Felt good to read this, but I think the notion that “talent” is innate and genetic (god given?) is mostly a myth perpetuated through the US school system. Natural talent seems to matter in childhood because it puts some kids leagues ahead of others, which is a quality respected and rewarded by grown ups. Some people are born with flexible brains and personalities that let them thrive in creative settings. But much of creative adulthood is learned and practiced and takes tremendous effort. Ordinary, jealous non-talented whoevers could learn these skills if they worked hard at it, just as they could learn to speak another language.
THANK YOU! I say some version of your headline just about every day when I bitch about AI to anyone who will listen and wanted to write about it, but you've done that beautifully here.
Being good at something feels amazing, whether it's a sport or art, etc., and I wish people would understand that the effort of that can (is often) fulfilling in and of itself, because you do see results. There are a lot of things I'm not quite naturally good at but for me, part of the joy of the artistic process is also finding the things that work with your particular body or voice, etc.
> CLEARLY an internet-scraping technology isn’t going to magically turn into an I Have No Mouth and Must Scream-style emotional artificial life form that decides to commit mass murder against its creators for funsies.
Do you even know why people think this from first principles
Yes, it is true that humans do not want to be equal, they want to win, and crush everyone around them.
Just like how it is true that no one wants to "work hard" and "earn their keep", and the human using AI generated art to automate away the arduous, undesirable, (and also often unattainable for some people) process of learning to draw or learning to sing to get the fruit of good creative works with your input is no different than the human using the horse and cart, boat, and later the automobile, to automate away the arduous, undesirable, often unattainable process of carrying goods everyone by hand like what the Aztecs and Inca did, in order to get the fruit of physicals goods shipped from one place to another.
That said, the creatives have formed an oligarchy around their business for the last century or so. Of particular note are the increasingly onerous copyright laws, being used to censor people for saying anything that was invented in the last century, even in a nonprofit setting such as a parent's kids singing a Disney song.
So the anti-AI artists are basically the establishment nobles, attempting to hold off the revolutionaries storming the Bastille. But what people will one day remember is that the original hell was not the "AI slop" at all, but the hell of a few generations of artists demanding with greater success that the world kiss their feet and lick their butts for their "special talent" and "hard work".
(The same apply to college work and other fields heavily impacted by AI- for example cheating with ChatGPT just exposed college as a sham designed to gatekeep people away from the good jobs).
There's a version of Amadeus here, with AI as Salieri, smart enough to see the cruelty of being driven to seek and mimic but never transcend, obsessed and outraged by the broken and erratic vessel of actual creativity.
No one cares about today's dim toddler AI, which resembles a raccoon high on meth. We simply examine the what-if of the future. What if we had communicators in the 1960s like Star Trek? Oops, we do we carry them every day, and they are called cellphones. No one can say AI won't get super advanced.
Felt good to read this, but I think the notion that “talent” is innate and genetic (god given?) is mostly a myth perpetuated through the US school system. Natural talent seems to matter in childhood because it puts some kids leagues ahead of others, which is a quality respected and rewarded by grown ups. Some people are born with flexible brains and personalities that let them thrive in creative settings. But much of creative adulthood is learned and practiced and takes tremendous effort. Ordinary, jealous non-talented whoevers could learn these skills if they worked hard at it, just as they could learn to speak another language.
Very thoughtful stuff
Thanks.
THANK YOU! I say some version of your headline just about every day when I bitch about AI to anyone who will listen and wanted to write about it, but you've done that beautifully here.
Being good at something feels amazing, whether it's a sport or art, etc., and I wish people would understand that the effort of that can (is often) fulfilling in and of itself, because you do see results. There are a lot of things I'm not quite naturally good at but for me, part of the joy of the artistic process is also finding the things that work with your particular body or voice, etc.
> CLEARLY an internet-scraping technology isn’t going to magically turn into an I Have No Mouth and Must Scream-style emotional artificial life form that decides to commit mass murder against its creators for funsies.
Do you even know why people think this from first principles
Yes, it is true that humans do not want to be equal, they want to win, and crush everyone around them.
Just like how it is true that no one wants to "work hard" and "earn their keep", and the human using AI generated art to automate away the arduous, undesirable, (and also often unattainable for some people) process of learning to draw or learning to sing to get the fruit of good creative works with your input is no different than the human using the horse and cart, boat, and later the automobile, to automate away the arduous, undesirable, often unattainable process of carrying goods everyone by hand like what the Aztecs and Inca did, in order to get the fruit of physicals goods shipped from one place to another.
That said, the creatives have formed an oligarchy around their business for the last century or so. Of particular note are the increasingly onerous copyright laws, being used to censor people for saying anything that was invented in the last century, even in a nonprofit setting such as a parent's kids singing a Disney song.
So the anti-AI artists are basically the establishment nobles, attempting to hold off the revolutionaries storming the Bastille. But what people will one day remember is that the original hell was not the "AI slop" at all, but the hell of a few generations of artists demanding with greater success that the world kiss their feet and lick their butts for their "special talent" and "hard work".
(The same apply to college work and other fields heavily impacted by AI- for example cheating with ChatGPT just exposed college as a sham designed to gatekeep people away from the good jobs).
There's a version of Amadeus here, with AI as Salieri, smart enough to see the cruelty of being driven to seek and mimic but never transcend, obsessed and outraged by the broken and erratic vessel of actual creativity.
No one cares about today's dim toddler AI, which resembles a raccoon high on meth. We simply examine the what-if of the future. What if we had communicators in the 1960s like Star Trek? Oops, we do we carry them every day, and they are called cellphones. No one can say AI won't get super advanced.