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Comment by aiisimmoral | Hacker News Reader

Which means a net negative for humanity.

Depends, the camera killed painting and is a positive for art in my opinion

It's not obvious that LLM generation won't create more interesting music experiences (for lack of non-marketing speak for self curated music)

The camera did not kill painting. And how does comparing a camera to an LLM even make sense?

They're conflating the LLM to advancement by comparing LLM:Camera, when really cameras and paintings are two different things

Painting (portraits for example) as a profession largely disappeared, while art based on painting evolved (impressionism, cubism, etc) due to the camera.

My point is that photography is essentially a simulacra of reality, yet it unexpectedly created its own art form and influenced existing ones. So will the use of LLMs for generation

LLMs will not do what the camera did. LLMs have no anchor to reality like the camera, they simply optimize for the average. A camera is a whole new medium, an LLM is a statistical construction. Sorry to burst your AI bubble. LLMs will not be the new camera, they won't be a new programming language, and they won't be the new compiler.

I am not sure I agree, a camera on the surface of things is the most boring machine. It shows you what was already there. It is still can be the basis of several interesting art forms

I don't see why this can't happen with AI, or at least I am not certain like you it can't happen

It might turn out that there are more portrait artists, brush in hand, working today than at any point in history, in real numbers. This is certainly true for riding horses, and most definitly for musicians. But as the sole sources of those services, that is no longer true, or as percentages of total's, but with 9 billion people, the internet, and a big of effort, almost anything is viable.

I generally agree because the population grew, and music can be put aside has it never went through such a technological revolution (synth never really caught on)

But from what I saw there are less living horses today than 200 years ago, and although that just a proxy for horse riders I believe the same applies for painters, especially non-hobbyists

The camera did not kill painting. There are tons and tons of painters still, lots of them use digital means like a tablet these days but it still absolutely exists.

> lots of them use digital means like a tablet these days but it still absolutely exists.

Yes, because art evolves over time.

As it very likely will with generative art.

And even with that evolution, people still use paint, and people will still use instruments and make music the same ways we always have...

Arguably, the camera evolved painting because it expanded the idea of what it could be – that it could be more than the illustration of/"illusion" of reality.

I think and have always thought the exact same thing will happen with generative AI.

Yes, which was the point I was trying to convey. However it did also kill the profession of painters (the craft in art vs craft). Which might unfortunately happen to the more commercial side of music

Do you have any evidence of all these "killings" of the profession or are you just vibing?

Photography had particularly dramatic effects on the livelihoods of painters who operated on the fringe of the mainstream. This included the portrait miniaturists, whose markets fell drastically, particularly after the introduction of the multi-pose and cheap cartes de visite in the mid-1850s. Many gave up, while others turned to colouring photos [25]. Some painters of sentimental genre scenes were also particularly affected, as a result of the profusion of readily available photographic genre works, often composed in a painterly or "pictorial" style [26]. This was sometimes due not to the public’s preference for the photographic version, but simply because a particular subject matter lost its appeal to painters and their clients once photography entered the scene [27]. In addition, the introduction of “half-tone” photography in the 1880s also initiated a slow decline in the market for newspaper and magazine illustrators [28].

Much more here: https://www.artinsociety.com/pt-1-initial-impacts.html

https://www.barnesfoundation.org/whats-on/early-photography

Nice wall of text, which part of that says painters jobs were killed?

Or did you just read the title of the second article and not realize it’s not being literal but capturing the anxiety of the painters in the 19th century?

I think the first article which is highly recommended (where the excerpt comes from) goes over subsequent effects on the profession. The second one goes over the different genres that disappeared, and concerns less with the artists themselves

Apart from that our interaction seem overly emotional for me so I'd leave it as that

So nothing about killing the profession, got it, so we were just vibing.

Correspondingly AI expanding the idea of what it means to think and therefore what it means to be human.

By extension then also what it means to interact with other humans as we become more used to interacting with AIs, our interactions with each other will change.

Along with these improvements, depending on which side of the fence you stand, the releasing of humans to focus on consumption while AI produce the triggers for our consumption, i.e., the advertising.

AI is moving into far more spaces of human activity than the camera ever did. But that could also be because painting wasn't such a broadly practiced activity as thinking seems to be.

>Depends, the camera killed painting and is a positive for art in my opinion

Have you been to a contemporary art museum?

It killed realist art and it greatly reduced the "market" of available paintings, which back then was really a market, art was usually commissioned for the same reasons you take a photograph today

You could have just said "no" or maybe admitted that "killing" painting was overblown, or maybe that it was not an accurate descriptor at all if you're argument is that it just "changed" painting.

I don't do semantics arguments because they don't help anyone learn anything

It largely killed an industry which was everywhere, sure there are still paintings and it's a primer art form. The number of paintings commissioned and number of painters fell drastically since the 19th century to the point I am willing to guess you have never had your portrait taken, something that was common place in the equivalent pay grades of today tech workers. Regarding the art form it is also arguably less important in people's life then it used to be (while museums still exist), However most music today is still mostly a profession rather than pure art for the sake of art

We can continue discussing whether the word kill is a metaphor or must be used only for a zero or one situation but I don't think that's interesting enough compared to the actual topic

> It's not obvious that LLM generation won't create more interesting music experiences

It's very obvious that it's polluting and/or killing everything it touched so far though

it's an automatic bullshit machine so essentially it creates cliches as an automatic process

this doesn't mean this can't be controlled by someone talented

We should give everyone live grenades, someone talented might do something cool, maybe, eventually, who knows right ?

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