I've come face to face multiple times with the idea that lack of access hinders creative expression. While I believe that there is some merit to the statement, I also believe that most of us are simply not that creative to begin with.

I'm talking in context of the recent GenAI flood.

The means to "write" was supposedly democratized with ChatGPT 3. Now everyone had a language model at their fingertips. What did it result in? More slop. Your social media feeds got polluted with LLM vomited texts with no heads or tails - a fragile string of garbled up words linked by nothing more than a probability of occurrence.

Next, the means to create art was democratized. Image models could now be summoned to generate art and almost realistic looking images within a matter of few seconds to minutes. So what did we generate? I rather not get into that.

The means to create videos were also democratized. What happens next? AI generated misinformation, advertisements, nonsensical animated stories.

Underneath every Twitter post, we have users commenting "@grok is this true?" Underneath many pictures, we have fellow humans asking Grok to generate an explicit variant of that pic. Cat videos are replaced with AI generated animal videos. This isn't what these systems promised.

Almost 3 years since ChatGPT launched publicly and it hasn't yet replaced creativity. The big barrier is that people don't know what to generate. Until that remains true, GenAI is only going to be used to generate slop.

Even if an LLM can spit out a story that matches writing styles of most celebrated authors, does the user have a concept that matches up to an author like Hemingway? If you can create art with AI, do you have the creativity to think of something like Springtime? Yes, AI is supposedly making movies now, but does your movie theme come anywhere close to what Studio Ghibli has produced?

Literature has never waited for LLMs. Great poems have been written even before paper existed: Rabia slit her wrist to write her final poem on the walls of her hamam with her blood. Creativity hasn't waited for a probabilistic word generator to become accessible. The greatest art has been embedded into grand architecture around the world which inspire awe like no AI art can ever.

I know few (2) people who are into art. While I have personally never gone beyond simple sketches of anime characters, I have wondered whether art is an expensive hobby. Those fancy pens cost $$$. Fancy pens need fancy paper. Fancy paper is best adorned with fancy colors.

Doesn't the $$$ add up too much?

I was surprised to see how much $$$ could be saved by using a digital tablet. A friend of mine was creating digital art on a basic PC and the cheapest Wacom off of Amazon. Not just creating, but even taking commissions and making a side income out of it. He did spend in other ways - attending an actual art school and buying lots of physical art supplies for practicing. But the real cost wasn't the school or his supplies; it can't be measured in currencies. The cost was the time and effort he put into practicing his skill and choosing an unorthodox career path amidst this uncertainty.

I corrected myself. Art needs some $$$ investment, but simply $$$ will not make you an artist. Whether I lend you a cheap watercolor brush, a top of the line digital tablet or a best image generation model on the market - the limits of what you can create is dictated by your own mind, not the tools you own.