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Comment by rlt | Hacker News Reader

More hand-wringing over technological progress, as usual.

Are artists going to stop producing art, or will they use AI as a tool to produce entirely new styles and forms of art?

I see it as similar to the hand made vs factory made debate. There’s room for both, and the vast majority are happy with the factory product.

Generative AI will make it easier to get new ideas to the masses affordably. That could yield some really interesting results. There will still be a demand for art like Miyazaki animations or similarly painstakingly human generated works of art, and I expect it’ll live on as well.

Thanks to machines, I can afford to own some crazy technology relatively affordably. It’s okay that it’s not made by a human, because it allows this human to engage life in more ways. I can build things with wood that would be virtually impossible for me 200 years ago, but I can do it in my spare time over weekends. I can own an aquarium with plants and animals from South America, which is an immensely gratifying hobby for me, providing endless appreciation for life and nature when I’m away from it.

I think generative AI will eventually accomplish something similar for people. They will be abstracted from the experience of life in some sense, but ultimately may allow them to experience it more in other ways. It could awaken in many people the idea that they can imagine and bring things to life. Letting their ideas out and into the light could be a massively liberating experience! How many people would probably love drawing if only they could realize that they truly do have ideas and visions worth bringing to life? That it really can bring them joy?

There’s plenty of room for doom and terror, but that’s too obvious. Other forms of automation in the past were no different. What I find more interesting is how to find the good in it, because like it or not, it’s here.

Yeah, my take as well. I think "Her" portrayed it nicely; you can still get your human-written poem or whatever nonsense you want to be made by hand, doesn't mean everyone has to dispatch atrociously meaningless or repetitive tasks. What, do people think VFX grunts love rotoscoping mundane subjects all day long? People hate boilerplate work, and getting rid of it will be a huge boost for enjoyment, too.

There truly is room for doom and terror, but none of those wannabe essayists even remotely scratch the reality of it all; they are almost exclusively trying to dunk on tech that will help disabled, impaired, destitute folks to even remotely catch up to the rest of those who are living a relatively cushy life. Just look at therapy and what the sheer possibilities are, it's so incredibly callous in my mind to pretend like it's all going to be so bad when we have tangible proof that this is going to be positively changing billions of lives in the shortest amount of time imaginable.

There is so, so much good here, and I'm getting kind of tired of the narrow-minded naysayers. I mean, they're kind of few, all things considered, and they'll instantly vanish the moment we get really competent agents doing anything... but it's still exhausting being aware of all this all the time. I guess AI/ML can improve my own personal life by just helping me sidestep all the bickering and all these awful non-arguments I keep stunlocking myself on, which would be pretty funny to me.

You don't need AI to make art. You need AI to take some low-fi tasks off your plate so you can make more art.

You don't need AI to make art like you don't need a camera to make art. But it's likely you can use new tools to make entirely new types of art.

It's also likely new tools will make certain types of art a commodity. People used to need to paint portraits, now they can just take a photo. There will still be some demand for the hand crafted art that AI can produce but it will be diminished.

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