And the problem is that since these dickwads want to close source their neural networks, we wasting billions of watts training on similar data sets repeatedly generating models with minor differences over and over again. If there was a truly awesome open source model, then we could train on top of it and create more complex and complex models targeted at the good of humankind. But no, stakeholders must get profits. When will they understand that the entire humanity is a stakeholder in this planet.
Protecting creative jobs is extremely important, full stop. AI generation is a destabilizing development, I don't want to see it locked up in walled gardens or thrown away though. What I hope to see is a new generation of artists pushing the boundaries with open source AI tools. Yeah a lot of that's going to be bespoke porn... What am I even saying...?
We're just apes with fancy tools afterall. The same things were said about photoshop and digital art. We'll be fine, just get stocked up with some brain bleach.
Every non artist who doesn’t know shit about any creative workflow always regurgitates this “it’s a tool that will empower artists” line. Every working artist who understands what they’re talking about says this will lead to the elimination of 90% of jobs and just leave one underpaid guy churning out stolen artwork at a breakneck pace.
Artists had the exact same reaction when photography was invented. Simply taking what artists say as gospel isn't any more rational because artists also have their own biases. Meanwhile, the problem with jobs doesn't come from the technology but from the capitalist system of relations. Maybe we shouldn't be structuring society in a way where people have to do work for the sake of doing work.
As the photographic industry was the refuge of every would-be painter, every painter too ill-endowed or too lazy to complete his studies, this universal infatuation bore not only the mark of a blindness, an imbecility, but had also the air of a vengeance. I do not believe, or at least I do not wish to believe, in the absolute success of such a brutish conspiracy, in which, as in all others, one finds both fools and knaves; but I am convinced that the ill-applied developments of photography, like all other purely material developments of progress, have contributed much to the impoverishment of the French artistic genius, which is already so scarce. It is nonetheless obvious that this industry, by invading the territories of art, has become art’s most mortal enemy, and that the confusion of their several functions prevents any of them from being properly fulfilled.
― Charles Baudelaire, On Photography, from The Salon of 1859
Similar things were also said about CG in general particularly in 90's and 2000's when it spreaded from a niche to places like big cinema. And speaking of cinema...
The rise of CG did eliminate jobs in the SFX area. Make up, costumes, set dec, stop motion animation, animatronics, etc. But whereas someone in animatronics can retrain to use CG, there’s nowhere for an artist being replaced by a neural learning program to go. The program produces a finished end product. There is no pipeline for it to fit into. I feel like pro A.I. people are deliberately obtuse about this.
If you ever actually tried using these tools you'd realize that what you're saying is complete and utter nonsense. The workflows for generating stuff with AI tools are already getting very complex. This technology isn't magic, it's just a different way to produce art where the tool takes care of the mechanical aspects. A human is still very much needed to direct what's actually produced.
Couldn't agree more! Capitalism sucks! Also to add on to that, artist haven't come to many consensies about generative AI. The only one I think everyone can agree on is that it'll be disruptive, and makes the future for people who earn a living creating art even more uncertain than it already was. Whether that future is good or bad is entirely up for debate, although I think it'll land somewhere in the middle. Regardless of any of that, Pandora's box is open and it can't be closed.
Exactly, this is a disruptive technology that will change the way art is created going forward. There will be positive and negative aspects associated with it just like every new technology. One positive aspect I can definitely see is that it will allow a lot of people who lack technical skills for producing visual art to express themselves.
And it's also worth noting that the workflows are already getting fairly sophisticated. It's not just a matter of typing in a prompt and getting an image back. People are using stuff like control nets to pose the characters in the scene, inpaint specific details, etc. It's a different set of skills from traditional art, but it still requires expertise to produce a particular result you're looking for.
The way I look at it is that this tech will help automate a lot of tedious work involved in creating art, but it still takes a person with good taste to produce art that's interesting and engaging. In this sense it's quite similar to photography. Anybody can pick up a camera and start shooting pictures, but it takes an artists to create interesting pictures that people find meaningful. This is no different.
