An image of an archeologist adventurer who wears a hat and uses a bullwhip

I think the cat is out of the bag when it comes to generative AI, the same way how various LLMs for programming have been trained even on codebases that they had no business using, yet nobody hasn’t and won’t stop them. It’s the same as what’s going to happen with deepfakes and such, as the technology inevitably gets better.

> Hayao Miyazaki’s Japanese animation company, Studio Ghibli, produces beautiful and famously labor intensive movies, with one 4 second sequence purportedly taking over a year to make.

It makes me wonder though - whether it’s more valuable to spend a year on a scene that most people won’t pay that much attention to (artists will understand and appreciate, maybe pause and rewind and replay and examine the details, the casual viewer just enjoy at a glance) or use tools in addition to your own skills to knock it out of the park in a month and make more great things.

A bit how digital art has clear advantages over paper, while many revere the traditional art a lot, despite it taking longer and being harder. The same way how someone who uses those AI assisted programming tools can improve their productivity by getting rid of some of the boilerplate or automate some refactoring and such.

AI will definitely cheapen the art of doing things the old way, but that’s the reality of it, no matter how much the artists dislike it. Some will probably adapt and employ new workflows, others stick to tradition.

It's a very clear difference between a cheap animation and Ghibli. Anyone can see it.

In the first case, there's only one static image for an entire scene, scrolled and zoomed, and if they feel generous, there would be an overlay with another static image that slides over the first at a constant speed and direction. It feels dead.

In the second case, each frame is different. There's chaotic motions such as wind and there's character movement with a purpose, even in the background, there's always something happening in the animation, there's life.

anyone _can_ see it, but _most_ people don't (and don't care)

To be clear, I am not saying it's not valuable, only that to the vast majority, it's not.

I wonder if really great stuff are always for a minority. You have to have listened a lot of classical music to notice a great interpretation of Mozart from a good one. To realize how great was a chess move, how magical was a soccer play, how deep was the writing of a philosopher. Not only for stuff that requires previous effort, but also the subjectiveness of art. Picasso will be really moving for a minority of people. The Godfather. Even Shakespeare.

Social media and generative AI may be good business because the capture the attention of the majority, but maybe they are not valuable to anyone.

I think of a lot of thing in terms of distributions, and I think the how-much-people-value-quality distribution is not that much different.

On the right side, you have the minority of connoisseurs. And on the left, there is a minority who really don't care at all. And then the middle majority who can tell bad from good, but not good from great.