Alchemy

https://joshcollinsworth.com/blog/alchemy

by tobr • 9 months ago

29 22 9 months ago

hastamelo• 8 months ago

when music became easier to make in the 90s and 00s due to computers, and you no longer needed studio access, everybody in their bedroom started flooding the market with songs. yet music remains valuable.

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• 8 months ago

when music became easier to make in the 90s and 00s due to computers, and you no longer needed studio access, everybody in their bedroom started flooding the market with songs. yet music remains valuable.

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.

dzink• 8 months ago

The only question is whether what is valuable to Humans remains what is valuable. If major chunks of global money is in the hands of a few entities who can generate more money by doing things that humans don’t care for (example oligarchs profiting from war, or by some far out analogy - some AI company blocking the sun to extract as much energy as possible to power AI farms at the expense of food farms). Then you have a real problem.

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?

heddycrow• 8 months ago

Look at the history of art itself to find several movements where artists make the point that difficulty in production is not the key feature of art. You might even find proof that human connection and humanity are not the key features. In fact, it's pretty hard to nail down an objective definition of art, but we can say what it doesn't have to be.

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.

8organicbits• 8 months ago

I think gold was mentioned to give the nod to alchemy.

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.

Ekaros• 8 months ago

The resale value of any diamond jewellery should tell all about real value of it. Unless it is actually rare and special piece my understanding is that value drops massively moment the payment clears.

Compare this to gold, silver etc. which do have labour, but still difference is mostly that and some buy/sell margin.

darepublic• 8 months ago

Artificial means of creating gold has not made it less scarce. Diamonds on the other hand should be less expensive, its value is based on proving your love to someone. Diamond resale value sucks. Diamond hasn't changed at all in the process.

nprateem• 8 months ago

From the school of thought that brought you "No one will buy mass produced goods" and "They won't believe it if it's not true" comes another idea that won't age well...

drdrek• 8 months ago

Its the first player past the goal post problem, the first alchemist will crash the gold market but he will be insanely rich. You can see this with advertisers, when a new approach is found they all rush to it. They know its going to kill it soon, but the first few will get that sweet sweet revenue before the public catches on.

AI art will poison the well, but someone will make the few bucks that can be extracted before it happens.

recursivecaveat• 8 months ago

Always thought it was a strange objection. Obviously the argument proves too much: by the same logic there is no point in inventing or operating say a wheel; the price of pots will just fall to the price of clay. Of course that isn't true, you make money hand over fist until reaching some kind of perfect competition again once everyone else catches up, at which point it becomes merely a living.

eochaid• 8 months ago

New things are hard to value.

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]

[1] https://poets.org/poem/conundrum-workshops

ibash• 8 months ago

AI is having the same effect on art as the iPhone did on photography.

There’s a lot more photos now, most of them mediocre, but some exceptional.

It does become harder to filter great photography from noise.

bananaflag• 8 months ago

Why do people want to present some tired point, that has already been made a thousand times, like some clever new insight?

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.

firefoxd• 8 months ago

This should help: https://xkcd.com/1053/

jamamp• 8 months ago

I would argue that the author has no obligation to engage with more counter-arguments, or provide something "new" (to you) to the conversation.

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.

testartr2• 8 months ago

do you think machine mass-printed books are less valuable to read than hand written ones?

jhbadger• 8 months ago

There was a real world example akin to the alchemists getting their wish of making gold and finding out that that destroyed the value of it -- Spanish colonialism. Spain brought back tons of silver and gold from the New World and instead of making them wealthy it crashed their economy by hyperinflation.

https://www.worldhistory.org/article/2045/the-gold-of-the-co...

IAmBroom• 8 months ago

And cochineal red dye, which outvalued the gold they brought back. But that doesn't negate any point your making; it's simply another constituent.

I wonder if there was a surge in red clothing immediately after... perhaps followed by the wealthy disdaining it.

d--b• 8 months ago

Ok so this argues that alchemists would destroy the value of gold by creating loads of it, and that's what's going to happen to AI artists. A bit of a stretch IMO, but whatever.

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.

whydoineedthis• 8 months ago

Some people make art for the sake of art though.

Alchemy

Related Stories