We already live in a world where a vast library of songs by musicians who play much better than you are readily available on YouTube and Spotify. This seems like more of the same?
I like living in a world where I know that people who have spent actually time on nurturing a talent get rewarded for doing so, even if that talent is not something I will ever be good at.
I don't want to live in a world where these things are generated cheaply and easily for the profit of a very select few group of people.
I know the world doesn't work like I described in the top paragraph. But it's a lot closer to it than the bottom.
It's hard to see how there will be room for profit as this all advances
There will be two classes of media:
- Generated, consumed en-masse by uncreative, uninspired individuals looking for cheap thrill
- Human created, consumed by discerning individuals seeking out real human talent and expression. Valuing it based merely on the knowledge that a biological brain produced (or helped produce) it.
I tend to suspect that the latter will grow in value, not diminish, as time progresses
It seems to me that you’re describing Hollywood? Admittedly, there are big budget productions, but Hollywood is all about fakery, it’s cheap for the consumer, and there’s a lot of audience-pleasing dreck.
There’s no bright line between computer and human-created video - computer tools are used everywhere.
> I like living in a world where I know that people who have spent actually time on nurturing a talent get rewarded for doing so, even if that talent is not something I will ever be good at.
Rewarded how? 99.99% of people who do things like sports or artistic like writing never get "rewarded for doing so", at least in the way I imagine you mean the phrase. The reward is usually the experience itself. When someone picks up a ball or an instrument, they don't do so for some material reward.
Why should anyone be rewarded materially for something like this? Why are you so hung up on the <0.001% that can actually make some money now having to enjoy the activity more as a hobby than a profession.
99.99% of people, really? You think there isn't a huge swath of the economy that are made up of professional writers, artists, musicians, graphic designers, and all the other creative professionals that the producers of these models aim to replicate the skills of?
Why am I so "hung up" on the livelihood of these people?
Doing art is a Hobby is a good in and of itself. I did not say otherwise. But when I see a movie, when I listen to a song, I want to appreciate the integrity and talent of the people that wrote them. I want them to get paid for that enjoyment. I don't think that's bizarre.
You can still makes movies , music etc. But now with better tools. Just accept the new reality and try to play this new level. The old won't come back. Its a waste of time to complain and feel frustrated. There are plenty of opportunities to express your creativity.
I could see that theater and live music (especially performed on acoustic instruments) become hyper popular because it'll be the only talent worth paying to see when everything else is 'cheaply' made.
> I like living in a world where I know that people who have spent actually time on nurturing a talent get rewarded for doing so, even if that talent is not something I will ever be good at.
That world has only existed for the last hundred or so years, and the talent is usually brutally exploited by people whose main talent is parasitism. Only a tiny percentage of people who sell creative works can make a living out of it; the living to be made is in buying their works at a premium, bundling them, and reselling them, while offloading almost all of the risk to the creative as an "advance."
Then you're left in a situation where both the buyer of art and the creator of art are desperate to pander to the largest audience possible because everybody is leveraged. It's a dogshit world that creates dogshit art.
Yes but I don't want to hear some anonymous background music.
A better example would be Spotify replacing artist-made music recommandations with low-quality alternatives, to reduce what it pays to artists. Everyone except Spotify loses in this scenario.
My prediction is that personal generation is going to be niche forever, for purely social reasons. The demand for fandoms and fan communities seems to be essentially unlimited. Big artists have big fandoms, tiny ones have tiny fandoms, but none of that works with personalized generations.
Well, maybe. But there are overwhelmingly large numbers of people who want to be in a fandom, and that means being fans of some shared thing. Maybe that shared thing will be AI generated, but it won't be a world of solipsists.
I think what the person you’re responding to meant was that you can generate a fandom for the content that was generated for you. So, you can get the feeling of being in a fandom despite there being no actual other humans that know what you’re talking about.
Sure, and people might enjoy that, but I'm saying that as much as people want to have fans, people also want to be fans, and that's not compatible with everyone consuming algoslop generated for them personally. Nobody is going to walk around with a T-shirt for an algoband that has an audience of just themselves. Maybe a virtual band gets famous in the same way Hatsune Miku is famous. But that's not personalized generation, that's just an old fashioned band with different tech.
A world without fandom is one without sports. That seems deeply unlikely to me! Anyone can generate personal podcasts with NotebookLM, which people enjoyed for a bit but doesn't seem to have made any impact on actual podcasts at all.
Communities around fictional universes are already fractured and shrinking in member size because of the sheer number of algorithmically targeted universes available.
Water cooler talk about what happened this week in M.A.S.H. or Friends is extinct.
Worse, in the long run even community may be synthesized. If a friend is meat or if they're silicon (or even carbon fiber!), does it matter if you can't tell the difference? It might to pre-modern boomers like me and you.
I think things will look a lot more like Vinge's Rainbows End than everyone burrowing into their own personal algoentertainment. I can't speak for GenZ but when D&D can sell out Madison Square Garden, there doesn't seem to be any softening in people's interest in fandom.
Virtual influencers might be a big thing, Hatsune Miku has lots of fans. But it's still a shared fandom.
But availability of new works shall change once the floor of how popular you need to be to survive off of art will change and it will, since not everyone will care. Taylor Swift will be fine either way, but it's not about her.
