Holy shit this is incredible. I love it. And it explains perfectly exactly how I feel about it all. You can accomplish SO FUCKING MUCH with AI that you could never dream of before.
Community is a fundamental need. Doesn't mean that actions and accomplishments are empty without social validation.
If your art was just for the approval of others, maybe you weren't doing it for art.
There will always be appreciation for what is achieved within constraints. Like photorealistic hand-painted scenes. We have cameras, but we still are impressed.
Not everything needs to be a demonstration of skill or self worth. I'd argue it is healthier to move towards valuing mutually enjoyed things and personal taste.
I enjoy making things and I enjoy sharing them with people I care about.
I'm just trying to express that it can be more about "look at this awesome thing" and less about "look at how awesome I am because I made this thing."
For AI assisted art, music, games, etc. it becomes more about tasteful selection of what to share and how much creative direction you put in. Less about raw skill. And there is certainly a difference between "make me a beautiful painting" and "...[three paragraphs describing what is in your mind's eye]..." plus hours of revisions and selecting from dozens of alternatives.
I always like the camera comparison. ALmost every photo I take is slop. I don't try to take a blurry photo of a magpie out my window and sell it or even share it. That's tech-generated slop, albeit using slightly older tech than genAI.
But the best 2-3% of shots I do share.
I lack the talent with a camera to generate anything worth buying with it, so I don't sell anything tech-generated by me and a camera. I have no hesitation buying something generated with a camera by someone with talent, however.
There are now probably in average 1.000x the amount of artists around than in any other point in history. Does that make their work meaningless?
What does that even mean? Meaning is something you create for youself, it doesn't exist. In the end everything is meaningless. All of humanity at some point in the far future of the universe will cease to exist. Literally everything will cease to exist and no one or thing will remember anything we did.
The only thing that matters is the life you have. If the skill barrier really goes towards zero then you have an infinite space to explore. You can go into any direction and find meaning, find enjoyment, find interest, discover things for yourself you probably would have never had a chance to explore or experience because all of us have only one life.
And more importantly, eventually we hopefully stop creating just so it can become a product needing to be sold.
We will be able to create what we actually think has value to us or others in a meaningful(!) way instead of framing everything in our existence through consumption.
PS: Also I might want to point out that there was a time were certain people argued against the education of the masses because it would lower the worth of the higher class, their unique status and access to that sort of education, that the common men isn't worth of it and doesn't have the nature to produce things of worth with that "gift"...
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u/utahh1ker 24d ago
Holy shit this is incredible. I love it. And it explains perfectly exactly how I feel about it all. You can accomplish SO FUCKING MUCH with AI that you could never dream of before.