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Comment by orangedog | Hacker News Reader

You're replacing some artist and empowering others. If a single creative can gen a 3 hour movie (we'll pretend it is high-quality), then they can do things which were previously impossible. Was it not marketed as a tool which enabled people to do more?

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Again, that is not what either sales pitch was nor long term vision. It was sold LITERALLY with "hahahha artists are useless now, AI will replace them'.

And quite a few on HN run that talking point too.

> Was it not marketed as a tool which enabled people to do more?

Oddly, no. I remeber it, because I found it weird. I found the open hostility toward creatives very noticeable. The way this campaign came across made me reject the "refuse to engage with modernity" style of arguments. If you run around insulting and taunting people, them rejecting you is not necessary rejection of modernity. It is rejection of insults and taunts targeted at them.

We know our society doesn’t value creative people. It never has, really. The greats of the classical era all had sponsors because it has never been workable for most people to earn their living in a creative field. Today you have to come from generational wealth pretty much.

But also people have bad taste. AI music really only works on people who don’t critically listen to it. Most people just seem to want a catchy hook and the general structure of a pop song, and that’s how Spotify gets away with it.

But you ask people to pay even $1 for a track they will listen to hundreds of times? No thanks.

So people get what they deserve.

But that is entirely different claim. People do not want to pay an optional expenses - like paying an artist to paint a mural when you do not really have to. Or opting for piracy instead of buying a book or a movie. The rhetoric of companies and ai fans was not that. It was pure open hostility with "hahaha we will destroy those losers" basically. Their claim here is not about just about the market or really about the market. It came across as if the "obsoleteness" itself was the goal regardless of monetary gains/looses. And as if "people creating" were something negative that will finally be stopped.

> But you ask people to pay even $1 for a track they will listen to hundreds of times? No thanks.

People used to buy albums or listen to the radio for free. If anything, paying Spotify means that quite a lot of people pay more then before for music ... however it is spotify who benefits rather then artists.

Just like with studios which used to have captured market and earn more then artists themselves.

> Oddly, no. I remeber it, because I found it weird. I found the open hostility toward creatives very noticeable.

Indeed, and we're now seeing similar hostility towards mathematicians, of all people. It's disgusting, honestly.

I follow AI quite closely and I have yet to see any hostility towards artists or mathematicians from anybody worth talking about (maybe some forum dwellers?). Nor have I ever seen any marketing or implications from big AI companies that says creative work or math is in any way useless or obsolete. The fact that AI can solve long unsolved math problems isn't hostility towards mathematicians.

Fat cat (checks notes) math professors have had it far too good for far too long. If they think they’re so smart, why didn’t they get a real job and raise venture funding for a scammy startup?

Right? Like, God forbid someone work gruelingly hard at a stable job quietly and slowly advancing the state of human knowledge without seeking fame and fortune!

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