Comment by keiferski

> It's like you assigning to humans divine capabilities :)

I can't tell if you're being facetious. But being an embodied consciousness with the ability to create is as divine as it gets. We'd do well to remember.

It's kind of like the difference between something being enjoyable for you, and something being widely popular?

In a hypothetical world of "AI can produce a lot of extremely high quality art", you can easily find (or commission) AI art you would absolutely love. But it probably wouldn't be something that anyone else would find a lot of value in?

There will be no AI-generated Titanic. There will be many AI-generated movies that are as good as Titanic, but none will become as popular as Titanic did.

Because when AI has won art on quality and quantity both, and the quality of the work itself is no longer a differentiator against the sea of other high quality works? The "narrative/life of the artist" is a fallback path to popularity. You will need something that's not just "it's damn good art" - an external factor - to make it impactful, make it stick in the culture field.

Already a thing in many areas where the supply of art outpaces demand. Pop music, for example, is often as much about making sound as it is about manufacturing narratives around the artists. K-pop being an extreme version of the latter lean.

> When I watch a movie, I don't care about the artist's life. I care about character life, that's very different.

I’m fairly certain the original comment was referring to instances where the artist is the character/primary subject.

I agree with everything you said, except that #1 is clearly wrong. I can prove it with one word: autotune.

At least in popular, mainstream culture, the viewer is heavily invested in the identity of the artist. The quality of the "art" is secondary. That's how we get music engineered by committee. And it's how we get paparazzi, People Magazine, and so forth.

On the other hand, this isn't anything new at all. We've had this kind of thing for decades. Real art still manages to survive at the margins.

> When I watch a movie, I don't care about the artist's life. I care about character life, that's very different.

It may seem like this, but up to now, you haven't been able to divorce a story from its creator because every story has an author, whether it's a novel like Harry Potter or a movie that has a writer and director. When you're experiencing the story, in the back of your mind, you always know that there is someone who created the story to tell you some kind of message. And so you can't experience something like a movie without trying to figure out what the actual message behind the movie was. It is always the implicit message behind the story that makes it valuable versus just the elements of the story.

The story has more weight because it is the distillation of somebody else's life and most likely, if it's a successful story or book, it is the most important lesson from that person's life and that's what makes it more valuable compared to the random generation of words from a computer.

The food analogy is that a cookie baked and given to you by a friend is going to taste far better than anything you buy in a store.

> When I watch a movie, I don't care about the artist's life.

And here we come back to the aged old "can you seperate an artist from their art" because I'd argue when you watch a movie you are watching a product of their life

1. I meant artists writ large, not specifically movies. My point being that community management, PR, having a brand, etc. are becoming a key element of an individual artist’s career. Examples of this abound – see the recent Markiplier film as a case in point. That movie did well because Mark’s audience wanted to help him, not because it’s such an original genius concept for a movie.

But even then – people obviously go watch movies because they like the actor/director involved. It’s not really clear why anyone would care about an AI actor. People want to watch people, not imitations of them.

The rest of your comments seem to be summarized as “it has gotten better and therefore it will eventually solve all problems it has now.” Which may be true in a technical sense, but again this is not taste.

A technical company like Space X really has nothing to do with this conversation, and I think you missed my point about it being uncool. It’s not about critics, it’s about culture at large.

At this point I think identifying a work as AI-created makes people instantly devalue it. We are rapidly approaching the point where no one wants to admit something is AI-created, because it comes with negative perceptions.

Originality comes from humans experiencing the world and interacting with it. What AI tool is a living being interacting with the world? None, of course. Hence the constant generic slop images of Impressionism or some other already-existing art style.

Just look at the images in the link: this is the best they can do? A kangaroo at a cafe in Paris? Could anything be more devoid of good taste?

> It's like you assigning to humans divine capabilities :) . Hyperbolizing a little, humans also only copy and mix - where do you think originality comes from? Granted, AI isn't at the level of humans yet, but they improve here.

I reckon we copy God - who is a creator - which means we're creators too - and our creations will copy us. But the created won't ever match the creator.

> You assume AI won't be able to make cool art with time. AI critics were shown time and time again to be underestimating the possibilities. Some people find it hard to learn in some particular topics.

You misunderstand their point: it's not that AI can't make art that looks cool, it's that a portion of society (mostly artists but a certain amount of lay people) who consider the act of prompting AI for art to not have any cultural cache, or even to be socially distasteful.

Well, there are definitely people who care about the vision and style of movies from certain directors. It's not so much "story" like plot, but story in the sense of a "brand story" where there's recognizable elements in all the work, repeated themes, changes and decisions and evolution to how they approach things.

>Engineers are in business of converting non-technical problems into technical ones.

Art is not a problem to be solved.

> It's like you assigning to humans divine capabilities :) . Hyperbolizing a little, humans also only copy and mix - where do you think originality comes from? Granted, AI isn't at the level of humans yet, but they improve here.

Every human being is unique, both biologically and experientially. Until an AI can feel and have a lived experience, it can not create art.

>It's like you assigning to humans divine capabilities :) . Hyperbolizing a little, humans also only copy and mix - where do you think originality comes from? Granted, AI isn't at the level of humans yet, but they improve here.

Humans do that a lot but it's not all we do. Go to a museum that has modern(ish) art. It's pretty incredibly how diverse the styles and ideas are. Of course it's not representative of anything. These works were collected and curated exactly because they are not average. But it's still something that humans made.

I think what people can do is have conceptual ideas and then follow the "logic" of those ideas to places they themselves have never seen or expected. Artists can observe patterns, ask how they work and why they have the effect they do and then deliberately break them.

I'm not sure current genAI models do these sorts of things.

>"You're currently here" is the always existing point which isn't achieved at the moment and which gives to critics something to point to and mount the objection to the process as a whole, because, see, this particular thing isn't achieved yet.

This is a contradiction that is so blatant I don't even know what language you're speaking. The definition of that phrase is the exact opposite of what you're saying.

"You're currently here" is the always existing point which is achieved at the moment.

>gives to critics something to point to and mount the objection to the process as a whole, because, see, this particular thing isn't achieved yet.

No it doesn't, because unless progress is reversed or undone, you can always point to your current success and say that the critics have been wrong so far. In fact, that's exactly the argument you're making here, which is why it's so weird that you're twisting it into its opposite.

If you want people to understand you, then you actually have to articulate what you're thinking instead of wrapping it in layers of euphemisms and hoping that the recipient nods along because they happen to agree for a completely irrelevant reason (e.g. "I like AI" or "I like space") to the argument presented.

> When I watch a movie, I don't care about the artist's life. I care about character life, that's very different.

The target audiences for art and film are not the same. The latter is far more pop culture. You can't apply them the same way, and the narrative of the artist has been extremely important for decades. People will watch slop movies. They don't pay $30K for slop art. They're paying that for historical importance or, if contemporary, artist narrative.

I'm in fandom spaces, and the prejudice against AI art is overwhelming. I also run in art collecting circles, being somewhat wealthy but not a billionaire. They also care about authenticity.

That is to say, the people who pay for original art, and participate in art spaces, are generally educated who actively hate AI. Filmgoers are probably a standard deviation lower in education, and are far more willing to part with the cost of one unit of consumption (a $10 ticket) than art buyers.

AI is a threat to graphic designers and those in their orbit.

The only way I see AI being a threat to professional artists is AI copies of their work. And AI isn't anything new there. I have a friend who gets commissioned by hotels to do one-off pieces for display all over the world. People have been making knockoff pieces of her style and selling them for at least a decade. And that's her lower margin, small pieces made for a couple thousand dollars to hang at your house, not her $100K+ pieces for hotels where they fly her out to supervise reassembly and mounting.

[dead]

God, thank you.

Finally, someone pointing out all of this is just people announcing what has been in play for half a century.

Post-modernism says that the artist isn't important. Dead, in fact. Art is something that happens when we perceive it, not when the author creates it.

Is that what putting a camera in the hands of everyone with a smartphone (basically everyone) did for photography?

Or making video editing + free, global publishing platform did for film? (see: doom scrolling).

Football anime doesn’t involve real people or stakes. AI can introduce a storyline, characters, etc. It won't necessarily be as popular as the real sport but I doubt the audience is zero.

>Would any football fan watch this?

Depends what the future of VR worlds look like, and what the viewers place is in them.

The problem is, we have no real understanding of what people will or will not do with this technology. Will humans only be interested in “real“ activity?

We have no idea, and most people are just guessing in a way that flatters some understanding of art that they have. We also frankly have no idea what the permanent relationship of humans to art is even without AI.

The television is less than 100 years old. There aren’t very many, but there are some people alive today who were alive before the television was created. The computer is about 80 years old. The whole idea of photography and of recorded audio is less uthan 150 years old.

We are still living in the aftershocks of industrial production of art. It is foolish to imagine that in the midst of this chaos, we can point the way forward with ease.

Photography was considered pretty uncool; it removed what at the time was perceived as all of the skill. We now can appreciate deeper aspects of captured images such as composition, and we now see painted portraits replaced by more abstract, surreal, or imagined imagery. Generative AI is similarly revolutionary in that it moves away from realism back into the realm of the imaginary; whether or not a user's prompts can be appreciated remains to be seen.

Digital Photography and digital painting. Both were considered deeply offensive to a lot of artists. I have witnessed both first hand and the criticisms were verbatim the same as AI.

They said you couldn't become a good photographer if you didn't learn it with the limitation of film that forced you to make each shot count. Photoshopping a picture made it "not a real photo" and was banned from online communities and irl events, drawing in photoshop was not considered art. I find it very ironic that digital artists are repeating the exact same argument as the one used against their art

Apple AirPods.

Well, it can be both.

Crucially, chest is also thriving as a spectator sport - and what's drawing the views is not the high-level matches: people are far more interested in more fast-paced and casual content, where the personality of the streamer can shine through.

On the other hand, absolutely nobody is watching livestreams of two chess bots playing each other. They might technically be better at chess, but that doesn't mean it makes for entertaining content.

Should a randomly-shuffled deck of cards be considered art? After all, the card shuffling machine created something which statistically has never existed before. Every shuffled deck should belong in a museum, right?

On the other hand, prompting AI for "pelican riding on a bicycle" clearly shows that it has far more trouble with unique concepts, compared to prompting for something more cookie-cutter.