Comment by randomcatuser | Hacker News Reader

Comment by randomcatuser | Hacker News Reader

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a somewhat counterintuitive argument is this: AI models will make the overall creative landscape more diverse and interesting, ie, less "average"!

Imagine the space of ideas as a circle, with stuff in the middle being more easy to reach (the "cliched average"). Previously, traversing the circle was incredibly hard - we had to use tools like DeviantArt, Instragram, etc to agglomerate the diverse tastes of artists, hoping to find or create the style we're looking for. Creating the same art style is hiring the artist. As a result, on average, what you see is the result of huge amounts of human curation, effort, and branding teams.

Now reduce the effort 1000x, and all of a sudden, it's incredibly easy to reach the edge of the circle (or closer to it). Sure, we might still miss some things at the very outer edge, but it's equivalent to building roads. Motorists appear, people with no time to sit down and spend 10000 hours to learn and master a particular style can simply remix art and create things wildly beyond their manual capabilities. As a result, the amount of content in the infosphere skyrockets, the tastemaking velocity accelerates, and you end up with a more interesting infosphere than you're used to.

To extend the analogy, imagine the circle as a probability distribution; for simplicity, imagine it's a bivariate normal joint distribution (aka. Gaussian in 3D) + some noise, and you're above it and looking down.

When you're commissioning an artist to make you some art, you're basically sampling from the entire distribution. Stuff in the middle is, as you say, easiest to reach, so that's what you'll most likely get. Generative models let more people do art, meaning there's more sampling happening, so the stuff further from the centre will be visited more often, too.

However, AI tools also make another thing easier: moving and narrowing the sampling area. Much like with a very good human artist, you can find some work that's "out there", and ask for variations of it. However, there are only so many good artists to go around. AI making this process much easier and more accessible means more exploration of the circle's edges will happen. Not just "more like this weird thing", but also combinations of 2, 3, 4, N distinct weird things. So in a way, I feel that AI tools will surface creative art disproportionally more than it'll boost the common case.

Well, except for the fly in the ointment that's the advertising industry (aka. the cancer on modern society). Unfortunately, by far most of the creative output of humanity today is done for advertising purposes, and that goal favors the common, as it maximizes the audience (and is least off-putting). Deluge of AI slop is unavoidable, because slop is how the digital world makes money, and generative AI models make it cheaper than generative protein models that did it so far. Don't blame AI research for that, blame advertising.

I like the picture, but I'd be more impressed with the exploration argument if we were collectively actually doing a good job giving recognition to original and substantial works that already exist. It'd be of greater service in that regard to create a high-quality artificial stand-in for that limited-quantity "attention" and "engagement" all the bloodsuckers seem so keen on harvesting.

(And I do blame the advertisers, but frankly anyone handing them new amplifiers, with entirely predictable consequences, is also not blameless.)

I read this argument/analogy and the "AI slop will win" idea reminds me of the idea that "fake news will win".

That is based on perception that it is easier than ever to create fake content, but fails to account for the fact that creating real content (for example, simply taking a video) is even much easier. So while there is more fake content, there is also lot more real content, and so manipulation of reality (for example, denying a genocide) is much harder today than ever.

Anyway, "the AI slop will win" is based on a similar misconception, that total creative output will not increase. But like with fake news, it probably will not be the case, and so the actual amount of good art will increase, too.

I think we are OK as long as normal humans prefer to create real news rather than fake news, and create innovative art rather than cliched art.

> I think we are OK as long as normal humans prefer to create real news rather than fake news, and create innovative art rather than cliched art.

So we're not OK.

I think I need to state my assumptions/beliefs here more explicitly.

First of all, "AI slop" is just the newest iteration on human-produced slop, which we're already drowning in. Not because people prefer to create slop, but because they're paid to do it, because most content is created by marketers and advertisers to sell you shit, and they don't want it to be better than strictly necessary for purpose.

It's the same with fake news, really. Fake news isn't new. Almost all news is fake news; what we call "fake news" is a particular flavor of bullshit that got popular as it got easier for random humans to publish stories competing with established media operations.

In both cases, AI is exacerbating the problem, but it did not create it - we were already drowning in slop.

Which leads me to related point:

> Anyway, "the AI slop will win" is based on a similar misconception, that total creative output will not increase.

It will. But don't forget Sturgeon's law - "ninety percent of everything is crap"[0]. Again, for the past couple decades, we've been drowning in "creative output". It's not a new problem, it's just increasingly noticeable in the past years, because the Web makes it very easy for everyone to create more "creative output" (most of which is, again, advertising), and it finally started overwhelming our ability to filter out the crap and curate the gems.

Adding AI to the mix means more output, which per Sturgeon's law, means disproportionately more crap. That's not AI's fault, that's ours; it's still the same problem we had before.

--

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law

A small technical point:

Tastes are almost never normally distributed along a spectrum, but multi-modal. So the more dimensions you explore in, the more you end up with “islands of taste” on the surface of a hyper sphere and nothing like the normal distribution at all. This phenomenon is deeply tied to why “design by committee” (eg, in movies) always makes financial estimates happy but flops with audiences — there is almost no customer for average anything.

I agree with your conclusion.

"Design by committee" is also how most hit movies are made. Hit songs too

Do you have an example?

My experience with customer surveys indicates the opposite — that customers prefer you have an opinion.

An example of a hit movie or song that was created by committee?

Inside Out 2 had the largest box office of any movie in 2024. Checkout the "research and writing" section in its wikipedia article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inside_Out_2#Research_and_writ... ... psychological consultants, a feedback loop with a group of teenagers, test screenings.

Or how about "Die with a smile" - currently number 1 in the global top 50 on Spotify. 5 songwriters

Or "APT." - currently number 2 in the global top 50 on Spotify. 11 songwriters

You don't have to look very hard

Inside Out 2 has a single writer, who also worked on the first.

Consulting with SMEs, testing with audiences, etc isn’t “design by committee”.

Similarly, “Die With a Smile” seems to have been the work of two people with developed styles with support — again, not a committee:

> The collaboration was a result of Mars inviting Gaga to his studio where he had been working on new music. He presented the track in progress to her and the duo finished writing and recording the song the same day.

Apt seems to have started with a single person goofing around, then pitched as a collaboration and the expanded team entered at that point.

It's just like when Bootstrap came out. Terrible-looking websites stopped appearing, but so did beautiful websites.

And as AI oversaturates the cliched average, creators will have to get further and further away from the average to differentiate themselves. If you pour a lot of work into your creation you want to make it clear that it isn't some cliched AI drivel.

You will basically have to provide a video showcasing your workflow.

I promise you that the artists can outlive the VC money.

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