After a lot of thinking, I have come to a conclusion that expresses me personally, so feel free to disagree if you like:
The human being was not created to be deprived of the right to express his feelings through fine arts. From the moment you deprive me of the right to express myself as I feel through external as well as internal stimuli and you want to replace me with an insensitive mechanism that neither feels nor has judgment like a human being, then everyone will become cynical and unsmiling and all they will lose their meaning.
I like playing video games with a computer. I also like playing music with a computer.
I've learned far quicker playing chess against an AI than I would have playing against humans. And yet I still really enjoy playing against humans too. In fact the experience playing against humans is richer thanks to a deeper understanding of the game that came from AI.
Your argument is along the same lines as arguing electric guitar is lifeless when compared to the non-machine acoustic version. When what really matters is who is operating the machine. AI is just another tool. It will be used in insensitive mechanical ways and in ways that deeply enrich our lives.
I have hard time believing that you can learn quicker playing chess against AI. Humans can explain ideas behind their moves, their long term plans and their position evaluation. That what chess coaches will explain you and that's what you can read in chess books. Computer has hard time explaining his moves, has no notion of long-term plan and it's position evaluation is often useless for beginner or intermediate chess players (like evaluating position as a draw while one side has to do a series of very precise moves to achieve equality, which is a clearly lost position for a non-grandmaster player).
Some of what you are claiming is false. Most chess AIs for example can identify almost every opening move in existence. Something no human can do. That's a type of position evaluation, and a good starting point for further research. No free coach is going to sit for 4 hours straight, 5 days a week, playing thousands of games exploring variations of a particular opening. That kind of self-study will definitely help you become a better player. Humans just aren't willing to be that opponent, especially to a beginner and not for free.
Also I'm not claiming you can learn quicker by exclusively using AI. I'm claiming you can learn quicker by adding it to your set of tools. Human coaches and books are other tools you can or should use.
Even the some of the best chess players in the world are now using AI opponents to explore new ideas.
Chess engines are very important for grandmasters, for sure. But for beginners they are mostly useless. That’s what I was arguing about.
Regarding openings - the best place to learn are books/studies/even Wikipedia articles that explain the ideas behind the major moves and variations, which chess engines don’t do. Also, a human can explain which opening are good to play at your skill level and which are not.
Regarding free coaches, playing with a friend/relative over the board and discussing the game afterwards has a similar effect.
Chess engines aren't useless for beginners. That's an empty claim and is as easily dismissed as it was made.
I gave a list of reasons why a chess engine is good for learning. Refute those as a start.
Here's another reason: an AI engine will point out illegal moves, and patiently over hundreds of games in your home. A free coach isn't going to come to your house and do that.
Neither will most friends or relatives. People get bored and move on.
> I have hard time believing that you can learn quicker playing chess against AI.
I’d be more inclined to agree if everyone learned the same way, but we don’t. What works for you may not work as well for others.
For me and music, for example, I learn best by hearing and playing by ear. If I want to learn a song, it’s usually a good bit of time with me playing and rewinding, pausing, playing, pausing, rewinding, etc. I can read sheet music, but the process is woefully slow and not fun for my brain. I could watch someone teach me each part, but that also sounds boring, and I feel I learn better through my own method of trial and error because my brain has to work out the nuances - “was that a hammer-on? Was there a slide transition there? That sounds like a permutation of an earlier chord instead of a direct reuse of it! Etc”
Being able to play against AI may be just as valuable for person A to learn as playing against a human would be for person B. To suggest one is strictly superior to the other, in all cases, is very black and white thinking that doesn’t fit how people work.
Will those players analyze and rate your moves like a chess engine will? Will they name common opening strategies for you so you can research them in books? Will they let you take back several moves to explore different lines?
You are not being deprived of any rights. You just don't have them exclusively. Make music, or don't. Up to you. Either way, there will be machines also making music. So, what?
I think it may be worth asking if social media has the capability to deprive a subset of people of living a peaceful life, because of its mental health effects. It is the users' choice to stop using social media, but they don't, maybe because their friends are all their and it drags them back into the orbit of algorithmic timelines and depression. Is it simply a matter of saying "up to them" to stop using?
Now imagine in a group of people you share a hand-crafted song but one of your friends who isn't as interested in producing music takes your song as inspiration and creates something that sounds better. Imagine they aren't even trying to do this to intentionally one-up you; they think of it as the same kind of sharing and creation. You may disagree but their definition of self-expression differs, and it's difficult to change people. But this happens consistently and the bar is raised ever higher each time.
How well someone handles this kind of scenario depends on mindset. Is the joy in being better than others, or pursuing the craft and learning things, or sharing in the experience in consumption? People will have different values. But I think the bias in AI is for people to focus on the end result without needing to put in a lot of effort.
It's the entire selling point of these products - taking out the effort in getting a high-quality result. Yet the effort spent on human art isn't wasted effort. The effort doesn't just go towards the finished price, but to the satisfaction of the artist themselves. It stimulates their neurobiology. And in a lot of tutorials for hand-crafted art, the mindset taught is to focus on the process and not the end result. Generative art contradicts that bit of knowledge, and it could cause dissonance.
In Stanisław Lem's story about the electronic bard, the existence of the impeccable poetry-generating robot does not directly deprive the poets of their ability to create their own poems. Instead, after perceiving the generated work to be higher quality than anything they're capable of writing, the poets become depressed and commit suicide.
You could say the poets didn't have the right mindset of how to approach life, but I think it raises a good point. It's the mental state of people who create and how society views these tools that matters. You will always have the ability to put pencil to paper regardless of what big technology does, but will you want to if you think the rest of the world has moved on without you?
I think maybe in modern times the effect will be closer to: artists scale back or give up their craft because the potential audiences vote with their wallets and attention spans for people who rent server farms. It's the despair at seeing the public valuing the end-result over the human element in a broader cultural sense. It's feeling as if a piece of yourself is being lost in an eternal void.
And it's the idea that generative models could become a fundamental part of society. Billboards are generated because those cause the most successful ad campaigns. People hold massive music festivals exclusively made of generative synth lines because they attract the crowds. The taste of your drink is algorithmically modeled with ingredients adjusted for the best product-market fit possible.
What stops these people in their tracks is perceiving the world as one that values the machine over the human, and even if you value the human, you still have to get in line with the machine - everyone else is doing it. Generative models could retrain our value systems.
It's not so much what generative models take away than how they change the public's perception of art itself. It is the depression and mindset changes that come with knowing the poetry-robot will be there for all eternity.
Older forms of thinking become outdated, some which may be considered virtuous or delicately intertwined with the human spirit, and this causes anguish and despair at the state of things, and the ever-improving army of poetry robots that sees no end in sight. Because we haven't put an end state on improving technology, and I think deep down some of us believe there was never meant to be such an end state in the future. We would have to spin terms like degrowth and Luddism into something more palatable to have any chance of creating one.
Why would I go see a jazz band made of 20something year olds when I can just go into youtube and hear all the masters in the comfort of my bedroom?
Oh, maybe because watching live music is a different experience. Maybe because being the best is not as important as simply doing something most people can't do.
Funny thing is, when you go to shows of people who are not yet professional musicians but might be studying, might be in a band with their friends and so on... most of the people who attend these shows are their friends and also other musicians. Most musicians are not professional musicians.
Being a professional musician is already a fraught career with low rates of success. This is even more true if you exclude people that are working with modern digital systems. Not a lot of jobs available for orchestral musicians, for example.
But there still are people making art with older techniques. There is a greater variety of art being made today than ever before in history. The development of new techniques has made art richer rather than poorer. Yes, the most commercially focused art chooses techniques based on price (far cheaper for a single person to stack synths than to pay a full orchestra) but that's okay.
Hip hop and electronic music have been creating totally new things for decades without ever touching a physical instrument. Music didn't die, it flourished.
This is different though, because the end game of AI music isn't better music technology for musicians, but replacing musicians.
I'm worried we're going to go into a dark age where society forgets how to make truly creative new art due to lack of incentives, and the AIs won't make anything new due to lack of anything creative to train on. We'll just regurgitate the pre-AI stuff forever.
If we're fast-forwarding the tape, why not directly go to the ultimate conclusion that the end game is AI replacing humans, period?
This is not a slippery slope; new art will be created regardless of incentives and skilled people who learn to augment their craft with AI will probably create better works of art.
Because previously if you honed your skills as a musician there was a chance that you could do it for a living, so there was another incentive to get better. Electronic tools just facilitated human creativity, but the random listener couldn't sit down with a synth or a DAW and just press a button to get music out. But if all the money drops out of the music industry because the consumers can auto-generate unlimited music, how will that work?
Furthermore, generate music based on music you created. They're alienating the labor of the musician then using it to drive that musician ut of their livelihoods. I feel like pro-AI people constantly miss this point with inane quips about the printing press. Artists created all the value and get none of the reward.
Becoming a professional musician isn't a "right" of any kind. You don't have a "right" to be paid to do anything you want. You're certainly allowed to do it (barring outright criminal activity), but don't expect to be entitled to monetary compensation.
Plenty of musicians make money doing live performances. Since Spotify, record sales are just not a great revenue stream any more. I don't see AI impacting this much. But of course there are going to be some musicians that specialize in background music or other forms of, relatively, low value music work that are going to be affected by this.
Plenty of people make music for fun while having other careers. A lot of the masterpiece painters did it for passion and lived in poverty (I'm not saying that is good, but clearly a career is not necessary for great results).
Sure but most renowned artists had the time to become really skilled because they could dedicate all their time to it. If no one wants to pay humans for art any more, how will that happen?
Then become politically active and make sure we have a strong safety net with healthy labor rights that allow everyone to have ample free time. You don't ban music production software.
You could make the same argument against recordings (and people did). It would take away jobs from the musicians. Yet, 136 years later and people are still creating music and playing instruments.
It's almost like the peak form of being a consumer. All you have to do is express your desire in a sophisticated (maybe even not sophisticated?) way, and you can easily pay a device to fulfill it on the cheap.
This 100%. I'm amazed that people somehow are unable to distinguish between the craftsmanship of a painting, and writing a prompt that an external system uses to paint.
What I always emphasize is that if the input and output are sufficiently divergent then your sense of accomplishment at the resulting creation should be proportionally diminished. But what do I know? People use ChatGPT to write a story and midjourney to illustrate it, then make a viral post with the caption "I just wrote a book in under 24 hours."
Have you ever told someone you code and they say "I have an idea for an app!", proceeding to explain in like one sentence the vague idea of an app? Would you call that person a creative? An engineer? An inventor? An entrepreneur? Do you really ever feel that they added any value to you? Do you not find them incredibly naïve? If you did create the app, do you feel like they did 90% of the work of creating this app, because the rest of the process is that meaningless? If you created it from their one line prompt of their idea, would you agree with the concept that the final result was actually all a direct expression of their idea?
Machines cannot express, as far as I know. They're sophisticated tools but still tools.
If someone feels these tools help them express what they want, if they are satisfied, I would call that a form of self-expression. I mean, who am I to deny them that feeling?
Nodoby forbids you to create art for the sake of art however you want, be it by recording instruments, making stuff in FL Studio, mixing meme samples or using AI.
If you want to be competitive in music production industry you have to be somewhat economically effective as in any industry and AI will raise economical effectiveness to the whole new level.
Using the "journey metaphor", for some people what matters is the destination; for others what matters is the journey itself; for others what matters is the person doing it; and for others any combination of those.
The target audience for most generative stuff is mostly people who are looking at "the destination".
The human being was not created to be deprived of the right to express his feelings through fine arts. From the moment you deprive me of the right to express myself as I feel through external as well as internal stimuli and you want to replace me with an insensitive mechanism that neither feels nor has judgment like a human being, then everyone will become cynical and unsmiling and all they will lose their meaning.