[quenix]

It saddens me. Innovations in AI 'art' generation (music, audio, photo) have been a net negative to society and are already actively harming the Internet and our media sphere.

Like I said in another comment, LLMs are cool and useful, but who in the hell asked for AI art? It's good enough to fool people and break the fragile trust relationship we had with online content, but is also extremely shit and carries no meaning or depth whatsoever.

[anxoo]

>who in the hell asked for AI art?

everyone who has ever used stock photography, custom illustrators, and image editing. as AI improves, it will come after all of those industries.

that said, it is not OpenAI's goal to beat shutterstock, nor is it the goal of anthropic or google or meta. their goal is to make god: https://ia.samaltman.com/ . visual perception (and generation) is the near-term step on that path. every discussion of AI that doesn't acknowlege this goal, what all of these billions of dollars are aiming for, is myopic and naive.

[rurp]

There was a recent discussion in another HN thread that I think summed it up well. Good art rewards a careful viewer; the more you look at and think about good art, the more you get out of it. AI art does the opposite and punishes thoughtful consumers. There's no logical underpinning to the various details, it's just stuff mashed together in a superficially nice looking way.

[mojuba]

I think AI "art" can be as useful as the text generators, i.e. only within certain limits of dull and stupid stuff that needs to exist but has little to no value.

For example, you need to generate a landing page for your boring company: text, images, videos and the overall design (as well as code!) can be and should be generated because... who cares about your boring company's landing page, right?

[whatevertrevor]

One could ask why the boring company landing page exists in the first place though. If it's not providing value to humans to warrant actual attention being paid to it...

[tomjen3]

The world is in need of soap. Not the fancy beautiful artistic kind, but the kind that comes in containers and you put in bathrooms. This objectively saves lives and is one of those boring things I can imagine.

[carlosjobim]

Then you don't understand the purpose of a landing page. If the boring company hires somebody to make the landing page who actually understands their job, the landing page will have great importance.

[yunwal]

> the landing page will have great importance.

Most companies don't need this. They need a page that has their contact info and some general information about services they provide so they can have a bare minimum internet presence and show up on google maps.

[carlosjobim]

Absolutely, if your company doesn't want to make sales or if you want to be bothered all the time by people calling and mailing only for them to find out your product isn't a fit for them. Or if you want third party sellers to take over most of your business like Booking.com, AirBnB DoorDash or Amazon.

Companies who understand the importance of a customer friendly and functional web presence get a great return on their investment. And it's much better for the customer.

[yunwal]

I have an ice cream shop by me that doesn't even have a website. They're mobbed every day, because good ice cream is fairly self explanatory, and doesn't need a web presence

[lobsterthief]

You’re conflating “website” with “landing page”.

Your ice cream shop doesn’t need a landing page because of word of mouth and foot traffic.

Some project management platform for plumbers needs a highly tuned webpage because they’re competing with 20 other such systems, and there’s no line to walk past and assume it’s there because the software is good.

Believing that if you build great plumbing SAAS software people, paying customers will magically appear, is naive.

A great product can sell itself. But that doesn’t mean that marketing and sales aren’t necessary in order to get the product in front of people, assuage their concerns, reassure them that it solves their problems, show social proof from others using it, and close the deal. A good landing page will do all of this ;)

[dale_glass]

> Like I said in another comment, LLMs are cool and useful, but who in the hell asked for AI art?

I did. I started messing around with computer graphics on DOS with QBASIC and consider AI art to be just an extension of that.

On the other hand I don't care all that much for LLMs most of the time. They're sometimes useful, but while I find AI art I enjoy very regularly, using a LLM for something is more a once every couple weeks event for me.

[computerex]

How do you know they are a net negative? What's your source?

[quenix]

My opinion ;-)

That's what HN is for

[CamperBob2]

It's quite well-supported on here, that's for sure.

Somewhere there's a site for "hackers" where it isn't, and I hope I stumble across that site at some point.

[Cthulhu_]

Do add "in my opinion" or prefix with "I think", because your definite wording implied you were stating a verifiable fact. Telling opinions like they are facts and then backtracking with "oh but it was just my opinion" is a big problem in (online?) society / discourse, and has led to a lot of misinformation and anti-scientific takes spreading.

"The earth is flat" - "Can you prove it?" - "Oh it's just my opinion". It's dishonest.

[randomlurking]

I agree with the first part. For me, AI art is the chance to have a somewhat creative outlet that I wouldn’t have otherwise, because I’m much worse at painting that I can stand. Drawing by prompts helps me be creative and work through some stuff - for that it’s also nice and interesting to see that the result differs from my mental image. I will tweak the prompt to some extent and to some extent go with some unintentioned elements of the drawing. I keep the drawing on my phone in the notes app with a title and the prompt.

To get back to the beginning: I really do agree that the societal impact on the whole appears to be negative. But there are some positives and I wanted to share my example of that.

[tomjen3]

That describes most art. At least ai art can be pretty and doesn’t have the same political message.

[Der_Einzige]

Go on civil.AI, it’s primarily used for hardcore waifu porn.

[jeffhuys]

You mean civitai.com? There's a lot more on there than just that...

[lmm]

Much of the time I don't want "meaning or depth", I just want a pretty picture of whatever it was. AI art is great, it's just that the people it most benefits are the people you don't see or hear much from (and, rude as this is to say, people who write less convincingly).