Money at its start was human willpower packaged conveniently for transport - in exchange for money you could have humans do something for you they wouldn’t normally do on their own. If you can make money by crunching numbers with a GPU that doesn’t sleep or eat, using energy that doesn’t need humans to make, and you can buy products with it that make you more money automatically, how much would you ask of humans and serve to humans?
Gold doesn't share this nebulous sort of definition. Same with diamonds, what's their price now that we have figured out the "alchemy" for those?
What is it about these sorts of questions that escape those that write articles like these? Better yet, if the authors did ask these sorts of questions, could they write at all? Put another way, must there be a lack of depth in order for these sorts of ideas to be properly viral?
Maybe my feed just sucks. Someone please tell me where I can read what I describe. Thanks in advance.
Diamonds are an interesting example. My understanding is that synthetic diamonds are largely used in industrial process (esp. abrasives). Synthetic diamonds in jewelry are cheaper alternatives, but jewelers can still sell natural diamonds for a premium. I think jewelry diamond prices are down in recent years, but not a crash. I think the market largely split.
The value of diamond jewelry feels quite nebulous to me. I remember looking at diamonds when picking an engagement ring and the jeweler had me look through the loope to examine microscopic imperfections, trying to upsell me on a different stone. Realizing the absurdity of using a microscope to assess jewelery which would otherwise only ever be seen by naked eye, the illusion of value broke and I purchased none.
Compare this to gold, silver etc. which do have labour, but still difference is mostly that and some buy/sell margin.
AI art will poison the well, but someone will make the few bucks that can be extracted before it happens.
> When the flush of a new-born sun fell first on Eden’s green and gold,
> Our father Adam sat under the Tree and scratched with a stick in the mould;
> And the first rude sketch that the world had seen was joy to his mighty heart,
> Till the Devil whispered behind the leaves: ‘It’s pretty, but is it Art?’
— Rudyard Kipling, The Conundrum of the Workshops [1]
There’s a lot more photos now, most of them mediocre, but some exceptional.
It does become harder to filter great photography from noise.
At least, if you believe that, engage with some counter-arguments at least, to make your article worth reading. This blog post is exactly the kind of slop (though not AI) that the author is criticizing.
This is a blog. Blog posts are a way to show the voice of the author, share their thoughts on the matter, perhaps work through their own thought processes and come to a nice conclusion for themselves that they choose to share with the public.
I would find the internet and the community incredibly dull if the first person to post a criticism was it and everyone else always referred to their article. There'd be no further discussion whatsoever.
I found this article to be enlightening and a wonderful way to frame my disdain for AI-generated art and other content in a framing that I hadn't thought of so explicitly before. The analogy to alchemy is a welcomed and fresh take. I appreciate this article. Perhaps I'm one of today's lucky 10,000 to have made this connection.
I also appreciate this article because the author put effort into it and voiced their opinion. Voicing opinions don't have to be novel, since this isn't academia necessarily where you have to fight for uniqueness and new takes.
Do you mean value as perceived by the reader? Do you mean value as 'price' of book?
meant reader perceived value, obviously a hand written book will cost more dollars.
https://www.worldhistory.org/article/2045/the-gold-of-the-co...
I wonder if there was a surge in red clothing immediately after... perhaps followed by the wealthy disdaining it.
So instead what they should have done is to buy tons of lead, and make people believe it was actually as good as gold. So people would buy it from them, cheap at first, but then they would rise the price slowly, and those people who had bought first would have made a profit, triggering others to buy lead at an even higher price, and making the alchemists a ton of money.
The play was crypyto mining, not AI art.
hastamelo•2mo ago
today instagram is flooded with ai videos, many extremely obvious (cats doing things), yet these videos are highly popular, some have 400!!! mil views, millions of likes
author is confused, thinks music means just beethoven or Pink Floyd or whatever he considers "good music"
> AI will never fully displace creatives, because the moment AI can mass-produce any kind of creative work at scale, that work will stop being worth producing in the first place.
literally confusing art with elitism and gate-keeping. might as well require "artist degree from an accredited institution"
musicale•2mo ago
Rick Beato and others have argued that this flooding (a single day in 2025 has as many songs uploaded to Spotify as an entire catalog-year from the 1980s) along with ubiquitous, cheap access to millions of songs per month vs. saving up for a single album (and actively listening to it in its entirety) has devalued music quite a bit. It seems to be becoming more ephemeral and disposable.