A Berlin-based prompt artist wins a category of Sony World Photography Awards, and because he’d submitted to make a point, refuses the prize.

This is the tip of iceberg in two ways:

• This conscentious objector will be the rare exception that reveals what they did. Most AI-generated content will (and already has) win the prize and take the money without saying anything, or pass generated work off as if it was human-created, or take their spot on the front page of HN.
• This is just the beginning. It’s going to get more widespread and much worse.

Why does it matter? This is going to cheapen content in a fundamental way. News outlets, social media platforms, and Google search results are going to be flooded with this stuff. Even employers trying to pay for original writing or art will have a hard time telling if the person is lying and just turning in GPT output. There will be job losses. Arguably, they’re here already.

Long term, there will be a loss in human aspiration. Remember how your parents or grandparents knew how to build things in their garage or be able to make/repair clothes, and now almost no one does as we replaced those skills with fast fashion and Amazon.com? How many kids can we expect to spend the thousands of hours learning to write, draw, or make music when they can accomplish better results with instant gratification by prompting GPT? Many would contend that this is fine, humans don’t need to be doing that stuff. But to that I would ask two questions:

1. In a hyper competitive world, what exactly are your kids going to have that separates them from everyone else?
2. What exactly are we doing with all that saved time? More YouTube? More TikTok? The Star Trek: The Next Generation future where people master the violin in their spare time does not appear to be forthcoming.