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Comment by madrox | Hacker News Reader

We are largely having a reckoning with whether a discipline is the process or the outcome.

Music didn't enter the conservatory so much as the relative interest in various styles have changed over time. I get that the author was implying that by talking about pop music, but what was music doing before Mozart came around?

Every field is having this existential crisis right now, from art to math. Especially in art, the anti-AI hate mostly reduces to arguing that art is the process not the outcome.

The need for research-level math isn't changing (if anything, it may accelerate), but how we do it is. The languages, systems, and process I used to write code has changed a lot since I wrote my first line of BASIC in 1994. Mathematicians, I expect, have not encountered nearly the same amount of disruption in academia. I feel for them.

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>? Especially in art, the anti-AI hate mostly reduces to arguing that art is the process not the outcome.

That is not my objection to AI art at all. The value of art for me is that somebody has an idea to express and they're trying to communicate it to me. That's totally absent from AI-generated material. I'm not categorically opposed to AI, but my interest in automatically generated content tailored to indulge my personal taste is absolutely zero.

> somebody has an idea to express and they're trying to communicate it to me

I don't see why that would exclude GenAI - you have an idea, you write a prompt, you get something that's sort of but not quite what you were going for, so you iterate a bit until it's good enough to communicate what you wanted.

In my experience the AI still does a lot of heavy lifting of thinking for the person.

Just like if I tell an artist can you draw a painting of a deer in the forest, but make it ominous and tense. I could have a vague idea of what that would mean for me but the professional artist will make correct decision in composition, light etc. to create that.

Just my sentence is nothing but the image can evoke feelings if done right.

Yes, but that sounds to me exactly the process vs. outcome distinction that the parent made, rather than a difference in the intent to communicate.

I think those two arguments converge into one- you can’t get the intent unless you have the process

The difference for most people against AI is that there is no world where someone with intent and skill can engage with AI to make anything approaching art. If your process includes AI, it is impossible to be an artist.

Even engaging with the nuance is beyond the pale.

It sounds like the problem you have with AI art is that instead of an artist iterating over parts of the image to get what they want, someone iterates over entire images to get what they want. (Or... they still iterate over parts of the image, but with a generative model instead of manual brush strokes.) Somehow that process distinction makes the difference for you.

Before AI it was possible to "express" yourself to someone else by recommending them a piece of art you liked. There's a lot of art in the world, expressing many different things, so you could actually get across something very specific by being a good curator / recommender. But nobody would seriously claim that they were actually creating, painting with a broader brush at a "book level" instead of a "word level" when they were just curating good novels.

They didn't create the works they recommend, but they did create the recommendations. AI art is kinda like that, even if you didn't create the work in the dataset. Unfortunately it's also like if the recommendations tried to pass off as original work instead, and didn't actually cite the original work, which I think is a huge reason why people dislike it. I still think it's possible to create art with generative AI, but it takes more than just a prompt, if that makes sense.

I express myself with AI all the time, I just can't share it with anyone because it's banned from all the platforms where I'd care to do so. I don't really write stories without AI anymore, so probably people won't see expressions like that from me again. Maybe you could call that "AI hurts artists", dunno.

>the anti-AI hate mostly reduces to arguing that art is the process not the outcome.

The outcome is also bad though, once you scale past static images. That's why consumers, who otherwise are apathetic at scale, are extremely negative against generative AI. at least where they (perceive to) notice it.

AI seems to be the new CGI. If it's invisible nobody cares and you only notice when it's awful.

Yeah, that's my impression from games. Even being told that a game was vibe coded doesn't matter much unless the game runs like crap. GenAI is a OR disaster, though, and very few Indies can really "hide" the usage as of now. How AAA navigates it will be interesting to see, but this isn't exactly a booming time in industry to begin with.

I like this framing. I know that AI has it's place and in others it doesn't. I recognize I sound like an AI shill in personal conversations, but I'm a very outcome driven person. I simply want multiple, thousands of outcomes even, and those outcomes all coming together is my process/journey, which is different to a developer or musicians process may view their career.

The outcome I want from art is to feel some emotion in common with the artist. Machines don’t have emotion.

People who write prompts can have emotion. If someone is feeling really sad and they say to a computer "draw me a sad thing" and it draws something really sad and they break down crying, and then they show it to you and you also break down crying, that meets your goals, but it probably isn't what you meant.

The sad thing was produced by the machine, as its idea of something sad. It is not s result of this particular episode of sadness.

Put another way, “draw me something sad” is too vague; a million people can issue the same prompt, and what comes out does not correlate to any specifics of their own experience of sadness.

What happens if the outcomes were obtained instantaneously, and without effort on your part? Would it be more enjoyable for you?

Besides, I don't think you can be driven by thousands of outcomes, by definition, as you can't be in love with thousands of people. Your main motivation must be the thing that unites them. Perhaps you are driven by the process of imagining solutions to problems and/or realizing your ideas.

I think classical and symphonic music are helped in the US by school music programs. It's the best way to have 100 kids practice and perform for a concert. Breaking them into 25 jazz quartets is a lot more complicated.

Marching band.

Yup, big group when it's warmish, marching band. Big group when it's cold, symphonic band.

> Especially in art, the anti-AI hate mostly reduces to arguing that art is the process not the outcome.

It's both. The outcome is bad (boy is it ever bad), and even if it were good I still would rather enjoy art produced by humans.

Before Mozart came along, we had folk music, music of the masses, and they continue to exist and will exist today.

Why are you guys talking about Mozart as if you can split the mass adoption of music into pre and post Mozart? Mozart was one of many in an ongoing evolution of European music. The way masses interacted with music varied based on the time and the culture. Some cultures at any given time would vary based on whether they produced much music at all (look at how Calvinism and the way the Dutch aristocracy handled music patronage vs Italy or France impacted Dutch music's dominance before vs after the Renaissance), what kind of music they produced (worship music only or also secular patronage?), etc. Mozart did not significantly overhaul this, rather he spent his latter years desperately trying to keep his reputation and relevance alive with travels.

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