I don’t think “real art” will disappear. People will always want to create (although monetising that will now be exceedingly more difficult).
It feels like we are ripping the humanity out of life on a greater and greater scale with tech. Instead of replacing crappy jobs and freeing up peoples time to enjoy their life, we’re actually automating enjoyable pursuits.
NB: when I’m referring to art I mean of all types as that’s where we are heading.
Good stuff will still be good stuff, and it will keep being rare. The biggest change will be that producing mediocre content will be cheaper and more accessible, but we're already drowning in it, so .. meh?
> Instead of replacing crappy jobs and freeing up peoples time to enjoy their life, we’re actually automating enjoyable pursuits.
That's an interesting observation.
Have you been to the internet?
In all seriousness, the cream will rise to the top. The mediocre “content” will get generated and we will get better at filtering it out which will decrease the value in generating mediocre content, etc etc. The tools being produced just further level the playing field for humanity and allow more people to get “in the arena” more easily.
Humans are still the final judge of the value being produced, and the world/internet will respond accordingly.
For a thought exercise, take your argument and apply it to the internet as a whole, from the perspective of a book or newspaper publisher in the 1990s.
> Instead of replacing crappy jobs and freeing up peoples time to enjoy their life, we’re actually automating enjoyable pursuits.
Yeah really hit the nail on the head here. I thought a lot of backlash against AI was due to workers not really reaping the benefits of automation and that's a solvable problem. But I've seen a lot of artists who are retired or don't need to work dive into despair over this still. It's taking their passion away, not just their job.
I don't really know how we could stop it though without doing some sweeping Dune-level "Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of the human mind" type laws.
We already live in a time of artistic stagnation. With how much audio engineers manipulate pop music in Pro Tools, "fake" singers have been a practical reality for 20 years. Look at Marvel movies. Go to any craft fair on a warm day, or any artists' co-op, in a major city and try, try to find one booth that is not exactly like 5 other booths on display.
People have been arguing about what is "real art" for centuries. Rap music wasn't real because it didn't follow traditional, European modes and patterns. Photography wasn't real because it didn't take the skill of a painter. Digital photography wasn't real because it didn't take laboring in a dark room. 3D rendering wasn't real. Digital painting wasn't real. Fractal imagery wasn't real. Hell, anything sold to the mass market instead of one-off to a collector still isn't "real art" to a lot of people.
Marcel Duchamp would like to have a word.
If anything, I think AI tools are one of the only chances we have of seeing anything interesting break out. I mean, 99% of the time it's just going to be used to make some flat-ui, corporate-memphis, milquetoast creative for a cheap-ass startup in a second rate co-working space funded by a podunk city's delusions they could ever compete with Silicon Valley.
But if even just one person uses the tool to stick out their neck and try to question norms, how can that not be art?
This has always been the case. Most entertainment regardless of form (music, art, tv, games...) is mediocre or below mediocre, with the occasional good or even rarer exceptional that we all buzz about.
AI image gen is only allowing a wider range of people to express their creativity. Just like every other tools that came before it lowered the bar of entry for new people to get in on the medium (computer graphics for example allowed those who had no talent for pen and paper to flourish).
Yes, there will be a lot of bad content, but that's nothing out of the ordinary.
High-quality content rarely rises to the top. The internet as of 2022 optimizes for mediocrity: the most popular content is the one which is best psychological manipulation using things like shock value and sexuality. Just take a look at Twitter, Facebook, or Reddit: it is extremely rare to see genuine masterpieces on there. Everything is just posted to farm as many shares and likes as possible.
If anything, this will result in the cream getting drowned in shit. Not to mention that artists do not get the space to develop from mediocre to excellent - as the mediocre market will have been replaced with practically free AI.
i’ve noticed this mediocrity decades ago when artists started using computers to create art. for me that’s when it went downhill.
The through line for a lot of mediocre stuff is the intention of the artist/creator to appeal to as broad a demographic/audience as possible so as to dissolve away anything that makes the art interesting, challenging, and good.
I feel like this about the mostly-human-created fashion. In my not so long lifetime I've seen everything from the 90s making a comeback. Ultimately I guess in terms of clothing that is practical with the materials that are available, we've already cycled through every style there is, such that the cycle time is now <30years.
But what if AI generates arts where humans do not scale?
For example, what if the AAA game you are expecting gets done in half of the time, or has ten times the size of explorable area, because it is cheap and fast to generate many of the arts needed by AI?
Or if some people excellent at story telling but mediocre at drawing can now produce world class manga due to the assistance of AI?
This feels like the natural outcome of Moravec's paradox[1]. I can imagine a grim future where most intellectually stimulating activities are done by machines and most of the work that's left for humans is building, cleaning, and maintaining the physical infrastructure that keeps these machines running. Basically all the physical grunt work that has proven hard to find a general technological solution for.
We're like people getting the very first electric light bulbs in their home, trying to speculate how electricity will change the world. The pace of change however will be orders of magnitude faster than that.
I think this situation says a lot about the nature of human desire, not just the fact that a few people were ingenious to come up with the idea of diffusion models. A lot of ingenious inventions are relatively boring when exposed to the broader populace, and don't hit on such an appealing latent desire.
What will this say about the limitless yet-to-be-invented ideas that humanity is just raring to give itself, if only someone would hit on the correct chain of breakthroughs? Would even a single person today be interested in building a backyard nuclear warhead in an afternoon, and would attempt to if the barrier of difficulty in doing so was solved?
But in my case, I don't happen to find drawing or painting enjoyable. I simply don't, for nature- or nurture-based reasons. I also don't believe that everyone can become a trained manual artist, because not everyone is interested in doing so, even if they still (rightly or wrongly) cling to the idea of having instant creative output and gratification.
I think this lack of interest is what makes me and many other people a prime target for addiction to AI-generated art. Due to my interest in programming I can tweak the experience using my skills without worrying about the baggage people of three years ago had to deal with if they wanted a similar result.
So without any sort of generation, how does one solve the problem of not wanting to draw, but still wanting one's own high-quality visual product to enjoy? I guess it would be learning to be interested in something one is not. And that probably requires virtuosity and integrity, a willingness to move past mistakes, and a positive mindset. The sorts of things that have little to do with the specific mechanics of writing code in an IDE to provoke a dopamine response. Also, the ability to stop focusing so hard on the end result, a detriment to creativity that so many (manual) art classes have pointed out for decades.
I sometimes feel I lack some of those kinds of qualities, and yet I can somehow still generate interesting results with Stable Diffusion. It feels like a contradiction, or an invalidation of a set of ideas many people have held as sacred for so long, a path to the advancement of one's own inner being.
I will relish the day when an AI is capable of convincing me that drawing with my own two hands is more interesting than using its own ability to generate a finished piece in seconds.
So I agree that, on a bigger scale beyond the improvement of automated art, this line of thinking will do more harm to humanity than good. An AI can take the fall for people who can't or don't want to fight the difficult battles needed to grow into better people, and that in turn validates that kind of mindset. It gives even the people who detest the artistic process a way to have the end result, and a decent one at that.
I think this is part of the reason why the anti-AI-art movement has pushed back so loudly. AI art teaches us the wrong lessons of what it means to be human. People could become convinced to not want to go outside and walk amongst the trees and experience the world if an AI can hallucinate a convincing replacement from the comfort of their own rooms.
We are a long political fight away from people in industries affected by AI not feeling like their livelihoods are under attack. It would be better received, at least for me, if the AI guys would admit that under the system we have they're playing with a big heaping flamethrower in a vast ocean of gasoline.