Backlash against AI causes even more harm to art than AI itself

In our fervor to prioritize humans over machines when evaluating art, we’ve conditioned our minds to hate anything perceived as “AI/slop” and love anything perceived as non-AI. In visual art, AI “slop” typically manifests as eye-popping saturated colors, heavily made-up, overly beautiful people, and post-processing. In short, AI was trained to produce what people considered beautiful, and now, in an ultimate uno reverse card, everything that people considered “beautiful” is now considered ugly, because it’s associated with “AI”. This effect is happening across all mediums: Visual art, music, and writing.

Case in point #1: Observe how in this Reddit post, everyone is gushing about a new AI model, noting Image #2’s superiority over Image #1. What everyone seems to be ignoring is that the main difference is simply that Image 1 is what a professional photographer might’ve done after working on it for hours and applying lots of post-processing, whereas Image 2 is what a normal person would’ve done just be snapping a photo on their phone. If you’d asked everyone 10 years ago which image is better, everyone would’ve answered Image #1. But today, everyone answers Image #2 because it looks plain, which means it’s not as “AI”.

Case in point #2: In 2023, a news article circulated about an artist who was banned from an online community because his art closely resembled AI art. They told him to “find another style”. Never mind that his works are part of the reason AI could make that type of artwork in the first place, and the reason AI was trained to produce that kind of style, was because it’s what people considered conventionally beautiful at the time!

Case in point #3: Many bots posting LLM-generated text, like the one in this reddit comment, are now programmed to purposely make basic grammar mistakes, such as avoiding capitalizing the start of a sentence, and to replace the EM dash with a hyphen. In short, people posting AI-generated text are compelled to literally insert mistakes to make it seem more attractive and less like AI.

At this rate, in the future:

• “Good” visual art will require color-correcting your image to look as bland as possible
• “Good” music will require making so many music theory mistakes that an AI couldn’t have possibly come up with it
• “Good” writing will require lots of grammar/spelling mistakes and misusing hyphens as EM dashes.

Stop recommending blue-collar jobs as a way to survive AI and job loss

An old parable goes like this: A client hires a plumber to fix a leak. After a few hours, the plumber taps one rivet with his hammer, and the leak is fixed. The plumber charges $10,000. The client asks, "You expect me to pay you $10,000 for that?" The plumber says, "I charged $1 to physically hammer it, and $9,999 to know where to hammer."

Think about the last time you hired someone to fix your car, or a leak in your house. Were you paying them to physically turn nuts and bolts? Or were you paying them for their expertise and problem-solving abilities? Every time there's a post about AI and jobs, there are tons of people suggesting that knowledge work is becoming obsolete, and therefore people should go to a trade school for a blue-collar job. Are people somehow forgetting that in a trade school, you learn things about how to do your job more effectively, which is, in effect, knowledge work?

If the day comes that AI can completely automate a typical tech worker's job, it won't be very long before it can automate the job of a plumber, electrician, mechanic, or repairman. Especially with multi-modal models, soon all you will have to do is point your camera at something and ask it where you should point your camera next, which part of the house you should show it to have it get a better diagnosis, what kind of test to run to figure out what's wrong with your car, or what tool you should buy or how you should physically turn the wrench.

Note: We are assuming AI in this hypothetical future had already become powerful enough to replace a typical software engineer or tech worker. As long as AI is not capable of the task I described above, then it is also not yet capable of replacing typical white-collar "knowledge work" in the first place.