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The hard-core heavy-duty hate is all economic. People are angry about economic issues like low wages and unaffordable real estate but we've been beaten into le

by api 3mo ago

The hard-core heavy-duty hate is all economic. People are angry about economic issues like low wages and unaffordable real estate but we've been beaten into learned helplessness on those things. Nothing can be done. Both parties are bad. The right promotes corrupt oligarchy and regressively transfers wealth upward, the left prevents new home construction (driving real estate costs) and regulates away everything but service industries and white collar jobs that AI is now replacing. The worst AI hate I've seen comes from artists and creatives. I've found the AI hate in those communities to be white hot bordering on people talking about violence. My early take, which I think is still valid, is that actual art is very unlikely to be replaced by AI. AI generated visual stuff looks bland, cliche, or has this weird "plastic" look. AI generated prose is boring. AI generated stories are hilarious barrages of tropes played exactly straight, cliche characters, basically just like paint by numbers bad TV writing or even worse. If real artists find ways to use AI, it won't be this way. It'll be as an assistant or they'll get in and hack it and make it do exactly what they want, much like artistic experimental photography. But I'm only half right, and when I realized this I understood the hate. AI is not replacing "true art," and it won't even if true artists end up finding ways to use it (like artistic photography etc.). But what it is replacing is what a lot of artists make their money doing: commercial art, making "content," ghostwriting, first-pass editing, graphic design, web design, that kind of thing. That's not pour-your-soul-into-it capital-A Art, but it's what pays the bills. AI is absolutely decimating the market for that. So back to my first point: it's all economic.

acedia000 3mo ago
Yes, I strongly agree with these points, but particularly the second half. "Real art" is not at all under threat by AI, which has effectively no ability to even touch, let alone dilute the supposed magnitude and breadth of the human spirit in expression. The existence/proliferation of AI is not going to infringe upon the abilities or opportunities of a bus driver who comes home every day after work to work covertly on an entire house full of sprawling, elaborate tinfoil miniatures which aren't discovered until after his death. The inconvenient reality of most "creative" work that AI has excelled at supplanting is that it already is, and has been, exactly what people accuse AI to be doing to the form: pure commercial churn, meant solely to occupy temporary space, occasionally brilliant, mostly by accident, but nearly always produced lazily, insincerely, and without pride by people who are not paid enough to care and would rather be working on anything else. AI accelerates human mediocrity not because it is inherently mediocre by nature but because most people, and the things they produce, are. And I very squarely place the bulk of all my own creative efforts and accomplishments within that category too.
- api 3mo ago
  I think "AI is replacing art" is a category error. If I read a book or look at a piece of art or listen to music, the whole point is to receive the thoughts, feelings, and lived experience of a human being. But yes, AI is supplanting the mundane "art" that artists use as potboiler work, and that is the economic threat. The bitter horrible irony of art as a career is that the best art is often the hardest to sell, and it also takes the most time and energy to make. It's insanely hard to make a living doing just "pure art."
  - philipkglass 3mo ago
    This reminds me of the decline of the news industry. The best thing that traditional news publishers offered was in-depth investigative reporting. For example, 50 years ago: https://www.pulitzer.org/prize-winners-by-year/1976 https://www.pulitzer.org/prize-winners-by-year/1976 You can pick just about any year and find great work. The best newspaper work is hard to sell. Pure investigative reporting is too expensive and slow to keep a newspaper in business by itself. Newspapers relied on geographically limited oligopoly to sell a lot of other cheap page-filler at good margins: weather forecasts, sports scores, political opinions, comics, classified ads, movie schedules... People who just wanted to read the latest Calvin and Hobbes strip were inadvertently, benevolently financing the investigative reporting that their area's newspapers used to support, even if they never actually read those stories. When the Web un-bundled it all, everything but the investigative reporting could be done better and/or less expensively by non-news organizations. News junkies who really care about hard hitting news aren't numerous enough to keep funding the investigative reporting. (And even if they were, most metro areas don't have enough latent scandals to keep newspapers printing regular editions of investigative exposés alone.)
    - api 3mo ago
      Media seems like one of the domains where capitalism and the profit motive works the least, the other being a lot of health care. In media it seems to be an immediate race to the bottom that converges on dopamine generating chum and slop. A bottomless TikTok-style infinite scroll feed of mindless shit is the ideal form of profitable media. Good art, in depth investigative reporting done in a disciplined fact based way, those kinds of things are expensive and time consuming to make and don’t tend to sell broadly. It’s not because people don’t want them. It’s because people don’t like paying for something intangible. People will spend $25 in Starbucks for a coffee and a snack but dissolve into rage at paying that for an album, book, or movie, even though those deliver a lot more and cost a lot more to make.

by api 3mo ago

acedia000 3mo ago

Yes, I strongly agree with these points, but particularly the second half. "Real art" is not at all under threat by AI, which has effectively no ability to even touch, let alone dilute the supposed magnitude and breadth of the human spirit in expression. The existence/proliferation of AI is not going to infringe upon the abilities or opportunities of a bus driver who comes home every day after work to work covertly on an entire house full of sprawling, elaborate tinfoil miniatures which aren't discovered until after his death. The inconvenient reality of most "creative" work that AI has excelled at supplanting is that it already is, and has been, exactly what people accuse AI to be doing to the form: pure commercial churn, meant solely to occupy temporary space, occasionally brilliant, mostly by accident, but nearly always produced lazily, insincerely, and without pride by people who are not paid enough to care and would rather be working on anything else. AI accelerates human mediocrity not because it is inherently mediocre by nature but because most people, and the things they produce, are. And I very squarely place the bulk of all my own creative efforts and accomplishments within that category too.

api 3mo ago
I think "AI is replacing art" is a category error. If I read a book or look at a piece of art or listen to music, the whole point is to receive the thoughts, feelings, and lived experience of a human being. But yes, AI is supplanting the mundane "art" that artists use as potboiler work, and that is the economic threat. The bitter horrible irony of art as a career is that the best art is often the hardest to sell, and it also takes the most time and energy to make. It's insanely hard to make a living doing just "pure art."
- philipkglass 3mo ago
  This reminds me of the decline of the news industry. The best thing that traditional news publishers offered was in-depth investigative reporting. For example, 50 years ago: https://www.pulitzer.org/prize-winners-by-year/1976 https://www.pulitzer.org/prize-winners-by-year/1976 You can pick just about any year and find great work. The best newspaper work is hard to sell. Pure investigative reporting is too expensive and slow to keep a newspaper in business by itself. Newspapers relied on geographically limited oligopoly to sell a lot of other cheap page-filler at good margins: weather forecasts, sports scores, political opinions, comics, classified ads, movie schedules... People who just wanted to read the latest Calvin and Hobbes strip were inadvertently, benevolently financing the investigative reporting that their area's newspapers used to support, even if they never actually read those stories. When the Web un-bundled it all, everything but the investigative reporting could be done better and/or less expensively by non-news organizations. News junkies who really care about hard hitting news aren't numerous enough to keep funding the investigative reporting. (And even if they were, most metro areas don't have enough latent scandals to keep newspapers printing regular editions of investigative exposés alone.)
  - api 3mo ago
    Media seems like one of the domains where capitalism and the profit motive works the least, the other being a lot of health care. In media it seems to be an immediate race to the bottom that converges on dopamine generating chum and slop. A bottomless TikTok-style infinite scroll feed of mindless shit is the ideal form of profitable media. Good art, in depth investigative reporting done in a disciplined fact based way, those kinds of things are expensive and time consuming to make and don’t tend to sell broadly. It’s not because people don’t want them. It’s because people don’t like paying for something intangible. People will spend $25 in Starbucks for a coffee and a snack but dissolve into rage at paying that for an album, book, or movie, even though those deliver a lot more and cost a lot more to make.