[yannyu]

I think it's even more pernicious than the paper describes as cultural outputs, art, and writing aren't done to solve a problem, they're expressions that don't have a pure utility purpose. There's no "final form" for these things, and they change constantly, like language.

All of these AI outputs are both polluting the commons where they pulled all their training data AND are alienating the creators of these cultural outputs via displacement of labor and payment, which means that general purpose models are starting to run out of contemporary, low-cost training data.

So either training data is going to get more expensive because you're going to have to pay creators, or these models will slowly drift away from the contemporary cultural reality.

We'll see where it all lands, but it seems clear that this is a circular problem with a time delay, and we're just waiting to see what the downstream effect will be.

[hannasanarion]

> All of these AI outputs are both polluting the commons where they pulled all their training data AND are alienating the creators of these cultural outputs via displacement of labor and payment

No dispute on the first part, but I really wish there were numbers available somehow to address the second. Maybe it's my cultural bubble, but it sure feels like the "AI Artpocalypse" isn't coming, in part because of AI backlash in general, but more specifically because people who are willing to pay money for art seem to strongly prefer that their money goes to an artist, not a GPU cluster operator.

I think a similar idea might be persisting in AI programming as well, even though it seems like such a perfect use case. Anthropic released an internal survey a few weeks ago that was like, the vast majority, something like 90% of their own workers AI usage, was spent explaining allnd learning about things that already exist, or doing little one-off side projects that otherwise wouldn't have happened at all, because of the overhead, like building little dashboards for a single dataset or something, stuff where the outcome isn't worth the effort of doing it yourself. For everything that actually matters and would be paid for, the premier AI coding company is using people to do it.

[kurthr]

I guess I'm in a bubble, because it doesn't feel that way to me.

When AI tops the charts (in country music) and digital visual artists have to basically film themselves working to prove that they're actually creating their art, it's already gone pretty far. It feels like the even when people care (and they great mass do not) it creates problems for real artists. Maybe they will shift to some other forms of art that aren't so easily generated, or maybe they'll all just do "clean up" on generated pieces and fake brush sequences. I'd hate for art to become just tracing the outlines of something made by something else.

Of course, one could say the same about photography where the art is entirely in choosing the place, time, and exposure. Even that has taken a hit with believable photorealistic generators. Even if you can detect a generator, it spoils the field and creates suspicion rather than wonder.

[crooked-v]

> more specifically because people who are willing to pay money for art seem to strongly prefer that their money goes to an artist, not a GPU cluster operator.

Look at furniture. People will pay a premium for handcrafted furniture because it becomes part of the story of the result, even when Ikea offers a basically identical piece (with their various solid-wood items) at a fraction of the price and with a much easier delivery process.

Of course, AI art also has the issue that it's effectively impossible to actually dictate details exactly like you want. I've used it for no-profit hobby things (wargames and tabletop games, for example), and getting exact details for anything (think "fantasy character profile using X extensive list of gear in Y specific visual style") takes extensive experimentation (most of which can't be generalized well since it depends on quirks of individual models and sub-models) and photoshopping different results together. If I were doing it for a paid product, just commissioning art would probably be cheaper overall compared to the person-hours involved.

[musicale]

> people who are willing to pay money for art seem to strongly prefer that their money goes to an artist, not a GPU cluster operator

Businesses which don't want to pay money strongly prefer AI.

[clickety_clack]

Art is political more than it is technical. People like Banksy’s art because it’s Banksy, not because he creates accurate images of policemen and girls with balloons.

[smj-edison]

I'd distinguish between physical art and digital art tbh. Physical art has already grappled with being automated away with the advent of photography, but people still buy physical art because they like the physical medium and want to support the creator. Digital art (for one off needs), however, is a trickier place since I think that's where AI is displacing. It's not making masterpieces, but if someone wanted a picture of a dwarf for a D&D campaign, they'd probably generate it instead of contracting it out.

[patcon]

> AND are alienating the creators of these cultural outputs via displacement of labor and payment

YES. Thank you for these words. It's a form of ecological collapse. Thought to be fair, the creative ecology has always operated at the margins.

But it's a form of library for challenges in the world, like how a rainforest is an archive of genetic diversity, with countless application like antibiotics. If we destroy it, we lose access to the library, to the archive, just as the world is getting even more treacherous and unstable and is in need of creativity

[vkou]

> So either training data is going to get more expensive because you're going to have to pay creators, or these models will slowly drift away from the contemporary cultural reality.

Nah, more likely is that contemporary cultural reality will just shift to accept the output of the models and we'll all be worse off. (Except for the people selling the models, they'll be better off.)

You'll be eating nothing but the cultural equivalent of junk food, because that's all you'll be able to afford. (Not because you don't have the money, but because artists can't afford to eat.)

[TeMPOraL]

> I think it's even more pernicious than the paper describes as cultural outputs, art, and writing aren't done to solve a problem, they're expressions that don't have a pure utility purpose. There's no "final form" for these things, and they change constantly, like language.

Being utilitarian and having a "final form" are orthogonal concepts. Individual works of art do usually have a final form - it's what you see in museums, cinemas or buy in book stores. It may not be the ideal the artist had in mind, but the artist needs to say "it's done" for the work to be put in front of an audience.

Contrast that with the most basic form of purely utilitarian automation: a thermostat. A thermostat's job is never done, it doesn't even have a definition of "done". A thermostat is meant to control a dynamic system, it's toiling forever to keep the inputs (temperature readings) within given envelope by altering the outputs (heater/cooler power levels).

I'd go as far as saying that of the two kinds, the utilities that are like thermostats are the more important ones in our lives. People don't appreciate, or even recognize, the dynamic systems driving their everyday lives.