I’m in both a lot of art based communities and programming based communities (like HN). The one blind spot many HN readers have is that the quality of something is one facet of an artwork.

Humans make minute decisions in their art whether to tell a story or represent something. When someone generates something, at some point you as the viewer/reader could assume that arbitrary choices were made in places. Those arbitrary decisions just aren’t interesting. I’ve quoted this before, but Kane Parsons highlights exactly this thing:

> If I see an element of the environment has been, you know they used generative fill or whatever to change something about the scene, even if--. It just shuts the part of my brain that wants to know more about that world and wants to look for details, 'cause I would assume if they're willing to make an arbitrary choice there, they can make an arbitrary choice with literally anything.

It’s just less interesting to our minds, I think because there’s less to ponder and explore. It can be a masterpiece in quality but when I know something in that piece was just made up by a machine, why would I care? I can’t wonder why the artist would include it. I can’t think about what it’s trying to tell me because it’s likely not telling me anything.

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patcon 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

YES. Well said. This is why I want to know which text is from human thought labour. To read text or to consume outputs of human minds is to learn about those minds and how those minds might work.

There's a deep loss in having no mind to learn about in the subtext of the specific knowledge content written... I never knew this potential was there (for me) until it started to disappear as a domain of my interest and enthusiasm

I'm definitely a collectivist. Maybe this is related to that value system, or some other subtle thing that I didn't know varied in experience until a fracture and unbundling started. It feels a like how COVID introduced new fracture points in worldview and value systems that became less tenable to ignore, or at least harder to bridge and work across

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jan_m_savage 4 hours ago | parent [-]

This.

It also just occurred to me, inspired by your comment, that getting to know a mind is more than just satisfying your curiosity; personal experience confirms for me that as soon as I interacted with a brilliant mind, some of that shone back on me, and made me a tad more brilliant as well.

	▲	dofm 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		We always want to be among the people we imagine or visualise our future better selves to be. It's such an absolutely fundamental part of humanity (it is how children become adults, too) The reason "AI artists" engage in a spiral of angrily and defensively explaining that their process is not just pushing a button, or trying to project AI-like attributes onto existing things like "covering someone else's song" (which is what the Fender CEO recently did!!) is that we all know that, deep down, using AI to do creative things people did is less in at least some way. It's avoiding some emotional labour. People who know this less is a big part of what they do are the ones who need to reckon with it. Everyone else is free to mentally downgrade it just like they also mentally downgrade excessive photoshop, overproduction, etc., and they will. It took a generation for the world to find any kind of accommodation with what photoshop is capable of, what is appropriate and what is not, and there are aspects we are still justifiably angry about (fraud, deception, body image). AI artists seem in a hurry to have their own use normalised; they want people to hurry up and get over it and use it themselves so they don't feel bad. Many photographers have developed rules for what they will and will not retouch, even a century before photoshop — for example, if the spot on someone's face won't be there in a fortnight, it maybe even shouldn't be in a photograph that is intended to be a long-lasting, somewhat authoritative representation of that person. But this took a long time to become any kind of cultural norm. I think AI-only coders and CEOs are also in this "hurry up and get over it so I feel OK about my choices" phase, and I think we need to see this in a clear-minded way if we are to confront its impacts.

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trescenzi 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I think it’s a blind spot to a lot of people not just programmers. If you don’t have experience understanding and not just viewing you’ll almost always prefer the shinier object. I don’t really think this is particularly new even generative AI has just ramped up the speed that shiny objects can be produced. Most people aren't trained to do the understanding part so most media has always been about maximizing the shininess.