Comment by hardwaresofton
2 days ago
Like the hot take but it is needlessly negative because it doesn’t go far enough.
You could make the same argument about musical instruments, or being able to record and playback music, dj tools, etc.
I think what you get is the power law distribution for tons of content. Some of the stuff is still mega valuable, but distribution just gets more and more important and it’s harder and harder to break through. This is what the “democratization” of any previously difficulty-gated endeavor does.
More niches will be created, more fragmentation in tastes, stuff like that. Not just completely valueless content.
Incumbents and platform providers get to win through it all though, because humans still want to fill their time.
The difference is that the jury is still out if these things are truly generating something novel. Or are we just making it pick from the spaces in between an average of all the images on the internet.
The latter would mean everything quickly looks and feels the same.
I also believe some barrier to entry is needed for good art, people are inherently lazy and AI lets us get away with "just good enough" - see llm assisted coding as an example
> The difference is that the jury is still out if these things are truly generating something novel. Or are we just making it pick from the spaces in between an average of all the images on the internet.
Novel in what sense? Most creative endeavor is not completely novel -- it's usually a combination of pre-existing styles, taste, patterns, and other inputs.
> The latter would mean everything quickly looks and feels the same.
I think human preferences will be a good guard rail against this. The reward will be greatly reduced for creating mostly the same things, just like real artists in real life.
> I also believe some barrier to entry is needed for good art, people are inherently lazy and AI lets us get away with "just good enough" - see llm assisted coding as an example
That's a pretty deep philosophical question -- "good art" is also a hell of a rabbit hole to go down!
Guess we'll find out :)