitally regurgitated garbage. There has to be a point of diminishing returns for this kind of content, right? Maybe there will be some kind of Made By Humans verification that will make certain content much more valuable again simply by differentiating it from all the AI-generated simulacra.

This would be very cool. I think we're starting to see some hints of this. Maybe we'll see publishing houses and presses return to their former glory because they're the only ones not putting out AI generated recycled nonsense.

If you think about how much content we're already getting from mediocre artists and writers, how many tv shows are complete garbage, how much governments and corporations are promoting and trolling in online discussions, how many search results are already ruined by lazy copied content, it's difficult to see things getting orders of magnitude worse.

Good stuff will still be good stuff, and it will keep being rare. The biggest change will be that producing mediocre content will be cheaper and more accessible, but we're already drowning in it, so .. meh?

> Instead of replacing crappy jobs and freeing up peoples time to enjoy their life, we’re actually automating enjoyable pursuits.

That's an interesting observation.

Fair assessment, and I agree with much of your premise, though regards "it's difficult to see things getting orders of magnitude worse": Please don't challenge them.

I totally agree that there is a lot of low effort and consequentially low quality stuff out there in the world already. However, it still costs to make that. With this form of automation getting better it will simply become a lot cheaper to produce and is thus going to happen a lot more. So, I expect the ratio to become worse, maybe even "orders of magnitude" worse.

Yeah I agree. I was generally pretty pro AI art and agree with a lot of the pro AI sentiments here on a logical basis still, but as the tech develops I drift more and more towards thinking this may be a bleak path for humanity.

> Instead of replacing crappy jobs and freeing up peoples time to enjoy their life, we’re actually automating enjoyable pursuits.

Yeah really hit the nail on the head here. I thought a lot of backlash against AI was due to workers not really reaping the benefits of automation and that's a solvable problem. But I've seen a lot of artists who are retired or don't need to work dive into despair over this still. It's taking their passion away, not just their job.

I don't really know how we could stop it though without doing some sweeping Dune-level "Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of the human mind" type laws.

> But I can also see a deluge of mediocre “content” taking over the internet in the near future.

This has always been the case. Most entertainment regardless of form (music, art, tv, games...) is mediocre or below mediocre, with the occasional good or even rarer exceptional that we all buzz about.

AI image gen is only allowing a wider range of people to express their creativity. Just like every other tools that came before it lowered the bar of entry for new people to get in on the medium (computer graphics for example allowed those who had no talent for pen and paper to flourish).

Yes, there will be a lot of bad content, but that's nothing out of the ordinary.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law

> Instead of replacing crappy jobs and freeing up peoples time to enjoy their life, we’re actually automating enjoyable pursuits.

This feels like the natural outcome of Moravec's paradox[1]. I can imagine a grim future where most intellectually stimulating activities are done by machines and most of the work that's left for humans is building, cleaning, and maintaining the physical infrastructure that keeps these machines running. Basically all the physical grunt work that has proven hard to find a general technological solution for.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec%27s_paradox

If humans end up getting expelled from virtual reality back into physical one not forcibly, but by lack of meaningful virtual pursuits... is that really a grim future?

Oh, so there's a term for this -- TIL. I've heard something along these lines. I think AI diagnostics are a good thing, but I expressed worry about the medical field going away to somebody and was unironically told "you can just be emotional support for sick people". Now that's a fulfilling volunteer activity and everyone who has the inclination to do it should, but as a matter of practicality: Does it come with a salary?

We are a long political fight away from people in industries affected by AI not feeling like their livelihoods are under attack. It would be better received, at least for me, if the AI guys would admit that under the system we have they're playing with a big heaping flamethrower in a vast ocean of gasoline.

Not to distract too much from your point, because I agree that the obviously imminent explosion of AI generated work will probably lead to a generation of stylistic stagnation, but...

We already live in a time of artistic stagnation. With how much audio engineers manipulate pop music in Pro Tools, "fake" singers have been a practical reality for 20 years. Look at Marvel movies. Go to any craft fair on a warm day, or any artists' co-op, in a major city and try, try to find one booth that is not exactly like 5 other booths on display.

People have been arguing about what is "real art" for centuries. Rap music wasn't real because it didn't follow traditional, European modes and patterns. Photography wasn't real because it didn't take the skill of a painter. Digital photography wasn't real because it didn't take laboring in a dark room. 3D rendering wasn't real. Digital painting wasn't real. Fractal imagery wasn't real. Hell, anything sold to the mass market instead of one-off to a collector still isn't "real art" to a lot of people.

Marcel Duchamp would like to have a word.

If anything, I think AI tools are one of the only chances we have of seeing anything interesting break out. I mean, 99% of the time it's just going to be used to make some flat-ui, corporate-memphis, milquetoast creative for a cheap-ass startup in a second rate co-working space funded by a podunk city's delusions they could ever compete with Silicon Valley.

But if even just one person uses the tool to stick out their neck and try to question norms, how can that not be art?

Near future? The internet is cesspool of mediocre and terrible content already. AI is going to have an impact on art and everything else in general. Artists may (and likely will be forced) to adapt to/adopt its use.

> Instead of replacing crappy jobs and freeing up peoples time to enjoy their life, we’re actually automating enjoyable pursuits.

But in my case, I don't happen to find drawing or painting enjoyable. I simply don't, for nature- or nurture-based reasons. I also don't believe that everyone can become a trained manual artist, because not everyone is interested in doing so, even if they still (rightly or wrongly) cling to the idea of having instant creative output and gratification.

I think this lack of interest is what makes me and many other people a prime target for addiction to AI-generated art. Due to my interest in programming I can tweak the experience using my skills without worrying about the baggage people of three years ago had to deal with if they wanted a similar result.

So without any sort of generation, how does one solve the problem of not wanting to draw, but still wanting one's own high-quality visual product to enjoy? I guess it would be learning to be interested in something one is not. And that probably requires virtuosity and integrity, a willingness to move past mistakes, and a positive mindset. The sorts of things that have little to do with the specific mechanics of writing code in an IDE to provoke a dopamine response. Also, the ability to stop focusing so hard on the end result, a detriment to creativity that so many (manual) art classes have pointed out for decades.

I sometimes feel I lack some of those kinds of qualities, and yet I can somehow still generate interesting results with Stable Diffusion. It feels like a contradiction, or an invalidation of a set of ideas many people have held as sacred for so long, a path to the advancement of one's own inner being.

I will relish the day when an AI is capable of convincing me that drawing with my own two hands is more interesting than using its own ability to generate a finished piece in seconds.

So I agree that, on a bigger scale beyond the improvement of automated art, this line of thinking will do more harm to humanity than good. An AI can take the fall for people who can't or don't want to fight the difficult battles needed to grow into better people, and that in turn validates that kind of mindset. It gives even the people who detest the artistic process a way to have the end result, and a decent one at that.

I think this is part of the reason why the anti-AI-art movement has pushed back so loudly. AI art teaches us the wrong lessons of what it means to be human. People could become convinced to not want to go outside and walk amongst the trees and experience the world if an AI can hallucinate a convincing replacement from the comfort of their own rooms.

> But I can also see a deluge of mediocre “content” taking over the internet

i’ve noticed this mediocrity decades ago when artists started using computers to create art. for me that’s when it went downhill.

I will say, the kind of art intended for corporate needs (much of which in the last decade in particular has been a deluge of bland vector art with weird blob people) is not the same as the art that many artists make in their own time, or would regard as good.

The through line for a lot of mediocre stuff is the intention of the artist/creator to appeal to as broad a demographic/audience as possible so as to dissolve away anything that makes the art interesting, challenging, and good.

If these generated arts just replace human created arts, then it can be construed as depressing.

But what if AI generates arts where humans do not scale?

For example, what if the AAA game you are expecting gets done in half of the time, or has ten times the size of explorable area, because it is cheap and fast to generate many of the arts needed by AI?

Or if some people excellent at story telling but mediocre at drawing can now produce world class manga due to the assistance of AI?

We've seen this before when CGI first came out, then with the proliferation of Photoshop and other cheap editors. Now fake garbage is everywhere on the internet. Did that make human life substantially different? Nope. Everyone just ignores most of it and only believes stuff that comes from "reputable sources." That will be the end game here too. A flight to quality.

But also, the explosion in interest means there had been a latent interest in instantly generating pictures to begin with.

I think this situation says a lot about the nature of human desire, not just the fact that a few people were ingenious to come up with the idea of diffusion models. A lot of ingenious inventions are relatively boring when exposed to the broader populace, and don't hit on such an appealing latent desire.

What will this say about the limitless yet-to-be-invented ideas that humanity is just raring to give itself, if only someone would hit on the correct chain of breakthroughs? Would even a single person today be interested in building a backyard nuclear warhead in an afternoon, and would attempt to if the barrier of difficulty in doing so was solved?

To me it's terrifying and gives me a bit of panic playing with it. This is still early stuff, like dial-up or 100Mhz processors. We all know the trajectory tech takes nowadays, and the writing on the wall here is an event horizon where it's impossible to see the full scope of how this tech will change the world.

We're like people getting the very first electric light bulbs in their home, trying to speculate how electricity will change the world. The pace of change however will be orders of magnitude faster than that.

Majority of everything is always mediocre at best. There is no absolute value in those things, they always get pitched against each other. Something mediocre today, could have been a masterpiece some decades ago. A masterpiece from decades ago could be hot garbage today. Those things are a constantly moving target and will always shift. People will just adapt their taste and figure out some new random rules to say why something was yesterday a masterpiece and became today mediocre and so on.

Musea already have basements filled with thousands of art pieces nobody has seen in decades. There's already too much content.

If you find everything incredibly depressing, that may simply mean you have depression, not that it's actually objectively bad.

> But I can also see a deluge of mediocre “content”

Have you been to the internet?

In all seriousness, the cream will rise to the top. The mediocre “content” will get generated and we will get better at filtering it out which will decrease the value in generating mediocre content, etc etc. The tools being produced just further level the playing field for humanity and allow more people to get “in the arena” more easily.

Humans are still the final judge of the value being produced, and the world/internet will respond accordingly.

For a thought exercise, take your argument and apply it to the internet as a whole, from the perspective of a book or newspaper publisher in the 1990s.

Have you been to the internet?

High-quality content rarely rises to the top. The internet as of 2022 optimizes for mediocrity: the most popular content is the one which is best psychological manipulation using things like shock value and sexuality. Just take a look at Twitter, Facebook, or Reddit: it is extremely rare to see genuine masterpieces on there. Everything is just posted to farm as many shares and likes as possible.

If anything, this will result in the cream getting drowned in shit. Not to mention that artists do not get the space to develop from mediocre to excellent - as the mediocre market will have been replaced with practically free AI.

This is a truly cynical take - but by your own account the problem already exists and is widespread before AI even came along.

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