This is the fundamentally flawed and misguided argument that can literally be applied to any technological progress to curtail advancement.
Imagine if the medical tricorder (a device from Star Trek that does maybe 99% of what modern doctors do) is suddenly invented today. Doctors could use this argument to defend their livelihoods, but they lose sight of the fact that doctors don’t exist because society needs to employ them. They exist because we have a problem of people getting sick… if more sick people can be helped then great! That is an advancement for society because more lives are saved (as opposed to more doctors being employed), and then simply the standard for what doctors are expected to do is raised to a higher level, since someone is still expected to operate tricorders.
Similarly, artists exist for their output for society. If these AI models can truly fulfill the needs of society that artists currently output (that is debatable), then that simply raises the bar for what artists are expected to output. But it doesn’t change the fact that we only care about the output for society (which can never be truly harmed by advancements such as this because if someone can not outperform the AI then they are redundant), not the fact that artists exist.
Put another way, many current artists who fear this are simply doing the generative work of AI already… manually. The AI is democratizing art so that the lowest hanging fruit of art is now accessible to more people. The bar for art has now been raised so that the expected quality of newer work is to be much higher. Just like how after computer aided design was invented the quality of movie effects, digital game art, etc, all jumped. Progress means those doing current “levels” of art will need to add this tool to their repertoire to build more impressive things. Rent seeking and staying in place (from an artistic advancement point of view) is not the answer.
As someone else put it in a comment here, looking at other works of art and learning how to make art and creating new art from this influence is literally how humans have been doing it for eons. Everyone is standing on the shoulders of giants. This AI merely makes it explicit so I guess it brings out the rent seeking feeling since people must feel it’s now possible to quantify the amount their own work contributed to something. I guess if you don’t want anyone to be influenced by it—AI included—the traditional way is to not show it to anyone.
No, this is the only fundamentally correct way to view this. Before the existence of the printing press, we didn't need copyright law. Yet all that the printing press did was make transcribing books by hand faster.
Quantitative changes enabled by technology are qualitative changes. And not every form that a qualitative change takes is one that leaves the world better off than we found it.
People will still be creative and make art even without society consuming their output. But society can create incentives to reward people for making art.
Coal mining (if coal hadn't ever been mined, we'd probably have gotten large scale wind- and hydroelectric power much sooner).
Whitney's cotton gin, albeit due to it coming before automated cotton picking.
And yet, we have decided that society is better off when authors can make money off their work.
The automobile revolutionized transportation, but also came with licensing requirements. (And more recently, we are finding to be responsible for a health and climate catastrophe, necessitating new restrictions on fuel economy, leaded gasoline, ICEs, etc.) You didn't need a license to walk or ride a bicycle, or ride a horse, but when we started putting people behind thousands of pounds of steel, all of a sudden we needed to come up with a myriad of new rules and restrictions on how automobiles could be used.
The printing press came with copyright laws. New and more destructive weapons and tools and chemicals came with more restrictions regarding their possession and expected use. The telephone and the computer combined allow robo calling and spam on an industrial level, and those particular uses of those new technologies are forbidden. Radio revolutionized communication, but we don't just let any random asshole blast static into the spectrum. We have narrowly curtailed, permitted and forbidden uses of it.
It would be far easier to name the technologies that net-benefited society, and did not need new rules around them, to prevent their destructive and damaging uses.
This one isn't looking to be one of them.
We can create incentives so more people become doctors, but the purpose of incentives at the end of the day must maximize life saving, whether it’s done by an AI or a doctor using an AI.
Let's stop for a moment and define advancement (or "progress", as it's sometimes called). It's always tacit, and never explicitly defined, and I think it bears examination.
By advancement/progress, I'm taking the argument to mean "betterment". i.e. When we say "advances in science", we're usually referring to things getting better, as a result of more science.
However, science/technology are not good in themselves. They're just tooling. You need to stop and ask which direction you've taken this advancement in the tooling in, because whether you meant it or not, both advancement and progress have direction.
> Similarly, artists exist for their output for society. If these AI models can truly fulfill the needs of society that artists currently output (that is debatable), then that simply raises the bar for what artists are expected to output
I somewhat agree, and would say this is very much like when the camera was invented. Artists lamented that they no longer had a purpose, until they invented one for themselves with surrealism. Art shifted from visual reproduction to meaning and feeling.
Surrealism is then a good example of the direction that the advancement in science (of the creation of the camera) took. What is the direction that AI generated art is taking?
It's a tool. Folks get excited about statistics, massive datasets, and computer science is hip again.
Would we not want a push for folks to experience the exacting caress of an unforgiving compiler?
I thought this stuff would be easy!
Hopefully what doesn't happen is a fragmentation of folks into content caverns, where they may gaze into a mirror and see exactly what they wish, day after day. A literal instantiation of Plato's Caves, where scientific progress is frozen and forgotten.