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How to scale intent, quality, and artistry with AI [video]

73 points · 24 comments · simonjgreen

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simonjgreen · 1791103380 · focus · HN ↗
Just stumbled on this on YouTube and was compelled to share. This is the best (relatively) short form piece I’ve seen on avoiding AI slop while simultaneously embracing the gifts of AI
1. [deleted] · 1791143554 · focus · HN ↗
  [deleted]
tmpz22 · 1791142985 · focus · HN ↗
Scaling things that dont have objective definitions?
mpalczewski · 1791144369 · focus · HN ↗
instead, human slop with that ted talk format.
all for the following. 1. give a shit. 2. build a system and codify it 3. review iterate and recreate 4. be creative
cloogshicer · 1791144955 · focus · HN ↗
What a shallow talk. Also the grandiosity was extremely annoying.
1. dang · 1791148502 · focus · HN ↗
  "Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."
  <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html">https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  1. cloogshicer · 1791154599 · focus · HN ↗
    I apologize. My comment was indeed shallow (ironically so).
devindotcom · 1791146077 · focus · HN ↗
With the caveat that I have not watched the video, the title itself rubs me the wrong way. Intent, quality, and artistry as I understand them are not things intended to "scale." You would not, for instance, as a musician, think "I made an album, yes. But how do I scale up to ten or a hundred albums?" You may well think "How can I scale my audience," but that is a different question entirely and not a matter of intent, quality, or artistry. Scaling art is, to me, a wrongheaded notion to begin with.
1. wellpast · 1791147582 · focus · HN ↗
  But what if… thats changing? What if some next generation is so properly trained to find repeating any song after a first play to be so tedious that the new art form is just an endless effusive scaled-out stream of the artist’s brain?
  1. akoboldfrying · 1791164975 · focus · HN ↗
    Well, that's possible, but I think it's very unlikely.
    Then again, if you had told me a few years ago that AI was right around the corner and that the first jobs it would take would be in graphic design, programming and advanced mathematics, I would have laughed in your face.
2. charlesabarnes · 1791147843 · focus · HN ↗
  Honestly I think I disagree. If you take photography as an art for example, the "scale" was pretty technology constrained for a long while.
  1. eloisius · 1791175182 · focus · HN ↗
    In what regard? How many pictures you can take, places you can be, how fast you can edit? Photographers all have an archive of thousands of photos. The great ones deliberate for months or years to produce a 60-picture photo book. I don’t see tech scaling that part of the process, because it’s fundamentally about their artistic vision, emotional impact, etc.
    Maybe you could use tech to scale bottlenecks of commercial photographers doing advertising or wedding shoots, but we’re talking about art.
3. layer8 · 1791151969 · focus · HN ↗
  I’m not sure what “scaling” is even supposed to mean here. The video’s thumbnail and description advocate against “zombie UI” (whatever that means as well — probably the typical AI slop-style UI). The pressing issue is that there is a dearth of good (great) UI, scaling or not, and that was already the case in the years before the use of LLMs. We need more instances of really good UI before we can talk about scaling.
4. psvv · 1791153007 · focus · HN ↗
  It's a good talk and worth watching. The title doesn't really reflect what the talk is about, which is more about how to not lose those things while using AI tools. The title could maybe even be described as a kind of trojan horse because the answer (to the question of how to scale), if you read between the lines, seems to be basically: don't. Slow down and be intentional about every detail, focus on the user, and don't lower your standards.
5. [deleted] · 1791153370 · focus · HN ↗
  [deleted]
TomGarden · 1791146981 · focus · HN ↗
The rules are the same as ever. The people who are the most obsessed with building the best possible things win.
And for what its worth, this talk could have been a lot better
chakintosh · 1791153023 · focus · HN ↗
She could have a great career in audiobook narration
Zarar_Ahmed · 1791155149 · focus · HN ↗
[dead]
KazaNLP · 1791156124 · focus · HN ↗
"...Use the good judgment of the human and scale with the AI" this is the way.
socializer · 1791160263 · focus · HN ↗
The problem isn't that you can't use AI to uplevel your creativity. It's that doing it slows you down, so you end up at a marked disadvantage, because others who just prompt "hey Claude, make me X" will produce 100 good enough slop-pieces in the time it takes you to finish one.
For the vast majority of paying customers or social media appreciators, that low-effort slop is sufficient. It's cheap, fast, and gets better with every passing month. So if your overriding goal is to scale to win in that marketplace, then you can only scale by giving up on quality and artistry. It's a race to the bottom.
I think the only way to win is to push back on the notion that you need to work on superhuman scale in the first place. You can differentiate yourself from AI by asserting you're human and that there's inherent value in human art. You'll find some customers willing to pay extra for that, just like some hire a woodworker instead of buying at Ikea. But it's going to be a tough market for artisans because fewer and fewer people are forced to buy the fruits of your intellectual labor.
In software engineering specifically, we gleefully decided that speed and cost are the only thing that matters and we celebrate "hey Claude, make me X" projects the same as we celebrate human ingenuity (case in point: HN front page). So for SWEs, even that "I'm a human" route may be unavailable.
1. imnotr0b0t · 1791163190 · focus · HN ↗
  I have to agree. This is especially noticeable in software; it’s impossible to distinguish manual work from the generated kind. There’s no point in appealing to the human element here, the buyer simply doesn’t see the difference. But fortunately, for now, we still have work.
2. howunfortunate · 1791163653 · focus · HN ↗
  Year after year, I keep seeing people talk about various races to the bottom.
  And yet all the things (in particular the technology things) just keep getting better and better?
  1. Delgan · 1791175754 · focus · HN ↗
    It's fascinating that our perceptions are so different. I feel the exact opposite.
    I don't see things getting any better. The term “enshitification” emerged these last years for a reason. The software I use is just as buggy as it used to be (if not more) and is more bloated than ever. Search engines are unusable. Let alone the "slop" that is generated everywhere, from artistic creation to books and blog posts.
  2. countWSS · 1791177454 · focus · HN ↗
    "Cheap-to-generate" mediocre content forces the floor expectation to rise, becoming the "minimum", which raises expectations of "current mediocre" further. Its largely invisible, slow process, where you can't gauge past "floor-level" expectation for content, because it implicitly assumed the 'current year' standard is the norm(while its evolution of expectations). In a few years, expectation for "mediocre slop" would likely include stuff that considered top-level today, but has some minor deficiencies and the "slop of years past" would be relegated to unusable/useless junk, like\ e.g. Stable Diffusion 1.5 images and ChatGPT2 texts.
3. RAWGOD · 1791175152 · focus · HN ↗
  [dead]
4. Scrapemist · 1791176779 · focus · HN ↗
  Don’t see how scaling mediocre content is a winning strategy. Quality will go up and we all win.
5. AlexCoventry · 1791178213 · focus · HN ↗
  Did you watch the video? Her point is to use AI's productivity gains to iterate faster on the creative aspects.
N_Lens · 1791177618 · focus · HN ↗
Her stuttering and unnatural pausing makes me feel like she's fighting existential dread while delivering this peppy "optimistic" brand strategy video.
vuurmot · 1791180483 · focus · HN ↗
Many people have no interest at all in art, if it is not used for connection with others. Scale all you want, humanity overwhelming rejects it.
The end result is that certain genres of art (digital paintings, video games, digital music) will die, and people will return to participating in the real world. The purveyors of artistic expression will flow back towards those who perform in the real world, with different recombinations of the genre, tending towards those that can allow for recognition of genuine expression.
AI will kill certain genres of art, and many more genres of art will be born.

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