As an artist, I think it is a net negative for us. Disregarding the copyright issue, I think it’s also consolidating power into large corporations, going to kill learning fundamental skills (rip next generation of artists), and turn the profession into a low skill minimum wage job. Artists that spent years learning and perfecting their skills will be worth nothing and I think it’s a pretty depressing future for us. Anways thoughts?
You and other people have argued, and cogently, that the introduction of AI art will be a blight on the artistic professions under the economic burden of a capitalist system. However, I want to bring up the counterpoint that under capitalism, art is already being maximally removed from public life and either reduced to marketable commodities, or confined to private spaces as a hobby, and this has nothing to do with any influence on behalf of AI. Instead, I want to point out what a great thing this could be, if capitalists wouldn’t fuck us all over with it.
The essence of what AI does is to open the door towards artistic creation to all those who suffer from lack of talent, time, or education to become an artist themselves. In due course, everyone will be able to print out pretty pictures, unique in the world, and hang them into their living room. They will just have to tell the AI the motif they want, and perhaps the setting and the style.
But in time they will figure out to tweak little things about their painting, tell it to make a sunrise instead of a blue sky, tell it to add mountains to the flat land, dress their family portrait a little more formal on special occasions, or reroute the motorway around a view of their city. They will experiment with different colours and directions of light. They will attempt to micromanage the AI in finer and finer ways; and soon, without ever needing the skill to draw or paint, they will experience something approximating the decisions actual artists have to make when it comes to composing a painting. It will enable them to express themselves independently of technique, much like a keyboard allows you to bring across your point legibly even if your handwriting sucks.
Not only that, but once come to maturity, AI art can be a godsend for the many other professionals who have to work with imagery without being trained as artists. It may once be able to draw plans, construct 3D models, and even compose illustrative videos for city planners, architects, designers of all sorts, writers, engineers, textbook authors, or scientists and mathematicians who want to visualise concepts from their research without learning to tame complicated software; and in return, playing with it can also provide them with inspiration for their work.
Of course, people who learn to make art properly must be rewarded for it, and there are plenty of things AI cannot do such as actually painting the murals or laying the mosaics, but there are enough people out there who are just bad at drawing, and at some point it often becomes a severe impediment to the otherwise brilliant work they are doing, and under a better economic system, AI would be there to help them without disenfranchising trained artists like you.
I agree, the potential of this technology is constrained by the society that uses it. And under capitalism, that means it’ll be converted into a tool for worker exploitation. There are so many possibilities for AI art but we all know that what’s really gonna happen is that artists will have to compete for work with robots now ):
Does a person know how to create a new dish or know how to better the flavour if all they do is microwave frozen food? I feel the creation of such a shortcut will destroy fundamental skills in the next generation (same with writing currently, as students are getting AI to write/cheat essays).
I fail so see how artists can get better at art without dedicating most of their time to it (ie; creating bad art sometimes for their job). Sorry if this comes off as dick-ish.
My issue with this is that AI art generators are, buzzwords aside, nothing more than fancy human art remixers. Yes, they can grab characters from one style and transform them into another thanks to very complex math, but to make this possible they all make use of a huge database of copyrighted, stolen human art taken without the artists’ permission from the internet. No one asked us if we wanted our art to be assimilated into this monstrosity, and there’s even cases of generators outputting existing artworks virtually untouched, with artist watermarks and all. These art generators are breaking every copyright in the world, but artists alone don’t have much leverage and then nerds try to obfuscate things and make philosophical arguments to justify this. But these are not human artists taking inspiration from existing art and creating something new, it’s a machine remixing copyrighted works taken in without permission as raw material. And then the other issue is that due to the way neural networks work, you can’t ask the generator for its sources on any given output.
So it’s something that shouldn’t be allowed to be released to the public unless it uses only public domain artwork or artwork taken with the artists’ permission. And then it should preferably be able to include sources with the output.
That’s all aside from the economical implications and the effect this is having on the livelihoods of freelance artists everywhere.
Are you trying to justify this very thing that corporations are trying to keep up for as long as they can? Because copyright should be abolished.
The issue I have with your post is justifying copyright. You’re justifying something that corporations have been trying to extend for many years. Copyright (and Intellectual Property in general) exists as a result of capitalism trying to profit from the distribution of works. You’re justifying the profiting from copyright. Is this really a proletarian thing to do?
Copyright should be abolished, yes. Under socialism. Under capitalism it’s a double-edged weapon, but it’s one of the only defenses we proletarian creators have against the capitalist class. I would hate it if a capitalist grabbed my music off Bandcamp without my permission and used it for their commercial project without even crediting me. Class perspective.
Agreed. The copyright system under capitalism is ass, but the Free Software community – I repeat, the Free Software community, not the “Open Source” community – has leveraged it to great effect. The bourgeois world has gone through the hassle of completely rewriting entire compiler toolchains (e.g. LLVM) – something that takes absurdly high levels of technical sophistication and work time to do – solely to avoid the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC), its sponsor (the Free Software Foundation (FSF)), and its strong copyleft license (the GPL). Strong copyleft licenses like the GPL and Affero GPL, that require all derivative works to have the same license, scare the absolute shit out of Big Tech and are verboten in their organizations.
Another example besides tech is the Creative Commons. In particular, their licenses that have share-alike stipulations require re-use down the entire chain. And if “you can’t make money off my shit” is important, their licenses can also have Non-Commercial stipulations. I wonder just how much Creative Commons work has been used in training the various stable diffusion AI models.
Copyright, under these specific conditions, benefits the proletariat. It provides a battle-tested protection, however imperfect, against direct exploitation. A protection strong enough that the bourgeoisie strives to avoid it. They, and the petite bourgeoisie, flee from it, instead preferring timid “open source” licenses that permit capitalists to take the work of the proletariat and keep it for themselves.
Richard Stallman, the founder of the Free Software Foundation, is tragically and terminally liberal. However, I believe his essays in Free Software, Free Society are absolutely worth reading for anybody that writes or uses code (read: basically everybody). Especially “Copyleft: Pragmatic Idealism”.
It isn’t a class perspective at all. You’re justifying the petit-bourgeoisie in retaining their works so that they can continue making a profit off their work. It isn’t a defence of ‘proletarian creator’ nor is it a defence of most creators, because most individual creators do not copyright their works. Copyright has, and always will be, a defence for corporations, not for individual creators.
Source? All works are copyrighted from the moment they’re made, they don’t have to be registered. You’re not being dialectical by saying “well, the petit-bourgeoisie also benefits from it”. While it’s true that individual proletarian creators still have the lower ground in copyright court claims, due to the lawyer purchasing power capitalists have, at the very least it provides a legal ground for defense. Having rules and laws under capitalism is better for everyone, proletarians included, than having none. If you believe a rule-less capitalism would be better, then you’re an anarcho-capitalist. And then, under socialism, there would be many more rules and laws than there are now. If there’s copyright under socialism or not (which historically there has been), that’s a whole different topic because the very law would have a different nature due to the political system in place.
Are you confusing copyright with fraud? Fraud is definitely an issue, and should be addressed, but I doubt many people would throw a hissy fit over an adaptation of someone’s IP. Only corporations really care because it impacts their hold on the IP, and they can gain some money from those who ‘wrongly’ stole it.
What? I never said this. How come everytime I speak to one of you ‘anti-AI artist’ people, you always make up some sort of strawman?
Dialectics is when you justify copyright. I did think about this dialectically. From a dialectical perspective, only the bourgeoisie benefit from copyright. the Petit-bourgeoisie may benefit as well, but to a much lesser degree, and proletarians do not benefit at all. Copyright is used to intensify the class differences of ownership. When it comes to copyright works, you don’t own the work. You also don’t own the ideas that came with that work. If you steal these ideas and utilise them as a form of ‘inspiration’, or even directly ripping off the IP so that you can create your own fan project, you would be sued. That is dialectical.
What is not dialectical on the other hand, is justifying copyright so that the petit-bourgeoisie can benefit more so. Copyright is nothing but antagonistic to the working class.
I’m sorry. It looks like we’re working with different definitions of copyright. We’ll just be misunderstanding each other, so please let me know your definition first, in order to move this conversation into a positive direction.
The real question is why you’re so obsessed with defending AI and calling out “anti-AI artist” people.