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There's no point at which turning your brain off will work

204 points · 156 comments · robin_reala

  1. dzink · · focus · HN ↗
    You are a photographer from the olden age. Taking a photo back then took forever. You are standing on a hill trying to get the perfect picture of a sunset. You measure and sort and calculate angles and light. A tourist stands next to you with an high-speed iphone auto-settings camera. They spin around and get thousands of photos from different angles while you are thinking and measuring your one shot. That’s what AI does. It gives you many shots at the same problem. The thinking guy with the one approach will likely lose a photo competition to one of the accidentally better shots of the person who tried a lot more. Make and filter now may be a better approach than overthink and try only once.
    1. ssfdg · · focus · HN ↗
      I don't buy this analogy and I think it takes a depressingly reductive view of creativity. In both cases, the photographers had to take the time to go to a place, see a view they thought was worth capturing, operated their equipment to get a shot, and then had enough discernment to recognize which of their final products were worth something. Both the traditional photographer and the modern photographer can create images of value in different ways.

      If you want to shoehorn AI into this analogy at all then no one is even bothering going hiking at this point, let alone seeing anything worth capturing. It would just vomit up endless permutations of statistically average images that look like the kind of pictures people take of landscapes.

      1. augment_me · · focus · HN ↗
        Well yeah and then you can be liberated by the fact that maybe getting to the landscape and experiencing it and not taking the photo was the goal all along.

        You can be creative and take the photo for your sake but at the same time accept that you can generate 1000s of them and many of the generated ones will be more liked by the general public than your creative one.

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