In a post-scarcity solarpunk future, I could imagine some reasonable uses, but that’s not the world we’re living in yet.
AI art has already poisoned the creative environment. I commissioned an artist for my latest solarpunk novel, and they used AI without telling me. I had to scrap that illustration. Then the next person I tried to hire claimed they could do the work without AI but in fact they could not.
All that is to say, fuck generative AI and fuck capitalism!
It also makes a way for the poor to be able to afford to get art to make comics and other things when they otherwise would have been unable to hire artists. Generative ai also allows poor people to write code they couldn’t before because they couldn’t afford the help. It also gives poor people the ability to brainstorm new ideas when they can’t afford a team of consultants.
It helps the poor, just like search engines and the internet. There were people back in those days scared of change as well. Gen ai is a huge equalizer or wealth and power. The vast majority of people using Gen Ai are using it for things that they never would have considered being able to hire someone to do anyway.
And it helps the poor perform heart surgery because they couldn’t afford medical school. And it helps the poor build space craft because they couldn’t afford engineering degrees.
There’s a reason some of these things are done by experienced professionals not some AI kludge. If you really want to fix the problem, allow the poor access to education so they can become professionals in these areas if they so wish. The answer isn’t some AI telling them to put glue on their pizza.
I need a cover for my novel. Hold on real quick while I get this 4 year degree and spend $80k to send an fu to the AI overlords and design it myself.
After that I’ll throw my shovels away and use spoons instead.
Or you could pay someone… There’s a bunch of starting artists who work for cheap. There, saved you $79.5k Sadly your novel won’t sell because it’s been buried by an avalanche of ai generated books. (amazon recently limited the number of books you can self publish to only five per day… Your argument works both ways, why should I study and practice for years to learn to write my own novel (or pay you) when Ai can just generate it for me?
I recently commissioned a logo because AI is terrible at it. Once that becomes good enough, I don’t see myself paying another $100 when I can generate it for nearly free. I had submissions for the logo that were clearly AI generated. It’s the same problem with search, you won’t know what’s human unless you dig. It harms artists, but technology improvement always leaves a trail of industries obsoleted. The technology is here, it makes some work more efficient. If you cripple it now to save jobs, you’ll limit the investment and any future gains due to fear of repeat. I think the key is to look at it as a tool, not a replacement. It can certainly help you flush out your ideas and write a better book.
Gains for who? If Ai does all the art and books and all the artists are broke, the only ones left are the corporations making money, and the ones selling AI/hardware. The rest are left with generic art, and ironically, innovation in art will stall because Ai cannot innovate.
And it’s not being used as a tool, you yourself said that you’ll use it instead of paying an artist. As I said, there’s already a ton of Ai books being churned out, flooding the market. Are you fine with yourself being replaced by Ai because it’s cheaper?
I think at the point AI can “replace” artists, the individual becomes the artist. A much less exclusionary field if you don’t have the drawing ability. It becomes just another advanced paint brush.
The true creatives will still find a way to stick out. The definition of “art” will change.
If the AI isn’t stealing content, then piracy isn’t stealing either.
AI doesn’t steal art. It creates new and unique images, it just uses existing art as inspiration… Like what real artist do.
This is a deliberate misunderstanding I have seen repeatedly. They don’t mean the AI stole art. They mean the training data used to train the ai stole art and is now being used to lever artists out of the workforce because it’s cheaper.
The online scrapers just add whatever can be publicly viewed to their datasets. I fail to see how this is any different from actual artists going on the internet to view art to inspire and influence them. Regardless, what exactly do these artists demand? They can’t fight technology and win, this is a futile battle that has been fought and lost many times before. AI art isn’t going anywhere, it’s here to stay and it’ll only get better. No amount of anti-AI posts is going to change this. What exactly is the ultimate goal here?
There was a lot of stuff that could be publicly viewed that was still under copyright or similar. We spent a good 20 years having artists developed and distribute portfolios online to be marketable to firms. And now the firms have essentially taken their work for free, used it in a way that there aren’t really any protections against legally speaking, without any warning, and monetized the models to make money. All while cutting those same artists out of jobs because the LLM is cheaper.
The ultimate goal is you don’t take something someone made without their knowledge, use it to make profit for you and then tell me to get rekt when I want what I should be entitled to.
These artists aren’t a monolith. Most of them aren’t even unionised. This tech had a varied history but to most of the public this tech is like a year old. They want protections. They want to continue in the career path they made sacrifices to follow. They want a lot of things but the point is regulation would be a good start.
What is the ultimate goal of Generative AI? Because I don’t see a way forward where it’s unregulated use will be beneficial with no detriments to the people upon whose work it was built.
When you start getting into the specifics, it becomes way more complicated. How exactly should these AI companies notify people that their content is being used for their model? First of all, they’re not actually the ones harvesting the data. That scrapers tend to be independent… so these artists are going after the wrong people, unless you expect the AI company to parse through all the data they use to find the rightful owners of everything and ask for their consent, which isn’t really viable, let alone practical. Let’s suppose the artists do go after the scrapers, how exactly do they notify people that their content is being used? The content is collected by an algorithm, how are they supposed to reliably identify the rightful owners of content and ask for their consent? Do they just send automatic messages to any email or phone number they find?
How about this, what if an artist is posting their art on a platform, like say for example Reddit, and that platform agrees to allow the data to scraped and used for AI data training? Does the platform company own the data on the platform or the individual artist? If it is the latter, what’s stopping platforms from modifying their TOS to just claim ownership of anything posted on their platforms? Again, what is the ultimate goal here?
The point is that while I agree that AI has to be regulated, the criticisms and proposed regulations have to specific and pragmatic for them to mean anything. This general hatred of AI and whining by artists and other groups is just noise. It’s just people trying to fight against technology, and as history has shown us before, they will inevitably lose. New technologies have always threatened and displaced well established workers, careers, and industries. For example, lamp lighting used to an actual job, but as the technology improved and light bulbs became a thing, lamplighters became a thing of the past. They tried very hard to resist the change and managed to do so for awhile, but it was a losing battle and they eventually faded away. Economics and technology always win.
That’s kind of the key here, these generative AI’s are the light bulbs of our era. They’ve already replaced a bunch of jobs and radically changing entire industries. There’s no ultimate goal with them and there’s no fighting them. Pandora’s box is open and it’s not going to close. This new technology is still at it’s infancy now, but it’s going to rapidly expand, evolve, and adapt to a bunch of different situations. Whle regulations can help guide this freight train of a technology in the right direction, they can’t stop something with no brakes. As it gets adopted by more and more people and used in more and more spaces, it’s going to alter how we do things kind of like how smartphones or social media did. We have no choice but to evolve with them or else we’ll become the new lamplighters.
Receiving stolen property is still a crime. You can’t hire an independent contractor to draw you Disney characters and use the IP to make money. That’s still illegal.
But that’s not what these generative AIs do. They use actual content for training, but all generations are unique… Just like actual art
You come across as anti-tech out of spite. Yes, generative AI is snake oil, but that is a question of scope and power and speculation, not utility of easy to create pictures.
I am so happy with the vast amount of free art available these days. As a blogger, it’s easier than ever to find a free topical picture.
I am so happy with the vast amount of free art available these days. As a blogger, it’s easier than ever to find a free topical picture.
dirtbag
“hooray convenience, fuck your livelihood.”
“hooray convenience, fuck your livelihood.”
This is literally how everyone behaved when bank tellers were replaced by ATMs, when coal diggers were replaced by drills, when daily laborers were replaced by tractors, when Morse code operators were replaced by the telephone, when travel agents were replaced by websites, when warehouses and factories started delivering you your Amazon package in 1 day instead of 5 because they replaced humans with machines…
And now that technology is coming for artists instead of all the other jobs it replaced so far, now you wanna go back to the way things were?
Get with the times. I don’t wish this situation upon anyone, it’s devastating to see your profession reduced to a few clicks, but it’s silly to say “nah, THIS change is crossing the line”. Hundreds of millions of people before you lost their job to new tech. Let me know when you hire a town crier instead of whipping out your phone and searching for the news, and I’ll hire you for a painting instead of getting AI to apply some paint-like filters on a photo. Until then, I’m sorry but your job is in the process of being rendered obsolete, like so many others before it.
