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Comment by throwaway675309 | Hacker News Reader

I think one of my biggest fears is when I see people excitedly exclaiming, "these kinds of tools allow people to create things that they never would've been capable of building".

And then you see people on Reddit talking about how they created a picture book using stable diffusion for the pictures, and chat GPT for the story with the Reddit post titled "I wrote a book". It's almost as if people fundamentally misunderstand the concept of craftsmanship altogether.

https://youtu.be/QKZNOnLUBmQ

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The same thing could be said about using digital tools to edit the text/images or more extremely purchased art supplies instead of making your own. For the things you mentioned the low quality craftsmanship has no relationship to using the newer tools to make them.

You don’t see a difference between using a paintbrush to paint a painting, and pasting “landscape painting ultra-detailed 4K artstation” into midjourney and getting an immediate result?

I think it’s more like buying a paintbrush that also paints the painting for you. And I’d also have the same opinion about that.

First we delegate low-level repetitive mechanics, then we delegate high-level vision and thinking, then there are no more levels left to delegate.

If the first one harms motor skill, which we can pretend doesn’t affect the mind much, what does the second one harm?

> You don’t see a difference between using a paintbrush to paint a painting,

Haha, ew, gross, looks like real work, must be for the plebs.

> and pasting “landscape painting ultra-detailed 4K artstation” into midjourney and getting an immediate result?

Now you're talking. That's a producer credit! Welcome to really being someone!

What are your opinions of Yves Klein's series of IKB paintings? Do you have an appreciative understanding of the differences between IKB 79 and IKB 191? Are the differences all that important over opening Microsoft Paint, selecting the bucket tool, changing the fill color to blue, and clicking the canvas?

I'm not trolling either. I'm quite bothered by the common argument that "art is effort". Art is not defined by the effort it takes to create and anytime it gets easier (even to a trivial degree) there are always pundits and naysayers.

https://everythingcanbe.art/

I think we’re talking about different things. You’re asking if these things are still considered art, even if they required no effort. They very well might be. I’m not concerned with that.

I’m more concerned with how in love people are with the idea of suddenly being able to paint a picture without needing to learn how to paint a picture. I’d feel the same way about someone who was excited that they could replicate IKB 79 by opening MS Paint, filling the canvas with IK Blue and sending it off to the printers.

I am quite excited that I can take a photograph of scenery with my camera in the blink of an eye without ever having to learn how to paint. I can even send that photo off to be printed to hang on my wall!

E: I misread you so largely removed my post as it delved into the history of what is "art" which isn't really what you were talking about as made clear by your 2nd paragraph. But I feel the point of photography::paintings and what one excitingly sends off to be printed still holds true.

Of course there's a difference but at the end of the day, what difference does it make.

Shooting a movie on an iphone pro can be as artistically involved as shooting one in black and white on 8mm film.

With a phone you can make it arbitrarily more challenging for yourself because if you use raw capture you can take on the work actual film designers and film developers have done for you in case of film, and after all craftsmanship is a lot about overcoming challenges.

If you delegate video production to some perfect Stable Diffusion equivalent…

"pasting “landscape painting ultra-detailed 4K artstation” into midjourney and getting an immediate result?"

Try doing that. Getting a good result isn't as easy as you make it out to be.

You’re right, it does take more than that. I used an abbreviated version of a prompt to illustrate a point.

I suppose I could have written “Garden castle, Many flowers, A few roses, clouds, dramatic clouds above, pink, dreamy ultra wide shot, atmospheric, hyper realistic, 8k, epic composition, cinematic, octane render, artstation landscape vista photography by Carr Clifton & Galen Rowell, 16K resolution, Landscape veduta photo by Dustin Lefevre & tdraw, 8k resolution, detailed landscape painting by Ivan Shishkin, DeviantArt, Flickr, rendered in Enscape, Miyazaki, Nausicaa Ghibli, Breath of The Wild, 4k detailed post processing, artstation, rendering by octane, unreal engine --iw 10 --ar 9:16 --no blue”, but it would have ruined the flow of my comment.

It would also diminish your point. Prompt engineering is a real thing now.

The point you seem to be arguing is that prompt engineering is comparable in difficulty to picking up a paintbrush and painting a picture. Is that correct? If so, I just don’t think we’re going to find common ground here.

A difference? Well yeah, it's a hell of a lot quicker! Just like all tools before it you can lazily conjure a pile of (now shinier than before for the same amount of work) crap or you can put effort into crafting something good with it.

"It took a lot more effort than it needed to" isn't what defines whether something is able to have good craftsmanship put in.

I don’t think the same thing can be said. Yes, tools have evolved over time and at each step, the discipline has evolved with it.

But current AI tools do not seem analogous to the progression of tools that came before, and I don’t think we should treat them as such.

Not really:

I find a distinction between paying to CNC your own design and purchasing a product designed and CNC’d by someone else.

In both cases you have a finished product, but in the second case you didn’t make it — you bought it.

I find a distinction in your example as well but I don't equate using the above tools to buying a premade solution in the same way I don't equate using a CNC to buying a premade solution on the premise it's less work to use a CNC skillfully vs what it would take manually.

Sure — except that “a prompt turned into results” more closely matches buying results than creating your own CNC program.

People want desperately to experience the act of creation. Previously, you needed to put time into learning a craft in order to feel that feeling. Now, you can sidestep that, and go straight to the pleasure chemical release. It’s a new kind of digital drug.

"People want desperately to experience the act of creation."

I think online they perhaps want to experience the validation of creation over anything else. Increasingly, the "creation" is in service of what "scores".

The concept of craftsmanship is changing.

I think it’s fine for them to say they wrote a book. The book didn’t exist. Then they took an action and the book existed. It’s like saying “I wrote a book” if you paid somebody to ghostwrite a book that you outlined.

Reminds me of people gatekeeping audiobooks as not reading.

It’s kind of like the difference between the facts and the truth.

If you change the goal from "I wrote a book" to "I published a book and made money off of it", it's really no different than fronting the money to pay for people to write and illustrate the book, right? I tend to think about AIs these days as being tools for converting intent into action. Kind of like people.

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