davidivadavid

"The original has no value for the learner (other than a historical curiosity) because the revised versions are simply better expressions of the same thing."

I mean, how would we decide that? Do modern learners understand Newtonian physics better than Newton did? By what metric?

To me that's akin to saying you don't need to understand the history of physics because hey:

F = ma

Is all you need. I mean sure? But then we have a different concept of what "understanding" something means.

The idea that you can ignore history and have some sort objective summary of it is, to me, verging on cargo cult science — the opposite of what scientific (and philosophical) education should be.

Here's the productivity blackpill — most "productivity" improvement are dwarfed by immediate skill improvements. Want to be a better insert relevant profession? Get good at skills relevant to profession, don't try to improve some abstract "productivity" that's 10 steps removed from the actual craft.

You're probably not missing out on much. You've hit the 80/20 long ago.

> How did Van Gogh know he was making good art when he cut off his ear...

I wouldn't know, but I'm not sure what that point illustrates?

I'm fairly sure Van Gogh had a pretty good idea how his art was different/stood out from what existed, and could articulate why he did it a certain why (i.e. why it was good, to him at least). I'm far less certain about some random person with no art background typing a prompt being capable of the same analysis/understanding (that's also why 99% of AI art so far is transparently derivative).

To be clear — my point isn't that AI-art is bad or whatever. It's that it could displace/change the nature of what making art is about, and that incidentally it might require new skills or more extreme versions of existing skills, making the fear of the disappearance of "artists" overblown (and as a corollary making the idea that anyone can become capable of creating meaningful art exaggerated as well).

> It really doesn't feel like art is something that can be formulated and constrained as such. And it never was. All of those are techniques to effect certain results to convey the emotion or the idea. If the computer already does the technique part, what's left to the artist is to imagine, feel and express.

Right, but "expression" isn't something trivial, that's the point. If the prompt is "Harbor scene", there's a billion ways to realize that. Someone would presumably have to have the vocabulary/knowledge to navigate that space and produce something worthwhile in the end.

There's probably something to be said about the amount of control the artist gets on the output as well. The more we try to reintroduce post-hoc adjustments to e.g. an AI-generated image, the more we make "new art" look like "old art" (i.e. requires significant specific technical knowledge, albeit with different tools that paint and brushes).

Maybe it hits a balance, maybe it just goes back to the same situation as before.

> And you can be sure that people will differentiate themselves. Like how they did in every age before. Moreover, those who had a talent for art, but not a talent for all the techniques and the tricks that goes into making that art happen, will now start making art.

Yup, that's another important point. AI just becomes the new normal. But it will take skills to stand out given that new tool set. AI generated "art" will be seen the same way we see children doodles.

> If an AI is generating Shakespeare-level writing, and no one is capable of assessing its quality, then that's Shakespeare-level writing and its good.

Eh, disagree. If people had no knowledge of what poetry existed in the past or no understanding of it (think average college freshman essay), it certainly wouldn't follow that AI-generated crappy nursery rhymes would become Shakespeare-level poetry.

> Let's face it: Most of the 'high quality' criteria comes from our beautification and exaggeration of the arts of the past. There isn't any objective formula that is used to assess the 'quality' of any art.

That's why I made the point about curation.

If there's no "objective" quality to art, it's entirely narrative-based, whether on a past canon, or some sort of manifesto/principles something should stick to (think of modern art movements).

The job becomes completely different — it's not about the technical details of the work itself, but about how it's inserted in a larger cultural phenomenon ascribing certain values to art itself or certain principles in particular.

> If art creates thoughts and emotions in you, its good art.

To the person creating it, maybe, but then we're definitely talking about something different than ("high") art the way it's been talked about in academic discourse for the past ~2500 y. There has so be at least a common perception about the value of a piece of art for it to be considered as such.

Is every inch of my day to day life about to be spent consuming an endless stream of media?

> The artists now will be able to say "Put a distant view of Shangri-La, half visible behind a misty mountain during sunset, as the traveler gazes at it and wonders when he will finally arrive there". And they will have it.

Not so fast. To me this is the part that people are glossing over a bit too quickly in those discussions.

How does the person making this know it's actually good art? How do they pick between the 40,000,000 variations of that composition they're capable of generating?

Wouldn't they have to be familiar with principles of composition, color, dynamics, and so on?

As it becomes easier to generate the art, it becomes more important to be capable of differentiating it (except for purely "industrial" production where "good enough" will do).

And people will need to refine their taste to extreme levels to get there.

It's the same with poetry. What's the AI worth if it's supposed to generate Shakespeare-level writing, but no one is capable of assessing its quality?

Does it mean art essentially becomes a purely curation, taste-based endeavor?

Just throwing some random questions out there.

Sounds like you had bad trainers. Definitely wouldn't recommend that. Finding a good one on the other hand is easily one of the best investments you can make.

Art directors routinely execute artistic/creative tasks themselves. In many cases it's just title inflation.

But what's "common good" and a "useful skill" itself is defined by a status game.

Never seems to define what a "tool for thought" is supposed to be/do. Seems like a pretty big problem before moving on building them, let alone building "transformative" ones.

I think that's a pretty interesting conversation, I see two sub-questions:

1) Is our intuition that art requires effort some remnant of the labor theory of value applied to art?

2) Is it simply that as something requires less effort to make it redefines the baseline for what is considered beautiful, and thus to create something that stands out requires more effort than what's commonly available to everyone?

This level of detail is mandatory to have a spec that can actually be executed at some point.

The thing about Marc Andreessen is that of all VC-types of people he seemed like one with a modicum of tech legitimacy, given his history/role in the development of the web.

Unfortunately it seems to be quickly evaporating.

Kim Stanley Robertson? Get some editors, Vice.

That's the age old Hacker News fairy tale of the "fair and balanced reviews" approach to marketing.

Businesses don't need to advertise! We'll find their products and generate word of mouth! Yeah, I'm sure people who put their livelihood at risk by starting a new business are going to entirely trust that to happen.

Look, there's a lot of marketing scams. We know.

But until someone here stops whining for a minute and explains to me how they would start a business with nothing they would call "marketing" I'll keep being very dismissive of clueless engineers who could not sell something to save their lives but who happily work at fucking Google (or something that feeds off of it) and criticize whole disciplines they've never practiced or studied.

In that case I would suggest not having such apparently strongly held (wrong) opinions about a whole discipline their paycheck relies on every month.

The promise sounds great but the product looks very confusing and it seems just like a badly designed to-do list with a lot of accidental complexity. Why the emphasis on colors? Why is the UX so complex to end with something so simple? It's not clear what this is building up to.

Nobody in Europe uses Messages? Pretty sure everyone with an iPhone does.

No word is "intuitively spoken."

I get that everyone on Hacker News loves to repeat that nonsense, but it really sounds like no-one here has worked with a designer before. Are you thinking of graphic designers?

Have you met any developers before? As far as superiority complexes are concerned, I'm not sure designers are any worse.

This is honestly kind of a midwit take, though. They're "artifical" in the sense that nothing is inherently a resource until it's involved in a process where it's transformed into something we want. But it's certain still physical and limited in some way. That it's "artificial" doesn't mean we can conjure up resources out of thin air at will.

Of course that only works as long as you're surrounded by people who clap for BS.

Right. Silicon Valley seems to love those types of cringey shibboleths like "forcing function" and other nonsense.

Nah.

First, I don't think any major aesthetic theory claims there's no such thing as beauty. At best, they question the definition of beauty and the classical canons of beauty.

Second, you can put meaning and symbols into atoms buzzing back and forth (atoms buzzing back and forth are more or less a symbol, anyway).

"My son could paint that" vibes.

Hacker News art criticism at its best.

Right, that's also roughly what I default to (because Platonism seems to have more unnecessary complexity/hypotheses). The actual nature/ontology of abstractions isn't entirely (or at all) solved by that (e.g. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/abstract-objects/).

Yes, all that stuff kind of reminds me of some old LessWrong articles about how you should be careful, when thinking of a utopia, of making sure it is not just something that sounds/looks like it would be nice, but that would actually be nice.

That's 100% true in the abstract sense that meaning is conventional/contextual, but that doesn't mean all conventions are equally intuitive.

The rule "Top means stop, bottom means go" is specific to traffic light context. The meaning of the word "Stop" is much broader as it is used in more contexts. (Of course, some people can't read, which creates a bunch of other problems).

Maybe a better way to illustrate my point: I think traffic light are better at highlighting the problem of how to properly do semantic redundancy than at actually solving that problem (and that this is in part because colors are not accessible).

FYI, I'm not some kind of accessibility zealot, I think it's just an interesting design problem.