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One can value improving the struggle > reward loop, or one can value subtracting the struggle and getting all reward.
LTV, as I understand it, holds that labor IS value, and clearly that's not true because some labor is wasted or counterproductive. On the other hand, humans strive, we choose, we see things not the way we want and try to fix them. We grow and change, moving from less to more. Remove that, and what separates us from puddles of hedonium?
What separates this dream from the Minotaur? The AI draws transcendent art from you without conscious effort... Is the art actually transcendent, or is it just hacking your specific reward centers, ordering you to FEEL FEELINGS?
You personally are an Artist, in the sense I've been using the term here. Your chosen medium is the written word, and you are good enough at it that I can't imagine you aren't familiar with the artistic process, of the call of the muse, the desire to create, the experience of laboring to birth something novel out into the world. Certainly, it's a painful, often frustrating process, and full of disappointments and sorrows. You're never good enough, never fast enough, you see all the flaws and the inadequacies in your creations, and they pain you. But hopefully you also feel the high, the delight and wonder of hard work rewarded, when someone gets it, when people respond, perhaps even when their opinions change, or even just having a piece that you can read again with your own eyes and know that for that moment, you bore the sword of creation against the void.
Without the process, the succession of conscious choices, how much of that survives? If the AI draws it all without conscious effort on your part, is it really you speaking? How would you know?
An old joke:
A young man walks up the famous Russian novelist at a party. "Oh, it's so good to meet you," he says. "I've read all your novels, they're transcendent! You know, I've decided I'm going to be a novelist just like you! In fact, I've got a great idea for my first novel, and it's going to be incredible!"
"Ah very good," says the Novelist. "But you know, writing a great novel isn't easy. First you need a good thesis."
"Oh, I've got the best thesis! You've never seen such a good thesis!"
"Good, good. But you also need a good setting."
"I've got an amazing setting!"
"Excellent. But you also need strong characters."
"I've got incredible characters! They're deep, they're lifelike, better than life even."
And the novelist smiles and nods. "Well, it sounds like you're well on your way. Now all you need is five hundred thousand words, and they'd better be the right ones."
There's a particular kind of person I met a lot of when I was in school: the "idea person". They couldn't draw and they couldn't code, but they "had ideas", and they thought those ideas could be their contribution to the project. As they saw it, they would sit back in a comfortable chair and imagine "something cool", and then the rest of us would dutifully get to work actually modelling and rigging and animating and coding their "something cool" into an actual product. I spent a lot of time talking to this sort of person, because there were a ton of them and they all liked to talk a whole lot. Without a single exception, their ideas were absolute trash, warmed-over derivation mashups of things they'd watched or played, "X but with this mechanic from Y", or else completely incoherent, a half-step up from word-salad.
The thing is, there's a feeling of "this is a good idea", a sense of excitement, of infinite possibilities, an infatuation, a mania. But you can have this feeling without actually having a good idea, and not only is it not worth a damn if you can't execute it, it's questionable whether it even exists at all in any meaningful sense. A lot of times, maybe most of the time, it's just a glitch in the brain, premature enlightenment, completely lacking substance. And to the extent this is true, I do not think the AI will help.
What can be executed is what is real. I think it's certain that AI will allow orders of magnitude more execution, and orders of magnitude more success from that execution. Maybe it will also fool those people who have nothing to execute into thinking they're a genius, when really it's just stick figure > greg rutkowski trending on artstation. My guess is that when everything shakes out, the later will feel about as satisfying as the stick figure without the autogen; maybe less.
AI, Nueralink and the rest: does it make effort easier and more fruitful, or does it turn your brain into essentially a very large random seed value? Do you recognize a difference between these two outcomes?
...It's always possible that I've misunderstood, but the question comes down to "what is it all for", "what's the point", right? I think I have an answer to that question, and one I at least personally consider satisfactory. Pleasure serves life, not the other way around. We have a purpose: to grow and to choose, to go from puppets to real people.
I agree that it'll allow artists to produce art harder better faster stronger, by many orders of magnitude. I even think it's likely going to devastate existing artistic hierarchies. I question whether it will eliminate artistic hierarchies themselves, though. I'm confident disparate outcomes will persist, 90% of everything will still be crap, there will still be rockstars and sad sacks.
To some extent, this is a philosophical bet against the reality of the Singularity, similar in form to a lot of other bets I make on other topics. I'll admit that my worldview inclines me toward viewing a lot of techno-utopianism with horror and disgust, and it can be difficult to distinguish what we think should be from what we think will be. Maybe I'm wrong, but I don't think so and I defy the future to prove it.
Assuming I understand the statement, how is it not positional goods? I have access to orders of magnitude more art now than when I was a kid, and much of that art is qualitatively better in every way than what I had as a kid, but I still feel starved for quality. It follows logically that my standards have gotten stricter. Why do we suppose that this heightening of standards won't just keep increasing?
The bet here is that you like something, Game of Thrones or Ghost in the Shell, and the AI means that there's an unlimited amount of it available. The show never ends, or if it does there's another show that hits the same notes, right? And when you get tired of not just the show but the notes themselves, there's an unlimited amount of your next appetite, and the one after that and so on, correct? And not just an unlimited amount, but an unlimited amount of perfect, transcendent quality, the best one can imagine.
Yeah, this was my original argument, almost exactly. Endless perfect consumption is isomorphic to the destruction of the most valuable parts of your mind, in the same way wire heading or endless heroin and hookers are. what's it for? If there isn't a better answer than "feeling good forever", I don't want it, and I'm going to bet against it.
Gotta close the gestalt at least.
Artemiy Lebedev, the self-appointed Graphic Design Guru of Russia, has a famous note in his «Kovodstvo» (... «'Idance») blog: Idea worth negative million bucks. It's all very fair and clever and biting, it's only a shame Artemiy would've been a nobody without his illustrious mother, and his contribution to Russian design is probably measured in negative billions.
Regardless, I understand the contempt that doers feel for idea guys (and ChatGPT shows just how commodified random combinations of premises can be made). It's the same sort of contempt artists on 4chan feel for «prompteurs». Prompts can be auto-generated ad nauseam by a shell script, Greg Rutkowsky had to polish his craft for decades.
Mayakovsky was, presumably, like Rutkowsky. He wrote:
I don't like Mayakovsky or what he moved people towards.
I'm an idea guy. Ideas are like stick figures. But not all stick figures are created equal. One will never become as good an artist as Murata, and it's possible, likely even, that Murata believes himself to be a greater mangaka on the account of his ability to make technical artistic choices; he's wrong and it's a tragedy that One has to compromise with him in producing an artistically competent work. Frankly, One's time was wasted on learning to draw. It'd be proper for him to stick to his figures, and let someone like Oh!Great experiment with styles, to then use their finished forms at his discretion. This is one aspect of AI's promise for human creativity – distilling forms of talent, to recombine them without crippling compromise.
In any case, defining the inherent worth of artistic work through choices made feels odd.
For me it's not a matter of choices. There are instrumental choices made along the way, but mostly just mechanical effort towards crystallizing the idea into its finished shape, reverse-diffusing it from noise towards a predestined output – If I were to abuse this metaphor again. Suppose my fingers are cut off and I have to type with my tongue, or use some BCI with 15 characters per minute; that'd be the end of my participation here – just not worth the time; and moreover, it'd probably be impossible to finish any meaningful piece while the idea is alive and breathing (this post was not finished in time, and so it'll never be 1/5th as decent or 1/3rd as responsive to you as it should've been). It's a fragile thing – a true (pardon my hubris) idea; it's far more than a random seed. It's chosen near-instantaneously from an infinite murky space of triviality, grasped, and the ability to see its glitter is what matters; while this ability is perhaps developed and polished in some relation to iterative effort dedicated to implementation, it has a dimension that lies outside the entire artistic craft and has more to do – with some talent, of course, but more interestingly with unique human experience, that inner achievement which shitty Twitter illustrators purport to convey but probably lack; unlike artists whose fame they hide behind. Rubén David González Gallego has cerebral palsy. He has proven one can be a compelling writer in even worse circumstances than my hypothetical; I can't help but wonder how much more he'd have given the world without his handicaps. Quantitatively and qualitatively more – for the same reason of the impermanence of inspirations. And contrariwise, were it possible to diffuse faster, typing or rather altering the text – or other canvas – at the equivalent of 1000 char/minute globally, improving the work in its every point as the brain sees fit and as an algorithm can do – hoo boy, how some idea guys would shine.
Or not.
We are ankle-deep in the sea of generated creativity, both technical and ideational – watching the tsunami wave as it crashes down. I hope that when it recedes, the survivors will discover some jewels in the wreckage, something essentially solid and irreducible to combinatorial glass bead game guided by random seeds. Some true ideas. It's in our interest that they remain human-made.
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