... there's been a massive push by companies to replace people (writers, artists, etc) by using AI to create something "good enough" to function for profit...Why is that any worse than automation to replace assembly line workers, kiosks to replace food server order takers and cashiers, or any other of the myriad examples of advancement replacing human labor (the printing press, industrial looms, bulldozers, harvesters, ad nauseam)?
Because art is more valuable than all those other mundane activities.
But I'm also fully on board with going backwards/limiting progress to preserve human dignity.
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... there's been a massive push by companies to replace people (writers, artists, etc) by using AI to create something "good enough" to function for profit...Why is that any worse than automation to replace assembly line workers, kiosks to replace food server order takers and cashiers, or any other of the myriad examples of advancement replacing human labor (the printing press, industrial looms, bulldozers, harvesters, ad nauseam)?
Because "Idiocracy" exists now I guess? And people fear that is where all this automation is taking us.
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If Xenocrat was intending to make the argument that stealing artwork is just 'different' and not 'wrong', then they did so very badly.
than costlessly copying a nonexcludable good.
using without attribution the joke I made at the company water cooler,
If that is what art theft is being considered equivalent to, then the argument is invalid.
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If the end result is unrecognizable as compared to the original art or component art, than the whole argument becomes moot.
No. It really doesn't. There's a huge difference, morally speaking, between "I did nothing wrong" and "you can't actually prove that I did anything wrong". There's another difference between "You cant' prove I did anything wrong" and "you have serious probable cause to prove that I did wrong, but you can't prove that I wronged you."
The thing you are asking about? The thing you are facing, it is the disapproval of the subculture. The subculture disapproves of you because it it obvious that you are doing things that are wrong. The fact that they can't point specifically to which bits of art your picture was stolen from is moot when we all know that you got it out of the Piracy Engine.
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The algorithms aren't doing anything that artists haven't already been doing for centuries.This is laughably wrong/uninformed. The brain is not a computer and it does not function like one.Well...sort of...
The algorithms themselves are broad mathematical models of selected human behaviors (including creating artworks, writing, etc.).
Most folks don't really understand what the broad stacks of intertwined, monstrously complicated equations are doing but it boils down to this. Unfortunately, we've kind of already proven that these algorithms can approximate certain human behaviors. So, it's not as simple as saying headcheese isn't the same as a mdf board full of electronics.
It wouldn't matter if they could do it exactly the same as or even better than - which is something that seems lost to you all.
This is exactly the problem. People who love AI art see it as a product or material good. I swear materialist technocrats are going to destroy the world.
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The algorithms aren't doing anything that artists haven't already been doing for centuries. All art is, to some extent or another, derivative of someone else's art or idea.
The timescales are massively different. In order for an artist to take inspiration from prior art, they must interact with art and contribute to the massively complex web of relations around it.
Artists go to art school, go to museums, purchase art, share ideas in artist spaces, buy art supplies and programs, provide views and likes on forums and places like twitter, and generally do all kinds of things that contribute to the complicated intellectual and commercial sphere of the field of art.
A generative AI that steals art to incorporate into its model does none of that, and can churn out an endless stream of any combination of the input data nearly instantly. It's extractive, and can easily undercut the ability of artists to continue commercially if allowed to copy styles and compete against the original artists.
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If the end result is unrecognizable as compared to the original art or component art, than the whole argument becomes moot.No. It really doesn't. There's a huge difference, morally speaking, between "I did nothing wrong" and "you can't actually prove that I did anything wrong". There's another difference between "You cant' prove I did anything wrong" and "you have serious probable cause to prove that I did wrong, but you can't prove that I wronged you."
The thing you are asking about? The thing you are facing, it is the disapproval of the subculture. The subculture disapproves of you because it it obvious that you are doing things that are wrong. The fact that they can't point specifically to which bits of art your picture was stolen from is moot when we all know that you got it out of the Piracy Engine.
That's the equivalent of one artist demonizing another artist because the latter also used a brush and red paint in their work.
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Why is that any worse than automation to replace assembly line workers, kiosks to replace food server order takers and cashiers, or any other of the myriad examples of advancement replacing human labor (the printing press, industrial looms, bulldozers, harvesters, ad nauseam)?
Because the entire thing is running off of plagiarism and piracy. That is the problem. If they were running everything off of images that were public-domain and/or marked as acceptable use, it wouldn't be an issue. Like, the artists would still be having difficulties, sure, but it wouldn't be because people were stealing from them and then outcompeting them with the results of said theft.
Because art is more valuable than all those other mundane activities.
This is flatly untrue, and honestly somewhat offensive. Art isn't special. People who do normal, boring, practical, necessary things aren't lesser just because they're not artists.
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It's messed up that Capitalism has made "a computer can do your job now, so you have more free time to do whatever you want" into a bad thing.
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Art isn't special. People who do normal, boring, practical, necessary things aren't lesser just because they're not artists.
I agree that non-artists aren't "less than," but stating art is not special is incorrect. Without art, culture would not exist.
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It's messed up that Capitalism has made "a computer can do your job now, so you have more free time to do whatever you want" into a bad thing.
Anyone who thought technology was going to bring liberation is naive beyond saving.
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That's the equivalent of one artist demonizing another artist because the latter also used a brush and red paint in their work.
You have asked why everyone is offended. We have told you why everyone is offended, and (in many cases) added on that we ourselves are offended. Your response here can be effectively translated as "But they're wrong and I'm right." It's not actually germane to the initial question, and experience and pattern recognition from previous iterations of similar situations suggests that it's unlikely to be correct
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... there's been a massive push by companies to replace people (writers, artists, etc) by using AI to create something "good enough" to function for profit...Why is that any worse than automation to replace assembly line workers, kiosks to replace food server order takers and cashiers, or any other of the myriad examples of advancement replacing human labor (the printing press, industrial looms, bulldozers, harvesters, ad nauseam)?
Up until now, automation has typically replaced jobs that people didn't want to do and there were enough other jobs that those displaced could switch into.
We're rapidly reaching the point where automation to displace jobs is getting to the point where it could destabilize the global economy, and people are starting to seriously question how to handle that automation. There are proposals for robot taxes that help offset the impact to society of those lost jobs.
AI replacing artists is part of that same discussion. So in short: AI art replacing artists isn't really worse than other automation in the grand scheme as we approach technostate feudalism. It's more apparent because people generally see art as a calling whereas tightening a bolt on an assembly line was seen as an interchangeable gig with any other physical labor.
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RD, I really think you knew better than to create this thread and that you already know the answer... I was hesitant to participate and thought better of it but I just can't resist after seeing some of the downright silly discussion that's already taking place.
The shade is an extension of the signaling that creatives and artists who are threatened by the developments by way of them appealing to their fans and communities with forceful pushback, misunderstanding, and misinformation via their own individual platforms and social media which then deciminates through their communities much like a game of fake news telephone.
Copyright, as it exists now is just fully and completely unprepared to rule on AI art or protect against it. The only thing that actual law or rulings have done thus far relate to the fact that AI art and creations are so far outside of the framework and use case for this stuff that creations made ENTIRELY by AI cannot claim or be awarded their own copyright unless they undergo some "significant" human alterations and updates afterward.
I, for one, welcome our AI robot overlords. I only hope it stays and comes more open source rather than being sucked up by corporate tech entities to be entirely commoditized but right now, it's looking like it's probably going to go that way anyhow, and without our lifetime we will probably see something new that is as big and everpresent in our lives relating to AI much like how Google does for web services or Amazon does for online shopping/marketplaces.
Anyhow, that's all I have to say before this entire thread gets locked due to sniping, bait, trolling, misinformation, arguments, and edging into politics.
o7
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I should also note that AI art gets actually pretty bad when using open databases, as AI images generally get worse the more AI art they sample. Kind of like how recording a song on like a phone, then playing it back and recording it again will lower the quality. So it's ultimately without a proper database that has been curated (which most people big on AI don't want) it's ultimately a parasitic technology as it needs non ai art to stay high quality.
The ability for these algorithms to effectively poison themselves is part of what makes me moderately hopeful about the near future. Things are going to get worse before they get better though.
I've never paid for character art and didn't do so before AI art became a thing. I either didn't use art at all or grabbed a good enough picture from the internet and used that. AI art, for personal use, isn't any worse than either of those things.It's a difference of degree. What AI platforms do is like what Napster did; take a slow, low tragedy of the commons problem and crank on it to create a fast, big tragedy of the commons problem. And very much like that case where the industry went after the copying 'engines' while not bothering with the issue of individuals sharing copies of music with each other, I expect that here the industry will focus on these content-scraping 'engines' while leaving the constant background 'noise' of casual, individual image-copy-and-paste alone.
So everyone enjoy your free loot while you can, because while you will never be prevented from copying a picture from pinterest and adding it to your character sheet, I predict that in a few years all the AI programs will be fee-for-service with some of the money going back to the artists...and consequently, the number of people who use these programs will go way down as the casual users who were in it for the free content now won't want to pay a fee to get that same content.
Digital music has been a massive win for listeners and artists alike. If AI art turns out anything like that we should all be happy.
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Alice creates a sprite sorceress picture using brush and paint and sells the copyright to use it's digital capture to various companies for $20 a pop. Bob creates an orc barbarian picture using brush and paint and does the same. Now along comes RavingDork, and with his program he scrapes Sprite Sorceress (not paying the fee for use) and Orc Barbarian (again, not paying the fee for use), to create a digital Sprite Barbarian image
But, if I saw 100 different sprites and barbarians and made my own such that it matched the conceptual image of both categories it'd be fine right? Because that's effectively what's happening here. The machine builds a concept of what x looks like based on input data telling it what x looks like. You or I wouldn't know what a sprite or a barbarian are supposed to look like either until we're given some sort of description or reference image for them.
So the machine, armed with a veritable library of "known" concepts can reliably produce images matching those concepts, to one degree or another. If you ask someone to draw a horse, they can. If you ask someone who has only ever seen others' drawings of horses, they can, and it's not considered theft. Nor should it be here in my opinion.
Properly paid for digital & downloadable music has been a huge win for everyone. The ability of new musicians to offer their music free for download in order to build up recognition and a fan base has also been a huge win for everyone. But the current generative AI programs are neither. They are napster-like. Even worse: they are napster with the composer or composing group's name stripped off the music, so that you couldn't figure out who wrote it and buy more of their stuff even if you wanted to.It's a difference of degree. What AI platforms do is like what Napster did...Digital music has been a massive win for listeners and artists alike. If AI art turns out anything like that we should all be happy.
Yes, but without Napster and its P2P ilk, the digital revolution would have stalled and taken longer. Companies don't change their business model unless their current model becomes threatened.
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That's the equivalent of one artist demonizing another artist because the latter also used a brush and red paint in their work.You have asked why everyone is offended. We have told you why everyone is offended, and (in many cases) added on that we ourselves are offended. Your response here can be effectively translated as "But they're wrong and I'm right." It's not actually germane to the initial question, and experience and pattern recognition from previous iterations of similar situations suggests that it's unlikely to be correct
Agreed. I have made my thoughts known. The thread is devolving into trolling territory. I'm out.
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Yes, but without Napster and its P2P ilk, the digital revolution would have stalled and taken longer. Companies don't change their business model unless their current model becomes threatened.So your defense of these Generative AI programs amounts to: you agree they are doing something blatantly illegal, but you see using them for blatantly illegal activity as moral and ethical because oh those big bad corporate artists ought to change their business model? Because 'Big Fantasy Art' is keeping the little man down?
That is not at all what I have said. I've merely made note that sometimes a disruption that current laws are ill-equipped to handle can have positive results. AI art may have a worse impact if only because it doesn't seem poised to create a new model that benefits the masses. Movies have already gone digital and now we're seeing the downsides of that change. AI art will only make lazier mass-produced movies more attractive to studios who need no incentive to further favor sequels and remakes over original IPs.
On the other hand, AI art could advance to a point where it produces excellent results from small sample sets. Such an advance could allow a small team of creatives to create an animated movie based on concept art and live-action film and that would be a net positive. It remains to be seen which outcome comes to pass and it might be that both mass-produced AI slop and home-grown projects alike make use of this technology to different ends.
Correct! It's a difference of degree and method. But those differences matter - for the viability of art as a subject, for the people making a living at it, for how the market will work for new art, for properly recognizing whose talent and hard work created some new wonderful human social thing, for all sorts of important human social reasons.
As I said in another post, this is a tragedy of the commons problem. All of the "artists taking inspiration from other people's works and using that inspiration to create new art", combined are like 1 sheep. They aren't a risk to how the commons works. Just a few generative AI programs is like a whole flock. It is a risk. But when you or someone else asks 'but what's the difference between any one sheep in the flock and that lone sheep we had before', the answer is 'no difference, same animal.' Still, the law can easily treat human sheep-generators and computational flock-generators differently. So I expect that is what will happen in the future.
Why should we care that this technology is disruptive within the narrow band of capitalism that society currently operates within? No system lasts forever and one can imagine both better and worse societies arising from the inevitable explosion of automated labor in all fields. This change becomes even greater once we imagine what the rapid colonization of space will do to supply chains and the notion of scarcity and ownership of land.
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Why should we care that this technology is disruptive within the narrow band of capitalism that society currently operates within? No system lasts forever and one can imagine both better and worse societies arising from the inevitable explosion of automated labor in all fields. This change becomes even greater once we imagine what the rapid colonization of space will do to supply chains and the notion of scarcity and ownership of land.
Well, we care about technology being disruptive within our current band because it causes real problems for real people who are ambushed by changes in the environment that are happening faster than they can adjust to. Like, people who've invested significant amounts of effort into actually getting good at creating art, with the expectation that they'd be able to use that as a way of helping to pay rent, now find that this technology is threatening that, in a way that they could not reasonably have predicted when they actually made that investment in artistic skill.
Now, we also exist as part of a culture that has seen many waves of this kind of disruption pass over us, and seen that it often brings long-term benefits once you get over the short-term pain. That's why no one's really trying to put the genie back in the bottle on this one... because we know that "reject technological development out of hand" isn't the correct answer to this issue.
At the same time, the pain is there... and in this particular case, the AI is literally running on crime. So the flip side of this is that we have a weirdly shaped black box that runs on crime that is causing real problems for real people... so we're maybe not so much a fan of that, even if there are people benefiting from said crime.
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Well, we care about technology being disruptive within our current band because it causes real problems for real people who are ambushed by changes in the environment that are happening faster than they can adjust to. Like, people who've invested significant amounts of effort into actually getting good at creating art, with the expectation that they'd be able to use that as a way of helping to pay rent, now find that this technology is threatening that, in a way that they could not reasonably have predicted when they actually made that investment in artistic skill.
Then you should campaign for Universal Basic Income to insulate people from such changes. That's the best way to allow for these large-scale without hurting people's live's in the here and now.
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... there's been a massive push by companies to replace people (writers, artists, etc) by using AI to create something "good enough" to function for profit...Why is that any worse than automation to replace assembly line workers, kiosks to replace food server order takers and cashiers, or any other of the myriad examples of advancement replacing human labor (the printing press, industrial looms, bulldozers, harvesters, ad nauseam)?Up until now, automation has typically replaced jobs that people didn't want to do and there were enough other jobs that those displaced could switch into.
We're rapidly reaching the point where automation to displace jobs is getting to the point where it could destabilize the global economy, and people are starting to seriously question how to handle that automation. There are proposals for robot taxes that help offset the impact to society of those lost jobs.
AI replacing artists is part of that same discussion. So in short: AI art replacing artists isn't really worse than other automation in the grand scheme as we approach technostate feudalism. It's more apparent because people generally see art as a calling whereas tightening a bolt on an assembly line was seen as an interchangeable gig with any other physical labor.
Very simple solution, tax AI and automation replacing jobs and use the $ for unemployment, education, health care and retirement. The only thing in the way are rich people benefiting from replacing jobs with AI and automation.
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Then you should campaign for Universal Basic Income to insulate people from such changes. That's the best way to allow for these large-scale without hurting people's live's in the here and now.
UBI seems rather outside of the scope of this particular discussion... and veers dangerously close to Dread Politics.
That said, I'm not fundamentally opposed to UBI-based solutions, if they can be made to work properly. I just note that all such things are pretty much inherently messy. Also... good luck? I mean, maybe we'll get there eventually, but AI Gen is working on setting people's lives on fire right now.
Then you should campaign for Universal Basic Income to insulate people from such changes. That's the best way to allow for these large-scale without hurting people's live's in the here and now.UBI seems rather outside of the scope of this particular discussion... and veers dangerously close to Dread Politics.
That said, I'm not fundamentally opposed to UBI-based solutions, if they can be made to work properly. I just note that all such things are pretty much inherently messy.
AI art is politics. The only reason we care about the theft of IP is for economic reasons and economics and politics walk hand-in-hand. UBI solves the current main issue caused by AI art hence my suggestion.
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If you want to try and make the argument that dipping a basket of frys into a deep fat fryer and painting the Sistine Chapel have equal value as actions/activities you're welcome to take a crack at it.I somehow find that I can't come up with a direct response to this that is both honest and not baiting. So... enjoy thinking that, I guess.Be offended then.
The PEOPLE might not be lesser, but what they DO is.
I used to be a fry cook and a dishwasher before that. I've also designed and built 4 gigawatts of solar power. Was the lead technician in a pharmaceutical factory. Designed, built, and programmed a virtual world by myself. During the pandemic was the reason you had any food at all on your grocery store shelves. I've started a publishing company, owned a roller derby team, and played in a band best known for... finding creative ways to get publicity. The one thing I haven't done is get a college education. I walked out of my high-paying pharmaceutical job because the business was too corrupt for me, so went to a low-level job in an all-organic grocery store, that wasn't destroying the world or profiting off keeping people sick.
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That said, I'm not fundamentally opposed to UBI-based solutions, if they can be made to work properly.
If I ever hear of one that isn't at its core, "It will be awesome. No one will have to work and we can all be rich together." Then I might be interested. Until then, I'm relegating this to the same bin as perpetual motion machines.
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AI art is politics. The only reason we care about the theft of IP is for economic reasons and economics and politics walk hand-in-hand. UBI solves the current main issue caused by AI art hence my suggestion.
So... it solves one of the major issues. Lack of Purpose is also very much a problem in our current culture, though. Just giving people money... sometimes helps with that.
That all said, an honest political calculus says that it's not a solution that's going to be implemented any time soon. In the meantime, we have generative AI out here disrupting lives right now. So UBI might be shiny, and if we had it, it might make this less of an issue, but that doesn't really have any sort of bearing on the problem at hand.
If I ever hear of one that isn't at its core, "It will be awesome. No one will have to work and we can all be rich together." Then I might be interested. Until then, I'm relegating this to the same bin as perpetual motion machines.
The ones I've heard have been more like "you ought to be able to barely scrape by without also having to grind your internal resources down to nothing in a soul-destroying job for the privilege" rather than "we can all be rich together", but there's still a bunch of potentially problematic details to work out.
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That all said, an honest political calculus says that it's not a solution that's going to be implemented any time soon. In the meantime, we have generative AI out here disrupting lives right now. So UBI might be shiny, and if we had it, it might make this less of an issue, but that doesn't really have any sort of bearing on the problem at hand.
Then the solution is to wait a decade while rulings worm their way through courts, are challenged, and new laws are finally drafted. By the time that happens the situation will have changed enough that the issue the laws and court cases were designed to prevent aren't relevant. That's as effective as campaigning for UBI in that it also does nothing to solve the immediate issue while also not solving future issues either.
The ones I've heard have been more like "you ought to be able to barely scrape by without also having to grind your internal resources down to nothing in a soul-destroying job for the privilege" rather than "we can all be rich together", but there's still a bunch of potentially problematic details to work out.
If people are willing to accept mass-produced housing, mass-produced single models of vehicle (two-seat city car, five-seat family sedan, eight-seat van, truck), and fewer brands of food you can get current standards of living down to pennies on the current dollar. The issue is generating the will to do this and having that will be greater than incentives to keep the status quo.
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... there's been a massive push by companies to replace people (writers, artists, etc) by using AI to create something "good enough" to function for profit...Why is that any worse than automation to replace assembly line workers, kiosks to replace food server order takers and cashiers, or any other of the myriad examples of advancement replacing human labor (the printing press, industrial looms, bulldozers, harvesters, ad nauseam)?
One thing to consider is the difference in fields here. Creative fields are the big difference - automation in the form of the printing press hasn't done anything to say, calligraphy, because automation can't do that. Automation is only really able to cover tasks that can be done simply, whereas there's also still a market for hand-done and custom work of all types.
Generative AI takes that and stifles creativity because you can mimic hand-done work on the cheap, thanks to it stealing and copying the work of those that had come before it. It's also self-devouring, because you can have infinite levels of standard automation without affecting anything, while AI work can't sustain itself without non-AI people feeding it. It can't create something new - taking an example from a recent show, it can't imagine stars in a sky that has never had any.