Did cameras devalue the work of portrait artists?
ATMs to bank tellers? Tractor to farmer? Car to horses?
Again, it's technology. I guess I shouldn't have said I never heard an argument. I just never heard a good one that can't be applied to pretty much any other technology that came before.
In all your examples -
1) Yes. It was a good thing
2) Yes. It is now a thing done to learn how to draw, and a niche skill
3) Yes, yes, yes.
IF people are bemoaning the devaluing of certain activity, yup it’s true. It happens. There are fewer horses than there were yesterday.
Certain forms of activity get devalued. They are replaced by an alternative that creates surplus. But life goes on to bigger things.
The same with GenAI. Content is increasingly easy to create at scale. This reduced cost of production applies for both useful content and pollution.
Except if finding valid information is made harder, - then life becomes more complex and we don’t go on to bigger and better things.
The abundance of fabricated content which is indistinguishable from authentic content means that authentic content is devalued, and that any content consumed must now wait before it is verified.
It increases the cost of trusting information, which reduces the overall value of the network. It’s like the cost of lemons for used cars.
This is the looming problem. Hopefully something appears that mitigates the worst case scenarios, however the medium case and even bad case are well and truly alive.
I’m concerned with facts and science.
I have to talk past a litany of falsehoods about mental health with my dad before I can get to the actual science that will help him.
I have to remind people about things they studied in the 6th grade about history, to counter whatever hate group BS that has whatsapped itself into their heads.
This is what I am concerned about.
If it was cheaper to create true content, and more expensive to create non factual content, I wouldn’t be arguing about this with people who write code.
It’s just cheaper to create content and more expensive to identify content.
This isn't just a net win, this puts power in my hand I've never had before.
It's still work and art. No LLM is going to make a compelling story or make the right artistic choices. I do that. But now I get to control way more myself and I'm empowered to see the entire vision though.
This generative stuff feels reductive to me. There are no actors, no set designers, prop masters, musicians. Nobody’s bouncing ideas off a colleague or working with three other departments to bring a scene together. It feels less like art when it’s a computer using models based on real stolen art to generate content off of a prompt.
is this a good thing? to some extent sure but I feel like limitations and collaboration leads to better art in many instances
You are not, the LLM makes bulk of work for you and will choose a lot of things for you for the movie you are making.
>I'm empowered to see the entire vision though.
I think you fail to grasp one important thing about art in general - it is non-verbal by it's nature. You can't go and explain in LLM input some famous painting, it not how it works.
It’s definitely different. And has some bad sides for sure. But professionals using LLMs for creative work tends to be a lot more involved than just typing a prompt.
> You can't go and explain in LLM input some famous painting, it not how it works.
When directing a film, you're issuing verbal commands to your team. It's actually quite similar to prompting. And I almost never get what I envision. Diffusion in a way gets me closer to what's in my head.
You make it sound like producing art isn’t a real job and artists are just fucking around all day. Art takes work, it is a job. One where few can earn a living.
Most artists already have “day jobs like the rest of us”. What’s happening now is that even fewer people can afford to even begin to learn or improve their artistry, they have to give up before they start. Which, by the way, will in turn reduce what image generators can consume.
It's a double edged sword, having what you love be tied to a wage. Capitalism mediates the scope of what you are allowed to depict. Market forces have created a scenario where existing IP is a safer bet. Just get out of the game. It rarely produces anything worthwhile anyway. Most art is garbage in this system. Better to do independent things on the side.
Actually yes.
Ask any professional photographer what they think of the selfie generation.
Yes, you can argue "the best camera is the one you have with you".
But ultimatley it has devalued the value of the professional photographer.
I know photographers who, for example, spend their life swatting away phone camera users who turn up behind them at the spot where they've setup their camera etc. Its like, I've taken the time to find the spot, the angle, the light and you turn up and devalue all that....
Have you ever seen those “graphic design is my passion” memes? That’s a good analogy. Effective graphic design isn’t just plastering some words on a page, it’s understanding where those words go, where to break the lines, which font to use, what background is balanced… All things the tool doesn’t do for you but that affect the final result and how it’s perceived at a subconscious level. There is a difference between a good and a bad poster. Even if both have the same information, one of them will be better at its job (e.g. making people pay attention and pay for the concert ticket) even if the bad designer doesn’t understand what or why.
I expect there will be AI based art, not sure in which form, and people will still find joy in it.
There’s plenty of visually impressive AI art out there right now. No one is celebrating it.
I didn’t mean to imply artists don’t use technology. And certainly include photography in my definition of things made by the hands and minds of craft people. I have a degree in photography to back that up. But as with all technologies individuals will choose where their line of interest is drawn. There will be AI based art, and their will also be an audience who don’t want it.
The thing is, as was the case with many goods where individual craftspeople were largely displaced by industrialized mass production, the expression of the individual artist or craftsperson was often not what the market was paying for anyway. They were paying for something utilitarian, but limited by the available methods of production.
I specifically use market value because the market valuation mechanism is irrational and its meaning of "value" is different from what people often mean when they talk about value. E.g. the contributions of a fireman are far more valuable to a society than those of a mutual fund manager, but the market value of the fireman's labor is far lower.
Anyway I don't know when it'll happen but the cost of doing many things with AI, automation, etc will soon be very low, and having a human do the thing maybe worse maybe better, will be prohibitively expensive. Even if you argue that in the past new technologies have created new jobs, one can look at the labor market value trend of the last 70 years to see that it seems we've passed some turning point where human labor market value in emerging skillsets can't surpass the ability of technology to make them redundant - by which I mean take a look at them wages, they are slip sliding into oblivion.
Maybe not all jobs, but if even 20% of people can't justify their existence under capitalism with labor in a way that feeds and houses them, that's a historic national crisis.
Stopping technological development probably isn't the long term solution. Unions are great but also just a bandaid on a broken system - don't we want to enjoy the benefits of decreased scarcity?
It's time to start having real conversations about how to organize our society as scarcity diminishes to near 0, or if you don't like that, how to organize our societies with the expectation that 20% of people or more simply won't be able to justify their existence through labor.
If you can think of a way to make capitalism work in such a way without enforcing artificial scarcity, I'm all ears, but I'm skeptical. Probably we need to stop requiring people to justify their existence with labor and just let people have food, shelter, medical care etc in return for nothing at all. We almost certainly already have the resources to allow this, and if we don't today we definitely will in 50 years.