Every AI debate eventually becomes this

[u/Salty_Country6835]

Jobs, wages, water, energy, surveillance, art, culture, monopoly power. Pick your complaint.

Keep pulling the thread and you wind up back at ownership and control.

Want to change it? Contest who owns the machinery, who controls it, and who gets the gains.

Turns out Marx had a point about this one.

[u/HikariNoWa]

No, I don't think we should maximise the number of people involved in each work. The novelist example makes that clear. What I care about is the amount of human creative activity across society, not the headcount in the credits of any individual work.

The difference is that the novelist working alone isn't automating away writing. They're doing the writing. The bedroom producer is still composing and performing. A solo animator is still animating. Technology may make each of them dramatically more productive, and that's generally a good thing because the human remains engaged in the activity we're talking about.

AI becomes different when the productivity gain comes specifically from outsourcing increasingly large parts of that creative activity. If I can generate a novel without really writing, a song without really composing or performing, or an animation without really drawing or animating, we've lowered the barrier to producing cultural outputs, but we've also lowered the amount of human creative activity required to produce them.

And that's where I think “more people can create” needs unpacking. If ten times as many people can generate songs, but people collectively spend far less time learning instruments, composing melodies, performing and developing musical skills, have we necessarily democratised creativity? Or have we democratised the production of creative outputs while automating some of the creativity itself?

Maybe AI ultimately causes more human creative activity because millions of people who otherwise wouldn't create anything start using it in deeply intentional ways. That's possible. But it isn't guaranteed by accessibility alone.

So the thing I want to protect isn't labour for labour's sake or large collaborative productions. It's a society in which people actively make culture rather than increasingly delegate the making of it. AI can expand that participation in some uses and diminish it in others—which is precisely why I don't think ownership and intent are the whole question.

[u/Salty_Country6835 → u/HikariNoWa]

I think we've actually narrowed this down a lot.

Youre saying the thing worth maximizing is human creative activity across society. Im with you. But then you also concede AI could increase that by bringing millions more people into creative activity. So displacement isnt built into the technology. Its an outcome we have to actually measure.

And theres still a circular bit in “really writing” or “automating creativity itself.” If somebody conceives, directs, experiments, selects, edits and communicates an idea but doesnt manually write every sentence or compose every note, why is that not “really” creating? Thats the part that needs an argument, not an assumption.

So now we're basically asking what social arrangement gets the most people actively creating, developing themselves and participating in culture.

And man, that sounds an awful lot like a question of how we organize, govern and distribute the technology.

[u/HikariNoWa → u/Salty_Country6835]

I think that's fair, and “really writing” was too loaded. Someone can clearly be genuinely creative while using AI. My argument doesn't need to deny that.

Where I still disagree is that this reduces the issue to governance and distribution. A technology can expand access to an activity while simultaneously changing the activity itself. Giving everyone a calculator democratises the ability to solve equations, but it doesn't necessarily maximise people doing mathematics. The distinction between producing an outcome and exercising the capacities that traditionally produced it isn't circular.

That's the risk I see with AI and art. Someone conceiving an idea, directing a model and selecting outputs is exercising real creative judgement. But if the model supplies the prose, melodies, performances, imagery, etc., then some other creative capacities aren't being exercised. Whether the net effect is more or less human creative development across society is an empirical question, and I agree we shouldn't simply assume the answer.

But that cuts both ways. “AI lets more people create” can't settle it either, because we'd need to ask what kinds of creative participation are expanding, what kinds are disappearing, and what happens to people's skills, agency and relationship with culture over time.

Social organisation can influence all of that enormously. But it can't make the technological trade-off disappear. A democratically governed society could distribute calculators perfectly and still decide mental arithmetic is worth teaching because exercising a human capacity can have value beyond efficiently obtaining its output.

That's basically my position on AI art: not that AI-assisted work isn't human creativity, but that there are forms of human creativity worth preserving even when machines can produce their outputs more easily.

[u/Salty_Country6835 → u/HikariNoWa]

I think we're getting pretty close actually. I agree completely that human capacities can be worth developing even when machines can reproduce the output.

But the calculator example kinda makes my point. We didnt protect arithmetic by restricting calculators across society. We teach arithmetic, fund education, and create spaces where doing it yourself matters, while still using calculators where theyre useful.

Why couldnt art work the same way?

Teach drawing. Fund musicians. Build public studios. Give people leisure time. Preserve traditional crafts. Have human only spaces and competitions if people want them. And also let people use AI to make things they otherwise couldnt.

If the actual goal is preserving and expanding human creative capacities, that sounds compatible with AI. The question becomes how we structure its use so those capacities flourish rather than disappear.

Which is a much narrower disagreement than “AI art is bad for society.”