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I can't imagine caring about the work that goes into art. Art is a product; the process is not something to exalt, it's something to lament, because the process has only ever been an imperfect means of translating the perfection of thought into the rough matter of reality with crude tools. A statue is beautiful because it is beautiful; it is no less beautiful if God willed it into being with the merest flick of his finger, and no more beautiful if the most devoted artisan spent his entire life on it.
Work for work's own sake is an abhorrent waste of time and energy. I rejoice at the prospect of AI obsoleting the artist -- and any lover of the arts should. A doctor should think a world that has no need of him is amazing; a soldier should long for a world that doesn't need soldiers; and wouldn't it be grand if we had no need of farmers, for all were fed?
The ultimate triumph of a field is self-destruction.
The skill of it? The technique? The way the artist struggles with the medium, be it stone or paint, and solves for themselves the problem put to them? You see no difference in watercolours versus oils, impasto versus a smooth glossy finish, the way the artist blends colours and shades to achieve an effect - who would have thought that green and yellow and mauve would be part of painting flesh tones in a human face, but they are.
The invention of the camera didn't do away with art and the camera went from being "now we can have a perfect representation of a moment in time, no need for a painter to spend hours painting a portrait of someone when we can do it in minutes with better fidelity" to being used to create art itself.
It may well turn out that a lot of the current hysteria about AI art is just that - hysteria. That AI will become another tool for artists to use. It probably will replace a lot of commercial art, but maybe not - CGI did not replace humans as creators of images, now we need humans trained in how to use CGI to create effects.
Those are all differences in the end product, too. The skill and technique are relevant so far as they create a different output to enjoy.
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Sublimation, surely.
Tomato, tomato. The ultimate triumph of medicine would eliminate doctors. The ultimate triumph of creation would eliminate creators. If we could all be our own little Gods, speaking worlds into being, it'd take a real odd sort to gnash his teeth over all the construction workers and carpenters put out of business.
mm.
I'm inclined to agree, but it seems to me that this line of thinking butts up against some pretty serious philosophical questions about what we actually value. I'm not an atomic individualist, so a future where humans cocoon themselves away into perfect solipsistic selfishness doesn't actually sound all that hot. Making things easier is a good thing if the things in question are themselves good, but it seems to me that connection to others is something I'd miss if it were gone.
You don't need to be an individualist to see the value in trivializing the creation of luxury goods. Bond with people over a shared appreciation of the art, rather than the making of it -- which is typically a private and boring affair, anyway.
no disagreement there.
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All of those are basically engineering to serve a purpose. Picture engineering exists, which is why AI art is even used. Picture engineering is how you obtain company logos and silly images for ads and presentations.
Art is a status competition. It sounds like what you're saying is art is dumb.
Art isn't dumb at all. I have plenty of pictures on my walls that I find aesthetically pleasing. They're not high status, they were free, gifts from a friend who liked Bos Ross landscapes, would smoke, and paint his heart out.
Art as an elite status competition is stupid, but I don't really care. Let the elites posture.
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I agree. A parallel can be drawn between the invention of AI generated art and that of of optimizing compilers. They effectively replaced hand generated assembly code and I don't want to go back to a world where every programmer has to write their own assembly. It's much more productive to use higher level languages and reason about data structures and control flow, not registers and jumps. And just like AI art generators can make better art than the average person, a compiler can generate better code than even a competent programmer used to high level languages.
This doesn't make an understanding of assembly and the intricacies of the various families of processors any less useful in the narrower domain of compiler design. So maybe a keen understanding of art will be no less useful in a world filled with AI generated art, where the true connoisseur will appreciate the hand crafted art, while the masses will happily stare at machine created images.
Another comparison is procedural generated. I'm perpetually disappointed by it in games like Dwarf Fortress or the randomly generated side quests that games like Borderlands use - not because a human didn't put effort into each individual character name and backstory or quest goal, but because they're bland and boring for the most part, and it soon becomes obvious that even though there is infinite variety on the surface level, it all operates under a rigid structure.
Rather ironic given your flair!
I like the technology, but I worry that this metaphor may not continue. In a world where computers just Did Everything for you in the programming and compsci spheres except the extraordinarily difficult exceptions, would many people be able to develop the interest or fundamental skills that eventually lead to a successful compiler design understanding? Or would their first genuine CompSci problem going to throw dependency hell at students that don't know what a file is, and they just turn around and say fuck it?
Sometimes it's chicken-sexing, sometimes it's a problem of available resource scaling (how do you train in your basement to run multi-million-user scale cloud?), sometimes it's a matter of developing the temperament to not throw computer monitors out windows. The First Step is a Doozy, and a lot of these skills are hard to learn and harder to understand what you have to learn.
It's plausible this won't happen. Past changes to CompSci haven't eliminated on-boarding opportunities, even if they've mangled many of them; artists have adapted structures to discourage bulk-scale tracing and seldom (have the specific tech skills to) take available 'traditional' automation tools to their maxima. Music is different than it was a hundred years ago, but it's not lacking steps for the garage band. Even if it does happen, there will always be the auties and the paranoid and the slightly nuts who hypnotize themselves into doing in the old-fashioned way.
And yet, there are skillsets that are lost, at least to country-scales. If you wanted to rebuild Saturn rockets pre-SpaceX, you'd have to start by rebuilding the entire aerospace industry (and might still today). There's a lot of woodworking techniques that have turned into gimmicks, shown only by weirdos on YouTube because you'd have to scour auction sites to even find the tools in the right quality to have a chance to learn the trick, because a trim router can do the easier variants and no one finds the hard ones worthwhile. There are classes of power transformer that can’t be made in IGBT or MOSFET forms due to physical constraints, and when the last guy who knows how to make the vacuum tube version retires, I doubt we build up a whole infrastructure to support a replacement.
And there's only so much confidence that induction can give you, in a case where the Type II errors are invisible.
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I agree with what you say here. The way I see it, what AI is is the decoupling of art-as-status from art-as-product. People value the labor of prestigious artists because that artist has a monopoly on good artistic output. They respect the work so far as dedication is necessary to hone a craft, but if they could snap their fingers and make fantastic <music/video games/character portraits/illustrations for their novel/whatever>, they would, gladly.
Once the masses can produce art that satisfies aesthetic preferences, the status-artists will lose a huge market share. It's understandable why they'd bitch and moan, but it's the gurgling of a dying creature.
One must crush their enemies to enjoy the peace of a world without enemies.
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I simply thoroughly disagree with this sentiment, and I am quite certain that I am not exceptional here. The process is important, the social context is important.
I would probably go as far as to posit applicability of some sort of labor theory of value: if you print out a random photograph, nobody will value it very highly, but if you paint the contents of the photograph on canvas, it will immediately be seen as having more value. Even more so, if we build technology that allows us to make a painting with a some kind of a gantry CNC painting machine, it’s product will be seen as less valuable than something that human painted by hand.
I think the above sentiment is shared by most normies, whereas your comment exhibits rather postmodernist ideals that few people actually share, as shown by revealed preference. Why are people spending millions on original artworks, instead of hanging cheap replicas that are exactly as beautiful? Because they strongly disagree with you.
I think most normies don't entirely care about the process. I could be wrong, but it really wasn't until recent decades where most people actually got to peer into behind-the-scenes stuff for things like movies, music, and video games. Now, there are definitely consumers and audiences of those things who do care and want to know, but at the same time, probably the broad majority of people in the world don't stop to think about how things are made, but just the thing in front of them.
Yeah, check out how few people view art streams vs viewing the same artist's art. Even very popular artists usually have less viewers than some no-name twitch game streamer or 2view v-tuber.
People into the process are mostly other artists trying to crib notes.
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So what, specifically, is the source of that value? My intuition is that if the same painting were made not by a machine or a career-artist, but by a young child, or better yet, an animal, it would be seen as even more valuable, still. (Well, disregarding the effects of name recognition that can balloon chosen artists' work to staggering prices.)
At the risk of making things too meta, it seems to me like this value stands in proportion to how unusual (and thus rare and potentially otherwise-useful) the displayed skill seems to be. A great painter may be of extraordinary use in producing other great paintings that you want. A child prodigy, or an intelligent animal, may portend greater things still.
But a machine is just a machine, whose capabilities we know, just like we wouldn't care about the works of an animal if it were just an accountable product of instinct. The more of a good surprise it is, the more we treasure it, it seems.
But this is just my impression and I would be very glad to hear others with better theories.
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I think you are in fact an exception, not the rule. The process isn't what matters to most, unless you happen to have an interest in learning about it. What matters is not the process, but the output.
And this isn't just for art. This is generally true. I personally enjoy programming and learning more about how different programmers have solved particular problems. I'm in the extreme minority, though. Most people don't give a shit, they want their software to do a task for them and don't care how it was made. A statistician may care about the beautiful mathematical model they use, but most people just want to be told the results. And so on, for pretty much any discipline you can imagine. People just do not care about the process by which things are made, unless they happen to have a particular interest in that topic.
Not to mention that the AI model itself is built using beautiful and creative mathematical ideas and engineering principles. The code can be elegant etc.
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To show off. Jesus didn't say "yo, here's a loaf of bread, it's only one, so it's very valuable, make sure to hoard it". He instead multiplied the loaves of bread and the fish to feed the crowd. Sharing is good. If you have a reliable way to copy something, you should do it. Same way I think about file sharing, free software etc.
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If what you say is true, there is no cause for concern! If there is some ineffable quality of realness to authentic human-made art, and revealed preference does indeed show people prefer it, then AI art is not a threat to real artists.
I wonder why all the artists don't have that same confidence.
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