Comment by zemo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by zemo | Hacker News Reader

a lot of people in this thread seem to have no understanding that some people enjoy the act of writing or of painting by hand. Every framing in here to the tune of “everyone will use AI” is nakedly utilitarian. Sometimes people pain pictures or write not just because they enjoy the act. Sometimes people paint pictures or write because they want to communicate; not everyone will feel like they’re communicating from themselves when the words or pictures come from a machine. Generating content from a dataset is a way of exploring the dataset; generating content from within is a way of exploring yourself. They are simply different.

and fwiw, a lot of the assumptions in here are akin to saying at the dawn of photography that nobody would ever paint any more. Photography of course replaced certain entire categories of painting, but didn’t erase painting from the face of the earth altogether. Of course there are far more photographs than there are paintings, but volume alone is not the totality of meaning.

Generated content is strictly culturally regressive anyway. After a hundred years of ChatGPT will people still be writing prompts with “in the style of [person who produced all of their work before the year 2000]”? That would be a sad and boring future.

> a lot of people in this thread seem to have no understanding that some people enjoy the act of writing or of painting by hand.

I have things I have written that took me two years for 8-10 pages. I wrote them to help me think through certain things.

Could ChatGPT have written it for me? Maybe. Probably not, though - I kind of had to discover what the content was supposed to be.

Could it have written it better than I did in two years? Probably not. Two years leaves you a lot of time to polish the phrases.

Could ChatGPT have taught me what I learned in those two years? No way.

I'm not sure what's your point. People that enjoy the act of writing or of painting by hand will still be able to do that.

They can, but they won't be able to compete.

When photography replaced many of the uses of painting, some painting jobs were lost, but photography ones were gained. Now, many creative jobs will be done by computers, leaving the world less enjoyable for people who enjoy creating.

Sure, some people will continue to be creative, but look at what happened to art after photography: we got modern art, where people just piss on a canvas and sell it for millions based on the name of the artist alone, not the value of the art.

AI is progress in the same way nukes are progress: you have to get it or you'll be left in the dust. But is humanity better for it?

Jobs will be lost, people will still do it as a hobby. When I go for a swim or a run, I don't try to compete with general population, mostly try to improve myself. And that's what will happen for digital illustration and CGI business as well, to my understanding.

My glimmer of hope is if everything we see on a daily basis online is created by AI/AI-assisted tools, then we will go back to trying to be more creative in real life and our local surroundings.

Pretty messed up that it used to be that you'd put hard hours into running and exercising and then you could be faster than anyone else in your village, and now any asshole can just sit on a horse

Are you saying that photography is a bad thing?

> They can, but they won't be able to compete.

Compete for what?

> ...the world less enjoyable for people who enjoy creating

But why?? I think you measure everything only one how much you can sell something. Sure some art earns money, but many people do art without thinking if they can earn something out of it.

And to be clear, we got much more than just modern art, which you tried to nitpick here.

Whatever they produce, even if it is technically brilliant, will just be lost in the ai generated noise.

From an article posted here recently[0]

> Art is not what I think when I’m painting. It’s what you feel when you’re looking

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34921883

I disagree. It's both. If I'm playing the piano alone in my room and nobody else listens to it, I'm still having the aesthetic experience called "art". Many people make art just for themselves without the intent of showing it to anybody else, and it's not somehow less artistic than something that other people see. Art is an experience somebody has, including the artist.

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