[ben_w]

> Not even art, because that's among the things gen AI is displacing the most effectively.

Kinda, but also no.

Yes, there's a lot of people (including me) who genuinely enjoy the output of these models; but art isn't only aesthetics, I observe it also being a peacock's tail, where the cost is the entire point.

Why are originals more valuable than reproductions? Nobody who understands the tech can seriously claim that a robot with suitable brush and paints is incapable of perfectly reproducing any old masterwork down to the individual brush strokes — of course a robot can do that, the hardest part of that is compiling the list of requisite brush strokes, but that too can be automated.

But such a copy, and lets say the paints were chemically perfect and also some blend of plant and petroleum derivatives so as to fool even a carbon-dating test, would never command as much money as the original unless someone deliberately mixed them up so that nobody would even know which was which.

However, I don't know that this would ever help the masses. Perhaps a quadrillionaire in a space mansion would like to buy all of Earth and all the people on it, but that doesn't mean we'd get any better than being forced to LARP whatever folly* they chose for us.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folly

[Llamamoe]

People boycott AI art in indie games, music, etc. but it's still finding massive use everywhere across most industries, and by and large companies are getting away with it.

> would never command as much money as the original unless someone deliberately mixed them up so that nobody would even know which was which.

That is based on current sensibilities which are capable of change. Give it 20 years of PR campaigns and who knows where we end up.

[ben_w]

> People boycott AI art in indie games, music, etc. but it's still finding massive use everywhere across most industries, and by and large companies are getting away with it.

Use, yes. I find it on packaging, on billboards. "Massive" use? Not so clear, e.g. how much is this just a substitute for clip art and stock photography? I.e. stuff that was already low-value.

But even there, to the extent they get away with it, that's due to people like me who care about aesthetics.

To illustrate the difference:

Know what I don't care for? Der Kuss[0], the Mona Lisa[1], everything Van Gogh is famous for[2], likewise Pollock, Frida Kahlo, Monet, and Gauguin.

Know what's expensive? All of those things I don't care for.

> That is based on current sensibilities which are capable of change. Give it 20 years of PR campaigns and who knows where we end up.

Peacock tails are, necessarily, expensive signals.

When there's a thousand indistinguishable replicas of the Mona Lisa, the original becomes worthless, the replicas don't gain value.

The effort is the point, it's the reason for the price. When an expensive thing becomes cheap, it stops being an expensive signal (and vice-versa).

[0] the woman's head looks like it's been severed, rotated 90°, her ear placed where the stump of her neck ought to be. Most of Klimt's other stuff is better.

[1] her smile is not "mysterious", it's just the resting face of someone who had to keep still for long enough to get painted

[2] the stuff he's not famous for is, IMO, generally better than the stuff he is famous for.

[derangedHorse]

The originals of physical art pieces operate off the same logic that drives NFTs. As stupid as people think they are, they do show a modern drive for ownership of something with provenance.