Comment by hannasanarion

Comment by hannasanarion 2 days ago

19 replies

> All of these AI outputs are both polluting the commons where they pulled all their training data AND are alienating the creators of these cultural outputs via displacement of labor and payment

No dispute on the first part, but I really wish there were numbers available somehow to address the second. Maybe it's my cultural bubble, but it sure feels like the "AI Artpocalypse" isn't coming, in part because of AI backlash in general, but more specifically because people who are willing to pay money for art seem to strongly prefer that their money goes to an artist, not a GPU cluster operator.

I think a similar idea might be persisting in AI programming as well, even though it seems like such a perfect use case. Anthropic released an internal survey a few weeks ago that was like, the vast majority, something like 90% of their own workers AI usage, was spent explaining allnd learning about things that already exist, or doing little one-off side projects that otherwise wouldn't have happened at all, because of the overhead, like building little dashboards for a single dataset or something, stuff where the outcome isn't worth the effort of doing it yourself. For everything that actually matters and would be paid for, the premier AI coding company is using people to do it.

kurthr 2 days ago

I guess I'm in a bubble, because it doesn't feel that way to me.

When AI tops the charts (in country music) and digital visual artists have to basically film themselves working to prove that they're actually creating their art, it's already gone pretty far. It feels like the even when people care (and they great mass do not) it creates problems for real artists. Maybe they will shift to some other forms of art that aren't so easily generated, or maybe they'll all just do "clean up" on generated pieces and fake brush sequences. I'd hate for art to become just tracing the outlines of something made by something else.

Of course, one could say the same about photography where the art is entirely in choosing the place, time, and exposure. Even that has taken a hit with believable photorealistic generators. Even if you can detect a generator, it spoils the field and creates suspicion rather than wonder.

musicale 2 days ago

> people who are willing to pay money for art seem to strongly prefer that their money goes to an artist, not a GPU cluster operator

Businesses which don't want to pay money strongly prefer AI.

  • sureglymop 2 days ago

    Yeah but if they, for example use AI to do their design or marketing materials then the public seems to dislike that. But again, no numbers that's just how it feels to me.

    • solumunus 4 hours ago

      After enough time, exposure and improvement of the technology I don’t think the public will know or care. There will be generations born into a world full of AI art who know no better and don’t share the same nostalgia as you or I.

  • heavyset_go 2 days ago

    Then they get a product that legally isn't theirs and anyone can do anything with it. AI output isn't anyone's IP, it can't be copyrighted.

    • windexh8er a day ago

      What's hilarious is that, for years, the enterprise shied away from open source due to the legal considerations they were concerned about. But now... With AI, even though everyone knows that copyright material was stolen by every frontier provider, the enterprise is now like: stolen copyright that can potentially allow me to get rid of some pesky employees? Sign us up!

      • heavyset_go 11 hours ago

        Yup, there's this angle that's been a 180, but I'm referring to the fact that the US Copyright Office determined that AI output isn't anyone's IP.

        Which in itself is an absurdity, where the culmination of the world's copyrighted content is compiled and used to then spit out content that somehow belongs to no one.

      • [removed] a day ago
        [deleted]
    • semi-extrinsic a day ago

      No difference from e.g. Shutterstock, then?

      I think most businesses using AI illustrations are not expecting to copyright the images themselves. The logos and words that are put on top of the AI image are the important bits to have trademarked/copyrighted.

      • heavyset_go 12 hours ago

        I guess I'm looking at it from a software perspective, where code itself is the magic IP/capital/whatever that's crucial to the business, and replacing it with non-IP anyone can copy/use/sell would be a liability and weird choice.

clickety_clack 2 days ago

Art is political more than it is technical. People like Banksy’s art because it’s Banksy, not because he creates accurate images of policemen and girls with balloons.

  • majormajor 2 days ago

    I think "cultural" is a better word there than "political."

    But Banksy wasn't originally Banksy.

    I would imagine that you'll see some new heavily-AI-using artists pop up and become name brands in the next decade. (One wildcard here could be if the super-wealthy art-speculation bubble ever pops.)

    Flickr, etc, didn't stop new photographers from having exhibitions and being part of the regular "art world" so I expect the easy availability of slop-level generated images similarly won't change that some people will do it in a way that makes them in-demand and popular at the high end.

    At the low-to-medium end there are already very few "working artists" because of a steady decline after the spread of recorded media.

    Advertising is an area where working artists will be hit hard but is also a field where the "serious" art world generally doesn't consider it art in the first place.

    • ehnto a day ago

      Not often discussed is the digital nature of this all as well. An LLM isn't going to scale a building to illegally paint a wall. One because it can't, but two because the people interested in performance art like that are not bound by corporate. Most of this push for AI art is going to come from commercial entities doing low effort digital stuff for money not craft.

      Musicians will keep playing live, artists will keep selling real paintings, sculptors will keep doing real sculptures etc.

      The internet is going to suffer significantly for the reasons you point out. But the human aspect of art is such a huge component of creative endeavours, the final output is sometimes only a small part of it.

    • Uehreka a day ago

      Mentioning people like Banksy at all is missing the point though. It makes it sound like art is about going to museums and seeing pieces (or going to non-museums where people like Banksy made a thing). I feel like, particularly in tech circles, people don’t recognize that the music, movies and TV shows they consume are also art, and that the millions of people who make those things are very legitimately threatened by this stuff.

      If it were just about “the next Banksy” it would be less of a big deal. Many actors, visual artists, technical artists, etc make their living doing stock image/video and commercials so they can afford rent while keeping their skills sharp enough to do the work they really believe in (which is often unpaid or underpaid). Stock media companies and ad agencies are going to start pumping out AI content as soon as it looks passable for their uses (Coca Cola just did this with their yearly Christmas ad). Suddenly the cinematographers who can only afford a camera if it helps pay the bills shooting commercials can’t anymore.

      Entire pathways to getting into arts and entertainment are drying up, and by the time the mainstream understands that it may be too late, and movie studios will be going “we can’t find any new actors or crew people. Huh. I guess it’s time to replace our people with AI too, we have no choice!”

    • irishcoffee a day ago

      > I think "cultural" is a better word there than "political."

      Oh. What is the difference?

      • simonra a day ago

        I’d say in this context that politics concerns stated preferences, while culture labels the revealed preferences. Also makes the statement «culture eats policy for breakfast» make more sense now that I’ve thought about it this way.

smj-edison 2 days ago

I'd distinguish between physical art and digital art tbh. Physical art has already grappled with being automated away with the advent of photography, but people still buy physical art because they like the physical medium and want to support the creator. Digital art (for one off needs), however, is a trickier place since I think that's where AI is displacing. It's not making masterpieces, but if someone wanted a picture of a dwarf for a D&D campaign, they'd probably generate it instead of contracting it out.

crooked-v 2 days ago

> more specifically because people who are willing to pay money for art seem to strongly prefer that their money goes to an artist, not a GPU cluster operator.

Look at furniture. People will pay a premium for handcrafted furniture because it becomes part of the story of the result, even when Ikea offers a basically identical piece (with their various solid-wood items) at a fraction of the price and with a much easier delivery process.

Of course, AI art also has the issue that it's effectively impossible to actually dictate details exactly like you want. I've used it for no-profit hobby things (wargames and tabletop games, for example), and getting exact details for anything (think "fantasy character profile using X extensive list of gear in Y specific visual style") takes extensive experimentation (most of which can't be generalized well since it depends on quirks of individual models and sub-models) and photoshopping different results together. If I were doing it for a paid product, just commissioning art would probably be cheaper overall compared to the person-hours involved.