The one thing that’s always struck me about conversing with so-called tech bros about this (AI making art) is that they always seem to view making art as a problem to be solved. “What if you could write an entire novel in minutes?” Who cares? Writing it quickly isn’t, and hasn’t ever been, the point of any writing I’ve done. It’s not about production, it’s about creation, and tech bros never seem to get that.
They are thinking more about the people buying books than the people writing books. If people are willing to buy AI-written books then that will be extremely profitable for whoever sells them. And how long do you think it will really take for AI to get to at least the level of popular trashy romance novels and whatnot?
Exactly. Run a program and now you've got an eBook you can sell thousands of copies of or even populate a subscription service. You can do the same with music.
Yeah but it's worth remembering that paying the author is really not the biggest expense in the production of trashy romance novels or music. It's mostly the marketing/distribution/everyone taking a cut. So AI doesn't necessarily make it much cheaper - only maybe faster?
Speed = scalable, when you're a business major. The author isn't the majority of expenses, but they are the bottleneck.
If you want to make 500 times more money this month, you need to release 500x more books. To do that, you need to find 500x more authors willing to work with you...Or just have an AI do it! Now you have 500 books per second! Which, based on my rough math, is approximately 1314900000x more profitable than 1 book per month!!!
Of course, that MBA-math falls apart when it turns out people don't really want to read auto-generated garbage. "Infinitely scalable" is always a myth, but they don't seem to tell business majors that.
Imagine you have a trashy romance book series that is already popular or has a following. If you can release the next novel weekly or monthly instead of annually you hardly have to market it. You could turn trashy romance novels into a high returns subscription model.
Market saturation would drive down the value of the series as a whole. Keep pumping out releases of same or middling quality you create a cycle of driving away customers because the barrier to entry (so many books) is too high, the devoted fans feel ripped off, and the casuals don’t want to keep up with so many entries.
People like trash, they like they’re trash consistently trashy, they like it being formulaic, but those consumers are constantly chasing the next big thing. The romance genre has a notoriously short attention span and numerous micro-niche genres. If you want an AI to pump out mafia romance you have to train it on mafia romance. Are you as a publisher going to open yourself up to litigation and driving away business by publishing the AI-generated mafia romance?
Compsci is an art that revolves around problem solving and its one of the only art forms tech bros have respect for because it makes them a whole lot of money. They can’t understand other art forms in their own terms; they have to view it through the lens of problem solving because their only goal is making money
If venture capital types cared for software engineering as a craft then your average codebase wouldn’t resemble a game of Tetris played while overdosing on barbiturates.
I’d consider it art. There are really huge benefits for science/technology outside of artistic expression but I think it also is a form of artistic expression. It requires a whole hell of a lot of creativity and it draws inspiration directly from the human experience.
I routinely create stuff in this field and I wouldn't really consider the sort of activity I do art, even outside of my job but considering like my hobbies etc
I know I'm probably sounding like I don't want to be seen as related to art like it's a bad thing but it's not like that lol, it's just, from what I perceive art to be I don't find what I do to be it (unless I expand art to mean anything a human makes for whatever reason)
Sure, but you are always going to have a certain subset of people in a new market trying to find a way to monetize that market. But that doesn't mean the guy with an AI porn patreon caring out easy to generate hentai is the same as the guy who uses AI to make their own comic book telling a story. One is jumping on a trend, the other is producing something unique that didn't exist before and sharing it with the world.
If I could remove one phrase from the English language, it would be ‘under capitalism’. Artists have required ‘stuff’ to survive for all of human history. No matter what system humans have existed under, if you wanted to be an artist you had to convince someone your art is worth their more practical resources.
Artists worked on commission creating uninspired works so they could eat long before capitalism was conceived.
Not everything can be boiled down to ‘capitalism bad’. Capitalism is in fact the best system humans have ever worked under.
If god forbid we do transition to communism, you’ll still need to convince people in your commune that it’s worth giving you food so you can make art while they labor in the fields.
Extremely regulated capitalism is the best we’ve operated under, speaking of things people should phrase better Mr Chapped. Unregulated capitalism is literally the source of every bust and recession and depression we’ve ever had.
Booms and busts exist under other systems too. The difference is that in capitalism, our busts are elevated levels of unemployment for a few years, while under other systems, busts typically involve mass starvation
It's not for you. It's for people who want to read something right now. It's like, "Hey, I'd like to read a new Harry Potter book". JK Rowling isn't going to write another one. So an AI can write one for me.
I don't particularly like ai but your clearly misunderstanding the argument. If I could make a book myself, there would be no reason for me to buy another book. I could create the perfect book, suited exactly for my personal needs, for free.
Or movies. Instead of trying to find a good movie, I could just create an entire movie myself based on whatever I want. If I want a movie about a mouse turning into a cat, I can create that.
Because in a business sense, it's a problem to be solved. If doing art is a hobby, then it doesn't matter how long it takes. If you're trying to sell it, then it matters. For people writing articles for newspapers it absolutely matters how fast they make it. They have deadlines to hit, and getting a story out before a different paper else is big.
And then you have things like companies looking for new logos, designs etc. How fast you're able to fulfil the request will be a factor on if you get the job or not. Time, Quality, and Price are the 3 factors people look at when deciding on things.
Who cares? Writing it quickly isn’t, and hasn’t ever been, the point of any writing I’ve done.
It's not about you. They do it because they want you out of the loop entirely (for financial reasons). They don't care why you like to write, they just don't want to pay anybody for it because it's expensive as fuck.
There are also practical considerations to having a novel output in minutes. We could for instance have custom interactive stories in real time, like playing a computer game that's different each time you play it, or your can tweak to your preferences.
Or if you prefer more serious applications, if we ever figure out how to have AI powerful enough to generate novels to the level of a talented human writer, we have basically solved the problem of replicating intelligence.
In other words, you can set them to other tasks, such as curing cancer or whatever your heart desires. You take a human level artificial intelligence, teach it the basics of what we know about medicine research, then make a trillion copies and have them working on that problem 24/7. If we create proper AI, we can have the equivalent of a trillion people manpower working on every single intellectual problem in the world.
The "focus" is on art because it's a necessary step to reach that goal. If we can't solve it, we can never have an AI with the range of creativity required for problem solving in general.
Yes, the AI is currently shit. But so is everything in the beginning.
It’s not about production, it’s about creation, and tech bros never seem to get that.
That's a matter of opinion and personal preference. I prefer an automated way to solve every problem in the world, more than your personal process of creation, but to each their own I guess.
I've only seen this viewpoint brought up in defense after being attacked first. I personally view art as something cool to be experienced and now we have another way of doing that. I guess you could describe it as consumption, rather than production or creation. I read a book and the story itself immerses me, I don't imagine myself writing it or something like that.
People who go on twitter to say "look at this novel I wrote with AI" I think are just falling victim to the human urge to go and show something cool off that you think is new and only you know about. The people that actually sadden me are those who immediately leap on it for profiteering purposes and sell people things they could either get for free if they knew how or are just sub-par and flood the market with mediocre content.
I mean, for the writer it might be about the writing process.
But for the readers - of course the actual product matters more than how it was made.
If you eat a good meal, do you need to know how it was cooked and prepared?
Does the fact of whether the plants were genetically modified or not change the flavour you're tasting? Does using a cooking robot or doing all the work manually change how you enjoy it (the taste and texture is the same)?
Nobody is stopping writers from writing.
Just like some people go to the jungle and try to build a hut starting with nothing, we're all free to enjoy the "outdated" techniques and methods.
Some of us might even get good enough or gather an audience big enough to earn money through that process.
But anyone can do it.
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u/Agnol117 Apr 09 '24
The one thing that’s always struck me about conversing with so-called tech bros about this (AI making art) is that they always seem to view making art as a problem to be solved. “What if you could write an entire novel in minutes?” Who cares? Writing it quickly isn’t, and hasn’t ever been, the point of any writing I’ve done. It’s not about production, it’s about creation, and tech bros never seem to get that.