Comment by Dzugaru
3 years ago
You're not taking into consideration how the actual artists actually feel. And, from the first hand - the feeling is horrible. Most artists love to draw, the process itself is incredibly satisfying. Just like a musician loves his instrument.
This is destroying them, stealing the joy from the thing they devoted decades of life. My wife is extremely depressed by this, to the point I think she'll need serious therapy. She still has most of her job, but yeah recent developments like ControlNet? Well, shit.
The human impact is real, but how is it different from how carriage drivers felt about the automobile, or how typists felt about the word processor?
I’ll submit that people who feel horrible have mistaken the commodity and value-add aspects of their jobs. AI does not make someone an artist, but nor does great hand-eye coordination and good brush technique. The actual art is concept; brushes and canvas and AI are tools.
I’m sorry that the decoupling of creation from performance is making people you care about feel bad, but really this is hundreds of years old news for most artists (musicians, architects, sculptors, etc).
People who enjoy drawing can still draw, just like people who enjoy playing instruments can still play instruments.
yes, and every time an artist shares their exiting new drawing to the world at large, a computer program instantly mapps it and gives it away for free before the artist can even make a living off it. AI is driving out the ability to afford to make and share original art. Those 'menial tasks', by the way, are often the bread and butter that allow artist to make a living and continue to create.The end result will be a great loss of creativity and culture. The great misconception is that AI learns art just like humans by devouring preexisting art. Humans learn skills to manipulate MATERIALS, to then create imagery. AI copies those hard earned skills without permission like a library of stolen blueprints. Sad that so many people don't (or don't want to understand the difference). If I make a beautiful dress and you have the skill to copy it, so be it. If I make a beautiful dress and you take the pattern pieces I created to make the dress (since you do not have the understanding nor skill to make the pattern for yourself, but must rely on my patternmaking) well that is stealing in my book.
Any loss of creativity and culture from unviably commercial art will be massively overshadowed by the gain of creativity and culture this technology brings to the fingertips of... literally everyone with Internet and a few bucks to spare.
Art shouldn't be the privilege of only those dedicating a lifetime to holding a brush.
You just need better social security.
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> The human impact is real, but how is it different from how carriage drivers felt about the automobile, or how typists felt about the word processor?
Because driving a car or typing is entirely different from making art.
> People who enjoy drawing can still draw, just like people who enjoy playing instruments can still play instruments.
"You can just sit at home and play your little instrument, and not bother anyone, is that good for you?"
Your contempt for art and artists is just awful. It makes me despair for humanity.
99% of artists have never been able to make a living at it. If you love art, you have to do it for the love, not the monetary rewards. Welcome to how the rest of the world lives.
Eh, using your line of thought in a reductionist manner would simply lead to "it was a mistake to crawl down from the trees".
Humans change technology, technology changes humans. It is a tale older than civilization.
Also, many people would consider racing a car a form of art in itself. Same with riding horses that cars caused the general replacement of.
>The human impact is real, but how is it different from how carriage drivers felt about the automobile, or how typists felt about the word processor?
it's probably different in the way that the parent poster described, that artists found drawing an emotionally satisfying process whereas people typing probably didn't think setting styles in MS Word made them complete.
People who have never found their paid work so emotionally satisfying are worse off, not better. At least professional artists have gotten to spend some of their working lives that way.
there is nothing stopping them from doing the thing that "makes them complete" for leisure like most other people. AI art doesn't stop you from drawing, it might very well impact the commercial viability of it for sure but all that's lost is that.
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Sorry if this comes off as harsh but, AI is not stopping anyone from drawing. The person looking at AI and then fretting about the future, and then not drawing is the person preventing the drawing from happening.
The same thing happened to bank tellers with the ATM. Jobs change and so do industries. Art's become more niche.
You're right. This is harsh. Some people make a living off art. Having valuable skills is good for people's self esteem. We're not replacing a factory line job, we're automating something that takes people 100hrs of classes and self practice to master and people have put themselves in debt to achieve.
But they can doodle in their spare time while they search for another job that isn't being phased out or spend most of their day crafting text prompts. Maybe go back to college take on some more debt.
I was under the impression that it has _always_ been hard to make a living as an artist.
I think this is just a truth people will have to accept. I used to make music and quickly realized I would have to dedicate 1000s of hours to it if I ever wanted to make it a career. This is simply because there were 1000s of other people that wanted to also make it a career.
Your lack of empathy for factory workers is hurting your case. They are real, and train for their jobs, and care about the families they provide for.
“technical disruption is hard on people” is a much more sympathetic position than “artists should be exempt because they’re special”.
We all face risks. We all have to adapt. We all have opportunities from adapting to the world rather than clinging to the past. Artists are no different from factory workers (or programmers, or bus drivers)
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Many people have hobbies that are low value skills and they have to work doing things outside their passion if they want to be higher value. This isn't unique to people who draw for a living it's just new to them and they'll have to adjust.
You’re not wrong, but when we replace a factory line job that person also goes through their own little hell, and they probably don’t even have the possibility of going back to college and taking more debt.
If anything, if it is true that AI will render lots of jobs obsolete (I have my doubts), at least there’s a chance this may allow some empathy to grow in those affected. Perhaps we finally get some meaningful social change.
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Whenever I read a thread like this it makes me wonder how little most individuals know about the history that came before them.
I could take artist out of your statement and put blacksmith in and it would be difficult to tell if this was wrote in 1890.
Everyone seems to fight automation in an individual/industry battle rather at the society level. We keep measuring our worth based on work and when we finally run out of work we're going to have a problem.
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One big difference is that art is typically a passion job, whereas most of the previously automated jobs weren't. Being able to draw for a living also takes way longer to learn than being a bank teller, or data entry etc, did.
Not that it matters, AI is only going to get better from here. I'd also feel depressed if I made my living doing digital art.
<3
Good luck to your wife. This is fucking horrible. Being in an industry that Silicon Valley shitheads are ruining sucks.
It is definitely coming for the programmers too. They said coding would eat the world but I guess it ate itself...
It will only come for programmers when GAI is here, and that will change almost everything either way. I wouldn’t hold my breath for that though.
Obviously I don't get to tell your wife, or anyone else, how to feel about this. And there is a very real and very impactful thing in that, if you enjoy and make a living out of hand-drawn art, AI art will make it harder to make a living out of something you enjoy. There's no way around that, and I don't mean to deny that feeling. It always sucks when the circumstances around your craft and your source of income change.
But I don't think AI art can possibly take away from the beauty and enjoyment that can be found in drawing and making art. You mention how a musician loves playing their instrument. I can download a music edition software and summon a virtual orchestra out of my speakers in seconds. But does this take anything from the musician? Is their feeling any less true, their music any less meaningful to themselves and to those who listen? If I bring my laptop to a party and play Vivaldi's seasons on it, will that elicit the same reaction as if I play it in the living room's piano?
If language models eventually get good enough at programming that I'm out of a job, I won't derive any less enjoyment out of programming. I'll be a lot poorer, sure, but I will still enjoy the process of coming up with a way to express constraints in code, even if a machine can do it for me in the blink of an eye. Just like I find it relaxing to do the dishes myself when I'm anxious, even if I have a perfectly good dishwasher. Just like how people who enjoy solving Sudokus don't find it less fun just because automatic Sudoku solvers exist. The journey is the destination.
And for the record, I don't think human art will disappear because of AI art, or human programming will disappear because of AI programming. If there's one thing that's demonstrably true through the history of humanity, is that humans have a strong human-centric bias. The sooner we commodify something and remove the human element from it, the sooner we bring that human element back, now elevated to the status of luxury and catered to a niche.
Let me explain what I mean: I can buy black garlic in a plastic container for cheap, but I can also go to the weekend farmer market and pay three times as much for black garlic from a lady who lives up the mountains and can tell me the shape of the jar she fermented it in. IKEA makes perfectly good furniture that you can use to play board games for less than a hundred, but board game enthusiasts pay hundreds or thousands for custom furniture with nooks and bezels to stop the tokens from sliding out. Glass blowing as a form of art continues to exist, regardless of the availability of perfectly fine, industrially-made glass appliances. It's just in artisanal fairs in Venice, not in your living room.
And sure, you won't be able to make a living anymore out of cranking out uninspired corporate Memphis for bay-area startups, or drawing cartoon furries for Twitter randos on commission. And, in a way... thank fuck for that, right? The combinatorial space of drawing people with smooth curves in fantasy skin colors using technological appliances in collaborative settings can be exhausted by an AI, and you can actually focus on making art that breaks the mold, art that hasn't been made before, art that is meaningful to you. You can imbue art with meaning and use art to communicate with other humans, while the "art" that ticks out boxes and replaces placeholders in landing pages can be cranked out by AI.
Yes, it will be harder to make a living out of that, but I'm sure it won't be impossible. Computers have been able to generate Mondrian paintings since the 80s, and that hasn't made Mondrian paintings any less valuable. An AI may be able to produce the exact same drawing that you do, but it can't imbue human meaning in it.
I'll be a lot poorer, sure, but I will still enjoy the process of coming up with a way to express constraints in code
Good luck finding the time to enjoy your hobbies when being poorer.
You'll have much less time an energy for passions at that stage. You'll probably be flipping burgers at burger king, until that's automated too.
I'm not saying you won't be able to enjoy programming when poorer, but life is sure a lot tougher when you need to think about money constantly. When having a health problem means maybe not having the money for treatment etc.
It's weird because programming would probably be a lot less fulfilling when you can just talk to the computer and ask it to do any imaginable tasks without having to build anything. In comparison to actually putting paint on canvas vs asking an AI to generate an image, I think programming would be much more devalued.
On the other hand, if all programming was truly able to be created instantly by an AI, the productivity of our entire species would be increased to such a great degree, that being poor would be of little concern, because everything that you would want to buy would be instantly available for a fraction of the price it is today.
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Drawing furry porn commissions is meaningful to me. It's fun to sit around getting paid for drawing horny cartoons. It's a fucking blast, it feels like I am cheating at life to have this be part of my job. It's also easy and pays a nice hourly rate. And it's a human communication - I am helping someone express their feelings, desires, and fantasies. I am giving them permission to indulge in crazy fantasies and to feel beautiful, powerful, and desirable. Thank fuck that communication between myself and my clients can be automated away by a program! Thank fuck I'm freed from being a part of what binds a community of weirdos together!
Drawing Corporate Memphis bullshit for startups is a great way to transfer a big chunk of VC money from some Bay Area jerkoffs to an artist living somewhere much cheaper, where it can pay multiple months of their rent for not much work, and maybe even let them have some luxuries and/or financial cushions. Thank fuck that all that money can extend the startup's runway a tiny bit further now instead! Thank fuck those artists won't have to wrestle with the feelings that comes from getting paid better for a few hours of corporate work than for anything they've poured their passion into!
If you're regularly taking on client work, then you have places to play and experiment while still getting what you need to pay your bills, and even if you're just turning the crank to make another piece that fits in with everything else you've made, you're getting a tiny bit better at making art with every drawing you do, and you can bring that back to the time you spend on your crazy personal work. If you take some other job to make ends meet, your rate of progress slows way the hell down. I've seen it happen. Friends who used to draw a lot better than I did twenty years ago now just draw as a hobby, and draw just like they did back then; me and my friends who made it my job have spent the last twenty years drawing, and it shows in our work. Thank fuck that's endangered! Thank fuck we, too, might have a bunch of recurring gigs collapse out from under us! Thank fuck those of us who embrace becoming an AI wrangler for a corporation will be asked to do tons more stuff for the same pay, or less!
How do you propose the artists who are now blissfully freed from the work that pays their bills should pay the rent on their homes and studios, and to pay for their tools and materials, while still spending all their time making art that "breaks the mold, hasn't been made before, and is meaningful to the artist"? How do you propose they should find the time to hone the skills needed to do this? Because doing that is a lot of work.
> “And it's a human communication - I am helping someone express their feelings, desires, and fantasies. I am giving them permission to indulge in crazy fantasies and to feel beautiful, powerful, and desirable. Thank fuck that communication between myself and my clients can be automated away by a program!”
Serious question: are you sure that it can be? What you just described as the value proposition of your work is not the delivery of some pretty pixels. You’re selling a service, an experience, a human connection. You’re selling your artistic judgment and your ability to translate back and forth between client’s imperfectly expressed wishes and the visual design space. You’re selling work that is valuable to the buyer _because_ it was made by you.
I completely understand the fear that is gripping a lot of artists. But I’m as of yet unpersuaded by the predictions of doom and gloom. Art is human connection. Once the hype has worn off and we all get inured to generative art, I think we’ll find that people still value and pay for the real thing.
A final thought: algorithms can’t lay graphite on paper or put brushstrokes on canvas. You may consider offering your clients tangible artifacts that only a human can make.
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> How do you propose the artists who are now blissfully freed from the work that pays their bills should pay the rent on their homes and studios, and to pay for their tools and materials, while still spending all their time making art that “breaks the mold, hasn’t been made before, and is meaningful to the artist”?
They should connect with the people that aren’t artists and have a similar preference for non-AI art.
Or, they should learn the new tooling of the field, and use it as part of their mix of tooling.
The vast majority of would-be artists have never been able to afford to do it full-time and have needed “real” jobs; it would be astonishing for the narrow fortunate elite that have to think that they are somehow the one group of people in all of human history entitled to have that privilege without being concerned to adapting to change, even though that’s never even been the case in that same elite, which has had to deal with change (whether driven by technology or changing aesthetic preference for media, techniques, subjects, etc.) rather continuously, historically.
As to your question, UBI.
Artists are the ones now experiencing what the Luddites did. Smashing the looms didn't stop more looms from being built. Also, now the average person can afford fabric because of the technology.
Simply put as we move into a world where most needs can be provided by technology keeping up the 'winner take all' method of capitalism so many subscribe to isn't going to work.
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> You can imbue art with meaning and use art to communicate with other humans
Yes, but the moment you publish one piece the AIs will be able to crank variations on it at the push of button. So artists might think twice about publishing.
I for one have completely halted my plans for a website for my photography, painting and drawing. I'll be doing in person venues only. I may sell some merchandise but the pictures will be of the merchandise with the picture on it, ie. hard to copy.
"If I plant a seed and grow a plant, someone else could take the seeds and grow their own plant. Instead I'll burn the field to the ground."
I feel for your wife. It helps her any, many other careers and passions are not far behind. I foresee many intellectual tasks being automated in as little as three to five years.
A friend works in law, mostly handling workplace discrimination cases His job will be safe for now, but not those of his paralegals and staff who research case law, write drafts, and handle everyday communication with clients and the courts. Many of them have been in it for years and are passionate about helping victims who have been hurt by racism and homophobia. One of his most tenured employees is an elderly black man well past retirement age, who greatly enjoys that he can now help stop the sort of discrimination he experienced when he was young. None of these people will be able to meaningfully contribute to their passion in ten years.