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Comment by Juliate | Hacker News Reader

It's not that the choice is taken away. It's that it is going to be even more buried under an avalanche of industry-normalised, generated crap (crap because generated and industry-normalised).

And second, you express yourself, you said it. If a generator produces something, it's not _your_ expression, per definition. You may still have "constrained" it among myriad of possibilities through your prompt, it is still the production of the generator, not yours.

Example: when I play something on a Mellotron, I cannot claim that I played the flutes or violins recorded there. Those are definitely not mine. What I do play with it, what I sing above it, yes, maybe because I produce/play those, with what I understood of my previous musical education/experience.

That's, fundamentally different.

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Regarding the first point of being buried under an avalanche of crap, we can solve this problem through many ways. We can still filter by human music. Or we can use better recommendation systems (automated or p2p/word-of-mouth).

Regarding whether it is "my" expression or not, I consider expression as a way of making my feelings or thoughts known. This grants me an additional way of making my feelings or thoughts known. Perhaps of lower fidelity than if I learn to play an instrument but maybe that will improve with time. Either way, since I now have an additional choice of expressing my thoughts and _I_ decide if it's "good enough" to publish, I consider it as allowing me to express more.

> we can solve this problem through many ways

You realise that this is a problematic situation created by technology, that was designed as such first, right?

> This grants me an additional way of making my feelings or thoughts known.

Not really. Because again, this is a generator: what it outputs according to your prompt may _please_ you, or seem like it matches what you think you wanted, but this is still an output determined hugely by all the biases and sum of data it ingested before you even decided to use it.

It is vastly, it is even, again, fundamentally different that putting in the effort of expressing yourself, by formulating your own words, trying to express something on your own, and not being content of it, reflecting about why, trying a different formula or perspective, etc. before finally saying "ok, this is all I can say about it at this point, let's try".

The "your" is critically important here, both for correct attribution (from the perspective of others; this may or may not have financial or legal consequences), and foremost for your own self-esteem/understanding (devoid from an automated, biased generator, whose understanding is beyond yourself).

> You realise that this is a problematic situation created by technology

I'm saying this technology is a net positive for me. Sure, problems can arise from applying this net-positive technology but even considering them, they're a net positive. Especially in this case where we already have solutions for large amounts of crap content created by humans today. I think they'll scale well to crap content created by AI tomorrow (eg: Recommendation systems, p2p sharing etc).

Regarding your second point. I think we just have different perspectives on this. I see this technology as allowing me to do "strictly more" than I could before. You say that it's not "my expression" but I say it is because I'm able to bring forth what's in my mind (according to me!). You say it's not what I had in mind but compare against this scenario: I have an idea for a song and use a musical instrument. The output that I produce is quite far from my intent as I'm untrained. With this model, I can get a lot closer to my intent compared to using an instrument since I'm untrained. I still have the option of later learning an instrument if I'm unsatisfied.

Overall, I lose nothing and gain a nice power and still retain the option to learn an instrument if I wish. Thus it's a clear net positive for me that allows me to express more right now.

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