I don’t count productivity or coding as a net good for what it’s worth. Fun, sure, but it’s truly incredible how the influx of AI hasn’t been used to create a more efficient way to distribute resources irl
Tech bros are a scourge on humanity and I truly wish for nothing but the worst for them
The way actual AI art functions now is as an extension of human artists, not a replacement. You can’t just wind up the algo and watch it go, not only does it require curation and inpainting and touch ups, but it also requires an artistic vision that can only come from an artist. Without an artist it just churns out bland content, inherently derivative and filled with errors.
My only problem with AI-assisted art is that people who don’t have any artistic taste, like managers, think that it’s good enough to replace artists. That’s not the technology’s fault, though.
Yeah except… the latter thing you mentioned is what companies want, because they care more about profit than producing things.
Plus the “always just a recreation of existing cultural perspectives” thing is true too. There isn’t really a way around that in it’s current form. I think any tech nerds who are lefty should have the goal to implement more ways for artists to reinterpret and include their own views in what the AI is creating
I don’t see why an AI couldn’t be trained on specifically non-Western/counter-cultural/marginalized art. It seems trivial?
The bigger problem I see is that it can never make anything truly new, which is why it’s important for artists to keep making new art. I just think that AI, as a tool used carefully by artists to enhance their work or to take shortcuts on repetitive work, is fine.
As you said, companies are happy with AI goop that’s “good enough” and do not care about art, but that’s not the technologies fault.
EDIT Well wait, no, actually the way the plagiarism machine seeks to reduce all artwork into data points is also kind of bad since there’s no mechanism to force these AI companies to actually compensate artists.
Lol I just realized you said exactly what I said with less words, RIP me. Sorry comrade
Sorry, let me clarify. The issue isn’t the art it’s being trained on, but the fact that the artist can’t (currently) input their own personal opinions and thoughts. You can train it on countercultural art, but you can’t, like, specifically depict every aspect of how you personally view that art’s depiction of, say, a cat, so it sort of stays “stuck” on the level of simply depicting the average cat in the art it was trained on. It can’t actually go through the art cycle of interpretation -> reinterpretation -> etc etc on the granular level traditional art can, instead being limited on only doing this on the abstract level of the prompts (which aren’t the end product anyways, so doing reinterpretations of them based on your own opinion is counterintuitive at best and at worst will not result in any sort of reinterpretation in the final product at best).
This is all a way for me to overexplain the fact that it cannot accept granular input based on the user’s subjective experience. This a huge limitation for it and, I would be willing to bet that if we fixed it, it would stop looking as much like art generators and more like how custom music synthesizer creation works or something. The AI would stop being an artist and start being a brush, basically.