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
Absolutely this -- and in many (maybe most cases), there was no consent for the use of the work in training the model, and quite possibly no notice or compensation at all.

That's a huge ethical issue whether or not it's explicitly addressed in copyright/ip law.

>>wwwest+gr1
It is not a huge ethical issue. The artists have always been at risk of someone learning their style if they make their work available for public viewing.

We've just made "learning style" easier, so a thing that was always a risk is now happening.

>>archon+Ww1
This is like saying that continuously surveilling people when they are outside of their private property and live-reporting it to the internet is not a huge ethical issue. For you are always at risk of being seen when in public and the rest is merely exercising freedom of speech.

Something being currently legal and possible doesn’t mean being morally right.

Technology enables things and sometimes the change is qualitatively different.