alt Hacker NewsI'm in film and highly exposed to the AI media and arts scene. I was very early to this hate, and I've experienced it personally by the metric boat load.
I'm fine with people not liking the technology, but the number of death threats, rude comments ("your mother didn't use the coat hanger well enough"), and literal stalking and doxxing I've received from some of these rabidly anti-AI people is appalling.
Whatever compels people to throw paint onto fine art or to block traffic for hours (including emergency vehicles and people just trying to get home) is the same bug a lot of these anti-AI griefers have.
I take great joys when luminaries in animation, illustration, game development, etc. announce that they're using AI tools and that they enjoy them. It's one of my sweetest pleasures after enduring the anti-AI outrage day in and day out for years.
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I do think that AI tools make creativity better and not worse. I grew up with Youtube poops, photoshop, garry's mod, and flash. Being able to go from idea to asset in a fast, throwaway capacity lets you nuance and remix jokes and media on a level that isn't possible with traditional creative software. I got into software because I wanted to make things that I wanted. I think it is a great thing that the ability to make software is now in the hands of more people than ever, just as 3D printing did for widgets, as cheap chinese manufacturing did for electronics, diffusion models are doing for media.
Media production is often laborious and unfun. I learned that the hard way the first time I whipped out the physgun in Garry's Mod and started trying to make something funny. That experience was absolutely buns and the consequence is I didn't get to make as many fun things to share and enjoy as I could have.
My suspicion is that the people leading the outrage from a creative perspective is people who were, by-and-large, struggling/failing to make it in a creative industry before AI, and this is the outlet for that pent up frustration.
The closest I've come to sympathising has been witnessing the death of the farmer's market under a sea of generic AI slop and Temu garbage. And while sad, that feels like more of a story about globalising supply chains than one about the death of creativity.
The pessimism of Blueskyism feels very alien to me.
I think the most challenging part about these people is that it makes it so much harder to address real concerns with AI. I use it, but even I recognize that it needs to be considered carefully. I've been lucky in that most people who use AI that I've encountered have been willing to have great conversations on the pros and cons, the concerns, etc.
However, the moment som anti-AI person comes in, they immediately want to go scorched earth. I just wished they'd use even half this energy for something more impactful.
Being upset about blocked traffic for a protest but not upset that the rich are trying to kill off the labor market is the exact hilariously short sighted issue.
It will take a few years for the multigenerational dark age to set in, but eventually you too will realize that they had a point.