Comment by saberience
4 days ago
None of the tools that existed before created entire complete works with tiny amounts of effort.
E.g. "Write an amazing story for kids about a bear". ChatGPT writes a whole story for you. That's not "augmenting" your workflow, that's just doing all the work for you. And don't tell me, "writing the prompt is the new form of art", the reality is that writing these prompts doesn't require a tiny fraction of the talent required to write a novel from scratch.
The printing press is a horrible example also, it didn't write anything for you, it just literally prints already written content. Photoshop just let you edit already taken photos.
Cameras require you to go to places, take trips, put massive effort into actually making content from scratch.
A better analogy would be an automated flying camera that just goes off by itself to a destination, takes its own photos, edits them, and sends them to you, processed, edited, finished. All you did was say "go to Victoria falls and take photos."
Yes artists have used tools, pens, then a typewriter, a word processor i.e. the implements for the process, but the tools didn't ever replace the most important part of the artist, the actual creative work and imagination in the brain. The AI tools are just replacing the brain AND the actual implements.
You have missed the point of the analogy. I'd ask that you sit on this for a while and earnestly trying to understand what I'm explaining, which is how each generation of artists has a relationship with the prior generations that involves both imitation and rejection. Creatives are not one big blob of people, they all have their own opinions on what is and isn't great art, and it's all subjective.
And a lot of these moments of inertia, scenes, etc. are rooted in technological progress. And sometimes, the technological process is so great that prior generations of creatives feel as if the newer generations are "skipping" the required work to becoming a "true" artist; but that is just gatekeeping.