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Comment by poulpy123 | Hacker News Reader

It's the same that happened to google search: the cultural "market" is imploding into himself. It was somewhat manageable when creating crap necessited people, but now that AI can churn at speed never seen before, it's just a matter of time for creation to be devaluated. It's the first risk of AI before the other, and I'm wondering if it can be fixed and if it will be fixed.

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AI is being actively promoted and used as a tool to maximise content creation output, to create, edit, re-edit, re-mix, translate as much content as possible and win the war for our attention. The emphasis is on speed of creation and low cost; accuracy, originality, or merit are not even on the long-range radar of the providers or the users of AI.

>it's just a matter of time for creation to be devaluated

I think it's just value being properly reassessed to be more accurate.

Art has no intrinsic value, whatever value there might be are all external projections. If "AI" devalues art to what it should actually be, that is a good thing.

Incidentally, art has seen a slow but constant decline in perceived value over time. "AI" is merely accelerating it.

Nothing has intrinsic value. If society only values things that a computer can't do, we're all going to be plumbers and carpenters before too long.

When I say art has no intrinsic value, I mean that art doesn't feed, clothe, or house anyone. Nor does an artist contribute to society's productivity, objectively he's a dumb load.

Note that this isn't to say art is unnecessary, a society without art is a damn boring one. But art is quite a ways down on the list of priorities.

As an aside, tradesmen usually make good money while artists are stereotypically broke.

This argument has been had a thousand times before, and it would be a waste of time to relitigate it. Suffice it to say that "intrinsic value" is subjective, artists absolutely contribute to the productivity of any society made up mostly of human beings (the subgroup of artisans being strictly necessary for tool-making, if nothing else), and even if they didn't, a "dumb load" is objectively more constructive than the net destructive activity of many whose primary activities have so-called "intrinsic value".

But I'm not here to argue the points I've raised, only to state them, and that the debate you're trying to start is old and counterproductive and not something someone with any amount of introspective ability should want to continue further.

I'm merely stating the sometimes brutal reality of art and its real (intrinsic) vs. perceived value. When a society needs to respond to a challenge, art is among the first things that are put aside due to its unnecessary nature (lack of intrinsic value). Namely in times of war or disasters.

I've also only touched on how art has lost perceived value over time regardless, which I feel is in large part due to there being more and more an oversupply of artists as time goes on. "AI" accelerates this as I've said, but the trend itself has been around for a long time.

That's not true at all. In war? The Nazis took great pains to preserve (stolen) art; the Islamic State went out of their way to destroy it. Americans vigorously catalogue war efforts, with much risk to photographers. Even going back to ancient times, weapons and armor were lavishly decorated. What's the enduring symbol of the space race? An American flag, planted on the moon. And the way out of the Great Depression was the WPA, including its art and architecture initiatives. One of the few fully-intact survivors of Japan's economic crash in the mid-90s was its animation industry; the US gaming industry grew while the rest of the economy languished following the GFC. I could go on.

Art is political; it stirs passions, which is to say that it's the motive force behind (public support for) many great undertakings. In these cases, you've mistaken pricelessness for worthlessness. You're just one in a long line of very incorrect people to mis-define "intrinsic value"; designating that as a "brutal reality" is ironic, since you won't face the actual reality.

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