#lots of left-ish people are all aboard on space travel. But as Musk has gone more and more right

[upfrog]

An AI-generated art hot-take

Time to get some people mad at me.

I just saw a post where someone was expressing their frustration at generative AI, specifically the risk it poses to artists, and how it continues/worsens/partakes of a tradition of reducing art to a finished product. There was a particular piece of it that made me very annoyed, and I've seen this piece in a lot of posts about generated art. Well, it's past midnight where I am, I'm tired, and I'm tired of shutting up about my view on this.

"It's [AI art's] entire central premise is built on the grim truth that many people don't see artists as skilled laborers using years of practiced skill to create something unique, but as data to be exploited"

Some other posts also emphasize a perceived sense of entitlement to art; that AI art advocates feel it is unfair for artistic creation to be limited to the elect few.

I would like to give a very strong rule. Like all rules, no doubt you could come up with exceptions to it. But this rule is foundational to the world around us, it's development, and it's future.

Making it easier to create things is good. Period. Making it take less time, effort, people, and training to create things is good. Period.

Technology making jobs redundant is a good thing. It is the foundation of almost all human progress. We are all descendants of farmers who were cruelly put out of work by new technological developments. The day when one person and a computer can do the work of an entire department of artists will be a good day - we are not there, maybe we'll never get there. But technology making people redundant is good. Expanding the ability of the average human to do things is good. And the fact that we have gotten to the point where people are unironically saying "it's *good*, actually, that it takes years of practice and effort to be able to produce good art, and you shouldn't want it any other way" is... Perverse? Horrifying? Taking self-interest into the realm of actively tearing your fellow humans down?

To be clear (because this is the internet, and if I don't specify then someone will fill in the gap with the worst things imaginable) I'm not saying that a future where generative AI is extremely good, widespread, and accessible will not have downsides. The threats of bespoke scams, deepfaked videos, floods of bots with a superb ability to guide the narrative, and so on are real, dangerous, and may already be coming to pass.

I know that one aspect of the anti-AI-generated art kickback has to do with the nature of professional art, and the type of people who do it. "Art", broadly defined, is substantially a passion field. You don't do it to get rich, or to have a stable life. You do it because you love the work, and are willing to put up with a thousand downsides, annoyances, and more in order to do what you love. And having this taken away feels cruel in a way that, say, keeping grad students and accountants from having to manually calculate thousands of sums doesn't.

A few words of encouragement. Widespread literacy may have killed the scribal profession as it was understood at the time. But it opened up vastly more work than it destroyed, even if you just count the directly writing-related work. Mass-produced off-the-shelf clothing shrunk the tailor (as once understood) into practical insignificance. Does that mean that no one who is passionate about making clothes can work in the field now? No. We have far, far more clothing (insert anti fast fashion rant here, I'm all on board with that kickback), and more variety, and lots of people working with clothing. The development of software code compilers unemployed a large number of human compilers. In many ways, programming has gotten easier over the years, with a lower barrier to entry, more comprehensible languages, more resources, and so on. But that hasn't meant that software developers are stuck in an unemployment hell of too many job seekers and not enough openings. We, as a society, keep on finding more and more things we want them to program, and demand for the skillset keeps rising. I can't see the future. Maybe AI-generated art will be the end of employment for artists. Maybe the generative AI revolution is fundamentally different from every past productivity revolution. But I doubt it.

#ai art #ai #art #hot take #technology #The part I'm really sad about in all of this is how “tech bro” has become associated with basically everything tech #and how the tech bro stereotype is now often thought of as right-wing. #This makes sensible discussions of technology more difficult because people are using the tech topic as a tool to argue a more general #and unrelated political idea #Like #to change fields a bit #lots of left-ish people are all aboard on space travel. But as Musk has gone more and more right #and presented himself as more and more right #people who might otherwise have cheered any advance in space travel are now glad when a SpaceX thing doesn't work #Because they don't like musk #and musk/space is subsumed into the greater political debate #I don't like it #but in all fairness #I do think the Communists are on to something when they say that “everything is political”. #So a bit of an internal conflict there.