If your timeline for “not-too-distant” is measured in decades at the earliest and centuries otherwise, maybe. It doesn’t look like authentically enjoyable creative output is making nearly as many strides as summarization and code completion. GPT-MidJourney autopoiesis similarly degenerates into novel-but-unremarkable prompts & images.
Maybe a limit of training these systems on internet text and images, but it seems to me that we’d need something trained on the human experience itself to get expression that doesn’t read hopelessly derivative. Now and likely for a long time, all these tools need a puppet master.
And, of course, celebrity culture requires a celebrity in the flesh. At which point an AI analogue would be so sufficiently similar to us that they might be afforded a SAG membership themselves.
Perhaps, though the rate advance, as mentioned, seems headed in a direction entirely orthogonal to actual creative output that might threaten art-making. I’m in awe at the grammatical or visual fidelity of LLMs/GANs, but have yet to hear a funny joke or see an original image.
My impression of the appetite for derivativeness is that it’s waning, no? The authority on the craft of content milling seems to think so. [0]
e.g. the constant re-hashes of DC and Marvel, mediocre Star Wars spinoffs and sequels, live action remakes of things that didn't need remakes, etc etc etc
the single largest selling category of books is romance novels, and if you've ever spent time in that space -- I used to worked in a book store, and would read anything to kill time, including romance -- is often painfully derivative and repetitive. Amazon was flooded with e-book romance novels long before ChatGPT, and it's only going to get worse.
Maybe a limit of training these systems on internet text and images, but it seems to me that we’d need something trained on the human experience itself to get expression that doesn’t read hopelessly derivative. Now and likely for a long time, all these tools need a puppet master.
And, of course, celebrity culture requires a celebrity in the flesh. At which point an AI analogue would be so sufficiently similar to us that they might be afforded a SAG membership themselves.