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Notes -
But part of it really is that making art is a very human thing to do, from the earliest records we have of humans, and mechanising it away with AI feels like chopping out part of the human experience. It isn't like "a better way to make cheesecake", where the AI is churning out industrial-recipe amounts in an industrial process. It's reducing creativity and imagination to a set of standard tropes for lowest common denominator appeal, like the production line of Marvel movies which, I think, people are beginning to get tired of because it's all too much and too the same: just slot in a new comic book character and sprinkle in explosions and fight scenes. A formula that gets over-used no longer works, because it's tedious. You've seen the same thing sixteen times before, why go see this particular one?
A lot of the complaining is taking themselves too seriously, but it's not merely about losing a job. It makes people feel replaceable, and in something that was considered to be uniquely human. Maybe a robot could replace you as a worker on an automobile assembly line, but as an artist? How would you feel to be totally replaced as a programmer, and whatever you might produce would be regarded as amateur hobbyist stuff, "that's nice dear", but everyone knows real coding is done by AI. Your occupation would be gone, and if this is something you do because you love this stuff, and not just as "well I gotta do something to make a living", wouldn't you feel lost and valueless?
(Emphasis added). I'm not sure where the bolded part came from. What reason is there to believe that AIs would reduce creativity or imagination to a set of standard tropes for lowest common denominator appeal? Nothing about the actual process of the creation of art by AI would imply that. If we look at usage of AI in other fields like, say, go or chess, AI has been known to display creativity far beyond what the best humans have been known to come up with.
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