AI is never going to stop people from creating new things. Will it make it harder or different to make a living? Sure, but ai isn't the first thing to do that, nor will it be the last.
But making a living off of your art is incredibly, incredibly difficult, and always has been. If AI doubled, or halved, your chances of winning the lottery, it still wouldn't really change your odds of winning.
I concede that I don't have data to base this on but there's plenty of anecdata. AI companies brazenly steal artists' work and reproduce it, and automate its production, without those artists' permission. How is this going to make things not worse for artists? I think you're saying it doesn't matter because it's a drop in the ocean. Well, how did we get to the ocean? How did artists' work get devalued? Maybe it's all the technological advances that everyone brings up in those conversations, to justify the use of yet another one to do the work that until recently only human artists could do: photography, typography, CAD, computer graphics etc etc. Maybe the more we automate the more we take away from the value of artists' work, and that's why we're where we are now, where if you're an artist, you better find a day job?
I used to write a lot as a teenager. Hours and hours spent writing and overwriting, and correcting, and re-writing, drafts upon drafts. In Greek, mind, because that's my native language. I once passed some drafts to a big-name literary critic who was controversial for having said once that Kazantzakis had no talent; and he told me "write! Because you have talent!". He told me I got talent and he called Kazantzakis talent-less. What.
But of course I didn't become a professional writer. I didn't even try. I mean I kind of almost half-tried but it was obvious I could never write what I wanted (sci-fi and horror mainly with a smattering of fantasy) and still make a living. Not least because it was all written in Greek and those genres don't have a huge following in Greece. Or didn't back when I was a teenager, it's probably a bit better now. But still not enough to make a living out of. I could tell. Bad idea. Find a day job.
And then I got a job ...writing. Code. Ahem.
But I mean I'm bitching about the fact that we keep making all this new tech and none of it seems to make the life of artists any easier, and why not? Don't we all want to enjoy good art? Who's going to make it? Even if we replace human artists now, who's going to train the AI of the future to make new art, once the recombinations of the art they're already trained on stops being interesting? We enjoy novelty, right?
We have to draw the line somewhere with art, of course, and that usually comes down to a combination of what consumers value, and broader perceived cultural merit. Nobody really cares about the well-being of artists who specialize in making pretty paper airplanes, or drawing pictures using only the MSPaint pencil brush.
I think the audience, not the tools, deserve the most scrutiny here. Look around at this very thread, and all the people defending what the LLM wrote. Their feelings can't be argued with. But they make me feel sad and alienated, because I see a vast difference, so vast and so obvious, and they see none at all.
In the future, perhaps people will enjoy LLM work -- genuinely enjoy it -- as much as I've enjoyed Vonnegut or more. It may be the inevitable result of a broader cultural shift away from reading and writing. I guess with time, maybe we'll find out how valuable it actually is to have a strong command of one's language... I imagine, at least, people today are much better at other things to compensate.
Gosh! Thanks!
>> In the future, perhaps people will enjoy LLM work -- genuinely enjoy it -- as much as I've enjoyed Vonnegut or more. It may be the inevitable result of a broader cultural shift away from reading and writing. I guess with time, maybe we'll find out how valuable it actually is to have a strong command of one's language... I imagine, at least, people today are much better at other things to compensate.
I guess there's been a cultural shift away from literacy and towards technological prowess and science, at least in the anglophone world in the last couple decades? It seems so to me but I think it might be because I, myself, turned to tech and science, and away from literature, in that time.
What I remember from my school years is that most kids treated reading and writing as a chore. If I think about it, besides myself, there were just one or maybe two other kids I knew who read books other than what the school recommended, and for our own pleasure. I was the only kid I knew who wrote *.
Which is weird because, at a certain level, everyone can write, right? Like, at a certain level, everyone can sing, and if they really put themselves into it, most people can sing pretty decently after all. I would think it's the same with writing. There's plenty of people who write stuff, in the press, in books, online, for movies or theater etc. I always thought that was the main weakness of choosing a career as a writer: you do not have a moat. And like you suggest, taste is subjective so sometimes all you have to do to make a living as a writer is to capture the zeitgeist or get lucky.
Take J. K. Rowling as an example. I've absolutely read all of the Harry Potter series, but the writing is atrocious, the plot is trite and the world-building is unoriginal and shallow. Yet she's ... what, the best selling author ever or something like that? Like I say way above, people really want to read good stories. Or even not that good stories.
Will that change? I really don't think so. But will authors be replaced with chatbots? Will we all end up asking our favourite chatbot to generate a story like we want it? That makes me sad, too, and I feel like something will be lost that we don't want lost. But ... who knows. I also think we've lost something the way everyone is constantly on their phones now, but that's how the world works. Things change. Sometimes it's hard to see that they really change for the better.
__________________
* Although other kids were possibly at it but where too shy to share. I was... not a shy kid.
