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Comment by vuurmot | Hacker News Reader

Many people have no interest at all in art, if it is not used for connection with others. Scale all you want, humanity overwhelming rejects it.

The end result is that certain genres of art (digital paintings, video games, digital music) will die, and people will return to participating in the real world. The purveyors of artistic expression will flow back towards those who perform in the real world, with different recombinations of the genre, tending towards those that can allow for recognition of genuine expression.

AI will kill certain genres of art, and many more genres of art will be born.

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That's quite bleak, and I hold an opposing view. My main view is people are generally quite good to discern AI cruft from "human-made" paintings, games, and music. As soon as it will be impossible to make money from AI cruft, the AI cruft will disappear. As a (hobby) game developer myself, no AI tool I have used has ever made me feel "wow, this is great". It has always required multiple iterations of feedback. I tried tools like Meshy too. I ended up hiring a part-time 3D designer from Indonesia, who is a joy to work with.

We are good at distinguishing it, but that doesn’t mean the unmitigated flow of Super Intelligence-generated images, music, etc won’t degrade the spaces we share and exhaust people from filtering from the art that they do want.

I can tell an image is AI generated almost instantly, but it nonetheless stomped places like the Photographers of Threads channel. Not that it was great to begin with, but it was something. More and more I’m motivated to only discover photographers via photo books.

For example, I no longer generally enjoy videos of animals doing cute things. LLMs have taken the wonder of that from us, because though animals do really unexpected things sometimes, it's more common these days for it to be someone puppetting an AI in the hunt for internet points. I discard anything post-2022 or so, unless it comes from a known good source. (which also generally has to have a presence pre-2022 in order to feel safe)

LLMs are butchering whimsy and wonder.

Much of make it by human talk is giant cope.

we insist that humans can do things better in some way or do things that ai can't do. some of that is true right now, but can't assume that will hold.

and yes it requires iterations and taste right now.

the idea that it can't happen in the future. or that humans are special in some way (which you are not claiming, but is a common claim) is the cope.

I think the number of people who can't tell and don't care is far more overwhelming, and has been for pretty much the entirety of history. Also, AI doesn't prevent you from expressing yourself, much as e.g. using Gamemaker instead of programming it yourself would prevent you from making a really good game. It's a tool and it has lowered the barrier of entry to the floor, so there is gonna be a heck of a lot more low quality stuff, but I think there will also be a lot of really good stuff that wouldn't exist otherwise.

I suggest that while many people might express that they have no interest at all in art, that doesn't mean that they don't passively recognise it and reap the benefits of high-quality design.

I'm talking about videogames specifically, as it is the topic I'more familiar/invested in.

I definitely don't think they will disappear, or the current dynamics will change substantially, only their scale will.

As someone that is not artistically inclined, I have the same chance of producing appealing art and assets with AI than I have with pre-AI tools (yes, I tried).

But for people that ARE artistically inclined, skilled at using composition, color palettes, have strong fundamentals, etc... AI will be just another tool in their belt, and if they are able to integrate it with their own sensibilities and existing tools, there is little reason to think they won't be able to come up with art that it at least as compelling as that created with "old" tools, especially as now it is increasingly possible to exert a level of control on what is being generated.

Tools available to digital artists have evolved from having to paint pixel by pixel in the 80s to advanced layer and filter editing in photoshop (not to mention all the advanced tools available for 3D), this is "just" another evolution.

And yes, regardless of that, the market will be flooded by AI-generated slop, as the barriers of entry have lowered significantly; but the market was oversaturated already, and low-effort and asset flip games were a large part of daily releases.

Users still reward appealing, high-effort games, and they will likely keep doing so; the top of the iceberg will remain the same, and the ignored, forgotten bottom, augmented by the slop releases, will just get 10 times bigger.

What if I made a machine that live streamed my thoughts (via brainwaves) as images/video, i.e. a window into the imagination? That would involve both AI (necessarily) and communication.

Delusional thinking, I don’t know a single person that plays video games in order to connect with the creator of the game. They definitely play them to connect with others who play the same game. The only people not playing games due to AI are people who make a political issue out of it and are virtue signaling to their group and a small number of people with a massive chip on their shoulder about automation in media.

Look forward 5 years, whereby the majority of music, art, games are AI generated.

Is there a record amount of people playing video games? People spending hours in front of a computer listening to AI generated music and art?

I am pretty sure the trend will be towards the opposite. The AI fanatics believe that playing a video game is an isolated activity, but is it?

Don't people often play the latest video games (even single player) to belong to a part of a digital society? Do people play Dark Souls because it is a fun and challenging game? Or do they play it because they want to experience what the wider gaming society experiences, and participate in it?

I quote the MAGNIFICA HUMANITAS: "We can embrace the technological progress that alleviates suffering and unlocks new possibilities, provided that we do not abandon the very essence of our humanity, namely the capacity for relationship and love"

Did you even read my comment?

> They definitely play them to connect with others who play the same game.

Once anyone can generate any game, movie, or artwork they can imagine with a simple prompt, this shared experience will disappear along with it. The amount of content available will fragment the space so much we'll eventually lose the shared experience and novelty that brings enjoyment and fulfillment from these activities in the first place.

Then why are you sharing this thought and why am I reading it and responding to it? Why are other people reading it as well?

You can generate any thought you can imagine and write it down with a few lines of text but the amount of thoughts available haven’t fragmented the space so much that we lost shared experience of them. If anything it seems like sharing and responding to thoughts is more popular than ever and many are widely read, repeated, responded to and remixed by others.

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