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Comment by stavros | Hacker News Reader

Yes, just like they'll never be able to write poetry, or paint.

They still don’t do either very well. It’s more obvious with poetry and prose, but AI art is pretty vacuous as well once you get past the wow-effect.

"Your dog can sing?!" "It's not as impressive as it sounds, he's pitchy".

Yea, that’s a pretty good analogy. A singing dog is impressive but not able to replace human singers. From what I’ve seen so far, AI tools create technically impressive but generic and derivative works, and on their own, can’t do what a human artist does in terms of understanding the context of what they are requested to do.

It’s possible that doesn’t matter to most people, and the art world will have to realise that mass-produced schlock is all the public really wants. We’ll see.

There's also the possibility they'll get better, possibly much better than humans. Given how much they've improved recently, that's a very very big possibility.

I’m not sure what it would mean for AI to get “better” at art than humans. I expect we couldn’t understand the work it creates at that point.

Well, if AI is worse at art than us now, it means that we currently have a quality metric, otherwise "worse" means nothing. For an AI to get better than humans, it means that the humans are now the group that's worse at art.

You mention "better than humans" like its some profound realization.

It's like saying: for hammering, a hammer is better than my pinky finger.

That's kind of the point of tools.

This "art is just a job we need done" take comes right after a comment about how voice acting is a uniquely human thing that AIs will never be able to do, and I'm finding the disconnect interesting.

Are you saying you're not impressed by what we have acomlished so far?

Do you assume it will stay the way it is?

I am impressed with the technical level of the various AI tools, absolutely. I just think they are learning the surface of art - reproduction of reality and stylisation thereof - but not the point of art, which is orthogonal to the technical skill of an artist.

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