No, this viewpoint is the only reason a shirt doesn't cost a month's wages. Weavers once had similar arguments, decrying machinery that made cloth. Imagine how many more video games and movies can be made when we don't need anywhere near as many artists as before. How many more diagrams in textbooks. How many extra illustrations for Wikipedia.
There are tremendous benefits to making art something anyone can get for dirt cheap.
> Imagine how many more video games and movies can be made when we don't need anywhere near as many artists as before. How many more diagrams in textbooks. How many extra illustrations for Wikipedia.
With the possible exception of Wikipedia illustrations, I wasn't aware we had a meaningful shortage of any of those things. On the contrary, there are more great video games and movies (and books, and TV shows, etc., etc.) already available than I could ever hope to get through in my lifetime.
GenAI in anything resembling its current form can only dilute these markets with worthless slop and make it harder for consumers to find actual worthwhile media made by and for humans. This problem will be compounded if it also makes creative careers less viable for humans.
> On the contrary, there are more great video games and movies (and books, and TV shows, etc., etc.) already available than I could ever hope to get through in my lifetime.
As someone who has a very specific taste in video games, I beg to differ. If you happen to exist in the space targeted by AAA or if you don't have strong preferences for what you get out of an indie game the status quo is fine, but it's been a while since I've found a game I hadn't played before that scratches the itch.
Automation allows what's popular to become extremely cheap and what's niche to become possible.
Right now automation allows neither of those things. The best you're going to get is existing games reskinned with AI slop assets---the new shovelware.
In some hypothetical future world where GenAI content really is as novel and worthwhile as content made by humans, this will be a different conversation. Until then, I doubt it's going to satisfy even the tiny minority of people who literally want to play the same game, watch the same movie, read the same book, etc. over and over again until they die. But it certainly has the potential to severely damage the overall quality of the media landscape in the way I described, because people who care about money more than quality are in the driver's seat.
To be clear, I'm not envisioning complete automation—I'm envisioning a human game designer using these tools to make building out an idea much faster and with lower risk.
> No, this viewpoint is the only reason a shirt doesn't cost a month's wages.
But that shirt would last you decades with good maintenance, because it was a quality product that was made to be repaired by other craftspeople throughout it's service life (or even just yourself!). Now we have can have hundreds of shirts for that same money but all of them suck, are made cheaply, fall apart after a couple of years if we're lucky, and are made by people who can't afford to buy them in a country we've never seen. How is this an improvement in literally any way, apart from it makes fast fashion companies shitloads of money? It's worse for the people making the clothes, wearing the clothes, and selling the clothes. It's worse for the environment because now we're making and destroying millions of articles of clothing, not to mention shipping it here and there and everywhere. And, for all that, we still have people who don't have enough fucking clothing.
So modernity has eliminated my need to spend time looking after clothes? That is a big win. Not having to put time into repair and maintenance is a huge improvement. It has eliminated my need to be careful with my clothes? That is also a huge win.
My grandmother used to spend hours at a time repairing socks. It is a huge win that nobody knows how to do that anymore, as time has value.
> Now we have can have hundreds of shirts for that same money
Even if we accept the decades of life for an old shirt, you only need tens of shirts to match its lifetime, so this is an order of magnitude reduction in cost.
> are made by people who can't afford to buy them in a country we've never seen
So? Plenty of employees cannot afford what their employer produces. And it is a step up from where they were before. We freed up more capable people in our own country to do more productive things than made clothing.
You are right on the environmental part.
> And, for all that, we still have people who don't have enough fucking clothing.
Where would that be? Even the poorer African countries are chaffing at how much clothing is being dumped there.
So the main loser is the environment. As a customer, I am otherwise a tremendous winner. And when AI takes over most mundane art, like animating instructional videos or making logos, I will also be a tremendous winner.
> So the main loser is the environment. As a customer, I am otherwise a tremendous winner. And when AI takes over most mundane art, like animating instructional videos or making logos, I will also be a tremendous winner.
So as long as whatever shit that's burning the world benefits you in your life time, irrespective of the state of it when it's time for you to hand it over to your children, you're good with it.
Got it. I mean that makes sense, who needs a long-term stable biosphere when there's money to be made. Jesus Christ...
Weavers weren't concerned about "passion" for cloth, they were concerned about their economic ability to compete with machines that required huge capital outlays and centralized profit at the expense of the middle and lower class workers.
Sounds like we're repeating history then. If it were just about passion then artists wouldn't worry about AI because it doesn't deprive them of their hobby. It's only a problem because it takes away from their income.
Another take on this point, the race to the bottoming of shirts has been a disaster ecologically and has fostered a throwaway culture where people don't take care or pride in an item of clothing. There's benefits on reducing the barrier to entry, but profound downsides to it as well.
> Imagine how many more video games and movies can be made when we don't need anywhere near as many artists as before.
We have several lifetimes’ supply of good art in practically every medium already, even relatively new ones. Recording and mechanical reproduction have already enormously devalued creative talent and left us with a glut.
Harming the value of artistic talent and skill even further, to get us more of something we’re already drowning in, isn’t really an improvement.
Most art is not culture either. It is mundane movie shots, textbook drawings, logos, etc. Tailored shirts have not gone away. Custom fabric patterns have not gone away.
All that has disappeared is every shirt being tailored, custom, and expensive.
I make art for pleasure and the magical post creation beholding of what has emerged - it's a serious high :) That is of course a private concern, and that said, in my mind there are good points on both side of this argument. It is not a black/white issue.
To amplify my OP, there are certain intangibles regarding cultural artifacts which are strictly non-utilitarian. Culture is expression & is a product of the human psyche (of a coherent civilization). And past will affect the future. Culture minimally is a social tonic, maximally informs societal character.
The germinal question in context of 'high culture' (arts and letters) is whether the omission of the 'bar to entry' that requires acquisition of skill, dedication, and 'a development of a vocabulary' (etc) will have a degenerative long term effect on high culture, given that cultural development is generational and progressive, and the process of becoming an artist is a filter.
You can be passionate about this advancement without placing profits first.
> Imagine how many more video games and movies can be made...
Again, you can do this with passion and without placing profit first
> There are tremendous benefits to making art something anyone can get for dirt cheap
I disagree strongly here. Art has value in large part because most people cannot produce it. I like stories, but not everyone has a good story to tell. When the story is AI-generated, there isn't a consciousness behind it to give it the passion required for good stories.
> You can be passionate about this advancement without placing profits first.
Given the riots inspired by this machinery, I don't believe this is possible.
(Arguably also communism, but there was a lot going on back then).
> I disagree strongly here. Art has value in large part because most people cannot produce it. I like stories, but not everyone has a good story to tell. When the story is AI-generated, there isn't a consciousness behind it to give it the passion required for good stories.
I'm not sure either way on this. Possibly a simultaneous agree-and-disagree?
I agree that art may be a "peacock's tail" where the difficulty is the point, and making it cheap makes it cease to be art. In this case, some hypothetical AI which everyone agrees is totally conscious and also that it creates works of exquisite and sublime wonder, still won't be "art".
But the other view of art is that it may also be simply "nice stuff"; if so, then the ability to discern good art from bad art is sufficient, even if you regard an LLM as little more than "fancy autocomplete" — it doesn't need consciousness* of its own, the consciousness of the user is sufficient.
I suspect there's a lot of people in both groups.
* by whichever of the many meanings you intend for that
There are tremendous benefits to making art something anyone can get for dirt cheap.