>If I could print 30 rings a day, my partner wouldn't want any of them as a show of my undying love. Something more special and rare and thoughtful would have to take its place.
And now I think this serves the opposite argument better. Downloading some random ring from the internet would not show your undying love. Designing a custom ring just for your partner, even if it is made from plastic, and even if you use AI as a tool in the process, is where the value is generated.
> This is only true where it is distinguishable that the end result is made with care and love rather than indiscriminate copying. Which is why attribution is essential. No one realistically could tell a ring was hand crafted or mass produced if there wasn't some tell.
It doesn't matter if the ring was hand crafted or not. It's whether it has hand selected. If you find the perfect ring, even if it was generated by an AI, it's your selection that matters. It's the correspondence that matters. The way it reflects elements of your relationship. It's you recognising those elements in the ring. Your partner recoginising them in the ring. And your partner recognising you recognising them. That is what makes itself.
Not to dox myself, but I am not Grace Abrams. I met my partner long before her song "Risk" was written, but when I heard it I immediately played it for my partner and said "This describes the feelings I had when I met you". I played it for her, she cried. I didn't have to write the song or own or pay a cent for it. It's the curation that made an emotional connection and had value. The song itself has no value, and she might have even heard it and never made the connection, it was me embuing that had value.
To go back to Miyazaki, it's the connections between elements in his films. The attention to detail and tone between relationships that make his films amazing. It's all about the handyman's invoice [0]. By the time there are enough examples for AI to learn something, it ceases to be a novel insight and have value. It's the curation and application that have value and are human and cannot be stolen.
This is only true where it is distinguishable that the end result is made with care and love rather than indiscriminate copying. Which is why attribution is essential. No one realistically could tell a ring was hand crafted or mass produced if there wasn't some tell. Some people may say the "tell" is a kind of intuitive nebulous concept of the "soul" of the animation.. but I feel we are quickly approaching the point where this is no longer obvious.
As an aside, my partner detests the things I 3d print unless they have a very specific purpose, even when they are random semi artistic pieces I'm tinkering with (and I typically agree, they are junk). She loves the first thing i ever printed her though, a triceratops model, despite being randomly downloaded.
Anything made with intent from one individual to another will have some level of sentimental value, but I don't feel like making a ghibli image with AI specifically tailored to a friends tastes would have quite as much value as leveraging your own talent to do it yourself.
On the flip side, I do believe that "doing it yourself" has less value than it used to. It's a very sad reality and in my opinion a strong argument against blind "progress". We gain the ability to mass produce art but lose the ability to perceive it as art?