Rough thoughts on AI

• Made some holiday greeting cards for Purim, and used AI to make an image. Tried a few styles: first a 1930s cartoon style (which my better half rejected as “weird”, though I quite liked it), then a classic kitschy carnival one, which we liked, then finally a different version that was more minimalist and monochrome for our B&W printer. The art was nice. Not mind-blowing, but good enough. If a few years ago I’d gotten an artistic friend to draw one like that, I’d have been blown away and kept it forever.
• Made me think of the Benjamin’s Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. No less crazy than the idea that great art (or a natural scene) can be instantly and cheaply recreated is the idea can art can not just be mechanically reproduced, but also produced from scratch.
• I still tend to think that AI can do form, but not content. I.e. given an idea and a way to express it, it will do that very well. It started with “The Gettysburg address, but in haiku about frogs”, but now it is equally true for “given this codebase that implements feature x, implement feature y”. (Or, given your training set of hundreds of raytracing libraries, write one from scratch matching x requirements.) It is AMAZING that it can do that, but it is still a form of reproduction, just many degrees of complexity above that of the copier.
• Human art is maybe stronger in this situation, because when anyone can have decent art, people will aspire to own art that has more meaning and a story. This has been the trend with mechanical reproduction as well.
• But it is dispiriting for a human artist to know that the floor has been raised a lot. As it is for coders.
• And in general a lot of the effect of AI is raising the floor in many areas. In the past, the floor for a website was Wix/Squarespace/Wordpress; now (or soon) it is a flashy looking React site on Vercel, because why not. The bar for holiday card art is now much higher. It is not clear if society gains on net from these changes - reminds me a bit of the recruitment problem, where everyone is mass-generating applications and sending them everywhere, and recruiters are using AI to filter them; everyone is working more, but we don’t gain productivity.
• In the same way, what would have been a simple doc will now be a 20-pager with a table of contents and three appendices, and everyone will use AI to summarise it, and it isn’t exactly progress.
• Reading about this led me to Marchetti’s constant, the idea that commute time is invariant across cultures and time periods. Here is Lewis Mumford: