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They are no less beautiful nor are they gone after some gradient descent has slithered over them, so worry not.

It’s strange and highly unpleasant to watch people treat something as a zero-sum game that is decidedly not one.
No, I get it.

AI has the effect of making whatever it creates feel worthless. Something AI made says “this wasn’t worth spending any time on. It’s not something important ” Seeing something you care about become part of that Sucks.

That idea is incomprehensible to me.

I see value (or lack of it) in what I have in front of me, not in how much a person had to struggle and suffer for it to come into existence.

Either something is good or it’s not. Creating something good can sometimes take a lot of effort, but it’s not the effort that makes it good. Otherwise digging a hole and filling it back up would be a valuable undertaking.

What you are saying is that you either do not understand or do not care for craft (it’s an observation, not a criticism), but craft has definite value beyond the end result. Effort does play a huge part, including in animation.

http://gurneyjourney.blogspot.com/2019/03/painting-backgroun...

The lights in windows on the background of Akira, for example, were painstakingly painted one by one. That takes skill. That is impressive. It’s the kind of work that makes one with an appreciation for art (which goes beyond “pretty picture”) take another look and imagine what the artist was feeling and thinking as they were working. It makes you wonder about exact techniques and how to improve them, how to create something new.

All of that enhances the appreciation for the movie. The craft, the skill, the sweat put into it to make a hard and grandiose vision plays into how good and influential it has become.

Had those buildings just been spit out by gen AI along with everything else, there would be no value to taking a second look. You’d probably be looking at distorted images anyway, and even if you weren’t it’d just be a bunch of pixels with no intentionality to it. If no one put effort into the details, there’s no reason to look at them. The converse is also true.

I do care for craft, but I don’t view it as an end in itself. The value of craft lies in what it creates, and that value reflects back on the undertaking itself.

But if a machine can replicate mechanically what takes a human effort and ingenuity to do, a human doing the same thing through effort and ingenuity doesn’t magically add further value. And this is understood quite universally; that’s why no human practices the craft of multiplying large numbers anymore.

No, it doesn’t have to take effort, but that does mean that someone genuinely cares.

Like, I love blog posts. Really do, I’ll read anyone’s about anything. Someone thought of something and cared about it and put it into the world and that’s wonderful.

But someone making an AI post doesn’t care. And worse, it makes anyone who does care feel silly, like, why am I wasting my time on this thing that’s so worthless that whatever the first thing the computer spits out is good enough for them

AI output often 'looks like something' on first try, which makes it easy to assume no effort went in.

But there's a big difference between prompting and accepting the first output versus someone using search, multiple LLMs, actually READING the underlying papers, and iterating until it's done.

Sometimes that still means getting to 'done' faster than by more traditional means. Sometimes it means more depth than you'd manage otherwise. Sometimes somewhere in between.

Of course, by that point, either way, it doesn't really look like lazy AI output anymore.

Maybe it's not so much about the tools/agents as it is about the intent-to-engage behind them?

Yeah totally. Content aware fill is AI by any definition but I don’t have a problem with that.

It’s the stuff where, if the creator couldn’t be bothered to care about the details why should I? And most gen ai art is that way

Digging a hole and filling it up might very well have value as an art piece. The process is important for art, not just the end product.
Okay. Let's say we find out tomorrow that Spirited Away was animated via generative AI. Unbeknownst to everyone, Ghibli has a top-secret AI division which—thanks to some key lucky breakthroughs—is many decades ahead of everyone else and has been for a long time. The animators are a front to hide the truth; Miyazaki's anti-AI declarations were pure jealousy.

Would Spirited Away no longer be a good film?

And at the very least, if someone was willing to do back breaking labor to tell me something, it’s probably something they think is important
the process is not important for art, although it might have value for people. art is a subjective experience, one that comes to life in the obeserver.
imo a massive problem with generative AI is in communication skills of its creators.

Look at Google Gemini and how it's accepted. The only two differences between it and the rest is that it's made by Google, and they don't brag about disrupting the society or damaging its workings(Google do disrupt the society and damage its workings).

It's one thing to design a shotgun, it's another to give it a commercial name "Street Sweeper". The latter is asking to be treated unfairly. Torrenting bunch of media contents and brandishing the runnable blobs as weapons that kill all $classes_of_good_people just isn't and never was the way you communicate anything to anyone.

right, but photography as an art form is pretty much dead, isn't it? and I'm saying this as a heavy AI user
In many ways, it is a zero-sum game. Art is a form of communication, and people have a finite amount of time and attention. Some people enjoy seeing the craftsmanship of artists, and some artists enjoy displaying their mastery of the craft. Beyond that, people use craftsmanship as a proxy for care/thought put into a work. If you can successfully mimic the appearance of craftsmanship without the effort, a major incentive for artists to create, polish, and publish their work is now gone. If you're someone who enjoys viewing craftsmanship, or who tries to find for high quality work based on the craftsmanship put into it, how long will you be willing to look through a sea of increasingly convincing noise to find some kind of signal?
ever seen a meme being ran into ground by overexposure? ever heard a song on the radio one too many times?

it's like that

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