If you scroll all the way to the bottom of the article there is a gallery of items from the museum, along with detailed descriptions.
I also don't find it all implausible that goods from New York made there way to this region in the 1920's. As the article mentions, although the connection point between Europe and East Asia was severed by the Ottomans, small sections of the trade network continued for centuries afterwards.
>You will still be able to art, even if AI art becomes better.
I don't know, maybe all the artists, musicians, and poets will be too tired from doing whatever menial labor bullshit jobs are left post AI to create great art.
Why not direct our efforts into enabling more people to devote their lives to creating art instead of fewer? Wouldn't it be amazing if everyone was able to spend their time creating because the machines were doing the work we actually didn't want to do?
In the near future, we will have less art made by professionals and more art made by hobby artists (with or without AI support).
It will be a tough time for professional artists, but personally I don't believe we will "lose the human spark" in this transition.
If all AI art is soulless, new artists will rise that can put the missing part back in.
How many amazing potential creations have been lost because their creators did not have the time or money to make them? I'm looking forward to see what these people will create in the coming decade!
I think without financial support you're not going to get very good art. Some of the greatest artists of the renaissance were only able to spend all day painting because they had patrons. My city has lots of public art because the government spends money on it.
I believe there's a substantive difference between digital art tools like photoshop or illustrator and LLMs. LLMs do not create "art", they create images. Previously, you had to PAY an artist to create art. Now, you pay for an API to create an image loosely based on the specifications you give it. As a result, there is less art in the world.
Art models, to me, are very powerful paintbrushes. The technical skill of the artist is less important, but their ability to create art that makes people FEEL is more important than ever.
I think it's interesting how this always gets framed as reducing the number of creators.
I run an AI storytelling site with thousands of users and by most measures I wouldn't say it writes better than a practiced human, but what it does do is allow would-be consumers to become their own creators.
Some users spend $100+ dollars a month, not because it writes 10x better content than what a $10 Kindle unlimited subscription offers, but because even at 50% the quality they'd rather have the story they wanted to tell but didn't exist elsewhere.
For me AI art is not about replacing creators: it's about letting users go from passively consuming content made by people who have skills, time, and/or resources they lack to actively creating what they want to see in the world.
I'm not sure how compatible being against the democratization of creation really is with the narrative of defending the arts.
That’s it and with every invention the percentage stays the same 90% consume and 10% create. The insane amount that gets put into options of image models to create the maximum amount of images per hour is the dumbest approach possible for the technology at hand. Nobody is there that wants to consume it.
The reason why I'm personally convinced that generative AI for creative output will be bigger than any of the "PhD level agents" everyone is chasing is that gen AI can finally change "90% consume and 10% create", by changing what it means to consume.
People assume my storytelling tool is for writers because until relatively recently there was no other option: you couldn't make a writing tool for readers who only want to read, or a photography tool for viewers who only want to view, or a music tool for people who only want to listen.
But we're getting closer to tooling that makes it so frictionless to create, that you can insert the creation process in the consumption process, essentially turning it into curation.
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Next week Gemini Flash comes out and we're going to have access to the first publicly available image model that can edit images with as much nuance and understanding as current SOTA LLMs do for text.
Everyone is focused on a possible plateau in intelligence, but steerability is the key for creative output, and there are so many angles to attack it from that we're at the infancy of what generative AI can do for creative output.
I recently got hit up out of nowhere by somoene who was like i'll pay you to storyboard a music video of a famous dead rapper. Think tupac hologram but somehow even worse in terms of digging someone up from the grave. I was like ok sure why not, I know this generative AI stuff. Got paid like a hundred bucks to start on this storyboard.
Thing is the story was so fucking stupid that I stopped after generating one image. They probably didn't make the story itself with AI but it sure was ridiculous, I basically quit as soon as they asked me to somehow include a bunch of jailed celebrities like diddy into the next storyboard image, getting out of it saying that it went against my legal capabilities to include real living people.
I hope you realize that some people with millions of dollars just have really head ass ideas they're going to put through your thing and things are going to get weirder sooner as a result. Like that idea would have ended at the drawing board with a bunch of people talking each other down from it not that long ago but now it's basically like that WKUK sketch about a grape out here [1]
IMO the real interesting questions your post brings up are:
- what kind of labor is the $100 your users are spending coming from
- where would these $100 have gone before your product existed
- where do these $100 go once they change hands from users to you
There are many answers, not a single answer, to these questions, but I think they're worth considering.
In a previous life I worked for a startup where, getting to know our users, I realized that if you broke it down the revenue was essentially money being funneled from hourly-wage workers to venture capitalists, which was a sobering realization.
Not one person in this world should have to motivate you to do the thing you love. This is a reckoning moment for a lot of people, artists included. Dig deep. Because the truth is that a lot of people do things, not for the love of and enjoyment of doing the thing in and of itself, but because of the satisfaction they get when they impress other people.
"You're so talented"
"I love your art"
"I wish I could do that"
And now there is that fear that the validation will go away. And what are you left with?
>Because the truth is that a lot of people do things, not for the love of and enjoyment of doing the thing in and of itself, but because of the satisfaction they get when they impress other people.
And there's nothing wrong with that. That's part of what makes art art. Creators are not solipsistically creating art for its own and their own sake: they do it for sharing it with other people, and getting the others' recognition and connection.
Some of the greatest rock music, for one, was written to impress the other sex - and some of the best dance music was written to see people dance and their bodies connect to it.
Machines already took almost all artist jobs a long time ago. Ever heard of the camera?
Machines already took almost all musician jobs a long time ago. Ever heard of recording?
The current winner-take-all art fields are not very healthy for humans to work in anyway, as there are infinity starving artists for every success. Eliminating the few remaining successes won’t really change much from the perspective of the average artist.
Almost all human art today is already done by hobbyists.
It's incredible to make the claim that almost all art is done by hobbyists considering how large the movie, tv and video game industries are by employee headcount.
Okay, compare that to the amount of hobbyists by headcount. Also subtract out the support roles in those industries that don’t constitute “artist” roles. Is a programmer an artist? Is someone working on color grading according to the specifications of someone else an artist? Subjective for sure, but at least for me most roles in those industries don’t qualify as “artists” since they don’t exercise substantial control over the art output.
As an illustrative comparison, if we apply the same “massive org chart” model used in film or video games to painting, each employee would apply a few brushstrokes according to requirements specified by a painting director. Is each of them an artist? Or is the painting director the artist?
> Why not direct our efforts into enabling more people to devote their lives to creating art instead of fewer? Wouldn't it be amazing if everyone was able to spend their time creating because the machines were doing the work we actually didn't want to do?
People are also doing that. Note you're not travelling thousands of miles on foot to tell me this message; nor are you and your family doing subsistence farming. And you probably have time to do art if you want, because of existing advances.
I really enjoyed the perspective of this author and the article's contemplative tone. I think an important perspective is that these are tools for consumers, not creators. While we are all obviously both to a degree, the current economic model makes a clear distinction.
When it comes to monetary exchange, we are either artists or consumers. AI art has the potential to create a massive imbalance between these two fields, reducing the friction of being a consumer, and greatly reducing the number of people who are able to support themselves as artists. If you view yourself chiefly as a consumer this might (very narrowly) be viewed as a positive.
The social cost however is creating a society that favors consumption over creation, and weights incentives accordingly
> The social cost however is creating a society that favors consumption over creation, and weights incentives accordingly
We've been heading this way progressively for the last century.
If you look back at the early days of broadcast television, for example, there were only 3 channels. 72h of programming at most in any 24h time period. This deeply favored the creator (or perhaps more accurately, the owner of the channel of distribution). Now we have YT and Netflix, both of which are biased towards consumption. Is it all bad? In some ways; we have to wade through more to find the good stuff. But in other ways, we have more to choose from and more people can be creators.
I also don't find it all implausible that goods from New York made there way to this region in the 1920's. As the article mentions, although the connection point between Europe and East Asia was severed by the Ottomans, small sections of the trade network continued for centuries afterwards.