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Comment by gizmo | Hacker News Reader

AI writing is pretty bad, AI code is pretty bad, AI art is pretty bad. We all know this. But it's easy to forget how many new opportunities open up when something becomes 100x or 10000x cheaper. Things that are 10x worse but 100x cheaper are still extremely valuable. It's the relentless drive to making things cheaper, even at the expense of quality, that has made our high quality of life possible.

You can make houses by hand out of beautiful hardwood with complex joinery. Houses built by expert craftsmen are easily 10x better than the typical house built today. But what difference does that make when practically nobody can afford it? Just like nobody can afford to have a 24/7 tutor that speaks every language, can help you with your job, grammar check your work, etc.

AI slop is cheap and cheapness changes everything.

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Why do we need art to be 10000x cheaper? There was already more than enough art being produced. Now we just have infinite waves of slop drowning out everything that’s actually good.

For the same reason we don't want art to be 10,000x times more expensive? Cf. status quo bias etc.

A toddler's crayon art doesn't end up in the Louvre, nor does AI slop. Most art is bad art and it's been this way since the dawn of humanity. For as long as we can distinguish good art from bad art we can curate and there is nothing to worry about.

That's just the problem -- you can't.

Not because you can't distinguish between _one_ bad piece and _one_ good piece, but because there is so much production capacity that no human will ever be able to look at most of it.

And it's not just the AI stuff that will suffer here, all of it goes into the same pool, and humans sample from that pool (using various methodologies). At some point the pool becomes mostly urine.

My email inbox is already 99% spam (urine) and I don't see any of it. The bottom line is that if a human can easily recognize AI spam then so can another AI. This has always been an arms race with spammers on one side and curators on the other. No reason to assume spammers will start winning when they have been losing for decades.

The spammers have been given a tool that’s capable of higher quality at much higher volumes.

If nothing else, it’s now much more feasible for them to be successful by sheer force of drowning out any “worthwhile” material.

This is spoken by someone who doesn't know about the huge volume of mediocre work output by art students and hobbyists. Much of it is technically decent (like AI work), but lacking in meaning, impact, and emotional resonance (like AI work). You could find millions of hand drawn portraits of Keauna Reeves on Reddit before AI ever existed.

I am not seeing the problem here.

Why does any human have to look at any art in your problem statement?

What even is "bad art" or "good art" ? Art is art, there is no classifier. Certain art works might have mass appeal or something, but I don't really think it can be put into boxes like that.

> Now we just have infinite waves of slop drowning out everything that’s actually good

On the contrary. Slop makes the good stuff stand out.

Needles in haystacks.

I don't think that applies to the arts

It does, since you have only a finite amount of time to look at art during the day. Is it equally easy to find good art (for whatever definition of "good" you choose to have) if 5 out of 100 images you see in a day are generated by AI, than if 95 out of 100 are?

Back to my original point; slop makes the good stuff stand out

Ok, but, like, imagine you are a fantastic artist, there's 100 paintings, most bland as fuck, and yours is the only one that looks good. Great, people who view 100 paintings will see yours and marvel at your skill.

Now, we have AI. Yours is still the only good one, but there are now 100,000 paintings.

How likely is it that your painting is still recognised as good, by someone who looks at 100 out of 100,000 of those paintings at random?

It doesn't matter that your painting is good, the discovery mechanism is shot to bits.

How are you discovering art? What discovery mechanisms are you utilizing?

What mechanism exists that deals with this? Even if I say something like my local art gallery that just shifts the burden of wading through 100k paintings to them away from me, an they still won't be able to sift through them all.

This is mixing up two meanings of "art". Mona Lisa doesn't need to be 10000x cheaper.

Random illustration on a random blog post sure could.

Art as an evocative expression of the artist shouldn't be cheapened. But those freelancers churning content on Fiverr aren't pouring their soul into it.

I absolutely hate AI illustrations on the top of blog posts. I'd rather see nothing.

Yeah the low effort / gratuitous ones (either AI or stock) are jarring.

I sometimes put up the hero image on my blog posts if I feel it makes sense, for example: https://blog.senko.net/learn-ai (stock photo, ai-generated or none if I don't have an idea for a visualization that adds to the content)

True, but you need to play the game of including the slop to create the share cards for social media link previews.

A strange game - the only winning move is not to play.

Of blogger feels a strong need to add slop anywhere on their article, then their blog isn't worth my time.

AI is really good at automating away shit we didn’t need to do to begin with, but for some stupid reason were doing anyway.

Ghost writing rich people’s vanity/self-marketing trash business or self-help books (you would not believe how many of these are written every year). Images (and prose) for internal company department newsletters that almost nobody reads.

Great at that crap—because it doesn’t matter anyway.

Whether making it far cheaper to produce things with no or negative value (spam, astroturf, scams) is a good idea… well no, it’s obviously terrible. It’d (kinda) be good if demand for such things remained the same, but it won’t, so it’s really, really bad.

The bigger problem is that we as a species get used to subpar things quickly. My dad's bicycle some 35 years ago was built like a tank. That thing never broke down and took enormous amounts of abuse and still kept going and going. Same with most stuff my family owned, when I was a kid.

Today, nearly anything I buy breaks in a year or two, is of poor quality and depressing to use. This is by design, of course. Just as we got used to cheap household items, bland buildings (there is just nothing artistic about modern houses or commercial buildings) etc, we will also get used to shitty movies, shitty fiction etc (we are well on our way).

Could not agree more. The marketing for "AI" would have you believe it's a qualitative shift when it's really a quantitative shift.

One think to check about higher quality stuff in the past is how much it cost vs the average wage.

You might be comparing a $100 bike from Walmart with something that cost the equivalent of $600

Information is not like physical products if you ask me. When the information is wrong, it's value flips from positive to negative. You might be paying less for progress, but you are not progressing slower, you are progressing in the wrong direction.

I think that your post misses the point that making something cheaper by stealing it is unethical.

You're presenting AI as if it's some new way of producing value but it simply isn't. All the value here was produced by humans without the help of AI: the only "innovation" AI has offered is making the theft of that value untraceable.

> You can make houses by hand out of beautiful hardwood with complex joinery. Houses built by expert craftsmen are easily 10x better than the typical house built today. But what difference does that make when practically nobody can afford it? Just like nobody can afford to have a 24/7 tutor that speaks every language, can help you with your job, grammar check your work, etc.

Let's take this analogy to its logical conclusion: would you have any objections if all the houses ever built by expert craftsmen were given free of charge to a few corporations, with no payment to the current owners or the expert craftsmen themselves, and then then those corporations began renting them out as AirBnBs? That's basically what you're proposing.

They are not even that bad anymore to be honest.

The thing is, right now it is artificially cheaper. It is being heavily subsidized by all providers in a race to capture market share. It simply cannot stay this cheap forever at current costs.

Now, if costs change then we have a new story. But that is not guaranteed.

>You can make houses by hand out of beautiful hardwood with complex joinery.

We've logged an enormous amount of the old-growth hardwood forests the planet had doing this (and also shipbuilding). We literally don't have access to the same materials anymore.

And it will get a lot better quickly. Ten years from now it will not be slop.

Or it will all be slop as there us no non-slop data to train on anymore

No, I don't think that's true. What will instead happen is there will be expert humans or teams of them, intentionally training AI brains rather than expecting wonders to occur just by turning the training loose on random hoovered-up data.

Brainmaker will be a valued human skill, and people will be trying to work out how to train AI to do that, in turn.

Not sure about that. Stable Diffusion came out a bit over 2 years ago. I'm not sure that Stable Diffusion 3's, or Flux's, output is artistically _better_ than the original; it's better at following directions, and better at avoiding the most grotesque errors, but if anything it perhaps looks even _more_ generic and same-y than the original Stable Diffusion output. There's a very distinctive AI _look_ which seems to have somehow synced up between Dalle, Midjourney, SD3 and others.

You can generate AI images that do not have the "AI look":

https://ideogram.ai/assets/image/lossless/response/icQM0yZQQ...

And it's been two years since SD v1, a model that was not able to generate faces well, and it only output blurry 512x512 1:1 image without further finetuning, I tested v1.5 a few minutes ago and it's worse than I remember.

how does this make our high quality of life possible when everything's quality is being reduced?

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