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Comment by overfeed | Hacker News Reader

What cheapens the experience is the insistence of being called a "mountaineer" when a helicopter dropped you at the peak. This goes for "AI artists" and "astronauts" on commercial launches who glom on to unearned titles whose prestige was forged by countless professionals working very hard.

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I think people who are using these models and trying to claim they are artists for clout are not a very large group. Have you really seen a significant number of people doing this? Otherwise it just feels like you're nutpicking

Tale as old as time... today's "bakers" are nothing like the bakers of 100 years ago. With their digital temperature gauges, global recipe and ingredient sourcing, cold storage, and more advanced food science.

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.

I actually disagree completely. Mastering the piano is different from mastering digital synthesis no doubt, but there are also distinctive commonalities that make and mark a master in both. A disproportionate investment of time or the effortlessness with which one can generate sounds imagined or perceived, as though the machine were a part of one’s own body, are attributes shared by both. Certainly someone could spend thousands of hours mastering different digital synthesis techniques, and I don’t think that’s easier than mastering the piano. There’s a fundamental competitive aspect to things like music that keeps mastery difficult to attain. If it weren’t difficult then it wouldn’t be as valuable and scarce. Once things become common and accessible, they quickly become boring and new genres are invented.

People thought "canned music" (aka prerecorded music) would be the death of music, and art in general

>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...

It kinda was the death of music - reasonably-skilled musicians used to make money performing live, and now they can't. The market got eaten up by recordings of really good artists, who, ironically, treat music more as industry than art.

Such is technological progress.

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.

Technological progress does not directly result in posers. As you noted, smartphones allowed anyone to record videos, but I'm yet to see any influencer or YouTuber call themselves a director or cinematographer.

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.

> I'm yet to see any influencer or YouTuber call themselves a director or cinematographer

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.

Also look at the production quality that a single person can achieve today.

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.

> As you noted, smartphones allowed anyone to record videos,

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...

Not everyone who engages in AI-assisted creative work is patting themselves on the back and being tone deaf and denigrating people that actually have creative skill... but some certainly are. While I don't support a moral absolutism when it comes to the use of GenAI, I do support putting these idiots in their place.

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