Bruh. (Gaming)

by Kermit , Raleigh, NC, Monday, March 30, 2026, 17:43 (3 hours, 17 minutes ago) @ Vortech

We can dismiss the loss of professional art as "Hollywood" and say art will survive because it is part of human expression, and say human audiences will always prefer human expression…but.

I said Hollywood in part just because that's where the most narcissists live. Great movies come from all over the world. Iran. Utah. I respect art professionals and professionalism in art.

But, the reality is the people who decide what to fund rarely make that decision on what the audience will value most, but rather what is good enough. Nobody prefers narrow seats with less legroom, but that's what we got on planes because capitalism is not about making what is best, it is about maximizing value of a minimum viable product, and then milking the uber rich for upgrades. See also furniture that survives more than a couple years. See also washing machines that will never get repaired. Will human art become a product only available to the ultra wealthy? We see that dichotomy now with original vs. reproduction, but what will prevent it from becoming true of source, not just object?

It won't. With a decent prompt I can create pretty good "art" in the style of Matisse and have it printed and framed for cheaper than doing so by buying a print at Michael's. Better than a blank wall, but not worth much.

(An aside: I don't have your view of capitalism. What you say is true of monopolies and crony capitalism, and it's true that in this century we've become risk adverse and don't allow creative destruction to happen as often it should, but to say that's what capitalism is about doesn't give credit to free markets and what they have provided for the world. It's probably best to say we probably have different philosophies about this.)

But, plenty of people don't seem to care, or even prefer the absence of humanity. Self-checkout at the supermarket is less efficient than what we had before. It's not a surprise. Why would you think one person who does this once a week would be more efficient than 2 people working together all day. Not to mention you have one person for a whole set of issues, adding a delay. But even after it became clear that it was not about efficiency, people still chose it. The lines are literally longer for a worse experience and the store can happily fire those people and save money. I can only assume people prefer to avoid human contact. We have a generation that reports being literally afraid to talk to someone live on the phone. Hugely popular social media accounts are fabricated. Vocaloid singers are some of the biggest artists in Music.

I share many of these concerns. Covid and the resulting lockdowns fucked up the world and a lot of people have lingering mental illness. I believe social media is poison. I see signs of pushback, and I take the longview. I may not live to see us fully recover but humans are the same as they've ever been. We're wired to need human contact and to be interested in each other. I believe in cycles. Whatever trend is happening, a countertrend is brewing.

But, nobody is born able to create at a high level. Someone needs to fund failure, because that's where people grow. If all of that stuff gets fed to the LLM, how will the future artists we will need in the future eat?

But, for all of the downsides of mixing art and commerce — many of them listed above — someone needs to pay for it. We had a time in Europe where art was not funded. We called it "The Dark Ages." It preceded the Rennesaince: a near Cambrian explosion of new ideas and forms of expression all kicked off by an idea sweeping the land that Humanism mattered, and that someone other than The Church could fund art. Not great for access if you're not a Medecci, but rocks in a pond make ripples. Art became a commerce in itself, but also got folded into all sorts of previously unconnected industries like fashion and architecture, furniture, pottery because someone funded the development of those skills. The objects of daily life, which constitute the vast majority of lived existence could be touched by the thoughtful intention of a person. Separating out functional design — free to be taken over by the soulless — and some other Art with a capitol "A" may feel like it's preserving the art that matters, but it's washing away most of the impact art has on our lives.

Patronage is always an issue. Starving artists existed before AI. There is a school of thought that serious artists don't really have a choice in it--they are going to create art regardless. I do worry about how people are educated and develop taste, but that's not a new worry either.

I agree with you on one thing — this isn't new. But it's not a direction I'm comfortable with, and it is a huge acceleration.

You make a lot of good points. One of the problems with arguing against the pessimism is that I can't describe what it is that will keep everything from being terrible. From my perspective, it feels like every era I've lived through has been the best and the worst of times simultaneously. I love the arts, and all I can say is every year someone makes something fresh that blows me away. It can be a movie, a record, a book, a TV show, a game. It felt like it used to happen more regularly, but I'm probably jaded now. The point is, it hasn't stopped happening. If I find out that something that blows me away was created by AI, I might have rethink my priors, but that hasn't happened yet. I have a hard time conceptually distilling humans out of the equation.

Final word on the "very death of human culture": throughout history all doomsayers have underestimated our ability to adapt.