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
It's worth noting that there are at least two very different things being expressed by artists, at least on Twitter:

1. This is theft and that's bad.

2. People who do this are getting gains without putting the work and that's bad. (And, per quite a few commenters I've seen, are talentless hacks.)

I have a lot of empathy for the first, and think it has merit, and have a much smaller amount of empathy for the second.

I ended up reading a lot of the quote tweets on this guy the other day: https://twitter.com/ammaar/status/1601284293363261441/retwee...

Here's just a few of thousands in the vein of number 2:

> No talent or passion whatsoever

> He thinks he created something

> Why don't you subscribe to writing and art classes?

> This so ugly and shows real disrespect for people who have made stuff by themselves for years.

> Men will literally sell AI trash and call it "art" instead of go to therapy

> Can’t write or draw but wants to do both

> This is nothing but a HUGE disrespect to all the writers and artists around the world, and all it does is belittle their REAL work and effort. > > This is not art. > Nothing to be proud of.

> I just spent 8 months illustrating a children’s book by hand—working, not “playing”—after a lifetime of training. > > FUCK OFF!

There are also plenty people are complaining about "theft", but it honestly, re-reading through it now, it feels like a minority. If this were done using fully public-domain content, does it sound like any of the people I quoted above been okay with it?

There's a clear disdain for "non-artists" creating art in a new way. I very much feel for the people who see their careers going away, and I can also empathize people who spent a long time acquiring a creative skill that's now "unnecessary". Programming has this too—those darn kids programming in Python rather than Assembly, or doing bootcamps that don't teach big-O notation. This is a normal, human way to feel, and I feel that too from time to time. BUT, I also resist that feeling. I choose not to express disdain for newcomers using new technology, or skipping the old ways.

A large (or at least loud) part of the art community seen here is expressing absolute disdain for those of us who are "cheating" not because "copyright infringement" but because we're using new technology that bypasses years of learning and that's very much eating into my empathy for the community in general. I find it toxic in the programming community and I find it toxic in the art community. Right now, it's exploding in the art community in a way far beyond what I've witnessed in programming.