[slg]

It is interesting to see a post like this at the top of HN considering the vibe here lately.

The popularity of this post seems to show an innate understanding of the value of investing a lot of thought and effort into creating a piece of art. When you do that, the process of its creation becomes part of the art. There is something incredibly human about creating art like this. We have been doing it for tens of thousands of years. "Wasting" time meticulously carving things out of stone or mixing paint to use on our cave walls. It is an inherently human thing to do.

And yet browsing HN most days gives the impression that many tech folks see that truly as time wasted and instead just want to give some black box a prompt and have "art" spit back out at them. I just don't get it.

[nancyminusone]

Posts like this are the only reason I come here. I've never been employed as a programmer or software engineer, have never been to California and don't care much about startups.

The "other" category here is pretty wide though.

[DrewADesign]

It’s also interesting that it’s commercial art/design, which many tech industry denizens view as some disgusting malevolent force in the world. I’d argue the tech end of advertising, which props up a pretty huge part of tech, generally, has been a whole lot more concerning than the visual end of it for a couple of decades.

[autoexec]

> There is something incredibly human about creating art like this.

There's also something a little sad in that it's just one more artistic work created as an ad. Advertising has been one of the few ways artists have been able to actually make money in this world. So much of the artistic creativity and ingenuity of humanity has been funneled into outputting lies, manipulation, and corporate promotion. I have to wonder what artistic works we'd be able to talk about if these artists were able to make a living creating something other than marketing/propaganda.

I suspect that AI means fewer artists working on ads and it'll probably be a while before companies get sick of just regurgitating the history of artistic talent fed into their models and start employing artists again to make something new.

[slg]

While I agree that it would be great if artists had more freedom to create whatever they wanted, I think it is overly cynical to dismiss commercial art as somehow lesser. I think this specifically is a great example of that. It isn't really an ad for anything else beyond other art. It doesn't need to be as intricate, involved, and for a lack of a better word, artistic as it is. The only reason it ended up that way is because artists had personal pride in making it. This is true for countless pieces of art. Nearly all the music or movies people listen to and watch today are commercial art. That doesn't make them any less noble than art created by someone who has no financial incentive to create art.