Comment by Chance-Device
18 hours ago
> By many people’s criteria it automatically is worse, because part of what they value in art is thinking about the artist and their intentions behind their creation
That’s a bit separate to what I’m talking about, but I don’t think there are many of these people. I think this whole thing is about AI anxiety coupled with American social norms, and as soon as one of those things changes the artists are going to be left out in the cold again.
> I don’t think there are many of these people
I think there are lots of people who value art for the ideas of the artist. There are also lots of people who think that they value something like quality of brushstrokes, and these are the same people, mostly. I mean they don't know what they like it for, but the raw graphical data is what's in front of them, so they ascribe their preference to its (supposedly) measurable qualities.
Hence this thing about I can tell it's AI because its graphical quality is bad. In a way that's correct though! The artist's ideas are hinted at in the brushstrokes (or whatever other graphical aspects). In the gen AI picture you get hints of a phony mind. It becomes hollow when you know that, or when you think you know that. It's not delivering the cultural experience, if the hints you pick up on are false.
I think you’d be surprised by how many people feel that way but it’s hard to say for sure.
What did you think about my other examples? (The bookshelf and the microwaved meal)
There’s the idea of preferences and revealed preferences. People say their preferences and then their actions show what they really prefer. I suspect AI generated content, if curated by a human, would end up being people’s revealed preferences. There are a lot of bad artists and writers and whatever out there, AI would handily beat them.
I think at least for your niece’s drawings example, you’d probably prefer AI art if you had to choose one or the other until the end of time, not just one or two drawings that go on your refrigerator.
Thats part of the issue. People prefer human made art and then people feel tricked when they find out it’s AI art.
I would definitely choose my niece’s drawing for all time. Do you have young family members? That seems like a bizarre perspective to me.
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Revealed preference is a very real and useful phenomenon. But it seems to be increasingly overapplied as a convenient cop-out in scenarios where it's unclear any authentic preference is being revealed (e.g. due to confounding factors or active manipulation) and to exaggerate the extent to which real agency exists (externally predetermined outcomes).
Such as with RLHF-boosted writing from LLMs, where side by side comparisons of human vs. AI writing have been used as proof of revealed preference for AI. But an A/B test of a few sentences doesn't mean that someone would enjoy reading a 5000 word blog post in the same style, as the densely packed rhetorical flourishes become exhausting and repetitive tells start to jump off the page. Nor does it capture the signal/noise problem where despite technical ability and incredible verbosity, realization sets in that nothing in 2000 words has said anything at all while continually stringing the reader along. A side by side comparison with a few AI posters might be preferred in a five 5 minute test, but seeing the same visual elements from three frontier models in a loop on every surface for your entire life could quickly become actively repulsive.
And the problem with agency arises when limited freedom exists to truly make a different choice because the available options are externally determined. I've seen the argument made on HN that people's revealed preference is for AI maximalism, pointing to the fact that consumers keep buying products with AI, hundreds of billions of dollars are spent building new datacenters every year, workers (including creatives!) and students report using AI for daily work, etc.
But consumers aren't really given true choices that could reveal a real preference. The tech giants behind the phone duopoly have crammed AI features into both OS choices. With few exceptions every large company made an "AI strategy" their main focus since 2023 and competed to put chatbots and GenAI features into every inch of their product lines. Hyperscalers started a bidding war on datacenter buildouts in the expectation of future demand back when really only ChatGPT had any real market penetration outside the tech industry. Students and workers feel pressure to keep up with their peers by using AI to avoid getting fired/worse grades, artists struggling for work worry clients will go elsewhere if they take the time for their normal process.
Revealed preference when used haphazardly could be used to come to absurd conclusions like "people want to get scammed", "people like to be overweight", etc. Broadly and incautiously applied it just becomes a way to justify any given status quo as inherently optimally and reflective of collective will. With a creepy paternalistic implication that regardless of what you think you believe, forcing you do something against your will is secretly what you really want, and will make you happy even if you pretend not to realize it.
It's pretty questionable if a preference truly exists as "revealed" for something like AI art when it's preconditioned on active deception. An AI art-hater who gets tricked into picking AI doesn't mean they're lying/confused and actually love it. That sort of reasoning can get uncomfortably close to an anti-democratic argument for mass manipulation of people who can't be trusted to advocate in their own best interests.