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Comment by j0057 | Hacker News Reader

I'm already bored by AI art. At first you think, who thought of that? When? What techniques did they use? How long did it take to master them? Then you realize it's just a bunch of matrices in a GPU. On top of that it doesn't mean anything, there's no other person on the other side of the image to relate to.

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Depends, I find that the need to see more in a work is a fairly minority and insider opinion. The majority of people buying art go by visuals first, then their personal response, and finally talking/status points. Relating to the artist is something art-school kids do, but they forget that few outside of their niche have the same focus or interest.

Personally I like the way it has removed much of the need for a professional artist, I much prefer having decorations made (or generated) by myself friends and family; it now feels like buying art was something done to surpass the quality possible from a hobbyist, rather than an actual desire to support artistic professions.

But the effect of this is that art will no longer be a viable profession and as a consequence art education will no longer be viable and that even of those who bother to learn the skills somehow they will not get the chance to practice those skills. Skills take practice and commission work with no expectation to be exquisite, just good enough, provided opportunities to practice. The only people who will be able to get an art education are those born into enough wealth to never have to work.

Contrast, automation of driving, where there is a hard cap on skill. After a certain number of hours of driving you are not going to get any better at driving.

The pivot of AI form automating tedious work to automating creative work is simply tragic. I consider it one of the major forks in the road between a future utopia and a future dystopia.

I do not think the tech will get any further than it did for self driving cars. It will still be 80% there with the quintessential last 20% out of reach. But it has the potential to do lasting damage.

Automating tedious jobs runs the risk of sudden large scale unemployment if done abruptly but this can be solved by slowly and deliberately visibly phasing in the tech over a few decades.

Automating creative jobs runs the risk of creating barriers to entry and destroying the pipeline to mastery. The jobs eliminated will be the junior levels everywhere. And with no more juniors coming in eventually you will have no more seniors in any of the fields. And their job will likely not be automated.

Think of the demographic crisis China is in, but this time just in terms of skilled workers.

Also, all of those juniors are paying taxes part of which go to pay for pensions. Will the AIs pay taxes?

I see no particular societal need for people to be formally trained in art production. At least not any more than there is value in horse-riding or kendo. A small number of people able to attempt mastery professionally does nothing for the overwhelming majority of people. In fact it might be better for art to entirely leave the commercial domain, leave nothing but amateur works and hobbyists. If an occupation dies due to having insufficient value to sustain against an automated approach was it really valuable in the first place? While the idea that artists will simply be unemployed instead of finding other work is amusing; the reality is that its more likely that they will find work in some other form, that is now many times more productive due to automation.

That was not my point. I agree that maybe art should not be commercial at all. That maybe there should be only amateurs and hobbyists. And I agree that people will just find work in some other form.

My point was that the skill pipeline will be nuked. Amateurs and hobbyists will not have sufficient time and resources to reach the same skill level and eventually there will not be enough amateurs and hobbyists to teach others in a sustainable way and keep the craft going forward. The existence of formal training is important because it provides structure, continuity and certain knowledge is only highlighted in a formal setting. Hobbyists too benefit from networking with professionals.

To move away from art to a different creative field, imagine how the software ecosystem would look if there were only hobbyists and AIs(in the service of corporations creating all of the commercial software). It might be a hobbyist FLOSS utopia but certain knowledge would simply be inaccessible. Say you are a hobbyist and have a tricky question solved by some obscure but commonly thought algorithm, who are you going to ask? The AIs have no reason to spend time on StackOverflow. If an AI can write all software, I see no particular societal need for people to be formally trained in software engineering, yet I think humanity would be worse off by having lost this knowledge.

AIs will be appliances not tools. Like appliances, they will serve their purpose but unlike tools they will not elevate the user in any way. Any skill, knowledge or capability an AI has will be sealed within the black box of AI. This goes against one of the defining features of the human species, the ability to transmit knowledge by encoding it.

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