alt Hacker NewsI'm sure this has been written about but here's what happens long term - images are commoditized and lose their emotional appeal.
Probably about half of us here remember photos before the cell phone era. They were rare, and special, and you'd have a few photos per YEAR to look back on. The feel of photos back then, was at least 100x stronger than now. They were a special item, could be given as a gift. But once they became freely available that same amount of emotion is now split across many thousands of photos. (not saying this is good or bad, just increased supply reducing value of each item)
With image/art generation the same thing will happen and I can already feel it happening. Things that used to be beautiful or fantastic looking now just feel flat and AI-ish. If claymation scenes can be generated in 1s, and I see a million claymation diagrams a year, then claymation will lose its charm. If I see a million fake Tom Cruise videos, then it oversaturates my desire for desire for all Tom Cruise movies.
What a time to be alive.
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Had a meeting with a friend the other day, discussing the 'times' and all that is happening around us.
I sit here thinking how wonderful and terrible of a time it is. If you can afford to sit in the stands and watch, it's exciting. There's never been so much change in such a short period of time. But if you're in the arena, or expecting to end up in the arena at some point, what terrifying moments lay ahead of you.
I never thought I'd say this, but I expect the arena is where I'll end up...I've enjoyed my time in the stands, but I'm running low on energy, capital and the will to keep trying.
> They were rare, and special, and you'd have a few photos per YEAR to look back on. The feel of photos back then, was at least 100x stronger than now. [...] But once they became freely available that same amount of emotion is now split across many thousands of photos
I don't think I fully agree. Sure people make so many photo's that they don't have the time or the will to start looking through them all.
You can't just whip out your phone and start scrolling through thousands of photo's with friends. It would get so boring so fast.
But if you put some effort into making a nice little selection of the best photo's, that emotion is 100% still there.
It reminds me of the Star Wars content thats come out recently - before there was the Original Trilogy which we all watched many times and the lines became iconic. Since then it's all become a mismash and blur of mediocrity due to over-exposure.
(except The Mandalorian, and I can't believe I'm using the word "content" :/)
edit: Totally forgot about Andor & Rogue One sorry, great film and two seasons of top-notch storytelling.
> They were rare, and special, and you'd have a few photos per YEAR to look back on. The feel of photos back then, was at least 100x stronger than now. They were a special item, could be given as a gift. But once they became freely available that same amount of emotion is now split across many thousands of photos. (not saying this is good or bad, just increased supply reducing value of each item)
I take a hundred photos on a trip, my phone uses AI (not even the new fancy AI, but old 5-10 year old stuff to detect smiling faces and people in frame) to pull out less than a dozen that are worth keeping. Once a month or so I get fed a reminder of some past trip.
This isn't any different than before. The number of photos taken is greater, but the overall number of worthwhile photos from a given trip is about the same.
You know, all of a sudden, I am starting to lose interest in meticulously drawn Mermaid diagrams in README, perfect grammar and spelling in doc reviews, or neat generated general photographs. They are all correctly presented, of course. But the ideas are mostly wrong, too.
I guess my stick figure hand drawn diagrams, a doc with few mistakes in grammar or spelling would be seen as more worthy to read as long as my ideas are sound. Right? :-)
The first time I got a photo scanner, I was blown away that I could see myself on a screen. I eventually got a digital camera, and the novelty started to wear off. Now I can make myself the lead in a blockbuster movie, but that feels boring.
> I'm sure this has been written about
Scott Alexander has written about it:
I don't fully agree. Perhaps you're right when it comes to images as a whole, but I think individual images themselves still capture that emotional value for me.
Even if there were a million fake Tom Cruise movies I would still like Edge of Tomorrow (even if it had been AI made).
> a few photos per YEAR to look back on
I totally get this, but on the other hand, we have definitely benefited from being able to take more photos. I have some older friends (pushing 80 or so) who sucked at taking photos, so 9 of 10 photos they have from their prime adult years raising their family are blurry to the point of not recognizing the people if you don't already know who they are.
They have great photos from the last 15-20 years, but of course they do, phone cameras are vastly superior to the point-and-shoot cameras from the 70s, and when you reflexively shoot a dozen photos every time you pose for a picture your odds are way better that one will come out clear, everyone looking at the camera, smiling, etc.
I really don't get that. I look at pictures I've taken in a digital world and I'm moved, just as I am when I see pre-digital pictures. Perhaps older images are sometimes "more special" but that's an artifact of the distance between who I was then vs now. Why would I stop feeling an emotional attachment to photos just because I have many? I really can not understand this at all.
As Grayson Perry described the instagram age: “photography rains down on us like sewage from the sky.”
Considering half of the memes are still rage comics drawn with MSPaint i'm kind of skeptical of this statement.
It sounds like you've been reading Susan Sontag. For others, I recommend:
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Photography
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regarding_the_Pain_of_Others
https://medium.com/luminasticity/art-as-a-tool-for-storing-m...
"One of the primary properties of anything with Mana is a feeling of uniqueness. That one has never encountered something like this before, and therefore it is important. The uniqueness of the thing is a property that pulls you in to focus more closely, to attempt to understand more closely why the thing is unique."
Strictly speaking, I don't think it is the generation or creation that diminishes their value. it is the consumption.
You said it too:
> If I see a million fake Tom Cruise videos, then it oversaturates my desire for desire for all Tom Cruise movies.
The trick of course is to keep yourself from seeing that content.
The other nuance is that as long as real performance remains unique, which so far it is, we can appreciate more what flesh and blood brings to the table. For example, I can appreciate the reality of the people in a picture or a video that is captured by a regular camera; it's AI version lacks that spunk (for now).
Note that iPhone in its default settings is already altering the reality, so AI generation is far right on that slippery axis.
Perhaps, AI and VR would be the reason why our real hangouts would be more appreciated even if they become rare events in the future.
> The feel of photos back then, was at least 100x stronger than now.
I dare say, the feel of photos from back then is much stronger than of the photos taken today. See e.g.:
https://plfoto.com/zdjecie/413363/bez-tytulu?from=autor/beak...
https://plfoto.com/zdjecie/619173/bez-tytulu?from=autor/beak...
> They were rare, and special, and you'd have a few photos per YEAR to look back on.
My generation generally only had photos from birthdays, holidays, vacations, weddings, graduations and reunions. We looked at the three albums which contained every family photo often and I know them all by heart.
My kid was born in 2009 and our family digital album has nearly 1,000 photos per year of her life. And she's seen virtually none of them and seems to have little interest in ever seeing them since she creates so many of her own photos every day which are ephemeral.
A kind of the same happend to music. With a LP or a tape, you had to listen to all songs. Later with a CD you just skipped the not so good songs. And with MP3, you don't even bothered to save not so good songs. And now with TikTok etc. a song just have to be 20sec but has to bang hard for this short time.
> If I see a million fake Tom Cruise videos, then it oversaturates my desire for desire for all Tom Cruise movies.
I often call this over-saturation the media equivalent of semantic satiation. Anything commoditized or mass-manufactured isn't going to have emotional appeal.
Agree. But there are some use-cases where images can still be of huge help. Making textbooks come alive for instance. We are trying to do that and make a whole bunch of Indian textbooks into comics and free for students. (zerobyheart.com if anyone's interested and would like to make suggestions; the panel-to-panel continuity is still off and something we are working on )
> you'd have a few photos per YEAR to look back on
My parents took way more photos with film than I do with my cellphone camera.
Agree the same is happening with tools and services
This.
Unimaginable abundance may sound good (it does to me), but scarcity has value too. We might just find put that its value is too important. I just hope that if we do, it’s not too late.
Don't disagree but being the social animals we are, images and videos will never not be important. Things will always feel better when I can connect it with a friendly face.
This is the same argument illustrators made upon the invention of photography.
Your photos of your dog mean nothing to me.
I have a photo of a friend I’ve since drifted from, it’s her in her army fatigues after basic. She was had just went through a horrible divorce and that was a shining achievement for her.
The story behind the photo is what makes it matter.
Not the format.
However I will agree AI is a poor substitute. You’ll have people creating AI photos of a fake marriage and fake pets in a big fake house, while they sleep in a bunk bed in a halfway house.
I lived plenty of my life prior to the cell phone era (born early 80s).
I do not have the same feeling you seem to have about photos from this era. Some are fine, sure, but looking back on them, most of them are very bad photos and most do not capture anything close to what I'd call an emotional feeling.
I would go so far as to say 99% of the photos from my life prior to 2000s really suck, like really badly. Some also degrade visually and lose their impact over time.
Since you couldn't be sure what you caught more than often what is captured is poorly framed, blurry, weird, poorly timed, and often left out a lot of stuff that was actually going on. You also had to try and be super selective because each photograph had a real tangible cost.
Conversely, I find being able to take many photos in quick succession and across a long period of time at a very high clarity allows me to select a photo that most closely matches my feeling in those moments at that event.
Even more so with AI photos. Although many models cannot do this well, their abilities get better each day and can allow you to compose or edit/modify a photo in such a way that matches your internal feelings rather than the blandness of what is essentially a random photo of random stuff that may or may not convey an emotion anywhere near to what I was feeling or remember feeling in that moment.
IMO this would be a positive side effect were it true. Do you really long for the day Hollywood exploited your emotions for profit?
Probably some of us here remember paintings before the photography era. They were rare, and special, and you'd have a few painting per YEAR to look back on. The feel of paintings back then, was at least 100x stronger than now. They were a special item, could be given as a gift. But once they became freely available that same amount of emotion is now split across many thousands of photos. (not saying this is good or bad, just increased supply reducing value of each item)
contrary to that i use it to restore old pictures and it has increased their emotional appeal
There is still room for art. Any photographer sees lots of pictures, but can tell the good from the bad, and find pleasure. They don't dismiss photography altogether.
> images are commoditized and lose their emotional appeal.
No, ALL CONTENT is asymptotically approaching 0. This includes photos, videos, stories, app features, even code. Code is now worthless. If you want better security from generated code, wait 2 months and it will be better. If you want a photo, you just prompt and it will generate it on the fly.
AI will be generating movies and videos on the fly, either legally or illegally infringing on IP. Do you want a movie where Deadpool fights The Hulk? Easy. And just like how ad technology knows your preferences, each movie will be individually tailored to YOUR liking just so that your engagement will increase. Do you like happy endings? Deadpool and Hulk will join forces and defeat Thanos. Do you prefer dark endings? Deadpool and Hulk fight until they float off into the Sun and get atomized but keep regenerating for eternity.
If you want to see a photo of you and your family from 15 years ago, it will generate slightly better versions of yourself and your wife and maximize how cute your kids look. This is the world we are facing now, where authenticity is meaningless. And while YOU may not prefer it, think about the kids who aren't born yet and will grow up in a world where this exists.
Make Theatre Great Again
You're presenting this as an argument against AI, but really it's an argument against all human endeavor.
Every time in human civilization there's a new technology, existing humans rail against it and want the Good Old Days back, existing children grow up to get used to it, the generation-to-be-born knows it as the normal baseline, then maybe future generations rediscover the past and take the best things about how things used to be without being held back by how bad they were. (see retro games made after retro games died)
There is more to that, globalization. Now we have 8 billions humans. They are connected to the same infospace (internet) and share much more and more diverse content. Which means a lot more of emotional/interesting/helpful things. While each of them becomes less emotional.
Well, world changes dramatically. Connected old folks are like neanderthals in big city now. However not connected are still living locally in their minds. Youngsters are just accepting the world as it is. Nobody is amused by computers and cameras anymore. (at least in developed areas)
And with all that the worst is yet to come...
I think you're being tricked by nostalgia. It's about the fact that of course older photos you remember have a stronger emotional tie to you (they've had more time to form that bond), and it just so happens that older photos are not digital.
In my experience, a digital photo of myself and my partner used as the lock screen of my phone has the same emotional weight as the one sitting on my desk (which is a print out of a digital photo). Additionally, printing out a photo of you and your partner and gifting it to them has the same weight as going through childhood photo. A scrapbook of a recent vacation filled with printed digital photos evokes memories just as vividly as one from the 80s. On the flip side of this, a photo in a box in the basement has the same weight as a photo sitting in the cloud.
I'll offer you some more food for thought: are Aardman Animations films charming because they use claymation? Or is it the creative force of people like Nick Park and Peter Lord?
You can still buy a Polaroid, there is one factory left in the world able to produce the film required but they still make them.
People here like to say "Commoditize your Compliment" but to a company the size of google or amazon literally EVERYTHING is your compliment. Too bad no philosopher or political scientist or economist every thought about this stuff before or we might have some kind of plan to make the future less miserable and alienating.
> They were rare, and special, and you'd have a few photos per YEAR to look back on.
Um yeah I don't know. I fully resonate with the _emotional_ appeal here, but realistically I remember going round to people's houses to be shown analog photo albums that nobody was that bothered about seeing, because they didn't really care -- they weren't their photos.
The special photos (a few a year) still exists in digital form.
I believe this is the reason for a return to interest in analog media with both my generation (millenials) and gen-z. I do wedding photography on the side, and the past ~2 years have seen a huge increase in requests for film photography, either exclusively film or as an add-on to digital. Offering film has been one of the best things I've done for my side hustle.
Likewise with the sort of resurgence of vinyl, and the obsession over "old" point and shoot digicams.