If they could draw or make music, they wouldn’t need a robot to do it, and they clearly want to but don’t have the skills.
I’m a musician, dudes come up to me like listen to this song I made, and it’s obviously suno…
I call them out on it and they’re like mumble mumble.
Has nobody considered the angle that slopping is fun? It doesn’t make you an artist, nor an author, nor a musician. But it makes a thing at your direction and you can point at it and say “this vaguely resembles the idea in my brain”. For some people, that’s enough.
(this has been part 4 on my Nuanced Opinions Regarding AI)
Sir and or madam, I would like to subscribe to Nuanced Opinions Regarding AI facts.
That’s why the zeitgeist needs more time to settle on the perception of LLMs. It’s a cool toy, but people shouldn’t be getting it in their head that it gives them a shortcut to becoming a professional.
Wow. That’s a phenomenal comment. In my human opinion. Very cogent.
You gotta understand what it’s good for as a tool and realize it’s not going to do your job for you.
The problem is that it’s utility is basically inversely correlated with your skill on a given subject because you can’t reasonably hope to guide it to what you actually want if you aren’t already pretty skilled. Similarly, how much “benefit” or “coolness” it provides you is also inversely correlated with your skill but with like 3x the slope of utility.
If you are needing to navigate a pool of text as an expert in a field, it’s obscenely useful and the holes/pitfalls are super evident. The less skilled you are as a user the more magical and beneficial it all looks, which is scary.
the problem is that it’s utility is basically inversely correlated with your skill
I’ve thought this exact thing too, I’m sure many of us have. AI is really you get what you give, literally. If you’re educated, well read, know how to write and interact and think critically and have some technical skill, it can be massively useful.
If you don’t you just get mental masturbation.
Edit:
It’s like, I hate cars. I want them dead, gone, erased.
And I can acknowledge their utility.
I literally havent considered that. Probs should. It was really fun for me for a short while, but I never wanted to share my creations or pass it off as my own.
“Make a tank out of liqorice allsorts but have Big Bird hanging out the top using a stick of liquorice as a cigar” “hahahahaha thats really funny”.
It got boring fast though.
That was my perspective as well. Once that immediate novelty wore off I started to look at people still playing with it and wondering what they’re seeing that I’m not.
But I guess people like different things. Like I hate reality TV shows, but those are plenty popular.
I HATE LLMs
But it can be fun, a little part of the problem specifically for LLMs they are addicting. Image generation version less so unless it’s for porn
But I mean these things are great for shit posts
They’re great for shitposts? I thought the point of shitposts was they take no effort. Wouldn’t putting an extra service in the loop just complicate it?
I think that the kinds of people who would find the lying machine addictive would probably also find gambling mechanics in video games addictive. Also regular porn can be addictive to some people as well. I’m not disagreeing with you, just pointing out that these specific issues are not unique to generative ai.
People don’t go to RISD to learn to be an artist, they go for the connections.
Doubt.
You spend so much time using your clock and calculator on your phone you clearly want to be an engineer but don’t have the skills.
That’s actually a really illuminating analogy.
I can’t say I understand what people get out of playing with LLMs, but if they view writing code or drawing pictures like I view using a calculator then that explains a lot of the disconnect between the two camps.
I would 100% let some model draw me up a comic to shitpost without a second thought, and it by no means should be construed to mean that I wish I had chosen art for a career or a major or even a hobby.
Interestinger and interestinger. So you wish you could create the art (or pictures, whatever term you want to use), but the way you do it doesn’t matter, so you just use the LLM because that’s the easiest way to do it?
Would you normally try to soup something up in paint, or just do something else? I mean like before you could generate it with natural language.
Yeah I’ve done some minor photoshop before but that isn’t really the point.
It’s not even that I wish I could do it. Sometimes I think of a stupid meme like the “well yes but actually no” pirate and a picture of Mr Bean and Sean Bean or something and I could let an LLM shit that side by side out instead of using meme generator and like 10 minutes of thought. Or I could just… Not. I actually haven’t ever, but people who say “oh just draw it even if it’s stick figures” are full of shit. If I want to make a comic I’ll just do it who cares how.
Of course there is value in art, but that value doesn’t come in proportion to the huge number of people studying it and it doesn’t come from comics or memes either in my estimation. I don’t/wouldn’t use a language model for those things because I have penis envy, but rather because it’s easy for dicking around. People asking for relationship advice to Claude are also not secretly wishing they had gone to school for a BS in psych.
At the risk of being dismissive, people with liberal arts or art degrees can cool their tits: basically no one is using LLMs because we secretly wish we had gone down that road, and the ones that do… Well… Bless their hearts they are a small and special minority.
It’s also time. People want to create but learning practising. Getting through the “I suck” stage is rough.
Been in mine for several decades now.
I keep wanting to get more into music, but can never find the time/motivation to practice my scales.
I also tend to pick an instrument and abandon it every few years. I have nieces and nephews who occasionally get a second hand instrument.
Weirdly, I started to lost my sight a year or so ago, I had already coded a bunch of prototype games but if I can’t read it’s hard to code… might as well do the art side (my vision is like distorted I can still see but not whatever I’m looking directly at, like reading)
I’ve enjoyed the journey. Got a few games out and a Kickstarter brewing to spend time on the artwork.
My eyes let me follow my dreams by forcing me to lose my job 😂
Apart from graphic design and advertising, art is difficult and risky for billionaires to profit off of. Human artists are notoriously flaky and difficult to work with. This is one reason Larry Ellison bought WB.
Billionaires want public schools to turn out people who are as close to robots as possible. We all know they’d prefer actual robots, but that’s not happening anytime soon, regardless of all the hype. So, public schools drop anything not reliably connected to billionaires profits. They’re thrilled at the prospect of getting rid of human artists.
lol people down voted you. People be nuts
Accidental downvoting (esp on mobile) is pretty easy, plus some users downvote posts that are in competition for visibility with their own posts (loser behavior, but it happens).
4 downvotes on a post with 163 upvotes is basically just noise.
Accidental downvoting (esp on mobile) is pretty easy
Isn’t it? It’s not so uncommon for me to see a post that I had evidently downvoted without noticing.
Eh. I don’t think it says anything at all about their desire to be an artist. I think it says a lot more about their:
- greed (desire to be paid, regardless of what they’re being paid for)
- cheapness (not wanting to pay a proper artist)
- antisocial (as in: counter to the ethos of social collaboration; not as in “I want to be a potato today”) tendencies
- low ethical standards (not caring that the training sets for all of this are built almost exclusively from stolen contracts)
- self aggrandizement / narcissism (claiming aptitude and credit in a domain that you don’t actually have any skill in, but pretending you do anyways)
I don’t think wanting or not wanting to be able to do art is a major aspect of this at all. It’s largely about wanting the money and, sometimes, the recognition, without doing any of the work it normally takes for humans to get to that point of expertise.
I think not everyone who wants to be artistic can be. I sort of hear music composition in my head. But despite playing a musical instrument all through college, I could never play anything by ear. And memorizing music was really hard. So if AI could get what I hear in my head out, that would be astounding. It can’t yet, but you get my point. I also have poor fine motor skill, so drawing is out. Even with a computer and mouse it just is too hard. That said, I think what this really says is that people have a desire to consume more art, and they are willing to use AI to get it.
If you had the education, you’d know how to do all the things you say you want to do.
Perhaps how I said it wasn’t clear. When I said playing an instrument through college, I meant getting lessons and playing with official school and college bands. I had lots of education. I understand logically how to do the things. But I was unable. It takes more than education to be an artist.
There’s “skills,” and then there’s innate talent, and then there’s practice. Anyone who embraces AI art clearly doesn’t have the innate talent to recognize it’s crap, and their rabid eagerness to jump on the latest trend implies they probably doesn’t have the patience required for practice either.
Not that music and art classes and exposure aren’t important, but 12 years of mandatory gym classes definitely didn’t turn me into an athlete (if anything, it made me hate physical activity. Maybe if we had gone on hikes instead of playing dodgeball…)
But you know how to play dodgeball. Do you know what composition is?
If not, or even the fact that question is tricky for people, is to illustrate my point. People want to be able to draw, and we aren’t being taught how.
Sure I know how to play dodgeball, and I’ve had many, many gym classes worth of practice, but I was always absolute shit at it. Similarly, you can teach composition (or color theory or whatever other art technique you want), and have your students practice it, but most are never going to be more than just okay at creating art. “People just need to be taught the arts and then they won’t be seduced by the siren song of AI!” assumes that education can overcome innate limitations. I will never be a good athlete, just as most people will never be good artists/musicians/writers. Meanwhile here’s a tool that will produce (what AI users think is) an impressive facsimile of the real thing, and at a fraction of the effort with almost no barrier to entry.
Arts in school is just a tool to proliferate and transmit cultural values to the next generation to upkeep a certain base line in the population. Can’t change my mind (but im open to constructive criticism and input)
Here’s how to draw in two point perspective kids!
Sit fuming in the back fucking capitalist pigs trying to shove America down my throat fuck you Mrs. Dotterson I’m too woke to learn how to draw
I agree. I think AI fills a creativity gap for average users - worth making quickly once, not worth pursuing an artist to make it.
I don’t think AI will replace appreciation for human art, as human art is as much about soul as it is skill. AI can only ever do half the equation, but it’s the half that the average person doesn’t have and isn’t quite willing to pursue.
I’m sure there’s an argument to be made that AI copying human art is watering down the value of art, but with how people recoil after finding out it’s AI, I think the bigger risk is never having it disclosed in the first place.
I don’t think that it fills a creativity gap. It circumvents it. It’s a parasite. It gets in the way of you actually being creative and gives you a cheap dopamine hit instead of anything of substance. People learning how to do the things they want to do is what actually bridges that gap.
