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
I don't know why we keep framing artists like they're textile workers or machinists.

The whole point of art is human expression. The idea that artists can be "automated away" is just sad and disgusting and the amount of people who want art but don't want to pay the artist is astounding.

Why are we so eager to rid ourselves of what makes us human to save a buck? This isn't innovation, its self destruction.

>>MSFT_E+dw1
Most art consumed today isn't about human expression, and it hasn't been for a very long time. Most art is produced for commercial reasons with the intent of making as much profit as possible.

Art-as-human-expression isn't going anywhere because it's intrinsically motivated. It's what people do because they love doing it. Just like people still do woodworking even though it's cheaper to buy a chair from Walmart, people will still paint and draw.

What is going to go away is design work for low-end advertising agencies or for publishers of cheap novels or any of the other dozens of jobs that were never bastions of human creativity to begin with.

>>lolind+zC1
It's an important distinction you make and hard to talk about without a vocabulary. The terms I've seen music historians use for this concept were:

- generic expression: commercial/pop/entertainment; audience makes demands on the art

- autonomous expression: artist's vision is paramount; art makes demands on the audience

Obviously these are idealized antipodes. The question about whether it is the art making the demands on the audience or the audience making demands on the art is especially insightful in my opinion. Given this rubric, I'd say AI-generated art must necessarily belong to "generic expression" simply because it's output has to meet fitness criteria.