Comment by jatora | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jatora | Hacker News Reader

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Your snobbery will be short-lived as tools eclipse our "art", and creativity is revealed as nothing inherently unique to humans.

Creativity, fundamentally, is overlapping memories of what you have seen already. Literally no different than any diffusion or transformer model.

You painting a piece of art or composing a song was really the functional output of billions of cells coordinating in unison, 100% subconsciously, and the thoughts that arose out of your subconscious were entirely (or mostly, to avoid free will debate) out of your control. Your output was the product of billions of years of stellar and biological evolution on top of millennia of human history and influence. You created nothing.

Soon you will have to grapple with the reality of what really drives your enjoyment of media, and part of that will be realizing that the human-ness never mattered at all.

Is beautiful nature scenery not beautiful because it wasnt hand-crafted painstakingly by a creative human? Of course it is. There is no intuition for the vast swaths of time it took to form, that is a modern human conceptualization that came long after we already found nature to be beautiful.

We have a biological pattern recognition tuned for beauty regardless of its origin. And there is nothing inherently unbeautiful about elegant software that can produce beautiful "art". Nor is there any justifiable, defensible, or intellectually honest way to argue that the human/effort element in art matters in any way besides perhaps portraying and conveying social status.

> Creativity, fundamentally, is overlapping memories of what you have seen already. Literally no different than any diffusion or transformer model.

Every individual has a unique experience, and assimilates different things from their experiences depending on their personal tastes and culture. That is profoundly different from a model which assimilates the output of hundreds of thousands of individuals. A model has no creative, or artistic voice. Your argument is anti-humanistic, nihilistic nonsense, and also trivially verifiably wrong given no model today has produced music or art of any value.

Do you really think a human creating something isn't the output of assimilating the outputs of countless humans that came before them?

Your argument implies creativity is confined to humans or brains. So no creativity existed before that? Weird. Lucky for us that evolution spawned creativity then!

If you could answer that question then that should help me understand, since you say it is trivial to verifiably prove my position wrong

The dean of the art school I went to regularly used to say "The most creative people simply to the best job of hiding the source of their creativity". - in fact he invoked it once directly to me when I protested about how one of my peers went about their final assignment, and again when the whole program revolted over a submission that won honors. I learned a lot about art in that art program, but mostly I learned art wasn't that I thought it was. :)

I really disagree with the level of glee you display in predicting that artists will be replaced - that said, this:

>Soon you will have to grapple with the reality of what really drives your enjoyment of media, and part of that will be realizing that the human-ness never mattered at all.

is a good point that many media consumers will at some point have to come to grips with. There is a sense, almost accelerationist, in which the machine-generation of vast amounts of enjoyable media (let's not pretend none of it will be enjoyable) forces people to reconsider what drives their engagement with art/entertainment, what value there really is in sitting still for 2 hours to watch a movie or listen to music no matter how good. (As you can see all over this comment section most people have staggeringly naive ideas about art)

that's an interesting point. i wonder if the vast swaths of S tier media in the future will have the reverse effect of diminishing the drive for it all completely (regardless of the source). Triggering the descent for us all down to bedrock sources of animalistic enjoyment and contentment. Things like socializing... or hunting and gathering and building your little tribal village in the forest, or just perpetually living in a womb lol.

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