Will the difference between mass-produced glossy garbage and unique results of sustained human effort and productivity become ever more pronounced, leading to a massive increase in the value of the latter in the eyes of not just connoiseurs, but the masses as well?

The issue is that we were already in a renaissance of craftmanship before AI slop, and the AI slop is displacing it. It's harder and harder for people to get their products seen by consumers.

No. You can’t find good furniture as easily now like you could before Amazon.com for example. It’s all trash that lasts just long enough that you can’t leave a review for it, assuming the company still exists and didn’t restructure.

It's an interesting question, but I'm honestly not sure I see it. You always had plenty of people wanting to become artists and graphic designers and the like, the whole 'starving artist' trope exists for a reason.

Ai has taken a lot of that work and I think that isn't going to reverse. The AI will get better. It will get harder to tell human art from AI art.

The only way that masses are going to have an opinion is if using AI becomes taboo. I think we might be bordering on that in some circles but it's not a full threshold yet and I don't think it will become that.

If anything, it would happen only after "AI" crashes down and provokes a massive social shift. Which might not happen atvall, but then humanity will just disappear so the question won't really matter.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_crash_of_1983 ended all video games, including the good ones.

No because capitalism has an inherent tendency of degrading quality and increasing prices and costs because after all we need to make sure the oligarchs are comfortable.

No. YouTube and DIY maker subs/clubs/communities are more responsible for the current skill levels.

I remember trying to buy a couch during peak covid. Supply chain issues — the dreaded phrase — fucked everything up so bad you couldn’t get one for months. Companies turned to alternate sources for materials to speed things along, got the cheap stuff, never went back. Old supply chains therefore disappeared, new ones were formed. So yeah, we could see a renaissance of craftsmanship, but chances are it’s either too expensive to source truly decent materials, or will be prohibitively expensive for consumers to buy.

Perhaps, I was thinking about it in terms of furniture the other day. Like most people just go for their factory made, flatpack, cheap IKEA or IKEA-like furniture. But at the same time there is a whole industry of craftspeople out there making beautiful furniture by hand. Some people go out of their way to get something carefully crafted just for them, or make something themselves because it adds soul.

Nobody really knows what the future will be like, but I hope there will always be a space for things created with love and soul, no matter what.

Were we? Perhaps in certain indie gaming projects, but the vast majority of things pre-ai in the tech world were like open source SaaS self hostable crippleware “community editions” with some very specific exclusions, and the majority of physical products that were popular were short lived influencer powered e-commerce dropships that lived through podcast sponsorships. Unless I’m missing something, outside of those there were a few diamonds in the rough, but certainly not a renaissance

So nice things will probably just be more expensive in the way that nice unique furniture and things are more expensive?

I think it has the potential for allowing more people to pursue artisanry. Ideally we get the LLMs to start tackling the drudgery so more people are freed up to pusue the work they're passionate about.