AI is destroying the economics which allowed for a sizable middle class of artists. The issue is that many are paid for their art mostly for its aesthetic rather than artistic value. This isn’t the most creatively fulfilling, but it previously allowed many artists to make a living while refining their skills, often enabling them to pursue their real creative ambitions on the side.
AI enthusiasts actively want a world dominated by a few massive tech corps that'll steer our thoughts and kill creativity. The envy towards people who have skills that they polished is always very, very palpable when reading comments they make or hearing them talk in real life. But beyond just AI, the world is increasingly full of people who are proudly self-declared "accelerationists": accelerationism being the idea that we should make everything as shitty as possible because it'll make the world worse and bring everything down to their level. It's crabs in a bucket as a political, economic, and work philosophy.
I understand what you mean but speakers and recording equipment destroyed the economics of paying people to play music a long time ago.
It's another way of looking at the problem.
Smartphone cameras and easy-to-use professional equipment were thought to destroy the photography profession, yet photographers still exist, although we have to admit not as many as in the past.
If I had a company with a budget, I wouldn't waste my time using Claude to create art, even if it meant I could do all myself.
Certainly people who earned top dollar for doing something that AI can easily do now are going to be displaced, however the world of top dollar business has never been that big for the middle class of artists to begin with.
FWIW smartphones did massively change the economics of being a photographer. The family photographer used to be a reliable profession and now it's just a side thing that event and wedding photographers do.
Sure, this mirrors history, technology is always transforming economics.
I guess my point is that there is a decent sized middle class of creative professionals right now, and I expect that the number of them will go down significantly due to AI. Seems like art will become more and more restricted to hobbyists and the lucky few who achieve mainstream success.
This is kind of what happened with photography. But I think the scale is much bigger, affecting all creative industries.
If you take the analogy of smartphones & photographers- then why don't you take both sides? We're much better off with now than then.
So this is a bit of a hot take for HN, but while my life is dramatically more convenient due to smartphones, “better” is actually not obvious to me. Some things are better, some are worse.
Anyway, I don’t think anything I said was even framed morally (although of course I have my personal opinions). My prediction is just that the amount and average quality of paid creative work is going to massively decline. To me, the scale difference matters a lot (compared to impact of previous tech). I hope I’m wrong.
> AI is destroying the economics which allowed for a sizable middle class of artists.
I was an art major and switched to CompSci purely for the money.
AI "art" is often slop, but the ability to create something in seconds that used to take months shouldn't be taken lightly. There will undoubtedly be truly creative people who will use AI art as a force multiplier instead of a shortcut, and that is when things will get interesting.
We're already seeing this in software; plenty of people can attest to the fact that LLMs give them the opportunity to write software that they couldn't have written without AI, because their ability to write code wasn't up to snuff.
Some use that opportunity to get their existing work done faster.
But some use that opportunity to create things which were beyond their capabilities, just a few years ago. And when that same mindset eventually becomes prevalent among artists, we will undoubtedly see AI "art" that is truly art.
> There will undoubtedly be truly creative people who will use AI art as a force multiplier instead of a shortcut, and that is when things will get interesting.
No it won't :-/
What someone carefully prompted and refined over and over over a matter of months can be, the minute it is released, cloned in minutes.
Even being good with AI prompting still results in the product having no value to someone looking for the specific aesthetics.
Not only is AI art often slop, it's also often theft. Or maybe even always theft. And it's both of these things that account for this newfound ability to create something normally time-intensive in seconds. Imagine I want to have a world-class painting on my wall: the fastest and cheapest way is to steal one from a museum, especially if I found a way to obscure the act. In the case of LLMs, its obscured by the fact that the model draws from many sources, blending them together in a way that's hard or even impossible to separate. Is stealing a small amount from many more excusable than a lot from just one? I don't see why that would be so. It's the total amount that measures the gravity of the transgression.
"I was an art major and switched to CompSci purely for the money." Translation: Not an artist.
I worked for 30 years as a pianist. The number of programmers who have told me they too are a musician... No- you aren't. And you never were. That's the thing, if you were a musician, you would be playing music. That would be your job.
I mean as a hobbyist, yes, sure, enjoy splashing paint and calling it art, but spending the tens of thousands of hours to learn what music actually is, no, no, no. You aren't. Would you call yourself an architect if you can draw a picture of a building? No, you aren't.
No artist wants to "create things which were beyond their capabilities" with an AI, they want to develop their capabilities to create things beyond who they are now. Art is about discovering the world, yourself, the strange magic of an ethereal plane, some how reached through vibrations.
I don't know. Reading programmers talk about art, as if they are not dilettantes, is always depressing for me.
I agree with some of your characterizations here, but I don’t think it is fair to say that if you are not currently a professional artist, you were never a true artist. People get unlucky, have families to support, etc
Sure, if you devote yourself to art, you commit, and I'm not talking some insulated school environment, to improve and struggle, and then you burn out. Yes, this is a well known path for an artist. They failed, but they are still an artist. They are a failed artist, and this is actually a proud title to wear.
Someone who decides, "I'll be a programmer for money," was never an artist. Someone who studies music in college and does admin for some company is not a "musician" and never was. It is the journey in art that makes the artist, not playing a piece.
Unfortunately art is just like that. The amount of time required in devotion to the skill is truly staggering and humbling. And then, it's never enough.
I don't know.
It is possible to make this commitment while working in some unrelated field, but it takes tremendous will-power. Charles Ives is an example I suppose.
This might be the most pretentious waffle I have ever read lmfao.
You write like the critic from Ratatouille.
So Vivian Meier was not a photographer? The local bands that work day jobs aren't musicians?
Nonsense, frankly. Being an artist is not dependent on monetizing your talent.
There are artists and musicians and photographers, and there are professional musicians and artists and photographers.
What is someone who writes and performs music every day their whole life but bartends to pay their rent, to you? They're not a musician but someone that makes ukulele tracks for corporate training videos is, because the latter does it professionally?
If you are a computer programmer who meets up with your buddies to play every once in a while, no you aren't an artist.
If you are in a band, and you are playing all the time, obviously you are an artist. The job is facilitating you playing. The playing is the focus.
Someone who decides in college, or directly after college, "you know what, I'm just gonna be a programmer." Then touches the piano every once in a while, or plays with his friends every once in a while. I don't call that an artist.
There are so many of these people. They aren't artists. Sorry. Are the smart, probably, are they talented, probably, are they committed, yes to programming.
>you are in a band, and you are playing all the time, obviously you are an artist.
Well, no, it's very much not obvious, you literally just said "you're not a musician, if you were, it'd be your job" but now it doesn't have to be your job, as long as your job isn't programming?
AI appears to be doing this Software Engineering too, so seems it applies to other industries too.
Maybe the net effect so far has been more extractive and a transfer of wealth to a select few people? Is this how past technological revolutions were, or is this the first so far?
I think the elephant is the room is we hope things will change later - will they really?
I'm not sure if AI slop will make a bad situation much worse tbh. The pop stars of the 60's to 90's always depended on a distribution platform/network (record labels, radio stations, MTV, ...). Those distribution platforms either don't exist anymore, or changed their 'business model' to f*ck the artists at least two decades ago. To find the really good stuff you already have to look elsewhere, and popular music was already 90% mass produced "slop" before AI entered the scene.
E.g. this ancient Frank Zappa interview about the decline of the music industry is still as relevant as ever:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KZazEM8cgt0
It was already bad, but I think there is still room for it to get a lot worse unfortunately.
I think it will make a bad situation much worse, because CEOs of OpenAI and Antromorphic along with investors actively want to make it so. If they get more power, they will you that power to make the artists bad situation worst.
They don't have that power yet, but are consistently actively trying to worsen the situation for the last 4 years. They proudly bragged about achieving the bad situation like 2 years ago already.
I'm not sure it's the same people being paid for aesthetics as for the art. In streaming, for instance, background music is extremely profitable, and a good example of "just aesthetics". But you rarely see artistic artists crank out a few tracks for the "music for studying" playlists just to pay the bills.
They are not always the same but there is more overlap than you would think. One place that I know is being hit hard is Nashville (no comment on what this implies about the state of US country music). There are a lot of local musicians with their own (small) bands whose primary income came from (relatively low quality, compared to their own music) song-writing, playing back-up instrumentals/vocals for studios, stuff like that. This income stream is shrinking rapidly.
They're not going to put their name on it if they do.
Until fairly recently "jingles" - ad music - were a huge source of income for many musicians with full time careers. Likewise library music, which was prerecorded with a specific mood so music editors could drop into their projects without having to commission it, and then the composers would be paid for performance royalties/residuals.
Writers - not such a thing now, but in the 60s and 70s a surprising number of "serious" writers in the UK began their careers writing ad copy.
Famous movie directors - many started in the ad slop trenches.
Music videos are literally ads, and it's not a surprise they use many of the same techniques and are directed by ad industry people.
And then in tech there's ad tech...
AI is just the newest arrival to the party.
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