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Comment by soulofmischief | Hacker News Reader

Awful take. Transformers have greatly increased the potential number of cool things I can do in my lifetime. I've written poetry, short stories, I draw, and am an experienced professional software engineer, and thanks to transformers I've been able to augment my creative workflow.

People were similarly dismissive about computers in general. And calculators, and the printing press, and Photoshop, and cameras, and every other disruptive technology. Yet, people found a way to be creative with them even before society accepted their medium.

Truth is, you don't get to decide what someone else's creative journey looks like.

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You ARE, however, allowed to decide what constitutes Art - and the determining factor for many comes down to conception and intent.

With the advent of creation by prompting, the conception and intent is abstracted away to a patron/artist interaction as opposed to the tool/artist synergy you contend. Providing only instruction and infrastructure as input means the appropriate analogy is something more akin to Medici/Michelangelo than Mass-Production-Silkscreening/Warhol.

You may not get to decide what someone else's creative journey looks like, but you are more than entitled to critique the extent of its creativity and artistic veracity.

Nope, that's also incorrect. You get to decide what you think is art, but not what others consider art to be. That is the nature of subjectivity: your opinion holds no weight over others.

Generally, it's inter-subjectively decided what art is, which works enter the canon and are passed on. Placing it solely in each individual, "it's only a matter of taste", falls a bit short of some centuries of aesthetic theory.

Also, AI is maybe only the last straw as Silicon Valley and the digital sphere was already "transforming" the creative industry, cp this piece: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/01/the-dea...

No. The simple fact is that you cannot tell two people, a producer and consumer of art respectively, what kind of relationship they are allowed to have nor, what medium they express it through, or whether or not it is a valid form of creativity. It is simply none of your business, and it's exceedingly arrogant to think otherwise.

None of the tools that existed before created entire complete works with tiny amounts of effort.

E.g. "Write an amazing story for kids about a bear". ChatGPT writes a whole story for you. That's not "augmenting" your workflow, that's just doing all the work for you. And don't tell me, "writing the prompt is the new form of art", the reality is that writing these prompts doesn't require a tiny fraction of the talent required to write a novel from scratch.

The printing press is a horrible example also, it didn't write anything for you, it just literally prints already written content. Photoshop just let you edit already taken photos.

Cameras require you to go to places, take trips, put massive effort into actually making content from scratch.

A better analogy would be an automated flying camera that just goes off by itself to a destination, takes its own photos, edits them, and sends them to you, processed, edited, finished. All you did was say "go to Victoria falls and take photos."

Yes artists have used tools, pens, then a typewriter, a word processor i.e. the implements for the process, but the tools didn't ever replace the most important part of the artist, the actual creative work and imagination in the brain. The AI tools are just replacing the brain AND the actual implements.

You have missed the point of the analogy. I'd ask that you sit on this for a while and earnestly trying to understand what I'm explaining, which is how each generation of artists has a relationship with the prior generations that involves both imitation and rejection. Creatives are not one big blob of people, they all have their own opinions on what is and isn't great art, and it's all subjective.

And a lot of these moments of inertia, scenes, etc. are rooted in technological progress. And sometimes, the technological process is so great that prior generations of creatives feel as if the newer generations are "skipping" the required work to becoming a "true" artist; but that is just gatekeeping.

So instead of adding your voice to the world you decided to give away your voice and abandon your humanity.

You obviously don't value your reader if you don't value yourself enough to speak with your own voice.

I mean, I'd throw your "art" in the garbage with all possible haste once I learned that it was actually AI's "art".

You can derive value from it because you know what parts you did, but I can't derive value because I will have to assume you didn't do any art and that any glimmer of humanity I see is just slop.

Reading slop makes me dumber and less creative myself: it takes away my chance to learn how others minds work. It takes away a diversity of real perspectives and styles and feeds me averaged clones of them so that on the whole I gain nothing -- just like training AI on its own output results in model collapse!

It takes my interest in other human beings and exploits that weakness to hack my mind. If I could defend against that hacking I would. Why would I waste my time thinking about something that wasn't even worth taking time of thinking of how to say?

Does a camera give away a photographer's "voice" just because he doesn't have to draw his art by hand, but can simply press a button?

Does a sculpture artist who uses aides to carry out his will give away his "voice" just because he didn't do the physical labor himself?

Does a game designer give away his "voice" just because he has a team under him that independently executes on all manner of creative work surrounding the his central thesis and incremental feedback?

Don't be preposterous! My voice is whatever I decide for it to be, how arrogant to decide that for me! If you aren't into it, great: you weren't the intended audience and your critique is irrelevant.

I don't think you get to decide as much as you think you do, and I don't think the examples you provide are accurate enough analogies to offer the moral clarity you think they do.

Fortunately this isn't a moral issue though, just like thinking a piece of art is garbage is not a moral issue. I have the freedom to judge you, and in this case I'm judging because I think the primary legacy of slop machines is are sucking life out of people who put in blood and sweat -- who put their soul and themselves into their art because it is how they define themselves.

So many artists meet that basic bar of struggling with self expression that I see little point in engaging with anyone who can't or won't start with the premise that they have something unique to say

> I don't think you get to decide as much as you think you do

Art is subjective, and I will say one last time: No one should be so arrogant as to assume that they have any business dictating the relationship between an artist and their patrons.

> I'm judging because I think the primary legacy of slop machines is are sucking life out of people who put in blood and sweat

So you admit that you are operating from a position of bias. At least you can recognize that, but it means that there is very little use in attempting to have an earnest, healthy conversation with you on this topic.

> who put their soul and themselves into their art because it is how they define themselves

I also define myself as an artist, and I put my soul into it, but apparently I have to get conartist6's permission before publicly calling myself an artist if I happen to use generative techniques. How tiring.

> I have the freedom to judge you

Yes, you do. Judge away. Meanwhile, I have art to make and share with others who appreciate my creative expression.

The most salient irony of this conversation is that you think you are protecting and appreciating some kind of sacred art, when from my perspective you are simply gatekeeping and seem to have an incomplete, narrow appreciation of what art is.

I appreciate art and expression of all forms, both familiar and strange. I don't base my appreciation of art on how hard the artist worked on a particular piece. I have intricate, original pieces hanging on my walls that I bought for several thousand dollars, right next to two-minute doodles that I bought for five dollars. If you truly appreciate art and human expression, you will reconsider why your argument comes off as judgemental and hateful.

It sounds like a lovely collection of art curated by someone with an eye for creative expression.

My intent was to be judgemental and by doing so to make you uncomfortable. I hope you appreciate the reasons why this technology is a steamroller to those on the receiving end of it, who will create backlash in self-preservation as they are facing an existential struggle against an opponent with trillions of dollars of incentive not to stop steamrolling

As a software engineer, I feel like I'm facing an existential crisis on two fronts. But the way I see it is, the technology itself is a beautiful marriage of art and algorithm. Exploring and dissecting the possibility space, doing architectural research, creating expressive agents, there are so many interesting and things to still capture my interest and leave me creatively fulfilled.

As someone whose job has always been to automate away tedious human labor, like all software engineers, I've long made peace with the fact that I may sometimes ride the front of a disruptive wave. But from my perspective, this was an inevitability, and the moment I saw this current wave of machine learning picking up steam back in 2015, I started dedicating myself to learning the field and building neural networks and agentic systems.

I weep for what is happening right now to junior engineers in my industry, but I have hope that the industry will adapt and the kind of work I like to do will remain. Artistically, I deeply struggle with the fact that my creative work will increasingly be drowned out by an AI-accelerated long tail. I haven't yet figured out what it will mean to be an artist in the future, but I remain open-minded and hopeful that I will continue to find creative fulfillment within communities and collectives. I also hope that traditional art remains economically viable, but the cat is out of the bag and a lot of art is going to get commodified and outsourced, and people are going to lose professional employment, just like whenever the automated loom became popular and caused unemployment among weavers.

To each their own, but to me specifically, and I know that many, many artists share this point of view, the idea of having some slop-generating algorithmic regurgitation system create the actual "creative" work that is supposed to be the basic definition of an artistic creation is both disgustingly vapid and far from art.

If you hate putting your own thoughts to writing so much that you offload its very essence to some machine through a few minutes of prompts, you're creating nothing, least of all any original creations and views of your own.

Comparing this to typing, editing, calculating and reprinting tools like the ones you mention is laughable and factually wrong. Even a calculator isn't the same. It doesn't create your mathematical equations for you, and a printing press or typewriter, camera or photoshop don't just brainlessly, mindlessly create your text or images for you.

Edit: If you're some content creator or PR manager with no artistic pretensions, and use AI because you just need some quick slop content for marketing filler, that's fine. It might turn clients off but at least you're not pretending to a creativity that you don't possess.

But to have AI create for you while calling yourself an artist is simply lazy intellectual dishonesty.

> many, many artists share this point of view

Bandwagon fallacy.

> slop-generating

Strawman. I never said what level of quality I find acceptable to sign off on.

> algorithmic regurgitation

Computational generative art has been practiced since the 1950s, and mathematically-derived generative art has been done by hand even farther back since at least the 19th century. Is a century not long enough time for people to accept it as a valid form of expression?

> the basic definition of an artistic creation ... disgustingly vapid and far from art

Gatekeeping, and No true Scotsman fallacy. Art is subjective.

> Comparing this to typing, editing, calculating and reprinting tools like the ones you mention is laughable and factually wrong

As I mentioned in a sibling comment, you also have missed the point of the analogy. I won't rehash what I said there.

> Even a calculator isn't the same

The accuracy and social validity of calculators were distrusted for a long time, and computers as well.

> It doesn't create your mathematical equations for you

It takes care of a lot of what was considered by many to be essential duties for any self-respecting mathematician of the era. Photoshop and cameras were similarly criticized. Learn some art history before dismissing this stuff.

> But to have AI create for you while calling yourself an artist is simply lazy intellectual dishonesty

You clearly have little idea how artists are integrating these tools into their work, and how it is allowing them to think and operate at a higher level, just like digital painting did to traditional painting, even though many felt "technique" was lost or ignored, they themselves ignore all of the new technique that comes with mastering new creative tools.

If you don't like the art, fine. If you don't like it solely on the basis of how it was created, that's fine, but it is by definition bias. But it's arrogant to go even further and start declaring what is and isn't art, and who is and isn't an artist. That is not for you to decide. Furthermore, your argument is riddled with fallacies and needs serious review.

What i'm seeing here are the arguments of an apparently typical AI bro completely missing the forest for the trees.

I do art, photography and painting both, and most of my friends and acquaintances are artists of some kind or another too and generally among all of them as far as I know, the idea of having a visual regurgitation algorithm make your visual and textual (and now video) creations for you is anathema to artistic creativity.

Sure, there are artists who use AI to create interesting projects that I would call art, because the main crux of the work requires their creative construction and integration of elements and narrative, regardless of the final form it takes.

On the other hand, some idiot spending a couple minutes on a prompt to create a dozen variations of a cat making a mouseburger is not art, it's someone playing with some digital visuals.

And yes, I declare myself completely able to say that shit like that isn't art, and that the kind of person who'd claim it to be so because they couldn't pull a bit of their own effortful creativity out of their ass has no idea what art is or represents.

If you have a camera, you still need to take it to places and set up compositions. It takes effort, and there's a distinct difference between someone who learns to do it well vs. someone who has no clue except for an occasional, incidental lucky shot. Becoming a photographic artist lies in the gradient we move along between these two extremes, in sometimes unusual ways that are saturated with human creative narrative and effort. The same goes for other forms of creative expression.

Photoshop is a bit more tricky, and especially now, that it includes Firefly AI tools for completely rebuilding photos into... something else. but if one is serious about respecting their own learning curve of photography, they try to not let it take away from the essential message they were trying to communicate with the human-made photos they took in the first place. So on and so forth.

Bottom line: art is many things, and we could debate that, as well as questions of quality and preference, but it emphatically isn't the wholesale regurgitated, instant productions of a completely unthinking algorithm.

> What i'm seeing here are the arguments of an apparently typical AI bro

Ad hominem and a clear display of bias. You know nothing about me, my history or capabilities.

> Sure, there are artists who use AI to create interesting projects that I would call art

> And yes, I declare myself completely able to say that shit like that isn't art

Gatekeeping, again.

The rest of your post regurgitates your previous post, and completely fails to address my previous rebuttal. Your argument is disingenuous, tired and still riddled with issues. Take the L and learn to not arrogantly force your world view onto other creatives.

If your being "creative" consists of nothing more than having an AI vomit things up for you with no input on your part except for some prompts, you're not a creative. If my argument above seems repetitive, it's because i'm trying to hammer home a point that should be obvious, and is obvious to any number of people who exercise real creativity, regardless of its medium.

Also, ad hominem is fine as long as it doesn't form the main thrust of an argument.

Ad hominem is what people do when they lack a more convincing direct argument. It's one thing to draw attention to relevant attributes of a speaker, it's another to say "What i'm seeing here are the arguments of an apparently typical AI bro", which is literally an attempt to discredit an argument by insulting and pigeonholing the speaker, instilling bias, instead of engaging with the argument itself. It is childish, and poor taste.

> no input on your part except for some prompts, you're not a creative

Hm, some people disagree with you:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_art

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algorithmic_art

You can shout at clouds and spread hate online all you want, but you still don't have the power to declare someone a creative or not. I did not grant you that power and neither has anyone else. Your criticism is yours alone of which to bear the weight, meanwhile I'm gonna go make art with cool revolutionary tools that redefine what it can mean to be an artist and allow many more people to participate in self-expression.

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