THIS motivated the “current largest labor action in USA”? Not the countless other reasons but THIS?
US petty burgies at Sigliberalism are apparently mad their comission-fueled comfortable life are being endangered and are trying to twist Marx to defend it. Also they suddenly started to love IP and cry crocodile tears about poor artists being ripped.
Also lol the donwnvotes in this thread are something entirely else, guy just shared his (admittely non-40k style) pics and every positivity for him is being dogpiled.
Didn’t realize a lot of yall hated artists so much, so much for workers solidarity.
Yeah, most artists are poor as fuck or use it as a second form of income to some shittier job. Calling it “petite bourgeois” to make like $500/yr on commisions is a bit disingenuous. Plus tons of formal artistic work is just making corrections, doing draftwork, or the repetitive gruntwork of someone who has a bigger name than you.
What AI replaces are the above. The people it will elevate are the big-name artists with brand recognition. They’ll use AI to do the gruntwork. Instead of teams of concept artists you just get one highly paid person to draft inputs for the computer to interpret and then have it auto-generate hundreds of lookalikes. Architects can use AI to work out the fine details while they just focus on “the vision”. Animators won’t need tweeners or posers or texture artists or modelers, just someone with a recognizeable art style to feed data.
What AI creates is petit bourgeois content creators. You can already see this on sites that allow AI submissions, where hundreds of copy-paste grifters cheaply produce multiple AI generated images per day, based on someone else’s art style, with no skill or talent of their own, and charge people for the copyright. It’s taking the ownership of the means of production from laborers and giving it to hacks who would’ve never put in the effort to learn to do it themselves.
Contrary to popular opinion, copyright and IP make AI image generation more lucrative, because skill is no longer a barrier to entry. What makes an AI work valuable is the “ownership” rights to the image itself, because that’s what’s being traded in a transaction. In this way it’s quite similar to NFTs and draws the same crowd of supporters.
You are missing the point, which is, it’s aleady happening and it cannot be stopped outside of some heavy handed act which would furthermore had to be implemented worldwide.
It’s just happening to the people which thought they are safe (and i can’t not notice that it did produced considerable lack of solidarity to workers from their side in the past). Artists, and then will be the turn for journalists, programmers etc, like @lil_tank@lemmygrad.ml wrote below.
No it wont. If anything the amount of “gruntwork” will increase. Also, anyone getting 500$ per year on comissions is simply irrelevant for this discussion, unless you can live the entire year for 500$ and have no major income source otherwise.
How big? The ones that are earning much more than 500$ per year? Seems they are afraid the most.
Even bigger? Those are rather the part of the already inflated art business.
Hahaha do they earn more than 500$ per year of those AI pics? I though the hate for AI is widespread surely they won’t earn much for this? And how long would it last?
Your argumentation is silly because it is exactly what happened with all other automatized trades: it eventually gets concentrated. And no, petty bourgeoisie won’t survive there, who will survive are: the giants owning everyything and the workers working for them. Of course there will be some cracks too.
Labourers don’t own IP. And sure as hell won’t in the future, IP is bourgeoise tool created by the bourgeoisie fro the bourgeoisie. Beside that entire idea of “based on someone else’s art style” is also questionable in the first place since art is copying and recreating itself in the human brain all the time, this is how it works, else you would pay Monet for every impressionist painting ever created after.
Good thing, the “IP owning labourers” will profit on this!
This is unironically the greatest thing of all in this entire AI issue. This alone make it all worth it. The only thing that can make it sour is when:
How is that different from the current state? Again the amounts of AI art is not even increasing currently, it is exploding, although it’s not good enough for most high-budget uses still. NFT flopped and won’t be back.
Again, to corral the AI art for the sole exploitation tool for the bourgeoisie massive legislation will be requires, which is basically what the deviant art and similar already demand! They don’t give a shit for the real art workers producing content already owned by their bosses, they are only interested in their own class interests as i was pointing out.
Why would capitalists pay 5 people $35000 per year ($175k total) to produce a couple dozen sketches per day at best, when they can pay one person $60k-$80k per year to make hundreds of finished works. AI works have the speed of being a punch-press operator with the fine-tuning of a CNC-miller. We haven’t really seen custom work of this scale before. I think it will be a preview into what physical labor will look like with cheap modular robotics vs current methods based on machine operation and support crews.
I agree with this. I think there will be fewer professionals who get paid more while simultaneously producing more, which will cut out a lot of the skilled workers the same way the first wave of industrialization replaced blacksmiths with metal workers and engineers. But I think in this case the people doing the cheap dataset training won’t necessarily need to be artists and they’ll probably be outsourced to third parties. So the only artists necessary are the ones telling the AI “create x images based on this drawing I uploaded”. And since most companies want a uniform style across their product line, they won’t want multiple artists messing with that data, they’ll want one person whose style is recognizeable. Similar to how big name soundtrack musicians currently get all the brand recognition despite having numerous supporting technicians, but with AI performing the role of the technicians. Another example is voice artists and actors. Anyone can have Tara Strong in their work of all they need to do is pay for a few voice samples. Or how in the new star wars movies, they found a Mark Hamill lookalike but still CG’d Hamill’s face over the actor, making the actual actor himself just a host for someone with brand recognition.
Small-time artists don’t make money on IP. A lot of them are IP thieves in their own right, and get popular by remixing the works of others. Their own characters and stories usually don’t get as much attention and they make most of their money on commissions (ie. a person with no skill needs their skill to make an image). Getting your own characters or story to blow up is seen as “making it” and is extremely rare if they don’t already have connections with powerful figures. Most pop culture figures have rich parents when you look into it, including animators that a lot of poor artists look up to. The reason smalltime artists get upset about AI art is because it takes away the only thing they can offer, which is the skill to create something a buyer wants. I would imagine more prolific artists are upset about it because AI will increase competition until only the most recognized brands survive, so a lot can see themselves being cut out of the equation and having all their customers go to people who are already millionaires.
I think this goes along with the myth about github’s AI program writer making it easier for newbies to get into programming. All it really does it make Github the keyholder. If you take away the necessity of learning a skill, then the person who owns the tool has all the power. Because you won’t know how to produce it yourself and will instead rely on the keyholder to give you the answer. Another example is facebook giving people pre-formatted user pages vs people doing their own html. When a tool does the work for you, you give all the power to that tool and its owner. Sure more people than ever have internet profiles, but at the cost of the real owners selling user data and manipulating their psychology. Rather than democratizing the internet by making it accessible to newbies, it instead promoted walled gardens and placed the control in the hands of big business.
I agree with you on this one.
For example: go look at the thread at Sigmarxism i took that screen from, and look at what exactly OP of that thread posted. Point is, he did specified it has to be 40k imperial propaganda and AI was completely unable to create anything looking even remotely like this. And for what i know probably thousands hours were put into getting that (EDIT: not specifically that thread naturally, but overall attempts of getting AI to create anything really 40k). Current AI is completely incapable of making it too specific, it would need tons of work. Same with anything other too specific, we are posting Marx and Stalin created by AI all the time here but you won’t see even one decent Lenin (well i got one good but anime Lenin and that’s it) or nothing even remotely resembling H&S. That means if they want to get heavily into AI that gruntwork would increase probably way more than the current art comissioning. Who knows in the future though.
I will certainly watch it since it’s interesting and we are right now at the moment of birth of technology that can potentially transform quite much, but it’s in it infancy and it can go many different ways. Though i don’t predict either the best one or the worst one happening.
It was the same in manufacturing, skilled artisans were replaced by machine operators. It don’t mean that machine operators don’t need skill too, just a different one. Again we can’t stop this, and neither i do think we should stop this. And continuing the comparison, the people i talk about would be not entirely unlike the guilders.
Definitely, again we will see the same phenomenon Marx described, people squeezing themselves to compete with machine and ultimately losing, becoming proletarians in the process.
Somehow i don’t see people buying art for 50 bucks being able to afford those established brands, not to mention millionaires. More like they will just do it themselves. What you probably didn’t missed if you looked at the mentioned Deviantart, is how the overal amount of productive accounts rise rapidly, even though they produce AI pics.
Again, similar as in the other automation cases, but since it’s digital thing there would probably always be alternatives, also i don’t think humans will en masse lost the drawing ability or something. And as i wrote them, it’s not AI they hate, it’s capitalism, and they downvoted even such a well established 150 years marxist thought, which precisely prompted me to call the sub “sigliberalism” and them the petty bourgies, even if just for their mentality.
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I see you are one of the downvoted posters in that thread, is that why you are so dismissive of artists? Is it socialist to call people “petit-bourgeois” just because you disagree with them? Looking through that thread, they had some great points.
It seems like your view of artists is some kind of high art gallery artist who splashes paint on a board and then gets 5$ million from it. Or you somehow think the profits at marvel is given to the artists instead of the shareholders. 95% of artists are working class just like you and me.
Also, we are not in a communist utopia, so cheering for technological advances like this is basically cheering for mass poverty.
I exactly said who i meant and why so don’t twist my words. It is you, who is building the picture of some huge (mass poverty, really?) and very homogenous group of “artists”.
It’s also not a hill to die for, it’s already happening and won’t stop.
OK, when your industry inevitably gets cannabalized by AI, and you are jobless. I will be quoting your words back at you.
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Ah yes, the workers solidarity with the terminally online petty inteligenstia subset. Let me get there real quick write some defense of IP when we’re at it.
It’s time for some socialisation and proletarisation of art.
I agree art needs more workers who are paid fairly and don’t need to be so competitive to get a decent wage. The gig economy is toxic and offers people less for their work than its true value. A lot of young artists will spend 6-8hrs on a work and charge $30 for it. That’s $5/hr! Far lower than minimum wage.
Due to this demand for cheap art, AI turns people who don’t do any labor into salesmen who “sample” the labor inputs of others so that they have a product to sell. In this case I side with the artists, and not the wannabe capitalists trying to use technology to wrench the means of production away from the productive forces.
This will be achieved under socialism only i’m afraid. Although most likely even then there will be no turning back, just as there is no tuning back from any form of automation to any form of pre-automation outside of subsidized niches.
You do need to put time and labour in the AI generation. Currently generating something decent require dozens of tries and most likely also post processing to remove artifacts. Unless you mean the thing that really gatekeep art from the workers: talent. But if we talk about this, then labour is not the issue. Because if we talk just about labour, then that argument is the same one that was on for centuries by now.
Hard agree
Talent doesn’t actually exist. Getting good at art just takes the motivation and resources to spend thousands of hours practicing. It’s labor like any other labor. The “talent” that people perceive in artists is just an inclination to pursue that particular form of labor, or the privilege of having the free time to learn it. What differentiates art from other kinds of labor is the manner in which capitalists value it. Most human beings are driven to produce some art or craft, many dream of it as a hobby or mythical career path. But only sellouts usually make it, and the highly competitive market artists exist in ensure only those who are willing to work with the bourgeoisie rise to the top, while those who want to pursue art for pleasure or escapism are barred from popularity. Plenty of artists who charge a pittance for their work can create things just as well as any “pro”, the difference is that they grew up proles and didn’t win the lottery. It’s the same game the bourgoisie pulls with sports players. Plenty of people around the world are absolutely jacked and spend all their free time thinking about sports. But the ones who make it sell their performance to the bourgeoisie.
Key word: currently. As they get more refined, they will learn what humans find proper and what we don’t, and those roles will be automated out too, or someone will design tools specifically for the purpose of automating them out.
Agree about the talent, this makes things even simpler and further puts the entire issue in materialist context.
Last paragraph: i think people panic because while the futurists been predicting total automation of society for many decades (even Marx predicted that it could possibly happen and that would be the moment when capitalism ironically abolish itself), the general opinion was always “we will still have jobs which are impossible to automate”. But suddenly basic part of this iron base is endangered.
Remind me for some reason of Frank Herbert’s Dune: a universe where the automation was reversed, and it not only plunged entire humanity into the depths of slavery, but they literally needed magical tech and even literal magic not to regress into barbarism.