The Rise of Whatever

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.

People will write lengthy and convoluted explanation on why LLM isn't like calculator or microwave oven or other technology before. (Like OP's article) But it really is. Humans have been looking for easier and lazier ways to do things since the dawn of civilization.

Tech never ever prevents people who really want to hone their skills from doing so. World record of 100m sprint kept improving even since car was invented. World record of how many digits of pi memorized kept improving even when a computer does that indefinitely times better.

It's ridiculous to think drawing will become a lost art because of LLM/Diffusal models when we live in a reality where powerlifting is a thing.

I think it's interesting that practically every time this point is made (and it is made so very often), the examples that are used to prove the point are objective and easy to measure. A 100m sprint time or a calculation of Pi is not the same as a work of art, because they can be measured objectively while art cannot. There is no equivalent in art-making to running a 100m sprint. The evaluation of a 100m sprint is not subjective, does not require judgement, does not depend on taste, context, history, and all the other many things the reputation and impact of a work of art depends on.

As ever, the standard defence of LLM and all gen AI tech rests on this reduction of complex subjectivity to something close to objectivity: the picture looks like other pictures, therefore it is a good picture. The sentence looks plausibly like other sentences, therefore it is a good sentence. That this argument is so pervasive tells me only that the audience for 'creative work' is already so inundated with depthless trash, that they can no longer tell the difference between painting and powerlifting.

It is not the artists who are primarily at risk here, but the audience for their work. Artists will continue to disappear for the same reason they always have: because their prospective audience does not understand them.

The example might be bad but the argument still stands. Painting hasn't disappeared when photography was invented. Drummers still drum after the invention of drum machines.

Music is actually a terrific counterexample to your point. It perfectly demonstrates the culturally and artistically destructive power of the steady march of progress in computer technology -- which really has led to fewer drummers.

Far fewer people make their living as musicians than did even thirty years ago, and being a musician is no longer a viable middle-class career. Jaron Lanier, who has written on this, has argued that it's the direct result of the advent of the internet, music piracy, and streaming -- two of which originally were expected or promised to provide more opportunities for artists, not take them away.

So there really are far fewer drummers, and fewer, worse opportunities for those who remain, than there were within the living memory of even most HN users, not because some specific musical technology advanced but because technological advancement provided an easier, cheaper alternative to human labor.

Sound familiar yet?

I know the writings of Jaron on this and I think he is mostly wrong.

What he is comparing was a brief time in history that the music industry was at the absolute peak.

We have just gone back to normal that most people can't make money being a musician just like being an actor is not really a viable middle class career option.

Sure, when I graduated high school you could have just made a living in a local rock band because everyone wanted to be in a band to be the next Guns n Roses.

To me, it is like how even Hitler wanted to be a painter because everyone wanted to be a painter at that time. The way everyone wanted to be a rock star when i was a teenager.

Times change and the collective artistic taste change with them. So many musicians are doing better than ever before because of youtube too.

I play the baroque lute and I can tell you that it is much tougher to get a gig in a bar today than it was in 1650 in France.

The best lutenist though are killing it on youtube with Bach videos.