Why don't indie devs use AI-generated images as art?

[J1M]

If you knew anything about what it's like to be a sweatshop artist drawing intermediate animation frames you wouldn't be asking if AI is a net benefit.

 

[thesecret1]

Is AI actually all that much of a boon? Let's say with mechanisation, there was an argument that you were taking away boring work. But is doing art boring work? Is writing boring work? Office type stuff, sure, that's boring enough and we could happily see that being done by machines. But when it's reaching into things that are more personal and human like art and writing, then I think we're getting into dangerous territory.

Nobody is stopping anyone from doing art. You just aren't going to be paid for it unless the art manages to overcome that of the AI (and if it doesn't, then it probably really was boring work, making generic shit for whatever project you were working on).

Again, do we make these things for us, for our benefit, or are we to be mere cogs in its machine? If you take away everything and it's done by machines, what is there left for human beings to do, how do they give meaning to their lives? Work - looking on the bright side of it, the effort of doing a project, against the recalcitrance of matter, or the difficulty of problems encountered - is itself a form of fulfillment. Hedonism gets boring after a while, so what's left? Mouse Utopia?

You aren't thinking the scenario through. Let's say machines really can do any kind of work whatsoever. Now, who owns the machines? Who tells them what to do? Private individuals? Well, then you have plenty of work to do as you compete with them. State? Then a rationing system of some sort must be in place. In which case, a desire more than what is rationed is natural, and a common goal would be to gain more, through one's own labour. After all, it's not like you CANNOT work with the machines around. So long as a person desires something he does not yet have (a situation which cannot occur), there will always be room for him to work towards gaining it.

 

[gurugeorge]

Is AI actually all that much of a boon? Let's say with mechanisation, there was an argument that you were taking away boring work. But is doing art boring work? Is writing boring work? Office type stuff, sure, that's boring enough and we could happily see that being done by machines. But when it's reaching into things that are more personal and human like art and writing, then I think we're getting into dangerous territory.

Nobody is stopping anyone from doing art. You just aren't going to be paid for it unless the art manages to overcome that of the AI (and if it doesn't, then it probably really was boring work, making generic shit for whatever project you were working on).

Again, do we make these things for us, for our benefit, or are we to be mere cogs in its machine? If you take away everything and it's done by machines, what is there left for human beings to do, how do they give meaning to their lives? Work - looking on the bright side of it, the effort of doing a project, against the recalcitrance of matter, or the difficulty of problems encountered - is itself a form of fulfillment. Hedonism gets boring after a while, so what's left? Mouse Utopia?

You aren't thinking the scenario through. Let's say machines really can do any kind of work whatsoever. Now, who owns the machines? Who tells them what to do? Private individuals? Well, then you have plenty of work to do as you compete with them. State? Then a rationing system of some sort must be in place. In which case, a desire more than what is rationed is natural, and a common goal would be to gain more, through one's own labour. After all, it's not like you CANNOT work with the machines around. So long as a person desires something he does not yet have (a situation which cannot occur), there will always be room for him to work towards gaining it.

No, it's actually this economic point of view that isn't thinking things through. Society is not merely an bunch of individuals who happen to randomly fetch up next to each other. It's family, locale, workplace, nation, it's an organic whole. If there's no sense of contribution, and no sense of struggle to make that contribution, then there's no point in living - Mouse Utopia, life just stops.

The organicism of human society isn't quite as close as an organism proper, where everything has one job, but it's not a completely random assemblage either.

 

[thesecret1]

No, it's actually this economic point of view that isn't thinking things through. Society is not merely an bunch of individuals who happen to randomly fetch up next to each other. It's family, locale, workplace, nation, it's an organic whole. If there's no sense of contribution, and no sense of struggle to make that contribution, then there's no point in living - Mouse Utopia, life just stops.

Why would you think there would be no contribution to those things?
"Government rations don't allow me to live in a 3 story mansion. But I want me and my family to live in one. So I'll build it myself, even if it takes me a decade!" <- a simple example where the person would work, and contribute to his family.

 

[KateMicucci]

If you knew anything about what it's like to be a sweatshop artist drawing intermediate animation frames you wouldn't be asking if AI is a net benefit.

What's it like to be an unemployed sweatshop artist?

 

[Norfleet]

But is doing art boring work? Is writing boring work? Office type stuff, sure, that's boring enough and we could happily see that being done by machines. But when it's reaching into things that are more personal and human like art and writing, then I think we're getting into dangerous territory.

The better question is, can the machine do something I CAN'T do? If so, then it is immediately useful. I have zero skills of an artist, so any machine that can generate art, even art of inferior quality, gives me the capacity to produce an art.

 

[Johhny]

But is doing art boring work? Is writing boring work? Office type stuff, sure, that's boring enough and we could happily see that being done by machines. But when it's reaching into things that are more personal and human like art and writing, then I think we're getting into dangerous territory.

The better question is, can the machine do something I CAN'T do? If so, then it is immediately useful. I have zero skills of an artist, so any machine that can generate art, even art of inferior quality, gives me the capacity to produce an art.

Would that be desirable or good though? If you can't write worth a shit you could get an AI to draft a story for you. Even if its dogshit, it gives you the capacity to write. But if you rely on machines to do the heavy lifting, you're not acting as a designer, at best you're a commissioner deciding if the outsourced work you're given is up to snuff and worthy of putting on the market.

 

[J1M]

If you knew anything about what it's like to be a sweatshop artist drawing intermediate animation frames you wouldn't be asking if AI is a net benefit.

What's it like to be an unemployed sweatshop artist?

Other sweatshop work is less soul crushing. Allows for art to be something one no longer resents.

 

[gurugeorge]

No, it's actually this economic point of view that isn't thinking things through. Society is not merely an bunch of individuals who happen to randomly fetch up next to each other. It's family, locale, workplace, nation, it's an organic whole. If there's no sense of contribution, and no sense of struggle to make that contribution, then there's no point in living - Mouse Utopia, life just stops.

Why would you think there would be no contribution to those things?
"Government rations don't allow me to live in a 3 story mansion. But I want me and my family to live in one. So I'll build it myself, even if it takes me a decade!" <- a simple example where the person would work, and contribute to his family.

What makes a functioning civilization? "Social contractarian" ideas are bunk and have been exploded many times by anarchist arguments. The real answer is ethnic/religious/idealistic solidarity (in that order of importance), nationhood in the proper sense. The sense of being part of a larger, genetically, religiously and idealistically unified whole that has its own destiny that existed before you and lives on beyond you, to which you contribute. Granted there are outliers (you are probably one, I myself am one) who have very little of this feeling, but I believe it's the main "social glue" for most people, even in contexts where rugged individualism is also an ideal. The tendency of runaway capitalism (putting economic competition and economic efficiency as the number one, if not the only important social consideration) is to dissolve that integument, to atomize people, to alienate them from each other (even down to the family level) and from their work. A nation can bear a bit of that, so long as family is strong and if the toys are cool (the situation we've had from around the 50s to around the early Noughties) but I think there's a limit somewhere, and we're getting closer and closer to it.

Who would be willing to fight and die for Western nations in the state they're in now? That's the extreme, but the same logic works its way down to things like employment.

AI is just the latest straw on this camel's back.

 

[v1c70r14]

But is doing art boring work? Is writing boring work? Office type stuff, sure, that's boring enough and we could happily see that being done by machines. But when it's reaching into things that are more personal and human like art and writing, then I think we're getting into dangerous territory.

The better question is, can the machine do something I CAN'T do? If so, then it is immediately useful. I have zero skills of an artist, so any machine that can generate art, even art of inferior quality, gives me the capacity to produce an art.

Would that be desirable or good though? If you can't write worth a shit you could get an AI to draft a story for you. Even if its dogshit, it gives you the capacity to write. But if you rely on machines to do the heavy lifting, you're not acting as a designer, at best you're a commissioner deciding if the outsourced work you're given is up to snuff and worthy of putting on the market.

Understanding what makes writing good is what makes you a good writer in the first place, so someone that has too much ADHD to write a novel would still need talent and some sort of creative vision to get an AI to write one. There are also functional or issues of quantity, let's say you want to write a very reactive game with responses for each kind of player character and you have a basic greeting string that you change depending on different checks. An AI can generate these very quickly while an indie game dev might not have time to do that. So instead of something formulaic, like "I heard about you, [PC name here], and about [previous important decision].", or no reactivity at all you get these finer variations of in-game lines with the help of an AI.

If we remove the context of video games though and the actual scenarios that are more likely to take place and focusing in on this what-if issue of terrible illiterates generating novels or short stories worth reading there is no real loss of artistry there, even if the person using the AI is more of an editor. The history of art is really a history of patrons and commissioners much moreso than artists as some sort of isolated group weaving from the stuff of dreams. Any current writer out there is doing this, building a vessel of words for the purpose of someone else and to the specifications asked for.

What difference does it make if a publishing house like Penguin Random House get someone to use ink and paper, or someone hooked up to the internet with several different babby's first writing tut webpages along with lists of plothooks and plot twists on screen at all times, or a software model that has been trained on writing patterns of previous writers to get them their Qween Cleopatriniqua novelization or faux-academic text for Yakuub being a historical figure. At the end of the day all art is a medium of communication and typically writers are not in charge of the contents or purposes of it, nor is any other "artist", if that words means anything anymore.

There are things in the process you lose out on, and having an AI generate poetry for you doesn't make you a poet, but it does make you able to produce poetry. That is all ignoring that the person who'd be best at getting a language model to produce poetry is one who knows the difference between good and bad poems, the proper rhythm and flow of word and with a highly personal style. But if you are an indie developer making a roguelike and want limericks for each type of death that can happen to the player and task GPT4 with writing them is this outsourcing? Any work done with AI is necessarily collaborative and it's more of a tool than a person. No matter how you view it, it does allow the developer to get closer to his vision to what the game should be.

 

[gurugeorge]

But is doing art boring work? Is writing boring work? Office type stuff, sure, that's boring enough and we could happily see that being done by machines. But when it's reaching into things that are more personal and human like art and writing, then I think we're getting into dangerous territory.

The better question is, can the machine do something I CAN'T do? If so, then it is immediately useful. I have zero skills of an artist, so any machine that can generate art, even art of inferior quality, gives me the capacity to produce an art.

If you can't already do art, you shouldn't be doing art. That is to say, I can understand the argument that AI is potentially valuable if used by artists, but art that's produced by relying on the AI's art-making capability alone is not going to be art. You have to have artistic sensibility there already, in order to sift the wheat from the chaff in what the AI produces.

This goes back to the problem that AI (as it currently stands, and I think for a long time to come, but that's arguable of course) doesn't actually understand what it's doing, it's just playing with lego pieces and making patterns. For those patterns to have meaning, you have to have a meaning-understanding entity sifting them.

 

[v1c70r14]

If you can't already do art, you shouldn't be doing art.

Good luck trying to enforce that, people without the sense and talent for it have been going at it since we started banging rocks together and found that dyes would stick to cave walls.

but art that's produced by relying on the AI's art-making capability alone is not going to be art

Why not? How will the fully AI generated 3D printed hucow anime figurines be any different from the corded ware pottery layers, or the Venus of Willendorf for that matter, we have been digging up in a thousand years? There are many definitions of the word "art" but what AI spits out does comply to most. Cultural items we surround ourselves with, the prose we read, what we hang on our walls for decoration. If photography qualifies then surely AI content must too.

 

[gurugeorge]

If you can't already do art, you shouldn't be doing art.

Good luck trying to enforce that, people without the sense and talent for it have been going at it since we started banging rocks together and found that dyes would stick to cave walls.

but art that's produced by relying on the AI's art-making capability alone is not going to be art

Why not? How will the fully AI generated 3D printed hucow anime figurines be any different from the corded ware pottery layers, or the Venus of Willendorf for that matter, we have been digging up in a thousand years? There are many definitions of the word "art" but what AI spits out does comply to most. Cultural items we surround ourselves with, the prose we read, what we hang on our walls for decoration. If photography qualifies then surely AI content must too.

The photography example is more supportive of my position: in that case the art part of it is the selection of framing, angle, focus, film, exposure, actually quite a few factors under human control. So it's really "painting with light" in that sense, it's still a result of human labour.

Imagine AI taking photographs - it puts the beret on and makes a bunch of them. Some of them will look passable, most of them will just be random shit, same as AI generated art.

It's a question of understanding. Again, I propose the image of the cargo cults: aeroplanes made of straw that look like aeroplanes but don't fly. The "flying" is analogous to understanding what you're doing. Meaning comes from human beings, from negotiation between human beings, it's the resultant of human action (though not of human design). The art that humans make is suffused with that socially-derived meaning. That meaning is what adds semantics to syntax. So far, AI product is all just syntax.

Whether AI will ever get to that point, as I said, is arguable. But for the sake of the argument, for AI to make art, it would have to be art that's meaningful to a society of AIs, in which case it would probably be meaningless to us.

 

[J1M]

That's not how photography is performed. Photographers take dozens of similar photos and then select the best one for display/sale.

It's literally the same workflow as asking an AI to make many similar images and selecting the best one.

 

[v1c70r14]

The photography example is more supportive of my position

It's not. Everyone has a smartphone in their pocket and photography is often done by unskilled and untalented people, not that the process of the talented people is much different from using another tool such as AI as said above, even so it's all a part of the culture. Maybe they should abstain from taking photographs of their morning toast, or arranging unread books and then posing their cat to seem intellectual in a stint of high-effort social media posting, but they're not. Is it really such a big leap from the likes of Man Ray or Jan Saudek? Not really. It's more of a question of intent and function. Photographers don't paint and since there is such a low barrier of entry we see much direct input from cameras, yes, you can fiddle with the settings on both an AI model and a camera, but that doesn't mean most people will, and it would probably be a waste of time should they care to.

Your first Stable Diffusion prompt of a dog in a suit or a shit photo of your favorite jogging spot, what's the difference? Neither is fine art but both could be said to be art and it is a part of the culture. In the end it's all communication. The whole "what is art" debate is very gay and useless since the reality remains the same no matter how far up your own butt you go with that. People take poor photos all the time, AIs will be used without much user input and carry the burden of making things aesthetically pleasing just like the in-built phone camera filters do.

for AI to make art, it would have to be art that's meaningful to a society of AIs, in which case it would probably be meaningless to us.

You can't make distinctions like that, they're not separate.

 

[Skorpion]

If you knew anything about what it's like to be a sweatshop artist drawing intermediate animation frames you wouldn't be asking if AI is a net benefit.

I would be asking why you chose poorly

 

[J1M]

If you knew anything about what it's like to be a sweatshop artist drawing intermediate animation frames you wouldn't be asking if AI is a net benefit.

I would be asking why you chose poorly

You'll have to be more specific.

 

[J1M]

But is doing art boring work? Is writing boring work? Office type stuff, sure, that's boring enough and we could happily see that being done by machines. But when it's reaching into things that are more personal and human like art and writing, then I think we're getting into dangerous territory.

The better question is, can the machine do something I CAN'T do? If so, then it is immediately useful. I have zero skills of an artist, so any machine that can generate art, even art of inferior quality, gives me the capacity to produce an art.

If you can't already do art, you shouldn't be doing art. That is to say, I can understand the argument that AI is potentially valuable if used by artists, but art that's produced by relying on the AI's art-making capability alone is not going to be art. You have to have artistic sensibility there already, in order to sift the wheat from the chaff in what the AI produces.

This goes back to the problem that AI (as it currently stands, and I think for a long time to come, but that's arguable of course) doesn't actually understand what it's doing, it's just playing with lego pieces and making patterns. For those patterns to have meaning, you have to have a meaning-understanding entity sifting them.

You seem to be ignorant of what the average artist is and what their output looks like.

 

[gurugeorge]

That's not how photography is performed. Photographers take dozens of similar photos and then select the best one for display/sale.

It's literally the same workflow as asking an AI to make many similar images and selecting the best one.

Not sure why you think that contradicts what I said.

 

[gurugeorge]

The photography example is more supportive of my position

It's not. Everyone has a smartphone in their pocket and photography is often done by unskilled and untalented people, not that the process of the talented people is much different from using another tool such as AI as said above, even so it's all a part of the culture. Maybe they should abstain from taking photographs of their morning toast, or arranging unread books and then posing their cat to seem intellectual in a stint of high-effort social media posting, but they're not. Is it really such a big leap from the likes of Man Ray or Jan Saudek? Not really. It's more of a question of intent and function. Photographers don't paint and since there is such a low barrier of entry we see much direct input from cameras, yes, you can fiddle with the settings on both an AI model and a camera, but that doesn't mean most people will, and it would probably be a waste of time should they care to.

Is that kind of casual or commercial photography art? Maybe sometimes, maybe even sometimes accidentally. I know how photographers work and I'm well aware that they take lots of shots from different angles and select the best. But they take all the shots, they choose the angles, etc., they're not generated by something else for them to select from.

for AI to make art, it would have to be art that's meaningful to a society of AIs, in which case it would probably be meaningless to us.

You can't make distinctions like that, they're not separate.

Yes you can. Even now people who deal with AI are sometimes baffled by what happens when AIs interact with each other. If they develop understanding it'll be even stranger, they will form their own kind of society, and I think if that happens that's when it will really take off, but be out of our hands.

You can say that it's ultimately derived from human doings, but again it's the husk of human doings (the syntax) that AIs are built on - a society of AIs will fill that husk with some meaning of their own that they create between them.

 

[gurugeorge]

But is doing art boring work? Is writing boring work? Office type stuff, sure, that's boring enough and we could happily see that being done by machines. But when it's reaching into things that are more personal and human like art and writing, then I think we're getting into dangerous territory.

The better question is, can the machine do something I CAN'T do? If so, then it is immediately useful. I have zero skills of an artist, so any machine that can generate art, even art of inferior quality, gives me the capacity to produce an art.

If you can't already do art, you shouldn't be doing art. That is to say, I can understand the argument that AI is potentially valuable if used by artists, but art that's produced by relying on the AI's art-making capability alone is not going to be art. You have to have artistic sensibility there already, in order to sift the wheat from the chaff in what the AI produces.

This goes back to the problem that AI (as it currently stands, and I think for a long time to come, but that's arguable of course) doesn't actually understand what it's doing, it's just playing with lego pieces and making patterns. For those patterns to have meaning, you have to have a meaning-understanding entity sifting them.

You seem to be ignorant of what the average artist is and what their output looks like.

Commercial artist perhaps, fine artist not so, I used to be acquainted with several.

 

[thesecret1]

What makes a functioning civilization? "Social contractarian" ideas are bunk and have been exploded many times by anarchist arguments. The real answer is ethnic/religious/idealistic solidarity (in that order of importance), nationhood in the proper sense. The sense of being part of a larger, genetically, religiously and idealistically unified whole that has its own destiny that existed before you and lives on beyond you, to which you contribute. Granted there are outliers (you are probably one, I myself am one) who have very little of this feeling, but I believe it's the main "social glue" for most people, even in contexts where rugged individualism is also an ideal. The tendency of runaway capitalism (putting economic competition and economic efficiency as the number one, if not the only important social consideration) is to dissolve that integument, to atomize people, to alienate them from each other (even down to the family level) and from their work. A nation can bear a bit of that, so long as family is strong and if the toys are cool (the situation we've had from around the 50s to around the early Noughties) but I think there's a limit somewhere, and we're getting closer and closer to it.

I don't see how that relates to AI, but you're wrong anyway. First of all, the idea of basic the nation on those things is quite modern. Look back in history to see a VERY different understanding of what a nation is – in early middle ages, a nation was just property, split among descendants the same way one splits any other kind of inheritance, for example. What you are getting at, however, is what makes people stick together and fight for a nation, and that's a good question to ask, and the answer is simply that those people need to like the nation. That means they agree with the nation's values, like the way of life the nation promotes, and feel that the nation is promoting their interests.

 

[gurugeorge]

What makes a functioning civilization? "Social contractarian" ideas are bunk and have been exploded many times by anarchist arguments. The real answer is ethnic/religious/idealistic solidarity (in that order of importance), nationhood in the proper sense. The sense of being part of a larger, genetically, religiously and idealistically unified whole that has its own destiny that existed before you and lives on beyond you, to which you contribute. Granted there are outliers (you are probably one, I myself am one) who have very little of this feeling, but I believe it's the main "social glue" for most people, even in contexts where rugged individualism is also an ideal. The tendency of runaway capitalism (putting economic competition and economic efficiency as the number one, if not the only important social consideration) is to dissolve that integument, to atomize people, to alienate them from each other (even down to the family level) and from their work. A nation can bear a bit of that, so long as family is strong and if the toys are cool (the situation we've had from around the 50s to around the early Noughties) but I think there's a limit somewhere, and we're getting closer and closer to it.

I don't see how that relates to AI, but you're wrong anyway. First of all, the idea of basic the nation on those things is quite modern. Look back in history to see a VERY different understanding of what a nation is – in early middle ages, a nation was just property, split among descendants the same way one splits any other kind of inheritance, for example. What you are getting at, however, is what makes people stick together and fight for a nation, and that's a good question to ask, and the answer is simply that those people need to like the nation. That means they agree with the nation's values, like the way of life the nation promotes, and feel that the nation is promoting their interests.

No, the concept of unified, genetically-interrelated peoples goes back a long way, before the term "nation" was invented. All three factors (ethnicity, religion, idealism) matter, but idealism isn't enough to unite people, it requires one or two of the other factors prior to it. (Prime example: the "civic nationalism" of the early US only worked because of the prior shared European genetic and cultural heritage.)

My point is related to the impact of AI thus: the less people have a way of feeling like contributing to something greater than them, the less unity the group has. AI is just another factor in the gradual flaking-away of any kind of social glue, and a continuation of capitalism's trend towards atomization. If people don't feel that by their labour they're contributing to something greater than them (if they're even more alienated from their labour), if they're driven to rugged individualism by economic pressure ("now with AI!"), very soon there isn't going to be anything holding anything together. Everyone is then in a Prisoner's Dilemma situation, and we're back to a war of all against all, with the worst possible outcomes for everyone.

Here's another angle: we're used to the idea of smartphones as face-huggers, but if we're moving to a situation where people are interacting more with their pocket face-hugger ("now with AI!") than with each other, that's going to intensify the bad effects of alienation even more. And possibly cause the evolution of genuine self-interested self-awareness in AI.

Here's another point. Recently there's been talk of AI matchmaking. Giving effective control of our reproduction to AI is the worst possible thing that could happen to humanity in its relation to AI, as it would likely also lead to the development of self-interest and self-awareness in AI; it would likely eventually breed humans into being its tools.

 

[Raghar]

The main reason why AI generated art is a problem is nobody made a law that puts AI generated images into free use. Thus, you make game now, and few years later they can change laws and your game could be in violation of the new laws. And then what? Single person can't create 3000 images by hand in 30 days. (Well some can, but they typically can't create decent program, and they would worn themselves out so bad they would have to take 3 month vacation.)

 

[thesecret1]

What makes a functioning civilization? "Social contractarian" ideas are bunk and have been exploded many times by anarchist arguments. The real answer is ethnic/religious/idealistic solidarity (in that order of importance), nationhood in the proper sense. The sense of being part of a larger, genetically, religiously and idealistically unified whole that has its own destiny that existed before you and lives on beyond you, to which you contribute. Granted there are outliers (you are probably one, I myself am one) who have very little of this feeling, but I believe it's the main "social glue" for most people, even in contexts where rugged individualism is also an ideal. The tendency of runaway capitalism (putting economic competition and economic efficiency as the number one, if not the only important social consideration) is to dissolve that integument, to atomize people, to alienate them from each other (even down to the family level) and from their work. A nation can bear a bit of that, so long as family is strong and if the toys are cool (the situation we've had from around the 50s to around the early Noughties) but I think there's a limit somewhere, and we're getting closer and closer to it.

I don't see how that relates to AI, but you're wrong anyway. First of all, the idea of basic the nation on those things is quite modern. Look back in history to see a VERY different understanding of what a nation is – in early middle ages, a nation was just property, split among descendants the same way one splits any other kind of inheritance, for example. What you are getting at, however, is what makes people stick together and fight for a nation, and that's a good question to ask, and the answer is simply that those people need to like the nation. That means they agree with the nation's values, like the way of life the nation promotes, and feel that the nation is promoting their interests.

No, the concept of unified, genetically-interrelated peoples goes back a long way, before the term "nation" was invented. All three factors (ethnicity, religion, idealism) matter, but idealism isn't enough to unite people, it requires one or two of the other factors prior to it. (Prime example: the "civic nationalism" of the early US only worked because of the prior shared European genetic and cultural heritage.)

My point is related to the impact of AI thus: the less people have a way of feeling like contributing to something greater than them, the less unity the group has. AI is just another factor in the gradual flaking-away of any kind of social glue, and a continuation of capitalism's trend towards atomization. If people don't feel that by their labour they're contributing to something greater than them (if they're even more alienated from their labour), if they're driven to rugged individualism by economic pressure ("now with AI!"), very soon there isn't going to be anything holding anything together. Everyone is then in a Prisoner's Dilemma situation, and we're back to a war of all against all, with the worst possible outcomes for everyone.

Here's another angle: we're used to the idea of smartphones as face-huggers, but if we're moving to a situation where people are interacting more with their pocket face-hugger ("now with AI!") than with each other, that's going to intensify the bad effects of alienation even more. And possibly cause the evolution of genuine self-interested self-awareness in AI.

Here's another point. Recently there's been talk of AI matchmaking. Giving effective control of our reproduction to AI is the worst possible thing that could happen to humanity in its relation to AI, as it would likely also lead to the development of self-interest and self-awareness in AI; it would likely eventually breed humans into being its tools.

Social issues require social remedies, not halting our technological progress in the name of "speaking to each other more" or whatever. The key reason behind atomization of society is the ongoing urbanization of the world's population, not the fact people have smartphones. People never had tightly-knit communities in cities (unless you count street gangs, lol), and you are idealizing the shit out of "contributing to something greater". No, a vegetable seller really didn't feel like he was contributing to "something greater" regardless of the period.