Comment by tptacek

>bread-and-butter replacement-tier

How is creative expression required for such things?

Also, I believe that we're just monkey meat bags and not magical beings and so the whole human creativity thing can easily be reproduced with enough data + a sprinkle of randomness. This is why you see trends in supposedly thought provoking art across many artists.

Artists draw from imagination which is drawn from lived experience and most humans have roughly the same lives on average, cultural/country barriers probably produce more of a difference.

Many of the flourishes any artist may use in their work is also likely used by many other artists.

If I commission "draw a mad scientist, use creative license" from several human artists I'm telling you now that they'll all mostly look the same.

> Far more importantly, though, artists haven't spent the last quarter century working to eliminate protections for IPR. Software developers have.

I think the case we are making is there is no such thing as intellectual property to begin with and the whole thing is a scam created by duck taping a bunch of different concepts together when they should not be grouped together at all.

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/not-ipr.en.html

> LLMs immediately and completely displace the bread-and-butter replacement-tier illustration and design work that makes up much of that profession, and does so by effectively counterfeiting creative expression. An coding agent writes a SQL join or a tree traversal. The two things are not the same.

In what way are these two not the same? It isn't like icons or ui panels are more original than the code that runs the app.

Or are you saying only artists are creating things of value and it is fine to steal all the work of programmers?

What about ones trained on fully licensed art, like Adobe Firefly (based on their own stock library) or F-Lite by Freepik & Fal (also claimed to be copyright safe)?

> LLMs immediately and completely displace the bread-and-butter replacement-tier illustration and design work that makes up much of that profession

And so what? Tell it to the Graphviz diagram creators, entry level Javascript programmers, horse carriage drivers, etc. What's special?

> .. and does so by effectively counterfeiting creative expression

What does this actually mean, though? ChatGPT isn't claiming to have "creative expression" in this sense. Everybody knows that it's generating an image using mathematics executed on a GPU. It's creating images. Like an LLM creates text. It creates artwork in the same sense that it creates novels.

> Far more importantly, though, artists haven't spent the last quarter century working to eliminate protections for IPR. Software developers have.

Programmers are very particular about licenses in opposition to your theory. Copyleft licensing leans heavily on enforcing copyright. Besides, I hear artists complain about the duration of copyright frequently. Pointing to some subset of programmers that are against IPR is just nutpicking in any case.

counterfeiting creative expression

This is the only piece of human work left in the long run, and that’s providing training data on taste. Once we hook up a/b testing on ai creative outputs, the LLM will know how to be creative and not just duplicative. The ai will never have innate taste, but we can feed it taste.

We can also starve it of taste, but that’s impossible because humans can’t stop providing data. In other words, never tell the LLM what looks good and it will never know. A human in the most isolated part of the world can discern what creation is beautiful and what is not.

Modern flat graphic style has basically zero quality, I drew one myself even though I'm absolutely incompetent in proper drawing.