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Comment by hansmayer | Hacker News Reader

I cannot stop thinking about the LLMs having this Midas touch quality, because everything they touch seems to ruin things or make people want to avoid them, for example:

- Ghibli studio style graphics,

- the infamous em-dashes and bullet points

- customer service (just try to use Klarnas "support" these days...)

- Oracle share price ;) - imagine being one of the worlds most solid and unassailable tech companies, losing to your CEOs crazy commitment to the LLMs...

- The internet content - We now tripple check every Internet source we dont know to the core ...

- And now also the chips ?

Where does it stop? When we decide to drop all technology as it is?

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I am not sure how, or even if, it does stop. I assume once the hot air from LLM company CEOs starts being treated as the flatulence that it is, things will wind down. The sentiment against generated content is not going away.

In previous eras there were many purists who considered photography not-art, sequencer and synthesizer made music not-music, other forms of (non-AI) digital art less legitimate than their more manual classical counterparts, etc. This is the same discourse all over again.

Is electronic music where the artist composes it on a screen and then hits 'play' music? I think it is, of course, but I have had experiences where I went to see a musician "live" and well... they brought the laptop with them. But I think it still counts. It was still fun.

AI slop is to AI art what point and shoot amateur photography is to artistic photography. The difference is how much artistic intent and actual work is present. AI art has yet to get people like Ansel Adams, but it will -- actual artists who use AI as a tool to make novel forms and styles of art.

(I used an emdash!)

This is an outstanding read: https://medium.com/@aaronhertzmann/how-photography-became-an...

Anti-photography discourse sounds exactly like anti-AI discourse to the point that you could search and replace terms and have the same rants.

Another thing I expect to see is novelists using AI to create at least passable live action versions of their stories. I don't think these will put real actors or actresses out of work for a long time, but I could see them serving as "sizzle reels" to sell a real production. If an author posts their AI-generated film of their novel and it gets popular, I could see a studio picking it up and making a real movie or TV show from it.

I don't believe that there is near enough room for creativity to shine through in the prompt-generation pipeline, and I find the mention of a talent like Ansel Adams in this context asinine. There is no control there, and without control over creation I don't believe that creativity CAN flourish, but I may be wrong.

Electronic music is analogous to digital art made by humans, not generated art.

How much room for creativity is there with a camera? Angle, lighting, F-stop, film type, film processing? I have a local image generator app called Draw Things that has many times more options than this.

Early synthesizers weren't that versatile either. Bands like Pink Floyd actually got into electronics and tore them apart and hacked them. Early techno and hip-hop artists did similar things and even figured out how to transform a simple record player into a musical instrument by hopping the needle around and scratching records back and forth with tremendous skill.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NnRVmiqm84k

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ekgpZag6xyQ

Serious AI artists will start tearing apart open models and changing how they work internally. They'll learn the math and how they work just like a serious photographer could tell you all about film emulsions and developing processes and how film reacts to light.

Art's never about what it does. It's about what it can do.

I do not think that the things you say will happen, will ever happen.

Also, photography has the added benefit of documenting the world as it is, but through the artist's lens. That added value does not exist when it comes to slop.

I do not think that the things you say will happen, will ever happen.

When's the last time someone who said something like that was right?

> How much room for creativity is there with a camera? Angle, lighting, F-stop, film type, film processing?

How many subjects exist in the world to be photographed? How many journeys might one take to find them? How many stories might each subject tell with the right treatment?

> Serious AI artists will start tearing apart open models and changing how they work internally. They'll learn the math and how they work just like a serious photographer could tell you all about film emulsions and developing processes and how film reacts to light.

I agree that "AI art" as it exists today is not serious.

"AI art" today is mostly play, which is usually the first thing you get with new artistic tools. People just fool around with them in an un-serious way. There's also some porn. Porn is always early. It was one of the first uses for moving pictures, for example.

"The early adopters of new technologies are usually porn and the military." Forget where I heard that but it's largely true.

You may check these videos by Oleg Kuvaev. 100% generated using AI. Everything: text, music, characters, voices, editing -- all done via prompts, using multiple engines (I think he mentioned about a dozen services involved). I would not call it "high art", but it's definitely not a slop, it's an artist skillfully using AI as a tool.

https://youtu.be/A2H62x_-k5Q?si=EHq5Y4KCzBfo0tfm

https://youtu.be/rzCpT_S536c?si=pxiDY4TPhF_YLfRc

https://youtu.be/wPVe365vpCc?si=AqhpaZHYb4ldSf3F

https://youtu.be/EBaGqojNJfc?si=1CoLn4oeNxK-7bpe

While we're sharing AI generated videos, IGORRR's ADHD music video [0] is definitively art, zero question about it. I don't think typing a prompt in and taking the output as it comes is art -- good art, anyway (the point-and-shoot photography comparison is apt) -- but that doesn't mean AI can't be used to make truly new, creative and unique art too.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TGIvO4eh190 (warning, lots of disturbing imagery)

This is absolutely slop. Higher quality slop, but slop nonetheless. Ask yourself: what does it say? What does it change in you? How this makes you feel?

Artists use their medium to communicate. More often than not, everything in a piece is deliberate. What is being communicated here? Who deliberated on the details?

Those videos are as much "art" as Marvel's endless slop is "art".

Does it not describe what the prompter wants it to describe?

This is like saying a director isn’t really an artist simply because all they do is direct things.

> I don't believe that there is near enough room for creativity to shine through in the prompt-generation pipeline

I mean you are building a prompt and tweaking it. I mean even if you didn't do that you could still argue that finding it is in itself a creative akin to found art [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Found_object

I suppose. You're "finding" something that didn't exist and that nobody ever cared about. Something that you wrote, mashed against the tensors trained on real artist creations, and out came the thing that you "found".

I'm genuinely amazed at how some people perceive art.

To me art has always been "an interesting idea". Decorative things that take skill to me are crafts. Sure, it's a water color of your garden, but what does it tell us about the human condition? Sure, it's skilled... but it's empty. Give me Jackson Pollock or Picasso. Give me a new way to see the world. Pure skill to me is as impressive as cup-stacking personally.

Not saying you have to agree, but it is a distillation of how some portion of the world sees the world.

Defining art in this way is like defining intelligence as the possession of a degree from Stanford. It's just branding.

Art shouldn't make you feel comfortable and safe. It should provoke you and in this sense AI art is doing the job better than traditional art at the moment here.

Other than the technological aspect, there's nothing new under the sun here. And at its very worst, AI art is just Andy Warhol at hyperscale.

https://wbpopphilosopher.wordpress.com/2023/05/07/andy-warho...

I Ghiblified a photo of my dog when chatgpt 4 came out. I was utterly horrified by the results.

It's exciting being able to say that I am an artist, I always wondered what my life would have been had I gone into the arts, and now I can experience it! Thank you techmology.

If you really want to experience the struggles and persecution of an artist, you should empty your bank account and find a life partner to support you while you struggle with your angst and inner trauma that are the source of your creativity. But, to be fair, complaining about AI art is a great start down that path!

Logic might fail you, but snark is Ol' Faithful it seems.

How else would you address the incessant ramblings of people who figuratively curse the sunset daily? After AI art has been integrated into the already existing suite of digital art applications (which themselves were once not considered art), whatever shall you complain about next?

Now if you wanted to define art to require 100% bodily fluids and solids 100% handcrafted to be the only real art, now that I'd understand.

what you did was not even close to an attempt at making good art.

I think it's actually quite apt to look at all of "AI art" as a single piece, or suite, with a unified argument or theme. Maybe in that sense it is some kind of art, even if it wasn't intended that way by its creators.

Similarly, I'm not sure that argument is making the point those who deploy it intend to make.

I think the entire fear of AI schtick to farm engagement is little more than performance art for our FAANNG overlords personally. It behaves precisely like the right wing manosphere but with different daily talking points repeated ad nauseum. Bernie Sanders has smelled the opportunity here and really stepped up his game.

But TBF, performance art theatre is art as well.

The end game IMO will be incorporation of AI art toolsets into commercial art workflows and a higher value placed on 100% human art (however that ends up being defined) and then we'll find something new and equally idiotic to trigger us or else we might run out of excuses and/or scapegoats for our malaise.

> incorporation of AI art toolsets into commercial art workflows and a higher value placed on 100% human art

I don't even really believe serious artists need to totally exclude themselves from using genAI as a tool, and I've heard the same from real working artists (generally those who have established careers doing it). Unfortunately, that point inhabits the boring ideological center and is drowned out by the screaming from both extremes.

They aren't, but some are already using pseudonyms to experiment with it to avoid the haters condemning them for doing so. And their work is predictably far superior from the get-go to asking Sora to ghiblify your dog.

> Art shouldn't make you feel comfortable and safe. It should provoke you and in this sense AI art is doing the job better than traditional art at the moment here.

jumpscares and weapons being used at others aren't art

I don't believe that there is near enough room for creativity to shine through in the prompt-generation pipeline

You seem so sure that you'll always be able to tell what you're looking at, and whether it's the result of prompting or some unspecified but doubtlessly-noble act of "creativity."

LOL. Not much else can be said, but... LOL.

You know that you can give a drawing as input for image generation, right? I think there's a lot of creativity possible with AI image generation. Things like ControlNet and the various loras and upscale methods etc all add a lot of choice.

> Is electronic music where the artist composes it on a screen and then hits 'play' music?

If X composes something, X is an artist. The person playing a composed work is a performer. Some people have both the roles of artist and performer for a given work.

To say an AI composes something is anthropomorphizing a computer. If you enter a prompt to make a machine generate work based on existing artists' art, you're not composing (in the artistic sense) and neither is the computer. Math isn't art even if it's pretty or if mathematical concepts are used in art.

The term "director" instead of composer or artist conveys what's happening a lot better with telling machines to generate art via prompts.

The vast majority of artists in all fields don't really have their own style and are just copying other people's. Doesn't matter whether we're talking about art, literature, music, film, whatever.

It takes a rare genius to make a new style, and they come along a few times a generation. And even they will often admit they built on top of existing styles and other artists.

I'm not a fan of AI work or anything, but we need to be honest about what human 'creativity' usually is, which for most artists is basically copying the trends of the time with at most a minor twist.

OTOH, I think when you start entering the fringes of AI work you really start seeing how much it's just stealing other people's work though. With more niche subjects, it will often produce copies of the few artists in that field with a few minor, often bad, changes.

Sure, you can say that AI is just "stealing like an artist", but that makes the AI the artist in this scenario, not the prompter.

It bothers me that all of the AI "artists" insist that they are just the same as any other artist, even though it was the AI that did all of the work. Even when a human artist is just copying the styles they've seen from other artists, they still had to put in the effort to develop their craft to make the art in the first place.

I mostly agree with your sentiment, but saying "math is not art" is the same as saying "writing is not art". Calculation isn't art. But math isn't calculation. Math is a social activity shared between humans. Like writing, much of it is purely utilitarian. But there's always an aesthetic component, and some works explore that without regard to utility. It's a funny kind of art, accessible to few and beautiful to even fewer. But there is an art there.

This really made me think and you're right. Perhaps I should have said "calculation" instead of "math."

The Demoscene would disagree ;)

When it comes to art, description is after practice

It does not matter if they are labeled "composer" or "director ". It is the product that counts.

"....I know what I like"

Incorrect. Art is practice. It's literally what the word means historically. Put in "Etymology of the word 'art'" in your favorite search engine or LLM.

If someone is entering a prompt to generate an image in a model I have access to, I don't really need to pay them to do it, and definitely don't need to pay them as much to do it as I would an actual artist, so it is deceptive for them to represent themselves as someone who could actually draw or paint that. If the product is what counts then truth in advertising is required so the market can work.

> AI slop is to AI art what point and shoot amateur photography is to artistic photography.

Sorry... It's all slop buddy. The medium is the message, and genAI's message is "I want it cheap and with low effort, and I don't care too much about how it looks"

Just like photography

So art is just a status signifier? "This is hard to make so I must be really special"?

Uh, yes?

"This is hard to make" hasn't been the distinguishing factor for popular/expensive/trendy art for a long time.

There is a literal cliche "my six year old could've done this" about how some of the techniques do not require the years of training they used to.

And a literal cliche response about how the eye and execution is the current determining factor: "but they didn't."

It is more useful to think about it in terms of what that effort actually entails.

If you haven't ever written a novel, or even a short story, you cannot possibly imagine how much of your own weird self ends up in it, and that is a huge part of what will make it interesting for people to read. You can also express ideas as subtext, through the application of technique and structure. I have never reached this level with any form of visual art but I imagine it's largely the same.

A prompt, or even a series of prompts, simply cannot encode such a rich payload. Another thing artists understand is that ideas are cheap and execution is everything; in practice, everything people are getting out of these AI tools is founded on a cheap idea and built from an averaging of everything the AI was trained on. There is nothing interesting in there, nothing unique, nothing more than superficially personal; just more of the most generic version of what you think you want. And I think a lot of people are finding that that isn't, in fact, what they want.

At the very least, art usually contains effort signifiers. Yes, an artist could potentially employ gingerbread men cut from construction paper in a work, but no, construction paper gingerbread men are typically not in the same league as David.

What a barren viewpoint.

The logical implication of your view is that if someone or something has a halo, they can shit in your mouth and it's "good." The medium is the message, after all.

This is the same pretentious art bullshit that regular people fucking hate, just repackaged to take advantage of public rage at tech bro billionaires.

For fun I decided to try out the find and replace on this comment

> Sorry... It's all slop buddy. The medium is the message, and photography's message is "I want it cheap and with low effort, and I don't care too much about how it looks"

Hmm... it seems like you have failed to actually make an argument here

So fun.

Photography is neither cheap nor low effort. Ask AI about it.

I literally just took a photo with my iPhone. So easy, took seconds.

and painting is so easy you can do it with dirt and a stick

And I can make music with my mouth. Cheap

For fun I decided to try out the find and replace on this comment

> Hmm... it seems like I have succeeded at making an argument here

THING IN PAST SIMILAR MUST BE SAME THING

you enjoy your industrial effluent, I'm gonna stick to human artists making art

Whatever, man, this guy isn't wrong. Look at the example he gave how a camera made it so that anyone could do what only a few could. Novel art is just a candid shot now. It forced art to completely change its values. Much of the same will happen now. The difference is that with the past, we still needed artists to take advantage of them while now, it all can be completely automated. It's disgusting but I'm sure purest thought the same of every innovation.

that's not art, that's product. Enjoy it, you deserve every ounce of it.

Keyboards have had functions that let them play music at the touch of button for decades.

Decades later we still don't consider anyone using that function a musician.

>actual artists who use AI as a tool to make novel forms and styles of art.

writing a prompt lol

We don't compare Usain Bolt to Lewis Hamilton when talking about fastest runners in the world.

But hey think about how much money you could save on a wedding photographer if you just generate a few images of what the wedding probably looked like!

The (wedding) photographer is likely going to use this AI themselves though. They used Photoshop way back in the day to touch up images. They're going to be doing the same with genAI. Content-aware fill is one of the most useful tools they have.

Your reasoning process here is:

There is a "demo" button on synthesizers that plays a canned melody, therefore playing canned melodies is all synthesizers can do, therefore nobody that uses a synthesizer is a real musician.

Yeah i'm saying the prompter is the button presser.

If i commission Michelangelo to paint me a picture that doesn't make me a renaissance artist.

I'm not against AI art per se, but at least so far, most “AI artists” I see online seem to care very little about the artistry of what they’re doing, and much much more about selling their stuff.

Among the traditional artists I follow, maybe 1 out of 10 posts is directly about selling something. With AI artists, it’s more like 9 out of 10.

It might take a while for all the grifters to realize that making a living from creative work is very hard before more genuinely interesting AI art starts to surface eventually. I started following a few because I liked an image that showed up in my feed, but quickly unfollowed after being hit with a daily barrage of NFT promotions.

I'm not sure people remember when PCs and inkjet printers became affordable while MS Word added cliparts at around the same time. Those black figurines with a light bulb above them while some text was written above or below in either Comic Sans or 3D "word art" were absolutely everywhere. Digital typesetting was bad when it started (see Donald Knuth's rant about it, leading to TeX), but you have to imagine the horror of normal people trying to layout stuff in Word all of the sudden without a hint of competence. This is exactly what happens right now with LLMs, some people will find the right amount of usage, the others won't, but that's OK. The problem back the wasn't MS Word per se (bar some stupid defaults Microsoft had borked completely), neither are LLMs inherently the problem right now. We are in the seemingly never-ending hype cycle, but even that will pass.

> Where does it stop? When we decide to drop all technology as it is?

Whenever you want.

Of course you can't directly control what other people do or how much they use t0echnology. But you have lots of direct control over what you use, even if it's not complete control.

I stopped taking social media seriously in the early 2010's. I'm preparing for a world of restricted, boring, corporate, invasive Internet, and developing interests and hobbies that don't rely on tech. We've had mechanisms to network people without communications tech for thousands of years, it's probably time to relearn those (the upper classes never stopped using them). The Internet will always be there, but I don't have to use it more than my workplace requires, and I can keep personal use of it to a minimum. Mostly that will mean using the Internet to coordinate events and meeting people and little else.

I agree with you and I will also anecdotally note that I've been personally observing more and more of the younger generations (Z, esp gen Alpha) adopt these mechanisms en masse, viewing social media as the funhouse simulation of socialization that it always was and finding true social connection through other manners.

> it's probably time to relearn those (the upper classes never stopped using them)

Can you tell me more about these? I’m actively trying to find ways to cultivate my community.

Face-to-face social gatherings - parties, dinners, clubs, meetups

Membership organizations - country clubs, professional associations, alumni networks, charitable boards

Personal introductions and referrals - being introduced through mutual acquaintances

Cultural and civic participation - involvement in local institutions, community organizations, religious groups

Ha, I can only wish. Maybe true if you live in NYC, SF, Berlin or London.

But most of these don't exist or help with socializing and making new connections where I live (medium sized European university city).

Everyone here only hangs out with their family and school/university mates and that's it. Any other available events are either for college students or lonely retirees but nothing in between.

> Everyone here only hangs out with their family and school/university mates and that's it.

If you can get a few people from 2 of these groups together more than once, you've started solving this problem. Of course keeping it going for a long time is a challenge, and you want to avoid always being in the situation where you are doing all the work and others aren't contributing, but it gets easier and better with experience.

Except that if you're not anyone's family and not in university anymore then you're shit out of luck as people in their 30s already have their social circles already completed and don't have space, time and energy to add new strangers when they barely have free time to hang out with their existing clique.

There are also private group chats open only to selected elite and wealthy people. When you see several prominent people suddenly make similar public statements on a particular issue there's a good chance they used those group chats behind the scenes to coordinate messaging.

> Where does it stop? When we decide to drop all technology as it is?

It doesn't stop. This is because that it's not the "technology" driving AI. You already acknowledged the root cause: CEOs. AI could be great, but it's currently being propped up by sales hype and greed. Sam wants money and power. Satya and Sundar want money and power. Larry and Jensen want to also cash in on this facade that's been built.

Can LLMs be impactful? For sure. They are now. They're impacting energy consumption, water usage, and technology supply chains in detrimental ways. But that's because these people want to be the ones to sell it. They want to be the ones to cash in. Before they really even have anything significantly useful. FOMO in this C-suite should be punishable in some way. They're all charlatans to different degrees.

Blame the people behind this propping up this mess: the billionaires.

The CEO quiet part out loud was very clearly: "salaries".

This will scale back when AI replacement attempts slow down as expectations temper (Salesforce, Klarna, etc).

It's always about cutting the OpEx spend. Companies are nothing more than giant piles of money seeking to grow themselves in any way possible.

The weird thing is that the AI companies themselves are hiring like there's no tomorrow, doing talent aquisitions etc. Why would you do that if the purpose of your product is to reduce necessary workforce?

Why isn't that the first question that comes to mind for a journalist covering the latest acquisition? It's like an open secret that nobody really talks about.

Everyone is trying to be the shovel sales person for AI, not the gold diggers buying shovels.

I'm not sure if even the LLM companies themselves are selling shovels yet. I think everyone is racing to find what the shovel of LLMs are.

It was collectively decided some time ago that this particular shovel is called nVIDIA.

That was decided when crypto mining became too expensive, I guess.

And memory. What I'm surprised by is that memory production isn't being scaled up since it's basically a universal part of any computing device.

To answer your questions (I don't think it's what you wanted, but people will scratch their heads after reading them):

On reality, they are hiring because they have a lot of (investment) money. They need a lot of hardware, but they also need people to manage the hardware.

On an alternative reality where their products do what they claim, they would also hire, because people working there would be able to replace lots of people working in other jobs, and so their workers would be way more valuable than the average one, and everybody would want to buy what they create.

Journalists don't care about it because whatever they choose to believe or being paid to "believe", it's the natural way things happen.

Just to clarify: Most AI companies don't own their hardware, with a select few exceptions. That's why a handful of hyperscaler stock has rallied recently on letters of intent on large orders from AI companies. Which technically is a handful of shell companies under complete control of their parent companies, which can then take on credit without it being visible on the parent company balance sheet.

But addressing the specific question: It is still a valid. If the product sold is a 10x developer force multiplier, you'd expect to see the company fully utilizing it. Productivity would be expected to increase, rapidly, as the product matures, and independently of any acquisitions made at the same time.

Real consequences need to be implemented such as prison time or ideally death penalty. But sadly we’ll never see that happen

> Sam wants money and power.

I think all the AI companies want to be the first to say they have achieved AGI, that moment will be in the history books.

Some people are dropping things in response to how things are being ruined. Many people are not.

I hope you're right but I imagine with more computing power used more efficiently, the big companies will hoard more and more of the total available human attention.

We need a word for a Midas touch except instead of gold everything turns to feces.

That’s the Mierdes Touch.

^ Very funny this ;)

Nice!

We just need people capable of understanding it's a curse.

.. and maybe to ignore whoever can't.

Absolutely, not to say "You are right!" :) The items touched by Midas were if nothing else, shiny and gold after all is a precious metal preserving its material properties for a long time...Whereas the stuff produced by LLMs...yes, quite resembles the key properties of feces, come to think of it. It is a simple meshup of whatever was digested over a timespan, it stinks, and it does not require special skills - anyone can produce one!

Montezuma's touch

>Where does it stop?

I think you explained it very well. For now all sorts of "creative finance" are being invented to give AI momentum. At the same time, some of us that have to work with this monstrosity for 10 hours a day are nauseated. The same feeling I had towards putrid technology is now extended to generative technology. I would rather fight and lose my job than call this intelligence of any form. It is a generative thingy. Was very enthusiastic in tabnine days. Used copilot since closed beta. Use it for 10 hours a day. I rather not use it, though. I have to use C#. Would kill not to use this bullshit anymore. Would never,ever, touch Microsoft without being paid. Feel the same about AI in general. Betting on AI becoming lame would be the safest bet I ever did. When I see someone worshiping generative technology I just know what to expect and then I leave. In some levels, opinions on generative technology are very similar to politics. Tell me how you interact with it and how you feel about it, I won't ever need to ask a second question. Now, I think this sentiment will inevitably arrive to the masses. Yeah, sure I am fatigued and most people don't have to deal with generative tools for 44 hours a week, but it will slowly creep. Tell me again how excited everyone is to fiddle with SAP, Oracle, Microsoft, react components, Vercel. The most shilled convenience of our timeline will become cringe, as always.

> Was very enthusiastic in tabnine days. Used copilot since closed beta. Use it for 10 hours a day.

I sort of have a similar story with it. Was also one of the earliest GH Copilot users...but now I find its just utter crap. The one thing that worries me though is, while most of the tech folks have grown disillusioned, for each engineer who now rejects LLMs, there seems to be 20 "common" persons who just absolutely love it, for their ephemeral use cases, like planning their next trip, or asking if it will rain tomorrow and similar. And this sort of usage I think quietly underpins the drive. Its not just the CEOs, it is also the masses that absolutely love to use it, unfortunately.

Oracle was "one of the worlds most solid and unassailable tech companies"?

The Oracle DB moat is big. Like Ocean-sized big.

Yes, absolutely. It is essentially the "nobody ever got fired for buying <insert-safe-choice>" of the databases universe.

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