zlacker

>>dredmo+(OP)
I've been finding that the strangest part of discussions around art AI among technical people is the complete lack of identification or empathy: it seems to me that most computer programmers should be just as afraid as artists, in the face of technology like this!!! I am a failed artist (read, I studied painting in school and tried to make a go at being a commercial artist in animation and couldn't make the cut), and so I decided to do something easier and became a computer programmer, working for FAANG and other large companies and making absurd (to me!!) amounts of cash. In my humble estimation, making art is vastly more difficult than the huge majority of computer programming that is done. Art AI is terrifying if you want to make art for a living- and, if AI is able to do these astonishingly difficult things, why shouldn't it, with some finagling, also be able to do the dumb, simple things most programmers do for their jobs?

The lack of empathy is incredibly depressing...

>>meebob+kc
Setting aside questions of whether there is copyright infringement going on, I think this is an unprecedented case in the history of automation replacing human labor.

Jobs have been automated since the industrial revolution, but this usually takes the form of someone inventing a widget that makes human labor unnecessary. From a worker's perspective, the automation is coming from "the outside". What's novel with AI models is that the workers' own work is used to create the thing that replaces them. It's one thing to be automated away, it's another to have your own work used against you like this, and I'm sure it feels extra-shitty as a result.

>>Alexan+Xh1
> From a worker's perspective, the automation is coming from "the outside".

Not, if the worker is an engineer or similar. Some engineers built tools that improved building tools.

And this started even earlier than the industrial revolution. Think for example of Johannes Gutenberg. His real important invention was not the printing press (this already existed) and not even moveable types, but a process by which a printer could mold his own set of identical moveable types.

I see a certain analogy between what Gutenberg's invention meant for scribes then and what Stable Diffusion means for artists today.

Another thought: In engineering we do not have extremly long lasting copyright, but a lot shorter protection periods via patents. I have never understood why software has to be protected for such long copyright periods and not for much shorter patent-like periods. Perhaps we should look for something similar for AI and artists: An artist as copyright as usual for close reproductions, but after 20 years after publication it may be used without her or his consent for training AI models.