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Raphael Thys
I was staring at hundreds of batches of images my computer was generating through an AI Art program. A GB of batches over the course of a month, each image around 0.3–1.5mbs in size.
It dawned on me that this thing has created more art than everyone in my neighborhood in a single month, maybe even in my entire small town.
Red or Blue Pill?
Artificial Intelligence is creative, it does things we never knew it could. The people behind AI are creative, too, they don’t just use it for art, they use it to spot literal rocks rolling off cliffs onto roads before they kill someone, they spot diseases in humans, they might soon fight our wars, cure our cancers and create a post-capitalist society.
Having been a role player for several years, doing Dungeons and Dragons campaigns with friends, and trying to find character art and commission it, I spent literally thousands of dollars on the game.
Stable Diffusion made me not only an art consumer but also an art creator with just a few words on a screen. When you think about that, Stable Diffusion has far larger implications on how AI can be used.
End of scarcity?
Twenty years ago, post-scarcity in debates was met with skepticism or even ridicule. People thought it was a joke because people are still starving in the world, struggling to survive, and working their asses off just to make ends meet.
Redditors and tryhards alike all talk about ‘machines taking our jobs,’ but what if what happened with art, me being the consumer AND the maker of it, was applied to everything else in my house?
The machine — giver of life…
AI generating my food, AI generating my electricity, mining asteroids in far-off belts for my benefit, if a 3D printer printed my computer components, I would have become an entire state, an entire corporation, but inside of my own house.
I’d become both the factory worker and the factory.
The creativity of AI isn’t just going to eliminate the need for painters but will also eliminate the need for everything else, and we need to think about that future and what it entails, both in a positive light and a pessimistic one.
Do we all become consumers of everything?
Does virtual reality become the only way to find an actual struggle?
Are we even designed for this? I once saw a meme that said that our brains were designed to survive, not to be happy, so would we have to change to survive in this new world?
Editor’s Book Choice (related to the article topic): “Voyage from Yesteryear” by James P. Hogan.
Editor’s Note: Remember to vote for the AI Waifu artwork that you think should win the monthly contest, “Who is the Best AI Waifu?”! There’s no cost for voting, and it’s just for fun.
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