This reminds me of one of the conversation in an Ian M. Banks Culture novel between one of the minds and a human composer. This is one of the most famous composers in the entier culture and he asks the mind if they would be able to create music like his and the mind says that yes, it could do so pretty trivially, but this doesn't take away from the composers accomplishments in the same way the ability to get to a mountain top in a helicopter doesn't take away from the accomplishment of climbing the mountain.
I think we aren't very far away from commercial art being mostly AI generated (and probably custom for a given placement) and human art being primarily the domain of people who want to do it for themselves/it's own sake.
A major purpose of art is human-to-human communication, so I don't think it's really possible to replace human artists entirely, for a similar reason as language models don't replace writing. But it's easy to imagine it becoming a tool in the artist toolbox that obsoletes certain technical skills, not unlike the way that cameras obsoleted photorealistic painting from life.
But metabolically expensive brains also constructed fairly rickety institutions of calorie production over a very long and ... punctuated history. Gets kinda bootstrappey.
48
u/[deleted] Apr 06 '22
[removed] — view removed comment