I'll admit to being a little gun-shy about the idea that technology always creates new opportunities. Sure, it has happened over and over in the past, but relying on it feels superstitious.

Still... yeah, you've got good reason to be optimistic. I genuinely can't imagine what will happen when Just Anybody could create a major motion picture or a AAA videogame, by themselves or with a few friends rather than a city-full of talent. Probably, something completely different that I can't even imagine. I hope I recognize it when it comes, rather than being the old grump who doesn't think it's worth anything.

> I genuinely can't imagine what will happen when Just Anybody could create a major motion picture or a AAA videogame, by themselves or with a few friends rather than a city-full of talent.

If I look at video games today, it seems like a necessary (but not sufficient) condition to be successful is to have a lot of money to make heavy marketing.

When consumers can't make a difference between the quality of a product (be it a piece of art or anything else, like a car or a browser), then what makes the difference is the brute force side of marketing: pay more to be more visible so you sell more.

I don't think it's a good thing. I prefer a world where those who have expertise in something are recognized as experts. What's the point of practicing 10h a day to be a musician if your neighbour can just pretend to be one with AI, and nobody will ever make a difference?

The AAA games need enormous marketing because they need to sell a lot of copies. They are extremely expensive to make.

Conceivably, in the future, somebody could make a Zelda or Baldur level game in their spare time. It may not sell ten million copies, but it doesn't need to.

Is it worse than the current games, with vast amounts of craftsmen? Maybe. It might be a little sad. Or it might be great that all of those artists now have free time to do their own art.

Of course all of them have to eat. And so we'd better hope it also comes with even greater superabundance than we already have. We get lots of artists, who sell very little but produce great art, or we get something potentially very bad.

> It may not sell ten million copies, but it doesn't need to.

Have you ever spoken to independent game developers? They don't want to sell millions, just enough to live from it. Well that's hard.

> Or it might be great that all of those artists now have free time to do their own art.

Some of them actually want to make a video game. But the risk is that non-artists will be able to make games with generative AIs (which trained on data that the authors - artists - did not agree on sharing this way).

You can say "yeah yeah, it's progress, some jobs disappear, etc". But I still have to note the irony: generative AI was trained from the work of artists to steal the job of those artists, and everybody seems to find that it was "fair use" of their intellectual property...

Less glibly, I feel like the comment OP made is looking at first-order consequences of new generative technologies, but that it misses a deeper truth about art and creation. The creation of the camera didn't "solve" painting. By and large the art we find exceptional and noteworthy is that where an artist takes a collection of tools and invests a large amount of time in combining them in a new, rare, and/or exceedingly detailed and refined way. nobody is going to create enduring, culturally significant art off of 60 seconds of effort entering one prompt into Midjourney. There will be artists who do amazing things using, among other tools, generative AI, but it will be because they put lots of time into understanding the new creative possibilities they unlock and refining their composition into something aesthetically significant and uncommon, even given the new generative status quo.

The question to me is: will "consumers" still be able to make the difference between this "amazing piece of art that used generative AI" and the rest of the random outputs of generative AI?

If people can't make a difference, I believe you have just killed the domain (in the bad way).

I think the problem that you're getting at is that people need a steady stream of income in order to have the time to innovate beyond what AI is capable of regenerating, but that steady stream of income has always been predominantly comprised of exactly the sort of derivative work that AI is going to completely undermine the market for.

Without the ability to do the usual stream of generic graphic design arrangements, or advertising Jingles that pays the bills, the aspiring genre-breaking creative has little or no means to develop an excursive masterpiece that the next generation of AI will slavishly absorb and regurgitate.

There's a joke about art teachers funding future art consumers, but it's only funny because it's true. Teaching people to appreciate and distinguish is important to the arts now, more than ever. I wonder how much the work itself can be made to teach the subtle differentiations, and how to appreciate them? Would solve this whole problem handily.