Comment by km144
6 days ago
I think that is a fair perspective. When I say "to what end" I am mostly implying the "end" of a product for the market. I think writing in particular is always a thing where if you tell people you do it as a hobby, they assume your goal is a published book, not the process itself. Creativity as the end is a wonderful thing, but I just have a feeling AI is going to be more widely adopted to pump out passable (or even arguably "good") content that people will pay money for.
Again the same thing with writing software, where you can be creative with it and it can enhance the experience. But most people just use AI to help them do their job better—and in an era where many software companies appear to have a net negative effect on society, it's hard to see the good in that.
> "but I just have a feeling AI is going to be more widely adopted to pump out passable (or even arguably "good") content"
Absolutely! And, as you say - the vast majority of books are already written to be passable-enough for publication. I guess it'll be slightly less charming when it's unclear whether a book you're buying has had at least one human believe it is good. Maybe this is already the case on Amazon!
> "that people will pay money for."
Haha - authors aren't making much money as it stands. I do really hope that a (much) higher volume of 'slop-work' means audiences value 'good-work' more, as 'good-work' will be harder to seek out, and that as a result of this better revenue models for creators of freely-duplicatable work (like books and music) are forced into creation. That's the best possible outcome. But - I think we agree that material reward isn't a good incentive for the creation of art.
I'm not wildly concerned about the arts, in this sense - I think it's (over a long enough timespan) a highly meritocratic world. I trust readers / audiences / users. Good work finds its audience and time and floats eventually. And DRM-locked, Kindle-Unlimited-type work will, by design, not be on anybody's shelves in fifty or a hundred years.
The alternative, I think, is that LLMs start making beautiful art completely unprompted (something I've seen zero evidence of being possible thus far). That's a universe I would be fascinated to exist in. A shame its probably paradoxical - I can imagine it being like whalesong :-)
Software is very different, as you say, not least because of its contingency on utility and temporality. Another thing that I find nice to imagine is a future canon of 'classical' software. I'm sure that this will exist at some point, given how young a form it is, relatively speaking. That too, I hope, will be predicated on beauty of design, as we've done with all our other canons.