> Why should I bother to read something you didn't bother to write?
The answer seems obvious: because it's better.
Obviously it isn't better now. But it's easy to imagine a day in the not-too-distant future where AI can shit out 1000 hours of content that is better in every way than what humans create. And it will even feel more human than the human made stuff because the AI will have learned that we like that.
What do you do then? Watch the worse stuff? Maybe, and I think a lot still will. But how long does that last?
The point really is that "better" in this context means "made by a human" - not "faked to look like made by a human". People need connection to other people - art is one of the means of communicating _between people_.
Is that easy to imagine? I’m not sure it is, particularly.
Ultimately, the LLM industry can’t run on jam tomorrow forever. At some point, people have to stop concentrating on the hypothetical magic future, and concentrate on what actually exists.
I can easily imagine AI spitting out volume. I can't imagine it spitting out quality. Most of what it generates now is just trash. Like the Tourist/bear paradigm in dumpster security there may be overlap between the worst human writing and the best AI writing... but that's not how you make a successful film.
Mechanizing the expression of artist endeavour seems silly. Does an LLM know the pleasure and pain that love can instill or does it just regurgitate tokens in a pattern it thinks is best fit?
Once AI is entrenched and the economics work out, it will become way more expensive to shoot a "traditional" movie. You won't find the trained technical staff, the actors, scripts, etc. which will be all out of jobs and doing something else. Like today if you want to run a steam locomotive, it's way way more expensive than their modern counterpart because the infrastructure isn't there anymore.
So yes, the AI will eventually get better even if it doesn't !
My cynical take is, younger generation who is growing up with AI generated content will accept it as normal and move on. We only enjoy human-created stuff, as that seems "natural" to us. That "natural" feeling tends to change in every new generation.
Train it to attribute its failure to land on wokeness, have it generate designs for merch that communicate this idea, and book an appearance on JRE and it'll have completed the arc of a lot of short run comics.
Generative AI is not autonomous, it's wielded by a user just as a brush is, prompted and tweaked by a human being, a new tool in the artist's tackle box, like acrylic paint, Photoshop, "content-aware fill" etc.
it's impossible to answer to this line of reasoning without wasting time so I'll just start right away with the ad hominem.
you just don't like art, you don't understand it and you want slop, admit it and don't feel compelled to enter the discussion with your growth oriented bullshit mindset
Literally this. Ben hits the nail on the head that these tools can “write convincing Elizabethan language but can’t write Shakespeare”, along with his metaphor about craftsmen vs artists.
These tools can never create art because art is the imperfection of reality transposed from the mind’s eye using the talent of the artisan and their tools. Writing a convincing enough prompt to generate an assortment of visual outputs that you “choose” as the final product can never be art, because your art skills ended with the prompt itself - everything after was just maths, and not even maths you had a direct hand in. Even then, you cannot really shill your prompt as art either, because you wrote tokens to ingest into a LLM to generate pseudorandom visual outputs, not language to be interpreted by other humans and visualized on their own accord.
Art is one of those things you cannot appreciate until you make it, and generating slop is not creating art. A preschooler with a single, broken crayon and a napkin makes better art than anything generated via tokens and math models - and to really drive that home, I’d argue that the teenager goofing around with math formulas on their graphing calculator to create visually beautiful or interesting designs is also superior art than whatever the LLM can spew forth using far more advanced maths.
If you really want art, then make it. Learn to draw, practice photography, paint some scenery, experiment with formula visualizations, layout a garden, or heck, just commission an artist to bring your idea into reality. Learning to articulate your vision with language in such a way others can illustrate or create it is a far more valuable skill than laying out tokens for an LLM.
I never created a movie. I can appreciate a good one over a bad one (Argo, Gigli).
Statistically speaking, the number of people who have created a movie rounds to zero. And yet, to suggest basically no one appreciates a movie or the difference between a good movie and a bad one is obviously very dumb.
You're conflating the reality of the situation with me. I didn't say I wanted AI generated content. Just that it seems like it will inevitably win. All the insults in your comment just stem from an imaginary and inaccurate picture of me, a stranger, that you created in your head.
> don't feel compelled to enter the discussion with your growth oriented bullshit mindset
Alice, an incessant painter with passion for it but zero natural talent, learns about stable diffusion. She teaches herself how to use this new tool and creates imagery she never could before. She tweaks settings and prompts, iterates for hours, and ultimately generates imagery she is pleased with. She shares this creation with others and many of them appreciate what she has created.
Except Bob. Bob looks at the imagery and, thanks to his up to date technical knowledge, recognizes that the work may be generated. So Bob rejects the imagery, he refuses to allow it to affect him at all. He insults it, calls it slop, insists it cannot be art, insults Alice, and insults the people who were moved by Alice's work.
If one of these two people "doesn't like art" and "doesn't understand it," which one is it more likely to be: the one who is creating, or the one who is criticizing the creation?
Plenty of mass media are just uninspired derivatives. It seems to entertain a lot of people. I see AI can take care of the mind numbing work of making uninspired bullshit so real creatives can be freed to pursue actual, meaningful art.
Lots of people will lose jobs working on stupid bullshit, of course. That is an economic issue, not a technology issue.
The answer seems obvious: because it's better.
Obviously it isn't better now. But it's easy to imagine a day in the not-too-distant future where AI can shit out 1000 hours of content that is better in every way than what humans create. And it will even feel more human than the human made stuff because the AI will have learned that we like that.
What do you do then? Watch the worse stuff? Maybe, and I think a lot still will. But how long does that last?