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Comment by brookst | Hacker News Reader

Can you elaborate? I haven’t seen any of these philosophies that are apparently about crushing art.

As a part time artist, AI has been great for me. I’m creating more, and spending less time on scaffolding (I am a middling-at-best programmer). I’m feeling empowered, not crushed.

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This happens every cycle. I helped build deviantart, I went as cohort 1 to the first pure digital film program in Canada 20 years ago now, I have 3 emmy awards. I've heard this so many times, it's the continuation of humans clinging to the tooling aspect of the work. I'm grateful my father always taught me "a maker never blames their tools" - and I think that is what this at the end boils down to, the analogue people were so tied to the tool they couldn't imagine their art without it, so instead the new digital film tools made the art less art somehow. Heck for some period of time the film societies when we had salons would not accept digital work, even into the more creative categories.

So much hubris. You think its about the tools?

How can you say something like this as Meta steals 82gb of text from the worlds writers and producers of knowledge without compensation, on the sly, to build their system?

Its the thieving and the disrespect!

This does not bode well for the future. If you think it stops at the artists you have so much contempt for, think again.

When I was in art school I walked into the studio and this dude was doing his thing... his thing was re-creating this image he found in some book. I thought "what a fucking cheater" and shook my head. Well I came second to him on that assignment, so I went to the dean of our art school and I said "Chris committed plagiarism and his work should be removed from the salon" and explained - Dean looked at me like I was crazy and said "the most creative things simply hide the source of their creativity, good artists know that, get out of my office". I don't know what your definition of art is, but after art school I realized it's simply "anything that isn't science"

This is exactly about tools, tools and the fact that people with no artistic ability have relied on them heavily, it's not my problem or the problem of OpenAI that people are just bad at art, but people are indeed bad at art, and it's always people who blabber on about the tools.

Oh yeah, and while I'm at it, I don't believe in copyright, so there is that too.

But doesn't economics matter somewhat? You don't seem to acknowledge supply/demand; just talented and untalented craftsmen which you assume exist in eternal ratio that cannot fluctaute with supply and demand or market forces. Reality encompases both money and art.

The reality is that most artists need to engage with economic situations to survive and continue making art. I would say I think it's important to recognize "art" is wide and means lots of things to lots of people. For example I would put gfx in a "creative science" more than a "creative art" - for example. Never the less, the reality is that most artists need to engage with economic realities to survive and continue making art, if you blame the tool, you're not a very good artist. you raise a good point about supply and demand, it's something I've seen reshape creative fields multiple times over my career, I've consistently found that the artists who thrive are the ones who adapt their tools while maintaining their creative vision, rather than letting the tools define their art.

Jeff Koonz thrives, invents tools to produce new works, and will not be replaced by an LLM. Art is wide, and it should not be reduced to a few Koonz'.

I actually specifically did well-ish in art also because I invented my own tools, if you look at the Cinevate Brevis, those ideas came out of my program. The image was soft, it leaked light, you got CA like crazy, awful tool, but I managed to create some amazing images with it and people really loved my art, I never cared that the existing tools didn't cater to my art, I didn't care my tool sucked, my art was my art, it's art! I sold a lot of commercial work too using that tool, but to me that wasn't my art, maybe I'm an artist doing that work, but that wasn't my art. Jeff didn't say well I can't make my art fuck the existing tools, he made his own. But I was never going to be economically comfortable doing art, I was never a good enough artist, hence I switched to tech. Being an artist is hard, and just because someone fancy themself an artist, doesn't mean they are.

Stipulating that Meta are terrible people, etc, etc… so what? What bearing does their character have on whether AI in general — not theirs — can be a tool for creating art? Or whether their “philosophy” is about “crushing art”?

Are you over-generalizing, something like “meta did something wrong to build AI, therefore AI is bad, therefore nobody can ever do anything good with AI”?

Thanks for articulating that. “Mistaking the tools for the art” is exactly what’s going on. I’m old, so for me it echos the days when “real musicians” had contempt for those kids with their synthesizers and sequencers.

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