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Comment by zarmin | Hacker News Reader

This is a sentiment I'm starting to see more of, and have really started internalizing in recent months.

For every creative task I've given an LLM in the last 2 years, if I cared at all about the output, I ended up redoing it myself by hand. Even with the most granular of instructions, the output feels like a machine wrote it.

I have yet to meet anyone who felt any kind of emotion from generated art, except for "wow, it's cool that AI can make this". That's because (imo) art comes from experience, and experiencing is absolutely not what LLMs do.

Meanwhile, my dad, whose AI experience amounts to using MS Copilot "two or three times," is sending me articles about Devin, and how it's over for software engineers.

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> I have yet to meet anyone who felt any kind of emotion from generated art, except for "wow, it's cool that AI can make this".

Have you ever observed how difficult it is to _remember_ AI generated pictures?

I can think of only one AI-generated art thing that has stuck with me, and it's because of the enormous amount of effort the guy using it went to generating really genuinely creepy fake photos to go with a plausible but fake story (about a lost expedition in the early era of photography).

I thought at the time, OK, maybe people will do creative things with it. Maybe I am wrong.

Except that months on I can't remember any specific detail of any of the photos in enough detail to visualise it. Only the emotion and the feel, which could have been evoked by that talented person entirely without Stable Diffusion.

There is something about AI generated photos, in particular, that confounds my ability to remember the image (as a photographer)

That is very interesting, I'm picking up what you're putting down. YouTubers make rampant use of AI art. If nothing else, this era of YouTube will be recognizable from afar.

I do like that many people have learned to recognize the writing style and visual aesthetic, and are rejecting it.

> maybe people will do creative things with it

_Some_ people will do _some_ creative things with it, but most people will use it as a shortcut—as long as there's some kind of output, they couldn't care less about the quality. How much of correspondence is just an LLM summarizing what a different LLM wrote? If the internet wasn't dead before, this is surely killing it.

> I do like that many people have learned to recognize the writing style and visual aesthetic, and are rejecting it.

This is the thing that gives me hope -- inquisitive people who have no idea how ChatGPT does what it does can point out ChatGPT-generated text. It's more difficult with GAN-generated images but in the creative community I am part of, some people are very literate about this already.

There's a lesson in here somewhere, but I'm not sure what it is.

I don't think this will hold for too long. We already had soulless art hanging on the walls of waiting rooms and bank branches, even before GenAI. Rather sooner than later AI products will be indiscernible - even today enough AI outputs are for many - so what then?

I don't know.

But quite a lot of people understand the difference, at a visceral level, between a painting made by an individual amateur artist and a painting made for selling at one of those Fine Art chains, or the difference between something rough and charming and a painting you might have seen in the 90s while trying to locate the loo in a UK branch of McDonalds.

People's instinctive artistic "literacy" is often surprising.

> Have you ever observed how difficult it is to _remember_ AI generated pictures?

No matter how much you filter and purify it, puke will rank.

I think it’s more about uncanniness and some sort of latent, subliminal incoherence. Like maybe it is somehow disruptive to visual memory in a subtle but noisy way, because it doesn’t hang together quite right.

I have no science to back this up, mind you. But I struggle to recall details of these images (I also believe I have a limited form of aphantasia so it could just be my flawend noggin)

But I will take your point ;-)

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