[timeattack]

Advances in generative AI are making me progressively more and more depressive.

Creativity is taken from us at exponential rate. And I don't buy argument from people who are saying they are excited to live in this age. I can get that if that technology stopped at current state and remained to be just tools for our creative endeavours, but it doesn't seem to be an endgame here. Instead it aims to be a complete replacement.

Granted, you can say "you still can play musical instruments/paint pictures/etc for yourself", but I don't think there was ever a period of time where creative works were just created for sake of itself rather for sharing it with others at masse.

So what is final state here for us? Return to menial not-yet-automated work? And when this would be eventually automated, what's left? Plug our brains to personalized autogenerated worlds that are tailored to trigger related neuronal circuitry for producing ever increasing dopamine levels and finally burn our brains out (which is arguably already happening with tiktok-style leasure)? And how you are supposed to pay for that, if all work is automated? How economics of that is supposed to work?

Looks like a pretty decent explanation of Fermi paradox. No-one would know how technology works, there are no easily available resources left to make use of simpler tech and planet is littered to the point of no return.

How to even find the value in living given all of that?

[Etheryte]

> I don't think there was ever a period of time where creative works were just created for sake of itself rather for sharing it with others at masse.

Numerous famous writers, painters, artists, etc counter this idea, Kafka being a notable example, whose significant works only came to light after his passing and against his will. This doesn't take away from the rest of your discussion point, but art always has and always will also exist solely for its own sake.

[stillpointlab]

> I don't buy argument from people who are saying they are excited to live in this age

What argument is required for excitement? Excitement is a feeling not a rational act. It comes from optimism and imagination. There is no argument for optimism. There is often little reason in imagination.

> How to even find the value in living given all of that?

You might have heard of the Bhagavad Gita, a 2000+ year old spiritual text. It details a conversation between a warrior prince and a manifestation of God. The warrior prince is facing a very difficult battle and he is having doubts justifying any action in the face of the decisions he has to make. He is begging this manifestation of God to give him good reasons to act, good reasons not just to throw his weapons down, give away all his possessions and sit in a cave somewhere.

There are no definite answers in the text, just meditations on the question. Why should we act when the result is ultimately pointless, we will all die, people will forget you, situations will be resolved with or without you, etc.

This isn't some new question that LLMs are forcing us to confront. LLMs are just providing us a new reason to ask the same age-old questions we have been facing for as long as writing has existed.

[HocusLocus]

Genie 3 not only groks the Bhagavad Gita, it can generate "Blue & Elephant People: The Movie".

[p4coder]

Today physical world is largely mechanized, we rarely walk, run lift heavy things for survival. So we grow fat and weak unless we exercise. Tomorrow vast majority of us will never think, create, investigate for earning a living. So we will get dumb and dumber over time. A small minority of us will keep polishing their intellect but will never be smarter than machines just like the best athletes of today can't outrun machines.

[pizzathyme]

This is surprisingly a great analogy because millions of people still run every week for their own benefit (physical and mental health, social connection, etc).

I wonder if mental exercises will move to the same category? Not necessarily a way to earn money, but something everybody does as a way of flourishing as a human.

[Kiro]

I don't understand your argument at all. I've made hundreds of songs in my life that I haven't shared with anyone and so have all other musicians I know. The act of creating is separate from finding or having an audience. In fact, I would say that the complete opposite of what you say is true.

And even so, music production has been a constant evolution of replacing prior technologies and making it easier to get into. It used to be gatekept by expensive hardware.

[skybrian]

We already live in a world where a vast library of songs by musicians who play much better than you are readily available on YouTube and Spotify. This seems like more of the same?

[podgietaru]

I like living in a world where I know that people who have spent actually time on nurturing a talent get rewarded for doing so, even if that talent is not something I will ever be good at.

I don't want to live in a world where these things are generated cheaply and easily for the profit of a very select few group of people.

I know the world doesn't work like I described in the top paragraph. But it's a lot closer to it than the bottom.

[Saline9515]

It still requires work, dedication and produces authenticity. A world where AI can produce music instantly commoditizes it.

[tekacs]

We can dream bigger: when music, images, video and 3d assets are far easier then treat them as primitives.

We can use these to create entire virtual worlds, games, software that incorporates these, and to incorporate creativity and media into infinitely more situations in real life.

We can create massive installations that are not a single image but an endless video with endless music, and then our hand turns to stabilizing and styling and aestheticizing those exactly in line with our (the artist's) preferences.

Romanticizing the idea that picking at a guitar is somehow 'more creative' than using a DAW to create incredibly complex and layered and beautiful music is the same thing that's happening here, even if the primitives seem 'scarier' and 'bigger'.

Plus, there are many situations in life that would be made infinitely more human by the introduction of our collective work in designing our aesthetic and putting it into the world, and encoding it into models. Installations and physical spaces can absolutely be more beautiful if we can produce more, taking the aesthetic(s) that we've built so far and making them dynamic to spaces.

Also for learning: as a young person learning to draw and sing and play music and so many other things, I would have tremendously appreciated the ability to generate and follow subtle, personalized generation - to take a photo of a scene in front of me and have the AI first sketch it loosely so that I can copy it, then escalate and escalate until I can do something bigger.

[yomismoaqui]

The question is, why are you doing art?

- Because you enjoy it

- Because you get pats in the back from people you share it with

- Because you want to earn money from it

The 1st one will continue to be true in this dystopian AI art future, the other not so much.

And sincerely I find that kind of human art, the one that comes from a pure inner force, the more interesting one.

EDIT: list formatting

[sunsunsunsun]

You seem to forget that most artists enjoy it but due to the structure of our society are forced to either give it up for most of their waking life to earn money or attempt to market their art to the masses to make money. This AI stuff only makes it harder for artists to make any kind of living off of their work.

[assword]

> The 1st one will continue to be true in this dystopian AI art future, the other not so much.

No it won’t, you’ll be too busy trying to survive off of what pittance is left for you to have any time to waste on leisure activities.

[snickerdoodle12]

I see two ways this is going to go:

1. Universal Basic Income as we're on the way to a post-scarcity society. Unlikely to actually happen due to greed.

2. We take inspiration from the french revolution and then return to a simpler time.

[dist-epoch]

In the french revolution the army and the people had similar kind of weapons. And there was no total surveillance to round up the leaders.

[maerF0x0]

> Unlikely to actually happen due to greed.

Greed makes no sense in a truly post scarcity society. There is no scarcity from which to take in a zero sum way from another.

Status is the real issue. Humans use status to select sexually, and the display is both competitive and comparative. It doesnt matter absolutely how many pants you have, only that you have more and better than your competition.

I actually think this thing is baked into our DNA and until sex itself is saturated (if there is such a thing), or DNA is altered, we will continue to have a however subtle form of competition undergirding all interactions.

[holoduke]

If bio engineering takes off for real we will integrate our consciousness in our artificial digital ecosystem.

[rolfus]

I'm one of those excited people! We haven't lost anything with this new technology, only gained.

The way I see it, most people aren't creative. And the people who are creatives are mostly creating for the love of it. Most books that are published are read exclusively by the friends and family of the author. Most musicians, most stand-up comedians, most artist get to show off their works for small groups of people and make no money doing so. But they do it anyway. I draw terrible portraits, make little inventions and sometimes I build something for the home, knowing full well that I do these things for my own enjoyment and whatever ego boost I get from showing these things off to people I know.

I'm doing a marathon later and I've been working my ass off for the prospect of crossing the finishing line as number four thousand and something, and I'll do it again next year.

[Wissenschafter]

"Granted, you can say "you still can play musical instruments/paint pictures/etc for yourself", but I don't think there was ever a period of time where creative works were just created for sake of itself rather for sharing it with others at masse."

I sit and play guitar by myself all the time, I play for nobody but myself, and I enjoy it a lot. Your argument is absurd.

[furyofantares]

> but I don't think there was ever a period of time where creative works were just created for sake of itself rather for sharing it with others at masse

Kids do it all the time.

> So what is final state here for us?

Something I haven't seen discussed too much is taste - human tastes change based on what has come before. What we will care about tomorrow is not what we care about today.

It seems plausible to me that generative AI could get higher and higher quality without really touching how human tastes changes. That would leave a lot of room for human creativity IMO - we have shared experience in a changing world that seems very hard to capture with data.

[svantana]

You're quite the pessimist. I think the arts would do well to look at sports as a glimpse of their future. Machines are faster and stronger than people, but that hasn't had any impact on sports at all. Nobody's tuning in to the robot olympics.

[rishabhparikh]

Agreed that no one wants to watch shotput when the ball is launched out of a cannon, but people might be interested when the robots competing are anthropomorphs.

For example, robot boxing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rdkwjs_g83w

[likium]

A better analogy would be musicians. Recorded music is around but some musicians still make a living, mostly off live concerts and merch.

But it might also go the way of pottery, glass-making and weaving. They’re still around but extremely niche.

[AstroBen]

Who did the visual effects of the last movie you watched?

Most commercial artists are very much unknown, in the background. This is a different situation from sport

[quantumHazer]

Machine learning as it is needs human data and input to progress further.

Synthetic data can be useful until a certain point, but you can’t expect to have a better model on synthetic data alone indefinitely.

The moat of GDM here is YouTube. That have a bazillion of gameplay and whatever videos. But here it is.

The downside I can see is that most people will stop to publish content online for free since this companies have absolutely no respect whatsoever for the humans that created the data they use.

[dbspin]

I've never understood this argument... The real world is an unbounded training set that its cheap to observe with readily available sensors that have existed for almost a century.

[dawnerd]

Charging for content means nothing. Meta was pirating media and training against that and I suspect everyone else is too but hasn’t been caught yet.

[rikroots]

> Granted, you can say "you still can play musical instruments/paint pictures/etc for yourself", but I don't think there was ever a period of time where creative works were just created for sake of itself rather for sharing it with others at masse.

There's a whole host of "art" that has been created by people - sometimes for themselves, sometimes for a select few friends - which had little purpose beyond that creation[1]. Some people create art because they simply have to create art - for pleasure, for therapy, for whatever[2]. For many, the act of creation was far more important than the act of distribution[3].

For me, my obsession is constructing worlds, maps, societies and languages that will almost certainly die with me. And that's fine. When I feel the compulsion, I'll work on my constructions for a while, until the compulsion passes - just as I have done (on and off) for the past 50 years. If the world really needs to know about me, then it can learn more than it probably wants to know through my poetry.

[1] - Emily Dickinson is an obvious example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emily_Dickinson

[2] - Coral Castle, Florida: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coral_Castle

[3] - Federico Garcia Lorca almost certainly didn't write his Sonetos del amor oscuro for publication - he just needed to write them: https://es.wikisource.org/wiki/Sonetos_del_amor_oscuro

[neom]

In my opinion, what humans need, crave, chase, is novelty. Just look at how phobic we are of boredom. I believe creativity is part of the chasing of novelty, or the allaying of boredom. I studied film making in my 20s when the shift to digital happened, and I was the first cohort through the first digital film program in my country. When new ways to create become available, the people who struggle are often the ones who are unable to adapt their mindset to the new creative mediums and don't think "what is new to be done here". Many people when I graduated thought I was totally nuts of not owning or using an analogue camera, so many reasons, oh you can't trust the CF cards, oh the HDR will never get there, oh the shutter is too slow. This is just a version of that imo. I think AI and robotics are going all the way to the end, I'm trying to adjust my old man brain to the new world the best I can, feel blessed to have been part of a version of this before.

[zyruh]

I agree. While I love AI, advancements must be responsible. We are made to be social beings and giving more and more of lives over to AI takes us away from the fundamental need to draw creativity, inspiration, and connection from other people. Thoughts?

[rohit89]

> So what is final state here for us?

I think we have a long way to go yet. Humanity is still in the early stages of its tech tree with so many unknown and unsolved problems. If ASI does happen and solves literally everything, we will be in a position that is completely alien to what we have right now.

> How to even find the value in living given all of that?

I feel like a lot of AI angst comes from people who place their self-worth and value on external validation. There is value in simply existing and doing what you want to do even if nobody else wants it.

[slaterbug]

> I feel like a lot of AI angst comes from people who place their self-worth and value on external validation. There is value in simply existing and doing what you want to do even if nobody else wants it.

I agree on this point, and have come to that conclusion myself regarding my own AI angst. However that doesn't solve the economic issues that arise from this technology. As large swathes of the workforce becomes replaced (something that, in my opinion, is rapidly approaching), how do we organise society so that everyone can survive / thrive?

As far as I can see there is very little impetus behind tackling such issues, compared to the forces pushing this tech forward so rapidly.

[dist-epoch]

> Looks like a pretty decent explanation of Fermi paradox.

It's not. We will be replaced, but the AI will carry on.

[dingnuts]

this is a religious opinion at this state of technological development lol

a lot of these comments border on cult thinking. it's a fucking text to 3D image model, not R Daneel Olivaw, calm down

[hooverd]

Eh, might as well kill yourself now then.

[tomrod]

Branding and differentiation.

People still value Amish furniture or woodworking despite Ikea existing. I love that if I want a cheap chair made of cardboard and glue that I can find something to satisfy that need; but I still buy nice furniture when I can.

AI creations are analogous. I've seen some cool AI stuff, but it definitely doesn't replace the real "organic" art one finds.

[HeatrayEnjoyer]

What if it's not cardboard and glue but woodworking of ultra-master quality?

These fears aren't realized if AI never achieves superhuman performance, but what if they do?

[pessimizer]

> I don't think there was ever a period of time where creative works were just created for sake of itself rather for sharing it with others at masse.

You don't think there was ever a time without a mass media culture? Plenty of people have furniture older than mass media culture. Even 20 years ago people could manage to be creative for a tiny audience of what were possibly other people doing creative things. It's only the zoomers who have never lived in a world where you never thought to consider how you could sell the song you were writing in your bedroom to the Chinese market.

It used to be that music didn't come on piano rolls, records, tapes, CDs or files. It used to be that your daughter would play music on the piano in the living room for the entire family. Even if it was music that wouldn't really sell, and wasn't perfectly played, people somehow managed to enjoy it. It was not a situation that AI could destroy. If anything, AI could assist.

[mindwok]

Man, same here. I was initially a massive AI evangelist up until about a year ago, now I just feel sad for some reason - and I don’t want to feel sad, I’m a technologist at heart and I’ve been thrilled by every advance since I was born. I feel like some sad old boomer yelling at clouds and I’m not even 30 yet.

My only hope is this: I think the depression is telling us something real, we are collectively mourning what we see as the loss of our humanity and our meaning. We are resilient creatures though, and hopefully just like the ozone layer, junk food, and even the increasing rejections of social media and screen time, we will navigate it and reclaim what’s important to us. It might take some pain first though.

[lubujackson]

Be comforted by the fact that no matter how good the AI gets, people crave human connection. Just like AI can generate music there is an uncanny valley effect where you quickly deduce there's no true humanity behind any of it, and ultimately undervalue it. At best you can have something like Minecraft or Dwarf Fortress where the generated worlds CAN be inspiring to a degree, but that is because the rules around generation are incredibly intricate and, ultimately, human.

Yes, AI can make music that sounds decent and lyrics that rhyme and can even be clever. But listen to a couple songs and your brain quickly spots the patterns. Maybe AI gets there some day, but the uncanny valley seems to be quite a chasm - and anything that approaches the other side seems to do so by piling lots of human intention along the way.

[pixelesque]

What's interesting to me along these lines is I assume most of the companies funding the research are targeting the "creative" media in terms of image generation, music generation, avatars, speach, etc.

I can understand it's very interesting from a researcher's point-of-view (I'm a software dev who's worked adjacent to some ML researchers doing pipeline stuff to integrate models into software), but at the same time: Where are the robots to do menial work like clean toilets, kitchens, homes, etc?

I assume the funding isn't there? Or maybe it's much less exciting to research diffusion networks for image generation that working out algorithms for the best way to clean toilets :)

[einarfd]

There are companies out there working on those problems as well. How the funding climate for them are. I don't know. But the market for smart robots, should be gigantic. So there must be some. Keep in mind that what is easy, and hard for a human, which is the result of billions of years of evolution. Isn't necessary the same things that are hard or easy for our technologies.

[lentil_soup]

Or replacing CEOs, investors, bankers? I would have thought those would be easier to replace than creating robots to clean or replacing artists, or even developers. Maybe I am wrong?

[cherry_tree]

There was a recent talk about using vision language models to train robots to do household tasks: https://youtu.be/a8-QsBHoH94

I wonder how advanced world models like genie 3 would change the approach if it all.

[dingnuts]

robotics is difficult and since transformers are just next word predictors they can't actually help us design those robots :)

also the billionaires have help so they don't give a shit if the menial stuff is automated or not. throw in a little misogyny by and large too; I saw a LinkedIn Lunatic in the wild (some C-level) saying laundry is already automated because laundry machines exist

fucking.. tell me you don't ever do the laundry without telling me. That guy's poor wife.

[elzbardico]

Relax, contrary to expectations of the autistic misanthropes that abound here on this bubble, most of this is just computationally expensive slope and far, very far from even having the chance to become real AGI.

[tim333]

>So what is final state here for us?

The merge. (https://blog.samaltman.com/the-merge)

I'm quite enthusiastic. I've always thought mortality sucks.

[kiririn7]

agree about mortality but im afraid the idea of merging may be naive

[michalf6]

Nick Land kind of took this line of reasoning to its ultimate conclusion, I recommend giving his ideas a read even if they sound repulsive.

"Nothing human makes it out of the near-future."

[pizzathyme]

I've tried and failed to find a good starting point for his ideas. Do you recommend any?

[flyinglizard]

I share your feelings. Also couple that with a populist and cynical political climate that can’t create effective regulations even if it wanted, and that by its very appetite for scale AI thrives at the hands of the few that can feed it and you get something quite bleak.

My only hope is that we could have created 100k nukes of monstrous yields but collectively decided not to. We instead created 10k smaller ones. We could have destroyed ourselves long ago but managed to avoid it.

[roboboffin]

In theory, creativity is an infinite space. As technology advances it allows humans to explore more and more complex things; take the advancement of music as an example, synths, loops etc.

If humans are not stretched to their limits, and are still able to be creative, then the tools will help us find our way through this infinite space.

AI will never be able to generate everything for us, because that means it will need infinite computation.

[seanw444]

It doesn't need to generate everything. It only needs to be marginally better or more efficient than a human for it to start generating everything humans need when needed.

Edit: left the page open for a while before responding, and the other person responded with basically the same thing within that time.

[rowanG077]

AI will not be able to generate everything for us. Just the things that are able to be explored by humans and hopefully a tad bit more. AI is already more creative than humans by a lot of measures.

[j_timberlake]

I don't know how on Earth people can think like this. Most people can find "value" in a slice of pizza. It doesn't even have to be a good pizza.

Or kittens and puppies. Do you think there won't be kittens and puppies?

And that's putting aside all the obvious space-exploration stuff that will probably be more interesting than anything the previous 100 billion humans ever saw.

[slaterbug]

This is digressing a bit, but I don't buy that space exploration will be more interesting than anything you can see on Earth.

Aren't other planets / moons etc. basically just barren deserts of rock and dust? Once you get over the novelty of it, it will basically just be the shittiest and most uncomfortable place you've ever been.

[wahnfrieden]

Automation only leads to more labor if we allow that employer relation to dictate so. Automation affords leisure time (for everything besides labor that life has to offer, including optional labor-like pursuits) but it’s currently unevenly distributed who gets to benefit from that

[fgafford]

You need to read Brave New World. Already have all that figured out.

Work is fundamental part of society and will never be eliminated, regardless of its utility/usefulness. The cast/class system determines the type of work. The amount (time) of work is set as it was discovered additional leisure and to reduce it does not improve individuals happiness.

[worldsayshi]

We keep coming back to the conclusion that we need to turn the economy on its head.

With business as usual capital is power and capital is increasingly getting centralized.

[mbowcut2]

It's not a new problem (for individuals), though perhaps at an unprecedented scale (so, maybe a new problem for civilization). I'm sure there were black smiths that felt they had lost their meaning when they were replaced by industrial manufacturing.

[curious_cat_163]

> So what is final state here for us? Return to menial not-yet-automated work? And when this would be eventually automated, what's left? Plug our brains to personalized autogenerated worlds that are tailored to trigger related neuronal circuitry for producing ever increasing dopamine levels and finally burn our brains out (which is arguably already happening with tiktok-style leasure)? And how you are supposed to pay for that, if all work is automated? How economics of that is supposed to work?

Wow. What a picture! Here's an optimistic take, fwiw: Whenever we have had a paradigm shift in our ability to process information, we have grappled with it by shifting to higher-level tasks.

We tend to "invent" new work as we grapple with the technology. The job of a UX designer did not exist in 1970s (at least not as a separate category employing 1000s of people; now I want to be careful this is HN, so there might be someone on here who was doing that in the 70s!).

And there is capitalism -- if everyone has access to the best-in-class model, then no one has true edge in a competition. That is not a state that capitalism likes. The economics _will_ ultimately kick in. We just need this recent S-curve to settle for a bit.

[slaterbug]

> Whenever we have had a paradigm shift in our ability to process information, we have grappled with it by shifting to higher-level tasks.

People say this all the time, but I think it's a very short-sighted view. It really begs the question: do you believe that there are tasks that exist which a human can do, but we could not train an AI to also do? The difference between AI and any other technological advancement is that AI is (or promises to be, and I have no reason to believe otherwise) a tool that can be adapted to any task. I don't think analogies to history really apply here.

[myahio]

What specific form of creative media is this supposed to replace though? I feel like its just going to create a brand new, exciting category of entertainment. I personally fail to see any bad precedent within this announcement.

[dartharva]

I look at it as the pendulum swinging back.

For too long has humanity been collectively submerged into this hyper-consumption of the arts. We, our parents and our grandparents have been getting bombarded by some or the other form of artificial dopamine sweets - from videos to reels to xeets to "news" to ads to tunes to mainstream media - every second of the day, every single day. The kind of media consumption we have every day is something our forefathers would have been overwhelmed by within an hour. It is not natural.

This complete cheapening of the arts is finally giving us a chance to shed off this load for good.

[imiric]

I can relate. It's exhausting.

The main challenge over the next decade as all our media channels are flooded with generated media will become curation. We desperately need ways to filter human-created content from generated content. Not just for the sake of preserving art, but for avoiding societal collapse from disinformation, which is a much more direct and closer threat. Hell, we've been living with the consequences of mass disinformation for the past decade, but automated and much more believable campaigns flooding our communication platforms will drastically lower the signal-to-noise ratio. We're currently unable to even imagine the consequences of that, and are far from being prepared for it.

This tech needs strict regulation on a global scale. Anyone against this is either personally invested in it, or is ignorant of its dangers.

[SamInTheShell]

My bets are hedged on being replaced one day, followed by a few years roughing it, to be eventually be met with something along the lines "Well damn, we really couldn't complete the entire loop on automating the automation" because frankly autocomplete will always be just that. Autocomplete.

Till then, I just learn the tools with the deepest understanding that I can muster and so far the deeper I go, the less impressed with "automated everything" I become, because it isn't really going to be capable of doing anything people are going to find interesting when the creativity well dries up.

[HardCodedBias]

"Creativity is taken from us at exponential rate"

Nothing is being taken away.

[delfinom]

All I know is I am investing into suicide booth startups

[taberiand]

So that the robots have a leisure activity, or so that humans get a quick escape in the face of runaway climate change?

[lbrito]

>And how you are supposed to pay for that, if all work is automated? How economics of that is supposed to work?

With UBI, probably. With a central government formed by our robot overlords. But why even pay us at that point?

[stronglikedan]

> How to even find the value in living given all of that?

If your value in living is in any way affected by AI, ever, then, well, let's just say I would never choose that for myself. Good luck.

[vessenes]

Don’t be mad bro. Seriously. Every single person working on a film has creative input, not just someone hand painting a backdrop. You have an immense number of tools available to be creative with now. This is a great thing!

[skeezyboy]

a reminder, most of the world do manual labour in exchange for money. an LLM cant help with that and never will

[rowanG077]

There is huge progress in robotics. Which includes fruits from the LLM hype. A lot of manual labor will be able to be done by humanoid robots.