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Comment by binkethy | Hacker News Reader

Eliminating creative jobs is not progress, by most people's standards. Its a beancounter fantasy, but causes us to question all roles further up the chain as well. Perhaps someone can make c-suite jobs obsolete instead?

Perhaps computers can have sex for us as well, they may even perform better.

At some point one has to confront the human mammal, society, and the planet that we are a lifeform on, that we are rapidly rendering uninhabitable for no reason other than boring ideology.

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> Eliminating creative jobs is not progress, by most people's standards

There are always stated preferences and revealed preferences. Before mass market production, we had artisans to cater to the apparel needs of everyone - clothes, shoes, bags you name it. Most of those creative jobs are now replaced by industrial manufacturing. And guess what - everyone just buys the mass market products. I don't see anyone lamenting the loss of village cobbler or tailor who had only a handful of offerings at insanely high prices.

Just to counter your absolutist point: I do. The imperfections and the story and everything make a thing more alive. In general, in most of the cases I’d prefer an item made by a single hardcore artisan or a small team to anything factory made. There are natural limits to this (airplanes), but for most of the things this definitely stands.

I, for one, don't like American canned comic books or IPs produced by faceless corporations and prefer artisanal Japanese manga.

if it can "make GDP go up" then it is good. it's a political question how to distribute the economic surplus. it always was.

similarly, it's up to us to a large degree where we spend our money. if there are going to be enough people to want non-AI art, then there will be a number of creative jobs.

> if there are going to be enough people to want non-AI art

Well, maybe this will change one day, but now I don't know a single person who wants "AI art". After the initial hype with magic images created with Midjourney wore off, it's left what it is: boring, repetitive, a few similar looks, cheap. Just like Chinese plastic goods.

Not so may people want "AI art" (branded as such). But a good chunk people use generative image model to "commission" works that they are interested in - but would be to expensive to get a human artist to do it. There are many niches/subcultures where this is popular, from anime to cyberpunk, to fantasy, computer games, role playing games, etc.

It might be that there is general appeal to be found in images created with AI tool (by a human tool-wielder, the actual artist). But people want to buy art from human artists, have a back story - for there to be a "meaning" - a why. Some initial research: https://www.sciencenorway.no/art-artificial-intelligence/peo...

> boring, repetitive, a few similar looks, cheap. Just like Chinese plastic goods.

And yet cheap Chinese plastic goods are literally a hundred-billion dollar industry.

Yes, definitely, and there are people who use them, mainly because they can't afford a more durable version or don't care. This is the niche for the current generation of generative AI for art: cheap, boring stuff that some people dislike, some ignore, but it has its uses.

> I don't know a single person who wants "AI art"

Heck, I don't even know a single person who wants real art apart from 20-50$ wall hangings from Amazon or Etsy (all mass produced), or cheap souvenirs when they travel (mostly made in China).

That argument also worked very well when it was "If there are enough people who want smoke-free bars and restaurants, there will be a number of them".

and it will be interesting to see the second hand effects of AI in art galleries.

where I'm from restaurants had separate dining rooms (and now there's an indoor smoking ban), and most restaurants and bars in general are bad cheap places. if AI crowds out the cheap creative shit (from advertisements to mass produced plastic "home decor" to ad-supported "free art" and so on) I don't see that as a problem.

... furthermore, the cost-benefit balance of smoking - with a high certainty - seems to be negative. we don't know AI's yet.

>if it can "make GDP go up" then it is good.

Not always. If you have a car crash and pay medical bills that raises the GDP by the amount of spend but is not a good thing.

I'm not sure how well GDP accounting works with AI.

> If you have a car crash and pay medical bills that raises the GDP by the amount of spend but is not a good thing.

I mean, in an alternate reality where car crashes still happen but the person dies because of the lack of medical care, then it is a bad thing. That we invented medical procedures to deal with car crash victims is a valuable offering to the society and GDP is a crude way to capture such value.

Very crude.

Unusable infrastructure counts towards GDP as well, if I'm not mistaken.

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