[survirtual]

Dumping money into a company until desired results is not "building a company". I have nothing against capital, but the hubris of the people investing is insane. /s

Look, sarcasm aside, for you and the many people who agree with you, I would encourage opening your minds a bit. There was a time where even eating food was an intense struggle of intellect, skill, and patience. Now you walk into a building and grab anything you desire in exchange for money.

You can model this as a sort of "manifestation delta." The delta time & effort for acquiring food was once large, now it is small.

This was once true for nearly everything. Many things are now much much easier.

I know it is difficult to cope with, because many held a false belief that the arts were some kind of untouchable holy grail of pure humanness, never to be remotely approached by technology. But here we are, it didn't actually take much to make even that easier. The idea that this was somehow "the thing" that so many pegged their souls to, I would actually call THAT hubris.

Turns out, everyone needs to dig a bit deeper to learn who we really are.

This generative AI stuff is just another phase of a long line of evolution via technology for humanity. It means that more people can get what they want easier. They can go from thought to manifestation faster. This is a good thing.

The artists will still make art, just like blacksmiths still exist, or bow hunters still exist, or all the myriad of "old ways" still exist. They just won't be needed. They will be wanted, but they won't be needed.

The less middlemen to creation, the better. And when someone desires a thing created, and they put in the money, compute time, and prompting to thusly do so, then they ARE the creator. Without them, the manifestation would stay in a realm of unrealized dreams. The act itself of shifting idea to reality is the act of creation. It doesn't matter how easy it is or becomes.

Your struggle to create is irrelevant to the energy of creation.

[j4coh]

It doesn’t even have to be art. If someone told me they were a chef and cooked some food but in reality had ordered it I’d think they were a bit of a moron for equating these things or thinking that by giving someone money or a request for something they were a creator, not a consumer.

It may be nice for society that ordering food is possible, but it doesn’t make one a chef to have done so.

[survirtual]

In ordering a meal from someone else who makes it, I think that the relationship is rather well defined. One person is asking another person to use their skills to make a meal.

With AI, there is a vision and there is a tool executing it. This has a recursive loop involving articulation, refinement, repetition. It is one person using a tool to get a result. At a minimum, it is characteristically different than your comparison, no?

To add, my original statement was concerning going into a grocery store and buying ingredients. That was once a much more difficult process.

As an aside it reminds me of a food cart I would go to regularly in Portland. Sometimes the chefs would go mushroom foraging and cook a lunch using those fresh mushrooms. It was divine. If we ever reach a time when I can send a robot out to forage for mushrooms and actually survive the meal, I would celebrate that occasion, because it would mean we all made it through some troubling times.

[samdafi]

I enjoy this take. Funding something is not the same as creating it. The Medicis were not artists, Michelangelo, Botticelli, Raphael, etc were.

You might not be a creator, but you could make an argument for being an executive producer.

But then, if working with an artist is reduced to talking at a computer, people seem to forget that whatever output they get is equally obtainable to everyone and therefore immediately uninteresting, unless the art is engaging the audience only in what could already be described using language, rather than the medium itself. In other words, you might ask for something different, but that ask is all you are expressing, nothing is expressed through the medium, which is the job of the artist you have replaced. It is simply generated to literally match the words. Want to stand out? Well, looks like you’ll have to find somebody to put in the work…

That being said, you can always construct from parts. Building a set of sounds from suno asks and using them like samples doesn’t seem that different from crate digging, and I’d never say Madlib isn’t an artist.

[survirtual]

Michelangelo had apprentices and assistants, many of which did a significant portion of the work. You could model him as the executive artist, directing the vision. Is this so different from prompting? Whose name is attached to all those works?

I will say Michelangelo was particularly controlling and distrusting of assistants, and uniquely did more work than other master artists of the time, but the point remains. The vision has always been the value.

[visarga]

Assuming that 1. food is free and instant to get, and 2. there are infinite possibilities for food - then yes, if you ordered such a food from an infinite catalog you would get the credit.

But if you ordered 100 dishes iterating between designing your order, tasting, refining your order, and so on - maybe you even discover something new that nobody has realized before.

The gen-AI process is a loop, not a prompt->output one step process.

[j4coh]

Am I a chef then because I tell my private chefs what to make on an ongoing basis?