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Comment by mrtksn | Hacker News Reader

We automate people's jobs, not taking their intellectual properties and build machines that can churn endless versions of it. The people put out of work by computers no longer work and they were paid in full for the work they did, unlike the people who developed intellectual property on their own dime hoping to be compensated later only to find out that their work was copied and distributed by the computer people.

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What do you guys think Excel spreadsheets did? Back in the day people had pages with lots of boxes and did the calculations manually. The processes, terms, techniques, were all human inventions and shamelessly replicated by machines.

Almost everything computers do was once done by a person, and the people who did those jobs laid the framework for which the processes were automated through.

This has happened dozens of times. My entire job is writing software that was written in the 80s, which replaced customer service reps who are needed in the '70s, and the computer does what they used to do. It took what they invented, their processes, and made the computer do it.

This is what automation is. It's always built on top of, and replaced, human beings who used to do those jobs.

Automated jobs do the physical work. Here the computer is redistributing the physical work made by the artists, however much diluted. AI cannot make art on its own, it needs to be fed physical art and then be told what it is and what to do with it. It is not automation, it is simply a data manipulating tool.

to me it's less about the process and jobs lost and more about some feeling loss related to the excitement about removing expression and experience from a domain for honestly very little real benefit

continuing to transform things which in part centered around exploration, discovery and experimentation into something cold and kind of dumb

like we will make some interesting things but it's the general trend of modern society that upsets people everything just getting easier/worse faster

That is also my feeling. There is nothing like having a pile of raw materials, or a set of new inks or water color pencils, etc. and to explore the boundaries of what you can do with them. Art being made from a menu seems rather sad.

On the other hand, paints and canvases are very very expensive, making art a domain of the rich. You can use the ai tools at the library, making art more proletarian.

I think the pushback is around status and elitism, and that people with certain backgrounds are societally expected to be not making art.

I picked up some nice canvases recently at the dollar tree. Masonite, wood and paper can be painted on. Masonite is actually preferable for acryllic paints and it is quite affordable, as are acryllic paints themselves. You can paint with coffee grinds and beet juice...the exploration is endless. I come from a family of seven living in the backwoods and most of my artist friends would not nearly qualify as rich. I had a teacher once who made the most beautiful art out of entirely recycled metal junk. Art is a reflection of culture, top to bottom and ingenuity plays a big role. Ingenuity is accessible to everybody.

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