> Don't fool yourself into thinking that we as technologists are not creating a mind.

I'm not sure exactly why but the phrase "don't fool yourself" sets off paranoid alarm bells when I'm reading something.

It's usually immediately followed by a confident assertion without firm evidence. It feels very much like someone wants me to change my beliefs without presenting a rational argument why I should change, and without giving me any new facts so I feel more well informed.

This post doesn't seem to be a counterexample.

I haven't thought as deeply as you about the ethics of it all. I only meant with my comment if I see art I expect it to be human and thats why I value it. If you churn it out with AI I feel hoodwinked into valueing something worthless.

But I am learning towards a lot of your points about how another mind is being created. I still am very uncomfortable with the implications that something digital is Actually Learning. These deep learning networks seem to need 100,000x more examples than a human to learn but once they get to human level they can learn just like us. That a bunch of linear algebra can play chess or make art brings up many questions about what exactly human consciousness is. If consciousness isn't the ability to do any of those activities, then what is it for? I might have to become religious and believe in a soul because I'm not sure I can handle the idea that I'm just a clump of neurons. But then again you have to look at reality in the face.

The history of science has been one of increasing humility.

First Earth was not the center of the universe. Then the Sun wasn’t either. Then the galaxy wasn’t. Then we learn that we were not literally made by a deity but a product of a natural process, and are closely related to monkeys.

Now we’ve learned how to build machines that can do things we once thought only we could do, and it took no magic. It’s just a lot of math. We are learning how it works.

We are not special. That’s been the lesson, over and over.

For many this induces existential despair. I wonder now if it’s behind what seems to be “peak narcissism” at least in our culture. Maybe it’s compensatory narcissism, a reaction on some deep level to the fact that science keeps knocking us off pedestals. The narcissist fears the truth because the truth does that.

But there’s a way out of that despair.

Stop needing to be special. Stop caring. You don’t have to be the main character to have the right to just exist.

I’ll continue to enjoy human art because it speaks of the lived experience of another human. It doesn’t have to be the greatest most elaborate possible art. Art isn’t like that anyway. It just is.

I’ll also continue to be fascinated by the fact that machines can now at least emulate it, and can do so in amazing ways like writing an ad hoc program.

Now wait until we meet extraterrestrials. That’ll be another notch. Earth isn’t even special. Life isn’t even special. There’s probably a trillion biospheres at least.

Well the LLMs are much bigger than diffusion models so I think that's the bitter lesson. You could scale compute for diffusion models though.

Consumers will avoid AI art like they avoid fossil fuels and sweatshop merchandise?

There's a misalignment of distributions here.

>Consumers at large hate all AI art

I disagree. The consumers who hate AI art are very vocal about hating AI art. But most consumers likely do not care. Odds are many don't even really understand what "AI art" is. These are the same consumers who are the target audience of the large commercial projects which stand to gain the most from outsourcing their work to AI.

I doubt corporations like Disney will lean into AI too heavily too quickly. They have a reputation that they surely won't be willing to risk with such a venture. But don't be surprised when smaller studios start popping up which are able to leverage AI to produce work which competes with larger studios. Those smaller studios will love to capture that audience that doesn't care about AI. From there, the rest will ease into it as it becomes more viable.

But, to be clear: there will certainly be a core audience that will reject AI art wholesale. They will be catered to accordingly with human slop accordingly.

Consumers can almost never tell AI art apart from human art.

Consumers don't hate AI art, they hate the idea of AI art, but actually prefer AI art to human art when they don't know it's AI generated. Furthermore, most of them don't actually hate the "idea" of AI art so much as they hate the idea of Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg all the other evil billionaires putting their friendly neighborhood artists out of work (even though asset packs and clipart from southeast Asian art sweatshops have already done this), and a lot of people who create AI art are using heavily customized local models anyhow.