AI art steals from the poor and has no place in modern society
AI art steals from the poor and has no place in modern society
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.
AI is a lot like plastic:
It is versatile and easy to use. There are some cases for which it is the highest quality product for the job; but for most cases it is just a far cheaper alternative, with bit of a quality reduction.
So what we end up with is plastic being used a lot, to reduce costs and maximise profits; but mostly the products it is used for are worse than they would otherwise be. They look worse. They degrade faster. They produce mountains of waste that end up contaminating every food source of every animal in the world. As a species, we want to use it less; but individual companies and people continue to use it for everything because it is cheap and convenient.
I think AI will be the same. It is relatively cheap and convenient. It can be used for a very wide range of things, and does a pretty good job. But in most cases it is not quite as good as what we were doing before. In any case, AI output will dominate everything we consume because of how cheap and easy it is. News, reviews, social media comments, web searches, all sorts of products... a huge proportion will be AI created - and although we'll wish they weren't (because of the unreliable quality), it will be almost impossible to avoid; because its easier to produce 1000 articles with AI than a single one by a human. So people will churn junk and hope to get lucky rather than putting in work to insure high quality.
For individual people creating stuff, the AI makes it easier and faster and cheaper; and can create good results. But for the world as a whole, we'll end up choking on a mountain of rubbish, as we now have to wade through vastly more low-quality works to find what we're looking for. It will contaminate everything we consume, and we won't be able to get rid of it.
Link to the full Penny Arcade comic: https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2024/07/01/jobophage
I feel like enjoying AI "art" is the same entertainment type as scrolling through Facebook or TikTok. Fine to kill time, but nothing that will improve our lives. In other words It's a perfect media for the future to get addicted to, and get nothing done.
To the "but what about copyright abolition" people:
There's a clear difference between someone making a meme with an image they taken out of context, or a musician using a sample taken from a song the original artist never seen a single penny from it, or an artist making a fanart of their favorite character, and the AI industry scraping all of it and selling it as a "better, more advanced replacement" of all of it.
AI doesn't steal any more than you stole from your learning material.
Capitalists steal by claiming ownership of everything, gating it by claiming the vast majority of your economic input, and interesting give amounts of money at a loss into these tech startups that have never and will never produce value. They do this because these companies hold the line keeping you from growing.
AI art has a very real place in current society. It's very useful, and is absolutely going to get better and become a normal part of the future. We're not going to avoid it, so we should work on making AI less morally fucked. The technology isn't the problem, the people behind it are. Rather than stealing art, the multi-million/billion-dollar companies behind these models need to pay artists for every single piece of art they use in their models.
I think the way forward is to label and be honest about AI.
So to your point OP, I agree, using AI art is fine, but lying about it is bad just like lying about your vendors.
Oh look, it’s Mira Murati!
What happens when AI advances to the point where it can do everything it does today (and more) without using copyrighted training material?
This is inevitable (and in fact some models already use only licensed training data), so I think it's a bad idea to focus so much on this angle. If what you're really worried about is the economic impact, then this is a dead-end argument. By the time any laws pass, it will likely be irrelevant because nobody will be doing that anyway. Or only the big corporations who own the copyrights to a bajillion properties (e.g. Disney) will do it in-house and everyone else will be locked out. That's the exact opposite of what we should be fighting for.
The concept of "art" changes based on technology. I remember when I first starting fiddling with simple paint programs, just scribbling a little shape and using the paint-bucket tool to fill in a gradient blew my mind. Making in image like that 100 years prior would have been a real achievement. Instead of took me a minute of idle experimentation.
Same thing happened with CGI, synthesizers, etc. Is sampling music "art"? Depends what you do with it. AI should be treated the same way. What is the (human) artist actually contributing to the work? This can be quantified.
Typing "cat wearing sunglasses" into Dall-E will give you an image that would have been art if it were made 100 years ago. But any artistry now is limited to the prompt. I can't copyright the concept of a cat wearing sunglasses, so I have no claim to such an image generated from such a simple prompt.
the first rule of the server is to be constructive, you may want to keep that in mind when posting
control of ai by capital is bad, we all know that on this server; what are the next steps then? this is what solarpunks should ask themselves (first of all they -artists- prob need to unionize their workplace, for those not freelance, to ensure their jobs)
also those artists who used ai without telling you just want to get by their lives and are costrained by the system as you and as me
Is this what Penny Arcade looks like nowadays? Man I really dislike the shift in art style…Tycho looks grotesque
So AI is invalidating capitalism because it's showing that people's value shouldn't be tied to what they can produce... And you're mad at that too? It's so weird to me to see people mad that AI is not allowing them to participate in capitalism when they themselves have a dislike for capitalism. Like... I understand the immediate problem is because of AI... but it's highlighting so beautifully the main problem of capitalism. Which is the real problem.
AI is like the climate change of the economy. We all knew automation was coming and would be the death knell for capitalism. But now that it's one or the other, people are choosing capitalism because it's what they know. Even people that are still outspoken anti-capitalist! What we should be fighting for is more open sourced models and AI projects.
Every artist complaining about AI art is like John Henry.
If AI is stealing because it's using art in it's learning algorithm, then so is every artist who has studied other artists for inspiration. AI just happens to do it a hell of a lot faster, kind of like how all technology does when it replaces any other form of labor. And while AI art can't compete with the top 0.1% of artists, it can certainly compete with the bottom 99.9%, and it can produce thousands of images in the time it takes an artist to produce 1, which is plenty good enough for most applications.
No. AI art isn't going anywhere. It's too convenient and we're not going to reverse course just to save jobs, something we have never done in the advancement of technology. No one stopped the steam engine driving railroad spikes because they wanted John Henry to keep his job. No one stopped the printing press because they were concerned about scribes. No one stopped the DVD because they were worried about what VRC repair men would do afterwards.
AI art is a tool, and it's here to stay. Adapt or fall victim to the progress of technology. "AI art is sTEaLiNg" is some desperate nonsense that I think even those making it know deep down is BS. It's the only argument being made because all the technical ones about quality, speed, and availability have quickly fallen flat. AI art is higher quality, faster, and more accessible to users than regular art and it's not even a question. So all they have left is "it's theft!" while conveninetly ignoring that it's the same fucking thing they did to learn art, just in a much faster, more optimized way.
"If you have the facts on your side, pound the facts; if you have the law on your side, pound the law; if you have neither the facts nor the law, pound the table." Artists are firmly in the table pounding stage.
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.
