[LampDrewNear]

This is how I feel as well. I'm a software engineer by trade, but I'm really much more interested in writing music and stories. I always imagined myself retiring the day I have saved up enough money so I could focus on art and creativity. My life certainly has felt much less meaningful since I saw what DALL-E 2 can produce.

And my main concern is not that of professional artists' financial situations. I'm mainly worried about how the massive influx of computer-generated content will inflate away the meaning of human-created art. And I'm afraid that when art becomes so good and so customized to each individual consumer, we won't have much common culture left.

I think this Penny Arcade strip well puts into words how I feel: https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2022/06/06/dalliance

In a way, I'm so mad at my fellow engineers. There's so much good we could do, is really killing the creative arts the right thing to do?

And I don't believe for one second this talk about AI just being a tool, and prompt-engineering being a new craft for artists to learn. I think this kind of interface will quickly go away, and soon enough AI apps will look much more similar to TikTok or YouTube than they do today.

[fleddr]

We seem to have some things in common. I'm also a software engineer with a creative hobby: wildlife photography.

In that space, there's already a kind of abundance problem. It's saturated. So even in the case of a "hit piece", the appreciation lasts about a few hours. A bunch of likes and some shallow comments. That's it.

If I were to base my meaning on that, I'd say it has no meaning. That's why I find meaning in my deep love for my subjects, as well as the process of photography itself. I decouple external validation from my intrinsic motivation. Few photographers do this, they crave the attention, which is why they're restless and miserable. They would surely feel even worse in an AI world where current saturation levels will do a 1000x.

The above you can probably apply to lots of other creative endeavors. For example, creative writing on a blog. You already can't get noticed today, imagine the avalanche of AI writing making this problem exponentially worse.

So we will have little shared meaning, at best personal meaning, but only for the strongly intrinsically motivated, the rest may stop altogether. On top of that, the new "creators" will also experience little meaning. You can generate the most beautiful piece of AI art, but can't seriously claim: I made that.

[mostlylurks]

Computer-generated content may pose an essentially insurmountable challenge to human practitioners of most art forms, but not all of them. The forms of art that are at risk of being overtaken by ML are those in which individual works of art can be faithfully represented in some storage format (which may be anything from a video file to a piece of paper with things printed onto it), which is used to transmit the work of art to an audience via inanimate means.

Those art forms that feature the physical presence of an actual human being, such as theater, dance, stand-up comedy, musical performances, etc, will presumably remain somewhat safe from the flood of computer-generated content, and people might even flock to such art forms in pursuit of authenticity. Things like improvisational theater also add an element of genuine human reactions to the mix, which will no doubt attract some interest in the age of AI art, which has no direct human will behind it. Of course, AI could produce imitations of recordings of such performances, but not the actual physical performances themselves, and people already seem to very strongly favor actual performances over recordings.

Ironically, mass-produced AI art might conceivably cause a cultural shift from our status quo of having an abundance of inanimate mass-market art with essentially global reach to a culture favoring local performative arts (which, aside from concerts, have no real mass appeal at the moment), which would essentially foster a unique local art scene with some limited number of performers for each city that mostly stay in that city. Such a scenario wouldn't result in hyperindividualized art, quite the opposite.

[LampDrewNear]

I like this view. That is a future I could find meaning in. I actually spent some time during my college years doing amateur musical theater, something I didn't think I would return to, but maybe I will.