Thread

'That's so AI ' What gen Alpha's biggest insult tells us

216 points · 323 comments · YeGoblynQueenne

keiferski · 1790255905 · focus · HN ↗
In the world of arts/media, I think AI basically only has a future as a hidden thing. Openly admitting that you used AI to make something will be used against you, in order to dismiss your work. For a lot of people/things, it already is - see Hank Green, or the daily comments about "I don't want to read what you didn't write."
Expect a massive marketing reversal in 6-12 months, when every "AI-powered" company removes the keyword from their home page.
1. orangedog · 1790256742 · focus · HN ↗
  I really doubt it. I think more and more people will get used to it and accept it. It's not going anywhere. The best artists and creators will figure out how to use tech which empowers them and then what will the rest of the artists and creatives do? Refuse to engage with modernity? I doubt it.
  It only takes a single project to show it works to get other people jumping on board. Some amount of gamers are pretty vocal about it (though I'm sure it's being used in most studios these days in some fashion). If a company creates a game which embraces the "slop" and has great assets on a fun game are people going to avoid it? If that works out, will companies following them avoid it? That's just not how people work.
  1. watwut · 1790257722 · focus · HN ↗
    > he best artists and creators will figure out how to use tech which empowers them
    But that is NOT the selling point of AI in relation to art. The selling point is "it will make all artists obsolete and unemployable". Literally. That is how Sora was sold too. It was not sold as tool for artists. It was sold as replacement for artist.
    If AI ends up as a tool for artists, then that tech failed on its creators terms.
    orangedog · 1790258000 · focus · HN ↗
    You're replacing some artist and empowering others. If a single creative can gen a 3 hour movie (we'll pretend it is high-quality), then they can do things which were previously impossible. Was it not marketed as a tool which enabled people to do more?
    watwut · 1790259368 · focus · HN ↗
    Again, that is not what either sales pitch was nor long term vision. It was sold LITERALLY with "hahahha artists are useless now, AI will replace them'.
    And quite a few on HN run that talking point too.
    > Was it not marketed as a tool which enabled people to do more?
    Oddly, no. I remeber it, because I found it weird. I found the open hostility toward creatives very noticeable. The way this campaign came across made me reject the "refuse to engage with modernity" style of arguments. If you run around insulting and taunting people, them rejecting you is not necessary rejection of modernity. It is rejection of insults and taunts targeted at them.
    mingus88 · 1790263127 · focus · HN ↗
    We know our society doesn’t value creative people. It never has, really. The greats of the classical era all had sponsors because it has never been workable for most people to earn their living in a creative field. Today you have to come from generational wealth pretty much.
    But also people have bad taste. AI music really only works on people who don’t critically listen to it. Most people just seem to want a catchy hook and the general structure of a pop song, and that’s how Spotify gets away with it.
    But you ask people to pay even $1 for a track they will listen to hundreds of times? No thanks.
    So people get what they deserve.
    watwut · 1790339547 · focus · HN ↗
    But that is entirely different claim. People do not want to pay an optional expenses - like paying an artist to paint a mural when you do not really have to. Or opting for piracy instead of buying a book or a movie. The rhetoric of companies and ai fans was not that. It was pure open hostility with "hahaha we will destroy those losers" basically. Their claim here is not about just about the market or really about the market. It came across as if the "obsoleteness" itself was the goal regardless of monetary gains/looses. And as if "people creating" were something negative that will finally be stopped.
    > But you ask people to pay even $1 for a track they will listen to hundreds of times? No thanks.
    People used to buy albums or listen to the radio for free. If anything, paying Spotify means that quite a lot of people pay more then before for music ... however it is spotify who benefits rather then artists.
    Just like with studios which used to have captured market and earn more then artists themselves.
    eli_gottlieb · 1790319066 · focus · HN ↗
    > Oddly, no. I remeber it, because I found it weird. I found the open hostility toward creatives very noticeable.
    Indeed, and we're now seeing similar hostility towards mathematicians, of all people. It's disgusting, honestly.
    throwaway_7274 · 1790337736 · focus · HN ↗
    Fat cat (checks notes) math professors have had it far too good for far too long. If they think they’re so smart, why didn’t they get a real job and raise venture funding for a scammy startup?
    eli_gottlieb · 1790359613 · focus · HN ↗
    Right? Like, God forbid someone work gruelingly hard at a stable job quietly and slowly advancing the state of human knowledge without seeking fame and fortune!
    ragequittah · 1790456884 · focus · HN ↗
    I follow AI quite closely and I have yet to see any hostility towards artists or mathematicians from anybody worth talking about (maybe some forum dwellers?). Nor have I ever seen any marketing or implications from big AI companies that says creative work or math is in any way useless or obsolete. The fact that AI can solve long unsolved math problems isn't hostility towards mathematicians.
  2. archagon · 1790267471 · focus · HN ↗
    How does AI “empower” artists…?
    orangedog · 1790268636 · focus · HN ↗
    It allows them to take on tasks they could not before.
    For example, creating a game where before you'd have to pay for assets or creating a movie to where you'd have to pay for a lot of various things. I gave an example earlier where I've watched vids people generated based on existing fiction. These are artists (you're still framing the shot, selecting dialogue, etc), and they could not have done this before; it would have been too expensive.
    Some artists get cut out of the loop but it allows small teams to do what was impossible. Is this not valid?
    archagon · 1790270000 · focus · HN ↗
    I would argue these are influencers and “content creators” cosplaying as artists, taking shortcuts and never bothering to hone their craft or cultivate their taste. End result is tons more low-effort content and outright spam in the world, not some creative golden era.
    And maybe film is different in some respects, but AI does not allow musicians, artists, or writers to do anything they could not do already. The only benefit is churning out mediocre content faster.
    _g0xr · 1790352426 · focus · HN ↗
    Tell that to Kane Parsons (The Backrooms). Or anyone who owns a smartphone. I'd rather watch a million youtube skits where all the actors are played by one person in different wigs than any attempt at passing off AI generated video as big budget special effects.
    The animated movie Flow won an Oscar, and that was made by a very small team and entirely in Blender.
    Fanvids and AMVs made by clever sampling and splicing have been a thing for a very long time, too.
    There are also a lot of games that exclusively use free or self-made assets.
    Money allows access to better tools and bigger teams. But replacing artist jobs with AI doesn't seem like a great way for artists to get money (or time to focus on art, for that matter).
    Generative AI, especially for video, also keeps getting more expensive, as AI companys' bills finally come due.
    boorang · 1790318607 · focus · HN ↗
    you don't need to learn blender anymore. you can talk with the ai and describe what you want and iterate. all of the software tools used in media are now accessible to creative but not necessarily technical people.
    esarbe · 1790336979 · focus · HN ↗
    Just describing what you want doesn't make you an artist. It makes you a client.
    Just iteratively refusing what a stochastic generative algorithm presents to you doesn't make you an artist. It makes you a client with attitude.
    defrost · 1790337502 · focus · HN ↗
    Jeff Koons, artist or client?
    * <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puppy_(sculpture)" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puppy_(sculpture)
    * <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Jackson_and_Bubbles" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Jackson_and_Bubbles
    etc.
    esarbe · 1790348813 · focus · HN ↗
    Apples, oranges.
    Koons didn't write a two paragraph description of his ideas and then handed it over to a porcelain factory that repeatedly tried to come up with something that fit the spec until Koons cried out "Yes, that's it! That's what I had in mind!"
    He drew sketches, built models, shaped prototypes, etc. He was an active participant in the creative process from the very start to the end, not just a client that checked in on what the artists were doing from time to time to give the thumbs up or thumbs down.
    archagon · 1790382517 · focus · HN ↗
    But also, many people consider Koons to be a hack. (He says his art has no intrinsic meaning and he mostly makes vapid balloon sculptures for very rich people.)
    orangedog · 1790342825 · focus · HN ↗
    I think this is just gatekeeping. If you are involved in the creative process - additive or subtractive, you are an artist.
    _g0xr · 1790352738 · focus · HN ↗
    Funny how I've only seen people make this kind of claim about AI, and never about people who commission art from artists.
    Pope Julius II did not paint the Sistine Chapel's ceilling. Michelangelo did. I cannot believe I have to say this.
    esarbe · 1790412425 · focus · HN ↗
    Exactly.
    If just "being involved" in the "creative process" is enough to be called an artist, then by that measure that includes the guys that are simply involved by having the money to patron the process. Maybe it also includes the guy delivering the pizza.
    boorang · 1790343728 · focus · HN ↗
    I mean i suppose it depends on if you think people using blender are artists. If you think the part that makes them creative is knowing to right click select blah do blah then I get your position. If you say "no, make the background fade out at this point, push the face to the foreground, and add some shadow behind", I really don't understand why knowing the specific keystrokes are the creative part.
    But I think you know that and you're just straw manning.
    edit- to be clear i'm talking about using existing software like logic pro, blender, etc. i'm not talking about generative AI.
    archagon · 1790382417 · focus · HN ↗
    A person using tools to make art is an artist (or craftsman). A person yelling directions at people or machines that make the actual art is a director, at best.
    esarbe · 1790412835 · focus · HN ↗
    Knowing the tools of your trade is what you makes a artist. It's not enough to know that you would like to have the shadow there and have the face pushed to the foreground, that's just being aware of the design space. To be an artist you also need to know how to navigate the design space - know how to use the colours, brushes, vertices - to actually arrive at the place you intend. That means that you know how to use the tools of your trade so that this stroke or infill completes the brow to create the gaze you were aiming for.
    Just selecting from a random sampling makes you a curator at best. You know where you want to go, but don't know how to do that. If luck is not in your favor, you will never arrive. And you're wholly dependent on luck to get there.
    boorang · 1790424783 · focus · HN ↗
    I appreciate you directly addressing what I was talking about. In my case, I'm an old school 90s wannabe rapper/producer and I used to make beats with old school drum machines, a sequential prophet 2000 sampler, and my friends MPC3000 sampler when I could get my hands on it. When music went into the full computer/MIDI programming phase I dropped out as I lost interest in it, for many of the same reasons that artists today will be facing with AI.
    Having never learned the computer tools, like Logic Pro, or whatever open source alternatives are available, I've been considering taking a crack back at it. I have no desire to learn these tools, but if I can say "ok move the kick 1/8 and double up the snare on measure 4" I may get back in the swing of things.
    Forced retirement at 50 has me looking for new hobbies.
    I'm not really worried about what anyone wants to call me, but I was just pointing out a legitimate use case for agentic AI in the arts.
  3. SubmarineClub · 1790286780 · focus · HN ↗
    > Refuse to engage with modernity?
    God I hope so! Modernity sucks.

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