I think it’s more like people want to enjoy the view without having to learn how to climb, which is a perfectly reasonable thing to want, even if it cheapens the experience somewhat.
It’s not a moral judgement, that’s just how humans are wired. The lows make the highs higher.
I can imagine AI art having a similar effect (creating a glut of images/logos/whatever that devalues ones made with care) but am hopeful that we'll get better at filtering the cream of the crop. In 5 years tons of things will have AI logos that would have been made by a graphic designer (or simply not made) in the past. That sucks for graphic designers who are out of a job, is good for people who get cheaper logos, and TBD for overall society who now has lots more "custom" logos etc to wade through.
Obviously having roads is a great boon to a park's accessibility, and the ability of people with different mobility needs to appreciate nature. But it also made me thoughtful to imagine the feeling of wonder at seeing bridalveil fall after hiking for days into a roadless yosemite valley; how much more special and impressive it would seem after that journey?
This metaphorical tangent is pretty far removed from the original discussion, but how do you weigh the accessibility of a thing against how that accessibility changes its nature?
This is such an old man “I used to walk uphill both ways” take.
Not everybody has the TIME COST to pursue being an expert in art or code or whatever. But if they have an amazing idea and can now use AI to produce the idea then that is a beautiful thing!
For example: Having an idea for a cartoon used to be a dead end. It would die in your head because most people cannot stop their life and dedicate a substantial amount of time, effort, and sacrifice to produce the single cartoon idea.
This kind of mentality would ban Star Trek replicators, should they be invented one day. "In my day, you had to actually make things, we didn't get to replicate them, so we shouldn't, even if it's possible!"
What's the point in having an idea for a cartoon in your head if an LLM can just write an infinite amount of cartoon ideas in a heartbeat, and probably a better one than you came up with.
But drawning a cartoon isn't very challenging. Most of my peers could draw someone from South Park in a junior school.
The hardship in making cartoons is the amount of choices you need to make and the amount of knowledge how those choices would impact a viewer. If you delegate all of that, the cartoon wouldn't be simply blunt, it would be self-contradicting. And we already had a way of making cartoons, that allow your writing to shine through bland animation – since flash, actually. It might actually be even faster then using generative AI
AI generated images are only an extension of what e.g. photography has experienced in the last decades. We’ve had film cameras, then digital cameras, then smartphones, each of these commoditized image creation by a then-unthinkable factor.
It’s an ongoing process, even if this leap seems especially big.
I suspect the wannabees exist in the narrow window when technology has expanded enough for non-professionals, but hasn't seen wide enough adoption that the man on the street will recognize the pretentious self-aggrandizement.
You must not be looking very hard. There are many youtubers or influencers making indie films or shows.
NigaHiga, Annoying Orange and Shane Dawson all made movies. Freddie Wong started out as a Youtuber and created Video Game High School.
Go to Amazon and drop a few grand on mics, lights, cameras and lenses. The result is production quality beating any 90s talk show, which would have taken a whole team to do.
No, I was talking about photography - and people replacing a digital camera with a smartphone. For most this substitution works very well; and the whole digital camera industry has shrunk significantly[1].
The photography community has been discussing wannabe photographers ever since my uncle bought a dslr and started taking photos at family weddings.
[1]: https://petapixel.com/2024/08/22/the-rise-and-crash-of-the-c...
Today's musicians have far greater access to lessons, recording equipment, inspirational material than 100 years ago.
Mountain biking (80s single speed with no gears, suspension, etc.) versus modern e-bikes with radial tires and hydraulic brakes.
Who cares? Value your own experience as you do. The less we all think about prestige, the more it will go away.
>The time is coming fast when the only living thing around a motion picture house will be the person who sells you your ticket. Everything else will be mechanical. Canned drama, canned music, canned vaudeville. We think the public will tire of mechanical music and will want the real thing. We are not against scientific development of any kind, but it must not come at the expense of art. We are not opposing industrial progress. We are not even opposing mechanical music except where it is used as a profiteering instrument for artistic debasement.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/musicians-wage-war-ag...
The trouble with things like climbing is there are only so many mountains to go around. We already can't walk in many places because of cars. I don't look forward to the day that similar vehicles can go up mountains. The existence of mass-produced clothing doesn't affect your ability to do your own knitting, though.
> The trouble with things like climbing is there are only so many mountains to go around.
This is taking the metaphor far too far. Nobody is literally taking mountains away from people.
There's a big gap between "pretty much nobody" and the reality, which is somewhere between one third and two thirds of everybody. You might want to reflect on exactly how your perception diverged so radically from reality.
Do people in cities suffer from not being able to grow their own food and make their own clothes? I don't know for sure, but official statistics claim that, even today, they commit suicide at much higher rates despite having much less material scarcity. Robinsonades have been a popular genre of fiction for centuries, suggesting that people long for that kind of autonomy. Today, we also have zombie apocalypse fiction, RPGs, and preppers.
From another angle, sports consist entirely of skills and challenges which aren't needed and never have been, suggesting that they don't get forgotten. Hobbies also consist of skills and challenges which aren't needed.
It's not about climbing.
is it a net negative to society if the average person could produce so much art that it becomes post-scarce?
It is enshittification.
Tangentially, what does enshittification mean now? Quoting Wiktionary, at one point it meant "The phenomenon of online platforms gradually degrading the quality of their services, often by promoting advertisements and sponsored content, in order to increase profits" (coined by Doctorow), but now people seem to use it to mean... things becoming shit?
You could argue this is the very sort of activity they were criticising when they posted! We are all vulnerable.
> Second: the fact that a neologism is sometimes decoupled from its theoretical underpinnings and is used colloquially is a feature, not a bug. Many people apply the term "enshittification" very loosely indeed, to mean "something that is bad," without bothering to learn – or apply – the theoretical framework. This is good. This is what it means for a term to enter the lexicon: it takes on a life of its own. If 10,000,000 people use "enshittification" loosely and inspire 10% of their number to look up the longer, more theoretical work I've done on it, that is one million normies who have been sucked into a discourse that used to live exclusively in the world of the most wonkish and obscure practitioners. The only way to maintain a precise, theoretically grounded use of a term is to confine its usage to a small group of largely irrelevant insiders. Policing the use of "enshittification" is worse than a self-limiting move – it would be a self-inflicted wound.
We have no right to tell people they have to learn to climb to get to top of the Everest.
I can't draw but I want to create my Art using AI. What I now see is a bunch of people who associate their self worth with a rare talent and don't want others to join the party. I want to resolve the issues around copyright for training, but once this is out of the way I want to draw exclusively through AI because it's the only way I can do it. And I LIKE IT.
I'm a skilled pianist. The funny thing is that I heard similar criticisms about computer music a couple decades ago. "No playing skill needed". Despite knowing how to play, I'd rather do computer music nowadays anyway. Please stop telling me what I can and can't do!
Computer music, as it existed a couple decades ago, still played exactly what you asked it to, and it wasn't filling areas where you underspecified the music with a statistical model of trillions of existing songs. And that's the difference, for me: the ability to underspecify, and have the details be filled in and added in a way that to the audience will be perceived as intentful, but which is not.
Whether drawing (writing etc.) through AI counts as drawing (as making art) is a debate we have to resolve in the upcoming future.
As soon as we get more control over AI output, those arguments will finally die their well deserved death
To those that AI art offend: don't think of people as artists, but simply as art directors dealing with stubborn artists that won't ever work to spec
Dismissing the argument that we are losing something in this "democratization of creativity" by fighting a strawman that says you are not allowed to participate instead is a bit lazy
My, my, you really took the worst example to defend your point. The Everest is now an overcrowded dumping ground full of cadavers, shit and trash, with idiots putting not only themselves but their sherpas and other mountaineers in danger due to their arrogance, lack of ability and shittiness.
>What I now see is a bunch of people who associate their self worth with a rare talent and don't want others to join the party.
What I see is a bunch of people creating digital doubles of existing artists without their consent and using it to make money.
>Please stop telling me what I can and can't do!
Oh the irony...
You're just not shallow in the parts of reality that you care about.
Don't feel superior for you are not.
Unlike many, I am not going to follow along into caricatural post-modernism where nothing is good, nothing is bad anymore.
Explain to me why nihilism is factually incorrect?
Good and bad is all relative to the perceiver.
Code is a way of creating something that itself may or may not be good. But the actual code - I agree, it can be objectively bad.
The Nihilism concept, as I mean to use it here, is more about meaning, values, aesthetics. Concepts like Logic & Math, not so much.