Comment by slg | Hacker News Reader

Comment by slg | Hacker News Reader

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>Books, comic strips, movies, they're all just telling a story with a different amount of it left up to the viewer's imagination. Lowering the barrier to entry for this type of stuff is so cool.

This response just never feels true to me. Many of the most successful web comics are crude drawings of just stick figures and text[1] with potentially a little color thrown in[2] and like half of the videos I see on TikTok are just a person talking into the forward facing camera of their phone. The barrier to entry in the pre-AI world isn't actually that high if you have something interesting to say. So when I see this argument about lowering the barrier to entry, I can't stop myself from thinking that maybe the problem is that these people have nothing interesting to say, but no one can admit that to themselves so they must blame it on the production values of their content which surely will be improved by AI.

[1] - https://xkcd.com/

[2] - https://explosm.net/

This is a thing I think about often.

I think people have a mistaken view of what makes some form of storytelling interesting. Perhaps this is my own bias, but something could be incredibly technically proficient or realistic and I could find it utterly uninteresting. This is because the interesting part is in what is unique about the perspective of the people creating it and ideas they want to express, in relation to their own viewpoint and background.

Like you pointed out, many famous and widely enjoyed pieces of media are extremely simple in their portrayal.

>Perhaps this is my own bias, but something could be incredibly technically proficient or realistic and I could find it utterly uninteresting. This is because the interesting part is in what is unique about the perspective of the people creating it and ideas they want to express, in relation to their own viewpoint and background.

I completely agree. And now that you mention this, I realize I didn't even point to the most obvious and famous examples of this sort of thing with artists like Picasso and Van Gogh.

If someone criticizes Picasso's or Van Gogh's lack of realism, they are completely missing the point of their work. They easily could have and occasional did go for a more photorealistic look, but that isn't what made them important artists. What set them apart was the ways they eschewed photorealism in order to communicate something deeper.

Similarly, creating art in their individual styles isn't interesting because it shifts the primary goal from communication to emulation. That is all AI art really is, attempts at imitation, and imitation without iteration just isn't interesting from an artistic or storytelling perspective.

I can't stop myself from thinking that maybe the problem is that these people have nothing interesting to say

Social media is the new CB radio.

But now with an AI-powered addiction factor so you can never put it down, no matter how bad it is.

Blipverts are next.

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