Comment by javier123454321
1 day ago
Yes, the flipside of this is that we're eroding the last bit of ability for people to make a living through their art. We are capturing the market for people to live off of making illustrations, to making background music, jingles, promotional videos, photographs, graphic design, and funnelling those earnings to NVIDIA. The question I keep asking is whether we care to value as a society for people to make a living through their art. I think there is a reason to care.
It's not so much of an issue with art for art's sake aided by AI. It's an issue with artistic work becoming unviable work.
This feels like one of those tropes that keeps showing up whenever new tech comes out. At the advent of recorded music, im sure buskers and performers were complaing that live music is dead forever. Stage actors were probably complaining that film killed plays. Heck, I bet someome even complained that video itself killed the radio star. Yet here we are, hundreds of years later, live music is still desirable, plays still happen, and faceless voices are still around, theyre just called v-tubers and podcasters.
> This feels like one of those tropes that keeps showing up whenever new tech comes out.
And this itself is another tired trope. Just because you can pattern match and observe that things repeatedly went a certain way in the past, doesn't mean that all future applications of said pattern will play out the same way. On occasion entire industries have been obliterated without a trace by technological advancement.
We can also see that there must be some upper ceiling on what humans in general are capable of - hit that and no new jobs will be created because humans simply won't be capable of the new tasks. (Unless we fuse with the machines or genetically engineer our brains or etc but I'm choosing to treat those eventualities as out of scope.)
Give me one aspect in which that has actually happened? I'm wracking my brains but can't think of one. We are a weird species in that even if we could replace ourselves our fascination with ourselves means that we don't ever do it. Cars and bicycles have replaced our ability to travel at great and small distances and yet we still have track events culminating in the olympics.
1 reply →
Tin Pan Alley is the historical industry from before recording: composers sold sheet music and piano rolls to publishers, who sold them to working musicians. The ASCAP/BMI mafia would shake down venues and make sure they were paying licensing fees.
Recorded music and radio obviously reduced the demand for performers, which reduced demand for sheets.
umm, I don't know if you've seen the current state of trying to make a living with music but It's widely accepted as dire. Touring is a loss leader, putting out music for free doesn't pay, stream counts payouts are abysmally low. No one buys songs.
All that is before the fact that streaming services are stuffing playlists with AI generated music to further reduce the payouts to artists.
> Yet here we are, hundreds of years later, live music is still desirable, plays still happen, and faceless voices are still around...
Yes all those things still happen, but it's increasingly untenable to make a living through it.
Artists were saying this even before streaming, though, much less AI.
I listen pretty exclusively to metal, and a huge chunk of that is bands that are very small. I go to shows where they headliners stick around at the bar and chat with people. Not saying this to be a hipster - I listen to plenty of "mainstream" stuff too - but to show that it's hard to get smaller than this when it comes to people wanting to make a living making music.
None of them made any money off of Spotify or whatever before AI. They probably don't notice a difference, because they never paid attention to the "revenue" there either.
But they do pay attention to Bandcamp. Because Bandcamp has given them more ability to make money off the actual sale of music than they've had in their history - they don't need to rely on a record deal with a big label. They don't need to hope that the small label can somehow get their name out there.
For some genres, some bands, it's more viable than ever before to make a living. For others, yeah, it's getting harder and harder.
But this is different? Wholesale copying of copyrighted works and packaging it up and allowing it to be generated. It's not remotely reasonable
The amount of artists that managed to actually earn enough to pay the rent and bills was already very very small before AI emerged. I totally agree with you, its heartbreaking to watch how it got even worse, but, the music industry already shuffled the big money to the big players way before AI.