[bayindirh]

So you're saying that, we should stop pursuing art and prose? Because when you fine tune midjourney with 30 or so images of an artist, it can create any image with the artist's style.

You removed the value and authenticity that artist in 30 minutes, you applauded it, and defended that it should be the norm.

OK then, we can close down all entertainment business, and generate everything with AI, because it can mimic styles, clone sounds, animate things with gaussian splats, and so on.

Maybe we can hire coders to "code" films? Oh sorry. ChatGPT can do that too. So we need a keypad then, only the most wealthy can press. Press 1 for a movie, 2 for a new music album, 3 for a new book, and so on.

We need 10 buttons or so, as far as I can see. Maybe I can ask ChatGPT 4 to code one for me.

[gedy]

> Because when you fine tune midjourney with 30 or so images of an artist, it can create any image with the artist's style.

Artists style is not copyrightable, at least in the US.

And if they changed that because of "AI"? My word, the lawsuits that would arise between artists...

[bayindirh]

Doesn't matter. You pay the artist for their style of rendering things. Consider XKCD, PHD Comics, Userfriendly, etc. At least 50% of the charm is the style, remaining 50% is the characters and the story arc.

You can't copyright style of a Rolex, but people pay a fortune to get the real deal. Same thing.

> My word, the lawsuits that would arise between artists...

Artists imitate/copy artists as a compliment, at least in illustration and comics world. Unless you do it in bad faith, I don't think artists gonna do that. Artists have a sense of humor to begin with, because art is making fun of this world, in a sense.

[beernutz]

No, you pay them for the finished product. The STYLE is independent. Lots of artists have similar styles. They don't all pay each other for copying their styles.

[bayindirh]

Every artist has their own style, because it's their way of creating the product.

Pixar, Disney and Dreamworks have different styles, same for actors, writers, and designers, too. You can generally tell who made what by reading, looking, listening, etc.

I can recognize a song by Deep Purple or John Mayer or Metallica, just by their guitar tone, or their mastering profile (yes, your ear can recognize that), in a couple of seconds.

If style was that easy, we could have 50 Picassos, 200 John Mayers, 45 Ara Gulers (A photographer) which you can't tell them apart, but it doesn't work that way.

XKCD took a couple of guest artists because of personal reasons. It was very evident, even if the drawing style was the same.

People, art, and hand made things are much more complex than it looks. Many programmers forget because everything is rendered with their favorite font, but no two hand-made thing is ever the same. Eat the same recipe from two different cooks, even if you measure the ingredients independently and give them beforehand, you'll have different tastes.

Style is a reflection of who you are. You can maybe imitate it, but you can't be it.

Heck, even two people implementing the same algorithm in the same programming language doesn't write the same thing.

[nkohari]

> Style is a reflection of who you are. You can maybe imitate it, but you can't be it.

Isn't this an argument that AI-generated artwork will never be more than a lesser facsimile? That'd suggest that human-made works will always be more sought-after, because they're authentic.

[bayindirh]

It'll be, and human made things will always be better and more sought-after, however capitalism doesn't work that way.

When the replacements become "good enough", it'll push the better things because of being cheaper and 90% being there. I have some hand-made items and they're a treat to hold and use. They perform way better than their mass produced ones, they last longer, they feel human, and no, they're not inferior in quality. In fact it's the opposite, but most of them are not cheap, and when you want to maximize profits, you need to reduce your costs, ideally to zero.

[Wissenschafter]

"So you're saying that, we should stop pursuing art and prose?", no, it becomes a hobby like any other. People still sew for fun.

[bayindirh]

Great, hold on, I'm calling Hollywood to tell that all they do is a hobby now.

...and the writers' guild, too.

[crazygringo]

Well obviously AI isn't at the level of replacing Hollywood yet.

But once it is? I mean, yeah, it'll replace Hollywood.

People will tell Netflix, "hey I want a move about X in the style of Y and I want Z to star in it", and bam -- your own bespoke movie.

I mean, once the capability's there, it's just inevitable. And yeah -- acting will become a hobby, just like sewing is today.

[bayindirh]

Honestly, that'll be boring. I don't want to be a star of a movie, that's not what pulls me in.

I want to see what the person has imagined, what the story carries from the author, what the humans in it added to it and what they got out of it.

When I read a book, I look from another human's eyes, with their thoughts and imagination. That's interesting and life-changing actually. Also, the author's life and inner world leaks into the thing they created.

The most notable example for me is Neon Genesis Evangelion. The psychological aspects of it (which hits very hard actually) is a reflection of Hideaki Anno's clinical depression. You can't fake this even if you want.

This is what makes human creation special. It's a precipitation of a thousand and one thing in an unforeseen way, and this is what feeds us, albeit we are not aware of this and love to deny it at the same time.

[Wissenschafter]

"This is what makes human creation special.", that's a load of garbage. There is nothing inherently special about human creation. Some AI artwork I've seen is incredible, the fact it was AI generated didn't change its being an incredible piece of art.

Thinking our creation has some kind of 'specialness' to it is like believing in a soul, or some other stupid thing. It's pure hubris.

[bayindirh]

Actually, I'm coming from a gentler point of view: "Nature and living things are much more complex than we anticipate".

There are many breakthroughs and realizations in science which excite me more than "this thing called AI": Bacteria have generational memory. Bees have a sense of time. Mitochondria (and cells) inside a human body communicate and try to regulate aging and call for repairs. Ants have evolved antibiotics, and expel the ones with incurable and spreadable diseases. Bees and ants have social norms, they have languages. Plants show more complex behavior than we anticipated. I'm not entering the primates' & birds' region because only the titles will be a short chapter.

While some of them might be very simple mechanisms on chemical level, they make a much more complex system, and the nature we live in is much sophisticated than we know, or want to acknowledge.

I'm not looking from "Humans are superior" perspective. Instead, I'm looking from "our understanding of everything is too shallow" perspective. Instead of trying to understand or acknowledge that we're living in a much more complex system on a speck of dust in vast emptiness, we connect a bunch of silicon chips, dump everything we babbled to a "simulated neural network", and it gives us semi-nonsensical, grammatically correct half-truths.

That thing can do it because it randomly puts a word after word after a very complex and weighted randomization learned from how we do it, but imitating it blindly, and we think that we understood and unlocked what intelligence is. Then we applaud ourselves because we're one step closer to strip a living thing from its authenticity and making Ghost in the Shell a reality.

Living things form themselves over a long life with sight, hearing, communication, interaction and emotions, at least, and we assume that a couple of millions lines of code can do much better because we poured a quadruple distilled, three times diluted version of what we have gone through.

This is pure hubris if you ask me, if there's one.

[ParetoOptimal]

Then people will see how empty and inferior it is and want movies with actual people and writers again.

[Wissenschafter]

Then the market will decide, won't it? Why the fuss about generative AI then? If you're so confident about its inferiority, you shouldn't have to worry about it, right? The better product will win, right?

[mftrhu]

The market does not choose the superior product. It might choose the least common denominator, the cheapest product, the product that got on the market the earliest, or the one with the richest backers, but not "the superior product".

[ParetoOptimal]

No, because the market isn't fair.

What will actually happen is people will think "meh good enough", shitty AI art will become the norm, and we'll be boiling frogs and not realize how shitty things have become.