Do art for the sake of art on your own time. But expecting companies to not embrace AI to do their jobs is foolish just like it's foolish to think corporate programmers will be a thing at some point in the future.
This viewpoint is what fucked up the world.
There are tremendous benefits to making art something anyone can get for dirt cheap.
All that has disappeared is every shirt being tailored, custom, and expensive.
To amplify my OP, there are certain intangibles regarding cultural artifacts which are strictly non-utilitarian. Culture is expression & is a product of the human psyche (of a coherent civilization). And past will affect the future. Culture minimally is a social tonic, maximally informs societal character.
The germinal question in context of 'high culture' (arts and letters) is whether the omission of the 'bar to entry' that requires acquisition of skill, dedication, and 'a development of a vocabulary' (etc) will have a degenerative long term effect on high culture, given that cultural development is generational and progressive, and the process of becoming an artist is a filter.
But that shirt would last you decades with good maintenance, because it was a quality product that was made to be repaired by other craftspeople throughout it's service life (or even just yourself!). Now we have can have hundreds of shirts for that same money but all of them suck, are made cheaply, fall apart after a couple of years if we're lucky, and are made by people who can't afford to buy them in a country we've never seen. How is this an improvement in literally any way, apart from it makes fast fashion companies shitloads of money? It's worse for the people making the clothes, wearing the clothes, and selling the clothes. It's worse for the environment because now we're making and destroying millions of articles of clothing, not to mention shipping it here and there and everywhere. And, for all that, we still have people who don't have enough fucking clothing.
> with good maintenance
So modernity has eliminated my need to spend time looking after clothes? That is a big win. Not having to put time into repair and maintenance is a huge improvement. It has eliminated my need to be careful with my clothes? That is also a huge win.
My grandmother used to spend hours at a time repairing socks. It is a huge win that nobody knows how to do that anymore, as time has value.
> Now we have can have hundreds of shirts for that same money
Even if we accept the decades of life for an old shirt, you only need tens of shirts to match its lifetime, so this is an order of magnitude reduction in cost.
> are made by people who can't afford to buy them in a country we've never seen
So? Plenty of employees cannot afford what their employer produces. And it is a step up from where they were before. We freed up more capable people in our own country to do more productive things than made clothing.
You are right on the environmental part.
> And, for all that, we still have people who don't have enough fucking clothing.
Where would that be? Even the poorer African countries are chaffing at how much clothing is being dumped there.
So the main loser is the environment. As a customer, I am otherwise a tremendous winner. And when AI takes over most mundane art, like animating instructional videos or making logos, I will also be a tremendous winner.
So as long as whatever shit that's burning the world benefits you in your life time, irrespective of the state of it when it's time for you to hand it over to your children, you're good with it.
Got it. I mean that makes sense, who needs a long-term stable biosphere when there's money to be made. Jesus Christ...
With the possible exception of Wikipedia illustrations, I wasn't aware we had a meaningful shortage of any of those things. On the contrary, there are more great video games and movies (and books, and TV shows, etc., etc.) already available than I could ever hope to get through in my lifetime.
GenAI in anything resembling its current form can only dilute these markets with worthless slop and make it harder for consumers to find actual worthwhile media made by and for humans. This problem will be compounded if it also makes creative careers less viable for humans.
As someone who has a very specific taste in video games, I beg to differ. If you happen to exist in the space targeted by AAA or if you don't have strong preferences for what you get out of an indie game the status quo is fine, but it's been a while since I've found a game I hadn't played before that scratches the itch.
Automation allows what's popular to become extremely cheap and what's niche to become possible.
In some hypothetical future world where GenAI content really is as novel and worthwhile as content made by humans, this will be a different conversation. Until then, I doubt it's going to satisfy even the tiny minority of people who literally want to play the same game, watch the same movie, read the same book, etc. over and over again until they die. But it certainly has the potential to severely damage the overall quality of the media landscape in the way I described, because people who care about money more than quality are in the driver's seat.
We have several lifetimes’ supply of good art in practically every medium already, even relatively new ones. Recording and mechanical reproduction have already enormously devalued creative talent and left us with a glut.
Harming the value of artistic talent and skill even further, to get us more of something we’re already drowning in, isn’t really an improvement.
Industrialization is fun isn’t it?
You can be passionate about this advancement without placing profits first.
> Imagine how many more video games and movies can be made...
Again, you can do this with passion and without placing profit first
> There are tremendous benefits to making art something anyone can get for dirt cheap
I disagree strongly here. Art has value in large part because most people cannot produce it. I like stories, but not everyone has a good story to tell. When the story is AI-generated, there isn't a consciousness behind it to give it the passion required for good stories.
Given the riots inspired by this machinery, I don't believe this is possible.
(Arguably also communism, but there was a lot going on back then).
> I disagree strongly here. Art has value in large part because most people cannot produce it. I like stories, but not everyone has a good story to tell. When the story is AI-generated, there isn't a consciousness behind it to give it the passion required for good stories.
I'm not sure either way on this. Possibly a simultaneous agree-and-disagree?
I agree that art may be a "peacock's tail" where the difficulty is the point, and making it cheap makes it cease to be art. In this case, some hypothetical AI which everyone agrees is totally conscious and also that it creates works of exquisite and sublime wonder, still won't be "art".
But the other view of art is that it may also be simply "nice stuff"; if so, then the ability to discern good art from bad art is sufficient, even if you regard an LLM as little more than "fancy autocomplete" — it doesn't need consciousness* of its own, the consciousness of the user is sufficient.
I suspect there's a lot of people in both groups.
* by whichever of the many meanings you intend for that
But I think that telling people to do a good job "on their own time," kinda sums up the zeitgeist of today's tech industry.
https://littlegreenviper.com/art/Cavalier.png
https://littlegreenviper.com/art/Chat.png
https://littlegreenviper.com/art/DragonRider.png
https://littlegreenviper.com/art/Dragonstar.png
https://littlegreenviper.com/art/Elric.png
https://littlegreenviper.com/art/Fugitive.png
https://littlegreenviper.com/art/Gym.png
https://littlegreenviper.com/art/Island.png
https://littlegreenviper.com/art/Olympus.png
https://littlegreenviper.com/art/Seer.png
https://littlegreenviper.com/art/Sentinels.png
https://littlegreenviper.com/art/Skeletor.png
https://littlegreenviper.com/art/Tarsus.png
https://littlegreenviper.com/art/Tigress.png
Companies can and will do whatever they want.
However, on the level of the individual, I see no reason why profit-seeking should overrule my passion. I don't code to make money, I code because I love doing it. I make money to allow myself to engage in an activity I find rewarding, I don't engage in that activity to make money.
If that activity is no longer rewarding, there is no amount of money that can compensate for that.
Perhaps you're right, and that the future has no place for people like me. We'll see. Regardless, though, I'm not going to participate (either as a dev or as a customer) with processes that dehumanize people to such a degree.
I am retired. I didn't want to be retired, but I was told that I'm too old (I was 55, when I retired in 2017) to be playing at programmer; that it's a young man's game, and I should just go and carve decoy ducks in my garage or something.
Fortunately, I had enough set aside, that I was able to just accept that no one wants to play in my sandbox, and work on my own. The scope is more humble, but I am absolutely thrilled with the work that I do, and so are the folks that benefit from it (I tend to write stuff for people that can't afford the kind of stuff I write).
Money isn't everything, but I suspect a lot of folks don't realize that, until it's way too late.
Maybe you were ready to retire anyway so this doesn't matter -- but you shouldn't believe what you were told on this matter. There are tons of software engineering positions where being on the older end of things isn't considered a handicap.
I'm pushing 60 and find there is plenty of opportunity. About half of the engineers I've worked with over the last 30 years or so have been over 40, many over 50. I have a coworker on my team right now who is one of the best devs I've worked with and is 73.
Some folks actually seem to be offended that "olds" are doing it (I've been writing Swift since the day it was announced, and have released over 20 apps with it -all on my own time. My paid gig never wanted that stuff).
I ran a C++ shop, with really experienced engineers. They were all able to get jobs, after our department was dissolved, but it took them years, and at least one of them keeps getting laid off, every two years or so.
I used to say "My dream is to be coding for free."
Livin' the dream, baby!
[EDITED TO ADD] I think that I was ready to retire, but had no idea, until I was pushed out of the nest. I was REALLY pissed off, for a while, at the way that I was treated, but, in the aggregate, it has been the best thing that ever happened to me.
Ahh, that makes sense. There are subcultures within the industry that are very bigoted about age. Fortunately, they aren't representative of the entire spectrum of the industry.
> Livin' the dream, baby!
Excellent! That's what we're all striving for, I think (although we all have different dreams). Keep it up!
Then keep doing it.
No amount of generative AI will stop you from writing your own code.
I think it will be a long time before AI produces code of such quality and correctness that I'd give it a passing grade in a college-level CS/programming course.
One thing I give it credit for, it will confidently spit out code when you ask it, often code that works, but it's pretty terrible code.
As someone else has mentioned, just because weavers were/are passionate about what they do, that doesn't mean people shouldn't have been allowed to invent the loom + mass production techniques for clothing. Everyone on the planet has benefited mightily from this, and there are other similar examples.
Maybe there are restrictions that should be enforced to prevent this in some cases, or curtail it to some degree. There's likely not a one size fits all rule, and a lot of it is determined as net-good or net-bad in hindsight.
And yes, even a hobbiest has the right to make money off their work.
I won't comment on any of the potential legal differences between AI being trained on an artists work without their knowledge versus Jacquard studying hand-made clothmaking techniques. It's certainly something that needs careful consideration.
The obsession that everything must go in a financial box or be relegated to the increasingly diminished "free time" available to oneself is a cancer that is destroying our society.
Things that are profitable =/= things that have value to people. They often coincide but it is not a direct correlation. Tons of things that make absolutely unethical amounts of profit have zero value to society. Conversely some of the most valuable things in human experience have zero monetization, in practice or theory.
Money is not everything.
What's your TC?
Ding ding ding.
I think that we're already experiencing all the downsides of having AI-generated content. Look at high-budget movies - they're completely bland, tell nothing, they're only optimized for getting money out of average uneducated customer. Ubisoft is known for making all games according to same template that works and makes money. Mobile gaming lasted three entire months before it was overtaken by those profit-driven.
Some time ago I went to an expensive concert, and I realized... those guys got loaded by playing literally the same songs they've been playing for twenty years. They found the golden formula and they keep on riding it.
Turning to AI only cuts the middle man.
I turned towards independent creators because those guys have a passion and want to share it. So not all hope is lost. It's just that true artists are going to be the minority, just like they always were, while the rest will keep slurping up the commercial slop, just like they always have.
Law hasn't even evolved either. What if in the future people bring special tradecraft to companies that they don't want leaking elsewhere? who knows. the door is still open.
How do we know this?
I don't think corporate programmers are obsolete. How will a sophisticated AI programmer in the future be any different than a human programmer in an outsourcing firm?
I do, constantly. In large swaths of software engineering, RAM and other resources are still scarce enough to require careful consideration in their use.
The laws did not anticipate AI models hoovering up all known IP without any permission from or compensation to its creators, but that does not mean that we cannot correct that and it does not mean those creators cannot or should not be able to assert rights and be compensated for violations.
No one becomes an artist except because of passion for the work. It sure as hell isn’t for the money. That’s not so universally true in Silicon Valley, and I’m guessing you’re one of those people who views their job mostly as a means to fund the rest of their lifestyle.
Go to North Korea if you want a country with little capitalism.