The REAL Fight Over AI Art

6:30 & 11:30 - This is such a disappointing take that fails to recognize the difference between this “tool” and all prior tools. AI Generation of words, images, video & music is a fundamentally different category of tool than a printing press, cameras, or Excel. Printing press automated manual labor, it didn’t write the book for you. Cameras democratized the recording of what is in front of you, it didn’t craft & decide WHAT was is infront of you. Emad says “excel didn’t put accountants out of work” but ignoring the fact it literally did, this is a false equivalence when Excel doesn’t do your taxes for you (and if it could, they would).

AI can be used AS a tool (i use it), but we need to recognize it is so much more than JUST a tool - it encroaches on things we consider human domains - the combo of observation, interpretation, systhesis of ideas, and the craft of execution that only the human brain&hands could execute - all in one! That alone is miraculous, but at the speed and scale it’s capable of takes this tool to a crazier place. 

The people who can’t see the difference are called AI Bros. They’re quick to call any opposition luddites with zero empathy or experience in the mental and physical processes to actually create something manually. These machine learning datasets are trained on millions of artworks that took millions of human hours to produce (years of training, practice, life exp, production time) with zero consent from the image owners or compensation to the image owners. It’s vampiric. “I automated your human expression, be happy artists!” Maslow is rolling in his grave with his hierarchy of needs. 

In a few years the last bastion of “creativity” and “authorship” will simply be curation, and we’ll start calling curators “artists.” In 10yrs everyone will forget what it meant create *anything* without AI assist, without using someone else’s brain(AI) for ideas, synthesis, and execution. The optimistic view of this says the rising tide lifts all boats, and AI outputs push human creativity to a higher place, faster. The downside is you now live in a world where suspicion of using AI in your work is now the default assumption - the context in which we create works is forever changed, and it’s impossible to experience a 20th century context again. (did you use AI to help you write that book? or imagine a sculpture or architecture, or design that website, painting, song, etc?) Yes the people with top skills will always edit AI outputs to a level beyond the raw output, but just based on the speed and automation of AI content creation I think we can project that statistically thats not the content you’ll run into on a daily basis. When most AI Outputs will be “good enough” for most people, why bother? Given a long enough timeline does the internet become 99% synthetic? Given a long enough timeline, do all human IRL works become derived from an AI idea? It makes me think 2022 was the last, pure snapshot of humanity, before everything became synthetic derivatives and the nature of creativity and authorship changed forever.