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Comment by imathew | Hacker News Reader

I won't (if I know) either, but for me it's because a very big part of reading fiction or enjoying any art is that you have a relationship of a kind with its creator. When a passage surprises me or a song lifts me or a painting inspires me it's partly because I'm amazed that someone was able to do that, and that they were able to reach me like that.

Everyone borrows or steals from prior art but I'm still amazed by the people that build on what came before to create something new. I just don't have that experience if I know it's generated by a LLM. I appreciate that it will be harder to know the difference as time goes on, and I'll need to be careful not to cast a side-eye at a lot of legitimate stuff unfairly in the future because of that.

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>Everyone borrows or steals from prior art

We are products of our environment, we learned what art is by having other peoples art as reference to "what art is". So it's only natural that our own art is inspired by other peoples work. People usually do not directly steal an artstyle though and if so, they are usually called out for that. LLMs directly steal from artists works hallucinating them into a pile of stolen bullshit that roughly fits the given prompt.

You can't steal someone's art style because they never owned it in the first place. It's not copyrightable. It's good and right for AI to copy artists' styles - it can produce more work more cheaply for those who want it. If that affects the profits of commercial artists, so be it, that's the risk you take when you engage in business in the free market. Get over it.

Thanks for showing again that people on this platform have little to no empathy, only care about businesses and money and have no understanding of art in general :-) Shows why I don't befriend tech savvy people usually.

Do you have empathy for rent-seekers in other domains when they get undercut by cheaper alternatives? Property investors? patent trolls? Record labels that own the rights to music from long-dead artists finally reaching the end of their copyright terms? Commercial artists are businessmen out to make a profit just like all those others I listed. They're not some magical monks that society needs to protect and shield from the struggles of normal life.

Thing is, I started appreciating this way of looking at art only after reading anti-LLM arguments, and I am a bit angry at myself for not feeling it during the pre-LLM decades of my life, which would have been much enriched.

There is this other way of looking at art (which probably dominated my worldview) where you don't care much about where it comes from. An extreme example is reading Harry Potter fanfiction, which in some way feels like reading math proofs, namely you continuously wonder what else can be done in a largely fixed setting.

So HPMOR and friends prove that we don't need to worry about the authorship, and focus on the experience?

It makes sense, but is the opposite of the OP.

HPMOR is one of those fanfics which make you feel a strong connection to the author, he really poured his soul into it ("rare vitamins" as he put it [1]), the good and the bad, kinda the exception that proves the rule. Probably this is why it was so successful.

[1] https://hpmor.com/notes/progress-14-05-01/

> Everyone borrows or steals from prior art

I just want to mention that this is not a bad thing

Often we just call this "inspiration". All our genres are music have their origin in taking stuff from other genres. We wouldn't have reggae if not for ska, rocksteady and R&B.

But your view of art is based on who you “think” made it. So if someone lies about who made the art your views on the art changed. That’s a strange position that doesn’t make sense to me.

Context can very easily enrich or ruin nearly anything, but especially creative expression. I'm surprised this is seen as strange.

A Million Little Pieces was a popular book about addiction that inspired a lot of people. Turned out the story wasn't true, and so a lot of inspiration turned into anger.

Always thought that was interesting, because if the lies weren't exposed the readers would have remained inspired.

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

One time I called in sick to work, they even sent me flowers. Later they found out I was lying and wasn't really sick and they got angry about it. Humans are strange.

One time someone asked me to paint their house, so I made a 5 square inch watercolour of it. Unfortunately this didn't protect the walls from moisture and they ended up with mold in their house.

I think it depends on what you value in art. For me, the value of art is that it's an emotional communication from a person. What the art actually looks/sounds/feels like is completely secondary to that. Machine-generated art is fundamentally empty and meaningless to me, and therefore uninteresting.

Also, if someone lies about using genAI I discover it, that makes the "artist" a liar who cannot be trusted.

It seems like a pretty normal behavior. Just look at the whole tabloid industry that follows actors and musicians around. You might like bland architectural paintings, but knowing they were made by Hitler sort of changes your impression.

It used to be justified and respected stance to separate the art from the artist.

At the same time, blatant copying was excepted, painters today can take Rembrandts like you wouldn't know the difference. But art fruits in a time and place.

I still think LLMs won't generate art worth anything, of course I make genai pictures of my dog with a pet bird.

> I'm amazed that someone was able to do that

This is a bit "woo" but I've always thought of this experience/phenomenon as souls touching across time and space. LLMs either don't have souls or they've stolen them but, either way, that experience (if still possible with slop) would be tainted and perverted.

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