Comment by slg
6 days ago
I don't see that as a distinction worth making. Commercial art is still art.
Music, for example, is an incredibly commercialized art. Replacing every song or album I have ever purchased with AI generated facsimiles is also an incredibly depressing thought. And let me tell you, my tastes aren't "a few elite artists doing paid high culture art".
I would hope people still find value in painting, especially in a world with photography. That is even ignoring the strained nature of this analogy. The context of the original quote was in a discussion of the inherent plagiarism of AI. Photography wasn't invited by stealing painters work.
There will be people who see something created by AI, are told it was made by a human, and have an emotional reaction as if it were. That alone challenges the idea that emotional impact depends on human authorship.
Does knowing a human made something automatically make it more valuable? Should it? Shouldn't the work speak for itself, rather than rely on the cult of personality around its creator?
These discussions always seem to focus on form as if that is what defines art. But in many cases concept is more important. Duchamp didn't craft the urinal. The idea was the art. If a piece moves someone, and that reaction changes based on who or what made it, what does that really say about how we judge art?
I mean, context changing how we see art seems natural enough. Would anyone care about analyzing this painting[1] if wasn't created by Hitler? Would anyone care about this child's drawings[2] if it wasn't 800 years old? Would people care about a stained glass depiction of the Crucifixion of Jesus if it wasn't a central event in Christianity?
Personally, I think in a lot of cases, people want to feel some sort of emotional connection with the artist through their creation, which doesn't work if you know it's AI created.
[1] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Adolf_Hitler_Der_Alt...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onfim
The big distinction is that the cheaper AIs will crowd out the humans out of the market, so mass market commercial art will be made by AIs if it is possible to produce that art. But some people will still want non-AI art, which I believe will be focused on less commercial focused art sectors.
> Music, for example, is an incredibly commercialized art. Replacing every song or album I have ever purchased with AI generated facsimiles is also an incredibly depressing thought.
And just to be clear, I'm not saying you're wrong.
> I would hope people still find value in painting, especially in a world with photography.
Sure, people do, but it is now a hobby for some and high art for a smaller number of professional painters, but the market willing to sustain a large number of professional painters doing portraits is gone.
> That is even ignoring the strained nature of this analogy. The context of the original quote was in a discussion of the inherent plagiarism of AI. Photography wasn't invited by stealing painters work.
I think the analogy is relevant because I am discussing the plagiarism of AI in relation to the economic aspects of copyright infringement and the impacts on the market for artists and SW devs. Not in relation to the moral rights[1] of authors. The issue of artists being annoyed on principle, not on economic effects, that some souless computer is producing plagiarist art that imitates their artstyle without attribution is a separate but closely related issue. I'm not sure but I think the article is more concerned with the former issue.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_rights
>I think the analogy is relevant because I am discussing the plagiarism of AI in relation to the economic aspects of copyright infringement and the impacts on the market for artists and SW devs. Not in relation to the moral rights[1] of authors. The issue of artists being annoyed on principle, not on economic effects, that some souless computer is producing plagiarist art that imitates their artstyle without attribution is a separate but closely related issue. I'm not sure but I think the article is more concerned with the former issue.
How can you justify separating the two concerns? This article is a defense of AI against its critics. It is a pretty poor defense if the argument is along the lines of "certain ethical concerns don't count". The author being "more concerned with" one issue doesn't make the other issue invalid or irrelevant.
> Replacing every song or album I have ever purchased with AI generated facsimiles
The error here is that the quote from the article says "the median artist" and you have never purchased a song or album by a median musician.