RedRegard
6hr ago
Most art was already commodified, and it was commodity artists, not creative artists who got the most brutal axe.
Essentially, contrary to your point about AI having imagination, creativity is the primary skill it lacks. It's basically a machine for producing median outcomes based on its training data, which is about as far away from creativity as you can get.
But for most artists, their jobs were based on providing quotidian, derivative artworks for enterprises that were soulless to begin with. To the extent that creativity was involved in their finished products, it was at a higher level than their own input, i.e. a director or something commissioning preset quotidian assets as a component in their own 'vision', the vision being the creative part of the whole deal.
However, I do believe creative artists will be threatened too. It's a little complicated to get into, but I think creative art depends not just on lone individuals or a consumer market, but on a social and cultural basis of popular enthusiasm and involvement in a given artform. I'm talking about dilettantes, critics, aficionados here. It's a social and cultural pursuit as much as it's an individual or commercial one, and I think that AI will contribute to the withering away of these sorts of underpinnings the same way corporate dominance and other ongoing trends previously have.
So for the artistic field, I envision complete and total commoditized slop produced by machines, once the human spirit has finally been crushed.
RedRegard
6hr ago
Who are these people, exactly?
Internet nerds like us who based their lives around forums, intellectualism, in my case, literature, etc. The new AI world of dopamine cattle harnessed by the tech fiends suggests total obsolescence of any sort of life that isn't fully grounded in the concrete or else enslaved for the purpose of dopamine-slop control. Admittedly, some people here have lives which go beyond the abstract.
RedRegard
6hr ago
I had a somewhat related idea to this. It's relates to ways that middle class professionals could be screwed. I haven't really hammered it out fully, but here's the gist of it. Basically, the value of automating labor is that it allows human resources to be freed up for other tasks. Rather than having one hundred artisans hand tooling goods, you have one machine operating by one engineer producing the same goods and then ninety nine people who can perform tasks in other areas of the economy.
But with AI, there will be an extinction of an entire class of meaningful work. That which is done by the middle class. There aren't adjacent fields for them to move into once displaced, as those will also be taken by AI. Their only options will be to move up or down, into different classes of the economy, and for the vast, vast majority of them, it will be a downwards spiral.
The area below the middle class economy is called the gig economy. So the value of AI is that there will be a wealth of gig workers, and thus fast food can be delivered more cheaply than ever before.
That is the one benefit of AI we are certain about.
There is a hypothetical scenario, a longstanding dream of science fiction, where with infinite labor afforded by AI there will be infinite opulence. However, some points that contest that are 1) there is only so much demand for consumables and market goods and services, so that economic demand begins to be overshadowed by status concerns and non-economic spheres of life in terms of desired things, 2) many of the inputs that go into supplying those goods and services are finite (i.e. resources) and so their creation can't be infinite, 3) political ramifications suggest reduced power and thus leverage for the displaced, and so their economic needs could easily be ignored by those who retain power.
All in all, there looks to be dark times ahead.
Personally I don't find AIs as fun to talk to as any human. To me, they're like an interactive encyclopedia. It is fun to read and learn about stuff, but they can't stand in for the human element, either on the individual level or the level of an entire society or group (like the motte). Ultimately I find them in some sense desirable in terms of their first order effects (helping with research, etc.), but it's their second and third order effects I'm worried about, where I think, as I explain elsewhere, they will kill off large parts of human culture, remap the class system, and generally work towards all the ongoing, negative trends that already seem apparent. In a sense they are a continuation of capitalism and its logic.
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