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Comment by mjr00 | Hacker News Reader

> This is an odd article. To me, it seems like the "creative" arts are an ideal arena for AI. After all, there's no such thing as "wrong" art.

Yeah but who wants to consume art purely generated by AI (that is, not human-created with AI support)? Most art sites have had blanket bans, or at least required tagging, on ai-generated art because people hate it so much.

Or to put it another way: why are you in the comment section of Hacker News, and not just asking ChatGPT to generate social media comments on the article?

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>why are you in the comment section of Hacker News and not just asking ChatGPT to generate social media comments on the article?

Because I know the brains generating these comments have rich, diverse experience and a large set of refined, domain-specific heuristics derived from it - that is, they have top-notch training and alignment, at the cost of 20+ years of upfront incubation in an evolution-optimized meat harness with unpredictable success rates (and occasional personality defects). I can encounter new perspectives here that I don't think any current LLM could imitate efficiently or reliably. But if I wanted to know what Fox/MSNBC/NPR commenters had to say about this topic, I would absolutely ask ChatGPT, because those are commodity-grade opinions, and it excels at producing them. (It is not obvious to me that HN will still be an exception for, say, GPT-10 or whatever.)

This is definitely speculative and a little catty, but I suspect a lot of "hatred" of AI art is a) emotional solidarity with working artists who feel economically threatened by it, and b) a personal sense of insecurity along the lines of "what if I love this piece and it turns out to be AI - does that make me a boring NPC/a chump? better reject it as fiercely as possible to avoid introspection!"

> This is definitely speculative and a little catty, but I suspect a lot of "hatred" of AI art is a) emotional solidarity with working artists who feel economically threatened by it, and b) a personal sense of insecurity along the lines of "what if I love this piece and it turns out to be AI - does that make me a boring NPC/a chump? better reject it as fiercely as possible to avoid introspection!"

Strongly disagree, just take a look at the AI-generated tag on pixiv[0] -- it's 99% same-looking garbage, and since there's no barrier to generating, uploaders flood pixiv with tons of images. Browsing tags is basically unusable without it being filtered out.

[0] - https://www.pixiv.net/en/tags/AI-generated/artworks mildly nsfw if you're not logged in, very nsfw if you are. (edit: note that this isn't a lot because pixiv later added a meta-tag for AI art so it's possible for users to filter without pixiv premium; that's how much it was hated.)

You're confusing art with pretty pictures. AI "art" is not art, they are just pictures.

It has no meaning, it has no context, it is not inspired by anything. Art has depth, art has emotion.

Theres no AI pieces that someone "loves", theres nothing beyond, oh this is a cool image, it just doesnt exist.

>Art has depth, art has emotion

But significant portions of those qualities are imputed by the viewer! The artist has their own intent and experience during the creation of the art, but that only inheres in the art insofar as another mind can later recover some of that feeling upon viewing. Huge parts of the meaning of ancient (and more recent) art are lost forever because they depended on never-recorded cultural or personal understandings, and our emotional appreciation of them today largely hinges on how they make us imagine the past or our relationship to it. I think it's incredibly short-sighted to be certain that nobody does or will love any AI artwork when so much of appreciation is contingent on the mind of the of the beholder, which is not necessarily responding to real information about the work's creator, even when human.

All you say is true but that is still not the point

Ai does not and cannot create art, it’s as simple as that.

Just to be clear, even when a human writes and refines prompts, tweaks parameters, and iterates generation until they see something they imagined but lacked the traditional art skills to produce... we have not ended up with art? (If someone posts all 2000 iterates of their last prompt, that's bad social behavior, but it's hard for me to feel like it "un-arts" the results.) Or is there some other generation procedure you're imagining that's responsible for the alleged non-art?

(Lest I be accused of moving goalposts or trying to sound less crazy, I want to double down on my original motivation that I think we need to make philosophical space for minds with agency and potential personhood that did not evolve in meat. I have no confidence that that will become urgent in my lifetime, but I think it will someday and it would be nice to be culturally through with the arguments about whether it could possibly ever make art before we're forced to argue about whether it can vote or join the priesthood or whatever!)

With all due respect, I don’t think you really get what art is. Please just google the definition or something. No someone that doesn’t have art skills cannot create art precisely for the same reason, with or without ai .

The hypothetical situation doesn’t even make sense. For the exact same reason that no matter how many prompts you use, you can’t write a good book with chat gpt. Art “goodness” exists entirely beyond the realm of being able to communicate it through words. It’s not something you can quantify logically and refine it through a prompt. You’ll always end up with some mechanical, derivative crap

> who wants to consume art purely generated by AI

Most people won't care one bit. Some artists care strongly, hence the bans on artist-focused sites. When it's about as good or better than humans, people will consume it.

As for why people are still on HN, TBH a lot of these comments could be easily written by ChatGPT. What makes it worth it is seeing comments from people in the know, which is something ChatGPT can't replicate.

For your other comment about pixiv, people don't hate AI art, they hate low-effort trash. Most people, if they saw art they liked, wouldn't care who or what created it.

> When it's about as good or better than humans, people will consume it.

How are you measuring better? AI art is already better than most humans in a lot of ways: better shading, better coloring, even better anatomy outside of hands and feet (which has been mostly solved with controlnet and related extensions). Yet nobody wants to look at it.

> Yet nobody wants to look at it.

That's simply false. Lots of people are enjoying it. Especially porn of course, but people are enjoying plenty of regular AI art, right now. "Better" isn't objective, more people will enjoy more AI art as it gets better at generating art that they like.

What makes you think otherwise?

> Or to put it another way: why are you in the comment section of Hacker News, and not just asking ChatGPT to generate social media comments on the article?

Current models have fairly poor performance, compared to a human. If better art or better conversation could come from AI, then I suspect many might prefer it. Why wouldn't we? Why would we want simpler, less enjoyable, "real" conversations, or less symbolic art?

If they hate it so much it shouldn't need tagging as it would be naturally lower ranked.

Different forms of art (ai or human made) are good for different situations. Commenting on hacker news has a different set of needs and depth that ChatGPT cannot replicate. But I do switch over to chatGPT when trying to get background information about things. Different 'tools' for different needs.

>If they hate it so much it shouldn't need tagging as it would be naturally lower ranked.

Eh, this is a two sided argument.

For example, lots of people look at porn. This doesn't mean when I pull up an art/picture site I want to have porn displayed to me. In addition sites that allow porn are typically flooded with massive amounts of that kind of content. If you are a site that wants to show non-pornographic artistic content, in general you have to ban and heavily moderate it or it takes over the site.

I can see where the same will be true for AI generated art. Where for human art, one work could take hours, maybe days or far longer to create. Nearly unlimited amounts of AI art could flood a site in days, so much so that even attempting to host content would not be feasible in any way.

> If they hate it so much it shouldn't need tagging as it would be naturally lower ranked.

Lower ranked how? Not everything has a Reddit-esque upvote/downvote system. Plenty of sites let you browse by fandom/character/artist tags and just return chronological results (thinking primarily pixiv + all the booru-likes). Those sites were the ones where there was universal backlash to AI art and all of them require an AI-generated tag now.

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