This is a really solid article, and has a lot more meat to it than I expected. It's also a great example of how "AI" is such a boon to bad actors because neither the LLMs nor scammers care about the truth.
Edit:
I am torn about how I feel on the matter but here’s a story worth sharing: I stayed up all night the day before the release of a much-awaited book in a series to read, leaked blurry jpeg by leaked blurry jpeg, hundreds of pages of the book that had just appeared online (I also went out and bought a copy the next day).
While reading it, I knew there was no guarantee it was “real” and it could have been an elaborate hoax but the quality of the storytelling was such that I didn’t care (at least in the moment) if it was fan fiction or the real deal: it was good and I wouldn’t have regretted my time or enjoyed what I had read any less if it turned out to be a “fake.”
If what I'm getting is just a synthetic, semi-random découpé, then that is lost. Similarly, looking at randomly generated maps can be fun, but it's a pretty shallow fun unless there's a real territory represented there.
That said, it can also be interesting to look at the machinery that's generating it, in the same way I enjoy videos of how things get made. But it's a different kind of interest and engages different parts of my mind.
But unfortunately now that this type of comment can be the rambling of an LLM, I don't want to put in the effort when it could simply be a mechanical fever dream...
I find the story of a human who makes an excellent fake pretty fascinating. There are noteworthy examples of forgery-as-art throughout history. I think art, as a concept, is a big enough space to house both things.
You wouldn't be wrong, you would just be post-modern. As a post-modernist viewer, I decide the context that I want to place media in.
It certainly comes down to perception, interpretation, and a blind assumption though, right? Before generative AI, the blind assumption was that some human made a piece of art. That might be changing now, but if you didn't know (and couldn't know) a piece was artificial, feelings may still be evoked and you might still infer some meaning from it.
With that said, not all art need be about human connection. I still enjoy mindless dubstep music on occasion despite not caring one bit about the artist or any meaning behind it (if any even exists beyond "it sounds cool"). The only value there is my enjoyment of it, but then again, I think enjoyment is the most valuable aspect of any piece.
Let’s put AI aside for a minute, then. When a suspected {Van Gogh, Vermeer, Picasso, etc} is found to actually be from a temporally coincident painter, perhaps one of his pupils, why can you no longer do that?
I don’t really care about having some equivalent “conversation” with an LLM.
There are likely thousands of people who can paint extremely high quality Monet-alikes, but they weren't there at the beginning of the impressionist movement.
Granted, there's also name weight and limited supply due to creator death, but that "first!" can't be ignored.
The artistic-economic tangle around originality wasn't something I'd thought about deeply until I saw some of Warhol's "X of Y" prints in person. Because he used an inexact process, there are subtle differences from frame to frame, which to me begged the question of whether a specific selection of frames and composition of them together was sufficient to re-establish a unique, original artistic work.
Let's imagine Hitchcock's compatriot releases a film that is Hitchcock-esque in every way it can be (camera, lighting, themes, sound... the whole package), while featuring a novel plot.
Then let's say Hitchcock also releases an equally-equivalent film to his first work.
There is no non-plot innovation in either work, and the plot is as similar as can be while remaining distinct.
What are the values these works could likely command?
To me... I think the Hitchcock work would be more valuable, by virtue of his name, which in turn originated its value from his first masterful and original work.
His compatriot's film would be valuable. After all, Hitchcock's original work was acclaimed, appreciated, and popular, so it stands to a reason an extremely similar work would be as well.
But I can't see it approaching the value of Hitchcock's second, despite them being functionally identical artistic works. It's instead discounted by the lack of Hitchcock's name, itself valuable from the link to his first, original work.
Interesting thought exercise!
The follow-up would be what would happen if the market were flooded with first-alike films, either from Hitchcock or his compatriot!
I'm not denying the appeal of "authenticity" but I can't for the life of me understand it.
I think what is new is that there are certain signals in text and creative work in general that would ordinarily demonstrate that some care and effort and resources have been used in the process of creating it, which makes it seem more likely that it's legitimate, and that now those signals are no longer valid. I think that people will rather quickly adjust from default credibility to default skepticism for text online, and will rely more on "provenance" for determining what to trust.
> no one is really sure what’s real, what’s fake, whether they’re being scammed, or who or what made the songs that they’re listening to.
This is close to the definition of technologically induced societal madness Jaron Lanier sketched in an article about a year ago.
Pop will eat itself. We always knew that. Pop is the spirit of whimsical, ephemeral, self-devouring, involuted art. It's to be expected.
But so much else has become like Pop; news media, food, medicine, clothing, even the cars we drive... At some point AI combined with appalling cyber-security and our over-reliance on tech will start to tear all of these things apart. This kinda started in the pandemic, even before AI. Is it really government advice to drink bleach? Or a terrorist plot?
Philip K. Dick would not know how to write this stuff.
These guys have come out of the gate strong. I think they only launched in the last couple of weeks.
Remains to be seen if they can sustain it.