> most artists love their work and do not want to outsource their passion to a machine that does this for them.
This was the money quote.
I love what I do (which tends to be programming, but I approach it as a craft), and often do things by hand, that others automate, because I love my work, and also the people that use it.
The mantra is "I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes".
I think that this quotation captures the essence of the problem.
It is nice to have the boring things automated - be it proofreading, generating mundane pieces of code, and stuff. The sad part
In programming (at least, for now), I feel that it is a net positive for my happiness - less stuff spent hunting simple omissions, checking StackOverflow, or checking (not always so complete) documentation of changes between version 0.4 and 0.5 of some library.
Yet, in other fields, it may be different. I am not a translator, but I did something for fun a few times (e.g. https://p.migdal.pl/blog/2019/10/the-statues-by-jacek-kaczma...). Now, with proper prompting, one can get very far (e.g. https://p.migdal.pl/blog/2023/05/genesis-az-by-gpt). For the first time, it gets me some existential chills, as it is taking away the joy of a linguistic puzzle of matching content, mood, atmosphere, and rhymes. It used to be an intellectual challenge only a real human being could do.
At some points, event sparks of genius in breakthrough scientific discoveries will be more like solving a crossword rather than something WE can add to the culture.
My wife is a creative director and she loves using this stuff. It's just another thing that she's added to her toolkit. It's actually remarkable to me how different people react to this stuff and just one more reason she and I are well-matched. Our reactions to LLMs and Diffusion Models are very similar. These are just new tools for us to accomplish what we want to do.
She used to draw on paper, then a Wacom, now she only ever doodles on her iPad. She designed our wedding clothes with Dall-E + Adobe AI + illustrating in PS/Illustrator.
I used to write code painstakingly in a text editor, then a rudimentary language-aware text editor, and then an IDE, and then an IDE with integrated LLMs. I ask my Mistral to find bugs and to tell me how to work with obscure systems.
These tools are really wonderful for doing things. They're not perfect and don't replace humans. But at every stage I recall most people opposing this stuff. And at every stage I recall enjoying the new tool. So I can only assume that the opposition to LLMs is the same as the opposition to search engines back in the day: "Real knowledge isn't about just looking up stuff. You only really grok something if you read the manual. There's lots of bits that relate to each other that you have to know".
Laundry and dishes don't pay well. Art does, but only once in a great while, and AI gives you a ton of attempts for little cost. Since rapid iteration is the biggest strength of advanced computing, people just invented cultural pollution machines in the hope of striking it rich.
If I could afford to pay for a reasonably priced Ai laundry & delivery service I would surely do it. If it was done by a robot that also cooked basic meals and cleaned my house, that would be invaluable to not just me, but many. A company that ran that service properly and reliably would likely be very successful. That would likely free many of the people in maid and janitorial jobs to work within the companies that run those services as inspectors and managers instead of in the field... This is how the model works, not just by simply saying that category of work isn't profitable...
A work hammer (the tool) doesn't profit, but the company that makes and sells it en mass (Like Stanley inc. or Craftsman) does.
Laundry and dishes aren't a source of revenue generation; that's why art is prioritized (it earns money, and reduces the costs of hiring creatives) whereas dishes and laundry doesn't earn startups cash nor is it worth eliminating the cost of.
Sure, but many people who are bad at art and writing would like AI to make art and writing that's tailored to their tastes and are fine doing laundry and dishes since they're good at that and we have already automated 99% of it with dishwashers and dryers.
The actual washing of the dishes we have automated, not the loading unloading, folding of clothes and organizing them in my closet. I spend at least 1 hour a week on that stuff… ~52hours per year I could be doing art and writing.
1 hour a week means you live alone. Add a partner and a kid or two, and someone will be spending one hour a day on unloading and sorting laundry into right wardrobes.
(On average. Realistically, it's more like a day and a half every two weeks or something).
Chores are terrible life suckers, and I for one subscribe to the notion of eliminating them with technology.
I'm expecting a minimum of 5-10 years to pass between real-time vision AI getting good enough for level-5 autonomous cars and the same stuff fitting into the power envelope available to this kind of domestic robot.
The thing is, you can get better at these. They are just creative skills that get better with practice (much like coding et.al.). And the skill will let you do things you can't do with AI.
> are fine doing laundry and dishes since they're good at that and we have already automated 99% of it with dishwashers and dryers.
With the minimal amount of sarcasm or ill intent possible: what are you doing with that spare time if not improving skills you clearly want the output of?
You can also get better at those skills while also using AI. It’s not really an absolute. You can generate outlines sketches so you can practice shading techniques as a simple example.
There are also those who don’t want to get better at those skills, as those skills are just a temporary medium. For example someone making pottery might be terrible at drawing and creating ideas, so they generate some and then get to working with clay. Essentially, references.
Using AI is not free, in either price nor time. If all the time spent iterating over prompts to get the "right" output was instead spent working on skills, you (the royal you) could get a lot better at drawing/writing right off the bat.
I've lurked through a few AI art boards, and the number of times people will spend dozens if not hundreds of hours iterating through prompts to get a simple anime character just right is mind boggling.
Can AI create references? Certainly. Will they be more detailed than what a potter can create in a similar timeframe? Probably. Will they be accurate to the potter's desire? Probably not.
> Using AI is not free, in either price nor time. If all the time spent iterating over prompts to get the "right" output was instead spent working on skills, you (the royal you) could get a lot better at drawing/writing right off the bat.
Eventually, by practice, a person can get better at art.
I've seen (pre-AI) artists spending dozens of hours just on icons, so the idea of artists spending hundreds of hours perfecting every detail of some character doesn't seem surprising, not even when the specific details really can be done by a better method than repeatedly changing the prompt.
Conversely, even when I use an app on my phone for GenAI, it's making images in perhaps 90 seconds, vs. the entire day that my GCSE* art class gave the students to create the final project — even with the need to have multiple attempts or prompt variations, the AI just gets stuff done too fast for me to learn much in the same time period.
I think the missing piece is the generative AI being tied to a physical embodiment. My point is, we need the physical machine but we also need to work on this generative AI aspect to manipulate the machine. Unfortunately, making pictures and writing text seems to be the lowest hanging fruit of the Transformer AI era since we have significant datasets already available. Several companies are working on creating datasets to train transformers to apply to other tasks and I suspect we'll start seeing the results in a couple to a few years. Not sure how long before we have a consumer bot doing the laundry and dishes though.
Correct me if I'm wrong here, but it seems that you're taking the wrong lesson from the above quote.
It's not an instruction manual on what parts of the human experience are not yet fully captured by AI.
It's a condemnation on the entire purpose of AI as actualized in our economy, re: it's presumed lofty sci-fi-inspired aspirations (giving humans more creative liberty and freedom) versus how it's actually being operationalized (replacing their creative liberty and freedom).
Unironically, yes. Detailed, nuanced, human level modeling of the world provides an interface with automation that allows for complex tasks and workflows to be built and trusted. "Go clean up the kitchen" might involve something where the question of "is this trash, or is this an adorable drawing made by a child that should be saved" or other such collisions between seemingly clear instructions and the vast context baked into the world requiring interpretation at a more-or-less human level. The system could even frame the above decision as "get clarification, or risk being thrown in the trash."
One of the huge advances in the last 5 years has been categorization of images, alongside segmentation, in conjunction with reasoning about categories. LLM chatbots and generative images and audios are the simplest and least nuanced uses of transformers, with the least friction between training and deployment of a product. Generative models tend to allow perception as detailed, varied, and nuanced as their output produces, and integration of these software capabilities will happen in new and surprising ways for many years to come.
TLDR; what they can create, they can see - advanced image models enable advanced computer vision.
Thanks for the response; I see your point that housework can have pretty significant cognitive requirements. I'm not sure I understood sufficiently the argument for why LLMs are well-placed to attack that sort of categorisation, but it's something for me to mull over.
My favorite version of this sentiment is also the earliest one I know of -- even beating the SMBC comic linked by others here by an additional half a year -- by Alex Krokus, in no small part as it doesn't fall into this trap of talking about physical tasks like laundry/dishes or plumbing: "but i like making art | can it do my taxes? -- no it can't".
Ai is ages away from being able to emulate the passion and intuition behind music, writing, and art that humans have cultivated for centuries. It can only emulate that passion even still, so it relies on a theft from human intellect & reasoning as it very basis. This is why in the long run it will become apparent that undermining the source of creativity, and by ruining the ability of artists and writers to succeed properly in innovating nw things, eventually Ai will become bereft of new ideas, and easily turned into a source for garbage, cheap, copycat, and undesired output.
There is also the looming risk that current creators may well turn towards corrupting their work specifically to hinder the corrupt idea theft currently occurring with Ai profiteers.
Well I don't think OP persuaded the AI start-up to pivot to laundry services. The start-up is going after the low hanging fruit, things easy to do, and no one likes to be thought of as easily replaceable least of all artists.
I wonder to what degree generative AI came before e.g. as in the article an AI that does your taxes because it's hard to be wrong, creatively. If I ask an AI for a painting of a dog commanding a fleet of starships, I'd be hard pressed to define, specifically, an incorrect result. There's wiggle room. Some results are more wrong or right than others, but I don't know that I'd ever hand back a grade of 0. And even if I did, so what? The stakes are low. Try again.
On the other hand, doing your taxes wrong is a thing. You can enumerate the possible mistakes. They're codified in law[0]. And these mistake have big stakes.
Generative AI is "safer" than an AI to do a specific task that has consequences.
[0] Yes, yes, I know, there's wiggle room here too and that's why we have courts
I think the problem is because AI is mostly created by engineers who have no clue about 'art', all they know is how to automate and optimise for the sole purpose of efficiency which has been the cause of AI eating creative fields including programming ironically as there an art to coding as well.
Most artists, like most programmers are working in a commercial capacity. I see no reason why "their passion" should overrule profit-seeking.
Do art for the sake of art on your own time. But expecting companies to not embrace AI to do their jobs is foolish just like it's foolish to think corporate programmers will be a thing at some point in the future.
No, this viewpoint is the only reason a shirt doesn't cost a month's wages. Weavers once had similar arguments, decrying machinery that made cloth. Imagine how many more video games and movies can be made when we don't need anywhere near as many artists as before. How many more diagrams in textbooks. How many extra illustrations for Wikipedia.
There are tremendous benefits to making art something anyone can get for dirt cheap.
> Imagine how many more video games and movies can be made when we don't need anywhere near as many artists as before. How many more diagrams in textbooks. How many extra illustrations for Wikipedia.
With the possible exception of Wikipedia illustrations, I wasn't aware we had a meaningful shortage of any of those things. On the contrary, there are more great video games and movies (and books, and TV shows, etc., etc.) already available than I could ever hope to get through in my lifetime.
GenAI in anything resembling its current form can only dilute these markets with worthless slop and make it harder for consumers to find actual worthwhile media made by and for humans. This problem will be compounded if it also makes creative careers less viable for humans.
> On the contrary, there are more great video games and movies (and books, and TV shows, etc., etc.) already available than I could ever hope to get through in my lifetime.
As someone who has a very specific taste in video games, I beg to differ. If you happen to exist in the space targeted by AAA or if you don't have strong preferences for what you get out of an indie game the status quo is fine, but it's been a while since I've found a game I hadn't played before that scratches the itch.
Automation allows what's popular to become extremely cheap and what's niche to become possible.
Right now automation allows neither of those things. The best you're going to get is existing games reskinned with AI slop assets---the new shovelware.
In some hypothetical future world where GenAI content really is as novel and worthwhile as content made by humans, this will be a different conversation. Until then, I doubt it's going to satisfy even the tiny minority of people who literally want to play the same game, watch the same movie, read the same book, etc. over and over again until they die. But it certainly has the potential to severely damage the overall quality of the media landscape in the way I described, because people who care about money more than quality are in the driver's seat.
To be clear, I'm not envisioning complete automation—I'm envisioning a human game designer using these tools to make building out an idea much faster and with lower risk.
> No, this viewpoint is the only reason a shirt doesn't cost a month's wages.
But that shirt would last you decades with good maintenance, because it was a quality product that was made to be repaired by other craftspeople throughout it's service life (or even just yourself!). Now we have can have hundreds of shirts for that same money but all of them suck, are made cheaply, fall apart after a couple of years if we're lucky, and are made by people who can't afford to buy them in a country we've never seen. How is this an improvement in literally any way, apart from it makes fast fashion companies shitloads of money? It's worse for the people making the clothes, wearing the clothes, and selling the clothes. It's worse for the environment because now we're making and destroying millions of articles of clothing, not to mention shipping it here and there and everywhere. And, for all that, we still have people who don't have enough fucking clothing.
So modernity has eliminated my need to spend time looking after clothes? That is a big win. Not having to put time into repair and maintenance is a huge improvement. It has eliminated my need to be careful with my clothes? That is also a huge win.
My grandmother used to spend hours at a time repairing socks. It is a huge win that nobody knows how to do that anymore, as time has value.
> Now we have can have hundreds of shirts for that same money
Even if we accept the decades of life for an old shirt, you only need tens of shirts to match its lifetime, so this is an order of magnitude reduction in cost.
> are made by people who can't afford to buy them in a country we've never seen
So? Plenty of employees cannot afford what their employer produces. And it is a step up from where they were before. We freed up more capable people in our own country to do more productive things than made clothing.
You are right on the environmental part.
> And, for all that, we still have people who don't have enough fucking clothing.
Where would that be? Even the poorer African countries are chaffing at how much clothing is being dumped there.
So the main loser is the environment. As a customer, I am otherwise a tremendous winner. And when AI takes over most mundane art, like animating instructional videos or making logos, I will also be a tremendous winner.
> So the main loser is the environment. As a customer, I am otherwise a tremendous winner. And when AI takes over most mundane art, like animating instructional videos or making logos, I will also be a tremendous winner.
So as long as whatever shit that's burning the world benefits you in your life time, irrespective of the state of it when it's time for you to hand it over to your children, you're good with it.
Got it. I mean that makes sense, who needs a long-term stable biosphere when there's money to be made. Jesus Christ...
Weavers weren't concerned about "passion" for cloth, they were concerned about their economic ability to compete with machines that required huge capital outlays and centralized profit at the expense of the middle and lower class workers.
Sounds like we're repeating history then. If it were just about passion then artists wouldn't worry about AI because it doesn't deprive them of their hobby. It's only a problem because it takes away from their income.
Another take on this point, the race to the bottoming of shirts has been a disaster ecologically and has fostered a throwaway culture where people don't take care or pride in an item of clothing. There's benefits on reducing the barrier to entry, but profound downsides to it as well.
> Imagine how many more video games and movies can be made when we don't need anywhere near as many artists as before.
We have several lifetimes’ supply of good art in practically every medium already, even relatively new ones. Recording and mechanical reproduction have already enormously devalued creative talent and left us with a glut.
Harming the value of artistic talent and skill even further, to get us more of something we’re already drowning in, isn’t really an improvement.
Most art is not culture either. It is mundane movie shots, textbook drawings, logos, etc. Tailored shirts have not gone away. Custom fabric patterns have not gone away.
All that has disappeared is every shirt being tailored, custom, and expensive.
I make art for pleasure and the magical post creation beholding of what has emerged - it's a serious high :) That is of course a private concern, and that said, in my mind there are good points on both side of this argument. It is not a black/white issue.
To amplify my OP, there are certain intangibles regarding cultural artifacts which are strictly non-utilitarian. Culture is expression & is a product of the human psyche (of a coherent civilization). And past will affect the future. Culture minimally is a social tonic, maximally informs societal character.
The germinal question in context of 'high culture' (arts and letters) is whether the omission of the 'bar to entry' that requires acquisition of skill, dedication, and 'a development of a vocabulary' (etc) will have a degenerative long term effect on high culture, given that cultural development is generational and progressive, and the process of becoming an artist is a filter.
You can be passionate about this advancement without placing profits first.
> Imagine how many more video games and movies can be made...
Again, you can do this with passion and without placing profit first
> There are tremendous benefits to making art something anyone can get for dirt cheap
I disagree strongly here. Art has value in large part because most people cannot produce it. I like stories, but not everyone has a good story to tell. When the story is AI-generated, there isn't a consciousness behind it to give it the passion required for good stories.
> You can be passionate about this advancement without placing profits first.
Given the riots inspired by this machinery, I don't believe this is possible.
(Arguably also communism, but there was a lot going on back then).
> I disagree strongly here. Art has value in large part because most people cannot produce it. I like stories, but not everyone has a good story to tell. When the story is AI-generated, there isn't a consciousness behind it to give it the passion required for good stories.
I'm not sure either way on this. Possibly a simultaneous agree-and-disagree?
I agree that art may be a "peacock's tail" where the difficulty is the point, and making it cheap makes it cease to be art. In this case, some hypothetical AI which everyone agrees is totally conscious and also that it creates works of exquisite and sublime wonder, still won't be "art".
But the other view of art is that it may also be simply "nice stuff"; if so, then the ability to discern good art from bad art is sufficient, even if you regard an LLM as little more than "fancy autocomplete" — it doesn't need consciousness* of its own, the consciousness of the user is sufficient.
I suspect there's a lot of people in both groups.
* by whichever of the many meanings you intend for that
I suspect most artists (and I used to be one, at one time[0 - 1]), would take advantage of AI tools. I suspect that the posting was really just exhibitionism, on the part of the site owners (I really wouldn't bother with that kind of thing, myself).
But I think that telling people to do a good job "on their own time," kinda sums up the zeitgeist of today's tech industry.
> I see no reason why "their passion" should overrule profit-seeking.
Companies can and will do whatever they want.
However, on the level of the individual, I see no reason why profit-seeking should overrule my passion. I don't code to make money, I code because I love doing it. I make money to allow myself to engage in an activity I find rewarding, I don't engage in that activity to make money.
If that activity is no longer rewarding, there is no amount of money that can compensate for that.
Perhaps you're right, and that the future has no place for people like me. We'll see. Regardless, though, I'm not going to participate (either as a dev or as a customer) with processes that dehumanize people to such a degree.
AI is going to have to get a lot better before "Programmed by a human" is an anachronism. I played around with Copilot over the weekend because everyone on HN urged me to try it and thought it would change my mind about AI. It's pretty terrible still. I tested three things on a few existing C++ and Objective-C code bases: 1. Have it explain existing code to me: This worked reasonably well. I give it an A-minus. AI seems to be able to analyze and explain code at the level of a junior CS student in college. 2. Have it write new code to do a few tasks: I give it a C grade. Not bad, but a lot of the code it writes just isn't how I'd do it, and I saw a couple of subtle bugs. 3. Suggest improvements/refactors to existing code: I give it an F. It's terrible, and often provides suggestions that don't make sense (the return value for foo() should be bar, when it already is bar!) or that will actually make the code worse.
I think it will be a long time before AI produces code of such quality and correctness that I'd give it a passing grade in a college-level CS/programming course.
One thing I give it credit for, it will confidently spit out code when you ask it, often code that works, but it's pretty terrible code.
I appreciate the post (for what it's worth). I suspect that we are probably considered "anachronisms," in today's culture.
I am retired. I didn't want to be retired, but I was told that I'm too old (I was 55, when I retired in 2017) to be playing at programmer; that it's a young man's game, and I should just go and carve decoy ducks in my garage or something.
Fortunately, I had enough set aside, that I was able to just accept that no one wants to play in my sandbox, and work on my own. The scope is more humble, but I am absolutely thrilled with the work that I do, and so are the folks that benefit from it (I tend to write stuff for people that can't afford the kind of stuff I write).
Money isn't everything, but I suspect a lot of folks don't realize that, until it's way too late.
> I was told that I'm too old (I was 55, when I retired in 2017) to be playing at programmer;
Maybe you were ready to retire anyway so this doesn't matter -- but you shouldn't believe what you were told on this matter. There are tons of software engineering positions where being on the older end of things isn't considered a handicap.
I'm pushing 60 and find there is plenty of opportunity. About half of the engineers I've worked with over the last 30 years or so have been over 40, many over 50. I have a coworker on my team right now who is one of the best devs I've worked with and is 73.
Part of it is my chosen specialty: Swift native Apple programming.
Some folks actually seem to be offended that "olds" are doing it (I've been writing Swift since the day it was announced, and have released over 20 apps with it -all on my own time. My paid gig never wanted that stuff).
I ran a C++ shop, with really experienced engineers. They were all able to get jobs, after our department was dissolved, but it took them years, and at least one of them keeps getting laid off, every two years or so.
I used to say "My dream is to be coding for free."
Livin' the dream, baby!
[EDITED TO ADD] I think that I was ready to retire, but had no idea, until I was pushed out of the nest. I was REALLY pissed off, for a while, at the way that I was treated, but, in the aggregate, it has been the best thing that ever happened to me.
> Part of it is my chosen specialty: Swift native Apple programming.
Ahh, that makes sense. There are subcultures within the industry that are very bigoted about age. Fortunately, they aren't representative of the entire spectrum of the industry.
> Livin' the dream, baby!
Excellent! That's what we're all striving for, I think (although we all have different dreams). Keep it up!
That's perfectly fine at the individual level (and probably encouraged for most people + their passions), I think the guy above is trying to get at something more like: just because some people are passionate about their thing, doesn't mean other people shouldn't allowed to pursue it for profit-seeking.
As someone else has mentioned, just because weavers were/are passionate about what they do, that doesn't mean people shouldn't have been allowed to invent the loom + mass production techniques for clothing. Everyone on the planet has benefited mightily from this, and there are other similar examples.
Maybe there are restrictions that should be enforced to prevent this in some cases, or curtail it to some degree. There's likely not a one size fits all rule, and a lot of it is determined as net-good or net-bad in hindsight.
One thing missing from this analysis is how the profit-seeking platforms for AI were directly created from the works of the passionate - something not seen when the loom (or machining tools, etc) was created. Most hobby artists see it as stealing, even if the laws may not agree.
And yes, even a hobbiest has the right to make money off their work.
I don't disagree that this is part of what makes this a particularly tangled situation, but it's also true that the loom/ machining tools were created by essentially copying the methods and styles that their non-automated artisans were using.
I won't comment on any of the potential legal differences between AI being trained on an artists work without their knowledge versus Jacquard studying hand-made clothmaking techniques. It's certainly something that needs careful consideration.
Related: so much of our technology, including all electronic devices, were built on top of R&D done by passionate researchers who weren't working with profits in mind. How much are all the tech giants paying to the estates of Feynman, Dirac, or Maxwell? None. And nobody argues they should.
> Most artists, like most programmers are working in a commercial capacity. I see no reason why "their passion" should overrule profit-seeking.
The obsession that everything must go in a financial box or be relegated to the increasingly diminished "free time" available to oneself is a cancer that is destroying our society.
Things that are profitable =/= things that have value to people. They often coincide but it is not a direct correlation. Tons of things that make absolutely unethical amounts of profit have zero value to society. Conversely some of the most valuable things in human experience have zero monetization, in practice or theory.
> Most artists, like most programmers are working in a commercial capacity. I see no reason why "their passion" should overrule profit-seeking.
Ding ding ding.
I think that we're already experiencing all the downsides of having AI-generated content. Look at high-budget movies - they're completely bland, tell nothing, they're only optimized for getting money out of average uneducated customer. Ubisoft is known for making all games according to same template that works and makes money. Mobile gaming lasted three entire months before it was overtaken by those profit-driven.
Some time ago I went to an expensive concert, and I realized... those guys got loaded by playing literally the same songs they've been playing for twenty years. They found the golden formula and they keep on riding it.
Turning to AI only cuts the middle man.
I turned towards independent creators because those guys have a passion and want to share it. So not all hope is lost. It's just that true artists are going to be the minority, just like they always were, while the rest will keep slurping up the commercial slop, just like they always have.
Created work even in a commercial capacity is protected IP. having AI train on those models for a publicly consumed LLM may not even be in the best interests of profit.
Law hasn't even evolved either. What if in the future people bring special tradecraft to companies that they don't want leaking elsewhere? who knows. the door is still open.
> just like it's foolish to think corporate programmers will be a thing at some point in the future.
I don't think corporate programmers are obsolete. How will a sophisticated AI programmer in the future be any different than a human programmer in an outsourcing firm?
The role will remain, but the job will change dramatically into one with a higher level of product focus. The "software craftsmen" type will become more obsolete than they are already. RAM used to matter. Now, who even looks at how much RAM their app uses?
I constantly look at how much RAM other people's software uses. I have to work hard to keep it down, otherwise my computer hangs. I would appreciate if software authors cared a bit more.
Most of the worst software is produced by organisations with plenty of resources, who place themselves as gatekeepers to coerce me into using their awful software. (I have no idea what they get out of this, in most cases.) This means I have to, eventually, choose between "having a job" and "not buying a new computer". Either choice leaves me with less money to give to those who write software I appreciate.
And this is why we have tons of trash software that runs like garbage, and nothing but low quality trash products on the market. People who don't give a fuck about anything but profit.
> Now, who even looks at how much RAM their app uses?
I do, constantly. In large swaths of software engineering, RAM and other resources are still scarce enough to require careful consideration in their use.
Curious what you think of intellectual property law in general. Trade dress, trade marks, written words, lyrics, distinctive visual styles, processes, melodies etc are all protected under various IP laws.
The laws did not anticipate AI models hoovering up all known IP without any permission from or compensation to its creators, but that does not mean that we cannot correct that and it does not mean those creators cannot or should not be able to assert rights and be compensated for violations.
I think your comment is emblematic of the very divide between Silicon Valley and the rest of the world that leads to frustration like what the artists here are expressing.
No one becomes an artist except because of passion for the work. It sure as hell isn’t for the money. That’s not so universally true in Silicon Valley, and I’m guessing you’re one of those people who views their job mostly as a means to fund the rest of their lifestyle.
The counterargument is that AI lets those without the skills take part too.
AI can help someone bring their musical ideas to fruition, draw pictures, or write stories.
There is still creative direction from a human - and now, rather than having to be a highly skilled human, it can now be almost anyone. In a way, AI brings creativity to the masses who aren't lucky enough to have the time to hone skills that would take thousands of hours to learn any other way.
More people would be "lucky enough to have the time to hone skills" if investment in AI were directed towards solving actual problems.
As a former professional musician, let me tell you: the skills are not the problem here. People don't not make art because they don't have the skills. They don't make art because they have nothing to say, nothing to express.
The skills are a byproduct of having a worldview, a perspective. And unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately) AI can't help anyone with that.
I don't necessarily disagree with your viewpoint, but sometimes the lack of a proper voice makes it impossible to identify that you have a perspective that can be expressed.
Iterating to get the right output from a prompt- and waiting for the output to be generated - is not an instantaneous endeavor. How much improvement could someone see if they dedicated that time to drawing or writing practice instead?
> I don't necessarily disagree with your viewpoint, but sometimes the lack of a proper voice makes it impossible to identify that you have a perspective that can be expressed.
Developing a "voice" is done, at least partially, via honing one's craft, as well as engaging with art made by other people and cultures. The former is antithetical to prompting, and the latter is actively being destroyed by AI.
I can't help but feel that this strange insistence by industry that AI be used to all but usurp art ultimately comes from a place of jealousy, and/or due to the fact that some intelligent-to-Americans-sounding British voice saying something like "we're operating at the intersection of art and technology..." at some TedX talk causes VCs to turn out their wallets.
> I can't help but feel that this strange insistence by industry that AI be used to all but usurp art ultimately comes from a place of jealousy
No, it is because replacing art is easier than replacing other jobs, that is the only reason. If they could they would replace something way more lucrative to them, but as is replacing artists is the thing they can do so that is what they do.
Alternative viewpoint - some creative people don't enjoy the actual physical act of making a creation a reality. For me, I don't particularly enjoy programming, but I love building things. I had hoped that AI would allow me to build things in a way that skips past or trivializes the stuff I don't like (it hasn't, because I'm still a much more competent programmer than "AI" is).
With art, though - I have some disabilities I don't feel the need to mention here, and am not particularly gifted at drawing or making art. I love making comics but I can't draw. AI allows me to make things like that now. It's been fantastic for someone like me, although I completely understand the arguments presented here by people that create for a living, I do think this is inevitably a losing battle because creating visual stuff is something this current iteration of generative AI seems to be pretty decent at.
I'd also like to see the results of hand-tracing of variable values done separately by the developer for each copy. Maybe have several developers do it as an extra check.
I think that the way people are mostly interacting with generative AI is not as a producer but as a _consumer_. They describe what they want, the AI makes it, and they get some enjoyment out of it, then discard it. Maybe they share it with a handful of people, but I think only a tiny percentage of people interacting with Chatgpt or MidJourney are doing anything creative or think of themselves as artists and _that's fine_.
I don't think AI has made me enjoy programming less. If anything it has made me love it even more. The biggest benefit for me is that it has helped me with procrastination. Instead of "I'll do it tomorrow" I will just ask the AI when I need to do something I don't feel like doing.
This feels like back in the day when photo editing and publishing software started getting big. "True artists" would shun anyone using those tools as amateurs. And for the most part they were right. It was mostly used by amateurs to create stuff that didn't look very good.
That is where we are with AI art right now. Most of it is garbage created by people who don't know what good art is.
But just like back in the day, a few professionals decided to adopt the new tools instead of complain about them. And all of a sudden they were creating good art much faster than their competitors. And then those tools simply became the tools of the trade.
This is where AI art is going. It will be a tool in the artists toolbox, just like Photoshop is. A great artist will use AI to do most of the work, and then add their professional taste and talent to make it great.
The smart artist is learning how to integrate AI into their workflows.
* And I'm including software engineers here as well. The smart engineer is incorporating copilots into their software development workflows.
The difference is that everyone thinks they're an artist now, skipping pesky things like talent or effort. GenAI is the ultimate tool for people who have the creativity of a potato.
Photoshop was a DTP accelerator and low-cost retouching alternative for Scitex.
Your example would be Andy Warhol (an actual artist) using Graphicraft.
Truth is that no one has the luxury to make that choice because everything is seen through the lens of productivity. It's the productivity that makes making art faster "good".
It sucks so hard that the choice is: either get on board or become irrelevant.
People have every right to complain about art, for many reasons. It's not comparable to Photoshop.
> Storytelling is personal. It is a connection between the writer and the reader. Without this personal connection, storytelling loses its purpose.
I read a book many years ago called If this is your land, where are your stories? One of the sections described how a group of native people from western Canada successfully reclaimed some of their land by telling stories in court. They lost their case in a lower court, because the court ruled that they were just telling stories. A higher court ruled that their people's stories, while not always factually correct, do lay claim to the land they lived on.
Everyone has a story. It's a confusing world where machine-generated stories can be indistinguishable from actual human stories.
Trust in authenticity is going to be a valuable asset going forward; I appreciate people sharing responses like this. It's easy to be cynical and say this response won't change anything, but if the people at Muse and companies like it keep getting these responses, some of them will realize the emptiness of what they're doing and move on to more meaningful work.
The suggestion you can do "storytelling without the need for personal content creation." says a lot about how that company views content. Content is a means to make money, it's not about telling a meaningful story or conveying information, it's about eyeballs and revenue.
It would be tricky do stop AI looking at content and making something inspired by it as humans have been doing that as a basic occupation for centuries. You'd have to differentiate between a human looking at stuff and then producing art and a machine doing it but what if a machine and human work together? I'm not sure how you'd differentiate legally.
Always worth remembering as we watch these cases go through the system that "legal" and "moral" (or even "benefits society") are not the same thing. They are usually intended to be the same thing, but the rule of law will never fully capture the intent, especially as time passes.
> Artists’ work has been harvested in order to train large language models
The idea of publishing something these days has become quite unappealing. For me, there's something dehumanizing about being used as LLM training data. Not that my thoughts are unique or interesting or special. But, man...
Years ago I went to a BBQ cooking class run by the owner of a small, one-location restaurant in Chicago. He said that Sysco and US Foods reps called him every single day to talk about outsourcing his pulled pork and brisket to them.
This feels oddly similar, except there's only a couple Sysco's and US Foods' and probably thousands of AI Content Farm startups at this point.
I'm curious how developers' sentiment towards code generation tools like Copilot compares to artists' sentiment towards art generation tools like MJ/SD/DallE.
As a developer myself, I want to see coding as a creative act and feel uneasy about the idea of relying on a tool that makes the code one tab away. But I also recognize most of the coding we do is in a commercial context where artistic expression is less relevant.
My main concern about Copilot use is that, unless you're in a race to quickly produce a minimum viable product, it doesn't optimize the hard part. The initial coding is a very small piece of the work.
Code has to be designed, maintained, and extended, and for supportable code we want to have someone on the team that understands it well. If we want the code to be flexible, we want design decisions to appear in as few places as possible, ideally one. Copilot as an auto-complete, where it just helps fill in function names and the like, is fine and helpful (but IDEs do most of that already). But if it's used to write larger code chunks we quickly have the problem that there are code sequences no one on the team understands (it passed the tests though, yay!?) and we wind up with bloat from a lot of copy-paste like code.
This is universally true of Generative AI's impact on all art and craft.
It's a Dunning-Kruger thing. It makes the stuff that a novice thinks is hard apparently easier, but does not ever tackle the difficult stuff. So that novice is actively disadvantaged compared to how they would be if they worked with an actual artist to make what they wanted.
I'm both an artist and a programmer, and indeed my opinions about them are very different. I work as sysadmin so both are activities are detached from my earnings, as a disclaimer. The artist opinion is a lot more abstract and feeling-based, while the programmer opinion is more pragmatic.
Also note that I condemn anyone using AI for "evil". Anyone using it to deceive or harm is despicable and just makes things difficult for everyone.
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As an artist I see stuff like Stable Diffusion to be very interesting, a fun toy or a potential tool to unclog your brain when needing ideas, and much faster than something like pinterest, specially with niche topics. Its ability to randomly combine concepts can be an starting point for inspiration as well.
I usually like to draw robots, which aren't a common thing in popular media anymore (at least not in the aesthetic I favor, think Armored Core) so having the AI generate a bunch of random robot slop is a good way to get my brain "in the zone", maybe stuff like "oh that pose is cool" or "I can try something with this type of joint". Or even "wow this is a hot mess but the way it placed that odd shape in the arm gives me an idea for a weapon" and let my brain juices flow and do the rest. If nothing else it can help you discard things that don't work.
However, I wouldn't let it replace my work, because the process of designing and drawing is what's fun to me. My favorite subject also requires a degree of consistency the poor thing just can't pull off even with assistance, specially when animating said robots with all the moving parts and stuff that splits and folds, so I'm on my own anyway.
Double however, the idealist in me also believes that anyone that can produce a fine piece, by whatever means, by putting effort and finesse with a tool IS an artist. I have seen some people intentionally working with the tools to do stuff and the results can be impressive. This however disqualifies most AI art you might be familiar with, because most stuff spammed in the internet is stuff that anyone (on the know) can tell is just default settings slop, done in batches with no soul, or even intent to deceive.
The process I'm talking about involves multiple hand-made edits, knowing the quirks of the system and knowing what to do. I've seen it used, for example, by TTRPG nerds (not an insult) to generate images tailored for a scene in campaigns. Those people have imagination and a sense of aesthetics but no art skills, and the way they put together a full scene by editing, making multiple passes, repainting areas until it looks right, training the characters involved... is something I can respect because it's coming from a place of passion and is sincere.
I guess intent matters. Some people are just trying to do fun stuff, others are trying to scam you and putting out basic slop while asking you to subscribe to their Patreons like if they were real artists, or making deepfakes. I'll always side with the former out of principle, even if they are a minority overshadowed by the shenanigans of the later.
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Now, as a programmer I see Copilot with utter disdain. I know for a fact that LLMs are extremely prone to mistakes, inconsistent, unreliable. Code is something that can easily have hidden gotchas that only an expert can notice. The consequences of people who have no idea what they are doing asking for code from a thing that has no idea what it's doing can have reaching effects that can, in the worst case scenarios, end up having consequences such as severe time, data or money loss. Or even death. I'd even question its use from seasoned programmers, because everyone can have a bad day and overlook a mistake.
I got hit up over several emails by a startup doing AI recruiting. I never replied back because it was hard to tell if it was actually the CEO reaching out to me because of my experience, or his AI system reaching out to me.
I thought, if I’m having this sort of issue figuring out if the contact is genuine, how will I feel working on this product? Even if it is genuine, is it ethical to have been recruited by a real person to work on a product that fools people into thinking they’ve been contacted by a real person?
A couple of years back I got a message on LinkedIn from Andrew Ng and I was blown away, then I quickly realized that this account was probably managed by a team of recruiters. I responded positively but mentioned some ML 101 concepts that could be applied to the problem, and the inability to engage confirmed my suspicion. So to some degree, deception has always been part of the game.
> Social Media platforms cannot grow without engaging and original content, made by people. This is the basis for any user to join. Creators have – in large part – not been privy to the rewards that these platforms have generated over the years even though they are the reason for platform growth.
Disagree. People use social media for plenty of other reasons than to consume artists' content. Sharing news with family and friends, arguing with strangers on the Internet -- HN itself is the obvious counterexample.
Ok, but the author referred specifically to "Creators", which usually means the minority of users who post things other than text.
If you read more of the author's post:
> We are a webcomic duo that has been creating original comics since 2011 and sharing them on various platforms on the web
> Any business model that does not acknowledge this and does not seek proper compensation for artists is not of interest to us.
My point is, while I agree with their sentiment, I believe they are mistaken that artists are the core driver of social media growth. (And by their assertion, the reason people use social media.)
I think you’re connecting two separate facts that need not necessarily be linked.
Regardless, users posting only life update-style text posts are also uncompensated for their contributions to the network (and their works too are feeding AI.)
Sure, maybe my definition was imprecise. Good catch.
But my point remains. I don't feel like I should be compensated for my HN posts. My great aunt doesn't expect compensation for posting her cat pictures. To be honest, I don't care about consuming artists' content. I'm sure it's great. But I go to the local art museum for that. When I go on social media, it's to hear from my great aunt.
And if YC wants to train a model that will eventually replace me, sure. I don't want to be paid for it. The whole thing is inevitable. You can't stop technology, only delay.
People just want to enjoy using computers (in the time humans have left).
I'm confused. The top reason for declining is this:
> The surge in AI has been built on the backs of creative people like us. Artists’ work has been harvested in order to train large language models and they have not been informed or compensated.
The AI company is literally informing them that they want a partnership, which obviously involves discussing compensation. That is the polar opposite of harvesting all their comics to create a language model. So how is this relevant?
Thing is, AI is happening to creatives whether you like it or not, so you might as well play a part in directing its trajectory. Apple hired world class drummers for the new AI drummer feature in their flagship music production software. Dreamtonics hired a lot of vocalists for its flagship vocal synthesis software, which happens to be quite brilliant.
The last reason says:
> Artists would much rather have an AI that actually helps with grunt chores, such as writing invoices, or helping with taxes in order to focus more on fulfilling creative tasks. Such an AI-tool would be of much more value to the artist community.
Such AI tools already exist in large numbers. It just so happens that the current frontier of AI is the creative arts. This is all rather similar to how people resisted personal computers in the 70s and 80s.
> Artists would much rather have an AI that actually helps with grunt chores, such as writing invoices, or helping with taxes in order to focus more on fulfilling creative tasks.
As wild as it may seem, there are people who love accounting and tax work for the mental stimulation it gives them to find those little places to save money (I am not one of them, but I know several). So at some point the argument breaks down into “don’t automate MY job, just somebody else’s that I value less”.
This concept that there are things we like/are good at and things we dislike/suck at is why specialization and trade exists. AI breaks that model in ways that most people (in this case, the author) don’t consider or understand.
The problem isn't that people are luddites and hate technology, it's that it has been built on the backs of peoples artistic work, and they haven't been asked or compensated for it.
The artists complaining about this have built their careers and revenue streams on the backs of thousands of years of artistic creation. Where's the compensation for those earlier artists? Did you get their permission to use their content to train yourself?
In almost every creative field, you learn by example. You watch what the Masters have done before you. You know their techniques, tools, and ways of expressing things, then mix those tools and techniques into something you think is original. It's almost guaranteed that somebody else had the same thought you did. Maybe they expressed it, maybe they didn't, maybe they rejected it, maybe it's not been published, but somebody else had the same thought that you did.
An individual is not unique, and people are not unique in feeling offended that they are not unique. People felt offended whenever animals did something previously thought to be uniquely human. People were offended when it was understood that humans and apes evolved from a common ancestor. People felt offended when it was discovered that the Earth was not the center of the universe.
Like Galileo, the current state of AI tells us, "And yet it moves."
Such bullshit. We have copyright protections to keep people compensated for their artistic work. Tech has changed, the copyright law didn't have foresight to protect against this. But that is definitely the intention of such law.
Copyright has nothing to do with compensation. It is a monopoly over the reproduction of an expression of a "creative" thought that the copyright holder may not even have created. Enforcing copyright is a way to extract rent.
Ha if apple is exlcusively the seller of iPhones, does that make them a monopoly? No because you can buy other phones. And you can buy other songs. No the analogy about rival goods is not a good analogy.
Yes, I am. Music is currently layered by a series of copyrights, including their copyright music copyright, mechanical reproduction copyright, etc. Each stage exists as a layer to accommodate a new technology, and rent is extracted in each stage.
Music on physical media, files, or streams is not sold. You rent a "performance license," which permits playing the music on that media. The type of performance license depends on the context in which you are "performing." see: https://www.soundreef.com/en/blog/music-licenses/
As I said, copyright has nothing to do with compensation. It creates a monopoly, and the purpose of a monopoly is to enable rent-seeking.
Your own definition "When an individual or an entity seeks to increase their own wealth without benefiting society". That doesn't sound like music or copyright
Friend of a friend decided they could make art with generative AI, and they wouldn't need to practice any skills to do it. They honestly thought they were going to make billions from D&D art. They had also been incredibly jealous of the people who had practiced enough to get good at art or music. Generative AI art was their intended shortcut to money and respect, because practicing is difficult and tedious.
They gave up after being told that nobody wanted their pictures. Now they're even more resentful because in their eyes their "valuable skill" was mocked.
There are different kinds of "art" with different use cases. Sometimes I want to look at something thoughtful and meaningful by an artist making a profound statement about humanity where I can see the emotion and motivation. Sometimes I want something that adds a bit of color to the office. One of those may never be the domain of AI, but if I just want something with a flower and a bird that matches the colors of the rest of the room....?
It is ok if you don't see any value in the second use case. Different people like different "art".
A very big part of art (probably the biggest part) is the meaning behind it. AIs have no internal "experience" or novel ideas so the art is ultimately meaningless, or only as meaningful as the idea behind the prompt the person put into it. This is why you can have an incredibly slick, high budget movie that is universally considered bad because it's soulless. If AIs become "conscious" or something and we actually have an interest in how they see the world I think their art could be interesting. Even without the consciousness I think that we can have interesting "art" that comes out of them based on how they see the world, which brings to mind things like the old Google AI Image generator hallucination/dream images from a few years back.
I generate stories for my children, based on topics they learn in school, with visual and music, you guessed it, also generated.
I’m the opposite end of an artist. But the generative AI is perfect for my use case. I wouldn’t be able to make “book” for my young without the help of genAI
"[Artists] would much rather be properly compensated for their work..."
'Properly compensated'... determined by the market, right? That's being driven close to $0, just like with software (and was headed that direction before the recent AI craze).
"Artists would much rather... focus more on fulfilling creative tasks."
Like the two penis jokes shown on that site? Incredible.
> Properly compensated'... determined by the market, right? That's being driven close to $0, just like with software (and was headed that direction before the recent AI craze).
This is just completely false, and there are so many obvious counterexamples I don't know where to begin, so let's just start with artists working in the film and video game industries. These are real working, earning people who do art and design as a career.
Oh I thought they were talking about silly web comics and random art on the internet that was 'stolen'. Film and game industries of course embrace all types of tech to make money (didn't Disney use generative AI for the opening sequence of a Marvel series last year?)
> Oh I thought they were talking about silly web comics and random art on the internet that was 'stolen'.
It is extremely common for "silly web comics and random art on the internet" to be meaningfully monetized by their creators, whether or not they make a living that way.
> Film and game industries of course embrace all types of tech to make money (didn't Disney use generative AI for the opening sequence of a Marvel series last year?)
Yes, and they also employ legions of human artists.
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edit: I checked out the OP artists' Patreon and they are, at a minimum, making over $2500/mo that way. That's a lot more than $0!
Looks like the screenshot and the text are different.
"Any business model that does not acknowledge this and does not seek proper compensation for artists is not of interest to us." -> screenshot of their reply is missing the first two "not"s.
If you struggle online selling your art because of AI, your Art is not good enough and AI was not the problem to begin with.
A lot of friends around me are really good in drawing. They do not sell anything. A friend can draw really really good like photoreal, he also can barley life from this.
All of this was before AI.
I want to use AI for customization and not because i don't appreciate art.
If an artist gets frustrated because of some AI companies, sry to say but i don't think you are honest to yourself.
I also still hate this 'companies grabed our art and now we hate it'. Everyone looked at art from others to learn from art. There is very little unique art styles and just because someone else did it, doesn't mean that someone else can't come up with it.
Btw. i do photography for 20 years. No one wants to buy my prints either. But i still don't mind AI training on all my pictures. Why? I really really believe that AI will enable us to do a lot more and is necessary to achieve a Star Trek like system were we will have time again to actually persue art because all the capitalism bullshit like ads ads ads and ads (don't forget ads) will be less relevant to us.
i'm a dev and a semi-successful artist and agree with you.
the way you sell art is not usually about skill, it's about how you market the art so that people will feel connected to it. it can be a story behind it, the people who are promoting it etc.
a lot of artists make art, don't sell anything and get angry at their audience for not buying it. now some of the blame is shifted to ai instead. i'm still not ok with ai being trained on artists work without permission, but it's not the only reason you're not able to sell art.
I probably live under a rock but I had never seen these comics before. Some of them are pretty funny. Can't imagine AI needing raunchy comics though, maybe I'm thinking too small for AI.
It's fucking NFTs again. The vague promise that it somehow creates value for your audience. The promise of "community". The completely empty platitudes about a new and exciting world. And of course the FOMO of "early leg up" on some inevitable future.
Maybe some people will be shamed that they’re not only spammers but spammers whose product may as well be a machine that automates the consumption and enjoyment of ice cream?
I think you're missing the point, it doesn't matter if it was spam or not - The point is that automating creativity is not a useful way of facilitating content creation. We should be automating the tedious behind-the-scenes stuff.
There is still tedious stuff when your doing content creation. Like if your hacking a website together and need something that doesn't look bad as your favicon. maybe your making a 2d game and need a bunch of tree pictures
While what you're saying is morally and ethically correct, unfortunately we have entered times where the capitalistic machine doesn't find this to be true.
This was the money quote.
I love what I do (which tends to be programming, but I approach it as a craft), and often do things by hand, that others automate, because I love my work, and also the people that use it.