Soon everything you see and hear will be built up through a myriad of AI models and pipelines.
The Facebook feed is AI; Google PageRank is AI; anti-spam filters are AI; A/B testing is AI; recommendation systems are AI.
It's been a long time since computers took over from humans with designing transistor layouts in CPUs — I was hearing about the software needing to account for quantum mechanics nearly a decade ago already.
It is so bizarre that some people view this as a positive outcome.
Your argument rhymes with:
- "Let's keep using horses. They're good enough."
- "Photography lacks the artistic merit of portrait art."
- "Electronic music isn't music."
- "Vinyl is the only way to listen to music."
- "Digital photography ruins photography."
- "Digital illustration isn't real illustration and tablets are cheating."
- "Video games aren't art."
- "Javascript developers aren't real programmers."
Though I'm paraphrasing, these are all things that have been said.
I bet you my right kidney that people will use AI to produce incredible art that will one day (soon) garner widespread praise and accolade.
It's just a tool.
1. (real illustration vs digital illustration)
2. (composing on sheet music vs composing in a DAW)
and
3. illustration vs Stable Diffusion
4. composing vs generative music models such as Suno
What's different is the wide disparity between input and output. Generally, art has traditionally had a closer connection between the "creator" and the "creation". Generative models have married two conventionally highly disparate mediums together, e.g. text to image / text to audio.
If you have zero artistic ability, you'd have about as much success using Photoshop as you would with traditional pencil and paper.
Whereas any doofus can type in the description of something along with words like "3D", "trending on artstation", "hyper-realistic,", and "4K" and then proceed to generate thousands of images in automatic1111 which they can flood DeviantArt with in a single day.
The same applies to music composition whether you are laboriously notating with sheet music or dropping notes using a horizontal tracker in a DAW like Logic. If you're not a musician, the fanciest DAW in the world won't make you one.
I spent 48 hours two weeks back (with only a few hours of sleep) making an AI film. I used motion capture, rotoscoping, and a whole host of other tools to accomplish this.
I know people who have spent months making AI music videos. People who painstakingly mask and pose skeletons. People who design and comp shots between multiple workflows.
These are tools.
The population of people who want to create art is higher than the people who have the classical skills. By sheer volume, the former will dominate the latter. And eventually most artists will begin to use AI tools when they realize that's what they are -- tools.
Many times this also happens with artists themselves. After a point, you are getting way more commissions than you can produce yourself, so you employ a small army of understudies that learn your techniques and make your pieces for you. So what you describe has existed for hundreds of years.
A short list could include old ones like Rembrandt or Rubens and a new ones like Jeff Koons or Damien Hirst.
Artists and "creative" people have long held a monopoly on this ability and are now finally paying the price now that we've automated them away and made their "valuable" skill a commodity.
I've seen a lot of schadenfreude towards artists recently, as if they're somehow gatekeeping art and stopping the rest of us from practicing it.
I really struggle to understand it; the barrier of entry to art is basically just buying a paper and pencil and making time to practice. For most people the practice time could be spent on many things which would have better economic outcomes.
> monopoly
Doesn't this term imply an absence of competition? There seems to be a lot of competition. Anyone can be an artist, and anyone can attempt to make a living doing art. There is no certification, no educational requirements. I'm sure proximity to wealth is helpful but this is true of approximately every career or hobby.
Tangentially, there seem to be positive social benefits to everyone having different skills and depending on other people to get things done. It makes me feel good when people call me up asking for help with something I'm good at. I'm sure it feels the same for the neighborhood handyman when they fix someone's sink, the artist when they make profile pics for their friends, etc. I could be wrong but I don't think it'll be entirely good for people when they can just have an AI or a robot do everything for them.
