Comment by sdiacom
3 years ago
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.
This is true. I think again, open source is an extremely important concept here. People need access to be able to stay at or ahead of the curve when it comes to being able to access technology that can help avoid poverty.
Also I kind of agree that in the short term this will suck for artists and illustrators but on the other hand, we recently went on a day trip with some friends and paid an artist to sketch us while we sit together and drink coffee, it was a great experience and I could’ve just used the “sketch” filter on my phone but there would be no “experience” or individuality. No memory that made it special.
What was interesting was, she had a huge queue of people paying about $100 an hour :) she was open for 9 hours.
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.
The "thank fuck!" part is me sarcastically quoting the person I was replying to, who used those words to express delight that two major pillars of my income are at risk of being destroyed by AI, thus "freeing" me from all this work to do real art.
> 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.
Giving away (economic) power and "trusting" some benevolent actor without having some other kind of enforcing power is rarely a good idea. I hope military uses of new technologies will not used on ever growing powerless citizens. For example, the gains of the commonfolks the last two centuries were "strong" bcs their labour (strikes) or brute force were valuable arguments. Things are different now, and power has visibly shifted out the hand of common people
except that AI art is made off the backs of artists who created the art being fed into the AI database.It could not exist without their work.
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What are you doing to make UBI a reality?
How will we support ourselves until the extremely unlikely event that becomes a reality?
What are you doing to support artists through this shitty transition? Hint: Calling us "luddites" and vaguely waffling about the hoped-for death of capitalism is pretty much the opposite of supporting us.
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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."