What is that character and human feel you speak of? All I see are two different ways of saying the exact same thing, nothing added or removed. Although of course the LLM version is more standardized English and structured.
None of those things are battlegrounds for AI art complaints since AI usage is still minimal there. The AI complaints are about anime, posters, YouTube videos, etc.
There was recently an anime in which they used one AI generated background in the ending theme, which spurred countless complaints. It's common knowledge that anime animators are badly paid and work on insane schedules, so they used AI to cut corners. How many of those complainers proposed better wages and less pressure for animators, vs demanding free replacement of the background at no cost on their own? This is entitlement.
When a significant amount of movie scenes are AI generated, let's see whether viewers are willing to pay premium for non-AI scenes, or whether they only complain that they're not getting non-AI at no additional charges.
I don't really understand your argument. So because me in America was not able to vouch for Japanese labor laws, I don't support human art? My country isn't exactly in the nest position to judge other countries's economic budgets. Especially in the arts.
>When a significant amount of movie scenes are AI generated, let's see whether viewers are willing to pay premium for non-AI scenes,
You act like prices for media isn't going up while also enshittifying at the same time. Netflix, Xbox, theatres, DVD/BD box sets, game consoles, and so much more did not need AI as an excuse to raise prices.
This is about paying for better-than-AI human artwork, not any human artwork. Would they pay premium for non-AI? That matters much more than whether they pay when they have no choice.
Factor? That's not what was described: "knowing it was AI irrespective of anything else."
And no - I don't think it's fair to call the art bad when in fact what you mean is you don't like the way it was made. Saying "I don't like AI art" is not the same as "This piece is shit", which is how it is almost always framed.
Art is not evaluated based solely on the isolated output. Intent, context, and human effort are fundamental parts of why people value a work. People calling an AI piece "bad" by default are responding to that lack of human agency and intent. The process is part of the work, so factoring how it was made into your judgment is entirely fair, even as the primary deciding factor.
A fair retort is that holding every creative output to this standard, like a flyer for a community fair, is needlessly critical. That is not an unreasonable position. Still, I think it is fair for one to believe that using an AI image is a clear low-effort signal that strips away the human element that makes community events appealing in the first place. And for commercial products: if your ad is low effort, why should I believe your product is not?
Again, that is not what is being described here: "knowing it was AI irrespective of anything else."
> And no - I don't think it's fair to call the art bad when in fact what you mean is you don't like the way it was made. Saying "I don't like AI art" is not the same as "This piece is shit", which is how it is almost always framed.
I don't really feel like you engaged with the point at all. You fixated on the original commenter's exact phrasing to dodge the argument: provenance isn't separate from art.
If someone strongly values human agency and intent, knowing a piece lacks both (in part, or entirely) is a completely rational reason to call it bad. Many would argue (myself included) that the primary difference between "art" and "content" is human agency, effort, and intent. The more the outcome is driven by a black-box algorithm, the more that agency and intention are compromised.
I'm not dodging at all - I'm providing the quote which makes your point fail to land.
What is being described is not "factoring". Factoring implies multiple datapoints were merged together. The quote demonstrates that only one data point was used.
You can see it again with "provenance isn't separate from art". What the quote describes is "provenance replaces art", which is prejudice.
Most people aren't aware of the prevalence of stock imagery during the 2000s. AI is just synthetic stock images, which I have zero problem with.
Artists with taste are the ones creating the best AI images, just they were the ones who photoshopped the best things out of stock images when that was the main mode, and just as they created the best stuff when everything was manual typesetting and dark room photography.
That assumes that AI is only used in place of stock imagery.
In reality it is seeping into our lives at an alarming rate which I worry is disrupting our shared sense of reality (which was already tenuous.)
AI has capabilities that were impossible (or very difficult before.) You could easily generate a realistic video of me saying terrible things or kicking a puppy or doing a pornographic act. You could clone my voice and call my grandma asking for money. It’s very hard to tell what is real now and it will get harder as the capabilities improve.
These tools are also much more accessible than photo editing software. Before, few people had the skill to create realistic fakes. Now anyone can do it. This has led to a flood of fake images, videos, and text online. This crowds out real humans and makes it hard to know what is real. My older relatives especially have Facebook feeds filled with fake content they think is real.
The capabilities combined with the scale make it hard to know what is real in a way Photoshop never did.
By many people’s criteria it automatically is worse, because part of what they value in art is thinking about the artist and their intentions behind their creation.
Similarly people may view an IKEA book stand as worse quality than one built by hand even if the hand built one has flaws. Or they might view a microwaved meal as worse than that created by a home chef.
People value the human intention and care that goes into creations. Without that it’s worse even if the output is fundamentally the same.
A drawing by my young niece may not have the same finesse as an AI generated one but I like it a whole lot more
I think a thought pattern that happens here is "Would you prefer a chair mass produced in a factory, or would you prefer a hand-crafted chair?"
Where by analogy, AI is the factory chair, human-designed is the hand-crafted chair.
And your mind imagines the most beautiful hardwood chair, with perfectly mitred joints, smoothed and waxed, your ideal handmade chair, made by a master craftsman.
Not the wobbly ugly piece of crap I would make if I tried to make a chair.
Ikea's cheapest factory-produced chair is a nicer chair than the one I would make by hand.
I’ve got a few wobbly pieces of furniture around the house. I love them!
I’ve also got a bookcase my dad made back when he was in shop class. And my mom has been using a cutting board I made her for the last 20 years.
I’m also a bad potter but love drinking out of the mugs I made and eating out of the bowls I made.
I love the artwork my friends and family have made even if they’re not super talented. It’s up on the walls.
IKEA stuff is fine. I have some, but I don’t feel much emotion around it. It gets the job done and not much more. (Though in my experience it’s not very sturdy and falls apart faster than handmade stuff.)
I would also add that back in the day there were a lot more craftsmen making high quality furniture for purchase. A lot of them have been driven out of business and so now buying that type of thing is much more expensive.
>By many people’s criteria it automatically is worse, because part of what they value in art is thinking about the artist and their intentions behind their creation.
I think that's true enough for what it is but, as the other commenter also noted, a bit of a different topic here. The Monet example shows that people work backward from AI to direct conclusions about the quality of the work itself, which isn't the same as agreeing a work is by all appearances equivalent to Monet but lacking in underlying deliberation.
One can inform the other to be sure but that conversation exists in parallel with another conversation that's a straight one-shot assessment of quality.
> By many people’s criteria it automatically is worse, because part of what they value in art is thinking about the artist and their intentions behind their creation
That’s a bit separate to what I’m talking about, but I don’t think there are many of these people. I think this whole thing is about AI anxiety coupled with American social norms, and as soon as one of those things changes the artists are going to be left out in the cold again.
I think there are lots of people who value art for the ideas of the artist. There are also lots of people who think that they value something like quality of brushstrokes, and these are the same people, mostly. I mean they don't know what they like it for, but the raw graphical data is what's in front of them, so they ascribe their preference to its (supposedly) measurable qualities.
Hence this thing about I can tell it's AI because its graphical quality is bad. In a way that's correct though! The artist's ideas are hinted at in the brushstrokes (or whatever other graphical aspects). In the gen AI picture you get hints of a phony mind. It becomes hollow when you know that, or when you think you know that. It's not delivering the cultural experience, if the hints you pick up on are false.
There’s the idea of preferences and revealed preferences. People say their preferences and then their actions show what they really prefer. I suspect AI generated content, if curated by a human, would end up being people’s revealed preferences. There are a lot of bad artists and writers and whatever out there, AI would handily beat them.
I think at least for your niece’s drawings example, you’d probably prefer AI art if you had to choose one or the other until the end of time, not just one or two drawings that go on your refrigerator.
But of course with the gen-AI stuff you are getting put in touch with the real ideas of real artists (e.g. Miyazaki), it's just that they've been anonymized and put through a blender.
Revealed preference is a very real and useful phenomenon. But it seems to be increasingly overapplied as a convenient cop-out in scenarios where it's unclear any authentic preference is being revealed (e.g. due to confounding factors or active manipulation) and to exaggerate the extent to which real agency exists (externally predetermined outcomes).
Such as with RLHF-boosted writing from LLMs, where side by side comparisons of human vs. AI writing have been used as proof of revealed preference for AI. But an A/B test of a few sentences doesn't mean that someone would enjoy reading a 5000 word blog post in the same style, as the densely packed rhetorical flourishes become exhausting and repetitive tells start to jump off the page. Nor does it capture the signal/noise problem where despite technical ability and incredible verbosity, realization sets in that nothing in 2000 words has said anything at all while continually stringing the reader along. A side by side comparison with a few AI posters might be preferred in a five 5 minute test, but seeing the same visual elements from three frontier models in a loop on every surface for your entire life could quickly become actively repulsive.
And the problem with agency arises when limited freedom exists to truly make a different choice because the available options are externally determined. I've seen the argument made on HN that people's revealed preference is for AI maximalism, pointing to the fact that consumers keep buying products with AI, hundreds of billions of dollars are spent building new datacenters every year, workers (including creatives!) and students report using AI for daily work, etc.
But consumers aren't really given true choices that could reveal a real preference. The tech giants behind the phone duopoly have crammed AI features into both OS choices. With few exceptions every large company made an "AI strategy" their main focus since 2023 and competed to put chatbots and GenAI features into every inch of their product lines. Hyperscalers started a bidding war on datacenter buildouts in the expectation of future demand back when really only ChatGPT had any real market penetration outside the tech industry. Students and workers feel pressure to keep up with their peers by using AI to avoid getting fired/worse grades, artists struggling for work worry clients will go elsewhere if they take the time for their normal process.
Revealed preference when used haphazardly could be used to come to absurd conclusions like "people want to get scammed", "people like to be overweight", etc. Broadly and incautiously applied it just becomes a way to justify any given status quo as inherently optimally and reflective of collective will. With a creepy paternalistic implication that regardless of what you think you believe, forcing you do something against your will is secretly what you really want, and will make you happy even if you pretend not to realize it.
It's pretty questionable if a preference truly exists as "revealed" for something like AI art when it's preconditioned on active deception. An AI art-hater who gets tricked into picking AI doesn't mean they're lying/confused and actually love it. That sort of reasoning can get uncomfortably close to an anti-democratic argument for mass manipulation of people who can't be trusted to advocate in their own best interests.
Here in Bangalore, you can usually book directly from the Google Maps listing. Or sometimes click a link that will open in Swiggy/Zomato, and you just book from there.
At least in this city, reserving a table using the apps you already have on your phone is faster than using an LLM. Maybe these products are for people who know about the existence of Claude and ChatGPT but not Google Maps?
If I'm booking a restaurant I'll probably be discussing the date/time options with the people I'm going with, and I can't see how adding a chatbot to the mix is meant to help?
The author of this post is complaining about CSS-Tricks not getting paid.
If the person who works ("works") for Digital Ocean but is not getting paid, should pretty leave immediately if that is the case. :) I.e, demanding on some moral premise that this other guy who I don't like is getting money, is quite a "far-left" way to go about it.
The author of the post (Vale) is talking about how the editor of CSS Tricks (Geoff) is not being paid by the owner of CSS Tricks (Digital Ocean)
This is not the first issue since Digital Ocean acquired CSS Tricks.
I’d encourage you to educate yourself more on the situation instead of discounting people as “far-left” (whatever you think that means in this context)
Well, the post is calling David Heinemeir Hansson "far-right". I'd instead encourage him, and perhaps you, to educate yourself on what that means, then read up on his blog post(s).
Here’s a section from the Wikipedia page on far right politics:
> Key to the far-right worldview is the notion of societal purity, often invoking ideas of a homogeneous community based on cultural, ethnic, national, racial, or religious lines or a combination of them
It sounds like DHH is talking about “societal purity” and is “invoking ideas of a homogeneous community based on cultural, ethnic, national, racial, or religious lines”
If he is, then that sure seems like far right politics to me.
Right, but DHH's argument isn't about cultural homogeneity for the sake of it, but rather the consequences of what the other cultures have brought. Reading further from links from the blog, either to his other posts, to the Tommy Robinson march, etc., would tell you that. I.e, you conflate race with merit - because they do associate in the statistics sense, but one is not the other.
The OP on the other hand demands funds from a private company, main argument being that "this other person, who I don't like, got money, then a website I do like, should too".
I don’t really want to argue with you about whether DHH is far right because it’s tangential to the main point of the article and based on your response I don’t think we’d agree.
It’s not about “giving money to a website” it’s about the fact that Digital Ocean purchased a business and hired an employee and then ghosted that employee and stopped paying them (without firing them or shuttering the business.) Thats messed up
While unfortunate that the website is inactive, then any employer is pretty much free to let go any employee (and the employee dispute this if they have grounds for it from contracts). Not to circle back to the left/right topic, but if you think this is "messed up", then I'm not sure how you think the world works at all.
If the love for that site is so great, I'm sure someone will pick it up. Otherwise, I'd doubt "size of love" we are talking about here.
People are also being trained/acculturated to LLM speak, so even if they are trained on human output, they could be getting reinforcement for their LLM-tinged crap-speak.
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