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Comment by BoorishBears | Hacker News Reader

I think it's interesting how this always gets framed as reducing the number of creators.

I run an AI storytelling site with thousands of users and by most measures I wouldn't say it writes better than a practiced human, but what it does do is allow would-be consumers to become their own creators.

Some users spend $100+ dollars a month, not because it writes 10x better content than what a $10 Kindle unlimited subscription offers, but because even at 50% the quality they'd rather have the story they wanted to tell but didn't exist elsewhere.

For me AI art is not about replacing creators: it's about letting users go from passively consuming content made by people who have skills, time, and/or resources they lack to actively creating what they want to see in the world.

I'm not sure how compatible being against the democratization of creation really is with the narrative of defending the arts.

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That’s it and with every invention the percentage stays the same 90% consume and 10% create. The insane amount that gets put into options of image models to create the maximum amount of images per hour is the dumbest approach possible for the technology at hand. Nobody is there that wants to consume it.

The reason why I'm personally convinced that generative AI for creative output will be bigger than any of the "PhD level agents" everyone is chasing is that gen AI can finally change "90% consume and 10% create", by changing what it means to consume.

People assume my storytelling tool is for writers because until relatively recently there was no other option: you couldn't make a writing tool for readers who only want to read, or a photography tool for viewers who only want to view, or a music tool for people who only want to listen.

But we're getting closer to tooling that makes it so frictionless to create, that you can insert the creation process in the consumption process, essentially turning it into curation.

Next week Gemini Flash comes out and we're going to have access to the first publicly available image model that can edit images with as much nuance and understanding as current SOTA LLMs do for text.

Everyone is focused on a possible plateau in intelligence, but steerability is the key for creative output, and there are so many angles to attack it from that we're at the infancy of what generative AI can do for creative output.

I recently got hit up out of nowhere by somoene who was like i'll pay you to storyboard a music video of a famous dead rapper. Think tupac hologram but somehow even worse in terms of digging someone up from the grave. I was like ok sure why not, I know this generative AI stuff. Got paid like a hundred bucks to start on this storyboard.

Thing is the story was so fucking stupid that I stopped after generating one image. They probably didn't make the story itself with AI but it sure was ridiculous, I basically quit as soon as they asked me to somehow include a bunch of jailed celebrities like diddy into the next storyboard image, getting out of it saying that it went against my legal capabilities to include real living people.

I hope you realize that some people with millions of dollars just have really head ass ideas they're going to put through your thing and things are going to get weirder sooner as a result. Like that idea would have ended at the drawing board with a bunch of people talking each other down from it not that long ago but now it's basically like that WKUK sketch about a grape out here [1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mqgiEQXGetI

Side question, what percentage of your clientele has NSFW usecases?

> Some users spend $100+ dollars a month

IMO the real interesting questions your post brings up are:

- what kind of labor is the $100 your users are spending coming from

- where would these $100 have gone before your product existed

- where do these $100 go once they change hands from users to you

There are many answers, not a single answer, to these questions, but I think they're worth considering.

In a previous life I worked for a startup where, getting to know our users, I realized that if you broke it down the revenue was essentially money being funneled from hourly-wage workers to venture capitalists, which was a sobering realization.

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