We let robots do so much already. The level of Luddite resurgence is through the roof.
I'd absolutely use AI to enhance my work. That doesn't make it any less meaningful.
I would disagree with this when it comes to many creative works. Things like gallery showings are there as much to sell art as they are to sell the connection with the artist. There's a lot more that goes into the experience of a creative product than just the product itself.
He hired minimum-wage people to do the work, and he spent all his time, schmoozing and going to parties, where he would evangelize it.
Apparently, he did quite well.
As an artist, myself[0], that had struggled to sell anything, I found it rather offensive.
Plenty of "low effort" art gets valued at arguably ridiculous prices, purely due to the name of the artist. Is suspending buckets of paint on a pendulum to let physics do the work worth more than providing an AI with a prompt?
In the end, the value of a piece of work is in the eye of the beholder.
Or the ideas in your head that are really just part of a prediction model that is a function of the inputs you surround yourself with.
Every art student copies. Voraciously. Every engineer. Every musician.
Babies and toddlers are learning machines. They soak in the world around them. For free.
Human learning is not the same thing as building a for-profit computer model. And making this comparison is part of my problem with the industry.
These people that are so offended by AI art and music I suspect are the type of people who would NEVER go to an art gallery anyway. They don't even know what you are referring to with buckets of paint.
AI Art is just a topic to be pissed off about and generate sentences about online to them.
The "This is just Luddites 2.0" sentiments are amusing in a sad way, because they seem to be expressed primarily by people who appear to be positioned well enough to readily understand why this is going to go horribly wrong.
> Luddites objected primarily to the rising popularity of automated textile equipment, threatening the jobs and livelihoods of skilled workers as this technology allowed them to be replaced by cheaper and less skilled workers.
The industrial revolution made life worse for generations in the early 1800s. We’re already seeing similar regressions — eg, app-driven-jobs and decreased customer service.
And you should look up how the automation of labor turned out for horses.
Automation as it was sold to us since the 60s is a complete failure on the social aspect. Wages stagnate, we work as much if not more than 40 years ago, retirement age is going up, job security is dead, inequalities are growing, poverty is rising, virtually everywhere in the west.
It's cool to automate factory jobs but if it's to push factory workers into amazon warehouses, uber, e-scooter juicers or food delivery jobs I don't see it as a net positive, capital owners sure generate more capital but that's the last thing I'd like to see increasing.
On the other hand, the demanded amount of fictional work (i.e. things that don't need to happen except folks must "make money") is not decreasing at all. This is stupid and bad.
It's not clear to me why it is fair to demand that the former stops as a response to the latter. The latter is what should be addressed, because addressing it is what gets us to luxury gay space communism when combined with the former. Which would be a nice place to be.
We can hope that the book in AI will lead to something similar - with automation making us far more productive.
Looking for that new Sunset Magazine issue, Backyard BBQing the Dev.
We're just scared so we should shut up and accept whatever is coming as God's truth... the invisible hand and the magic of the market will make everything fall in perfect working order, as it always do, without any external interventions
My advice is to try and live in the present and accept that the future is unknown, and accept that that was always the case, you could get hit by a bus any day regardless of what happens with the pending singularity.
I'm not afraid for myself but I am for the future and the willingness to hand it off creation to these tools. Personally, this is another example of a few deep pockets monetizing and selling back another piece of humanity. All without asking or caring. Facebook monetized your family and relationships. Google monetized the knowledge of humankind.
Right now people using a tool like Photoshop are varying degrees of craftsmen. You could take it away and give them a different tool and they'll be able to achieve something similar. You can take away a laptop from a writer and they'll still be able to write. Someone who illustrate in Procreate could lose their iPad and still achieve something with a pencil.
Now a couple generations down the line the skills will start to be gone and the only creation will be made at $99.99 a month for your OpenAI suite. We've been on the road to idiocracy for awhile and it's just been sped up. I don't think it's a doomsday scenario but I do think it's a potentially uglier future.