this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2023
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To be honest, I don't think AI is going to get good enough to replace human creativity. Sure, some of the things that AI can do is pretty nice, but these things are mostly already solved problems - sure, AI can make passable art, but so can humans - and they can go further than art, they can create logical connections between art pieces, and extrapolate art in new reasonably justified ways, instead of the direction-less, grasping in the dark methods that AI seems to do it in.
Sure, AI can make art a thousand times faster than a person, but if only one in thousand is tolerably good, then what's the problem?
AI is still very much in its infancy, and seeing the sort of progress that has been made even over the past 12 months, I don't see how anyone can imagine that it will remain a small and discrete slice of the pie, that it doesn't have radical transformative power.
My vision - gen z artists will reflexively use AI to enhance their material as artist and AI become entangled to a point where they're impossible to distinguish. AI art will increase in fidelity, until it exceeds the fidelity that we can create with our tools. It will become immediately responsive to an audience's needs in a way that human art can't. What do you want to see? AI will make it for exactly your tastes, or to maybe confront your tastes and expand your mind, if that's what you'd like. It will virtualize the artistic consciousnesses of Picasso, Goya, Michelangelo, and create new artists with new sensibilities, along with thousands of years of their works, more than a person could hope to view in a lifetime. Pop culture will be cheaper than ever, and have an audience of one - that new x rated final season of Friends you had a passing thought about is waiting for you to watch when you get home from work. Do you want 100 seasons of it? No problem. The whole notion of authorship is radically reformed and dies, drowned in an unfathomable abyss of AI creations. Human creativity becomes like human chess. People still busy themselves with it for fun, knowing full well that it's anachronistic and inferior in every way.
Donno, just a thought I have sometimes.
So yeah, you like AI because that way you won’t have to commission and pay real artists and you also don’t mind artists losing their jobs and being dehumanized and having to slave in factories. Glad one of you finally said it.
I didn't say any of that.
You said that actually. In many more words, but the point of what you said is exactly that. If you want an AI to make the show you want and if all of us thought the way you’re thinking, what do you think writers, directors, actors etc would do?
Also, you’re not considering the fact that art is not made for the public. Art is self-expression. The fact that we like movies others have made is that something about them resonates with us, but the reason those movies were made is not that. And only humans can do self-expression. A machine has nothing to say, a machine feels nothing, a machine is artistically nothing. You’re standing up for the “artistic” equivalent of Matrix soup as replacement for real food cooked by real people.
I'm not 'standing up' for anything in particular and I don't mean to express anything here as an outcome that I want, I'm just thinking out loud and wondering where this all goes.
I understand that you really dislike AI, and feel that what AI makes and what humans make will always and forever be categorically different in some important way. I can see where you're coming from and a fruitful debate could be had there I think. I'm less sure than you are that AI can be tamed or bottled or destroyed. I think it's something that is here to stay and will continue to develop whether we like the outcomes or not. As open source AI improves and gets into the hands of the average person, I don't see how it's possible to put effective limits on this technology. Geriatric politicians won't do it, this is painfully obvious. Complaining (or advocating, which you could note I have not done here) in a small corner of an obscure comment thread on an obscure platform won't make a difference either.
I get the sense that you believe there is a moral responsibility for everybody commenting in an online forum to call for the complete destruction of AI, and anything short of that is somehow morally wrong. I don't understand that view at all. We're musing into the void here and it has absolutely no effect on what will actually occur in the AI space. I'm open to changing my mind if you have a case to make about there being some moral responsibility to wave the flag that you want to wave, on an online forum, and that wondering aloud is somehow impermissible.
You didn't say that explicitly, but that's the implication of the world you're imagining. You're literally describing the death of all forms of creative industry--human musicians, human writers, human actors--all replaced with AI. You're describing the death of shared creative experiences; with an audience of one, nobody commiserates together over a movie they watched, or a book series they discovered, or talks about the new season of a favorite TV show together. You're describing the death of any form of subversive thought; with all media produced by AI, guard rails on creativity are trivial to introduce, gently redirecting, or outright prohibiting subject matter that is deemed inappropriate (and if you think I'm wrong, just imagine the world you're describing in modern day China--do you seriously think they would allow AI to proliferate that allowed you to create a movie about Tianenmen Square?).
The world you're describing sounds like a plastic, lifeless, lonely hellhole. It's the kind of world sci-fi authors would use as a dystopian background.
Sure, and I think the kinds of things that you mention might come to pass. But for the record I didn't say that I thought it was good. It's just a direction I think these things could go. There's no putting this genie back in the bottle. The view that AI will remain in the background, or merely solve problems that we already have solutions for, or cannot possibly bear on the character and influence of human creativity, I think underestimates the possibilities for change that this still very young technology could bring. That's all I'm saying, sorry if that wasn't clear.
Except production companies have just said they’d like to pay an actor for a day to copy their likelihood and then use those images to make movies without paying actors ever again. A lot of people are already prompting whole novels written by AI and selling them. This shit is ALREADY dystopic as shit. And it’s already here. No need to “give it a chance”, it straight up has to be murdered and be made illegal. It needs to flop as hard as NFTs did.
You absolutely get it. Like, right now all art is owned by corporations and shit is already bad as it is, if it’s made by machines that means the death of any kind of shred of human thought and empathy. It disgusts me to my core. It’s the goddamn world from Matrix, except some people are even INVITING IT IN. Like, I’d rather get a frontal lobotomy than see “art” made by AI.
It only becomes a problem if it is "good enough" to replace working artists. Companies have shown time and time again that they would be willing to cut corners for cheaper production costs. Hollywood would happily sell us AI generated stuff if we were willing to buy it. So consumers would really need to care and push back hard against AI art for artists to remain employed. I don't see it happening.