This attitude reminds of a particular 1850s-ish building in my area chock full of intricately hand-carved half-size wooden figurines. These were generated by true masters of their crafts. It’s obvious— work that only could be produced by a lifetime of devotion to a craft.

And the industry is gone. No one could produce figurines like that at any worldly price, probably for the last 100 years. The world is less for it, but it doesn’t matter, art follows different more efficient technologies and methods.

I sympathize with these artisans of the written word. But they’re all wrong, they’re dinosaurs who don’t know it. I myself was one, churning on high-value bespoke written work. The economic model is wrong, we’re the expert 1850s figurine crafters, adapt or … burn out I guess.

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apsurd 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

it's such a _wrong_ conclusion.

Art for its own sake. Say something. Experience having said something.

Economic value is the least of it. i get why economic value is the only thing that matters. we made the world this way. i get it.

but also: art for its own sake. say something. experience the saying of the something.

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tpmoney 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

Not all art is intended to "say something". Sometimes you want a piece of artwork because you want a portrait of your D&D character for the character sheet. Sometimes you want some background for some color in a slide. Sometimes you want a thing you like in a different style[1]. And don't get me wrong, if you're able to hire an artist for it, and you want to, you absolutely should. But there's nothing wrong IMO with using a machine to do it for you either. You can hand cut dove tails for your drawers with a little practice, and I've done it. I'm also not going to judge someone for using a jig, or buying a pre-cut drawer. You can hand make ravioli with a flour, egg and a rolling pin. I've done it. It was incredible fresh pasta. It was also a ridiculous amount of work and I'm just as happy to buy pre-made ravioli from the store, or roll out the sheets with a pasta machine.

[1]: https://www.inprnt.com/gallery/canadianturtle/pacman-ukiyoe/

	▲	scrollop 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		If you something is "art" then it almost by definition will "say something" if only the expression of an artist and their intention. If you are talking about the background colour of a slide, that is not "art", it's a simple choice. The portrait for your d&d character - if you used AI to generate just because you need any image and you don't care, you need a representation, then it may be difficult to classify that as "art". If you drew it, regardless of how bad it is, and you like and appreciate and connect with it, that is "art". Of course, we may all have our own definitions of "art"

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phantasmish 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

AI Economics (of money, anyway) aren't what'll kill writing. The vast, vast majority of writing is already not done for money. Approximately nobody makes meaningful amounts of money writing.

The existence of a sea of AI slop making it impossible to find or publicize writing is what will kill it.

It's purely a loss.

	▲	apsurd 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		Great point. Reminds me of the misinformation wars. People who respect evidence-based knowledge need to defend against a never ending onslaught of conspiracy theories. They only need to slip up once, while the other side of doubt can run their engine forever with the latest flavor.

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komali2 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

That sounds like a beauty building, and perhaps the market for such things is quite small now, but those artisans still exist. In Japan there's plenty of master carpenters and woodblock artists, including one American man that moved there like 40 years ago and dedicated the remainder of his life to the craft.

In Taiwan I've met indigenous woodworking artists. They sell stuff in markets all the time, plenty of it incredibly intricate. Incidentally, many temples here are also covered in beautifully layered granite carvings.

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bccdee 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Nah, that misunderstands writing pretty fundamentally. Language is how we express ideas. An LLM that could write as well as a person would need to be able to think as well as a person, and they just don't. That's why nobody's publishing LLM books, and why the only LLM articles are SEO slop and advertorials.

We've had LLMs for years. Image models and coding agents have gotten remarkably good, and their output is all over the place. So where is the AI writing? Outside of automated summaries, formulaic essays, and overly verbose LinkedIn posts, nowhere.

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shakna 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

Plenty of dime novels published with AI as well. Resulting in a depressed fiction marketplace, where people are even more hesitant to buy from an unknown author.

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fragmede 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Someone hasn't looked at the Kindle bookstore lately.

	▲	bccdee 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		Amazon self-publishing is full of spam, obviously, but nobody buys those. They're the book equivalent of a broken 3-star GitHub repo with 2 commits. If that was all that coding agents were used for, I'd call those a failed use case too.

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syphia 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Writing may not be produced for the prestiege of its result, but written words still serve an essential purpose for communication. I think that, as with any essential art, e.g. cooking, people will experiment with it to fit their needs.

Writing is also peculiar in that it is easily referenceable with a deep history, so it serves as a way to compare one's own ideas to others. Memes are similar in principle, but tend towards esotericism and ephemerality in a balkanized internet.

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smaudet 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

No.

What will actually happen, likely, is a complete death of writing. Not just that the craft is gone, but that art is gone.

What is the point of creating anything if it has no meaning? And likewise, there is no economic value to it either.

So there will simply be no art, and paradoxically any true art will simply be so ridiculously expensive and unaffordable that nearly nobody will benefit from it any more...

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trinsic2 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

If you are not doing art for arts sake, then I think you are missing the point. You can create all you want for the creators economy and maybe many people need that right now. There will always be people that go to art to experience the awesomeness of life. Its just a differnt way of seeing the world, no reason to put everyone into a binary category of adapt or die. Its never going to be like that for everyone. I dont feel the need to compete for attention.