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Not by AI

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Re: Not by AI

#151

Post by dale_glass »

grog454 wrote: post #141
dale_glass wrote: post #77

I get the concerns with AI, but this kind of thing has always looked odd to me. Like imagine a label on a thing that says "Made without CNC machinery". So instead of finishing the thing on a CNC mill, they instead stuck it on a Bridgeport manual mill, and finished by hand. Or somebody finished the cast with a file. Okay, and so? In the end, a hammer is a hammer. If it hammers well, what difference does it make how it…

> In the end, a hammer is a hammer. If it hammers well, what difference does it make how it got that precise shape? "Hand made" has been a selling point since things were first made by things other than hands. Example: "The factory, known as the Ateller, [...] it is the place where our craftspeople assemble each BUGATTI by hand."

I never got the appeal of that honestly, less for something like a BUGATTI. Not like an artisan hammered the panels into shape by hand, or somebody manually bored those cylinders.

In fact it's probably something completely incidental to the entire thing -- they're not assembled by hand because it's better, but because not enough of the cars are made to make automation make sense. It's just a pragmatic business decision, which then some marketer figured out how to spin.

Re: Not by AI

#152

Post by bogwog »

Spivak wrote: post #46
miklosme wrote: post #28

> If humans stop producing new content and rely solely on AI, online content across the world may run the risk of becoming repetitive and stagnant. Yeah, because the Netflix catalog, for example, is not repetitive and stagnant. These current advances will enable anybody with a unique idea to produce content. We are right before an immense explosion of human creativity.

If you just go into the Midjourney Discord you'll see people with absolutely no mechanical artistic talent be create absolutely stunning novel art. The creativity people have there is crazy and the AI is letting them go from head to canvas in a few seconds.

When I see AI art from those communities, it all looks the same to me.

People tend to overestimate their talent, and get overly attached to their own ideas. So when a tool like midjourney/stable diffusion generates beautiful artwork based on a low effort prompt from the user, it's comfy to think that they had a big part in it.

The reality is that almost everything those tools make is equally gorgeous/amazing regardless of who uses it, so they're effectively interchangeable. As a tool for personal expression, it has a lot of value because of the impact it can have on the individual using it, but as art it's pretty worthless. A generated AI image could potentially have some cultural impact or value, but not on the merits of "it looks pretty", since they all look like that.

Re: Not by AI

#153

Post by raincole »

underyx wrote: post #122
raincole wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whole idea of "there is no such thing as an original idea" is utterly stupid. It's just a hyperbole and some people are taking it literally. Of course there are original ideas. "C is not an original idea, because it's just mixing A and B..." ok so there are only two possbilities: 1. Someone else did mixing A and B before. Okay then we can recursively find the first person who mixed A and B. 2. No one else did mix…

In the context of this thread however, an AI mixing a randomly selected A and B makes it generate an idea that is just as original as a human's.

I do believe AI sometimes generates an idea that is just as original as a human's.

I don't believe originality is that valuable. It's a positive term to me, but just slightly.

I've seen a lot people on HN credit the SV companies' "free food" practice to google. Do they believe free food for your employees is a new idea that someone in google came up with? I don't think so.

Re: Not by AI

#154

Post by mjr00 »

randcraw wrote: post #144
mjr00 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly, it's a tool. The skill floor, as in the minimum amount of skill to produce something passable, has been lowered -- dramatically lowered -- but the skill ceiling is now higher than ever as a result. It's similar to music. DAWs and samples didn't kill off music; instead, it made it easier than ever for a teenager with a computer and a passing interest in music to create a song and share it with a world. As a c…

There's a GIGANTIC difference between a hammer and a button that when clicked builds a cathedral.

There's also a gigantic difference between spending 10+ years learning to play the drums and recording my playing at a recording studio, and dragging in a drum loop from Splice. Listeners don't seem to care either way.

Re: Not by AI

#155

Post by freejazz »

PurpleRamen wrote: post #125
raincole wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whole idea of "there is no such thing as an original idea" is utterly stupid. It's just a hyperbole and some people are taking it literally. Of course there are original ideas. "C is not an original idea, because it's just mixing A and B..." ok so there are only two possbilities: 1. Someone else did mixing A and B before. Okay then we can recursively find the first person who mixed A and B. 2. No one else did mix…

> For some incomprehensible reasons, people seem to accept "mixing A and B is not a new idea because A and B already exist." Like... why? In copyright-law (and I think patents?), there is the Threshold of originality. Basically you evaluate how much work and change went into something, to distinguish it from other works. Which IMHO comes down to how much of a and b can you still see in the mix, and how much did mixin…

Copyrights don't protect novelty. Two people can independently create the same thing and both be entitled to copyright. You cannot do that in patent. Only one is an invention in the eyes of the law.

The threshold for originality in copyright is the bare minimum, so it's not a good standard for "invention". Patents have a much higher bar to overcome, and it is hard to put into a simple explanatory phrase.

I think what you are describing in copyright isn't the issue of originality, but determining what is encompassed in a copyrighted work. The court will analyze what the work consists of, and what of it was your expression, as opposed to someone else's. So, it's not novelty exactly but it's close.

Re: Not by AI

#156

Post by raspyberr »

a254613e wrote: post #11

So cringy. Should we also add badges for doing it without autocomplete, syntax highlighting. Hell, why even bother with text, if you didn't develop it by punching cards then you're not a real developer.

I think you're being unreasonable. Your examples are closer to spellcheck and punctuation correction. Even they have subtle societal considerations such as Americanising English. A much more appropriate comparison would be Copilot which is being discussed nowadays.

Re: Not by AI

#157

Post by Sol- »

bleuchase wrote: post #136

The number of AI luddites on HN is fascinating.

What's luddite about not wanting to read ghostwritten AI stories posted by fake writers? If I want AI stories or art, I can just prompt the models myself and don't need a useless intermediary.

On the bright side, this is likely also going to play out this way and the market for the prompt "artists" will be nonexistent unless they add any value (which they rarely will).

Re: Not by AI

#158

Post by WillAdams »

underyx wrote: post #17

> If humans rely solely on AI to generate content moving forward, any new content generated by AI may just be recycled content from the past. To be honest, I’d struggle to find any human content that is not recycled from the past. I guess we are still better than AI at remixing sufficiently novel combinations of concepts but I think much of this AI content aversion comes from some kind of phobia, or an unwillingness…

"The Greeks invented everything, all else is variation."

Re: Not by AI

#159

Post by omnicognate »

donatj wrote: post #142
omnicognate wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are many rational reasons for a person to see these questions differently to you and plenty of explanations of those reasons around. You may disagree with them, but to claim that differing views must spring from phobias or other irrational mental states rather from a different assessment of the evidence is baseless ad-hominem. I would strongly recommend avoiding statements of that form in general as they achiev…

Hear me out. In the most basic sense, to believe the mind a box that can output things not based on input is inherently to believe it "irrational" in the truest sense of the word. It is to believe the mind to be non-functionally pure[1] in the programmatic sense. Output based somehow other than purely on input. And if that's the case, the question is where does that irrationality come from? A random number generator?…

This is a profoundly counterproductive way to approach a debate and I won't engage with it.

Re: Not by AI

#160

Post by sharemywin »

NateEag wrote: post #105
sharemywin wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These seem pretty creative to me? are they? I'm not a fictional guy so I don't really know? can you be extraordinarily creative and unusual? Sure, here are five highly creative and unusual fictional creatures: Crystalline Leviathan: The Crystalline Leviathan is a massive creature that lives deep in the ocean. Its body is made entirely of iridescent crystals that refract light in all directions, creating a dazzling di…

I mean, in some sense these are creative. But they mostly read like someone churning out monster manual entries by pairing animal names with adjectives then putting in the obvious two sentences of description. Nothing about it engages my brain or strikes me as brilliant, insightful, or what I'd usually mean when I say "creative".

I would argue most of the stuff we see even the truly brilliant stuff is the result of a long slog process that usually involving multiple people.
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