from Hacker News

Is AI the beginning of the democratization of creativity?

by haebom on 7/13/24, 4:57 AM with 10 comments

• by mtlmtlmtlmtl on 7/13/24, 10:21 AM

  The answer to the question posed in the title is unequivocally no. Creativity varies from person to person. No amount of currently existing software is going to change that. What it could "democratise" to some extent is technique and execution, but that will still be more helpful to people who are more creative.

  I'm hopelessly devoid of artistic creativity, and no amount of generative AI has made me capable of creating interesting art. Regardless of whether I'm able to pay for the shiniest iteration of the software, which seemed to be the main focus of this blog post.

• by Zambyte on 7/13/24, 5:52 AM

  > the pace of progress is accelerating exponentially.

  Lots of smart people say this, but lots of other smart people say it is logarithmically. It's hard to say with certainty until we are on the other side of this curve.

  > Requires a subscription fee of at least $20 per month, a high-performance computer, and a stable Internet connection.

  If you have a high-performance computer, the $20 monthly fee and the internet connection are not really required. I've been pretty blown away with what I can squeeze out of a 7900 XTX, both for text and images. I'm lucky enough to be able to also afford some subscriptions (Perplexity Pro and Kagi Ultimate), but I still find my local model useful for data that I don't want to leak to external APIs.

  As far as creativity goes, I think it mostly "democratizes" it in the sense that it is a new set of mediums to express creativity. New mediums are attractive to a different set of people from the old mediums that still exist, and therfore more people will be drawn to creative activities altogether.

• by unraveller on 7/13/24, 9:19 AM

  AI as a cause of inequality needs a bit more evidence than the current cost to run and expected business productivity gains. Easy way to virtue signal though.

  >People used to be in awe of creativity, originality, and innovation.

  People could choose to admire AI for those things but in truth it was only ever a very small % of those things which ever got a positive response for being partly new and partly familiar (Most Advanced Yet Acceptable design principle). When a tool comes along that can be too advanced and too familiar to everything they hold dear of course the focus is on how bad it is.

• by mort96 on 7/13/24, 10:50 AM

  The fact that a large portion of technologists are apparently unable to differentiate between creativity and the product typically created through the creative process is genuinely really worrying

• by thunkshift1 on 7/13/24, 9:05 PM

  There is zero democratizing anything with AI. It can be better described as misappropriating stuff others created for your own corporate benefit.

• by pachorizons on 7/13/24, 10:21 AM

  SaaS is not democratic.