[MichaelZuo]

Ah okay, I get your meaning now, I'll edit my original comment too.

Though we already have an established precedent in-between, that of Photoshop allowing artists to be, easily, 10x faster then the best painters previously.

i.e. Right now 'AI' artistry could be considered a turbo-Photoshop.

[deadbeeves]

Tool improvements only apply a constant factor to the effectiveness of learning. Creating a generative model applies an unbounded factor to the effectiveness of learning because, as I said, the only limit is how much computing resources are available to humanity. If a single person was able to copy themselves at practically no cost and the copy retained all the knowledge of the original then the two situations would be equivalent, but that's impossible. Having n people with the same skill multiplies the cost of learning by n. Having n instances of an AI with the same skill multiplies the cost of learning by 1.

[MichaelZuo]

Right, but the 'unbounded factor' is irrelevant because the output will quickly trend into random noise.

And only the most interesting top few million art pieces will actually attract the attention of any concrete individual.

For a current example, there's already billions of man-hours worth of AI spam writing, indexed by Google, that is likely not actually read by even a single person on Earth.

[deadbeeves]

Whether it's irrelevant is a matter of opinion. The fact remains that a machine being able to copy the artistic style of a human makes it so that anyone can produce output in the style of that human by just feeding the machine electricity. That inherently devalues the style the artist has painstakingly developed. If someone wants a piece of art in that artist's style they don't have to go to that artist, they just need to request the machine for what they want. Is the machine's output of low quality? Maybe. Will there be people for whom that low quality still makes them want to seek out the human? No doubt. It doesn't change the fact that the style is still devalued, nor that there exist artists who would want to prevent that.

[MichaelZuo]

> Whether it's irrelevant is a matter of opinion.

It's just as much of an opinion, or as 'objective', as your prior statements.

Your going to have to face up to the fact that just saying something is 'objective' doesn't necessarily mean all 8 billion people will agree that it is so.

[deadbeeves]

Yes, someone can disagree on whether a fact is true. That's obviously true, but it has no effect on the truth of that fact.

I'm saying something very simple: If a machine can copy your style, that's a fundamentally different situation than if a human can copy your style, and it has utterly different consequences. You can disagree with my statement, or say that whether it's fundamentally different is subjective, or you can even say "nuh-uh". But it seems kind of pointless to me. Why are you here commenting if you're not going to engage intellectually with other people, and are simply going to resort to a childish game of contradiction?

[MichaelZuo]

> For a current example, there's already billions of man-hours worth of AI spam writing, indexed by Google, that is likely not actually read by even a single person on Earth.

Continuing to ignore this point won't make the prior comments seem any more persuasive, in fact probably less.

So here's another chance to engage productively instead of just declaring things to be true or false, 'objective', etc., with only the strength of a pseudonymous HN account's opinion behind it.

Try to actually convince readers with solid arguments instead.