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Comment by est31 | Hacker News Reader

Tech companies love to show off that they are using AI, how they are embracing it, etc. Among engineers, there is also a growing community of folks who embrace tools like Cursor, Chat GPT, Gemini, v0, etc.

When it comes to artists, I have less insight but what I see is that they are extremely critical of it and don't like it at all.

It's interesting to see that gap in reactions to AI between artists and tech companies.

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Tech people like it because it isn't good enough to completely replace them yet. The sophisticated, coherent architecture of a well designed system is (for now) still beyond the LLMs, so for tech people, it's still just a wonderful tool. But give it another year, and the worm will turn.

lumberjacks didn't go away when chainsaws were invented; demand for wood rose to meet the falling cost of wood and lumberjacks kept cutting down trees. don't see why it won't be any different for programmers.

In the US, there were entire cities with essentially just lumberjacks. In other words, there used to be a LOT more lumberjacks than there are today, and they were a lot better paid.

Now there are a LOT of software engineers.

But the chainsaws were never developed to the point that the head of wood supplies could ask them to go and chop some trees down by themselves.

What's the equivalent of deforestation in that analogy?

I’m an artist and also work in tech. Enjoy using AI for work, no interest in using it for my art.

Using AI for art is an idiotic proposition for me. If I was going to use AI to write my novel, I would literally be robbing myself of the pleasure of making it myself. If you don’t enjoy perfecting the sentence, maybe don’t be a writer?

That’s why there’s a disconnect. I make art for personal fulfillment and the joy of the creative act. To offload that to something that helps me do it “faster” has exactly zero appeal.

AI will probably enable new workflows and forms of expressions. “Old” ways will still likely be around in some form. Photography didn’t kill portrait painting or movies theater.

But using AI for art doesn't have to mean "AI does all the art from start to finish", does it? Somehow the discourse about AI art is always weirdly maximalist.

> If I was going to use AI to write my novel, I would literally be robbing myself of the pleasure of making it myself.

The same would be true if I were going to use AI to read it. If we just wanted to trade Clif Notes around, why bother with novels at all?

Cyber-Leo-Tolstoy types a three-page summary of "War and Peace" into ChatGPT and tells it to generate an 800-page novel. Millions of TikTok-addled students ask ChatGPT to summarize the 800-page novel into three pages (or a five-paragraph essay). What is the point of any of this?

Or between artists in private and artists in public

And then there are the rest of us, indie developers who are building for and want to keep building things for the artists.

We don’t want any of this and are working to build around it.

It’s being really pushed by a lot of the same people who were pushing Web3 and NFTs and blockchain grifts.

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