The issue is that the signalling makes sense when human generated work is better than AI generated. Soon AI generated work will be better across the board with the rare exception of stuff the top X% of humans put a lot of bespoke highly personalized effort into. Preferring human work will be luxury status-signalling just like it is for clothing, food, etc.

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dilDDoS 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I'm probably in a weird subgroup that isn't representative of the general public, but I've found myself preferring "rough" art/logos/images/etc, basically because it signals a human put time into it. Or maybe not preferring, but at least noticing it more than the generally highly refined/polished AI artwork that I've been seeing.

	▲	appplication 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		There’s no reason to think people broadly want “better” writing, images, whatever. Look at the indie game scene, it’s been booming for years despite simpler graphics, lower fidelity assets, etc. Same for retro music, slam poetry, local coffee shops, ugly farmers market produce, etc. There is a mass, bland appeal to “better” things but it’s not ubiquitously desired and there will always be people looking outside of that purely because “better” is entirely subjective and means nothing at all.

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james2doyle 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I think "better" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in this argument. Better how?

Is an AI generated photo of your app/site going to be more accurate than a screenshot? Or is an AI generated image of your product going to convey the quality of it more than a photo would?

I think Sora also showed that the novelty of generating just "content" is pretty fleeting.

I would be interested to see if any of the next round of ChatGPT advertisements use AI generated images. Because if not, they don’t even believe in their own product.

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masswerk 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The issue being, it's not an expression of anything. Merely like a random sensation, maybe some readable intent, but generic in execution, which isn't about anything even corporate art should be about. Are we going to give up on art, altogether?

Edit: One of the possible outcomes may be living in a world like in "Them" with glasses on. Since no expression has any meaning anymore, the message is just there being a signal of some kind. (Generic "BUY" + associated brand name in small print, etc.)

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ragequittah 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Can't the expression come from the person prompting the AI and sometimes taking hours inpainting or tweaking the prompt to try get the exact image / expression they had in their mind? A good use I've found is to be able to make scenes from a dream you had into an image. If that's not an expression of something then I'm not sure anything is.

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masswerk 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Notably, this process of struggle is meant to go away, to make room for instant satisfaction. This is really about some kind of expression consumerism. (And what will be lost along the way is meaning.)

	▲	ragequittah an hour ago \| parent [-]
		I always find this argument to ring hollow. Maybe it's because I've been through it with too many technologies already. Digital photography took out the art of film photography. CGI took out the wonder of practical effects. Digital art takes out the important brush strokes of someone actually painting. The real answer always is the mediums can coexist and each will be good for expression in their own way. I'm not sure you immediately lose meaning if someone can make a highly personalized version of something easily. The % of completely meaningless video after YouTube and tiktok came about has skyrocketed. The amount of good stuff to watch has gone up as well though.

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fwipsy 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Only novel art is interesting. AI can't really do novel. It's a prediction algorithm; it imitates. You can add noise, but that mostly just makes it worse. It can be used to facilitate original stuff though.

But so many people want to make art, and it's so cheap to distribute it, that art is already commoditized. If people prefer human-created art, satisfying that preference is practically free.

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atleastoptimal 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

AI can be novel, there is nothing in the transformer architecture which prohibits novelty, it's just that structurally it much prefers pattern-matching.

But the idea of novelty is a misnomer I think. Any random number generator can arbitrarily create a "novel" output that a human has never seen before. The issue is whether something is both novel and useful, which is hard for even humans to do consistently.

	▲	CooCooCaCha 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Anthropic recently changed their take-home test specifically to be more “out-of-distribution” and therefore more resistant to AI so they can assess humans. I’m so tired of “there’s nothing preventing”, and “humans do that too”. Modern AI is just not there. It’s not like humans and has difficulties with adapting to novelty. Whether transformers can overcome that remains to be seen, but it is not a guarantee. We’ve been dealing with these same issues for decades and AI still struggles with them.

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idiotsecant 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

There are lots of things that are novel to you without necessarily being novel to the universe.

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paulddraper 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

"Artisanal art" as it were.

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vinyl7 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The goal of art isn't to be perfect or as realistic as possible. The goal of art is to express, and enjoy that unique expression.

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davebren 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> Preferring human work will be luxury status-signalling just like it is for clothing, food, etc.

What? Those items are luxuries when made by humans because they are physical goods where every single item comes with a production and distribution cost.