Copyright © 1995 Watterson Dist./Universal Uclick
Copyright © 1995 Watterson Dist./Universal Uclick
This comic perfectly sums up the reason why AI art is becoming so popular. For terminally-online people, it is all about the content. They need content in order to survive. And, it doesn't matter how many corporate sponsors a content creator has, it's impossible for them to meet the demand for new and fresh content every time the page is refreshed.
I've seen a lot of people saying "Ai art exists so artists can make a billionaire rich," and "now the machines create art so the people can work more"; and, that's true, but it's really a secondary effect. AI art exists so people can have content all the time, without delay. I used to be guilty of this, too. I only had 15 minutes' break time at my last office job and I would just autonomously open up Twitter and I'd get frustrated if there wasn't much new stuff there. AI art is meant to churn out a constant stream of mediocre content that can be consumed by people on their breaks at work, after lunch at school, and during commercial breaks on TV (does anyone even watch broadcast TV anymore?). Basically, somewhere that time is limited, desire for content is high, and expectations of quality are low. No one has the time to wait for someone to write a blog post, or compose a song, or paint a landscape, or film a porno with celebrity lookalikes, or whatever kind of creative endeavour they want to see; especially since they can go onto the internet and tell whatever AI algorithm to make it for them, and it'll spit out what they were thinking of. It won't be very good quality, but it'll satisfy their particular needs at the moment.
"Improved technology just increases expectations" is less accurate than "Increased expectation improves technology". The only reason why we have 64-bit microprocessors is the increasing expectations of the executives in charge of technology companies. But, eventually, the expectations started to increase on the consumer side, especially with the advent of social media. Expectations for content have been increased to infinity and only artificially-intelligent processes, like ChatGPT, like 15.ai, like DALL-E, are able to handle it.
There's no amount of money Skillshare can give to MrBeast that can allow him to make a completely new video every 13 minutes, but sooner rather than later, the inevitable Adobe product that concatenates all the various AI processes into a single mobile app will be able to do it for him, in his voice, with his likeness. It'll take longer to watch the video than it did for the app to make it.
Increased expectations improved technology. Infinite expectations created AI art.
--1 May 2023--