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Comment by K0nserv | Hacker News Reader

I think views on AI are not really views on AI, they are views on capitalism. People don't feel optimistic that AI's impact will benefit ordinary people because, even if works out, the benefit will accrue only to capital owners. This view feels pretty understandable to me, but is ultimately orthogonal to whether AI is useful and effective for the kind of tasks we want to leverage it for.

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This is an accurate take. From a tech perspective, AI and ML are great. It's a neat and successful experiment that has a lot to offer.

The fact it's being pushed on all of us as this panacea for the cost of human effort is just disgusting, even if the technology is truly impressive.

Every company salivated at the thought of using AI to enrich themselves, but not a single thought seems to have been given to the human element of it all.

That's part of it, but views on AI are also views on art and authenticity. I'm a huge fan of AI for coding, research and writing for work. When I see AI generated images, music or anything else "creative" my reaction has grown to be pretty negative. It's all got NFT vibes aesthetically.

I was absolutely blown away by Stable Diffusion and that AI could generate images, now I'm kind of disgusted with it. We've been flooded with low artistic value output and people are having a natural reaction to that.

Agree. I actually think we'll see a resurgence in art and graphic design as a consequence. At least for now people can spot AI generated artifacts and many immediately have a negative reaction to it. I don't read blog posts that feature AI generated images, even though they are only slightly worse than stuff cribbed form Unsplash.

The thing is the vast majority has never given a shit about authenticity though. All of the top pop stars are performing music made by committees and designed by marketing teams. Most music sold is and has been lowest common denominator trash since TV was invented. It's hilarious to see some Katy Perry fan frothing at the mouth about AI not being authentic art. As if they ever cared. Most mainstream entertainment is designed to placate and distract. And I'm not even saying mainstream is bad, there's nothing wrong with catchy. It's the crocodile tears over authenticity that bothers me.

I think it's a sliding scale. I love a well cooked meal and would never eat McDonalds, but I could see how someone who does eat at McDonalds wouldn't want to live off Soylent. Maybe a better way to put it is that Katy Perry is on the right side of the uncanny valley.

Yeah but it's a sliding scale where average food is a 5 out of 10, McDonald's is a 1, and soylent is 0.5. It's nonsensical.

I think it makes sense. Think of McDonald's or Katy Perry as the bare minimum quality a human will accept. To go even slightly less is to become unacceptable (hence, uncanny valley). There's lots of room for things to be better though, so 20X improvement is possible but 0.5X reduction in quality means it's completely worthless.

I think there are some gems in the media space, the Lord Of The Rings Disco song is a certified banger, AI or not.

But yes, there is so so much slop as well

AI will be the most important thing to happen to art. We have tolerated low quality art for far too long because we pretend mechanical dexterity is what makes art, art. Art is not valuable because of this. AI removes the part I never cared about. I never cared that a guitarist can physically play 1500 notes a second.

> We have tolerated low quality art for far too long because we pretend mechanical dexterity is what makes art, art.

Who is “we” in this sentence? A tiny subsection of metalheads? The vast majority of people aren’t seeking out the most mechanically dexterous musicians to listen to.

You sound like people who claim AI is freeing because it has removed the gatekeeping of programming when programming was never gatekept, all you needed to do was dedicate time to learn.

Your premise doesn't even make that much sense given that Knockin' on Heaven's Door uses only the three chords(G, C, Am) and they are some of the most common chords in music.

The empirical data doesn’t support this view.

Capitalism approval rates in the US is much more favorable than 16%.

That makes sense, but I would love to see the data on it. I don't doubt at all that capitalism in isolation is viewed more favourably in the US, but that doesn't preclude the intersection of AI and capitalism being viewed less favourably.

I suppose my comment should've said "views on AI aren't solely views on AI, they are views on AI as it intersects with capitalism"

Here’s a recent gallup poll.

You’re right that the AI opinions are largely colored by the business practices around it.

https://news.gallup.com/poll/694835/image-capitalism-slips.a...

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