That's hype. AI is just another sort of hammer. In the hands of a talented artist, they can churn out masterpieces in hours instead of days. Polarising people is modern marketing. Threating peoples bread and butter is a good way to do that.

Hello,

Let me chime in as someone who would probably fall under your definition of an AI defender.

How do I defend AI? Well, I think AI really flips the world on it's head. Including all the good and the bad that comes from it. I still think the industrialization is a good metaphor. Things changed a lot. A lot of people were pissed. Now we don't mind as much anymore, because it's the new normal, but at the time, most people weren't happy about it.

Same with AI. I think overall it's a plus, but obviously it comes with new pitfalls. LLM hallucinations, the need for more complex copyright and licensing definitions, impersonation, etc. . It's not entirely great, but I totality, when the dust settles, it will be a helpful tool to make our lives easier.

So why do I defend AI? Basically, because I think it will happen, whether you like it or not. Even if the law will initially make it really strict, society will change their mind about it. It might be slowly, but it's just too useful to outlaw.

Going back to industrialization metaphor, we adapted it over a longer period of time. Yes, it forever changed how most things are made, but it wasn't necessarily a bad thing. It's just a thing. And even though lots of logistics chains are streamlined, there's always gonna be handmade things and unique things. Ofc, not everything is handmade, but some important things still are. And for both of them, there's some stuff that's totally fine to be automated, and then there's some stuff that just loses it's value if we just gloss over with automation.

Now I don't want AI to just roam free (ofc not, there's some really bad stuff happening and I'm not pretending that it's not) but what we need is laws and enforcement against it, and not against AI.

Imagine if most countries outlawed AI. It would make all AI companies and users move operation to that one country that still allows it, making it impossible to oversee and enforce against. So we better find a good strategy to allow it for all the things where it doesn't do damage.

Now let me address some specific points you brought up;

In the near future no one will "need" to be a writer

But isn't this already how it's going? Only people who wanna be a writer are one, anf it's good that way.

Also, AI can only remix the art that's already there, so if you're doing something completely unique, AI won't ever be able to replace you. I find that somehow validating for the people who make awesome and unique art. I think that's how it should be.

Do these people not see or feel the human behind the art at all?

I do. And that's the exact reason I'm not concerned. Everyone who puts in the work to make something very particular to them should not be impacted in any way.

Now there's an argument to be made how consent for training data is given (opt-in / opt-out) and what licensing for the models can and should look like, but this is my very basic opinion.

Are these really opinions you have encountered outside of the internet?

I may have about one friend out of 30 who thinks like me.

I mean I am living proof we exist, but I can't say this is a popular opinion, which is fair.

I don't want people to mindlessly agree, I want them to come their own opinions because of their own research and presumptions.

I also don't expect you to agree with me, but I hope some people will understand my perspective and maybe this brings a bit more nuance to this bipolar conversation.

I can appreciate a sunset or a flower without needing these things to have "a human behind it all".

With that said, art is far from the most important potential application of AI. I am merely amused that right now I can ask a computer to draw a cow in the style of Monet and get a pretty good result. The amazing thing is not present-day capability (which is remarkable but not world-changing) but rather what the rate of progress implies about the near future. I think that a computer better than any human at everything (or at least at every intellectual task) is likely within my lifetime.

It's the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine.

Creative is great, industry not so much.

One note I never hear sung is AI's ability to jump-start creative works. EDIT: Proof at the end!

For example, I wrote a horror short that was stuck in my head. What if I had used AI to write it for me? I certainly would not have used the output verbatim, not even close, but it might have presented me some twists, vocabulary, structure, etc., that I had not thought of.

Same goes for code. I had an idea to automate Google Calendar entries with certain events at work. Couldn't quite get it right, had ChatGPT write it. Did it work? Of course not, but I found the pieces I needed to put it together.

Maybe you just need the right words. "explain to my wife what depression is like" That worked well!

I'm extremely creative, but not in the typical artistic ways. What I'm good at is taking junk and upcycling it into useful end products. I could input garbage items I found, see what an image generator or chat does with it. Well, let me put my money where my mouth is.

(Pulled this idea out my butt just now, no planning, testing prompts, totally ad lib, input and output quoted as-is.)

Towed a large, sealed, flat, thick, plastic container out of the river last month. (Fuck me, about sank the canoe untangling it from the dead fall!) ChatGPT: "what can I make with a large, plastic gas tank?"

1. Water Storage Tank

Repurpose the gas tank to store water, especially for outdoor activities like camping, gardening, or as an emergency backup. You can install a spigot at the bottom to make it easy to dispense water.

LOL, that was the idea! Going to hang it in a tree at camp, pump creek water into it with tiny chlorine tabs, make another shower. Or maybe use it for the bathroom I need to make? Hmmm...

2. Compost Bin

With some modifications like drilling holes for ventilation, a plastic gas tank can be transformed into a compost bin. The tank’s large size provides ample room for organic waste.

Great idea, but I've got all the space for compost I need. Although... Put it on a frame so it can be spun?

3. Outdoor Planter

If the gas tank has a sturdy base, it can be converted into a large planter. Cut the tank to create drainage holes, fill it with soil, and plant flowers, vegetables, or herbs.

Holy shit! I've been plotting on making floating, yoga-pad mats so I can grow in the creek without animals screwing it up. I have circular saw blades, can fit pots I already have or scrounge for free. I can make my own soil from local organic muck and sand. Let's see, play around with the buoyancy. Guess what I'm doing tomorrow. Hot DAMN am I stoked!

tl;dr: AI will add to our creative endeavors, not replace them.

with ai making content they will never have to worry about some sort of original content upsetting the selling of continous reboots.

I'm no AI bro, but I do think this concern is a bit overblown. The monetary value in art is not in simply having a picture of something, a whole infamous subset of "modern art" commands high prices despite being simple enough that virtually anybody could recreate it. A lot is simply in that people desire art created by a specific person, be it a painting that they made, or commissioning a still active artist to create something, or someone buying a band's merch to support their work. AI simply does not have the same parasocial association to it. And of course, it doesn't at all replicate the non-monetary value that creating something can give to someone.

I can, at most, imagine it getting integrated into things like advertising where one really doesn't care who created the work; but even then there's probably still value in having a human artist review the result to be sure of it's quality, and that kind of art tends to add the least cultural value anyway.

That isn't zero impact obviously, that kind of advertisement or corporate clip art or such does still pay people, but it's a far cry from the end of creative human endeavor, or even people getting paid to be creative.

Because AI bros love the smell of their own farts and they get off by convincing other people that they should also smell their farts. (Only partly /s)

But more seriously, I'd say it's just a symptom of the world we live in where there is tremendous pressure to commodify and commercialize everything in the most "efficient" way possible, including creativity.

My daughter (15f) is an artist and I work at an AI company as a software engineer. We've had a lot of interesting debates. Most recently, she defined Art this way:

"Art is protest against automation."

We thought of some examples:

• when cave artists made paintings in caves, perhaps they were in a sense protesting the automatic forces of nature that would have washed or eroded away their paintings if they had not sought out caves. By painting something that could outlast themselves, perhaps they wished to express, "I am here!"
• when manufacturing and economic factors made kitsch art possible (cheap figurines, mass reprints, etc.), although more people had access to "art" there was also a sense of loss and blandness, like maybe now that we can afford art, this isn't art, actually?
• when computers can produce images that look beautiful in some way or another, maybe this pushes the artist within each of us to find new ground where economic reproducibility can't reach, and where we can continue the story of protest where originality can stake a claim on the ever-unfolding nature of what it means to be human.

I defined Economics this way:

"Economics is the automation of what nature does not provide."

An example:

• long ago, nature automated the creation of apples. People picked free apples, and there was no credit card machine. But humans wanted more apples, and more varieties of apples, and tastier varieties that nature wouldn't make soon enough. So humans created jobs--someone to make apple varieties faster than nature, and someone to plant more apple trees than nature, and someone to pick all of the apples that nature was happy to let rot on the ground as part of its slow orchard re-planting process.

Jobs are created in one of two ways: either by destroying the ability to automatically create things (destroying looms, maybe), or by making people want new things (e.g. the creation of jobs around farming Eve Online Interstellar Kredits). Whenever an artist creates something new that has value, an investor will want to automate its creation.

Where Art and Economics fight is over automation: Art wants to find territory that cannot be automated. Economics wants to discover ways to efficiently automate anything desirable. As long as humans live in groups, I suppose this cycle does not have an end.

They’re high on their own supply.

People who are divorced from the fallout of their creation. More corporate-think where they chase the objective that costs jobs in favor of the bottom line, even if it’s a shitty idea, and just let it “sort itself out”. The “sorting out” part being not having to deal with any moral, emotional, or financial consequences personally for the result of their pursuits.

The best example I can think of, and this is being very generous to the AI bros, is that they're trying to compare it to obsolete creative positions. Think about animation. Each frame used to have to be hand drawn and colored entirely by hand. There was a lot of heavy lifting going on in the process that weren't necessarily creative but still required for the final product. I think they're trying to say that we'll need less work like this.

I'm not sure I agree or how accurate their claims are.

Edit: I'm just explaining what I think their point of view is. It's not my personal opinion.

There are people out there without any kind of conscience or memorse. If they can somehow make a profit, they'll sell somehing to you or anyone who is willing to listen.

"Hey, there's Evan. "He's a young guy. "He likes the Stereophonics."

Because they like money, and anything they say about creative industries is just silly words they don’t mean that you shouldn’t take seriously. Zero meaning in anything they say 🤷‍♂️