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Comment by devindotcom | Hacker News Reader

With the caveat that I have not watched the video, the title itself rubs me the wrong way. Intent, quality, and artistry as I understand them are not things intended to "scale." You would not, for instance, as a musician, think "I made an album, yes. But how do I scale up to ten or a hundred albums?" You may well think "How can I scale my audience," but that is a different question entirely and not a matter of intent, quality, or artistry. Scaling art is, to me, a wrongheaded notion to begin with.

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It's a good talk and worth watching. The title doesn't really reflect what the talk is about, which is more about how to not lose those things while using AI tools. The title could maybe even be described as a kind of trojan horse because the answer (to the question of how to scale), if you read between the lines, seems to be basically: don't. Slow down and be intentional about every detail, focus on the user, and don't lower your standards.

Honestly I think I disagree. If you take photography as an art for example, the "scale" was pretty technology constrained for a long while.

In what regard? How many pictures you can take, places you can be, how fast you can edit? Photographers all have an archive of thousands of photos. The great ones deliberate for months or years to produce a 60-picture photo book. I don’t see tech scaling that part of the process, because it’s fundamentally about their artistic vision, emotional impact, etc.

Maybe you could use tech to scale bottlenecks of commercial photographers doing advertising or wedding shoots, but we’re talking about art.

I’m not sure what “scaling” is even supposed to mean here. The video’s thumbnail and description advocate against “zombie UI” (whatever that means as well — probably the typical AI slop-style UI). The pressing issue is that there is a dearth of good (great) UI, scaling or not, and that was already the case in the years before the use of LLMs. We need more instances of really good UI before we can talk about scaling.

But what if… that’s changing? What if some next generation is so properly trained to find repeating any song after a first play to be so tedious that the new art form is just an endless effusive scaled-out stream of the artist’s brain?

Well, that's possible, but I think it's very unlikely.

Then again, if you had told me a few years ago that AI was right around the corner and that the first jobs it would take would be in graphic design, programming and advanced mathematics, I would have laughed in your face.

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