It's because this technology isn't (and never has been) intended for the laborers making the stuff. The ultimate aim of these companies is to address the managerial and c suite people with a product that can replace the labor pool.
Honestly, I think the current consumer focus is just an irrational consequence of these companies feeling like they can't leave all that consumer money on the table, but, precisely for the reasons this piece outlines, it makes no sense to market this stuff to people who actually like their craft. These tools are purely intended for superficial people who are not interested in creating things, they are only interested in outputs and end results.
You aren't wrong, especially about motivations. The "current consumer focus" has had some weird results, too - particularly in the image/video generation space, it's the consumers, or rather the OSS community, that actually did 90% of the work of turning AI research output into product prototypes - which many a startup now just pick, polish and scale up. Not to dismiss that work, either, but that's mostly the old-school SaaS building work; the hot AI part is already there on Github, packaged into ComfyUI nodes for people to play with.
Full video is a slightly different story because of compute demands, but image generation is basically the infamous Dropbox comment situation - any fancy image generation task you see offered as a service, a moderately tech-savvy person could replicate for personal use with ComfyUI over a weekend. That applies to interactive portraits too - the nodes are but a click away, models run fast enough for local use on an average PC.
I'd like to challenge you on your conclusion, though:
> These tools are purely intended for superficial people who are not interested in creating things, they are only interested in outputs and end results.
But this is exactly how progress is made. Quoting Alfred North Whitehead[0]: "Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them." Where for one craftsman, the process is the most important part of their creative work, another craftsman only cares about the output of the former, because it's an input to their creative work. That doesn't make the latter person "superficial", they're just one level up the dependency graph.
That is true, and that makes a lot of sense for supplying the outputs for our vital needs, like shelter, food, etc. But I would argue that creative work is different. Creative work is typically more about the process, not the immediate output, and in fact, it is usually only during the process itself that we figure out what we really want to express in a creative work. Art: "purposefullness without purpose". So, unless you are producing creative works as mere entertainment to fill laborers' time while they recover for the next day of work, and not as a mode of expression, I don't believe a productive optimization argument makes much sense here. We'll see, I could be wrong, the LLM might become a new paintbrush, but I think the inherent stochasticity might prevent that. Regardless, there's a reason all of our analog tools have stuck around for art making in spite of the existence of their highly efficient digital counterparts.
And I think the author of Process and Reality might agree with me.
> there's a reason all of our analog tools have stuck around for art making
As an early adopter of digital cameras and convert to film photography, I agree... to a point. Producing creative work can be entirely about the output and those outputs can be as Fine as any Fine Art, not "merely entertainment".
Take writers for example. As a business and as a creative pursuit, writers have (on the whole) enthusiastically adopted every technology that's come their way. In large part that's because it helped them stop thinking about certain critical operations. eg: dealing with ink and nibs and loose papers. And while I'd imagine most writers derive a lot of fulfillment from the process, none of that compares to the feeling they get when others read and enjoy their work. Do some writers still use pen and paper? Absolutely, but does that mean their art is better or more Fine or more authentic?
Those analog tools might still be around, but it's largely because there are people who still enjoy those mediums, not because their modern alternatives are inherently Less in some way. If they were then all the paintings in your local gallery would have been done in tempera.
> As an early adopter of digital cameras and convert to film photography,
I suppose this is a very good example.
Analog photography killed the market for portraits and landscapes, making them available to commoners - first by letting professional photographers make them much cheaper and faster than artists, and eventually by cameras getting cheap enough even commoners could afford them.
Yes, this hurt artists a lot. Turns out, the people wanting portraits never actually cared about the process, just the outcome, and from their point of view, analog photographs were not only cheaper but also better quality than portraits and sketches made by artists.
But I want to focus on something else entirely - on what analog photography gave us. It wasn't just portraits for everyone. It gave even the poor the ability to hold on to few of most cherished memories in physical form - think e.g. large family gatherings, weddings, graduations, etc. would have someone with a camera there, making photos. Think of your grandparents' photos of their parents, all in sepia or black and white. There were no earlier version of that available to the everyman.
Analog photography also gave us photographic evidence, boosted importance of journalism. On the art side, it gave us cinematography and everything attached to it. It created cinemas, and then it created TVs. But there's one more thing.
Analog photography gave us a good half of scientific and engineering progress in the late 19th and most of the 20th century. I'd dare to say it directly gave us nuclear physics and quantum physics, because it allowed to observe things we previously couldn't see, or wouldn't notice if we could. E.g. many people probably saw flashes in their eyes as some high-energy particle briefly oversaturated a rod cell. But those same particles leaving permanent traces on a photographic film, for us to see and study at our leisure? That's another game.
Now, digital photography. Digital photography killed the market for all the auxiliary services around analog photography. It hurt the still fresh art named "photography", and all but killed the dark room. But it gave us something as important as the previous step - it turned photography from expensive craft to basic human activity. Today, it's completely normal to casually take pictures of bills, papers, posters; it's normal to snap a label at the back of some device, because you'll need to type that number somewhere else in 2 minutes and you don't want to force yourself to memorize it.
Science and engineering-wise, digital photography gave us a lot, too, if perhaps less obvious. Most of it is pedestrian. So many daily practices, so many production process, involve digital cameras somewhere in the pipeline, in ways that weren't possible with analog cameras.
I could go on.
Point is, what the new tool does to artists is usually separate them from their source of income. Artists obviously want to have the two intertwined, but then again, can they talk about heart of the craft when taking commission for it? It's a complex topic. But either way, the new doesn't just mess up with the old, in many cases it's transformative well beyond anyone's imagination. True progress.
Will generative AI turn out to be like analog and digital photography in this regard? I don't know. I'm mildly convinced it will.
> Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them.
That's for mass production of useful tools. For decades, it's been easy to produce music, write a book, and draw with digital means. The actual truth is that people don't want to invest the time to learn how. Now they can pose as if they've done so, but the result never survives close inspection.
True, if you evaluate the new in context of the old. Anyone can summon a story with an LLM now, but it ain't gonna be as good as one written by an author pouring their heart and sweat into every word. Same with digital images.
However, the exact same technology is just a small bit plumbing away from allowing people to summon immersive stories in interactive 3D environments, and iteratively sculpt them from within, in the same way people in Star Trek did with the Holodeck (sans the actual holograms, but VR will do as a substitute). The building blocks are all there today, and are up to spec - what's missing is some glue and ironing out a kinks; I expect multiple attempts at this succeeding within next year or two. And this is a new kind of creative field, which will breed new mode of creating art (not just by chatting with a computer - there's a need for fine manual touch, too).
In the end, some things will be diminished, but new things will become possible. I'm mildly positive about it, but I guess we'll soon whether we'll gain more than we lose.
What you wrote can be summarized as:
1 Write Prompt
2 ...
3 Have a complete work
Let's take step 2. Drawing is easy to learn, but it's very hard to master. Why because, it derives from understanding and muscle controls. People fails to draw a simple cube because they don't understand the thing they see. Yes, they probably know that it has 6 faces that are square, but they haven't learned to see it. Knowledge is important, but it's just the initial step. You then have to understand how it all fits together (extract the rules), then apply that understanding.
Same with writing. Everyone has a story, but not everyone can tell it because they don't know how to. You have to learn the techniques, then apply it until you have a complete understanding, then you can create as much as you want to.
With no understanding, there's no creation. And generative AI won't help, because it can't feel the world as you and I do.
I'm reminded of my time in secondary school back in the late 90s.
I was trying to figure out how to make an FPS game of my own — from first principles given there was no internet for me to be advised by.
One of my peers suggested using flood fill as per photoshop, and I couldn't get him to understand that this didn't do perspective even with an example. (A real life "these cows are small, those cows are far away" moment).
Or that "Dulce et Decorum est" was required study material in the English Literature classes. Neither I nor anyone else in the school knew what it was really like to experience the horrors of war described in that poem, as the use of chlorine gas was banned before anyone under retirement age had been born.
Shakespeare is held in such high esteem, but how many of those who enjoy it today would have enjoyed an original performance of The Tempest in 1611 with actors who had little chance to memorise their lines, an audience who vocally participated, no light beyond what a fire could provide, no sound system beyond the cannon that accidentally burned The Globe theatre down? Can the works even be fully comprehended given that today the questions are "is Shylock an unfair and antisemetic stereotype?" and "why is The Taming of the Shrew even counted as a comedy rather than a tragedy?" and "why 'eye of newt'?"
Alternatively current AIs don't compose well with each other and don't let themselves be decomposed easily. This makes control and user interaction difficult to establish which leads to monolithic one-click input->output products by default.
Things that can be stated simply ("replace the banjo with a saxophone", "place the cat to the left of the table") can't really be tackled by composition (comfyui workflows of hell) and if you want something that generalizes, you need to train models specially designed with that composition scheme in mind (layout diffusion for instance).
GenAI is not capable of making art. Self expression is not only inherent in art, it’s essential. What AI does is make pretty pictures, but nothing more. It’s not a tool for making art because it removes the means for artistic expression. It’s possible for someone to make art from GenAI outputs, but that requires taking artistic liberties post generation.
It's not the AI that makes the art, but the person who tells the AI what to do. A painter friend of mine has gotten into generative AI lately, and the sometimes-pretty, sometimes-intimidating pictures she comes up with sure look like an artistic expression to me. She has a vision of something she wants to see, and she uses tools to bring that vision into reality, just like she does with paint; the new tools just give her new options.
> It's not the AI that makes the art, but the person who tells the AI what to do.
Would you still call them an artist if they commissioned another human actually skilled instead of an AI model?
Why can't people accept that their role in this new process simply isn't the one we've always called artist? We don't call computers to the people using a computer, that role is now the machine's. I'd rather label the model itself an artist than its user, as much as it pains me.
Isn't this what creative directors do? E.g. the creative director at a game development studio isn't creating art assets, they're directing other artists to produce art in a particular style or theme. Likewise, sculptors and other big art projects often have understudies that carry out a lot of work.
I would still call them artists if they delegate parts of the work to other artists - or machines - if they're the one at the helm of the overall artistic vision.
Artists have been using assistants to get their work done since forever; in modern times, Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst are famous for doing little or none of the actual fabrication of the artworks which bear their signatures.
You are right that this is a new process, in which a machine does work that was previously done by a human, but I don't think that means the human is not an artist. Consider the DJ, who "merely" plays back other people's records: yet there's a whole art form in weaving disparate music together. Or, consider, is a composer a musician? The only sound they make is that of a pen scratching on paper; it's not until a room full of other musicians perform the score that you actually hear any music. Yet we still think of the writing of that score as an artistic act.
> Why can't people accept that their role in this new process simply isn't the one we've always called artist?
I think what has happened here is that you are talking about something very specific. Putting text into midjourney, maybe. That's not the only way people use AI in their art. Are "prompt engineers" artists? Maybe, maybe not, maybe not yet. Maybe they are only as much of an artist as I was back in 2005 while clicking "generate clouds" in Adobe.
As far as I understand, art is typically understood to have two components: expression and impression. The creation of something, anything, as a form of self-expression, is considered art. Additionally, though, art is in eyes of the beholder. If a feeling is inspired in someone by the observation of a thing, act, etc, then it becomes art to them, in that moment. Notably, though, it doesn't necessarily make that thing art to anyone else, unless it is curated at which point that curation is a form of expression.
These definitions are distinct from the requirements for copyright.
>Self expression is not only inherent in art, it’s essential.
That idea is only about 200 years old and strongly Western. The vast majority of cultures saw no difference between "art" and craft, regarding pictures and sculptures as simply decorative objects, of the same basic cultural standing as pottery or textiles. Our understanding of "art" was fundamentally transformed by the development of photography and mass-manufacturing.
Anyone with a glib answer to questions about the cultural meaning of AI-generated art really needs to familiarise themselves with the thinking of William Morris and Yanagi Sōetsu, because this isn't the first time we've had this argument.
Sure it isn't art but I guess it will be a substitute for art for many things: do people care that much if their workout music is actual art or artificial not-art art-like stuff?
I would really like an objective explanation of why this attitude "that the whole point of art is the process of making it" is anything but pretentiousness in it's purest form.
Surely the actual artifact itself has some value? And even if one supposes that a key part of the value is self-exploration (which I disagree with generally because that presupposes an excessive level of self-importance), then being able to iterate more easily by leveraging AI art can be a huge advantage for many artists.
This is not to say that actual fundamental skills like drawing ability etc. aren't valuable. And it will be hard to develop them if you rely entirely on AI, especially while learning. But I don't see how it is logically necessary at all to completely exclude AI.
To me, this is a rationalization for disliking AI because it displaces humans to some degree or another. I think that is a fair reaction, but the rationale is nonsense.
I predict that the number of people who start to resent AI will increase dramatically over the coming few decades. Especially if we can't improve the structure of society to be less centered around exploiting labor.
> I would really like an objective explanation of why this attitude "that the whole point of art is the process of making it" is anything but pretentiousness in it's purest form.
i think that's a problem - i am no philosopher or art historian, but i truly can't think of "objective" truths of any kind when i think about art, the process of making art, or the process of engaging with art. it's nice to make art. i play around with synthesizers and it... makes me feel more like a human being, i guess? when i record music or do amateur photography i've actualized myself somehow. something that wouldn't have existed otherwise now exists because of my actions, and that's enjoyable to experience. i imagine one could argue "you still created something that wouldn't have existed when you prompt an AI!" but it just doesn't feel the same, and i struggle to explain why
> And even if one supposes that a key part of the value is self-exploration
i think a lot of value is the context of the art itself - picasso going insane, the protests leading up to the tank man photo, aphex twin's cheetah, jesse krimes being in prison, whatever. maybe this is just me, but when i go to museums the extra information in the labels or audio descriptions is where i find most of the joy and fascination that makes the artworks meaningful to me. AI art feels contextless
> Surely the actual artifact itself has some value?
genuinely - have you encountered AI-generated art that you find valuable? that you tell other people about or have kept a copy of for yourself somehow?
> genuinely - have you encountered AI-generated art that you find valuable? that you tell other people about or have kept a copy of for yourself somehow?
Oh, man, absolutely. Few examples:
- My daughter and I created a song about our cat with Udio. It took some trials and errors, but the result is awesome and it made us laugh many times since.
- Some early AI poems and stories that we generated are memes already for us
- I generate a lot of music and created tooling around it so I can curate and iterate upon them in quantities. Out of many thousands attempts there is a few dozen of songs that I absolutely love.
The thing is AI art is rarely 100% AI. But even if it was, I wouldn't feel ashamed if I liked it.
> i think a lot of value is the context of the art itself
I agree. The enjoyment I get out of a good piece of art isn’t just the piece of art itself, it’s that experiencing the art is a way to kind of connect your mind with the human that made it. If part of the art resonates with me, it’s nice to know that there was another person that felt the same way. If the art is a technical marvel, so can think about the genius and skill of the creator.
AI art doesn’t have any of that and I have to conclude that people who talk about enjoying AI art to the same level as human-made art just never bothered to connect with human art on that deeper level
Is the deeper connection to art just about the fact that there was another person who felt something, or is it about what the art is communicating/representing? I would argue that the real value is in what feeling or information is actually being communicated, not what person or process was on the other end.
Okay but can you parse my question a little more carefully? Because I said "the whole point".
Also you're talking about the context of the art and it's meaning. That does not depend on any actual person being involved or any long drawn out process of creating the art. In fact, if you really dig into the capabilities of AI tools today and think about it, they dramatically accelerate the ability for some artists to create lots of meaningful work that is very contextual. Or to make more carefully refined works that they have iterated on and carefully curated.
> I would really like an objective explanation of why this attitude "that the whole point of art is the process of making it" is anything but pretentiousness in it's purest form.
It's not necessarily pretentiousness (though it's definitely pretentiousness adjacent), but a view from the point-of-view of an artist. I say it's adjacent to pretentiousness because I think implicit in the entire article is the assumption that creation is superior to consumption (and also the assumption that art created just to pay the bills is inferior to art created for its own sake[1]).
Creation is superior to consumption in basically every value system ever constructed. That doesn't seem like a controversial axiom. Certainly it's widely believed on HN.
Possibly after you started your reply, I edited my comment to add that it also assumes that creation specifically for paying the bills is inferior to creation for its own sake. This may be also not super controversial, but it is adjacent to "popular things aren't good" which is definitely pretentious.
i dont think you need to go so far as to say more important, just that it is a part.
ai art is purely consumption, or if there is a production part, its from the artists who were ripped off as part of training and reselling their work through the image generator
“So what," the Chelgrian asked, "is the point of me or anybody else writing a symphony, or anything else?"
The avatar raised its brows in surprise. "Well, for one thing, you do it, it's you who gets the feeling of achievement."
"Ignoring the subjective. What would be the point for those listening to it?"
"They'd know it was one of their own species, not a Mind, who created it."
"Ignoring that, too; suppose they weren't told it was by an AI, or didn't care."
"If they hadn't been told then the comparison isn't complete; information is being concealed. If they don't care, then they're unlike any group of humans I've ever encountered."
"But if you can—"
"Ziller, are you concerned that Minds—AIs, if you like—can create, or even just appear to create, original works of art?"
"Frankly, when they're the sort of original works of art that I create, yes."
"Ziller, it doesn't matter. You have to think like a mountain climber."
"Oh, do I?"
"Yes. Some people take days, sweat buckets, endure pain and cold and risk injury and—in some cases—permanent death to achieve the summit of a mountain only to discover there a party of their peers freshly arrived by aircraft and enjoying a light picnic."
"If I was one of those climbers I'd be pretty damned annoyed."
"Well, it is considered rather impolite to land an aircraft on a summit which people are at that moment struggling up to the hard way, but it can and does happen. Good manners indicate that the picnic ought to be shared and that those who arrived by aircraft express awe and respect for the accomplishment of the climbers.
"The point, of course, is that the people who spent days and sweated buckets could also have taken an aircraft to the summit if all they'd wanted was to absorb the view. It is the struggle that they crave. The sense of achievement is produced by the route to and from the peak, not by the peak itself. It is just the fold between the pages." The avatar hesitated. It put its head a little to one side and narrowed its eyes. "How far do I have to take this analogy, Cr. Ziller?”
That's a great quote and explanation of why the process of making art is important for those who participate in it. However, it does not claim that the _entire point of art_ is that process, which is what I am refuting.
I think it's important that artists keep doing actual "traditional" art and grow in the process if they have any motivation to do so. But I feel strongly that asserting that AI art or art that hasn't involved some arduous process, doesn't have any value, is nonsense. Because that means that enjoyment or communication from art is not just much less important than the development of the artist, but worthless. It's kind of a classist or elitist and self-aggrandizing view.
Most artists create art that nobody cares about. This is just reality. You can make music, and likely nobody will listen to it. You can write a book, and probably nobody will read it. You have to create for yourself and if you’re extremely lucky someone else will care, but probably not.
AI art is a cute trick, but it makes this point even more true. Why would you care about a picture I drew when you could generate 100 of them in minutes and way better as well? The fact that you can put a coin in the vending machine and get a picture or song or novel completely devalues the end product.
What remains is the process of creativity, of choosing a medium and exploring the boundaries of what it can do. I saw a Picasso exhibit that showed all the studies and sketches he’d done in preparation for a piece. That process IS the creation of the art. The final picture isn’t even that interesting.
If someone feels fulfilled generating images, good for them, I guess. To me it seems like a cheap fix and a trick that we will all eventually grow tired of.
> Most artists create art that nobody cares about.
Except, in this age of social media, artists can harvest impressions and optimize for clicks. Which they do. I guess most parts of the world hasn't gotten to that point, nor will for years to come.
The point of art for the artist is expression. The point for the audience is to gain something through shared experience with the artist.
AI outputs are not created by a conscious agent experiencing affect, and its audience shares an experience with no one. It's not compelling, and isn't art.
To me, this is a rationalization for disliking AI because it displaces humans to some degree or another. I think that is a fair reaction, but the rationale is nonsense.
People just hates AI generated images. Why can't the framing be this simple?
AI images and users gets filtered out everywhere, closing into an edgy echo chamber groups, and rarely, if ever, for such "it displaces humans" philosophical arguments. AI generated data just evokes negativity, are low quality, and are unsalvageable, and there are little to no prospects of that improving through cooperation because AI-leaning people have ran around setting so many bridges on fire, so its potentials are all but ignored.
If anything, I'd expect the resentment will subside over the next decade, as generation techniques mature and barrier to entry for amateurs exponentially rise. I think we are already seeing signs of such guild moat forming in code generation LLMs.
You are exactly right, the artists are deploying all their rhetoric skills they learned in university to try to avoid becoming the next horse drawn carriage drivers.
As a software engineer and artist[1], my views on art and generative AI have been evolving.
In my opinion, GenAI has revealed that the art isn't primarily in the creation, but in the selection. It used to take incredible talent to create something worth selecting (writing, painting, sculpture, etc), so creation and selection were often so close to be seen as indistinguishable. A technically skilled artist was likely to create something great, because they were likely making high quality selective decisions all along the creation process. So the end result of a gifted writer was probably a high quality work.
But now the creation of technically skilled works has become detached from the selection process. Now we're flooded with technically skilled work, but no selection. But the selection process is still critical to make something compelling and innovative. The artist needs to evolve to inject themselves into selective decisions of GenAI, both in the process and in selecting the final result.
Underappreciated comment right there. The idea about selection vs creation was on my mind, but I wasn't able to put the idea into a solid form as you did there. Thanks.
Of all the things I do with AI, art is probably the one I do the most. When you create written content on the internet, "the algorithm" rewards you more if you add art to it. I am not an artist, but I can write good.
So when I'm done writing, I pop over to my AI image generator, describe a few images I want, pop them into the post, and away I go! And then boom, greater engagement. As an added bonus, I don't have to worry about copyright, because at the moment copyright law considers me the creator if I modify it or the AI (which makes it uncopywriteable). So I'm in the clear there (for now).
Kinda understandable, but as a consumer, I already dislike that a lot.
In the beginning, AI 'art' was novel and interesting in a way. But now I've already seen so much generic illustrations, and in 95% they don't add any value to a blog post. I'm even less likely to click on links with a generated thumbnail these days. It creates an expectation of SEO spam or low quality and I have to wonder if the author also used AI to write the text. The generated images seem so soulless to me.
As a creator, I dislike it too. I'd love it if the platforms would just show you my content without the pictures. But the pictures are what make people click, so I'm stuck.
It's the same reason online recipes have life stories. Because Google rewards longer pages. So now you have to do that just to get seen, even if you don't want to.
I wonder if that's a conscious or sub-conscious decision on the clickers part? It's hard to imagine anyone is consciously motivated to click on an article because of an AI generated picture.
Personally, I like a shitty 1min hand-drawn stick figure a thousand times more than a generated image. But I'm probably a minority here. You're right, it's not what Google and SEO incentivizes.
This is not creating art, but illustration. Art is where the meaning is inherent to the work, whereas illustration is when it is derived from something else that it accompanies (e.g. a text). There’s obviously a spectrum here, but GenAI blogpost decoration are pretty much the terminal point on the illustration part of that scale.
The world is topsy turvy. I can't even tell satire anymore or whether people are being sarcastic and tongue-in-cheek. This comment reads like sarcasm to me, overdoing on the things currently crappy about online "content creation":
0. The word "content" itself and self-applying the "content creator" label. No writer, artist, or musician I know thinks of themself unironically as a creator of content. How bland! Like a manufacturer! I produce units of content. My buddy who plays the saxophone and does a little composing would barf if you told him he was an audio content creator.
1. Feeding the algorithm. Do people really think about what "the algorithm" wants when they are being creative? Do they alter what they make to suit the algorithm? Why care what an unfeeling search engine wants if you're ultimately writing for the human soul?
2. Engagement as a goal. Is this really what you're after when you write? Not to inform, educate, please, inspire, upset, challenge, upend, or some other meaty goal? You just want some kind of generic "engagement"? This is the kind of thing a Marketing SVP wants, not a writer!
Sorry, I don't mean to attack. I'm trying to avoid being cynical, but the comment really struck me. I can't believe someone would write something like this about their creative passion, to the point where I question that maybe it was amazing sarcasm.
What you've described is the exact mechanism through which generative AI will actually kill search on the open web.
It's less likely that search will be threatened by the alternative of Q&A with a chatbot as much as by slop overrunning valuable content. More and more of the discoverable content will be machine-generated filler produced for exactly the reason you describe, it's rewarded by rankings.
People won't even bother writing on their own, let alone producing images to go with the writing. It'll be like the herculean task of just finding a damn recipe online without reading someone's life story first, but 1000x as bad. It's already here I guess. We've seen the baby peacocks in the coalmine.
Once I was an editorial illustrator, and the mantra always was "concept is king". Stick figures are kosher so long as they communicate something.
Impressionists emerged following the invention of the camera, as they had no more incentive to pursue realism. I think in the age of AI slop any form of crude image making is better so long as it's human. Scribble something out with crayons. Shape an animal out of a slice of bread, post a pic. It's all legit now, technical art abilities mean nothing. To impress you actually have to have a good idea.
This is actually reflected even in the AI slop. Most pictures look broadly appealing and correct, but very generic. So to draw a crowd it has to stand out some other way - be it the lighting, the colors, the materials, the framing, the poses, the setting, or whatever else. They really made me reevaluate what is it that I'm actually looking for and how much I value each of these aspects.
I never said anything about the degree. Of course my art is not as valuable as someone who has spent a lifetime perfecting their craft. But both are still art.
You're going to fall of that high horse of yours and break something. Most art for blogs before AI was shitty stock photos, maybe with a filter applied. It was not high art. It wasn't a major creative endeavor. It was a means to get Google with it's toxic ranking to bubble a blog post higher than the low effort copy/paste slop.
Google ranks a text-only page lower than one with a hero image. It ranks pages with a single image lower than one with multiple images. The stock art industry had long ago devalued actual art on the web selling vast collections of stock photos for a few dollars or giving away dreck for free.
AI tools have put no more actual artists out of work than Shutterstock or Unsplash. At least with an AI tool someone can make a hero image slightly more creative than "vaguely ethnic woman looking at computer" or a n out of focus picture of a dandelion.
TIL hero images on blogs are a valid metric when discussing art as a concept. If that's your primary exposure you're uniquely unqualified to have an opinion.
No, Chatbot All The Things is the least imaginative use of "AI." There's even a chatbot to search your Chrome history [1]. Nothing screams solution in search of a problem more than this.
Although the chatbot in chrome devtools is really useful. I selected a DOM node and ask "why isn't this visible" and it queried the DOM, css and figured out the height was 0 and explained exactly what lead to it being 0.
The reason for a DOM node not being visible is either the height/width being 0, its position is out of the viewport, it's behind other nodes or its opacity is 0. And that's basically the same for any layout engine that use node tree. The inspector is so easy to use that using a chatbot for the specified reason is a waste of resources.
There are so many more layers. Yeah, the height is zero. Why? Turns out the stylesheet styles are getting overridden by some global and import order is off. This is the perfect case for a chatbot that can see what's going on.
You can see all the styles that are applied to a specific node and their provenance. I believe learning how to properly debug is way more valuable than hoping that an LLM will get it right. And there's no global, and import order is kinda the wrong way to think about it.
There used to be a time, in the early days around 2018-2020, where "AI art" was something that only could have been made by an AI. Very trippy and resembling hallucinations. Sort of like dreams of a computer. I do miss that era of AI art. If you search "early ai art" on Google images there are some good examples.
I bought a book a few years ago called The Artist in the Machine by Arthur Miller[0] and it covers a lot of early AI creativity. I wish they shelled out for more color pages, because I agree things like DeepDream and GAN art are very trippy and would have made it a great coffee table book. It's wild that it took just two or three more years for diffusion models to hit the scene and take the world by storm.
I think there are some good uses for NFTs (and other token stuff), and this is one. The stupid jpegs thing is just... uhg, it's dumb and it's sad that that is where the technology went.
In principle it's less offensive than the "tulip mania" enthusiasm most people share, but it still suffers for the same reasons. Additionally, people simply might not care enough to register with NFTs - lord knows I don't care enough, and I'm one of the few people capable of doing it. But I'm not worried about getting my domain revoked so... what's the point? To spend money on a vanity label that a grand total of maybe 4 people will ever use?
ENS will inevitably butt up against the cryptocurrency problem of having few legitimate use cases and even fewer legitimate users. Outside the e/acc Twitter circles and lolcow online harassment forums, the demand for such an "uncensorable internet" is almost nonexistent.
What if you were worried about getting your domain revoked? What would you do in that case? What if your domain was your livelihood?
I think your claim about low demand could be taken more seriously even as recently as ten years ago but when you include "social media handle" in with "domain" then getting your online identity revoked is an every day occurrence and has been for years for a huge number of people who were not extremists or trolls. Later to be revealed by internal documents to be guided by the hand of the US government under false pretenses.
So it's not just extremists and trolls but also, every day people with opinions the government doesn't like who are getting their accounts and content taken away.
It will take a long time, but I think the ever growing usage of GenAI tools will ultimately make people desire human created works even more.
That said, there's a common thread in a lot of writing similar to this piece. Basically, it's some form of, "GenAI isn't art. GenAI creations lack a human element present in the creation process. GenAI creations cheapen the creative process in general due to the ease at which they can pop out new things."
I'm mixed on this. This is something we've always had to deal with as a species. This greatly simplies a lot of human history here, but consider:
- Our (long, long ago) ancestors had to paint on walls with their fingers. They had to make music by banging sticks together
- Paint brushes were invented. Musical instruments were invented. These things make it easier and quicker for people to _create_
- Mechanical machines made it easier to make garments and print books
- Digital machines made it even easier to write stories, or make music, or play music
The word processor alone made it ridiculously easy for highly evolved apes to start pounding on keyboards and outputting works of various lengths and quality.
Prior to the GenAI craze, there were music creation tools that contained multi-gigabyte sample packs. You could throw together random samples and make good sounding songs.
Photoshop and Illustrator made it exceedingly easy for artists to flex their creative muscles and get their ideas out there.
At the end of the day, these are all tools. And I think GenAI will ultimately be used in a similar way. It's a tool. Can it be used in a bad way? Sure. Just like PhotoShop. Just like Word.
Regarding what is and isn't art -- I don't think it's up to us to decide. And does it matter? History is full of ridiculous examples of things that might or might not be art.[0][1] Humans don't necessarily need to be involved in the creation process either.[2]
None of those links are art. They’re stunts at best. I know, I know someone will disagree, but they’re wrong.
The difference between cave paintings, brush paintings, and even photoshop versus AI generated works is that a human had to visualize mentally and then translate their internal visualization into the medium without words. AI generated does not require that.
Artists like Jackson Pollock or more modern instances of digital artists lie somewhere between the two—creating with little intention and little control.
- We will use LLMs to create/summarize documents.
- "You are StartupAI, an AI that is an expert in X and answers questions about X"
- An LLM that I can replace an employee with and fire them.
As with any revolution, we get to revise a whole generation of software and see how we can retrofit or rethink the solution/product. If you seek to build something novel, we will have to actually be creative, not minimally apply the technology to immediately extract value.
> "What we need is a computer that isn’t labor-saving, but which increases the work for us to do." — John Cage
Arguably both are needed. The kind that replaces the mindless repetitive work (e.g. dishwasher, roomba) so we have more time to focus on the kind that lets us do more than before (e.g. an orbital satelite, 3D printer).
There are only 24 hours in a day and you can't do more without doing less first.
Yes, life for housewives and mothers before the washing machine was hell. There are still billions of women in the world slaving away beating clothes on rocks.
In those days you had fewer clothes and wore them longer between washes as well. Something to consider as we dedicate time to fold 7+ full outfits of clothes every week per person today.
And kids would actually pull quite a lot of the weight back then too. "Clean your room" more like you are coming to the farm with me today boy and splitting the firewood for mother later.
Having lived in apartments with and without dishwashers its not as much of a time savings as you might realize. the dishwasher needs a degree of maintenance. Dishes have to be loaded precariously in a way to effectively wash them from the sprayer jets. Some dishes have to be washed by hand still. Everything needs rinsing and scraping. Its a modern dishwasher so that means its too weak to dry dishes on dry cycle to skirt energy efficiency standards, so dishes are then loaded into the rack by the sink to dry. and the whole cycle takes like 2 and a half hours.
And I'm wondering why I'm not saving much time and its because the time savings isn't really significant to begin with. Coupled with the fact that when I was hand washing, I'd actually wash dishes as I generated them during cooking. It only takes me about 30 seconds to wash a plate or pan with sink and sponge and soap. I could have most dishes done before dinner was even served saved for the plates and silverware it was eaten with and maybe the last pan in the process, maybe 30 seconds work hardly less effort than the act of rinsing and scraping before the dishes go into the dishwasher.
All that begin said I still use it, but I probably am not saving much, if any time, with the new rituals it requires.
I had a broken dishwasher with a part I didn't feel like replacing for a few years that I only used as a drying rack.
I replaced it recently because the door hinges broke as well. I now only run it once a week just to keep the parts moving. It is so much easier to just wash dishes as I go. And they're way cleaner when I wash them no matter how empty I keep the washer or how I arrange the dishes. Oh and I use it sometimes after I have guests over.
If you say that into a mirror five times an angry Canadian named Alec will show up behind you and start grumbling about prewash powder. It's amazing how absolutely nobody knows how to use a dishwasher properly.
Oh I am a powdered detergent truther already. I use the prewash tray. I clean the filter. I follow the manual to a tee. And you know what it says? Heat the water up out of the tap. Rinse and scrape the dishes. If I have to run the tap for 3 mins anyhow to get it hot enough to actually get the soap to suds up and not leave residue I might as well scrape out the pan.
It may not have reduced overall work, but certainly it reduced the amount of work they did washing dishes. That would allow them to do other things (or allow them to use more dishes.)
That is not the tradeoff being made. When you go from a home without a dishwasher to one with a dishwasher, you don't work more or less hours as an engineer at JPL. You work the same hours. Likewise for someone who does their housecleaning by hand or one that hires housecleaners, the latter doesn't start working 50 hour shifts at the office in response.
Then the question is what are people doing with the extra time? We'd all like to imagine we are an artist or poet or musician deep own if we had the time, but are we really? Or would most people take an extra ten minutes and use it not to pick up a violin or to work a garden, but to scroll through tick tock perhaps?
And you have to at least be aware to the fact that there is a lot of money to be made trying to get you to scroll tick tock instead of playing a violin not looking at advertisement, and very few interests out there pushing back as a result. So what gains we might make in efficiency today are liable to be gobbled up by some sort of profit making addictive product. And personally speaking, sometimes these low effort tasks like dusting the home or cleaning the dishes or mowing the lawn are great ways to disconnect active process into an automatic sort of action, to mediate while you are doing the thing, and think inwardly about some other idea you might have. In some ways washing the dishes is a forced chunk of time you actually have to think your thoughts. And scrolling an algorithmic feed in its stead is very much not giving yourself a chance to think your own thoughts about your own situation; you've in fact offloaded your thought process to the highest bidder to think for you. And that seems quite dangerous in society.
You say this with quite a bit of confidence, and I can see in a later comment you've got some personal experience. I do as well, but it totally contradicts what you're saying. I had to get rid of my dishwasher last year because it had been installed incorrectly and leaked without us realizing it until it had caused quite a bit of water damage. I had to wait to get that fixed before installing a new dishwasher, and that took about three months. I washed all dishes by hand during that time. Like you, I tend to wash all dishes as I generate them, but I don't live alone, and my wife does not, so that didn't make much of a difference, and washing dishes by hand did, in fact, take an hour or so every day.
Now that I have a new dishwasher and don't need to do that any more, I'm not on TikTok, but actually do mostly just work more.
Perhaps that was a bad example since it's too much of a person-by-person thing (for myself I can definitely say I get more done if I don't have to spend hours on chores), but the fact that we can as a society actually do anything at all beyond just surviving is down to tractors and combine harvesters, so 98% of us don't have to work in food production anymore. The base level of complete chore automation that we've apparently all forgotten about. The fact that a job at JPL even exists is down to that and to manufacturing automation afterwards.
My chemical engineer friends like to point out that the Haber-Bosch process has doubled global food production, or something like that. In the same “industrial agriculture” category as tractors and combines.
Yes indeed, it's the main source of nitrogen for fertilizer. Otherwise we'd be back to leaving a third of the fields empty to regenerate with clover or similar plants that deposit nitrogen, plus having lower yields in general.
I guess tractors/combines made a much bigger difference than fertilizer.
> The base level of complete chore automation that we've apparently all forgotten about.
This is easy to forget. I try to occasionally remind myself that a safe office job, nearly unlimited food, and electric machines (boring robots?) to do work for me at home are all pretty incredible. The majority of my physical exertion is for fun and health reasons.
I have zero interest in a tool that turns a text description into an image, video or song. However, I would pay serious money for a generative AI tool that worked differently. I make visuals and music because I love the process of realizing and refining my ideas into end results I like. My challenge is the shortcomings in my mechanical drawing skills or music keyboard fingering skills. Things like maintaining correct proportions across an object. Or nailing the triplet note syncopated timing. Things that take months of iterative practice to reliably do.
I need a tool that takes granular inputs during my creation process and collaborates interactively with me to extend or perfect them. Or suggest other options for that one granular element based on my initial attempts. Not finished results, just the next step in the process. And give it to me as an individual stroke, a masked layer or a MIDI track I can then continue to modify and remix manually.
Can I really be the only person who desperately wants this?
All the comments here assume that AI will be good enough to completely replace people. As of today I think AI outputs are kind of bad. Lots of artefacts everywhere once you zoom in.
What's needed is greater control over the output and whoever does that control becomes an artist in the process. He or she might use a futuristic hypertech brush, but a brush nevertheless.
I don't disagree at all, the process of human storytelling is key to art. But at the same time I'm still going to use genAI 99% of the time when I just want a pretty picture, when I'm in the mood for doing it myself I will, but most of the time I probably won't be.
I'm what people who know me call a "creative person", but generative AI for images and especially music really is a terrific tool.
> What if the point of art is that we actually make it?
It seems the author's point is the struggle and effort is what makes it worthwhile, but I kind of disagree. I used to pour a ton of time, effort, and heart into making something I wanted to see or hear, but unfortunately the results weren't particularly memorable (for me or others). The effort seemed to erase a lot of the novelty and interest for me as well.
Gen AI has made creating a lot more enjoyable for me, even if much of it is curation of trial and error.
Most of the music I listen to in past year is created in Suno (my own), and it's a lot better than my musical efforts in the past.
Art has a broader purpose than just unique artistic expression, indeed. Sometimes it is used to help visualise, create an atmosphere, communicate ideas, so on and forth. AI generated art fulfils these utilitarian purposes, doesn’t it?
People are a bit snobbish about art, but they forget there are thousands of printed t-shirt mills where tons of art is being pumped out so people can wear a message on their body. And thousands of homes and hotel rooms with Kinkade paintings no one will search for meaning in, to make the atmosphere “quaint”. Thousands of home developments with 3D renders on their construction site walls and PowerPoint presentations.
And that’s alright, art has many purposes and applications, even AI. I disagree with the elite-ish tone of the article.
Yes agreed, and not to knock people, but I worked with and around other artists for some years, and frankly many people really don't have some deep meaning around what they make, they just have a "style" and make things around that with a sprinkle of some meaning (which in some cases I suspect is added after the fact).
When I was younger I'd get into mild arguments with people that style !== meaningful art, and especially when they'd question why the things I made were sometimes wildly different styles.
AI can generate around a style almost effortlessly and I think it may expose a lot of people who have nothing else to define themselves as An Artist.
Same. Also, I spend just as much time curating what I consider to be the right elements of the Suno music I generate as I did before GenAI. I just get a lot more mileage out of it. Consequently, when I generate that final cut, I feel a strong sense of ownership over it, even though I understand clearly that I didn't "make the music". I described it. Doesn't stop me from listening to it over and over again and feeling pride.
There may also be a lack of awareness around the current capabilities of these tools. You can replace individual sections of a song seamlessly. You can use non-vocal prompting patterns to elicit desired elements, textures, and transitions. You can capture the essence of different patterns and apply them to new creations.
This space is rapidly converging towards DAW-like capabilities, and it won't be long before we reach similar levels of control that we had when we were in complete control. Midi support, nobs and sliders for discrete elements. You can already export vocals separately from the main music track, so separating elements for individual processing and modification doesn't seem far fetched.
Yeah agreed, I think issues come from people's misunderstanding (and likely companies misrepresenting) what "AI" does.
It's not correct to knock down creators using it as some magic box that just pumps out worthless "AI Slop" on its own. If you have no taste, no ideas, AI won't turn you into a fine artist. But that's similar to buying an expensive camera won't make you a great photographer.
Conversely, AI is also not just an English alternative UI for perfectly understanding what you want and make something to your exacting specifications.
* 1 - If you manage to do something interesting/beautiful after struggling, doubting yourself and working through it, you come out with a tremendous sense of accomplishment and satisfaction, even though the day to day might have been miserable (in that sense the mountaineering comparison from the article is apt).
* 2 - If you get something interesting/beautiful after little (I don't mean no, I mean little) effort, you still enjoy it somewhat.
* 3 - If you struggle through something for a while, and come out at the end with nothing to show for it that you like or are proud of, it feels pretty terrible.
So it seems in your case you used do do (3), and now can do (2), which must definitely feel nicer.
But for people that can do (1), such as proficient artists, having to move to (2) feels like it's completely destroying the entire reason why they like to do this in the first place.
most ai art is bland and worthless and has no meaning behind it.
im not postmodern enough to say its all the struggle, but regardless of if AI us used or not I expect the artist to have some idea of what they're trying to do or say, and typing a sentence into a box ain't it
i would prefer instead of an ai stock photo, an ugly unprofessional doodle. that would tell me something about the person drawing it, how they see the world, and if its bad at least its human.
ai stock photos also tell me something about the person making it and not much about it is endearing
Art is often still something people do to sell to others. Possibly sport and fitness are the real examples of what machines can't do for us. I spend hours a day over years as a kid perfecting my jump shot and my fastball. Ran miles a day. Here in middle-age, I haven't been in any team sports since school, but still spend a lot of time lifting, working on basic range of motion, and have quite a bit of fun getting as good as I can get at skateboarding and rock climbing.
If you gave me an exoskelton that I could put on that would allow me to just do those things without any practice, I would not want that. I'm not just looking for the thrill of being on the board or hanging from a rock wall. Building the skill to do it myself is the point.
I haven't been into any more explicitly artistic creative endeavors since high school, but I think I'd have said the same thing then. I spent 60-100 hours per painting back then, and I did it because I enjoyed doing it, I enjoyed seeing the fruit of lots and lots of practice, developing skills. If I could have just pressed a button and had the same paintings but not done them myself, it's hard to see what the point of that would have been. The effort involved was most of the reason I even wanted to do it. But this was 30 years ago and I guess it was different days. We had schoolwide and district-wide art shows and it was cool to win awards, but I wasn't selling anything or trying to gain fame in an attention economy, never hoped to make any kind of living off of art and I never did.
I would have said the same about school band, too. Probably a programmed synthesizer could have produced better melody than me, but physically practicing and playing the instruments myself was part of the point to me.
But I think this reveals at least two entirely different purposes to art, creativity, skill, whatever, reflected different in the author, myself, and you. I don't mean to invalidate your approach by any means. Creating something you and others love, by any means at all, even automatically by machine, is entirely valid. There is still that other side, though. Think of the whole meme of engineers who take up woodworking. I highly doubt they ever really make better furniture than could have been made by some more automatic means that doesn't involve their own labor, only expressing a desire and letting someone or something else do the work. But that isn't the point. They're doing it because they want to make something they tangibly did themselves, even if it's shit at first, shit for a long time, or even shit forever. It's why my neighbor (we live in downtown townhouses) insists of growing her own peppers. They're not better than she could buy from the store, or cheaper. DIY is its own reward.
i'm sort of pleased to see that with DeepSeek and the o-series, the hype/energy is shifting back towards coding and mathematical tasks, and away from generating images and videos. Programmers seem to be mostly happy with LLMs, unlike artists and musicians who almost all hate them. It seems possible that the incentives will continue to be aligned well, because it's staff at AI labs automating the skills that make them valuable (rather than putting others out of a job).
It's also not so unpleasant. I don't want to see AI images any more. I certainly don't want to listen to AI music. People are right to call it "slop". I understand how the field of machine learning got to image generation as a task, and that the products can be sometimes useful and fun as a novelty. But there is just a giant externality caused by the existence of these products.
Ever since AI art came into the scene I've seen more and better artworks than ever before. I understand why people have ethical problems with it, but the results are genuinely really good even when done by beginners.
I honestly think anyone claiming otherwise is just plain lying to themselves at this point. This is to the extreme that sometimes when browsing imageboards I find myself feeling surfeited. It's been a very interesting experience and a bit of a learning moment really.
The common appeals to the ivory towers of high art are missing the point terribly hard. This was never about them, just like typical commercial art isn't about them either. Nobody cares, you just happen to be beating the same drum the masses do right now.
This sounds like a video game to me, and we do have lots of them.
How should generated AI images be presented? I think of it as wandering in Borge's library of babel. Maybe it looks like Google's image search, or like Minecraft?
Unfortunately, current AI image generators aren't fast enough to do it interactively.
As long as you are still thinking of "images" and especially images as the product, you are not being creative.
A really creative and productive use is to start talking in terms of what specifically the images contain, what information they transmit and what purpose they serve:
"Providing training for pilots with an infinite amount of flight under distress material."
"Show how real estate projects would look like after they would be finished."
I haven't seen any that could seamlessly replace a Google images search result window at the same speed as Google image search, which is what I imagined upon reading that comment.
There are already efficient models that can generate single images in real time as fast as you can type the prompt. I wonder if you could tweak this approach to instead generate a page full of static thumbnails on submitting a query (using different seeds for each result), and then upscale the desired image when clicked.
It won’t be the same image once you upscale it. Moreover, while the fast generators do exist, they’re lower quality. That doesn’t mean just resolution—it also means comprehension and prompt understanding, so upon running the same prompt through a better AI you’ll get something entirely different.
So we experience a marvellous breakthrough in technology and your big complaint is that it's not fast or voluminous enough, and your big idea is to make (demand) more of it?
There's million of useful stuff you can create with what you are given. Do not chose to complain about what you have and demand more.
I’m a huge fan of this person if they’re behind the ocarina app (God, what nostalgia!) but I found this piece somewhat philosophically empty. They acknowledge that they don’t have any answers on broader philosophy of aesthetics questions (which is good, very few do), but give in to cynical rejection regardless. Namely:
…they purport to be tools for creating art, but by making every effort to dismiss and eradicate the process of learning to expressive ourselves, what they are actually creating is a new generation of consumers…
I am not philosophically in opposition to generative AI, even for artistic creation. For one, I don’t know what “AI making art” evens means at this point; I barely, if at all, understand “humans making art”. I am inclined to say, therefore, “there should be room for that, too”. At the same time, I am committed to preserving and protecting the room for humans to labor profusely, unenjoyably, illogically to creatively express themselves… “There should be room for that, too” should apply both ways.
This cynicism ultimately shows a lack of imagination, IMHO. If use of generative AI is just consumption, then why are there people held in high regard in those communities for producing particularly great stuff? Why is some output more popular than the rest?
The simple answer is that humans are far from being out of the loop in art creation. AI can clearly generate aesthetic material based on some inputs, reason about the meaning of a piece given a description, and maybe take some intuitive guesses on overall aesthetic “quality” or “appeal” — but all of that is a) piecemeal and b) not nearly as sophisticated as human engagement with aesthetic value. Some would say it’s one of our most fundamental talents, and I would say it’s at the core of morality, happiness, etc! The robots are not replacing human artists any time soon in my opinion, and I think it’s a plain fact that Suno alone is not up to the task.
As more of a side note, I don’t love how they engage with effort and aesthetics (/value more generally, as in mountain climbing). Yes, some people like some activities that inherently have arbitrary amounts of effort attached — the people who beat dark souls using a drum kit or a banana as their controller come to mind! But that kind of leisure activity is neither exhaustive nor universally-appealing.
I guess no one wants to do things that are so trivial that they are instant, but beyond that there’s a huge range. Musicians in particular employ a plethora of newfangled tools, both to increase output (eg virtual instruments, autotune, smart composition software) and to enable entirely new modes of production (eg loop pedals).
As they so poignantly say: there should be room for both ;)
Gen art space has seen a flurry of new developments that give artists great deal of control. Everything from control net, lora, ip adapters, to layer level noise injection. People with lazy and regressive attitudes will be left behind.
I think people underestimate how the nature of current generative AI products is simply based on what extremely large corpuses of data are available. Text, photos, video, audio. This is the easy stuff, the first step.
This is a boomer take. Technology in music has evolved over time and people continue to enjoy old and new music nonetheless, whether it's created from samples on a computer or performed live at a bar, despite the fact that people decry every generation that the next generation's music is not real music.
AI art is theft, especially when created via text prompt. Drawings needs to drawn, paintings need to be painted etc. Art via prompt is 'find and take'.
Photography is theft, especially when taken via point-and-shoot camera. Landscapes need to be painted, portraits need to be sketched etc. Art via photography is 'find and take'.
> “I am going up to Princeton to start grad school in computer science.” I replied, “I want to build the world’s most advanced automated music composition machine.”
> The guitarist studied me for a moment and asked, succinct and earnest, “What’s the point?”
Strongly agree. The whole point of music is the process of making it. That doesn't mean we can't repurpose generative systems, hack them until they do something fresh and expressive.
Around about the same time (2001) I visited Princeton and gave a presentation of my music generation system built in Super Collider. I jokingly stated that I wanted to eventually just press a button and have it spit out a hit song. Composer Paul Lansky scowled when I said that!
I also got a chance to sit in classes with Perry Cook (mentioned in the article) and he was the best professor I've ever seen. Really inspirational.
Honestly, I think the current consumer focus is just an irrational consequence of these companies feeling like they can't leave all that consumer money on the table, but, precisely for the reasons this piece outlines, it makes no sense to market this stuff to people who actually like their craft. These tools are purely intended for superficial people who are not interested in creating things, they are only interested in outputs and end results.