Ask HN: Why do we need generative AI?

Generative art brings the same kind of "power to the people" as phones and cheap cloud streaming bring for video and music creators. It's a form of digital democracy.

TV used to be terribly expensive to produce and distribute and was controlled by only a few big players. Today, your child can make a TV program and distribute on YouTube. Some even get rich. Modern music creation tools give everyone a chance to participate in the joy of music without learning to read it or navigate a piano keyboard. The classical musicians we've all heard of were from rich families that could afford a (very expensive) piano.

Generative art tools allow people to exercise their creative vision -- even when it exceeds their ability to execute. That's quite a big deal. The automobile allowed people to exceed their ability to walk, for example.

While folks who make their living from the "old ways" (and I'm one of them) could see this as a threat, it's really an opportunity. There will always be a market for human effort and hand labor. Velveeta didn't kill the market for artisanal cheese. AI song generators aren't going to stop the next Stevie Wonder. And generative art won't keep filmmakers and designers from making great new stuff. It will just bring those things to more people, cheaper, and faster.

Since we enjoy art, we have a lot of it around. That means that there's a wealth of training data available. If we're lucky, the techniques that we develop teaching AI to mimic what we like to do will also apply to teaching AI to do things that we don't like to do, or things that we can't do.

That may be a stretch, but it's the most charitable explanation for OpenAI's behavior that I can come up with. Art as practice for something else.

Perhaps later we'll be generating things like fungal species which leech lithium from the depths and bring it to the surface for extraction. That would be truly useful. But there's not very much training data for such a thing, so we're not focusing on it until we get our techniques sorted out in other domains.

Also, you'd have to be a double-specialist to work on such a thing. Both AI and Micology. Those are hard to find and take a long time to train. Much easier to find is the double specialist in AI and things-that-look-cool.

> other media that humans enjoy creating themselves Yes, “other media”. Not “art”. Decorative filler for emptiness lacking any sense, manufactured to trigger expected reactions. Gigabytes of nonsense texts to put some ad revenue driven sites on top of other, less technologically advanced. Ask people who produced that before whether they enjoyed it.

> Weren't the machines supposed to make labour easier? Those new “machines” were supposed to make certain activities even cheaper than hiring the cheapest workers, and make companies owning them indispensable providers for most businesses. That's how they intend to make money. Laborers can now do some other shitty job for new kings.

> Is the current gen AI state a stepping stone to much more useful applications? No, it's just marketing.

In my opinion, you have a very good point here. Why do we want to abolish or automate something that most people enjoy?

I think very few people enjoy laying tiles or connecting a toilet, so a robot in combination with an AI would be the more obvious target for a company. I guess one answer is that it doesn't scale, it's not pure software and the market for tile laying robots is limited. An AI that can easily generate artwork for anyone to offer via a subscription service generates more money.

We don't need it, I think that's obvious. We don't need Cap'n Crunch cereal or Cybertrucks either. We get all that stuff because it generates profit. Generative AI will make money. "Supposed to" have this or that actual benefit has nothing to do with it.

It's the new-new-thing and lemmings want to capitalize on it and get rich. Only problem is it has limited utility and doesn't really work for a lot of the things they are trying to do with it.