[herval]

In a lot of ways, indeed.

Lots of people are losing their minds with the fact that an AI can, in fact, create original content (music, images, videos, text).

Lots of people realizing they aren’t geniuses, they just memorized a bunch of Python apis well.

I feel like the collective realization has been particularly painful in tech. Hundreds of thousands of average white collar corporate drones are suddenly being faced with the realization that what they do isn’t really a divine gift, and many took their labor as a core part of their identity.

[cube00]

>create original content (music, images, videos, text)

Remixing would be more accurate then "original"

[herval]

Right, that’s one of the stories people tell themselves. Everything every human has ever created is a remix. That’s what creativity is…

[accrual]

Right. If we define "original" as having no prior influence before creating a work, then it applies neither to humans nor AI.

Not to claim this is a perfect watertight definition, but what if we define it like this:

* Original = created from ones "latent" space. For a human it would be their past experiences as encoded in their neurons. For an AI it would be their training as encoded in model weights.

* Remixed = created from already existing physical artifacts, like sampling a song, copying a piece of an image and transforming it, etc.

With this definition both humans and AI can create both original and remixed works, depending on where the source material came from - latent or physical space.

[kaivi]

> Remixed = created from already existing physical artifacts, like sampling a song, copying a piece of an image and transforming it, etc.

What's the significance of "physical" song or image in your definition? Aren't your examples just 3rd party latent spaces, compressed as DCT coefficients in jpg/mp3, then re-projected through a lens of cochlear or retinal cells into another latent space of our brain, which makes it tickle? All artist human brains have been trained on the same media, after all.

When we zoom this far out in search of a comforting distinction, we encounter the opposite: all the latent spaces across all modalities that our training has produced, want to naturally merge into one.

[kiba]

Skills is simply the amalgamation of smaller conceptual chunks.

Memorizing a bunch of Python API is simply part of building your skill as a programmer.

[herval]

Some skills are more mechanical and easier to replicate than others. Programming is a mechanical skill, but many coders long thought of themselves as uniquely gifted “artists”, and this whole LLM stuff is really touching a nerve on them

[kiba]

Is it? I bet if you keep breaking down skills into subskills, it will resolve to something mechanical in the end.

One of the foundation of drawing is to simplify objects into shapes and then into lines and then how to move your arm when drawing.

No matter how simple it sounds, it is hard for beginners.

[herval]

No matter how much you break down playing soccer, it’s the kind of activity that 99.9% of the practitioners will never, ever, in any hypothetical scenario, be able to compete professionally on.

Contrast that to coding. It might’ve been a difficult task when it was about memorizing assembly books. Today anyone can pick it up and become proficient quite fast, faster every day

It’s not the mechanical reproducibility alone, it’s the ease of learning & replication that accrues value