My kids both have creative hearts, and they are terrified that A.I. will prevent them from earning a living through creativity. Very recently, I've had an alternate thought. We've spent decades improving the technology of entertainment, spending billions (trillions?) of dollars in the process. When A.I. can generate any entertainment you can imagine, we might start finding this kind of entertainment boring. Maybe, at that point, we decide that exploring space, stretching our knowledge of physics and chemistry, and combating disease are far more interesting because they are real. And, through the same lens, maybe human-created art is more interesting because it is real.
> And, through the same lens, maybe human-created art is more interesting because it is real.
Conversations I have with people in real life almost always come back to this point. Most people find AI stuff novel, but few find it particularly interesting on an artistic level. I only really hear about people being ecstatic about AI online, by people who are, for lack of a better term, really online, and who do not have the skills, know-how, or ability, to make art themselves.
I always find the breathless joy that some people express at this stuff with confusion. To me, the very instant someone mentions "AI generated" I just instantly find it un-interesting artistically. It's not the same as photoshop or using digital art suites. It's AI generated. Insisting on the bare minimum human involvement as a feature is just a non-starter for me if something is presented as art.
I'll wait to see if the utopian vision people have for this stuff comes to fruition. But I have enough years of seeing breathless positivity for some new tech curdle into resignation that it's ended up as ad focused, bland, MBA driven, slop, that I'm not very optimistic.
> I only really hear about people being ecstatic about AI online, by people who are, for lack of a better term, really online, and who do not have the skills, know-how, or ability, to make art themselves.
Yes, I've noticed this. The people who are excited about it usually come off as opportunistic (hence the "breathless joy"), and not really interested in letting whatever art/craft they want to make deeply change them. They just want the recognition of being able to make the thing without the formative work. (I hesitate to point this out, anticipating allegations of elitism.)
Plus, really online people tend to dominate online discussions, giving the impression that the public will be happy to consume only AI generated things. Then again, the public is happy to consume social media engagement crap, so I'm very curious what the revealed preference is here.
The value in learning this stuff is that it changes you. I'll be forever indebted to my guitar teacher partially because he teaches me to do the work, and that evidence of doing the work is manifest readily, and to play the long, long game.
> Insisting on the bare minimum human involvement as a feature is just a non starter for me if something is presented as art
You can make the guidance as superficial or detailed as you like. Input detailed descriptions, use real images as reference, you can spend a minute or a day on it. If you prompt "cute dog" you should expect generic outputs. If you write half a screen with detailed instructions, you can expect it to be mostly your contribution. It's the old "you're holding it wrong" problem.
BTW, try to input an image in chatGPT or Claude and ask for a description, you will be amazed how detailed it can get.
You need an image for an ad. You write a brief and send it to an artist who follows your brief and makes the image for you. You make more detailed briefs, or you make generic briefs. You receive an image. Regardless, did you make that image or just get a response to your brief?
You want a painting of your dog. You send the painter dozens of photos of your dog. You describe your dog in rapturous, incredible, detail. You receive a painting in response. Did you make that painting? Were you the artist in any normal parlance?
When you use chatGPT or Claude you're signing up to getting/receiving the image generated as a response to your prompt, not creating that image. You're involvement is always lessened.
You might claim you made that image, but then you would be like a company claiming they made the response to their brief, or the dog owner insisting they were the painter, which everyone would consider nonsensical if not plain wrong. Are they collaborators? Maybe. But the degree of collaboration in making the image is very very small.
> Did you make that painting? Were you the artist in any normal parlance?
The symphony conductor just waves her hands reading the score, does she make music? The orchestra makes all the sounds. She just prompts them. Same for movie director.
The analogy isn't quite right. The conductor and director spend days collaborating with the symphony and the actors/crew. Parent's example is them literally prompting - via a creative brief - the artist or agency.
The symphony conductor gets credit for being the conductor-- not for being Beethoven. A film director has a thousand times more influence on their final product than a conductor has on theirs, and they still don't try to take credit for the writing, costume, set design, acting, score, special effects, etc. etc. etc. I've yet to see stable diffusion spit out a list of credits after generating an image.
It's still very different. What you describe is exactly what an art director does, which is creative and difficult— there's a good reason many commercial artists end their careers as art directors but none start there. Anybody that says making things that look good and interesting using generative AI is easy or doesn't require genuine creativity is just being a naysayer. However, at most, the art director is credited with the compilation of other people's work. In no situation would they claim authorship over any of the pieces that other people made no matter how much influence they had on them. This distinction might seem like a paperwork difference to people outside of the process, but it's not. Every stroke of the pen or stylus or brush, scissor snip, or pixel pushed is specifically informed by that artist's unique perspective based on their experience, internal state, minute physical differences, and any number of other non-quantifiable factors; there's no way even an identical twin that went to the same school and had the same work experience would have done it exactly the same way with the same outcome. Even using tools like Photoshop, which in professional blank-canvas art creation context use little to no automation (compared to finishing work for photography and such that use more of it.) And furthermore, you can almost guarantee that there's enough consistency in their distinctions that a knowledgeable observer could consistently tell which one made which piece. That's an artistic perspective— it's what makes a piece that artist's own piece. It's what makes something someone's take on the mona lisa rather than a forgery (or, copy I guess if they weren't trying to hide it) of the mona lisa. It's also what NN image generators take from artists. Artists don't learn how to do that— they learn broad techniques— their perspective is their humanity showing through in that process. That's what makes NN image generators learning process different from humans, and why it's can make a polaroid look like a Picasso in his synthetic cubist phase but gets confused about the upper limit for human limb counts. I think generative AI could be used to make statements with visual language, closer to design than art. I definitely think it could be used to make art by making images and then physically or digitally cutting pieces out and assembling them. But no matter how detailed you get in those prompts, there aren't enough words to express real artistic perspective and no matter what, your still working with other people's borrowed humanity usefully pureed and reformed by a machine. These tools are fundamentally completely different than tools like Photoshop. In art school I worked with both physical media and electronic media and the fundamental processes are exactly the same. Things like typography in graphic design are much easier, but you're still doing the same exact process and reasoning about the same exact things on a computer that you do working on paper and sending it to a "paste up man," as they did until the 80s/90s. People aren't just being sour pusses about this amazing new art tool— it's taking and reselling their humanity. I actually think these image generators are super neat — I use them to make more boards and references all the time. But no matter how specific I get with those prompts, I didn't make any of that. I asked a computer and that computer made it for me out of other people's art. A lot of people who are taken by their newfound ability to make polished images on command refuse to believe it, but it's true. It's a fundamentally different activity.
> your still working with other people's borrowed humanity usefully pureed and reformed by a machine
Exactly, isn't it amazing? You can travel the latent space of human culture in any direction. It's an endless mirror house where you can explore. I find it an inspiring experience, it's like a microscope that allows zooming into anything.
Sure it's a lot of fun. I also find it very useful for some things like references and mood boards. No matter how granular you get with control nets or LORAs and how good the models get, you just can't get the specificity needed for professional work and the forms it gives you are just too onerous to mold into a useful shape using professional tools. It's still, fundamentally, asking another thing to make it for you, like work for hire or a commission. Software like Nuke's copycat tool or Adobe's background remover or content-aware fill were professionally useful right off the bat because they were designed for professional use cases. Even then, text prompt image generators are more useful than not in low-effort, high-volume use cases where the extremely granular per-pixel nuance doesn't really matter. I doubt they'll ever be useful enough for anything higher-level than that. It's just fundamentally the wrong interface for this work. It's like saying a bus driver on a specific route with a bus is equally useful to a cab driver with a cab. There are obviously instances where that's true, but no matter how many great things you can show are on that bus route, and no matter how many people it's perfectly suited for, there's just no way a FedEx driver could use it to replace their van.
Just keying on one comment here, which perhaps no one will read:
I was, in fact, a paste-up man in the early 1990s, slapping together copy and ads for a magazine. As such, I was a ping-pong ball in the battle between account management and creative arts - each of them wanted to be the originator of the big and clever ideas. (This is pretty widespread in the industry, and was even a recurring theme in "Mad Men.")
The takeaway here is, people like to be creative. People need to be creative. There will always be an implacable drive to create, one which DALL-E can never satisfy. Gen AI is the artificial sweetener that might temporarily satisfy those cravings, but ultimately artists want to create something from nothing. There's some hope to be found in that, amid the tsunami of AI slop.
Well I really hope that you were easily able to transition out of paste-up because it kind of blows me away how quickly that whole craft just got clobbered. Just like my uncle that specialized in atlas publishing-- luckily he was able to hang on long enough to retire.
I agree that people do want to be creative, and I don't think that people are going to let Gen AI supplant that for them. However, the lower-end of the creative markets doing the low-end high-volume work-- think folks shotgunning out template-based logos on Fiverr-- are the ones that have already been displaced in large numbers, and there are far more of them. While they generally don't have the right skillset to do the higher-end work, their seeing that as the only viable career move is majorly fucking up companies' ability to find workers and vice versa, and for employers that don't know any better, they think the market is saturated which is bringing down wages.
Also, clueless executives just don't realize that having a neural network generate a "80% right" version of your work in a flat PNG file will take more effort to mold into shape for higher-end work than starting from scratch, so they've been making big cuts. A coworker on a contract also works in an animation house that fired their entire concept art department and replaced them with prompt monkeys making half as much money-- the problem was that standard art director changes-- e.g. I want this same exact image and garment, just make those lapels look a little fuller and softer but with sharper angles at the end, and change the piping on that jacket from green to purple-- might have been half an afternoon for a professional concept artist but would be DAYS of work to get art-director right using neural network tools... if for no other reason that the prompt writers just don't have the traditional visual art sophistication to even realize when they've got an appropriate solution, because learning that is a lot harder than learning to draw, and you learn that when you learn how to draw. So all the time they saved on the initial illustration was totally sucked up by art directors not being able to iterate even a tenth as quickly as they used to, and fast iteration was the major selling point for Gen AI to begin with. It simply does not do the task if you absolutely require specificity, and having a raster non-layered png that looks like it already went through post is a beast to edit, even for a skilled post-prod person. Well, three months later, they canned the prompt engineers and were begging their concept artists to come back and work for them again. What a waste of everything.
Why do I even bother torturing myself in forums like this by giving a real-world creative industry counterpoint to the tech crowd perspective, despite many of the most vocal ones being smug, patronizing, and self-aggrandizing? Maybe one executive out there will read this stuff and say "Hmm... maybe I should actually talk to people that work in this field that I trust to see if it's really beneficial to replace our [insert creative department] rather than relying on software execs and their marketing people say is feasible."
Photography, digital painting, 3D rendering -- these all went through a phase of being panned as "not real art" before they were accepted, but they were all eventually accepted and they all turned out to have their own type of merit. It will be the same for AI tools.
I'll be blunt, all of those images look comically generic and extremely "AI".
> Photography, digital painting, 3D rendering
Those are not the same as AI. Using AI is akin to standing beside a great pianist and whispering into his ear that you want "something sad and slow" and then waiting for him to play your request. You might continue to give him prompts but you're just doing that. In time, you might be called a "collaborator" but your involvement begins at bare minimum and you have to justify that you're more involved --- the pianist doesn't, the pianist is making the music.
You could record the song and do more to the recording, or improv along with your own instrument. But just taking the raw output again and again is simply getting a response to your prompt again and again.
The prompt themselves are actually more artistic as they venture into surrealist poetry and prose, but the images are almost always much less interesting artistically than the prompts would suggest.
> I'll be blunt, all of those images look comically generic and extremely "AI".
Ok, now I know you're watching through hate goggles. Fortunately, not everyone will bring those to the party.
> Using AI is akin... [goes on to describe a clueless iterative prompting process that wouldn't get within a mile of the front page]
You've really outed yourself here. If you think it's all just iterative prompting, you are about 3 years behind the tools and workflows that allow the level of quality and consistency you see in the best AI work.
I scrolled through and...have to agree with their impression. I'm confused as to what you thought is being demonstrated by images on https://civitai.com/images of all things, since it's all very high-concept/low-intentionality, to put it nicely. Did you mix it up with a different link?
My litmus test is to simply lie. It weeds out the people hating AI simply because they know or think it is AI. If you link directly to an AI site they're already going to say they hate it or that it all "looks like AI slop". You won't get anywhere trying to meet them at a middle ground because they simply aren't interested in any kind of a middle ground.
Which is exactly the opposite of what the artists claim to want. But god is it hilarious following the anti-AI artists on Twitter who end up having to apologize for liking an AI-generated artwork pretty much as a daily occurrence. I just grab my popcorn and enjoy the show.
Every passing day the technologies making all of this possible get a little bit better and every single day continues to be the worst it will ever be. They'll point to today's imperfections or flaws as evidence of something being AI-generated and those imperfections will be trained out with fine tuning or LoRA models until there is no longer any way to tell.
E: A lot of them also don't realize that besides text-to-image there is image-to-image for more control over composition as well as ControlNet for controlling poses. More LoRA models than you can imagine for controlling the style. Their imagination is limited to strictly text-to-image prompts with no human input afterwards.
AI is a tool not much different than Photoshop was back when "digital artists aren't real artists" was the argument. And in case anyone has forgotten: "You can't Ctrl+Z real art".
Ask any fractal artists the names they were called for "adjusting a few settings" in Apophysis.
E2:
We need more tests such as this. The vast majority of people can't identify AI nearly as well as they think they can identify AI - even people familiar with AI who "know what to look for".
> Respondents who felt confident about their answers had worse results than those who weren’t so sure
> Survey respondents who believed they answered most questions correctly had worse results than those with doubts. Over 78% of respondents who thought their score is very likely to be high got less than half of the answers right. In comparison, those who were most pessimistic did significantly better, with the majority of them scoring above the average.
You still make these. You sit down and form the art.
When you use AI you don't make anything, you ask someone else to make it, i.e. you've commissioned it. It doesn't really matter if I sit down for a portrait and describe in excruciating detail what I want, I'm still not a painter.
It doesn't even matter, in my eyes, how good or how shit the art is. It can be the best art ever, but the only reason art, as a whole, has value is because of the human aspect.
Picasso famously said he spent his childhood learning how to paint professionally, and then spent the rest of his life learning how to paint like a child. And I think that really encapsulates the meaning of art. It's not so much about the end product, it's about the author's intention to get there. Anybody can paint like a child, very few have the inclination and inspiration to think of that.
You can see this a lot in contemporary art. People say it looks really easy. Sure, it looks easy now, because you've already seen it and didn't come up with it. The coming up with it part is the art, not the thing.
When I make 3D art I instruct a lot of things, how the renderer is configured, lighting details, various systems that need to be tweaked to get the final render to look good.
Using the AI tool chains, you'd start with some generation either via text or image input, then modify various settingas, model, render steps, sampler, loras, then a generative upscaling pass, control nets to extract and apply depth, pose, outlines all etc. A colourful mix of systems and config, not unlike working 3D tool chains.
Its also not unusual to mix and match, handcrafted geometry but projection mapped generated textures and then a final pass in Photoshop or what have you.
Typing "awesome art piece" into ChatGPT is like rendering a donut.
> You still make these. You sit down and form the art.
When you use a camera you don't make anything. You press a button and the camera makes it. You haven't even described it.
When you use photoshop you don't make anything. You press buttons and the software just draws the pixels for you. It doesn't make you a painter.
When you use 3D rendering software you don't make anything. You tell the computer about the scene and the computer makes it. You've barely commissioned it.
Sorry, I don't think it's the same because making physical specifications via modifying pixels, or 3D art, or forming a shot is something you do.
It's the difference between making a house with wood and making a house by telling someone to make a house. One is making a house, one isn't.
The problem with AI is that it's natural language. So there's no skill there, you're describing something, you're commissioning it. When I do photoshop, I'm not describing anything, I'm modifying pixels. When I do 3D modeling, I'm not describing anything, I'm doing modeling.
You can say that those more formal specifications is the same as a description. But it's not. Because then why aren't the business folks programmers? Why aren't the people who come up with the requirements software engineers? Why are YOU the engineer and not them?
Because you made it formally, they just described it. So you're the engineer, they're the business analysts.
Also, as a side note, it's not at all reductive to say people who use AI just describe what they want. That is literally, actually, what they do. There's no more secret sauce than that - that is where the process begins and ends. If that makes it seem really uninspired then that's a clue, not an indicator that my reasoning is broken.
You can get into prompt engineering and whatever, I don't care. You can be a prompt engineer then, but not an artist. To me it seems plainly obvious nobody has any trouble applying this to everyone else, but suddenly when it's AI it's like everyone's prior human experience evaporates and they're saying novel things.
Right, it can require describing and refining over and over. I still don't think that means you did the thing. Otherwise, the business analysts who have to constantly describe requirements would be software engineers, but they're not.
Not that that isn't a skill in it of itself. I just don't think it's a creationary skill. What you're creating is the description, not the product.
You are creating the product but have to go through an unclear layer and through trial and error you try to reach your original vision. No different from painting a picture for an amateur.
The better you get the closer you can get to your original vision.
If I were trying to convince people that AI art is interesting and creative then I would not choose to highlight the site dedicated to strip-mining the creativity of non-AI artists, to produce models which regurgitate their ideas ad infinitum.
Not to mention extremely suspicious checkpoints that produce imagery of extremely young women. Or in others words women with extremely child like features in ways kids should not be presented.
I think the main point is that art is interesting precisely because it can transmit human experience. It's communication from another human being. AI "media" completely lacks that. It's more of an expression of the machine-soul, which is tempting us to continue its development until it takes over.
For me, art is more interesting, moving, soul connecting the more it is made by less and less people. Art by one person gives me a unique perspective to the artists mind. AI generated art is the opposite of being created by one person. It's an amalgamation of millions or billions of people's input. To me that's uninteresting, not novel and not mind-expanding at all.
> I only really hear about people being ecstatic about AI online, by people who are, for lack of a better term, really online, and who do not have the skills, know-how, or ability, to make art themselves.
Well put. This is also my experience. And I'm no AI doom-monger or neo-Luddite.
I think a key piece here is that I often consume art from the mindset of, "What was the creator thinking?" What is their worldview? What social situations pushed them to express things in this way?
For video, it's possible AI can feed into the overall creative pipeline, but I don't see it replacing the human touch. If anything, it opens up the industry to less-technical people who can spend more time focusing on the human touch. Even if the next big film has AI generation in it, if it came from someone with a fascinating story and creative insight, I'll still likely appreciate it.
I feel the opposite. I don't care how the sausage was made as long as it's a good sausage. Art was never about the creation process. In fact, before the internet most would never see the process at all. Just go to your local museum and you'll never know how most of pieces were made and that's a good thing. Art is all about the effect on the viewer.
Nah, meta-art is not that interesting tbh and the meta art culture is quite shallow in itself. Real art has always been about sharing an experience or an idea with the viewer and the production is completely irrelevant for this.
In other words if I take an AI drawing and lie the end user would still have the same experience as if I was telling the truth. My lie would only affect the meta culture not the art piece or viewers experience.
> I only really hear about people being ecstatic about AI online, by people who are, for lack of a better term, really online, and who do not have the skills, know-how, or ability, to make art themselves.
I generate a lot of art using Stable Diffusion/Flux of my spouse, kids, friends, etc. I was a professional photographer for nearly 10 years - I quit just last year.
People find even randomly generated stuff artistic. I remember the San Francisco Chronicle review of an art piece, which was random cracks in rock caused by heating.
I sort of wondered how you could claim to be the creator of the art when your kiln did all the work, but I suppose they did the important labor of putting it in there.
I follow a lot of the new AI gen crowd on Twitter. This community is made up of a lot of creative industry people. One guy who worked in commercials shared a recent job he was on for a name brand. They had a soundstage, actors, sound people, makeup, lighting, etc. setup for 3 days for the shoot. Something like 25 people working for 3 days. But behind that was about 3 months of effort if one includes pre-production and post-production. Think about editing, color correction, sound editing, music, etc.
Your creative children may live in a world where they can achieve a similar result themselves. Perhaps as a small team, one person working on characters, one person doing audio, one person writing a script. Instead of needing tens of thousands of dollars of rented equipment and 25 experts, they will be able to take ideas from their own head and realize them with persistence and AI generation.
I honestly believe these new tools will unlock potential beyond what we can currently imagine.
It doesn't really work that way. Over time, it really does just devalue the art form in a sense because now anyone can make a recording.
Electronic music is really the best example. In 1995 it took thousands of dollars to have a fully working studio to even produce any track. By 2005, anyone could do this in their bedroom for basically nothing. In 1995 the cost acted as a filter so only those with talent would bother. Once anyone could do it, all electronic music recordings were devalued by the infinite supply.
I thought there would be 1000 Richard James once this happened. Maybe there even are but I have never heard them because there is so much shit to sift through I really don't even listen to electronic music anymore. I don't think there are though. 900 them probably are doing something else because there is no money left in the art form, 90 are making some other style of music with better financial prospects and the 10 that are, I will never hear of or be able to find.
If the barrier to entry is low for high quality production and anyone is able to make good looking videos, I wonder how audience perception would evolve for judging and valuing what is considered 'good'.
Keep in mind: one of the top selling games for children is Roblox. Our perception of what is "good" is very open to reinterpretation by the coming generations.
That will be the end of creative work. Marketing and promotion is already the most difficult part of any creative endeavor. With literally unlimited trash being produced, it'll become impossible.
There's a term to describe this: creative destruction, literally.
We are at the cusp of a full scale commoditization stage of generative AI that will impact all aspects of the creative/software fields.
If you want to know what this creative destruction will look like, look no further than previous centers of innovation like Detroit, the emptying naval shipyards of Busan, the zombie game studios around Osaka as a sign of things to come.
TLDR: AI is going to destroy a lot of white collar, high creativity, high intellect jobs that isn't protected by a union or occupational collective associations which were all created to counter against creative destructions from taking people's livelihoods away.
Unfortunately, 10 years ago when I tried to create a union organization for software engineers/designers and creative workers, it was sabotaged by fellow software engineers who seem highly susceptible to psyops much more than any other group.
We might see a repeat of what happened in Japan after mid 90s, when much of the country's stable and ample jobs disappeared thanks to internet, globalized financiering backed by authoritarian labour market.
Instead this time its not a communist country working together with bankers rather its a small group of technology companies pushing out bankers and creating a sort of a dystopian AI dominated labour field where humans no longer dumpster dive for wages but any remaining labour industry that AI cannot infiltrate aka ppl literally switching careers to stay employed because their old jobs were outsourced to AI.
I didn't even talk about the impact on wages (spoiler: it will enrich the 0.1% while shunning the 99.9% to temporary gigs and unstable employment not unlike regions which have experienced similar creative destruction back in the 90s and early 2000s).
It's hard to see a future without some sort of universal basic income and increased taxation on billionaires who will no longer be able to hide their assets offshore without facing serious headwinds not unlike how Chinese billionaires fear the CCP.
Or maybe, the limiting factor in one's ability to create art will be... creativity rather than the technical skills necessary to make movies, draw, or pluck strings.
Creativity isn’t magic, it’s a skill. There is no creativity without the application of it. By definition creativity produces something. Without skills it’s not possible to produce anything.
The act of creating teaches you to be better at creating, in that way and in that context. This is why people with practice and expertise (e.g., professional artists, like screenwriters and musicians) can reliably create new things.
To an extent. Take cooking for example though- I don't doubt that writing recipes and trying them builds ones creative muscle, on the other hand, I don't think being we'd be at a loss for great chefs if we were to automate the cutting of onions, the poaching of eggs, and the stirring of risotto.
Take poaching eggs for example. Let’s say you automate that 100% so as a human you never need to do it again. Well, how good are your omelettes then? It’s a similar activity — keeping eggs at the right temperature and agitation for the right amount of time. Every new thing you learn to do with eggs — poaching, scrambling, omelettes, soft-cooking for ramen — will teach you more about eggs and how to work with them.
So the more you automate your cooking with eggs the worse you get at all egg-related things. The KitchenBot-9000 poaches and scrambles perfect eggs, so why bother? And you lose the knowledge of how to do it, how to tell the 30-second difference between “not enough” and “too much.”
I don't agree. There's some skill, some theory, behind it. But mastering this alone is almost worthless.
There's a huge overlap between creatives and mental illness, particularly bipolar disorder. It seems perfectly mentally stable people lack that edge and insight. To me, that signals there is some magic behind it.
And it's magic because then it must not be rationale and it must not make sense, because the neurotypical can't see it.
I think it's sort of like how you can beat professional poker players with an algorithm that's nonsensical. They're professionals so they're only looking at rationale moves; they don't consider the nonsensical.
All artists I have known have spent most of their lives practicing. Just as I have practiced programming.
That's the biggest edge, commitment.
To think that you _need_ to be neurodivergent to be an artist is non-sensical and stating mastering the craft itself is worthless is indicative of a lack of respect for their work.
I'm baffled by this type of comment here in all honesty. Really, broaden your horizons.
Certainly, life-long commitment to some discipline is not something that is in the middle of the bell curve.
I don’t know if neurodivergence might have any overlap, but I wouldn’t be surprise that a study reveals it to be as correlated as the fact that most rich people were born in wealthy families.
> To think that you _need_ to be neurodivergent to be an artist
You will notice I never said this.
All I said, and is true, is there is a correlation between being an artist and being neurodivergent.
> stating mastering the craft itself is worthless
Where did I say this too?
It appears you're having an argument with a ghost. You're correct, that argument is baffling! I wonder then why you made it up if you're just gonna get baffled by it? Seems like a waste of time, no?
Look, art is two things: perspective and skill. One without the other is worthless.
I can have near perfect skill and recreate amazing works of art. And I will get nowhere. Or, I can have a unique and profound perspective but no skill, and then nobody will be able to decipher my perspective!
I'm sorry if I misunderstood, but please clarify how this two quotes don't align with what I said?
> But mastering this alone is almost worthless.
> And it's magic because then it must not be rationale and it must not make sense, because the neurotypical can't see it.
Not trying to take them out of context, but specifying them. You mention, from my understanding, that mastering is almost worthless without the magic, and the magic only being there if you're neurodivergent.
This implies one cannot be a proper artist if not neurodivergent. Now, I could be misinterpreting it, so I apologize in advance.
I never said the magic is "only" there if you're neurodivergent, I said it seems to me neurodivergent people seem to be more likely to have the magic.
> There's a huge overlap between creatives and mental illness
Keyword overlap, but I don't think it's 100%
Magic is maybe not the right word here, but I do think it's indescribable. It's some sort of perspective.
But I stand by this:
> that mastering is almost worthless without the magic
How, exactly, you obtain the magic is kind of unknown. But I do think you need it. Because skill alone is just not worth much outside of economics. You can make great corporate art, but you're not gonna be a great artist.
I think if you're perfectly rationally minded, you're going to struggle a lot to find that magic. I shouldn't say it's impossible, but I think it's close to.
Fair, I think the "magic" depends on other factors that may or may not lead to neurodivergence. Those being:
- Life experience
- Exposure/education when young
Of course, these might lead to neurodivergence or might not. The key thing is that the magic is a very unique, personal thing. Human, one can say. Also, through practice you come to understand new perspectives, something that is perhaps lessened in your view.
Either way, I've missunderstood your take to a degree, and had a much more radical interpretation of it.
I'm not sure I completely agree. In some ways, developing technical skills can drill creativity out of you and condition you to think in ways that are really quite rigid and formulaic.
99% of humanity have very little interest in creating. They're mimics, they're fine with copying, hitting repost, et al. You see this across all social media without exception (TikTok being the most obvious mimic example, but it's the same on Reddit as well). You see it in day to day life. You see it in how people spend their time. You see it in how people spend their money. And none of this is new.
The public can create vast amounts of spectacular original content right now using Dalle, MidJourney, Stable Diffusion - they have very little interest in doing so. Only a tiny fraction of the population has demonstrated that it cares what-so-ever about generative media. It's a passing curiosity for a flicker of an instant for the masses.
The hilariously fantastical premise of: if we just give people massive amounts of time, they'll dedicate their brains to creativity and exploration and live exceptionally fulfilling lives - we already know that's a lie for the masses. That is not what they do at all if you give them enormous amounts of time, they sit around doing nothing much at all (and if you give them enormous amounts of money to go with it, they do really dumb things with it, mostly focused on rampant consumerism). The reason it doesn't work is because all people are not created equal, all people are not the same, all brains are not wired the same, the masses are mimics, they are unable & unwilling to originate as a prime focus (and nothing can change that).
That's simply untrue. Children have a natural inclination to create art. It is slowly drilled out of them by various factors, in large part, economic pressures. One of my best friends has a natural talent for drawing. He even made a children's book. Guess what? He became a cop because being a graphic artist is too precarious. If we alleviate the pressures that cause people to become closed off to the possibility of creating art, more people will be open to it.
Nah, creativity cannot be separated from the means. "The medium is the message". It is precisely the interaction of technical skill and the mind that creates something truly wonderful.
That's not exactly what McLuhan meant by that statement. "The medium is the message" refers more to how the medium itself influences the way a message is perceived by an audience. It is not an assessment of the creative process itself. It's not as though I disagree entirely with what you're saying though. There are certainly ways in which the medium is highly influential over the process of creating something. But it's a mixed bag, and technical skill is not something to be celebrated in all cases. A technically accurate painting is oftentimes quite dull and uninspired. One could argue that creativity isn't just the interaction of skill and mind, but rather the ability to think beyond the medium, to embrace accidents, imperfections, and impulsive decisions.
You don't need any special technical skills to write the next great American novel. Few people actually do it. Talent and dedication are as elusive as ever.
You: escape the oppressive technical limitations of scoring a piece for an orchestra through novel use of technology.
Csound: To make a sine tone, we'll describe the oscillator in a textfile as if it were a musical instrument. You can think of this textfile as a blueprint for a kind of digital orchestra. Later we'll specify how to "play" this orchestra using another text file, called the score.
The issue is that the human performance of those things is precisely how creativity is expressed. You can tell an AI to write a story you envision but if there’s nothing unique in the presentation (or it copies the presentation from existing media to a large extent) you still end up with boring output.
Paint didn't replace charcoal.
Photography didn't replace drawings.
Digital art didn't replace physical media.
Random game level generation didn't replace architecture.
AI generated works will find a place beside human generated works.
It may even improve the market for 'artsy' films and great acting by highlighting the difference a little human talent can make.
It's not the art that's at risk, it's the grunt work. What will shift is the volume of human-created drek that employed millions to AI-created drek that employs tens.
Earning a living through creativity doesn't work for the majority of people anyway even without AI in the picture. Creative expression is a thing that exists for its own sake, the people who make a living out of it are lucky outliers.
"So what" is that OP's children shouldn't be terrified about the prospects of an artistic career because of AI. It is not going from "good career choice" to "long shot", more like "long shot" to "somewhat longer shot".
I suspect the demand for human creative output will shrink, as AI generated content will be so cheap and prevalent, even as it will only ever be an imitation of human art. The same way that most people eat terrible, flavorless tomatoes from the supermarket, instead of the harder to grow heirloom varieties.
But I don't think human creativity is going anywhere. Unless there is some breakthrough that moves it far beyond anything we've seen so far, AI will always be trailing behind us. Human creativity might become a more boutique product, like heirloom tomatoes, but there will always be people who value it.
I had a similar thought. I knew someone who lived a life of crime, for a long time he was very poor like most criminals, but for a while made it big. He could buy anything he wanted, he always liked suits so bought very nice suits. But they meant nothing to him, he couldn't enjoy them, as he didn't earn then.
I wonder if it will be the same with AI. When you can have anything for nothing, it has no value. So the digital world will have little meaning.
Nobody cares about driving around in a million-dollar car. They want the money/power/status of the person who owns the million-dollar car. An unearned million-dollar car is practically a liability instead of an asset.
That's my optimistic belief as well but I've also been disappointed at every turn. The future feels like a nihilistic joke constantly competing to plot the most disappointing course forward.
More likely the average person will happily lap up AI generated slop.
If I imagine a random person on the street, they certainly aren’t enjoying fine human arts because it’s made by a real person. They are scrolling TikTok and don’t care if it’s AI generated or not, if they even notice. The people actually caring about art because it is art are maybe 20% of the population.
Creativity is about having original ideas. So far, AI isn’t that good at that, and neither at maintaining a consistent idea throughout a production. Will AI be able to come up with a compelling novel series, music album, video game, movie or TV series in ten years? Possibly, but there’s also a good chance that it won’t.
Cheaper more effective entertainment is likely to only cause more problems: it will be more addictive, better at hijacking our brains and attention, better at pushing the propaganda goals of the author, better at filling traditional "human needs" of relationships that forever separates us from each other into a civilisation of Hikikomori.
I have little faith in an optimistic view of human nature where we voluntarily turn more toward more intellectual or worthy pursuits.
On one hand, entertainment has often been the seed that drives us to make the imagined real, but the adjacent possible of rewarding adventure/discovery/invention only seems to get more unaffordable and out of reach. Intellectual revolutions are like gold rushes. They require discovery, that initial nugget in a stream, the novel idea that opens a door to new opportunities that draws in the prospectors. Without fresh opportunity, there is no enthusiasm and we stew in our juices.
I suspect the only thing that might save us from total solipsistic brain-in-vat immersion in entertainment... is something like glp-1 type antagonists. If they can help us resist a plate of Danish maybe they can protect us from barrages of Infinite Jest brain missiles from Netflix about incestuous cat wizards or whatever. Who knows what alternatives this new permanently medicated society, Pharma-Sapiens, might pursue instead though.
I believe you're right too. The internet and smartphones are great technology in general, and can do pretty great things but what they've ended up doing was screwing with the reward mechanisms in my brain since I was a teenager. Most optimized use case.
Reading these threads sometimes feels like a bad idea, because you just get new sad ideas on how things will almost certainly be used to make it worse than just the ones you can come up on your own.
We'll be able to start fuzz testing the human brain. A horror film that uses bio-feedback to really push the bits that are actually terrifying you, in real-time. Campaign videos that lean in to the bit that your lizard brain is responding to.
We heard this same argument when cameras were invented. Yet some of the most valuable paintings in the world were created in the 20th century.
We heard it again when electronic music started becoming a thing.
Formula 1 wouldn’t exist if the blacksmiths had their way.
The unknown scares people because they are afraid of their known paradigms being shattered. But the new things ahead are often beyond anything of which we could ever dream.
One must not use analogy to analyze individual technologies. People were afraid of the camera, yes, but the camera does not attempt to replace painting. AI attempts to replace photography, painting, and all sorts of art with something that looks like the real thing. Photography never tried to do that, as photographs don't look anything like paintings.
When the camera was invented, it did replace what paintings were used for at the time. Photographs don't look like paintings, but up until the camera paintings were trying to look like photographs. It's no coincidence that impressionism arrived at the same time as the camera.
There is a difference between replacing usage and replacing the exact art and the people who make it. Yes, the camera influenced painting, but it did not destroy it. AI attempts to destroy natural human expression.
Science is never going to supplant art. They serve two very different functions in society. What I hope is that performance art and experiences that can't be easily replicated by AI become more mainstream. Things like ARGs and multimedia storytelling, where there is a back and forth participatory sort of process between the audience and the creator.
> Maybe, at that point, we decide that exploring space, stretching our knowledge of physics and chemistry, and combating disease are far more interesting because they are real.
It's a compelling thought - we all like hope - and I think it might be realistic if all of humanity were made up of the same kind of people who read hacker news.
But is this not what the early adopters of the internet thought? I wasn't there - this is all second hand - but as far as I know people felt that, once everyone gained the ability to learn anything and talk to anyone, anywhere, humanity would be more knowledgeable, more thoughtful, and more compassionate. Once everyone could effortlessly access information, ignorance would be eliminated.
After all, that's what it was like for the early adopters.
But it wasn't so in practice.
I worry that hopeful visions of the future have an aspect of projecting ourselves onto humanity.
"And, through the same lens, maybe human-created art is more interesting because it is real."
Most human-created art is rather bad. I used to go to a lot of art openings, and we'd look at some works and ask "will this have been tossed in five years?"
Being pleasing to the eye is often not the point. Technical ability is a small part of the art experience. That's one reason a lot of people hate calling image gens "art" - it's so flashy without substance. But it's also a reason I don't think generative AI is much of a threat to the human practice of art-making.
That said, AI is probably a threat to roles in the entertainment industry. But it's also worth noting that much of the creativity was being sucked out of entertainment well before AI arrived.
Im hopeful US will have some subsidy for real creative works like ive seen in europe.
My limited understanding is that AI could generate Netflix top 10 hits that mostly recycle familiar jokes. The creators made a great product, but i expect anyone who attended film school would rather try something new, only issue is Netflix wont foot the bill (i know, they take a few oscar swings a year now).
Recent examples: TV Glow, Challengers, Strange Darling. All movies with specific, unique perspectives, visuals, acting choices, scripts, shots, etc. Think about the perspective in The Wire, The Sopranos, Curb Your Enthusiasm. There is plenty of great work that obviously is nearly impossible to reproduce by an AI and i hope that AI "art" is taxed in a way that funds human projects.
It is easy to do really creative work now but it is even easier to just browse instagram or tiktok. The real winner in the new world will be people with discipline who can use these tech to create stuff without too much capital or resources.
Why would anybody create stuff that the AI companies are just going to instantly subsume and reproduce far more cheaply? There is not going to be a meaningful economy based on creativity in the next 50 years, any more than there is one now. And then it is going to be far worse. The actual "winners" are just going to be the people who through arbitrary processes like fortunate birth or lucky circumstances are granted admission into elite institutions.
That is a very pessimistic take. In my opinion things are much more accessible now. Nobody cares about your background on internet as long as you can provide value.
For example, you can build a wrapper over an LLM focussed on a niche this weekend(using cursor/copilot) and launch it over twitter. It is very much possible with the tools we have. If you market it hard and provide value consumers will line up. This kind of power was not available 50 years back.
Things are easier if you want to hit big. But also it is easy to just be a consumer of media and social media. Depends on which side of the algorithm you are.
Also it does not help to think like a victim of your circumstances. You need to start where you are and try to keep pushing what is possible.
People like you who think you're going to come out on top of this by throwing everyone else under the bus, treating them like consumers, are a huge part of the problem. That kind of parasitic behavior is not "providing value" except in the cynical way that it let's you devalue other people's lives for your own gain.
So we’ll automate away entertainment jobs but none of the cool science jobs will be automated? I don’t understand how this proposed world will have an available work for scientists but not entertainers.
Recently I've been cutting back on TV in favor of non fiction reading and I feel you have a point. Entertainment comes in many forms and tbh all of them are interesting and rewarding in their own ways so I'm not worried of AI ruining entertainment for us. That's the least of our actual worries and I'm honestly surprised people find this issue so important.
I guess visualizing AI doing political or social damage or AGI mind control is a bit harder than your favorite show being gone.
Most of my entertainment is watching dudes sitting in their chairs talking into a microphone. I find it more entertaining than the billion dollar entertainment industry.
They will be creating for a very small crowd. It will be nice for me, because I can't stand all the blockbuster movies that prioritize stretching physics with unrealistic special effects over plot and dialog.
I think the musicians that are barely hanging on at this point would prefer to create over having to slog around on tours to pay their health insurance. But nobody is paying for creation.
Unless we have god-like robotics I don't see AI making physical art any time soon. We can print out photos but people still buy paintings. We can 3D print but people still buy sculptures. People are paid to design and build beautiful buildings and interiors.
And of course if you can combine skills with sculpture with graphic design you're getting more specialized and are more likely to make a living - even if the field of graphic design is decimated by AI. That's generally how I feel about my skills as a programmer. I'm not just a programmer. So even if AI does most of the work with coding I can still write code for income as long as it's not the only reason I'm getting paid.
I think there will be a body that certifies artistic content as organic similar to food. This will create a premium offering for organic content and a lower tier AI /uncertified level.
AI content is already very dull, the text is dull the music is dull the images and videos are also dull. No one is interested in AI Seinfeld or this short movie that AI created. Their only audience is just people admiring what the machines come to be able to do.
Any AI content that's good, and there are a few of them, actually has plenty of human creativity in it.
There are some AI artist that begin to emerge or there are some AI generated personas out there who are interesting but they are interesting only because the people behind it made it interesting.
I am not fatalistic at all for the creatives. AI is going to wipe out the producers and integrators(people that specialize in putting things together, like coders who code when tasked, painters who paint when commissioned, musicians that play once provided with the score), not the creatives.
The GOTCHA, IMHO, will be people not developing skills because the machine can do it but I guess maybe they will the skills that make the machine sing.
