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Comment by allturtles | Hacker News Reader

> My empathy for artists is fighting with my concern for everyone else's future, and losing.

My empathy for artists is aligned with my concern for everyone else's future.

> I want to help them, but want to unblock ML progress more.

But progress towards what end? The ML future looks very bleak to me, the world of "The Machine Stops," with humans perhaps reduced to organic effectors for the few remaining tasks that the machine cannot perform economically on its own: carrying packages upstairs, fixing pipes, etc.

We used to imagine that machines would take up the burden our physical labor, freeing our minds for more creative and interesting pursuits: art, science, the study of history, the study of human society, etc. Now it seems the opposite will happen.

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> We used to imagine that machines would take up the burden our physical labor, freeing our minds for more creative and interesting pursuits: art, science, the study of history, the study of human society, etc.

You’re like half a step away from the realization that almost everything you do today is done better if not by AI then someone that can do it better than you but you still do it because you enjoy it.

Now just flip those two, almost everything you do in the future will be done better by AI if not another human.

But that doesn’t remove the fact that you enjoy it.

For example, today I want to spend my day taking photographs and trying to do stupid graphic design in After Effects. I can promise you that there are thousands of humans and even AI that can do a far better job than me at both these things. Yet I have over a terabyte of photographs and failed After Effects experiments. Do I stop enjoying it because I can’t make money from these hobbies? Do I stop enjoying it because there’s some digital artist at corporation X that can take everything I have and do it better, faster, and get paid while doing it?

No. So why would this change things if instead of a human at corporation X, it’s an AI?

I don't get this argument. Artists will not be replaced by AI. AI will become a tool like Photoshop for artists. AI will not replace creativity.

It does just that though? Don't tell me nobody is surpised sometimes while prompting a diffusion model, that can only happen if a significant portion of creation happens, in a non-intuitive way for the user - what you could describe as 'coming up with something'.

I see two realistic possibilities:

1) It'll no longer be possible to work as an artist without being incredibly productive. Output, output, output. The value of each individual thing will be so low that you have to be both excellent at what you do (which will largely be curating and tweaking AI-generated art) and extremely prolific. There will be a very few exceptions to this, but even fewer than today.

2) Art becomes another thing lots of people in the office are expected to do simply as a part of their non-artist job, like a whole bunch of other things that used to be specialized roles but become a little part of everyone's job thanks to computers. It'll be like being semi-OK at using Excel.

I expect a mix of both to happen. It's not gonna be a good thing for artists, in general.

3) The scope and scale of “art” that gets made gets bigger and we still have plenty of pro artists, designers. AKA art eats the world

Maybe. But art was already so cheap, and talent so abundant, that it was notoriously difficult to make serious money doing it, so I doubt it'll have that effect in general.

It might in a few areas, though. I think film making is poised to get really weird, for instance, possibly in some interesting and not-terrible ways, compared with what we're used to. That's mostly because automation might replace entire teams that had to spend thousands of hours before anyone could see the finished work or pay for it, not just a few hours of one or two artists' time on a more-incremental basis. And even that's not quite a revolution—we used to have very-small-crew films, including tons that were big hits, and films with credits lists like the average Summer blockbuster these days were unheard of, so that's more a return to how things were before computer graphics entered the picture (even 70s and 80s films, after the advent of the spectacle- and FX-heavy Summer blockbuster, had crews so small that it's almost hard to believe, when you're used to seeing the list of hundreds of people who work on, say, a Marvel film)

> But art was already so cheap

Art is really not cheap. I think people think about how little artists generate in income and assume that means art is cheap, but non-mass-produced art is pretty much inaccessible for the vast majority of people.

> AI will not replace creativity.

If people can't differentiate between computer and human generated art, wouldn't that be the definition of being replaceable?

Work like this helps us work towards new approaches for the more difficult issues involved with replacing physical labor. The diffusion techniques that have gained popularity recently will surely enable new ways for machines to learn things that simply weren't possible before. Art is getting a lot of attention first because many people (including the developers working on making this possible) want to be able to create their own artwork and don't have the talent to put their mental images down on paper (or tablet). You worry that this prevents us from following more creative and interesting pursuits, but I feel that this enables us to follow those pursuits without the massive time investment needed to practice a skill. The future you describe is very bleak indeed, but I highly doubt those things won't be automated as well.

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