[latexr]

What you are saying is that you either do not understand or do not care for craft (it’s an observation, not a criticism), but craft has definite value beyond the end result. Effort does play a huge part, including in animation.

http://gurneyjourney.blogspot.com/2019/03/painting-backgroun...

The lights in windows on the background of Akira, for example, were painstakingly painted one by one. That takes skill. That is impressive. It’s the kind of work that makes one with an appreciation for art (which goes beyond “pretty picture”) take another look and imagine what the artist was feeling and thinking as they were working. It makes you wonder about exact techniques and how to improve them, how to create something new.

All of that enhances the appreciation for the movie. The craft, the skill, the sweat put into it to make a hard and grandiose vision plays into how good and influential it has become.

Had those buildings just been spit out by gen AI along with everything else, there would be no value to taking a second look. You’d probably be looking at distorted images anyway, and even if you weren’t it’d just be a bunch of pixels with no intentionality to it. If no one put effort into the details, there’s no reason to look at them. The converse is also true.

[p-e-w]

I do care for craft, but I don’t view it as an end in itself. The value of craft lies in what it creates, and that value reflects back on the undertaking itself.

But if a machine can replicate mechanically what takes a human effort and ingenuity to do, a human doing the same thing through effort and ingenuity doesn’t magically add further value. And this is understood quite universally; that’s why no human practices the craft of multiplying large numbers anymore.

[krapp]

The part of craft that can be replicated mechanically is the least interesting and valuable part of art.

This is what AI art supporters fail to understand because few if any of them actually practice the craft they emulate. They tend to only work with code and algorithms for which there is no fundamental human expression involved. They assume that because apart from rote intellect and memory the human experience is meaningless in regards to coding as they are acting merely a means of inputting instructions into a machine, that the human experience is equally meaningless for all creative endeavors.

However the value lies not in the technical aspects of craft as an end (which, mind you, no AI is actually good at yet) but as a means of expressing the human experience of an artist and their relationship to the viewer. That dialogue isn't something an LLM can replicate because by definition humanity isn't something an LLM can experience. And even if perfectly mastered on a technical level, it wouldn't have the same value as human expression just as a skillful forgery doesn't have the same value as an original.

[p-e-w]

> The part of craft that can be replicated mechanically is the least interesting and valuable part of art.

Everything humans do can be replicated mechanically. We’re biological machines, and crafts are just behaviors, not some mystical feat that somehow defies replication or analysis. And there can be no reasonable doubt that machines will replicate (and indeed surpass) everything human very soon.

[krapp]

This doesn't actually refute my comment, even given the assumption that your predictions prove correct. Even given a purely physicalist universe and a machine perfectly capable of replicating all human endeavors, most humans will find more value in human expression.

That doesn't require any argument from mysticism, just an understanding that the context of humanity has value for most humans (perhaps not you, but most humans) beyond the pure transactional mechanisms of value creation, stimulus and response.