Generative AI is killing our sense of awe

in terms of sheer spam, they might be killing the sense of awe in someone who found them awe-inspiring to begin with.

i can't speak for anyone else but i don't exactly find myself seeking out stable diffusion output because a big colourful high-contrast image of a t. rex bursting out the center of mars surrounded by rainbow mandala constellations or whatever doesn't really do anything for me. it's just blockbuster clip art. we had already been living in a broader culture that desensitises people to the impression of substance prior to dall-e or whatever; netflix originals and nolan flicks are visibly high-production-value but, generously, one out of every ten actually says anything.

even entirely hand-produced "blockbuster clip art" like that one pic of the cat with big round sunglasses with space reflecting in it that's been a fixture of 4chan wallpaper threads since time immemorial has long since served as an emblem of the easily-amused (see also any visual artifact that is a mainstay of stoners). and all it is is an original photograph by a certain андрей прохоров from a series known as "a girl and her cat", subject to a deviantart user's "10 minutes in photoshop for practice" for the reflections.

the real risk to awe is highlighted further down in the article and touched upon far too briefly relative to the firehose thing, which is the stain upon awe of suspicion. is this image from a camera or a 3d package or a generative neural network? balancing a healthy fascination with the world with a healthy suspicion of your senses is a discussion that risks veering into dangerously political, religious, not-very-hacker-news-guidelines territory, but i'll play it safe and just say an apocalyptic tone is not conducive to determining what the healthy balance is.

Well written and enjoyable. But this is not really new or related to AI. As mentioned in the article, this is more about aging.

I take a different stance where the author claims AI manipulated imagery is less "real" than photography that is produced with focus stacking and HDR shadows. Those are no less false than AI, particularly at the degree used in his examples.

The awe-drop towards photography that he describes I experienced during the rise of Instagram over a decade ago. I couldn't understand why people compromised otherwise good photography with something so obviously manipulated. It felt like people being proud of an exam they cheated on. But the world became accustomed to that and moved on.

Doesn't this hold true for everything? It all started with painting. Then photography came around and took some work to produce. Photography finally reached the masses with 1-hour photo shops. Then anyone with a phone could create them. Now AI can do it. It's the price of lowering the barrier to entry. We can go through this same exercise with a number of technological improvements. Construction has led to the demise of awe around buildings. Mass production has killed our sense of awe around products. Cheap abundant food has led to a decline in awe around fancy meals.

Not every art movement in history has been motivated by awe. There’s a toilet in a gallery somewhere. Important to remember that these tools are extensions of humans and their expressions through time, and generative AI is still subject to humans’ tastes: from the beginning of the prompt to the choice of sharing or deleting the result.

“If everything is extraordinary then everything becomes ordinary.”

The ordinary is quite awesome as well.

Is the author really claiming that it's generative AI's fault that we're inured to awe-inspiring images?

The internet killed our sense of awe with aggregators and algorithms. "Sort by popularity" killed it. It became easy a long time ago to binge on awesome images and content.

I dream suburbias where every child is brave and funny, where a green-skinned scientist cackling at dusk or a journey to the sherbet-wastes of Mars are childhood commonplaces. I dream teenagers, the boys with letter sweatshirts, girls with single brush-stroke brows, in endless ice-cream parlors, never growing old or running out of flavors, dream them in moon-chilled jalopies when their sit-com day is through... the delicate perfume of sex and leatherette pervades the air, the radios playing new Gene Vincent songs, new episodes of discontinued but beloved shows.

I dream of cities that old futurists would weep with joy to see, of wharfside neighborhoods where tough kids track down spies, where crumbling tenements contort to teetering and eccentric shapes that seem to spell out words against the night.

I dream of rugged, mustard-yellow monsters from the deep, with vulgar and percussive names like Zax and Rul-Rah-Room. I dream a world of dreams fulfilled, a place where ecstasy and not his brother pain has run amok, and even as I dream I know my dreams are almost true, a planet of attained desire and concrete fantasy that spins and glitters, balanced on the diamond capstone of Olympus.

What makes art impressive - what invokes awe - is the understanding that the artist is immensely talented and created something that is unique to them; no one else could have created that exact same thing.

Pressing a button and getting a technically impressive image will simply never invoke awe in the way that a human artist can; at least not after you've experienced it for the first time.

CGI has killed my sense of awe 20 or 30 years ago. How can I find special effects in movies awe inspiring when I know it's all done with a computer?

It used to me that I watched Godzilla smash a building and was awestruck because each and every tile on the roof of the buildings was carefully placed by hand, the brick walls crumbling like real brick walls showed me how much work and care went into making just a few seconds of footage.

But now I can watch monsters smash entire cities and it bores me to tears. I know the buildings are copy pasted, the details are just tiled textures. It still took somebody some time to design and arrange but I know it's relatively cheap because being cheap is the whole point of doing it this way and they try to compensate by doing more of it on a wider scale, which lacks intimacy. Because even the camera itself is fake they can fly the camera around rapidly to make sure I never get a good look at any of the details, to hide the deficiency of the models, to make sure I don't notice the cut and paste jobs.

Then I watch a war movie. All the shots of the huge armies are from very far away so the men are indistinct ants. Close up shots only show me a few men at a time, it's all calculated to hide the fact that they didn't actually have thousands of men on the field and how can I be amazed when I know this? But if I watch Waterloo, 1970, I am genuinely amazed because I can clearly see thousands of men in detail. They really did have an army on the field and it's awe inspiring in a way that a movie with copy-pasted composite armies never can be.

I'll note I had an extensively curated saved list of cute cats and kittens on IG, which ive carefully curated over the years.

Midjourney has made my list irrelevant. I noticed I wasnt saving these photos anymore on IG, even without making a conscious decision about it.

I think it is because cute cats are now infinitely generate-able and no longer something to curate. My behavior made me sad.

I'd be willing to bet there exists articles expressing this exact sentiment but with regard to photography.

This is interesting.

I am pragmatic with most things in life. Clinging onto something is mostly a losing proposition. If something, for some reason, does not do work for me anymore, and there is no reason to assume that's going to change and nothing I can realistically do about it anyway, then it's probably a good idea to adjust and let it go.

In this particular and rapidly evolving part of our experience, I am sure we will discover new things about us. Maybe yeah, looking at actual photos of strange places will do less to us. Maybe that's fine because we never did care if it's real or not; maybe that part of the experience was mostly for the photographer and not the audience. Maybe for the rest of us the wonder that is somehow induced and the imagination being tickled can just as well be synthesised.

Would that be bad? Of course, too much of a thing will still be tiring and outright bad for you. Food is our most obvious nemesis in this regard. But even in a society where it's overabundant, we still value whatever good food means for us and I think it's highly unlikely that that is going to going to change.

Only if you rely on screens for your awe. If you can get away from light pollution, going outside on a clear night is one good way to experience awe. Substitute your favorite way to experience nature in person...

This is mostly about AI generated images, not ChatGPT and alike that still put us to the ground on our expectations.

And I agree that a lot that can be generated in images with simple prompts is awesome. The problem is that is comparable or even better than the “old” awesome made by expensive artists. So, it was so awesome that old art if I can generate something even better with a short prompt?

I have 3 readings on that: AIs are standing on the shoulders of giants, most of “art” was not so much the work of genius but something more or less mechanical on remixing memes and cultural trends, and that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, the watcher is as responsible for the “art” as the artist as much of the magic happens in his head, and that is independent from how the image was generated.

In any case, I think we didn’t lost our sense of awe. I can generate a thousand pictures with simple prompts and think they are amazing, even to have a healthy effect on my by watching them. But the artificial scarcity and market that used to be around images may end.

I would suggest that we've already been through this with the advent of the internet - if anything awe inspiring happens anywhere in the world we can all hear about it which is a massive change from only being aware of local art/events. I think the major change will be the democratising of artistic taste, it's far easier to tweak a prompt than to learn how to be an artist so we'll get to see artistic expression from a much wider variety of people that are outside of artistic cliques.

It's my view that aesthetics are entirely independent of the work/suffering put into it by the artist and I'm looking forward to more art that is created to appeal to my innate sense of aesthetics by others who share that sense.

Don't worry, you can still find awe in pill form and there's a growing movement to legalize

So far AI was great in generating awe-inspiring outputs and fail on realism. I've been to Cappadocia and the photos of the photographer don't represent the reality of Cappadocia at all, they are all heavily stylised and what's lost is the awe to this stylisation.

IMHO Artists really need to embrace these new tools the way they embraced digitalisation and thrived.

You can tell that there's a plenty of room for artists as the nerdy types keep pumping out of the mill AI content that is only interesting in the context that it is AI.

The swagged pope image for example, is an example of good use of the tech for art(I know, may will disagree but consider the impact of that image on the culture).

My problem with the generative AI tools is strictly with the economical problems they might create to the artists who might lost the opportunity to be compensated for the art they already produced(because their business landscape was designed with the assumption that it's impossible to do what AI does today) and used in the development(training) of these tools. Other than that, it's just another toolset and it creates ample opportunities.

This is nothing new, and there's been plenty of examples already, but here's another: I remember game reviews on the Commodore 64 raving about the incredible realism of some game's graphics. An 8-bit machine with a muddy 16-color palette, and yet that awe was real. Same thing continued through the '90s, the 3D revolution, Doom and Quake and Unreal--the now-infamous "yes, these are in-game graphics" magazine cover.

Now it's 2023, game graphics are basically photorealistic, and when's the last time you saw half a review raving about awe-inspiring graphics? If you have at all, it wasn't for their "realism." In fact, there's a good chance it was for their lack of realism, for a novel stylistic filter that makes a game look more like an animated artwork than a film.

Given supply and time, amazing becomes expected becomes boring. It's why artistic fashions change and evolve in the first place. No one development will ever hold on to first place, but there will always be something new to impress us.

I’ve heard this effect called the “Bach Faucet”—when things wonderful and rare become so commonplace, we lose what made them meaningful originally.

I love this thought from the article.

> Limit our brain diet the same way we try not to eat (delicious) fatty food every day to avoid the total collapse of our bodies.

Gives me hope that after our societal binge on social media and genai, we will come up with healthy patterns.

It only took us a hundred years or so after the Industrial Revolution to start adapting habits after the relative plenty that resulted.

It is the same for every tech advance. What used to be awesome is now mundane.

The article is about questioning the reality of picture. It started way before AI, when image manipulation became possible. Many people find it difficult to appreciate the picture of a beautiful woman on the cover of a magazine, because it must be all makeup and photoshop. Even if she may be stunningly beautiful and natural in real life, what to believe once we know what photo editors can do?

With or without AI, I tend to assume that all awesome pictures are edited in some way, unless some somewhat trustworthy source tells me they aren't.

And even without editing, straight from the camera images, what you are seeing may be a distorted view of reality. For example, a wide angle shot of a room makes it look bigger than it is in real life, a trick well known by real estate agents. Our eyes don't have the field of view of a wide angle lens, so is such a picture "real"?

A very interesting take, but I am not sure I agree. First, this elaborates the idea on the image generation, but then applies it to all "generative AI", but no argument supports that in the post.

As of images, if anything, it was possible before with some good photo editing skills, or even with a good back story for a fuzzy photo (UFOs, Loch Ness Monster, etc.). If anything, I am glad that it is even easier now with the generative AI: I hope it forces more people to think through the novel information and decide for themselves whether they are accepting it or not, or if they want to research further. This is something we would do after reading a blog post, for example, so why would images need to be treated differently? We are too much used to treat the photos as proof or a fact.

No it's not. Our sense of awe was already dead, or we've become apathetic.

Look at all the "once in a lifetime ah so crazy that this happened definitely not scripted" content that has flooded the Internet the past couple years.

Channels where a pianist has a "total stranger" "randomly" join them to improv a duet with them. Every. Single. Video.

AI isn't killing awe, it's our species, and our addiction to the happy fun fun chemicals that our brain squirts out when we feel a certain way. We're meat bags, and it's all our faults.

Generative AI doesn't create art, it just creates novelty. Art requires so much more than just what you see with your eyes.

The market for AI-generated stuff exists, and I think it's a fine toolkit for exploration, drafting, democratizing and speeding up the creative process.

But nobody will experience 'awe' because that is a human emotion which requires empathy, e.g. a connection between audience and creator.

Very few people in tech will understand this, and its going to be hilarious to me when the bottom falls out of this hypecycle after the novelty wears off.

Isn't this a problem of overconsumption, not overproduction?

The internet has exposed us to exponentially more ideas and content than our ancestors had, in much the same way as printing gave them over theirs. AI making this stuff is only an iteration.

If consumption is bad, we only need ration our intake, use slower mediums, do something, exercise, play an instrument, craft, create.

I’m not sure how to describe it exactly, but it just feels like a lot of other people have a very different feeling about AI that is incredibly tedious for me. I’m fed up with it, with articles like this one, fawning over ‘real’ art and bemoaning ‘fake’ computer generated stuff.

Is awe a good thing? Either way I'm reminded of the psychological break the crew in (book three?) of the Three Body Problem suffers when they choose to abandon the prospect of ever returning to earth. It seems something similar is happening in the psychosphere.

Any awe is derived from the original awe of the art or photographs that went into the training. And no 3D or video means to me anyway that I feel like I'm looking at mediocre comic illustrations.

we ve had that with photography

and recorded music

and movies

and the internet

damn it, we will not find something to be wowed about ever again!

Automated entertainment generation is just getting started. The author is a "screenwriter and producer". Hollywood is terrified. The writers strike was just the beginning.

I'm in awe when I see what computers can generate. I'm in awe when I read arXiv and come to understand what's going on underneath. There's plenty to be in awe of.

If you're not in awe are you even paying attention?

It's been that way since "media" became a thing, and nothing beats seeing by visiting in person. Maybe VR will be a step that lasts a while?

Good.

Let's indulge yourselves until the point of collapse.

Hedonic adaptation works both ways so there will be no end to it, but we'll just get unsensitized to it.

I welcome the deprecation of the ornaments that the people of the world hold sacred.

On the contrary, the things generative AI is able to accomplishes fills me with awe.

So if you experience too much you lose sense of awe

I’ve lost my sense of awe when looking at this art, absolutely. It used to amaze me. It’s still fascinating and cool, but not like it was in the first while that I was viewing and creating it.

But this morning, my 6 year old was in bed with me (we’re sick), and at one point I rolled over and saw his little sleeping face. I was in complete awe. I thought about his life so far. How beautiful he is to me. How grateful I am for him.

Sometimes I just look in my aquarium and I have a sense of awe. It’s nature inside of there. These fish spawn in there. It’s their home. The plants grow so beautifully. The shrimp grow out in so many colours and patterns. It’s a window into the awe of nature.

I’m not sure if computers can necessarily take away my sense of awe. I have some sense of that when imagining what I can do with them, but when it comes to singular outputs… That’s not the kind of thing that amazes me.