[anigbrowl]

I'm less than enthused about all these products. Are the results impressive? Very. But it's to the point where they're making a lot of creative endeavors financially worthless, which is eventually going to mean fewer and fewer people develop any of those skills.

Cornucopians naturally point to all the many new possibilities and argue that this is a net benefit for humanity, but in general people make such arguments about things they perceive as a net benefit for themselves; with huge ML models you get text, art, music or whatever manufactured on demand, and you get to feel creative in the sense of museum and gallery curators being adjacent to historical or artistic items. The problem is that you can feel like this all day, but you won't be any more able to perform absent the aid of a digital prosthesis.

It's very 'don't ask questions, just consume product and get excited for next product.'

[marssaxman]

> The problem is that you can feel like this all day, but you won't be any more able to perform absent the aid of a digital prosthesis.

All tools are prostheses. Mastery of a tool incorporates it into your proprioception. Do you think about the motions your fingers need to make, when you type? No, of course not - you think about the words you are writing, and they appear. AI tools will be the same, once we get used to them; we will be able to think about the things we are creating at a higher level of abstraction.

Once upon a time there were workrooms full of skilled artisans who spent their days copying books by hand. Along came movable type, and that creative endeavor became financially worthless. Today practically nobody has those skills. A loss? Yes... but do we care? Not really; we'd rather let the 'mechanical prosthesis' of the printing press handle what now seems to us to be the rote work of book production.

[anigbrowl]

You completely missed the point, and ended up equating creative innovation with manufacturing.

Most copyists were not illuminators. Typing does not preclude other forms of writing (eg with a pencil, which I use almost as much as a keyboard), and typing is not a creative endeavor to begin with, unless you want to get into ASCII art.

There's a difference between generative and the merely productive. You could spend 10 years using AI picture generators, and it will not develop your ability to draw a picture on paper. Making selections as a consumer is not the same as creating something, for the same reason that food appreciators in a recent aren't halfway to being chefs.

[marssaxman]

I understood your point to be a concern that skills we value today will become marginalized or lost if the majority of people choose the new automated tools instead of doing it 'by hand'. You worry that people will just consume output, instead of engaging in creative expression. Did I misunderstand?

My point was that it does not matter whether you can "perform absent the aid of a digital prosthesis", because digital tools are not fundamentally different than any of the other kinds of tools humans have developed throughout our history. Creativity is always a function of the tools available. Creative thought is always shaped and enabled by the capabilities one can draw on. Different skills come and go as they are needed.

When the camera came along, the art of representational painting and illustration lost the importance it previously had. Why hire someone to spend hours making a picture when the camera can do it better, quicker, and cheaper? But of course painting and drawing did not go away, they just evolved into something else. Meanwhile a whole new creative form developed on top of the new technology of photography.

A different analogy: once upon a time, making music involved years of practice, learning to play an instrument, understanding how music works, memorizing compositions. Then records came along... and a few decades later, someone invented DJing. Is a DJ a musician? Not in the traditional way, they're just playing recordings of other musicians after all! But a whole new art form developed at a higher level of abstraction, looping and mixing recordings into a seamless performance.

I believe the same will happen with tools like DALL-E and midjourney. Some creative practices will diminish, because the robots will be good enough, and it won't make sense to have humans do those jobs anymore. But those skills won't disappear; they'll just become specialized, and people will find new strange creative things to do with them. Meanwhile whole new kinds of creative expression will emerge on top of the new AI tools. They won't look like the skills we value today, but people won't stop making creative use of their environments, so they will eventually become new disciplines as well-developed as anything we have today.