In the Battle Between Bots and Comedians, A.I. Is Killing | Hacker News Reader

In the Battle Between Bots and Comedians, A.I. Is Killing

nytimes.com

11 pointscgoodmac26 comments

If you take a taxi 26 miles you'll get to the finish line first, but you didn't run a marathon.

There is such a single minded focus on the consumption of art in lieu of creation of art in these discussions around AI and I find it incredibly disheartening.

The point of writing is not "I need a page full of words" for the same reason that the point of running a marathon is not "I need to get 26 miles from here fast".

The reason to make art is because it is inherently valuable to us as humans. The act itself makes being alive better for all those who participate.

Building a tool that outputs crummy simulacrums doesn't make everyone a poet, sorry. If you didn't make art, you didn't make art. The act of creation is quite literally the entire point.

Why are we currently obsessed with finding ways to eliminate it?

Amazingly, South Park had an episode basically about this over 12 years ago: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Funnybot

What happens if everybody can be a poet, everybody can paint masterpieces of art, everybody can be a comedian, everybody can make music?

What happens when anyone can speak the prose of Shakespeare, or of Charles Dickens, or Dostoevsky?

What happens if entire art styles are interchangeable? Will it feel different seeing one style from another?

If everyone is a poet, then nobody is a poet.

If everyone is a poet, then everyone is a poet.

If you repeat the same word, it doesn't count as a rhyme ;-)

What does this even mean. It's as if you just shoved possible words together.

It means that amazing poetry becomes nothing special. You cannot make a name for yourself as a poet because everyone can push a few buttons and get work as good or better than your own.

Poets making a living and poetry producing meaning are two different problems. Every poet can be destitute (many great ones have been), and people can still get meaning from their work. Or others' work. Or the work of other things.

>many great ones have been

And my point is that there will be no more great ones, because the field of comparison will be flat.

It means that poetry is a use of language that is exceptional in some way. If everyone can do it then it's no longer exceptional and the word loses its meaning.

Again, so easy to say. But there's no evidence that this is true.

Art and media have only increased in quantity over the years. When I consume some part of it, my enjoyment isn't any less. I still experience bliss and joy and get meaning from art in all the proportions I always have. And given how much people still deeply care about it all, so does everyone else.

The assertion that more of poetry means poetry becomes worthless hasn't got anything going for it.

Much has been said about how music has become a commodity. People today are much less likely to listen to the same album over and over, instead quickly moving on to some other song out of the endless offer on streaming services. Quantity has definitely changed consumption.

Moreover, in literature there has been a perception that the sheer amount of things on offer today has led to reduced interest in longer works, they become seen as more challenging than before. Dickens' doorstop novels were written as popular entertainment but today few have time for them.

The evidence is inherent and ontological. Just as much as everyone cannot, by definition, be an outlier to the norm.

What happens when anyone can create photorealistic images of their surroundings without spending years getting trained in portraiture? Painting evolved, plus we got a whole new medium too.

Less glibly, I feel like the comment OP made is looking at first-order consequences of new generative technologies, but that it misses a deeper truth about art and creation. The creation of the camera didn't "solve" painting. By and large the art we find exceptional and noteworthy is that where an artist takes a collection of tools and invests a large amount of time in combining them in a new, rare, and/or exceedingly detailed and refined way. nobody is going to create enduring, culturally significant art off of 60 seconds of effort entering one prompt into Midjourney. There will be artists who do amazing things using, among other tools, generative AI, but it will be because they put lots of time into understanding the new creative possibilities they unlock and refining their composition into something aesthetically significant and uncommon, even given the new generative status quo.

The question to me is: will "consumers" still be able to make the difference between this "amazing piece of art that used generative AI" and the rest of the random outputs of generative AI?

If people can't make a difference, I believe you have just killed the domain (in the bad way).

I think the problem that you're getting at is that people need a steady stream of income in order to have the time to innovate beyond what AI is capable of regenerating, but that steady stream of income has always been predominantly comprised of exactly the sort of derivative work that AI is going to completely undermine the market for.

Without the ability to do the usual stream of generic graphic design arrangements, or advertising Jingles that pays the bills, the aspiring genre-breaking creative has little or no means to develop an excursive masterpiece that the next generation of AI will slavishly absorb and regurgitate.

There's a joke about art teachers funding future art consumers, but it's only funny because it's true. Teaching people to appreciate and distinguish is important to the arts now, more than ever. I wonder how much the work itself can be made to teach the subtle differentiations, and how to appreciate them? Would solve this whole problem handily.

I'll admit to being a little gun-shy about the idea that technology always creates new opportunities. Sure, it has happened over and over in the past, but relying on it feels superstitious.

Still... yeah, you've got good reason to be optimistic. I genuinely can't imagine what will happen when Just Anybody could create a major motion picture or a AAA videogame, by themselves or with a few friends rather than a city-full of talent. Probably, something completely different that I can't even imagine. I hope I recognize it when it comes, rather than being the old grump who doesn't think it's worth anything.

> I genuinely can't imagine what will happen when Just Anybody could create a major motion picture or a AAA videogame, by themselves or with a few friends rather than a city-full of talent.

If I look at video games today, it seems like a necessary (but not sufficient) condition to be successful is to have a lot of money to make heavy marketing.

When consumers can't make a difference between the quality of a product (be it a piece of art or anything else, like a car or a browser), then what makes the difference is the brute force side of marketing: pay more to be more visible so you sell more.

I don't think it's a good thing. I prefer a world where those who have expertise in something are recognized as experts. What's the point of practicing 10h a day to be a musician if your neighbour can just pretend to be one with AI, and nobody will ever make a difference?

The AAA games need enormous marketing because they need to sell a lot of copies. They are extremely expensive to make.

Conceivably, in the future, somebody could make a Zelda or Baldur level game in their spare time. It may not sell ten million copies, but it doesn't need to.

Is it worse than the current games, with vast amounts of craftsmen? Maybe. It might be a little sad. Or it might be great that all of those artists now have free time to do their own art.

Of course all of them have to eat. And so we'd better hope it also comes with even greater superabundance than we already have. We get lots of artists, who sell very little but produce great art, or we get something potentially very bad.

> It may not sell ten million copies, but it doesn't need to.

Have you ever spoken to independent game developers? They don't want to sell millions, just enough to live from it. Well that's hard.

> Or it might be great that all of those artists now have free time to do their own art.

Some of them actually want to make a video game. But the risk is that non-artists will be able to make games with generative AIs (which trained on data that the authors - artists - did not agree on sharing this way).

You can say "yeah yeah, it's progress, some jobs disappear, etc". But I still have to note the irony: generative AI was trained from the work of artists to steal the job of those artists, and everybody seems to find that it was "fair use" of their intellectual property...

It will be a good thing.

For example, there are a bunch of people with different experiences than mine who are obscure not because their lives are boring but because they don't know how to write engagingly. I would love if the could use AI to help them write a fascinating and engaging story of their life

There are a lot of people who have great artistic ideas in their head but because they don't have the skills, the ideas are stuck in their head. It will be great for them to be able to express them and have others benefit them.

The story of our civilizations advancements have been removing gatekeepers and letting the common person do more and more. From literacy, to religious freedom, to self-government, there is a movement from gatekeeping to allowing the regular person to express themselves.

You don’t have to look far. What happens when everyone can write a letter to the editor and have it instantaneously published? What happens when everyone has a handheld camera and can publish huge amounts of visual crud? Do we really savor a well taken photograph ie form or do we just look for the content. Does art remain art when the form is average and the content is either close to literally presented or just surrealistic? The enshittification of creativity and craftsmanship, perhaps? Mass produced content will undoubtedly lead to enshittification of the platform where these are published.

https://archive.ph/6uniY

Reply on news.ycombinator.com