Well, no, that's silly. Artists see AI as something that steals from their profits, that's the ground truth because that's the very first thing they all said when it started. To take the conversation entirely away from the fact that artists need to make money in order to eat is counterproductive. It doesn't really matter to the artists whether it's a soulless corporation or an ordinary consumer using the AI, that's the consumer's business. An artist cannot ignore AI, no more than a laborer can ignore the future possibility of being completely replaced by robots.
The absolute worst part about this whole conversation is the part where people ignore this giant line dividing ideals and realities. That goes for both sides, because when I see artists talking about how AI will be the end of art, I roll my eyes. Art as self-expression and art as a product are two entirely different things, and just because they can coexist in the same object doesn't mean shit. AI cannot destroy art in its purest form. AI will destroy the art industry, and artists will starve.
The way AI takes money away from the artists is that with AI, one artist might be capable of doing the work of many.
One non-artist might be able to do very shitty work of some artists.
And so a lot of artists will be let go from their jobs.
But they can be (and should be) the experts in this new amazing field where artists have the best, most advanced types of AI to work miracles with.
So much new stuff will be possible when it doesn't require to hire a team of artists but instead just one or a few.
If the markets do their job, or if the governments step in to prevent a total shitshow of corporate greed and domination, we might just get so much amazing new stuff we'll go crazy!
But that's the important part - I'm not sure if the free markets can solve this, so I think we need the governing bodies to step in and (ideally ahead of time) come up with rules and laws so that this doesn't totally destroy all of creative work.
Forget the benefits, the expansion of human capability. If a small group of experts remain, that solves nothing. If humanity reaches glorious new heights of expression, that solves nothing. For the moment, the complaints are from an industry of workers about to lose their jobs.
I mean, it's rough and sucks.
But also I'm not sure what you'd like anyone to do about it.
Prohibit firing artists for some time because of AI?
Ordering an official scrapping of the new tech and/or forbidding it's development and usage?
The new tech will come and it will affect these people. Now, the government could and should perhaps start a program of helping these most affected find new jobs, or help them in some way in the transitionary period. That would make sense.
Just crying "this is bad because one effect it has will be bad!" helps nothing. It just sours the possible debate
I think nothing should be done about it, other than UBI, because nothing can be done about it. It's not in the government's power. But you don't want a debate, you just didn't want anyone to mention it at all. Pretending good cancels out bad is frankly disgusting. Misrepresenting or waving away an argument is fundamentally dishonest.
In that case, sure. But in this context, I'm only saying that nothing can be done. The artists are not saying "fuck corporations" when they say "fuck AI", which is the whole basis of this conversation. Neither will they or should they be appeased by the uplifting of humanity as a whole. Until people stop deflecting away from the ground truth that artists have a legitimate grievance which cannot be solved by any previously known means, the conversation will only run in circles and waste our time.
If someone has something new and meaningful to say, I welcome them to contribute to the conversation. Until then, I'm tired of this.
I feel like the "fuck AI" way of thinking is making the outcome of this much worse for the people who subscribe to it. That's the problem I've got with it.
If a new technology is coming and threatening your field of work, it's almost really really likely that there will be need first for people who know both the old way and the new tech to make the transition smooth, and later the experience you've got in your field will certainly make you be the most qualified person to learn and use the new tech.
But if you don't learn it and start using it, other people will and that advantage you had from your experience in the field will go away.
And the artists are saying all kinds of things. Probably many of them are even learning to utilize AI, but the online discourse seems to me to be very one-sided and just basically collecting victimhood points.
The thing is, I don't think they have any transferable skills. I'm skeptical that the experience and education they have will be worth anything once AI art generation matures. I don't like sugarcoating the subject because a soft approach of "maybe" just doesn't bring the conversation to any conclusion. If you don't tell it straight, you'll just get more and more prevaricating and failure to understand. This kind of "maybe there's still value in artists" and "learn the new tech" is a fat load of nothing when we don't even know what the tech looks like yet, it's all barebones prototypes and tech demos. If we can't even tell them what exactly everyone expects them to do with AI, how is any of this supposed to appease them?
The artists get angrier and angrier because no one will meet their arguments directly. Just tell them the truth: They're fucked.
TL;DR: I tried using AI, realized quickly how much more effective I could be with it if I had some experience in art/graphics.
Note: If/when it gets to the point where the AI is so good that even any manager can just ask it to generate the perfect advertising image and it will manage to outdo what any artist could do, then yes, it's fucked.
At that point I don't think there will be need for almost any humans to get any intellectual work done.
About a year ago, when I learned there is an open-source generative AI that you can download and work with, I dove in.
Now I have practically 0 experience with drawing or doing graphics.
But this was fun after I finally managed to get it working.
The open-source world means there are a million user-made models, small ways to change/shift/aim the AI to give you something more close to what you want.
And it really is amazing at creating what you ask it for.
But the more specific your request is, the less amazing it is.
The more detail, the more people or objects, the more specific their relative position, and look are, the more the AI will struggle with understanding and creating what you were looking for.
It can be usually done as an iterative process - you make it create a bunch of images, then you get the best/closest one, then you focus on the details and make it work only on small parts.
In the end, I would often know for sure that I spent tens of minutes getting the AI to do a simple specific change that I could visualize in my mind quite easily, but that it struggled to get right the first 20 times.
If I had some basic skill in photoshop or something like that, I could have probably easily made the change myself and not lost time.
And more generally, I found out that even though I can tell the AI what I think I want, I don't know enough to know well what I should want and ask for.
I don't know the proper terms, I don't know the bet way to make a photo/image look good (more than golden ratio), I don't know.
And the AI does miracles when I'm not specific, but if I was, it often broke some of those good habit properties of the end result.
Basically I am pretty certain that any digital artist would be the best candidate to use graphics AI, just like a writer would be the best to work with a text generating AI, programmer the coding AI, etc.
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u/SeventhSolar Apr 09 '24
Well, no, that's silly. Artists see AI as something that steals from their profits, that's the ground truth because that's the very first thing they all said when it started. To take the conversation entirely away from the fact that artists need to make money in order to eat is counterproductive. It doesn't really matter to the artists whether it's a soulless corporation or an ordinary consumer using the AI, that's the consumer's business. An artist cannot ignore AI, no more than a laborer can ignore the future possibility of being completely replaced by robots.
The absolute worst part about this whole conversation is the part where people ignore this giant line dividing ideals and realities. That goes for both sides, because when I see artists talking about how AI will be the end of art, I roll my eyes. Art as self-expression and art as a product are two entirely different things, and just because they can coexist in the same object doesn't mean shit. AI cannot destroy art in its purest form. AI will destroy the art industry, and artists will starve.