#also there's a whole conversation about IP and copyright I'm not touching on here when it comes to 'protecting art'

[eusuchia]

sorry to the anon but I couldn't figure out how to edit my answer once it was in my drafts (great website).

the question was (badly paraphrasing) shouldn't we try to preserve the livelihoods of ceramicists and weavers too? and instead of saying 'mass production already killed this industry, and it will happen to others,' try to save more art from it?

basically yes! deskilling due to industrial capitalism sucks and mass production makes commodity fetishism infinitely worse. I think it's important to preserve craft knowledge and don't think we should just cede everything to industrialization, but that feeling isn't going to shift industrial trends -- only industrial action will do that. for what it's worth, it's really annoying to hear 'just unionize!' as an artist, when many, like me, are self-employed/freelance, and without sudden mass interest in some kind of low-entry-requirement sectoral guild, are not very unionizable because we don't have workplaces in the traditional sense. but by sheer numbers a lot of the job loss to AI would be corporate-level, I think, and there's more potential for people employed by like, marvel, to actually do something significant about the use of AI, than for individual customers trying to throw their weight around by buying or boycotting. I'm happy to get proved wrong here by some targeted mass boycott campaign, but I'm not holding my breath.

on a personal level I regularly spend money on handmade ceramics, fiber arts, and original art commissions both physical and digital because I find them valuable and beautiful. but I also use my IKEA plates and print-on-demand t-shirts, functionally devaluing those crafts. no amount of hypothetical discourse shaming me for 'stealing from working craftsmen' would really change that due to the economic realities. (tangentially, I don't use AI as a stand-in for commissioned art because they are not at all interchangeable to me.)

broadly though, isn't every kind of automation 'taking a livelihood' from someone in theory? my original reply to metamatar's post was basically asking where you draw the line. digital printing is taking the work of typesetters and sign painters, canva presets are taking the work of graphic designers, slip casting is taking the work of ceramicists. yet those trades still exist, and if anything I think their creative horizons are a little wider when the drudgery of the industry is taken up by machines. I know that's paltry compensation for a vanishing job market under capitalism, but isn't it a good thing when ceramicists and weavers are free to explore their ideas and not confined to backbreaking work of making the same bowls or yards of tweed for years on end? (especially in The Good Society with robust social protection that we should all be fighting for anyway)

there can be different use cases for these things (artisanal vs mass produced) and one use doesn't mean 1:1 something is being stolen from the other. personally I'm never going to pay someone to render my likeness instead of taking a photo; the money that's being 'lost' by a realism portrait artist there is purely hypothetical. same for when people get mad about others generating AI art for fun. 'you could have paid an artist for this [generated meme in the style of hr giger]' ok but they weren't going to and you can't make them.

I think people are unthinkingly flattening all kinds of creative labour when they talk about what might happen with AI. to start with, people are often talking about the job market of the first world/imperial core/etc despite the huge amounts of creative labour in/outsourced to other countries. but wherever you want to apply AI -- I don't think boutique client-based work is ever going to vanish, because the stuff that AI can do well is limited to certain types of digital illustration and animation, and you need human, creative problem-solving for new creative work, even on industrial levels with lots of automating tools in the workflow. art directors with good sense can see that. big name editorial illustrators are going to remain big name editorial illustrators. etc. (tbh, I think even the stuff AI is 'good at' looks dogshit a lot of the time, hence my disinterest in it, but that's a personal valuation and has no economic bearing.)

I'm not saying there's nothing to worry about, especially because managers and execs are often stupid and have bad taste and want to 'incorporate AI' when it makes no fucking sense, and would gladly thin out their staff for any reason. but that is ultimately a labour problem and not an artistic one.

#sorry I got carried away there. just digesting a lot of things I've been thinking about already. #I really am trying not to be flippant about artists who are really anxious about industrial trends but yelling at people online won't help #I promise #also there's a whole conversation about IP and copyright I'm not touching on here when it comes to 'protecting art' #but in brief: copyright is not your friend as an artist