alt Hacker News> Why hire a builder to build your home? Why hire a mechanic to fix your car? Why pay a neighborhood kid to mow your lawn? Why hire a photographer for your wedding? Why hire a cook to make a meal?
But precisely, "AI" is _NOT_ fixing my car or building my home or photographing my wedding!! It's writing a sludge of plausible-looking but empty slop that contaminates everything on the web, it's attempting to automate the visual arts, it's generating fake video that's getting harder and harder to distinguish from real one. It's automating things that SHOULD NOT be automated, and it's NOT automating things that should!
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>It's writing a sludge of plausible-looking but empty slop that contaminates everything on the web, it's attempting to automate the visual arts, it's generating fake video that's getting harder and harder to distinguish from real one.
These are negative externalities, indeed, but the producer of the "goods" here does not feel those effects.
Some people are using it that way sure. And some people are using it to automate things that "should" (or at least that someone would want to) be automated. For example, here's a video from the Corridor Crew channel[1] that uses AI to automate the creation of animatable 3d, near photorealistic characters from pictures of real objects. And then they use that to make an actual piece of art, with an actual story. Yes, they could have taken those images, build 3d models in blender or whatever and hand animated them. They have those skills and their previous work attests to their ability to do it. And they clearly enjoy doing that sometimes too. But that sort of work can also be tedious and time consuming. It can get in the way of being able to do what you actually want to do (tell your story) and that's especially true if you don't have the skill sets that they do.
We've been down this road before. We're in the phase of new technology where it's good enough, and available enough for anyone to do anything with it. And like most things when we hit that phase, most of what people do with it is going to be pretty awful. CGI in general, drum machines, and electronic music generation are examples. And just like eventually people found new ways to use these things to create new forms of art that people enjoyed, people will find ways to use AI in the same way.
If you're into 3d modeling and blender, the suck of painstakingly crafting reality from digital star dust is why you're here, and you don't understand why someone would want to automate that away. But likewise, if someone else is into physical modeling, the suck of creating life and reality out of sometimes literal garbage is why they're there, and they don't understand why you would want to automate that away.
Yes AI allows trash makers and grifters to dump out more trash and grift, but it also allows more people who were previously prevented from expressing themselves in a way they enjoyed by a lack of time, money or skills to express themselves anew.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DSRrSO7QhXY