alt Hacker News> I can't commission an artist without questioning if they are using AI, which isn't acceptable in the projects I am commissioning for.
We've always judged the output, so why stop now. AI is just a tool. The artist still owns the output.
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> We've always judged the output, so why stop now. AI is just a tool. The artist still owns the output.
But we didn't. We relied heavily on a mix of trust and maybe occasional sampling. Having to verify everything is inefficient and exhausting.
> We've always judged the output, so why stop now. AI is just a tool. The artist still owns the output.
Who are we? What output? Organic certification has a long history in agriculture. To get certified requires more than just judging the output. My process are regulated or judged, and have been, using criteria other than the blinded output.
Even if this were true, it doesn't address the other element of the problem, which is that flooding the zone with horrible crap makes it harder to find the good stuff, and forces you to waste a lot more of your own time filtering crap.
Yes, I can usually identify AI slop within a couple paragraphs, but it still wastes my time to encounter it, and if it's my entire feed, it's going to drown out the good stuff I'd actually want to read. Same for literature at a larger scale, to say nothing of the countless scandals where obvious AI-written crap wins various writing competitions.
Imagine a relative passed and you commission someone to draw a portrait of them to show at the funeral. The artist has good reviews and all their work looks impressive; their portfolio has hundreds of amazing photorealistic portraits. It's expensive, but nothing is too good for a passed loved one.
After weeks of waiting, you finally get the portrait ...aaaaand it looks nothing like them. There's weird artifacting all over it and it looks like a supermodel imposter with meat-moss hair. You try to contact the artist, but they've completely vanished: socials deleted, emails unreplied, just gone.
Oh well, they owned the output, right?
We pretty much never only judged the output. An oil painting is valued because it's an oil painting among other things. If people know you have worked on something for a long time, it's valued more than something you just came up with this afternoon. A chair crafted by a woodworker, even if it's worse in some ways, is valued over an IKEA chair produced in a fraction of the time.
Generative models are like outsourcing to cheap mass production factory, not an advanced woodworking tool in your basement.