Comment by monkmartinez | Hacker News Reader

Comment by monkmartinez | Hacker News Reader

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"It has become standard to describe A.I. as a tool. I argue that this framing is incorrect. It does not aid in the completion of a task. It completes the task for you. A.I. is a service. You cede control and decisions to an A.I. in the way you might to an independent contractor hired to do a job that you do not want to or are unable to do. This is important to how using A.I. in a creative workflow will influence your end result. You are, at best, taking on a collaborator. And this collaborator happens to be a mindless average aggregate of data."

As a non-famous, non-professional artist this seems like a snobby take. Everyone of these arguments is logically inconsistent with what I know and have experienced using LLM's, stable diffusion, DALL-E, and other generative machine learning algorithms. I wonder what the author would say about plotter artists or CGI artists... would it sound like his take on generative art models?

I guess the only point I would really like to make is this; A closed mind is already defeated.

I agree with the closed mind thing, except it appears your mind is closed.

This artist is saying that it’s not a tool because it disconnects him from his task, rather than helps him invest the task with his own agency. This is not logically inconsistent.

If it is not consistent with your experience, then it suggests there can be different experiences. But perhaps you don’t care as much about your own contribution to your work, because, as you say, you aren’t “famous.” All that means is that what makes you special is not as valued by strangers as what makes him special. How is that an argument to make yourself less special?

His argument is completely consistent with my experience and feelings about using AI. I am in a completely different field.

I disagree with his notion that I just cede control of my output to AI.

I am using LLMs to help me improve my writing. I was asking for revisions but I found myself just copying what the LLM is outputting

Instead, I told the LLM to analysis my writing and encourage me to create more effective sentences. Instead of generating the output for me, the LLM help me think of better revisions of my writing.

It's consistent if the author comes out and predicts other things non-tool (i.e. agentic) AI are likely to do in the future. Otherwise it's a suspiciously specific argument.

Yeah, the bit that gets me is the assumption that an artist just _yields_ to the AI's choices.

The author says in the article "my own hand, the single most valuable asset I possess", but I'd say that much greater is the artist's eye——the artist doesn't just accept every line that flows out of their pencil, but knows what to throw out, what to redraw.

The infamous stereotype of AI art, the hand with too many fingers, is the outcome of a lot of people being given an artificially skilled hand without the skilled eye to go with it...

The AI artist who doesn't just cede to the AI, though, is bringing their own hand and eye to the work, not accepting the mere output of a prompt, but actively remaking it as an expression of their own craft and vision.

With the difference that they have to invoke incantation instead of using their invaluable hands :’)

And I guess that could create the much dreaded feeling of yielding up their artistic agency.

I've always wondered why people didn't edit out the extra fingers and legs. I haven't played with it myself - is post editing difficult?

Not really, you erase and then inpaint, or replace the offending area with multicolor noise, put a bit of multicolor noise over the whole thing, then do an image-to-image run on that.

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