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Comment by quantummagic | Hacker News Reader

If you're correct, creative people have nothing to worry about then. Creative people will still stand out and have a role. But the world already has an oversupply of creativity, and a need for a lot more of boring, uncreative things. A plumber, mechanic, or programmer, all need minimal creativity -- 99% perspiration, and 1% inspiration, as they say.

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Yes, that's exactly right. It's why I, and many other creatives I know, are not worried about AI. Our annoyance comes more from it dominating the conversation rather than actual perceived risk.

I'm sure there's a creative way to respond to the annoyance. One slightly worrying factoid is that chess players said the same thing about early chess engines, and them being no match for human creativity. Time will tell.

With chess, there is a known, specific end goal, and the "creativity" comes with how you arrive there. With an artwork, the end goal is entirely decided by the artist, there is no "win state" to reward.

That's not what people who play chess thought. The creativity wasn't in the goal, but how you arrived there. The "beauty" of the steps that you took on the way to the goal. They believed that it was human creativity and sense of beauty that would never be encapsulated in a computer program. They turned out to be incorrect, but maybe you're right and things are different in a wider domain, we'll see.

To be clear, Chess is a game, so yes they are still correct.

Not sure exactly you mean, or who you are referring to as being correct. Not sure the relevance of anything being a game, the question is the intersection of computation and interacting with humans. Having been there at the time, I saw the snide dismissals of computers playing chess, they were "simply playing by rote", they were just glorified calculators who could never understand the beautiful moves played by human grandmasters. And this was actually true at the time... it just didn't stay true.

Today, very many humans enjoy spectating computer played chess games, and often comment on the "beauty" of the moves played. Take that for what you will.

> A plumber, mechanic, or programmer, all need minimal creativity

I really have to take issue with this statement.

Well you probably don’t want an overly creative plumber at least.

Do you have any source for your claim that there is an oversupply of creativity? My gut feeling is that not all creativity is created equal, and there is a small amount of truly impressive creative works that are not simply retreads of existing ideas.

Are you actually asking someone for a source for their opinion?

I mean, a lot of "creatives" fund their art by doing work like making icons, thumbnails, jingles, website designs, corporate logos, etc. Things that can, and are being done by AI. This will have downstream effect on creativity since we aren't using the efficiency that AI provides for the greater good of society. Koenigsegg might sell one or two more cars though, so there's that.

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