Comment by potatowaffle
1 day ago
> What’s possible now that was impossible before?
> I spent a decade as an electronic musician, spending literally thousands of hours dragging little boxes around on a screen. So much of creative work is defined by this kind of tedious grind. ... This isn't creative. It's just a slog. Every creative field - animation, video, software - is full of these tedious tasks. Of course, there’s a case to be made that the very act of doing this manual work is what refines your instincts - but I think it’s more of a “Just So” story than anything else. In the end, the quality of art is defined by the quality of your decisions - how much work you put into something is just a proxy for how much you care and how much you have to say.
Great insights here, thanks for sharing. That opening question really clicked for me.
That quote seriously rubs me the wrong way. "Dragging little boxes around" in a DAW is creative, it constitutes the entire process of composing electronic music. You are notating what notes to play, when and for how long they play, what instrument plays them, and any modifications to the default sound of that instrument. Is writing sheet music tedious? Sure, it can be, when the speed of notating by hand can't keep up with the speed your brain is thinking through ideas. But being tedious is not mutually exclusive with being creative despite the attempt to explicitly contrast them as such, and the solution to the process of notating your creativity being tedious is not "randomly generate a bunch of notes and instruments that have little relation with the ones you're thinking of". This excerpt supposes that generative AI lets you automate the tedious part while keeping "the quality of your decisions", but it doesn't keep your decisions, it generates its own "decisions" from a broad, high-level prompt and your role is reduced to merely making decisions about whether or not you like the content generated, which is not creativity.
I'd say that deciding where a transient should go" is creative, manually aligning 15 other tracks over and over again is not (not to mention having to do it in both the DAW and melodyne)...
I agree that "push button get image" AI generation is at best a bit cheap, at worst deeply boring. Art is resistance in a medium - but at what point is that resistance just masochism?
George Perec took this idea to the max when he wrote an entire novel without the letter "E" - in French! And then someone had the audacity to translate it to English (e excluded)! Would I ever want to do that? Hell no, but I'm very glad to live in a world where someone else is crazy enough to.
I've spent my 10,000 hours making "real" art and don't really feel the need to justify myself - but to all of the young people out there who are afraid to play with something new because some grumps on hacker news might get upset:
It doesn't matter what you make or how you make it. What matters is why you make it and what you have to say.
> It doesn't matter what you make or how you make it. What matters is why you make it and what you have to say.
I want to add one point: That you make/ ship something at all.
When the first image generating models came out my head was spinning with ideas for different images I'd want to generate, maybe to print out and hang on the wall. After an initial phase of playing around the excitement faded, even though the models are more than good enough with a bit of fiddling. My walls are still pretty bare.
Turns out even reducing the cost of generating an image to zero does not make me in particular churn out ideas. I suspect this is true for most applications of AI for most people.
To be clear, as I said in another reply downthread, I think this particular project is creative, although creative in a fundamentally different way that does not replace existing creative expression. I also don't object to people doing "push button get image" for entertainment (although I do object to it being spammed all over the internet in spaces meant for human art and drowning out people who put effort into what they create, because 10,000 images can be generated in the time it takes to draw a single one). But "push button get image" is not making things yourself. I would give you credit for creating this because you put effort into fine-tuning a model and a bespoke pipeline to make this work at scale, but this project is exceptional and non-representative among generative AI usage, and "push button get image" does not have enough human decision-making involved for the human to really have any claim to have made the thing that gets generated. That is not creativity, and it is not capable of replacing existing expressions of creativity, which you've asserted multiple times in the article and thread. By all means push button and get image for as long as it entertains you, but don't pretend it is something it isn't.
I don't know anything about electronic music or what a DAW is, but his usage of "dragging boxes around" could either be a gross reduction in the process of creating art, or it could genuinely be just mundane tasks.
It's like if someone says my job as a SWE is just pressing keys, or looking at screens. I mean, technically that's true, and a lot of what I do daily can certainly be considered mundane. But from an outsiders perspective, both mundane and creative tasks may look identical.
I play around with image/video gen, using both "single prompt to generate" à la nano banana or sora, and also ComfyUI. Though what I create in ComfyUI often pales in comparison to what Nano or Sora can generate given my hardware constraints, I would consider the stuff I make in ComfyUI more creative than what I make from Sora or Nano, mainly because of how I need to orchestrate my comfy ui workflow, loras, knobs, fine tuning, control net, etc, not to mention prompt refinement.
I think creativity in art just boils down to the process required to get there, which I think has always been true. I can shred papers in my office, but when Banksy shred his painting, it became a work of art, because of the circumstances in which it was creative.
Just to provide a little more context, a DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) is, underneath all of the complexity and advanced features piled on top, a program which provides a visual timeline and a way to place notes on the timeline. The timeline is almost directly analogous to sheet music, except instead of displaying notes in a bespoke artificial language like sheet music does, they are displayed as boxes on the timeline, with the length of the box directly correlating to how long the note plays. Placing and dragging these boxes around makes up the foundation of working in a DAW, and every decision to place a box is a decision that shapes the resulting music.
Where to place boxes to make good music is not obvious, and typically takes a tremendous understanding of music theory, prior art, and experimentation. I think the comparison to an author or programmer "just pressing keys" is apt. Reducing it to the most basic physical representation undercuts all of the knowledge and creativity involved in the work. While it can be tedious sometimes, if you've thought of a structure that sounds good but there is a lot of repetition involved in notating it, there are a lot of software features to reduce the tedious aspects. A DAW is not unlike an IDE, and there are ways to package and automate repetitive musical structures and tasks and make them easy to re-use, just as programmers have tools to create structures that reduce the repetitive parts of writing code so they can spend more of their attention on the creative parts.
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Tedium in art is full of micro decisions. The sum of these decisions makes a subtle but big impact in the result. Skipping these means less expression.