Maybe this is a hot take, but I strongly suspect that having "an endless supply of [thing that perfectly suits my taste]" is going to be really bad for people in the long run.
>Delegating the thinking and feeling parts of the human experience, mechanizing human creativity itself, is a direct attack on human dignity.
And I'm honestly sad for anyone who disagrees because it indicates they don't have a deeper relationship to art. For me, art is fundamentally about communication. It's someone sharing a little bit of themselves. AI might be able to produce pretty images and sounds, but it has no experience or feelings so the art it creates lacks that magic of a shared human connection. Pardon the crass analogy, but it's like if someone said "I don't need any intimate partner, I have internet porn". It's a depressing mindset because it indicates that people can't even see what they are missing.
I guess I could have been clearer on the connection between the original comment and my reply. In my opinion, the "direct attack on human dignity" comes when someone starts projecting the depressing mindset I described outward. To continue the analogy, it's not just being satisfied with internet porn for yourself, it's telling someone else "you don't need an intimate relationship because you can always access internet porn" and I think it's fair to categorize that as a "direct attack on their human dignity".
> so the art it creates lacks that magic of a shared human connection.
I keep hearing this point, and the thought that comes up first is 'but blood diamonds'. Let me explain, you can buy a cheaper 'inauthentic' lab-grown gem that's chemically/physically identical to a (nearly hypothetical) flawless diamond, but we buy the 'natural, and imperfect' diamonds at a much higher price. The blood of the orphans that pulled the diamond rough from the minds soaked into the diamond raising it's value. The value isn't the blood, but the effort it took to produce that diamond, the story of how hard it was to mine is the value, not the end product (a shiny rock), which in the end, is all anyone can see.
The second thought I had was that what people find meaningful, beautiful, important varies wildly, to the point that landscapes are meaningful. Meaning can be found in anything, regardless of the existence of intent.
The third thought I had is communication does not survive the translation of art unscathed or unchanged. There is this disconnect, between the artist and the viewer. The viewer only ever sees a finished product. The viewer extracts meaning from the work entirely without the author/artist's involvement. This isn't communication, this is a soliloquy, frozen in time, the artist can not expand, explain, or sharpen (except in another works) those ideas once released into the world.
This disconnect is the rub. There are no 'magic' pixels that dictate secret meaning. There is no 'human color' that indicates intent. Meaning itself can't be painted. What relationship can ever take place between artist and viewer through those works alone. It's a 1-way conversation. And considering my second though, that intent isn't even needed to extract meaning, you can see the apathy and rise of the use of AI in art.
The point of making art isn't to make money, or to impress other people, or even change other people's thinking. It's to express yourself. That can't be taken by AI.
The point of viewing art is to reflect on how you perceive it. That's true regardless of the artist/author, and regardless of the blood (effort) (or not {AI}) used to craft it.
You have tortured the meaning of the term "blood diamond" to further a narrative. "Blood diamond" is a perjorative, meant to reduce the value of mined diamonds by bringing human exploitation to the minds of those looking to purchase jewelry. De Beers very much wants that term to go away. They also have a narrative, which is that lab diamonds are "synthetic" and that only natural diamonds are worth buying.
>The point of viewing art is to reflect on how you perceive it. That's true regardless of the artist/author, and regardless of the blood (effort) (or not {AI}) used to craft it.
"Art" as a term becomes meaningless with this definition. Once you disconnect art from its creation, everything becomes art. A sunset can be beautiful, but it's not art if a human doesn't capture it in some way. A pile of dog shit on the sidewalk can evoke emotions, but perceiving it doesn't turn it into art. The decisions of an artist are central to the whole endeavor and that is what is communicated. That communication doesn't have to be unambiguous, intentional, or conscious, but it has to be there to make something "art".
no, by your proposed definitions, an error occurs: pixel exact identical images, byte for byte, yet one is art and one is not based on 'how' it was created. This is nonsense.
Is it? This distinction already occurs in law: a sequence of bytes might be illegal, or it might not, depending on how you obtained it. Humans observe distinctions that computers do not.
If you find yourself wanting to say this in the future, maybe give the other person some benefit of the doubt and take it as a sign to reassess your interpretation of what was said. I truly have no idea how you got to where you did from what I wrote, so I don't even know where to start to dispute it.
I did some logical jumps, but stepping through it holds up.
> "Art" as a term becomes meaningless with this definition. Once you disconnect art from its creation, everything becomes art.
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, not in the beholden.
> A sunset can be beautiful, but it's not art if a human doesn't capture it in some way
If it is not 'captured in some way', agreed. I disagree with the human label being needed.
> The decisions of an artist are central to the whole endeavor and that is what is communicated.
This is the crux, what I disagree strongly with.
If the intention by the artist truly mattered, then a hypothetical double blind experiment can confirm this. If we have two works of art, one created by a human, and one created by a machine, (they just so happen to be byte for byte identical), and you have people one at a time decide which one is 'art' and which one is 'meaningless'.
We don't need to actually do this experiment because we all know how it would go. Because we can not measure 'intention' at all, we can not actually perceive intention. which is why we have things like the watchmaker fallacy. we are extraordinarily bad at assuming we can perceive things we we actually can't...
So if this is your position, then it is nonsense, if I have missed your position, correct me.
>> The decisions of an artist are central to the whole endeavor and that is what is communicated.
>This is the crux, what I disagree strongly with.
>If the intention by the artist truly mattered...
That is also the crux of your misinterpretation and it shows the flaws in this type of line by line communication that we're all guilty of doing because your point is refuted by the very next sentence of my original comment: "That communication doesn't have to be unambiguous, intentional, or conscious, but it has to be there to make something 'art'."
"Intentions" are motivations while "decisions" are actions. The decision by the photographer to frame a photo of a sunset in a specific way is what turns it from merely something beautiful into art. The specific motivation behind that decision is often unknowable even sometimes to the artist themselves, but a decision is knowable and communicates something. AI doesn't make decisions it just generates something based off statistics.
An artist can certainly use AI as a tool, but that doesn't make the AI output art, it makes the curation of AI output a form of art. But to mix in my other thread of comments, engaging with the AI output as its own art would be like primarily judging Duchamp's Fountain on the aesthetic qualities of the curves of the porcelain when the actual art is his decision to present that porcelain as "art".
Well, Duchamp's fountain is a great illustration that "art is fundamentally about communication." does not entail that a cultural/artistic artifact has to be created by the author at all. I as well can create a short story with help of an LLM and say - this is my vision and what I always wanted to say.
I have actually referenced Duchamp's Fountain before in similar conversations about AI art because I think it's a great example of what makes art art. The art itself isn't the toilet, it's the act of elevating a toilet to the status of art. If you don't know the context of the physical item, it loses all artistic merit because the item itself is not the art. The whole thing is more performance art than sculpture.
I'll freely admit that LLMs can be used in art in a similar way. You can certainly make LLM output the core of some performance art piece, but that doesn't make the LLM's output art itself or make it interesting on any level outside the context of its creation. Engaging with that short story as its own art would be like primarily judging the Fountain on the aesthetic qualities of the curves of the porcelain.
Even if we consider Duchamp's creation an outlier - one may say if it were created, say by some random plumber, instead of Duchamp, this urinal would not be as important of art piece as it would be if made by Duchamp, there is a plenty of other artistic niches - say DJ or an interior designer, where the author does not create a thing by themselves, just combine existing items, yet we judge the art piece purely by aesthetic merit, irrespective of the who exactly was the author.
I mean it is as simple as saying - here is my statement, it was generated by an LLM, but I had prompted and edited it, or even simply chose a single generation out of 500 and this conveys my feelings and therefore is art.
> AI might be able to produce pretty images and sounds, but it has no experience or feelings so the art it creates lacks that magic of a shared human connection.
Who cares? I want it to do my taxes for me, it doesn't need to be Picasso
>I want it to do my taxes for me, it doesn't need to be Picasso
It sounds like you are commenting in the wrong thread then. This article and thread is about what happens when people try to make it Picasso (or experience Picasso's work for them.)
Computers have been mechanizing people's jobs away for god knows how many years now. Everybody on this site is guilty of it to some degree. I'm a doctor, and automating me out of a job has been one of the wettest dreams of programmers since the expert systems of the 20th century, and that dream is palpable in every HN thread about medicine.
But now that computers have come for the "creatives", it's suddenly an attack on human dignity? No.
Programmers are not special. Artists are not special. Humans are not special.
The person you're responding to isn't talking about automation or jobs, they're talking about creating being fundamental to the human experience. And they're 100% correct. Humans have been creating since ancient times; the earliest cave painting discovered is 67,800 years old [1]! By comparison, how old is modern capitalism?
Work and art have existed long before emperors, kings, feudal lords, and capitalists and they'll exist long after them. Any economic or political system that misuses technology to disrupt the ancient human need to create is fundamentally anti-human. The biggest fault with our current socioeconomic system is it prioritizes the worst aspects of humanity (greed, hoarding, consumption) over the best aspects (building and creating). That's why people are upset.
> creating being fundamental to the human experience
Fundamental, I can agree with. Exclusive? Clearly not. Not anymore.
People can still create now, even in spite of AI. Will anyone pay for it? Who knows. Doubtful.
> The biggest fault with our current socioeconomic system
I can agree with this. I believe that at this point the only hope left for humanity is to leverage AIs to the max and achieve a post-scarcity society. It's our only chance, and things are gonna get ugly if we fail.
The socioeconomic argument is sound, just don't let it get twisted into "but think of all the creators, the super special noble humans, they deserve protection against the AI onslaught".
Nobody cared about all the countless skilled labourers who were disrupted and automated away by technology. Asking us to shed tears for artists now is honestly offensive, doubly so when the people asking are programmers who literally make bank by automating away the jobs of others.
We are job destroyers. Our work inherently reduces the set of people who are still economically valuable. We are all about getting more done for less. Our only hope lies in finishing our journey, and making it possible to do everything for nothing at all.
The harm of generative AI runs much deeper than economics.
Creating is communication. When you share your work, you're sharing your mind. You're demonstrating mastery of a craft. You're inspiring others. The linked article is specifically about how AI is actively harming the relationship between readers and writers, and not in a hypothetical future, but right now.
Even if we enter a "post-scarcity" society, I'm concerned fewer people will create. Why speak if your voice is silenced under a sea of synthetic outputs? Yes, you can create because you enjoy the mechanics, but the communication will be gone.
Generative AI is a long term concern as it hurts something fundamentally ancient.
You're not exactly winning me over with these "but these specific humans with noble professions are special and shouldn't be replaced" takes either.
I mean, what's this supposed to mean? It's totally fine to replace all those blue collar labourers with mass production factories, but replacing programmers and artists with AI is somehow a crime against humanity? Absolute nonsense.
This discourse does nothing but betray one's own sense of superiority over the lesser humans. Enlightened thought workers who thought their positions were unassailable and their leverages secured, but were proven wrong by the very technologies they helped create.
It's got nothing to do with preferences and everything to do with reality, and the reality is AIs are changing the world and the only hope left for us humans at this point is that they will somehow enable us to achieve a post-scarcity society.
> This discourse does nothing but betray one's own sense of superiority over the lesser humans
What are you even talking about?
The comment you were responding to said:
> Delegating the thinking and feeling parts of the human experience, mechanizing human creativity itself, is a direct attack on human dignity.
Everyone can and should engage in creativity, on whatever scale. No one in this thread you're responding to privileged a certain type of worker or even a certain type of creativity (let alone the "experience" and "dignity" the comment broadened it to).
Also just real weird post. The relative worth as humans of doctors and blue collar labourers vs artists and programmers was not the matchup I was expecting, but I guess it's ok because we're all equally garbage in your eyes? FWIW, I'm hoping for more from us than accidentally ending up in a human zoo.
> Everyone can and should engage in creativity, on whatever scale.
But not everyone will, absent economic incentives.
Calling the mechanization of human creativity a "direct attack on human dignity" is a revealing moral judgement.
What makes human creativity so special that it must be so thoroughly protected against technological progress?
Why "human creativity" specifically, and not any of the other categories of human activity?
Why is it "an attack on human dignity" to mechanize it?
What if it's the opposite? What if this is the technology that will finally free us from all the other indignities we suffer? What if it's the technology that could create a post-scarcity society?
> No one in this thread you're responding to privileged a certain type of worker or even a certain type of creativity
Somehow I just don't see anyone make these kinds of sad posts about displaced skilled craftsmen or poor factory workers or any other economically displaced human.
People make a few documentaries here and there so that history is documented, but we all accept that they are gone as a byproduct of the inevitable technological march.
Why should "creatives" be an exception?
> but I guess it's ok because we're all equally garbage in your eyes?
I never said we are all equally "garbage". I said we are all equally replaceable, and that to believe otherwise is to betray a sense of superiority over those who were replaced.
Even the CEOs will meet their match in the end. Stopping before their replacement would be the true crime against human dignity.
> Another factor that kept ED138 hidden is that it is on the same plane as our galaxy. “For the last 20 years, the object has kind of been looping its way across the Milky Way, from our point of view,” Holman explained. “People don’t typically search for things in the Milky Way, because there’s so many stars that it’s really hard to find moving objects.” [1]
This thing was actually found despite its location, not because of it. If it had been in the opposite part of the sky we almost certainly would have spotted it sooner, given that it's one of the brightest TNOs we've discovered.
We're finding it now because Vera Rubin (the instrument that found it) just came online and is exceptionally good at finding these kinds of objects specifically, even when they're hiding amidst a dense population of stationary background stars.
> ED138 joins the rapidly growing sample of solar system objects discovered by Rubin since it began collecting early data in preparation for the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST), which began in June 2026. In April, before LSST formally began, the Rubin solar system team announced observations of over 11,000 new asteroids, which included roughly 380 new TNOs. At the time, the team called this large submission “the tip of the iceberg” and expressed their excitement for the discoveries to come once LSST began. With the discovery of ED138, those hopes are coming to fruition.
My point was that the LSST survey was looking in those areas as part of its "mapping the Milky Way"
Pluto has a 248 year orbit... which is close to the 282 years for ED138. 100 years ago, maybe Tombaugh would have found ED138 that if he was looking in that part of the sky.
People keep saying this like it makes it better... If I knew my partner was a serial philanderer it wouldn't make me feel great, even if said partner was worth billions.
A lot of marriages are purely for superficial image. Many people also fall out of love but stay together legally for various reasons.
Many ultra high net worth people are married purely for financial reasons. The wife gets whatever she wants but now they don't need to worry about losing control of their company, etc.
This is to say nothing of the biological differences either. Menopause hits some women extremely hard and libido is completely gone. Rather than divorce or mutually suffer, they open up the marriage.
> They never did it in a way that was technically legal iirc.
If Jensen knew that Megaspeed was a Chinese front, then he willfully engaged in a criminal conspiracy to circumvent US export controls. That is very serious felony.
I know it's just speculation, but the fact that Nvidia hasn't tried to scapegoat some random compliance officer strongly suggests to me that Jensen did know, and that the board has seen the paper trail that proves it.
>If Jensen knew that Megaspeed was a Chinese front, then he willfully engaged in a criminal conspiracy to circumvent US export controls. That is very serious felony.
Sure, but the US gov itself lifted those controls soon. So they get this for bypassing controls that they lifted and found no use for anyway?
And does anybody really believe those exports, of the #1 most crucial supposedly restricted tech, wheren't covertly greenlit and scruitinized when they happened? Like, it caught anybody in government or nvidia or bodies checking these things as a surprise?
And why would they need some special honeypot for that? He was advocating for sales to china because they're good for nvdia's bottom line, way before he hooked up with that woman!
As for low level details, wouldn't be smarter, less visible to all, and more effective if they honeypotted some key technician instead? The CEO would be too visible in his moves, and too high position to know or care for the low level technical details, the kind that would be of interest to competitors.
More likely they know and were ok those things all along, but he's no longer useful, or his preferences doesn't work well with the new plans in the tech war with China, or they fear what would happen to Nvidia stock with Democrats in power having this compromising info to play up, and they got rid of him.
The same general reasons that allow planets to form instead of all the mass going into a single star: mass/momentum/charge asymmetries in the original stellar nebula, complex interactions in the accretion disk, gravitational perturbations from other stars in the same stellar nursery, etc
reply