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Comment by cruzcampo | Hacker News Reader

AI does feel like it sucks the joy out of any human creative endavour by replacing it with effortless, good enough slop.

Why try to engage in the arts when you won't be able to make a living as illustrator or musician because AI slop is good enough to feed the capital machine?

Why try to engage in engineering quality software when the power structure has decided that you better be using AI for it?

Why do anything that makes us think or exhibit any human qualities when it's not the most cost effective way in our lovely capitalist AI dystopia?

All that's going to be left for humans is going to be shitty manual labor that nobody wants to do - sweatshops coming back to the US again soon thanks to the Trump tarrifs! All the intellectually or creatively stimulating work is going away, sacrificed to the machine at the altar of mammon.

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If anyone has been going in to art for the commercial opportunities then someone needs to sit them down and explain how bad a strategy that is. Art is a recreational activity that happens to involve money sometimes. Besides, I don't care how good the AI is it can't make a $100 million equivalent to Blue Poles. People are clearly paying for the connection with the human artist rather than the quality of the art.

> Why try to engage in engineering quality software when the power structure has decided that you better be using AI for it?

Why engage in engineering quality software? The reasons haven't changed because AI exists. AI just adds new ways of achieving high quality software outcomes.

I don't mind admitting that I spent a lot of my childhood really annoyed at all the people who seemed to just be smarter than me and there was no clear way to catch up. It is a lot less fair than physical fitness where I could at least train more. Levelling that playing field somewhat is long overdue and - for most people - going to be quite a welcome change.

The reasons have changed. https://x.com/eugeneyan/status/1917034784355979479/photo/1

Our capitalist overlords don't want us to write quality software anymore. They want cheap, disposable AI slop.

Chess has been mastered by computers long ago, and yet people still play it.

Work is not the same as leisure.

horse riding has been obsolete as a primary mode of transportation, yet still people ride horses for fun.

But a computer still can't predict all moves, because the number of possible moves exceeds the number of atoms in the visible universe. This fact still blows my mind.

"Why try to engage in the arts if you won't make money" is perhaps the most capitalist dystopian statement I've read the whole year.

I sing with my friends regularly. I'm not expecting to ever get paid a dime.

That is the capitalist dystopia we live in. I don't like it either. If we lived in a post-capitalist society, AI wouldn't be the threat it is.

Precisely. The percentage of people making a living from their creative pursuit is vanishingly small.

We should be looking to move that number up, not down.

I don’t think they mean “getting rich,” they mean “enough to get by”.

Many art forms can and should require more time and investment than simply getting together with friends a couple of times a month.

Even then, for some people getting enough free time to do that is a struggle. They need to monetise their spare time by working second jobs, and so on, instead of pursuing art.

"Enough to get by" is still a variant of "make money"

Have people forgotten how enjoyable dancing, painting, making music or any of the other arts are, even if you don't get paid a penny

But if you don't get paid a penny, unless you're born into wealth, you will need to do some other endavour for most of your day if you don't want to starve. The point is that all that's going to be left to do to prevent starvation is the crappiest jobs - all the enjoyable ones are being automated away.

> all the enjoyable ones are being automated away.

You keep asserting this but I have to say that I don’t know that to be true.

Can you explain a little more concretely why you draw this conclusion?

Well I can only speak for myself, but my interest in poetry (which was non-existent) has spiked thanks to AI responding to random questions on poetry. To the point now, I spend sometime everyday thinking about poems, writing little notes to people and experiencing some real connection over it.

The dream of many (if not most) people here on Hacker News has always seemed to eventually leave tech and work with their hands. AI will just get us there sooner for many professions.

True, it's a cliche but it's my dream also.

Except the dream includes first using a tech salary to pay off a mortgage or at least most of it, and then being able to comfortably work with my hands in some romantic artisanal manner.

AI probably gets me closer to spending 60 hours a week doing back breaking groundwork and struggling to pay the bills.

https://smbc-comics.com/comic/sad-2

> good-enough slop

It isn't nearly good enough, as far as I can tell.

Systems that nobody understands because nobody wrote them are unsafe, unmaintainable, and brittle.

Art generated by AI can't be copyrighted so its use can't be controlled.

> Why do anything that makes us think or exhibit any human qualities when it's not the most cost effective way in our lovely capitalist AI dystopia?

If the most optimistic reasonable projections of the AI optimists are true, the decay of human capability by itself among people who rely on AI will be so damaging that those who don't rely on it will become more valuable on the labor market.

If the most optimistic projections aren't correct, then in all likelihood these will continue to be simple tools that nobody should use for anything serious.

And apart from market/labor dynamics, I have seen no evidence that those who shun the use of AI tools are worse off for it (quite the contrary), so the spread of these tools should, if the current tend continues, actually become a rallying cry for and proof of the value of human work and the intrinsicness and necessity of our participation in the worlds we make for ourselves.

The longer the hype continues, the surer I am that it won't replace humans.

> Why try to engage in the arts ... Why try to engage in engineering quality software

Try applying your questions to other areas. Why engage in the study of philosophy, or history, or ancient languages, when barely anything of use ever comes out of it? For that matter, why engage in the study of the sciences, when you are statistically very unlikely to make a significant contribution. Why engage in the sports, if you almost certainly won't become an Olympic champion, and quite likely not even a professional sportsman? Why work in geriatrics or palliative care when your patients will keep dying?..

There are things that we do for fun, or for personal fulfilment, or just because...

> Why do anything that makes us think or exhibit any human qualities when it's not the most cost effective way in our lovely capitalist AI dystopia? ... All that's going to be left for humans is going to be shitty manual labor that nobody wants to do

Well, there you go then. The reason for doing something that 'makes us think' etc. is because this is much more desirable for the doer than 'shitty manual labor that nobody wants to do'.

That's all fine and dandy, but in our capitalist system, we have to do something monetizable to be able to survive, unless we were lucky enough to be born into wealth. AI is taking away all enjoyable avenues to do so.

So how do historians, or philosophers, or classical linguists currently survive in our capitalist system?

Mostly through family wealth.

> Why try to engage in the arts when you won't be able to make a living as illustrator or musician because AI slop is good enough to feed the capital machine?

Maybe this is an uncommon view on HN, but personally I engage in the arts to scratch that itch of creative expression and emotional release, not with the goal to eventually monetize it. Even without AI, my poetry would never realistically be "good enough" to make it into a career, but that doesn't make it any less fulfilling for me.

In our capitalist system, we have to do something monetizable to be able to survive, unless we were lucky enough to be born into wealth. AI is taking away all enjoyable avenues to do so.

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