Comment by sorcerer-mar
6 days ago
Who said that's not okay?
The problem with AI-produced art is its potential to supplant human art, i.e. to destroy the incentive for any human to gain artistic mastery.
Here's how they're not equivalent: if you take human inputs out of AI, it disappears. If you take AI inputs out of human art, basically nothing changes.
If you need incentive to pursue artistic mastery, you will never really be a true master. I think you’ve failed to articulate any kind of real problem with AI art replacing human art, you just don’t like it personally so you want to see it gone.
> If you need incentive to pursue artistic mastery, you will never really be a true master.
Deploying fortune-cookie wisdom to defend against allegations of astounding ignorance of the real world is... a choice.
Which "true masters" didn't do do art commercially? According to your theory, not only should this list be of non-zero length, but it should include every master. So please tell me which ones.
An obvious example would be Van Gogh, who famously during his lifetime only sold a single painting.
I don't fully agree with the statement you quoted, as I think it overstates things a bit - there certainly are famous artists who not just lived of their work but sometimes were on permanent contracts. E.g. Haydn spent much of his career as music director for the Esterhazy family. Haydn also credited his relative isolation from other composers due to his position as part of the reason for his originality.
But at the same time, we see the vast majority of artists of all kinds not making much money. In the UK, the average full time author would do better as a fry cook at McDonalds if it was money they were after, for example.
A lot of these fields skew very heavily toward a very tiny sliver of the top, and while some of them are undoubtedly great artists, the correlation between the highest earners and most critically celebrated is rarely straightforward.
Furthermore, often the wealth comes after many of their great works, with the odds so long that very few people have a rational basis for going into it chasing the odds of a large payout. Chasing the hope of eeking out an existence, maybe.
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You don’t think there are? Then what do you care if masters go extinct and all masterworks are produced by AI? The end result is the same.
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