zlacker

> It's less about competition and more about the ethical way to do it. If another artist would learn the same techniques and then managed to produce similar art, do you think there would be just as visceral of a reaction to them publishing their art? Likely not, because it still required skill to achieve what they did.

Now suppose that the other artist studies to learn the techniques -- several of them do -- and then Adobe offers them each two cents and a french fry to train a model on it, which many accept because the alternative is that the model exists anyway and they don't even get the french fry. Is this more ethical somehow? Even if you declined the pittance, you still have to compete with the model. Even if you accept it, it's only a pittance, and you still have to compete with the model. It hasn't improved your situation whatsoever.

> My hunch is that in the near-term we'll see a major devaluing of both written and image material, while a premium will be put on exceptional human skill.

AI slop is in the nature of "80% as good for 20% of the price" except that it's more like 40% as good for 0.0001% of the price. What that's going to do is put any artists below the 40th percentile out of work, make it a lot harder for the ones at the 60th percentile and hardly affect the ones at the 99th percentile at all.

But the other thing it's going to do is cause there to be more "art". A lot of the sites with AI-generated images on them haven't replaced a paid artist, they've replaced a site without images on it. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing.