AI isn't democratizing art. Art has always been democratized. If you want to draw something in the Ghibli style, go ahead, no one is stopping you. I saw plenty of great Ghibli style non-AI art on my timeline in response to that, some by people who just spent a few days teaching themselves. The means have never been more accessible.
But using AI to generate something in that style doesn't make you an artist. It isn't art, it's just a product.
Pretty much my exact sentiments. The Internet for a long time has contained more than enough information and connections to other people for anyone to learn nearly any skill they want. Anyone who wants to put in the work has the opportunity.
Celebrating the 'democratization' of these skills is just showing adversity to basic learning and thinking. I'm not gonna celebrate a billion dollar corp trying to replace fundamentals of being human.
>Celebrating the 'democratization' of these skills is just showing adversity to basic learning and thinking.
The reality is that you cannot become an expert in everything. I have songs I'd love to compose in my head, but it would be totally impractical for me to go through the hundreds/thousands of hours of training that would be needed to realize these songs in reality. Nor am I particularly motivated to pay someone else to sit there for hours trying to compose what I am telling them.
This is true for hundreds of activities. Things I want to do, but cannot devote the time to learn the intermediate steps to get there.
>I have songs I'd love to compose in my head, but it would be totally impractical for me to go through the hundreds/thousands of hours of training that would be needed to realize these songs in reality. Nor am I particularly motivated to pay someone else to sit there for hours trying to compose what I am telling them.
So the alternative is that you'll pay a tech company instead -- to use their model trained on unlicensed and uncredited human works to generate a mishmash of plagiarized songs, the end result of which nobody will ever want to listen to?
You don't have to though. Anyone who's spent a decent amount of time in a creative hobby will tell you they sucked when they started but they enjoyed the process of learning and exploring. I think you're depriving yourself of the mental benefits of learning a new skill and being creative. It flexes your mind in new ways.
If you just want something to exist, sure, but when you can press buttons and have a magic box spit out whatever you want with no effort, how much are you actually going to value it?
Equating the process of creating art with adding numbers together is a very HN answer. Unsurprising that so few people here see value in human expression, when their only concern is efficiently generating a minimum viable product as quickly as possible.
But... using a calculator doesn't make you a mathematician either. And one could argue that society has born real negative consequences from the inability of most people to do even basic math because of the ubiquity of calculators. There is a big difference between using a tool and having the tool do everything for you.
Do you really believe that society will benefit when most people don't know how to express themselves creatively in any way other than asking the magic box to make a pretty thing for them?
Calculators, abacuses etc are tools that let you do math easier than in your head. People have done original math on all sorts of things.
Generative AI forces us to reconsider what original means because it's producing a "remix" of what it has seen before with no credit going to those who created those original works.
