alt Hacker NewsI do care for craft, but I don’t view it as an end in itself. The value of craft lies in what it creates, and that value reflects back on the undertaking itself.
But if a machine can replicate mechanically what takes a human effort and ingenuity to do, a human doing the same thing through effort and ingenuity doesn’t magically add further value. And this is understood quite universally; that’s why no human practices the craft of multiplying large numbers anymore.
The part of craft that can be replicated mechanically is the least interesting and valuable part of art.
This is what AI art supporters fail to understand because few if any of them actually practice the craft they emulate. They tend to only work with code and algorithms for which there is no fundamental human expression involved. They assume that because apart from rote intellect and memory the human experience is meaningless in regards to coding as they are acting merely a means of inputting instructions into a machine, that the human experience is equally meaningless for all creative endeavors.
However the value lies not in the technical aspects of craft as an end (which, mind you, no AI is actually good at yet) but as a means of expressing the human experience of an artist and their relationship to the viewer. That dialogue isn't something an LLM can replicate because by definition humanity isn't something an LLM can experience. And even if perfectly mastered on a technical level, it wouldn't have the same value as human expression just as a skillful forgery doesn't have the same value as an original.