I don't know about other people but I don't "fault" the AI anything, nor am I even particularly bothered by AI-generated content per se.

What fills me with dread is the obvious glee over removing human work from sellable products, when there is no viable alternative to working for most people. We've created a world where a lot of jobs can be automated, and that is somehow a bad thing, and it's going to be used to crush people. It's a labor issue not a philosophical one.

Would you be happier if your car / bicycle / city bus was produced entirely by hand, with no tools or automation?

Labor will shift. Bemoaning new efficiencies and new empowerment because they reduce the need for meaningless labor consumption is backwards. We should be sensitive to those whose lives will take an unexpected turn (I may be one of them!), but we should do so in the context of celebrating greater individual leverage to create and produce.

No, as I was trying to imply I don't particularly care about the use of a given technology per se, I care about the consequences of its application to labor.

"Labor will shift" makes it sound like a smooth and automatic process but it is not. People will lose jobs with no equivalent replacements, families will fall into poverty and misery when they hadn't before. In a place like the US with healthcare tied to employment, people will die. And eventually, it will reach a stable equilibrium with fewer jobs that can support a reasonable quality of life. That's what labor shifting looks like, we know because we've seen it over and over again.

The changes might ultimately be net positive for a great many people, but that's small consolation to the people whose lives will be made much much worse during the transition. None of this is inevitable, but historically it's the path we've chosen and we seem even more dedicated to this outcome now than at previous times of change in the relation between labor and survival.

I think a big issue I take with the removal of humans from art creation, or at least discussions around it, is that art is always talked about as being separate from the creator. As a product the person makes.

For many pieces of art, and what draws me to art, is knowing that the creator put a piece of themselves into it. (I'm going to avoid talking about the 'separating art from the artist' discussion, that's separate than what I'm discussing here).

An example I've talked about in the past on HN is Raymond Carver. Carver's short stories are often centered around blue-collar men in the mid west. This is because Carver was a blue-collar man from the mid west. I find that interesting. I enjoy reading about Carver's life, and reading about what people had to say about him.

Essentially, write what you know.

Art made by AI is missing that - and I think the frustrating part for me is that I don't think it's that hard to bring it back.

Show me the prompts used for the art. Tell me why you used those specific prompts. What did those prompts mean to you? I want to know all of those things.

I also think people stop too soon. Why not take what the AI has made, do something to it yourself, and then feed it back into the AI to see what happens?

> Labor will shift.

Until it doesn't. I mean until very recently the narrative justification for extreme automation was it would free up our time to create art and stuff. Now that's in question.

It's all excuses to avoid thinking about the problems the automation technology will cause. Avoidance worked OK in the past, but as these technologies get more and more extreme, the problems will get more and more pressing, and the old lazy excuses won't cut it anymore.

> ...but we should do so in the context of celebrating greater individual leverage to create and produce.

And the end point of that is a small cadre of elites who control the machines, and hordes of people left with no economic value (except, perhaps as slaves for elite amusement, like gladiators and prostitutes).

People who say "labor will shift" tend to have a significant overlap with the people who say "one day AGI will do all the work for us so we can live in paradise"; which, in turn, has significant overlap with the people who don't spend nearly as much time as they should acknowledging that getting from point A to point B is going to be the bloodiest proposition in history and not a guarantee besides. Probably because there is yet another overlap with people who find technology far more fascinating than society, and thus don't care to look beyond first order effects.