Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by lorecore 45 days ago
That's part of it, but views on AI are also views on art and authenticity. I'm a huge fan of AI for coding, research and writing for work. When I see AI generated images, music or anything else "creative" my reaction has grown to be pretty negative. It's all got NFT vibes aesthetically.

I was absolutely blown away by Stable Diffusion and that AI could generate images, now I'm kind of disgusted with it. We've been flooded with low artistic value output and people are having a natural reaction to that.

4 comments

Agree. I actually think we'll see a resurgence in art and graphic design as a consequence. At least for now people can spot AI generated artifacts and many immediately have a negative reaction to it. I don't read blog posts that feature AI generated images, even though they are only slightly worse than stuff cribbed form Unsplash.
The thing is the vast majority has never given a shit about authenticity though. All of the top pop stars are performing music made by committees and designed by marketing teams. Most music sold is and has been lowest common denominator trash since TV was invented. It's hilarious to see some Katy Perry fan frothing at the mouth about AI not being authentic art. As if they ever cared. Most mainstream entertainment is designed to placate and distract. And I'm not even saying mainstream is bad, there's nothing wrong with catchy. It's the crocodile tears over authenticity that bothers me.
I think it's a sliding scale. I love a well cooked meal and would never eat McDonalds, but I could see how someone who does eat at McDonalds wouldn't want to live off Soylent. Maybe a better way to put it is that Katy Perry is on the right side of the uncanny valley.
Yeah but it's a sliding scale where average food is a 5 out of 10, McDonald's is a 1, and soylent is 0.5. It's nonsensical.
I think it makes sense. Think of McDonald's or Katy Perry as the bare minimum quality a human will accept. To go even slightly less is to become unacceptable (hence, uncanny valley). There's lots of room for things to be better though, so 20X improvement is possible but 0.5X reduction in quality means it's completely worthless.
AI will be the most important thing to happen to art. We have tolerated low quality art for far too long because we pretend mechanical dexterity is what makes art, art. Art is not valuable because of this. AI removes the part I never cared about. I never cared that a guitarist can physically play 1500 notes a second.
You sound like people who claim AI is freeing because it has removed the gatekeeping of programming when programming was never gatekept, all you needed to do was dedicate time to learn.

Your premise doesn't even make that much sense given that Knockin' on Heaven's Door uses only the three chords(G, C, Am) and they are some of the most common chords in music.

> We have tolerated low quality art for far too long because we pretend mechanical dexterity is what makes art, art.

Who is “we” in this sentence? A tiny subsection of metalheads? The vast majority of people aren’t seeking out the most mechanically dexterous musicians to listen to.

I think there are some gems in the media space, the Lord Of The Rings Disco song is a certified banger, AI or not.

But yes, there is so so much slop as well