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627 points cratermoon | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.205s | source
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gyomu ◴[] No.44461457[source]
Broadly agreed with all the points outlined in there.

But for me the biggest issue with all this — that I don't see covered in here, or maybe just a little bit in passing — is what all of this is doing to beginners, and the learning pipeline.

> There are people I once respected who, apparently, don’t actually enjoy doing the thing. They would like to describe what they want and receive Whatever — some beige sludge that vaguely resembles it. That isn’t programming, though.

> I glimpsed someone on Twitter a few days ago, also scoffing at the idea that anyone would decide not to use the Whatever machine. I can’t remember exactly what they said, but it was something like: “I created a whole album, complete with album art, in 3.5 hours. Why wouldn’t I use the make it easier machine?”

When you're a beginner, it's totally normal to not really want to put in the hard work. You try drawing a picture, and it sucks. You try playing the guitar, and you can't even get simple notes right. Of course a machine where you can just say "a picture in the style of Pokémon, but of my cat" and get a perfect result out is much more tempting to a 12 year old kid than the prospect of having to grind for 5 years before being kind of good.

But up until now, you had no choice and to keep making crappy pictures and playing crappy songs until you actually start to develop a taste for the effort, and a few years later you find yourself actually pretty darn competent at the thing. That's a pretty virtuous cycle.

I shudder to think where we'll be if the corporate-media machine keeps hammering the message "you don't have to bother learning how to draw, drawing is hard, just get ChatGPT to draw pictures for you" to young people for years to come.

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1. CuriouslyC ◴[] No.44464426[source]
The transformation is to aesthetic awareness over raw technical facility, and to "freshness" over skillful adherence to norms.

The best artists will spot holes in the culture, and present them to us in a way that's expertly composed, artful and meticulously polished. The tools will let them do it faster, and to reach a higher peak of polish than in the past, but the artfulness will still be the artist's.

Futuristic tools aren't replacing art, they're creating a substrate for a higher order of art. Collages are art, and at its most crude, this higher order art reduces to digital collages of high quality generated assets with human intention. With futuristic tools, art becomes reductive rather than constructive. To quote Michelangelo's response to how he made David: "It is simple, I just removed everything that wasn't David"