I am all for supporting local artists and I feel that “handcrafted in XXX” products make great souvenirs when you’re connected to those places. Still, if some AI hallucinated me a perfect novel for my interests, or generated something I couldnt tell was manufactured or created by a master, I would happily enjoy it.
“How can I tell if this is slop so I can know to hate it” sounds stupid to me: good is good. When it comes to art / food / products, I want the best experience for ME. If I want human connectedness, then I’ll go interact with a human directly.
I can do without wasted water, power, and money, but in the abstract it seems to bother everyone on Lemmy to enjoy something a person didn’t make. I don’t have that hang-up.
Whenever I see this opinion it makes me think the billionaires just want it for their bunkers so their great grandchildren can entertain themselves without the need of other people ever again. Imagine a world where 99% of people are dead and the rest can just make all the music and movies they want, but none of it was actually made by a human. Does it matter then? Because if not then I guess what’s the point of sustaining civilization and Sam Altman’s comments that humans take more energy to raise than a large language model start to sound like maybe humans are the wasteful thing to get rid of rather than data centers. Does it matter if it’s sentient if it appears to be? Why even bother with valuing human life if you can just have a program act like a human and ‘make’ things like music? Does it matter if you never interact with a human and your entire interaction with ‘sentient’ life is not life or sentient and just a stochastic parrot telling you convincing lies? Would you care if you only ever consumed non human content in some sort of fucked up truman show situation? Idk. If you don’t care then why even bother consuming anything human anymore at all? Just seems like a rabid devaluation of anything human. Does it matter if a llm makes you feel loved if it really loves you? Why get love from a flesh and blood human being when you can just get the feeling of love from something else even if it’s a lie?
I would say that the point of being human is the human interaction, but that is best done person to person in the moment. You and Shakespeare are never going to have a relationship. It functionally doesn’t matter if you also liked a great tragedy or epic poem created by aliens. It’s a false dichotomy to say you can either have human connection or not.
You can have it in any of a variety of contexts, and anything you like doesn’t have to have had a human make it for it to be likeable.
But Shakespeare was a living human at one point, and if an alien is making something it’s also a living organism. Or enjoying birds singing or a trail of ants grabbing food. LLMs and image/video generation is a piece of software that runs on computers that was built off of all collective human data found on the internet with no permission, and you have marketers and layman claiming it’s sentient (same people probably wouldnt grant sentience to another living organism like a bee or a fish btw) when it’s very arguable that it’s not sentient at all and you have people treating it like it is. Like…even if you like the output not caring about where it comes from is just ridiculously careless. Why not boil some rats and listen to the screams if you don’t care about the source of things as long as it’s entertaining you.
I’m not following your argument here. Your commentary on sentience (by which you really mean sapience I think. A bee or a fish probably IS sentient) seems to be reverting to “it’s reckless to like things made by non-people”. I don’t know how you get to there from “art is not connecting you meaningfully to past figures or aliens as compared to direct human interaction”.