What's better, seeing a beautiful view from the mountain after being driven up, or never seeing the view at all?

Maybe torturing the metaphor, but building a road up the mountain often ruins the view.

To continue this metaphor, a while back my girlfriend and I went to Machu Picchu. We were taking a bus to the summit, but there was a landslide near the bottom of the mountain so everybody had to climb most of the way up. This led to it being eerily empty until people started trickling in, which certainly made it a better experience than the normal tourist swarm would have been.

I can imagine AI art having a similar effect (creating a glut of images/logos/whatever that devalues ones made with care) but am hopeful that we'll get better at filtering the cream of the crop. In 5 years tons of things will have AI logos that would have been made by a graphic designer (or simply not made) in the past. That sucks for graphic designers who are out of a job, is good for people who get cheaper logos, and TBD for overall society who now has lots more "custom" logos etc to wade through.

This discussion reminds me of Edward Abbey in Desert Solitaire advocating for not building roads in national parks to preserve the experience of true wilderness.

Obviously having roads is a great boon to a park's accessibility, and the ability of people with different mobility needs to appreciate nature. But it also made me thoughtful to imagine the feeling of wonder at seeing bridalveil fall after hiking for days into a roadless yosemite valley; how much more special and impressive it would seem after that journey?

This metaphorical tangent is pretty far removed from the original discussion, but how do you weigh the accessibility of a thing against how that accessibility changes its nature?

> People are robbing themselves of the joy that can only come from putting yourself through hardship in pursuit of a goal.

This is such an old man “I used to walk uphill both ways” take.

Not everybody has the TIME COST to pursue being an expert in art or code or whatever. But if they have an amazing idea and can now use AI to produce the idea then that is a beautiful thing!

For example: Having an idea for a cartoon used to be a dead end. It would die in your head because most people cannot stop their life and dedicate a substantial amount of time, effort, and sacrifice to produce the single cartoon idea.

>Having an idea for a cartoon used to be a dead end.

What's the point in having an idea for a cartoon in your head if an LLM can just write an infinite amount of cartoon ideas in a heartbeat, and probably a better one than you came up with.

Because it's your own? And previously that creativity of yours was hamstrung by your lack of ability in another domain (drawing), that the AI can help you with.

>> Having an idea for a cartoon used to be a dead end

But drawning a cartoon isn't very challenging. Most of my peers could draw someone from South Park in a junior school.

The hardship in making cartoons is the amount of choices you need to make and the amount of knowledge how those choices would impact a viewer. If you delegate all of that, the cartoon wouldn't be simply blunt, it would be self-contradicting. And we already had a way of making cartoons, that allow your writing to shine through bland animation – since flash, actually. It might actually be even faster then using generative AI

I agree. Toil itself is not valuable or noble. We, as a society, should work towards reducing the training, skill level, and manual effort needed to achieve things. There is no need to artificially gatekeep activities behind needless toil.

This kind of mentality would ban Star Trek replicators, should they be invented one day. "In my day, you had to actually make things, we didn't get to replicate them, so we shouldn't, even if it's possible!"

I disagree re toil. The original idea that brings a creative work into existence is only a tiny part of how that work evolves with every step. For example absolutely no writer starts off writing their final draft. They write & through writing their ideas are clarified & new ideas form, that they did not previously have, all due to the 'toil' of writing the previous drafts. Skipping all the steps that are required to create significant work leads to shallow work born from instant gratification, exactly like the Ghibli slop. It's not 'gatekeeping' that something requires time & effort. All that Ghibli slop is already forgotten, despite saturating social media only a few days ago, because it so shallow. The story & characters & intent is what gives Ghibli films meaning & human resonance.

I cannot draw for the life of me. I would however like a ghibli version of my D&D character. Am I a bad person?

I agree. You should hunt every bit of meat that you consume. Otherwise the experience is cheapened.