My purpose was to encourage people not to quit their art because I think human art is fundamentally superior to LLM-produced “art” and is necessary and important.
We definitely agree there. And yes, it would be great if human creatives could persevere in the face of this flood. But it’s really becoming difficult.
My thoughts on all this tend to go toward making an environment that is actively and intensely hostile to AI tools and those that promote them, because they will always have the upper hand in sheer numbers. In another reply I mentioned publishers closing submissions because of AI floods. When you go from ~50 submissions per month to hundreds per day, publishers are just going to stop trying to find the humans in the noise. And humans are going to give up on what is, and has been for several years now, and incredibly challenging market to get published in. Hollywood is going to see the writer and actor strike and decided it’s just cheaper to use AI. Software companies are going to see that it’s cheaper to use an LLM to spit out code than hiring actual developers. And on and on. Even if the end product is inferior, the people at the top with the money and making the decisions only care about the bottom line. Is it cheaper and maybe minimally viable?
I think a lot of the cause of this is capitalism. I genuinely don’t think that these kinds of tools would exist outside of capitalism. They only exist for profit. And inside of a capitalist system, those sorts of things are going to drive market decisions. But I don’t think it can end up being a marketplace where there can be true competition, and it’s going to end up snuffing out actual creativity. It’s an extremely dystopian prospect.