sugarrush-77

I think I'm starting to understand what artists are talking about when they say AI is like a spit in the face against humanity. The more I get into art, the more I understand art, the more emotionally involved I get with it, and I start to realize what it actually is. It's almost a sacred thing. It brings a lot of meaning to people's lives — it helps them see beauty, makes them feel like God exists in a world that honestly feels pretty hopeless sometimes. The livelihoods of the people that make it are already endangered, and with AI you could just bulldoze a whole bunch of them in one go.

But then there's the next thought, which is like — are all these artists actually creating art that has that level of sanctity? Are they all speaking that level of speech into the human experience? Not everyone's writing Crime and Punishment. Not everyone is Dostoevsky. But at the same time, are the people that have put their time, their whole life into creating something beautiful, creating something that changes how people view the world — is there something sacred about that process itself? I think so. Although I cannot fully express why I feel this way, I do feel like there is some encroachment on the sanctity of art when AI starts doing it, because the fundamental difference between AI and humans is that AI is copying. It's replication. If you believe in Christianity, or really most religions, most of them would say that AI has no soul, whereas a human does, and that's what makes humans different. There is something fundamentally different when you look at it from that perspective.

And in the name of efficiency and technological advancement and this kind of technology war that people are fighting — both private sector and public sector, across borders — we are going really fast. This is a classic human race thing. Greed and fear overpower everything, and people do not care about what happens next, they just care about winning because they're scared and also greedy. It's very human that it's all happening like this, but at the same time people are forgetting how dangerous this all is. We are going to deal with a lot of issues, not just art being less art than it used to be.

There's also the question of what really is art. Is it just as good if I can create something “soulful” using AI, compared to what a mediocre artist makes? I do think AI beats most mediocre artists right now. It just currently doesn't beat the people at the top. But if you're cutting out all the people that are mediocre, who even has the chance to become good? Nobody is born great. You have to be mid first. You have to suck for a long time. And if AI kills the bottom of that pipeline, the top eventually dries up too.

Now here's where it gets interesting though, and where I think my own thinking starts to complicate itself. I do think the nature of art is not going to disappear. It's going to become more and more technological. And actually, I think artists — all these different people that are not programmers — will have more leverage than the programmers. Once you abstract out the software engineering part of the equation, artists and designers and all these creative people have the ability to just create things on command. Things they used to need engineers for. They had the vision, but they needed a team to build it. Now they might not.

Actually, in the long run, software engineers might be the ones that are fucked, and artists might come out on top. Which is not necessarily a bad thing, because you'll still need engineers — they're not disappearing — but it means artists will have more things to do than before, because now they can create large, meaningful things, like software, things that actually change the world. If you look at the last Claude Code hackathon that Anthropic put on, there were like five winners, and four of them were non-software engineers. Only one was a software engineer. One was an artist, one was a surgeon, something like that. So I don't actually know if I agree with the idea that art is disappearing. I think it'll change a lot, but I think there will be an expansion in how artists are able to earn money and create and stuff like that. It's just going to be different from the previous way we've known.

I do wonder where all this is going and how it'll all balance out. It will all balance out in the future — the printing press was not the end, the industrial revolution was not the end. AI is not going to be the end. There are always going to be new horizons, new boundaries, new work to be done, new problems for people to solve. I do not think this is going to be the end. But I do wonder how it will all balance out and create a new meta, and I'm not so sure about that. I still have to think about this a little more. I have to think about the next logical conclusions of everything. I don't even know if I have the knowledge or the foresight to have that understanding either.

But it is something to know that this definitely isn't the end. The story will continue. It's just right now we're in a period of turmoil, and turmoil always feels like the end of the world when you're inside of it.

We'll see.