this post was submitted on 06 Aug 2023
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Artists should be able to make a living with their art.
The fact that anyone in the world is able to do that is great, and we should be allowing for inroad for more people to enter into creative careers, not endorsing technology that aims to make them obsolete while profiting from their efforts.
Based on my usage and understanding of AI art tools beyond simple Txt2Img prompting, I believe the future is artists combining more traditional painting techniques and compositional sensibilities with AI automation to speed up their workflow. Very similar to what Photoshop did to physical media at the advent of digital art.
It's all machine learning, which means any tools you use are trained against datasets. These datasets include art that were not authorized by the artist, but were used by unintended applications of 'fair use' IP laws. Machine learning ALWAYS makes use of datasets. That's unavoidable. This is where the big problem comes in, and how it's vastly different to photoshop.
Photoshop was a software developer's attempt to create digital tools for artists to use digital capabilities. They didn't develop Photoshop with artist's work, and certainly without the artist's permission as part of the computer code.
What the AI does to create the model which is used to generate artworks based on prompts is not fundamentally different from what humans do when they learn in general. Humans see examples of things and synthesize the idea of what makes up these things. While machine learning models aren't exactly mimicking the human learning process, there isn't magic involved in either and both do nothing but reprocess what they have been given as an input. Humans are no more original than that.
You are sublimating the value of a person's lived experiences into an algorithm. The act of someone learning a joy of art, and then applying that themselves with the sum total of their experiences and influences is an inner truth to that person's agency and sapience.
I'm not exactly disagreeing that there isn't a parallel here, but I want you to acknowledge that you are saying that someone's love of art is as valuable as an algorithm that has no understanding of what it is doing. That's a terrible dystopia that you're petitioning for.
I don't believe that the joy one feels during the creation of a piece of art necessarily is relevant to the qualities of the artwork. From the perspective of the end user, the artwork may look exactly the same, be it made by a person or AI (even if it had to be more advanced than what we have right now).
It is true that it would be a pity if the joy of self expression vanished as artists lost their ability to create art, but AI won't cause this. It will simply remove the ability to be paid for it and making something into your job tends to suck the joy from it more than it adds it.
The only shot there really is for artists is a future in which they don't need to work for a living and if that isn't a possibility then their chances are already gone in the long term. I'm not saying I'd enjoy any of that. But there is no reasonable future in which this technology isn't expanded and the industry refuses to use the incredibly improved methods of creating art.
Beyond that, you would be taking away the right of new groups of people to express themselves. People already are gaining access to a fork of expression they never had before through AI. Why do they not get the right to use AI in things they create? Even if it's as the basis for their own work or even if it's already the finished product.
Why do these artists being replaced have a right to make money with their art? Why didn't all the other professions that became obsolete through technological advancement have the same right?
Were cars invented with the aim to make wagon makers obsolete? Were cameras invented to make realistic painters obsolete? They were both, just as all other things, invented because they do something that people want to happen in a way that is easier and more accessible.
Why don't I have a right to have easily affordable art in my works and express myself in a way that I couldn't because I can't afford to hire an expensive artist or learn to make it myself through many hours of work?
And how are other artists not profiting off of artist's efforts by learning from their art and replicating styles, techniques and other such things?
Why are you not instead angry at the fact that an artist even has to make money to do what they want? Why aren't you angry at the fact that anyone has to turn their passions into labour to survive?
If you don't feel like people should be able to make a living off of not working at all, how do you suppose humanity shall move forward in an environment in which anything is starting to be automated? Should be half technological advancement now and forever, fighting tooth and nail against progress? Or should we accept what is inevitable at this point and focus on creating a society in which the common person still has a place?
That all sounds really dramatic and escalating, but many people approach this problem from an emotional position. No one has the right to make money from anything they do. No constitution in the world grants such a right. Making money isn't considered a human need in general. What I do agree with is that artists should be able to live their life and make art. That's what you should desire and fight for.
I don't think those advancements were categorically good, or were the morally correct things to occur. I won't go through them all, but just because something has happened, doesn't mean it was inevitable, or that it was a good thing to have happened and the world is better for it.
But putting that aside, the clearest difference that I see between those advancements and Machine Learning (A subset of Artificial Intelligence research), is that Machine Learning always takes datasets to train the system. As a result, the Machine Learning Generation truly isn't coming up with something new, it is just repackaging the work of other people. This is further morally fraught, as you have made a system with the aim to make the work of people irrelevant, while using their own work to do so without their consent.
And as to your proposition that artists shouldn't have to make money to live, I agree wholeheartedly. But this technology isn't going to lead to that future. It is currently being used by people with means to make more money by cutting out the people who would have to be paid to make creative works. Machine Learning already did this with language translators.
When Google Translate was getting somewhat good in the early 2000's, many companies fired their foreign language translators. What they discovered quickly is that the technology wasn't quite there yet, so they had to hire them back. But by and large, they didn't hire them back as translators, but as editors, who would clean up the bad translations from Machine Learning language translation software. We're currently on the same trajectory with this technology for a wide swath of creatives.
This is bad for right now, the foreseeable future. I do not foresee a future where we are freed from needing to exchange a majority our waking-lives for money, and this technology will only perpetuate that reality.
And yes I do believe you're being rather dramatic by implying that I'm a luddite who doesn't want technology to work at all. I want technology to work for people, not the other way around. I want the Jetsons future, where people work a minority of their lives, not the majority, where we can focus on quality of life over vainglorious pursuits that ultimately benefit the idle rich. The trajectory of this technology will ultimately only benefit those who don't need to work to live.
I find it unrealistic to not believe that a future in which we must not necessarily work a large part of our time to gain a living is possible, but believe that somehow you can halt the progress of technology. Instead of directing the outrage against your government and making them acknowledge that before too long automation will make any form of large scale employed a mere farce, you'd rather hope that corporations would be nice and not employ AI generated artwork to make their images.
This technology is on its way to benefit everyone unless you allow it to be monopolised by those who wish to do so. AI empowers their users to do what could have only been done by many people together before, for prizes that are relatively negligible. The fact that AI uses other people's art as input doesn't mean it just repackages other people's content. That's the same as saying that normal artists are just repackaging other people's content because they learned by looking at the art of other people and seeing what works.
The learning process employed in Machine Learning and the learning process that humans engage in is not fundamentally different. While it might not be the exact same set of mechanisms, in the end it just boils down to seeing what works and making things similar to that. That's what humans already do.
The model trained on all the data, if well trained, does not contain the data to reconstruct any of the images used to make it
Something that may be relevent is the application of completely self learned models. If an AI were to be able to learn making art without using human art (just human input on the quality and tagging of created pieces) would you feel better about that replacing artists? Because that is certainly something we will see in the future too. Back in the day when AI started beating the best Go players in the world the critique had been that it hasn't surpassed humans in skill, as it has learned from humans to be so good. So they made a version that only learned by playing against itself with no human input at all. There's nothing stopping art to be created in a similar way, as long humans give the input on what they like and what they don't.