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> If you missed them, you had to wait a year.

This is literally the intro section to Chuck Klosterman's Nineties - about the number of people who watched Seinfeld and those that missed it, just missed it.

> There's a quality bestowed through scarcity.

There's a depth to scarcity, but your kids are going to watch way more things growing up than you did and you have no idea what that means for them.

I get that you aren't able to pass on that "value the thing you hold, not the two you can get later" sort of commitment to a single thing.

But that's valuing the only true scarce thing left in my life at least - my time and attention.

I remember feeling the "post-scarcity" thing going to a library for the first time in the US.

I used to buy books and read them, before I came to the US. Each book was a hard choice on whether to spend money on it or buy something else.

I now decide to read through a book based on whether I want to spend the time, not the money.

Unless I'm going to be immortal, there's no fixing that scarcity (and I get how young people/kids don't get that part at all - their life is endless from where they are).

Maybe do a little better so that my 70s aren't spent in a bed, but in a park outdoors reading.

I really appreciate your response because it argues with my point and yet resonates with me. I think there's truth to what you're saying. Perhaps that "tradition" I'm seeking is, in a way, obsolete, and my kids are faced with an entirely different (and maybe better) problem: what to spend their time on?

I'll add one thing this made me think of: when I was a kid, my family computer and Game Boy had a fixed number of games. Getting a new game was a big deal. I took it seriously and I scraped the fun out of every game thoroughly. Once I got to college and got some money, I ended up with the "I have ten thousand Steam games and I don't feel motivated to stick with any of them" problem.

Not totally sure it's related, but I thought of that.

> … "I ended up with the "I have ten thousand Steam games and I don't feel motivated to stick with any of them" problem."

For my own personal instance of that exact problem, I've chosen to install a limited number of games at a time which fit into my current set of interests in gaming, and choose from among those when I feel like playing a game, until each has been thoroughly explored and enjoyed to it's fullest before uninstalling that one or two specific fully-explored game(s) to replace with another. Works for me … YMMV.

My younger sibling and I are quite far apart age wise and we grew up on other sides of this divide. When I grew up, families would buy VHS tapes for kids or record shows and kids were known to watch the same shows over and over again. Everyone in my cohort has memories of watching that one movie or that one show so many times that their parents were utterly sick of it (and of messing up a recording of the last episode of their favorite show.) My sibling grew up in the age of rental DVDs and Youtube and the idea of running out of content to them was laughable.

But as children we were both limited by our mental development, time, and attention spans. My sibling just watched the same Youtube video over and over just like I watched the same VHS tape over and over again. As much as material conditions change, humans tend to stay the same.

> do you think there's something lost by eliminating scarcity?

Certainly whatever these models can output just from text plus a bit of work/skill on the prompt plus a bit of selection will not be very valuable.

But it will see applications that don't need something very valuable, and where otherwise a piece of art would be not be affordable. I run a daily word puzzle game, and every daily puzzle comes with an image that helps tie the theme together. This is a low value piece of art that's nearly free for me to make, which wouldn't exist otherwise.

But the other thing is that people will make scarce and valuable things using generated art. Right now we're seeing tons of art where the direct output of a model is posted after less than an hour of work on prompts and selection by a person.

But when more people start combining all of these tools, spending dozens of hours on an image that's made out of components that are generated using AI tools, and other components that are manually edited or created, I think we're going to see a lot of brand new art and brand new skills.

There's always going to be people who pour their creativity, skills, and time into something. I can't wait to see what people can make when they do that while incorporating all these new tools that are being created into their process.

I hope we can distinguish it from other normal AI artworks, I very I don't have this ability:(

Others answered you in many interesting ways, so I'll just try to address this:

> Maybe I should be asking Gene Roddenberry but I'll ask all of you: do you think there's something lost by eliminating scarcity?

I'd like to think Gene would tell you, there's always going to be a scarcity of something - the adventure is in chasing it, but it's much more enjoyable when you aren't coerced into it by the need to feed and shelter yourself and your close ones. Basically, scarcity of food, healthcare, housing and opportunities is bad. Scarcity of unique experiences and relationships is enjoyable, and it's always going to be there.

I emphasize with how you feel about your kids, but I think this is less about scarcity per se, and more about your kids not wanting to participate in your tradition. It's possible they still might - after all, these kinds of traditions aren't really about a movie, but about the time spent together. Perhaps when they grow up, they'll voluntarily abstain from rewatching that movie on their own, outside Halloween.

Personal and much more childish example: in my more naive years, I've established a tradition, and roped a few friends into it, of watching "V for Vendetta" on the 5th of November. That was way back when the "oh fuck, the Internet is here" meme was funny, and not a stuff of nightmares. It was a completely random and voluntarily tradition, that lasted a couple years before naturally dissolving. My point being, the availability of the movie had little to do with it - it was all about voluntary choice of a group of people to do something together.

Absolutely. But where scarcity has been abused for domination and power over others, as in food or oil or money scarcity, it's not a good thing and whatever we can do to bring those systems down is, in my book, good.

Perhaps, finally, the persistent over emphasis on the expensive yet empty production value will give way to content composed of moral catch-22's and the richly described personalities enduring such situations, what is traditionally considered story first film making. No gloss is necessary when the story is strong.

Your story reminds me of a newspaper we have in France "La bougie du sapeur", it's only published on February 29th.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Bougie_du_Sapeur

I have some friends whose young children are addicted to watching videos of other kids opening presents on YouTube.

I've been trying to articulate why I reacted negatively to that concept, and I think you nailed it.

I have that exact problem here. I want my kids to have latitude and freedom with what they watch and do. But their child brains need adult moderation. They literally want every day to be Christmas, and they do not understand how that might "burn out" their synapses on things like the act of waiting, being excited, and eventually getting new gifts.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Work_of_Art_in_the_Age_of_...

Valuable material in the disciplines of aesthetics and philosophy of technology on this.

In addition to oversaturation, on-demand access to things can also lead to a sort of paralysis: the fact that I have access to shows on demand all the time means I almost never actually watch them. After all I can always do something else (read a book, browse HN) and watch that thing some other time. Whereas I will watch live TV (Jeopardy, sports), because I have to turn on the TV at a particular time to see it.

Your line of thought "rhymes" in an interesting way with Matt Levine's column today about how illiquidity sometimes has value [0]:

> Another, funnier sort of financial innovation is about subtracting liquidity. If you can buy and sell something whenever you want at a clearly observable market price, that is efficient, sure, but it can also be annoying. Consider the following financial product:

> 1. You give me the password to your brokerage account. > 2. I change it. > 3. You can’t look at your brokerage account for one year, because you don’t have the password. > 4. At the end of the year, I give you back your password and you pay me $5.

> Is this a good product? For me, sure, I got $5 for like one minute of work.[1] For you, I would argue, it’s also pretty good. For one thing, you avoid the stress of looking at your brokerage account all the time and worrying when it goes down. For another thing, you avoid the popular temptation of bad market timing: You can’t panic and sell stocks after they fall, or get greedy and buy more after they rise, because I have your password.

[0]: https://news.bloomberglaw.com/banking-law/matt-levines-money...

I'm sure there was something nice about hunting down big animal once a year and having nice feast by the fire next to the cave.

> do you think there's something lost by eliminating scarcity?

What a silly question. How does an extension of an already bottomless internet of content that you couldn’t consume over the course of hundreds of lifetimes come anywhere remotely close to ending food insecurity?

Certainly something is lost by removing scarcity... at the same time, once that scarcity is gone, it can't be restored short of civilizational collapse. There's no way to put the streaming genie back in the bottle, nor the Stable Diffusion genie.

Yeah, I think you're 100% right. There is no "should we do this?" question here. Like every technology ever invented, it's now here.

It's a bit like saying we can't stop music piracy, now that Napster exists.

Napster was a peer-to-peer file sharing application. It originally launched on June 1, 1999, with an emphasis on digital audio file distribution. Audio songs shared on the service were typically encoded in the MP3 format. It was founded by Shawn Fanning, Sean Parker, and Hugo Sáez Contreras. As the software became popular, the company ran into legal difficulties over copyright infringement. It ceased operations in 2001 after losing a wave of lawsuits and filed for bankruptcy in June 2002.

Use of the output of systems like Copilot or Stable Diffusion becomes a violation of copyright. The weight tensors are illegal to possess, just like it's illegal to possess leaked Intel source code.

If you use the art in your product, on your website, etc., you risk legal action.

The companies that train these systems can't distribute them without risking legal action. So they won't do it. It's expensive to train these models.

It will always exist in the black-market underground, but the civilized world makes it illegal.

That's where this is going, I hope. Best case scenario.

Just because it's here doesn't mean it can't be modified going forward, and that we have to surrender to any and all ability to regulate anything. Fatalism can be attractive if you don't want to think about regulation, though, I suppose.

Regulation can't trump individual morals, and is driven by collective ethics. Deepfakes still exist and are actively being made and developed, even though many platforms have regulated it. Ignoring the difficulty of passing a hotly debated premise, regulating would only limit the actions of those who align with the regulation - as the article demonstrates even if Google are cautious to release their DreamBooth model and specifics it doesn't take much for someone to replicate it, ignoring (or ignorant) of such concerns.

This is obviously something that we're going to have to collectively figure out - the technology is here and the technology is still being developed. Either we adapt our thinking or consider it taboo. Anything else (such as restricting usage to a "trusted subset") is just delaying the inevitable.

Let's not conflate ethical inputs for full-out "undo" panic.

I don't see many people saying that we need to "un-release" anything.

What I do see is a want for ethical considerations for vulnerable parties be part of the discussion. I don't think consent is too large a barrier, especially since the music-focused variant of these tools currently has the developers walking on egg shells to avoid aggravating people with deeper pockets.

Instead what I see is the borderline criminalization of the people who were forced into the role of gatekeeping to be able to support themselves in the span of a few months because someone said "We can!" and apparently didn't watch Jurassic Park.