this post was submitted on 29 Jul 2023
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Showerthoughts
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I was awful at drawing and painting and now I'm not. I've walked that path, and I'm glad I spend the time learning those skills. I much prefer creating whatever I want to as opposed to pecking a word at a time, trying to coax something vaguely like it from an algorithm. That seems sad to me.
Prompting an AI to make something cohesive in art or music is a skill in itself. In the future it will be about who can prompt better. AI is taking the hand eye coordination out of these arts, and making it all about who can be more creative.
Think of all the people who can't physically draw or paint due to disability. Now they can create these kind of arts with only their thoughts. It opens so many doors for people.
You can't stop progress, but you shouldn't be sad about it. There will always be a place for non AI art. It's just that the people who embrace the technology are going to have insane output compared to traditional artists.
The notion of progress is too much of a catch-all positivity word here. If speed and efficiency is all we care about then, sure, ai will blow traditional artists out of the water. If however, we care about what the artist themselves brings in terms of their unique perspective, talents, and stories, ai art will only serve to muffle and homogenize that.
The notion of people with disabilities being able to use it to create something is a fair point. I think it'd be absurd to say that it's only negatives. However, these kinds of cases, as good as they are, are often used to patch over the uglier aspects of what ai generated images is doing and will do. Kind of like how in Florida they're talking about slavery teaching people valuable skills.
I think the people most excited about it are those who seem to have a resentment of artists at some level, likely because those artists are already doing what they wish they could do. That's why I think there's almost a perverse giddiness at the notion of crushing artist's jobs and replacing them with these tech-oriented ones.
It seems like for some people, the ideal society is one in which humans have been made irrelevant and machines interface with each other in perpetuity, generating a heap of content that no one ever sees or thinks about. It's the kind of sci-fi dystopian ending which we don't want to acknowledge because there's money to be made for someone and nothing is supposed to get in the way of that.
I mean I kinda agree with you that it sucks that AI is being used on the arts. That's more than just a job, it's a passion. The arts are a hobby for most that they are fortunate if they can make a living out of it. I would focus AI and automation on menial labor type jobs if I was somehow in charge of it.
The problem is that no matter how much we dislike it, it's still going to happen, so we might as well embrace it and focus on the good in it. It's here to stay until the electrical grid is taken out I imagine.
Also, you are going off on a tangent imagining rare people in the middle there. I don't think there are many people out there that resent artists for having talent like you are saying. The few who do are narcissists, and are likely failed artists themselves. Not a common occurrence.
I do grant completely the valid uses for the technology which pertain to individual interests. I think there's interesting possibilities there as well.
There's a quote from the Tao Te Ching, which says, "why must you value what others value?" I think that's relevant here. It may be true that those with money and power will always try to force their own interests (See the app formerly known as Twitter for reference). I'm not suggesting that we can or should try to shove this technology back in the bottle so to speak. What I am saying is that we shouldn't so easily accept corporate interests as being in the interest of humans more generally and we should be skeptical of anything that sounds like happy tech industry propoganda.
As to the latter part, it's just my perception based on what I've read. It may not be accurate.
I 100 percent agree with everything you say there. If only we can convince the rest of the world that. I hate what tech is turning into right now. If we actually focused it on doing what's good for us and our future it could be so much better. We are using it for some good, but it is being vastly overshadowed by corporate interests and making numbers go up.
I mean, if it's some attempt at a passion project I guess it could be? But I'm usually just letting my GPU churn out cool wallpapers or character art in the background while I watch YouTube. There's no real soul going into it, but I'm not pretending to put in any, either.
And that's totally fine. I could see using it for that purpose too. I think there are a fair number of people who might like to be artists, but they think it's too hard, and so they look at ai as being a shortcut.