Submitted by SpinCharm t3_11c48ut in Futurology
The advent of the global interconnectedness of thoughts and ideas through social networking and the web has me thinking that our own thoughts and ideas are rarely original or unique. Most of us live in fairly repetitive, predictable and derivative ways that share broad commonality with a great many others.
We see it in Reddit comments, where an idea will trigger numerous responses that share the same origin, such as a meme or line from a movie or tv show. We see it in the predictive abilities of Facebook and Amazon, and the spectator chants at sports events.
Our social network bubbles reinforce this constantly, creating a sympathetic harmonizing of individuals into a larger single commonality of quasi community.
A singularity, where the majority of the masses comfortably reside, and where it becomes increasingly difficult to find original thought or expression of ideas.
This merging is an existential threat to the creative arts if fewer people are interested or willing to invest in the effort required to think outside of the walls that they reside within. And with less original thought comes less original material such as art, or music, or writing, and more manufactured similes generated by AI.
A couple of Reddit communities have driven this point home to me of late. r/vintage and r/antique are communities focused on objects older than 30 years or so, or older than 100 years. People post photos of items they own or are thinking of owning, always asking if it has monetary value.
The trouble is, more and more items that people are asking about are just mass produced merchandise manufactured in huge quantities for global sales at the lowest cost. There’s little intrinsic value in these items outside of novelty and nostalgia.
Someone will post an image of a 1970s portable tv or Cross pen or digital alarm clock radio, thinking that, because they’ve never seen one themselves, it might be rare or valuable.
It’s an understandable assumption that something that’s 50 years old might be valuable. After all, for all preceding generations of people, something 50 years old was valuable. Because back then, more things were made by hand, by craftsmen and artists, or locally, in small numbers.
Objects from 80 years ago were often made using materials that are scarce or considered valuable today, such as solid metals rather than amalgams, thick solid woods instead of veneers or lvl, woven threads instead of synthetic fabrics, and hand carved or blown glass instead of injection mold polystyrene.
So someone 30 years ago collecting vintage objects was collecting things that had intrinsic value such as originality, craftsmanship, uniqueness, innovative design, artistic merit, longevity, scarcity or durability. So the association of the concept of “vintage” was closely tied to collectibility and actual financial value.
But that’s no longer true for the most part. Something that’s vintage today means it might have been made in the 1970s or 1980s, and for someone born in the 21st century this might seem like a long time ago. But the overwhelming majority of things manufactured in the latter half of the 20th century were made in the millions, for mass consumption and global distribution.
Vintage is no longer about intrinsic value, it’s about collectibility for novelty, for alternative retro decorating and distinction from modernity. It’s about enjoying a popularity of furnishings and styles from a generation or two ago.
And that’s fine. But it represents a significant change in the ideas of quality and originality. Vintage objects (and soon, antique) are becoming less and less representative of originality and creativity and more about a representation of consumerism trends.
It’s this shift that I also seeas we enter the AI. Paintings can be generated to resemble any style; faces can be animated to bring life to still images. Deep fakes are becoming more difficult to discern and more intriguing to watch. The written word can be synthesized into books, news articles, and legal arguments, even resembling existing human authors.
But these are all derivative, blended and recombined based on mathematical and statistical models that have studied millions of people’s output. And in doing so, they produce the most common denominators of our supposed individuality, essentially blending and combining and revealing that there’s very little original thought in most of us. We are, statistically speaking, mostly repetition. And that’s not a comforting thought to most people.
AI output also reduces the ideas of quality and value, by replacing relatively scarce originality with mass produced popularity and commonality. In a generation or two, people looking for vintage and antique works of art, music, novels, movies etc will be collecting nothing but manufactured media made by machine and math, with no intrinsic value. The value of original thought and creative expression will slowly be lost to time and found in smaller and smaller pockets of humanity and individuals.
This might have a positive effect though. As more and more of our daily existence is created artificially, these generated objects, ideas, and media increasingly loses its value.
While today we can appreciate and value the effort and creativity of a music artist, very soon more and more music will be synthesized, and in doing so we will value it less. Movies, paintings, imagery, styles, fashion trends, news articles, fake news and real news will lose its value, because it’s not revealing any original, authentic, human insights and energies but merely synthesizing, reproducing, and blending countless prior works into an unidentifiable slurry of content.
Human-created art in all its forms will be overwhelmed by AI similes, driving artists into scarcity but also into increased value. There will be fewer human artists and craftsmen if there are fewer ways to earn a living, but those that remain may find that their efforts are valued more because of their relative rarity.
We’re already seeing this in the growing interest in restoration, preservation and handcrafting. More people are less willing to own mass produced consumer goods and more willing to pay for originality and quality, in turn supporting cottage industries over conglomerates and reinvigorating the values of scarcity, quality, and distinctiveness.
This is perhaps where opportunities lie in the future as AI inundates us with mediocrity and conformity, feeds us nutrition-less media, and keeps us coddled in our cocoons of complacency. As society has less need for workers, people will need ways to fulfill their needs beyond the basic Maslow bottom layers of safety, shelter, and sustenance.
Many will switch off and tune out as they always have, content to be spoon-fed their daily information, stimulation and recreation. But there will be new opportunities for creative expression, distinct from anything derivative and reductive that AI creates, valued by those also seeking nourishment that can’t be found in the mass produced marketplace.
Perhaps the era of AI that reveals and pushes a new generation of banality and commonality will also help us rediscover the value of individuality, and give many of us new opportunities of expression.
As always, it will come down to individuals to choose for themselves - or not.
Surur t1_ja1knct wrote
Nothing much to disagree with except one point - AI media will not be mass produced. It will be as individualized and addictive as your Facebook and tiktok feed.