>Even with art, I have a lot of ideas and concepts but can't draw or paint.
99.8% of artists all start out at a similar place. They have good "taste", but they suck at making art. Only through practice and feedback from other artists were they able to improve their skills and creative sight, and these things in turn further developed their "taste" in art.
The art pieces that people enjoy are the culmination of an artist spending countless hours practicing, failing, retrying, and experimenting with different ideas. You don't get a Zdzislaw Beksinski without endlessly iterating and honing your craft.
This is one of by biggest gripes with AI: it creates an incentive for people to skip all the hard work that results in great art. Why spend thousands of hours developing your art skills and your unique artistic fingerprint when you can press the instant gratification button right now? I know its not something you can blame a single individual for, but when society as a whole starts taking shortcuts that's when we'll really see a degradation in art.
But maybe you can get good at the more important "taste" part first and to a higher degree, and not the mechanical part. Old time artists (think Rembrandt) used to have make paint by hand, a consuming process, and partially poisonous. Modern artists, it's my understanding largely save all this part by buying it in tubes, giving them time or more important things.
>But maybe you can get good at the more important "taste" part first
I keep putting quotes around "taste" because its hard to properly describe. Whatever it is, it seems like a mixture of observing what has worked for others, personal preference, worldview, etc. "Getting good at" taste is therefor hard to quantify.
Furthermore, having good "taste" in the art you consume doesn't translate to having good "taste" in the art you create. There exists a gap between the appreciation and application of said "taste", and you need to practice creating a lot of stuff to shorten that gap. And again, these two sides of "taste" are deeply intertwined. The kind of art you consume tends to change as you hone your creative skills and begin to see the technique behind it all, and that in turn influences the kind of art you may wish to create.
>Being able to rapidly prototype concepts might help people get good at it,
Again, it's hard to quantify or validate. One thing I will say is that people can often misinterpret the things that make a certain piece of art work. It's often the little details, or even the absence of detail that make or break it. This is the sort of stuff that requires you to train your eye to notice.
For example, Da Vinci is often heralded as a master of the human form and proportions (the Vitruvian man). But many of his later works often eschewed realistic proportions, with his figures often being 10-11 heads tall. This is a subtle detail that influences how a piece feels, and yet most people would completely miss it!
I encourage you to do an experiment. Get two friends to learn a subject -- one spends 20 hours on it, actually solving problems by hand. One reads AI answers to problems.
At the end of those twenty hours, quiz them. Get them to solve a problem. Who do you think will do better?
Learning happens when the brain struggles with problems. Trying to shortcut that only prevents learning.
Both sides of this are about exploration. Compare with collage: it's a different thing. It's not painting or drawing. It's fast, and it's art, and it depends on and reuses other people's painting and drawing. It's not strictly superior.
The point is that these are not separate. They cannot be separate.
Deep understanding, taste, aesthetic, sensitivity to nuance, and so on...none of that can be developed without intimate involvement with the process, with the thing itself.
Your example of poisonous paint vs buying it in tubes is a fallacy, because that isn't what we're talking about. We're talking about _actually painting_ vs just...telling someone else to paint.
Taste is essentially a set of heuristics for what has worked for you and the people you learned from, and how the details of your current situation feed into it. You could argue that AI has almost nothing but taste.
For humans, taste is learned through friction against the details of your problem, and finding what ends up sliding smoothly through the details of the medium you're working in. For AI, it's the same, but it comes from the details of the training data.
We've automated taste well enough for most production needs, and its only going to get better over time. If you don't think it'll be good enough for artistic needs too, you're placing a pretty hard bet against AI.
"Taste is all that's left" is pure cope. Taste is one of the first things where humans become useless.
>We've automated taste well enough for most production needs, and its only going to get better over time. If you don't think it'll be good enough for artistic needs too, you're placing a pretty hard bet against AI.
It's not about placing bets on the ability of AI.
"Taste" can also include the human behind the piece. For example, I love listening to black metal. My "taste" as a consumer of black metal includes sombre atmospheres, oppressive walls of noise, dissonant, angular rhythmic guitar sections, etc.
But my "taste" in black metal extends to the artists behind the music. Black metal has a huge issue with racism and white supremacy. There is a lot of sonically interesting music made by hateful individuals in the black metal scene that I don't listen to because the artists values are antithetical to my own.
In a similar manner, art made primarily through generative AI may technically resemble art that normally matches my "taste", but I find myself wholly uninterested in it because the artists behind it have values that are antithetical to my own.
PS: I'm not trying to say "AI artists = nazis". I'm trying to say that your own motivations and world view behind the art you create influence whether I'll engage with it or not.
Yes, that's fair. But at least if judged purely on output, human taste is no moat.
So, if we're going to preserve human art, we either need AI to fail naturally, or we need to explicitly reject it. The same goes for the rest of human creativity.
> You could argue that AI has almost nothing but taste
But then you could argue that it has nothing but trained taste, and isn't creative. Then somebody could ask what you mean by that, and you could throw up your hands and say "I don't know", which is the decent thing to do, because none of us know, but it means something.
It isn't about the merits of the output, except that there are some creative outputs that it won't produce. But we can't formally describe those, because they're creative. They're all different, they have different qualities, there's no formula, and you don't get there by training. Once you "get there" you have to get there again, which is to say, keep being creative. This process can be mediated by actually daubing actual paint around.
It's debatable depending on who you're talking to whether taste is more "important" than execution/the mechanical part (I think calling it the mechanical part is a little misleading because that suggests one is brainlessly implementing a fixed algorithm). Maybe for the manager/CEO types who have a grand pie in the sky vision that they need an army to implement "taste" is more important. But I think for the artist themselves being able to spawn something into existence with their own labor is a large part of the experience.
Yes, we'll have lots more art for people to enjoy, but fewer artists.
Sorry oh great art master, I am but a poor peasant who cannot grasp the vast complexities of your world. Please forgive me for daring to speak about something I not worthy of understanding.
Here's a general principle: non-participants can have opinions about our thing (whatever thing that is). If they trot out the same naive dumb lines of thought over and over, and we can't put into words why they're wrong, that's a regrettable failure of discussion, but it's nobody's fault, and they should continue with their aggravating droning until we actually get our act together and find something effective to say in reply.
>I have yet to see someone produce a definition for art which excludes AI generated images but includes various widely accepted forms of art.
You can't define art for the same reasons you can't define what it is to be human. But most people can easily recognize what is/behaviors that are inhumane.
And yet, it's very problematic when someone thinks they've defined what it means to be human and decides to do something about everything that falls on the other side of their arbitrary line.
Yes I agree, you should try generating your own custom AI assisted art. You might be surprised by the enjoyment you get out of manifesting a vision in your head that you could not have produced before.
A ream of printer paper and 5 fineliners are about $10 and there's tons of online tutorials. Nobody is gatekeeping Art you just refuse to try actually doing it.
I draw all the time, I love it. I also dont care if somebody else chooses to use a machine to do it. Why does somebody else using ai affect me sketching in my pad?
>Why does somebody else using ai affect me sketching in my pad
It may not for you, but obviously it does impact lots of artists ability to make a living off their art, to find community in their art, and on a longer time scale it could even change how society values art.
You are gatekeeping though. The poster you're being disparaging to has created something new, they are producing art even if it doesn't meet your standards.
>The poster you're being disparaging to has created something new
The big issue here is that through all of human history, effort was a necessary prerequisite to making art. Whether that effort came from mixing paint together before sitting down in front of an easel, hiking through the back country to find the perfect spot for a photograph, or fixing n-gons in Blender all evening. If you created a piece of art, there was a shared understanding amongst other artists that you cared enough to put in the work to make something. For most artists, it's the work/journey/process they cherish, not just the end goal. Putting in the work to make your art is usually the only "gatekeeping" that happens in the art community.
But AI is allowing people to short circuit the path from idea -> creation, which begs the question: is that actually creating? Is prompting for a picture substantially any different than tweaking your search on Google images until you find a photo that resembles what you had in mind? Is creating just having a shiny new picture, or is it the hours/weeks/months of effort, failure, and successes that happened leading up to the picture?
Point is: you can call it "gatekeeping" if you want, but all we're really saying is that creation != ideation.
Failure is the most relevant part of that, not effort. But yes, tweaking an image search is creative, and tweaking a prompt is creative. The process isn't the process of using a pencil, though, and it isn't a camera, or clay, or a mesh, or a replacement for interacting with any other medium.
Which is also creative! You have a theory of what you want, you experiment to try to get it to happen (in this case by instructing the artist), you don't like the result, you revise your theory and try a new experiment.
Of course the commissioned artist is creative too, and the artists AIs are trained on are creative, and the artists who made the engravings that Max Ernst cut up for his collages were also creative. Creativity everywhere. Even Microsoft employees are creative sometimes, I believe, even when at work.
I guess your point is that we now have the option to produce uncreative slop, which is true and annoying.
I would say that it opens up art to a wider audience. Despite the lack of effort, they're still creating something.
Where this becomes even more of an issue is imagine somebody spends substantial time with these tools to create something - editing the output of vid models for example. Some would say that's not art but at the end of the day it is just using a tool.
Thats the beauty of art, appreciation is subjective and different for everyone. The only thing you have control over is whether you are open to that or not.
>Thats the beauty of art, appreciation is subjective and different for everyone. The only thing you have control over is whether you are open to that or not.
Subjectivity is not a shield that protects a work from criticism, and disliking a piece of art does not necessarily mean you are closed minded. It could simply be that you don't find it interesting, or that you find the values of the artist reprehensible, or that you find it overly derivative, etc.
So? You still got to eat and enjoy your pizza and it didnt take anything away from the hand crafted pizza artisans out there. In fact if anything Papa Johns has enabled many more people to enjoy pizza than would have been able to if only die hard pizza crafters were allowed to make and sell pizza.
>In fact if anything Papa Johns has enabled many more people to enjoy pizza than would have been able to if only die hard pizza crafters were allowed to make and sell pizza.
Well, your analogy assumes people consume art and food for the same reasons. Does the desire to experiencing a new piece of art come from the same place that makes you crave for a slice of pizza?
Of course not.
Another disconnect I often see in these discussions is that there seems to be a misunderstanding about what most artists conceive as "creating art." "Creating art" is not primarily about consuming or satiating some part of our brains. To use your analogy, we're not baking pizzas purely because we wish to eat them, but because we value the process of baking the pizza itself!
When artists have these sorts of conversations with people, it tends to turn into frustrating arguments due to this misunderstanding. When I question whether you're "creating" art, its not me trying to scold you and others who like to ask AI to generate a pictures you thought up. It's that I'm seeing people misinterpret the end result of creation with the act of creation itself.
The pizza analogy isa not mine, it is the post above mine . You can stop replying to me on multiple different threads now, theres no point in us conversing in multiple different conversations on old threads you are deciding to reply on.
By the way, you do realise I am an artist dont you? I think that proves that everything you are saying is false, because here we have two artists disagreeing on what artists think!
>I think that proves that everything you are saying is false, because here we have two artists disagreeing on what artists think
I also said "most artists" not "all artists". I'm not terribly surprised that a poster on Hacker News tends to think differently than most artists, seeing as this community tends to attract the sort of person who is pro-AI.
>It is elitist to only consider opinions from "peers in art" as valid opinions on the subject, as OP is doing.
For me, it's not about invalidating others opinions. In the same way I hold my doctors opinions of my health in higher regard than a random person on the internet, I hold the opinions creatives/artists/etc. on the subject of creation in higher regard than people who use generative AI.
So you can have your opinions, but it's not "elitism" for those of us who actually have experience doing a thing to state our opinions as well.
I feel your opinion is wrong here, and I dont say that lightly. Medicine is a science, art is art. They are very different things. You can trust somebody to know more about a science than you do because it is a discipline of knowledge. You cannot do that with art, as the beauty of art is in the eye of the beholder and has no relation whatsoever to the knowledge of the person creating it.
In no way can you trust someone to know more about the beauty of art than you do, because nobody else has any idea of what you yourself consider beautiful art.
Understanding the underlying implementation can have value even if rarely used. I think learning assembly has had a profound effect on my understanding of higher level code, but there is no /real/ point to learning it with great compilers, pre-ai.
>I predict by the end of the year they'll have a style/voice selector for responses.
Style permeates all aspects of writing: word choice, sentence structure, literary devices, pacing, plotting, characterization, dialog, theme, etc. Its a culmination of these things that is reinforced over again every sentence, paragraph, and chapter for potentially hundreds/thousands of pages.
I don't see how a prompt could reliably "tune" all of those different variables over such a large context window without it feeling like a surface level facsimile at best.
Human language isn't verifiable. If I ask for something "dark and gritty", there are endless outputs that are indeed "dark and gritty" yet completely miss the style I had in mind.
How so? For safety its the same as hands free phone conversations in the car which is perfectly legal. Also, it's much safer then looking/using phones (that's illegal) while driving, which millions unfortunately do now.
Also, talking and listening to AI for directions is safer where the Ai is like an intelligent person. An example the AI giving you contextual directions like that new mechanic you are looking for is next to your favorite McDonalds in XYZ city or town (provides context to something you're familiar with so you just drive to a familiar place).
>How so? For safety its the same as hands free phone conversations in the car which is perfectly legal.
The amount of brain power most people use while having a passing conversation is << than the brain power people use while trying to solve a problem, or reason about engineering abstractions.
I don't think this is a responsible thing to be doing unless you've completely relinquished all control of how things are built/designed/implemented to the AI.
Just because you __can__ does not mean you __should__.
You think programming still requires a lot of brain power? Definitely not as much as anyone who can talk can create software, iPhone apps, etc, etc.
Recently on a long drive I was working on an AI agent network concept talking it through and after each push to it's repo I would discuss more and prompt it to make more updates. On Wednesday at a bar with 2 unemployed software dev friends they were testing out my dating app Ive been working on in the car/in general. They provided me feedback on the dating app and boom GPT made the updates in less then minute.
"Just because you can___doesn't mean you should," I agree with you, as I wish this didnt exist, but it does and times always change. I'm personally embracing this new change!
>You think programming still requires a lot of brain power?
Maybe not for you.
>"Just because you can___doesn't mean you should," I agree with you, as I wish this didnt exist, but it does and times always change. I'm personally embracing this new change!
You can embrace AI agents all you want, but don't risk other peoples lives by distracting yourself while driving.
>The amount of brain power most people use while having a passing conversation is << than the brain power people use while trying to solve a problem, or reason about engineering abstractions.
Ok got it never have a handsfree phone conversation while driving if it involves a lot of brainpower. Which is super subjective and id say talk to chatGPT to create an idea of yours and see if your mind changes on this topic ;). It sounds like you have not talked to conversational AI to create software yet. cheers
>the new era of swe will demand more and more long term business + product direction and relationship building skills
Why do you assume this to be the case? Look at your own company culture--has it not become increasingly siloed as people look to their own agents for most questions, tasks? What relationship skills are you building while talking to your chatbot all day?
>the trajectory leads us to all becoming mini-ceos directing our company of agents
Only if you completely misunderstand how business and economics works. The price of code is falling because it's turning into a commodity. The amount of people needed to produce it is drastically decreasing.
We consume more food than ever, but the % of people who work to produce food is far smaller than it was 150 years ago.
> has it not become increasingly siloed as people look to their own agents for most questions, tasks
doesn't feel like it, collaboration is more important than ever for high level direction even if nobody pair programs anymore. relationships feel more important than ever especially customer ones. theres no RL environment for competing in business
> We consume more food than ever, but the % of people who work to produce food is far smaller than it was 150 years ago.
Yes, because there is a limit to human desire for food, as we tend to get full. is there a limit to humanity's appetite for software? I would posit probably not, because software is infinitely abstractable and can be applied to any industry and domain
the price of code is falling but the value of differentiated ideas and market alpha is rising. human attention is scarce - as the mini-ceo with your army of agents, how will you compete with the other mini-ceos with their army of agents that can produce software at a whim?
> We consume more food than ever, but the % of people who work to produce food is far smaller than it was 150 years ago.
I’m not sure this analogy works. In fact I’d argue it’s the opposite. Food is an example of something that is relatively stable in terms of consumption per capita. There’s only so much food a person can eat, so if you make it easier to produce, then jobs producing it go down, as we’ve seen. But software isn’t like that at all. There’s essentially no end to how much software we can consume, and so as it becomes cheaper to produce, we’ll likely produce it in even larger quantities. Again, as we’ve seen.
> We consume more food than ever, but the % of people who work to produce food is far smaller than it was 150 years ago.
You need to normalize that with world population, or a bigger population and a smaller percentage could be the same number of people.
Of course it is still a bit simple, because the distribution will not be uniform per country.
Then we need to know why 150 and see how other numbers look like, ideally per region. My guess is industrial revolution but it is mixed with different timings and political events in different places.
Regarding
> What relationship skills are you building while talking to your chatbot all day?
Obviously talking to the client, or does your llm power itself on and starts working without any input from you?
There are a bajillion apps on the app store that get little to no recognition. Most software startups fail to find a foothold and go under. An uncountable number of FOSS projects have been seen by at most a handful of people, and even fewer who have used/cloned the code.
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