It's not that it's replacing one form of activity with a cheaper one, it's that it removes the transaction. Which means that now there's nothing to tax, and nothing to measure. As far as GDP is concerned, economic activity will have gone down, even though the same work is being accomplished differently.

If AI concentrates economic activity and leads to more natural monopolies (extremely likely), yeah, the lower level activity becomes more efficient but the macro economy becomes less efficient due to lower competition.

Software has basically done the same thing, where we do things faster and the fastest thing that happens is accumulation of power and a lower overall quality of life for everyone due to that.

You are right. The next question is, who gets the surplus?

your example is complete nonsense as digging a hole is not creative in any way at all

Incumbents hate this one trick!

Until everyone has a personal fully automatic hole digger and there are holes being dug everywhere and nobody can tell any more where is the right and wrong place to dig holes

It doesn't cost less to get the thing you actually want in the end anyway, no one in their right mind would actually launch with the founder's AI-produced assets because they'd be laughed out of the market immediately. They're placeholders at best, so you're still going to need to get a professional to do them eventually.

Then there's the 3rd leg of the triangle. If a startup built with AI does end up going past the rest of the pack, they will have no technical moat since the AI provider or someone else can just use the same AI to build it.

Yeah exactly. I did CS because I love math and computability theory and logic and distributed computation, and I will have an interesting enough idea I want to play with, but I'll get stuck on some bullshit with Kubernetes or systemd or Zookeeper or firewalls or something that's decidedly not an interesting problem for me, but something necessary that I need to actually do my idea.

Being able to get ChatGPT to generate basic scaffold stuff, or look at errors, help me resolve dependencies, or even just bounce ideas off of, really helps me maintain progress.

You could argue that I'm not learning as much than if I fought through it, and that's probably true, but I am absolutely learning more than I would have if I had just quit the project like I usually did.

It all started going wrong with the printing press.

Imagine if you had to hire a designer if you wanted to build a web application or mobile app, at a cost of perhaps thousands or even tens of thousands.

Would we be better off?

I doubt it.

This is a financial dead-end for almost everyone who tries it. You're not just looking for "market fit" you're also asking for "market tolerance", it's a very rare combination.

The difference is you have autonomy now - the same autonomy as a person building a web application or app able to put together a serviceable UI/UX without any other person - without the sacrifice of "programmer art" or cobbling together free asset packs.

Is that an argument against the quality, saying that AI cannot (or some weaker claim like that it does not usually) produce "art"? Else, is it an argument of provenance, akin to how copyright currently works, where the same visual representation is "art" if a human makes it and is not "art" if an AI makes it?

When pedantry pays the bills this will be a helpful mindset.

Stop trying to impose your narrow-minded definition of art onto other people. If you disagree, that's fine, but you've lost my respect the moment you tell someone else that their definition of art is wrong.

I don’t see this as a claim that the AI is doing art. He’s just saying, that the art can be created at low incremental cost.

Like, if we were in a world where only pens existed, and somebody was pitching the pencil, they could say “With a pencil if you want 2x or 5x or 10x as many edits, it's an incremental cost, you can explore ideas and make changes without throwing the whole drawing away.”

Yes, being against a society without artists is totally a luddite argument. Being against AI entropy stopping societal progress, stagnating culture at 2025 when humans started stopping contributing to the training set is a luddite argument. Please stop, you are not responding in good faith.

Saying 'I think society should have artists' is not Luddism.

> There are going to be a million other things that move the economics away from scarcity and take away the profitability.

What we’re really talking about here is the consolidated of power under a few tech elites. Saying it’s a luddite argument is a red herring.

People are wanting to make a living by making art, not to get rich.

I highly recommend reading the book I mentioned as you don’t seem to have a particularly nuanced understanding of the actual struggles at play.

Perhaps an analogy you’ll understand is what happens to the value of a developer’s labour when that labour is in many ways replicated by AI and big AI companies actively work to undermine what makes your labour different by aggressively marketing that anyone can so what you so with their tools.

That's a really bad analogy, because even in digital art where you can pick your color from a color wheel on a monitor, understanding how primary colors combine to become different colors and hues is a _fundamentally_ important aspect of creating appealingly colored paintings, digital or physical. Color theory is about balance; some colors have more visual "weight" than others. Next to each other they take on entirely different appearances -- and can look hideous or beautiful.

This isn't me saying digital artists need to practice mixing physical pigment, but anecdotally, every single professional digital artist I know has studied physical paint -- some started there, while others ended up there despite starting out and being really good digitally. But once the latter group hit a plateau, they felt something was lacking, and going back to the fundamentals lifted them even higher.

If they get mad it's because you're saying this explicitly to be an asshole. The essence of art doesn't have much to do with the mechanical skills for assembling pieces into a whole, though that part isn't trivial. Rather, it's about expressing human thoughts and feeling in a way that inspires their human audience. That's why AI-generated "art" is different in kind from a skilled digital artist and why it really cannot be art.

It may be maddening to them because you are implying that physical color mixing is somehow that one defining thing that makes it art. Imagine someone said that about writing a book: if you don't write it by hand but use Microsoft Word instead, it's not a real book. How would that even be the case? The software is not doing the work for you (unless it's AI).

I can tell you with confidence that physical color mixing itself is a really small part of what makes a good traditional artist, and I am indeed talking about realistic paintings. All the art fundamentals are exactly the same, wether you do digital art or traditional oil, there are just some technical differences on top. I have been learning digital painting for a few years and the hardest things to learn about color were identical to traditional painters. In fact, after years of learning digital painting and about colors, it only took me a couple of days to understand and perform traditional color mixing with oil. The difficult part is knowing what colors you need, not how to get there (mixing, using the sliders, etc.)

And just to add a small bit here: digital artist also color mix all the time and need to know how it works, the difference here is that mixing is additive instead of subtractive.

Everybody has to decide where to draw the line at convenience versus artistic purity. For most, the creative act is in selecting the color, not how you get there.

Do you sneer at those who use industrial pigments instead catching and crushing their own cochineal beetles?

Given the diversity of media involved in digital art, I’m not sure that analogy is a particularly good one.

And to add, like many of his contemporaries, Michelangelo likely didn’t do much of the painting that’s attributed to him.

Are assembly programmers real programmers if they can't implement their algorithms by soldering transistors?

Pollock can get uncountable bytes of entropy from a skilful swing of a bucket.

Plus, is getting 1 billion bytes of randomness/entropy from your 1 thousand bytes of text input really <your> work?

I think what AI has made and will make many more people realise is that everything is a derivative work. You still had to prompt the AI with your idea, to get it to assemble the result from the countless others' works it was trained on (and perhaps in the future, "your" work will then be used by others, via the AI, to create "their" work.)

It is apposite that in a lot of modern art, the concept and provenance are valued more than the execution.

For now. Eventually it will get you 100% of the way there and we'll have the tooling for it as well.

That’s great info. Thank you. I’ll give it a shot tomorrow.

Because, uh, literally everything. But the main reason is that modeling is actually the easy (easiest) part of the workflow. Rigging/animating/rendering in the 2D style you want are bigger hurdles. And SOTA AIs don't even do modeling that well.

You said you had a budget about 0 in your top post. Was that for the pre-AI era or does that apply to your new AI flow as well? If it's still about 0, I'm guessing you're using primarily AI to learn how to do stuff and not using it mostly to generate assets? Is that a correct assumption?

Edit: also, where can we play Escape Goat.

Can you get consistency in the design? I know this was a problem 3 years ago…

Those games sell themselves on name alone, are they playable anywhere?

Yeah, you’re right.

Ease of entry brings more creative people into the industry, but over time it all boils down to ~5 hegemons, see FAANG - but those are disrupted over time by the next group (and eventually bought out by those hegemons).

Offtopic: I once read a comment that starting a company with the goal of exiting is like constantly thinking about death :)

Well, you still have to come up with something interesting.

Given that "AI" training needs millions of books, papers and web pages, it is a derivative work of all those books. Humans cannot even read a fraction of that and still surpass "AI" in any creative and generative domain.

"AI" is a smart, camouflaged photocopier.

I dont care how you phrase it. Its no secret that art was stolen from artists. Image generation is thievery.