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I'd love to see some data on the people who believe that AI fundamentally can't do art and the people who believe that AI is an existential threat to artists.
Anecdotally, there seems to be a large overlap between the adherents of what seem to be mutually exclusive positions and I wish I understood that better.
The trick is that there are companies/people that would commission an artist but go for AI instead because they don't want/need actual art if it's more expensive
I'm going to try to paraphrase that position to make sure I understand it. Please correct me if I got it wrong.
AI produces something not-actual-art. Some people want stuff that's not-actual-art. Before AI they had no choice but to pay a premium to a talented artist even though they didn't actually need it. Now they can get what they actually need but we should remove that so they have to continue paying artists because we had been paying artists for this in the past?
Is that correct or did I miss or mangle something?
Your description contains a mistake. You mixed up wants and needs. You said some people want fake art, and then you changed your wording and said those people need fake art. Sneaky.
Wants and needs are not the same thing. For example, many people want a modded truck that rolls coal and produces an engine sound louder than a helicopter, but nobody needs one. Many people want to build an LNG plant to process natural gas, but nobody needs one. Many people want a reason to discriminate against trans people and kick them out of sports, but nobody needs one.
That wasn't intentional.
Would it be more accurate for me to change "want" to "need" or the other way around?
It would be more accurate to change need to want. Because soulless corporations want soulless art, but they don't need it. Passionate, meaningful art sells better and it has a prosocial effect. Why do you think Disney calls their theme park engineers "imagineers"? They want passionate people working for them. Disney only cares about money, but passionate workers make more money.
And imagine how fucked society would be if we didn't have stories that made us think. You know those elsagate videos that were controversial a few years ago? I don't want kids to watch shows like that. I want kids to watch shows that teach them valuable lessons. Like Star Trek Prodigy, and The Owl House, and Diego, and all the stuff I liked when I was little that made me think but which I've forgotten. Kids need to think. Adults need to think. We need to have important social lessons reinforced. We need gay, bi, ace, trans, and nonbinary characters on TV because that saves lives.
Could an AI write Scar into The Lion King? Could an AI sneak a blatantly homosexual coded villain into a work by a homophobic company in order to have at least some representation? No. Companies only care about money, they will not program their art AIs to care about ethics. And that's why AI art sucks. Art without ethics is bad.
“(Not) Actual art” is a bit loaded. I call it “illustration” in this context.
AI can do illustration. Right now it needs a lot of hand holding but it will get better.
It's an awkward phrase but I was trying to stay as close to the original vocabulary as possible. I think the point still stands if you replace "not-actual-art" with illustration. People couldn't get what they were looking for so they paid more for the next best thing. Now they can get something closer to what they're looking for at a lower price.
AI doesn't threaten art as a medium. It threatens art as a job.
I can live with that.
I'd support a UBI so that anyone who wants to can just make art for their own fulfillment. If someone wants AI art though they should be allowed to use that.
And in your opinion, would that be so bad?
Doubt it is going to stop humans from creating art, no matter how powerful the AI is. It is a fundamental human thing to do.
I'm talking inside the context of capitalism. Yes it would be nice if we had a UBI to support people but we don't. I agree that art is fundamentally human.
Outside of the context of capitalism I'm not sure AI art would be found very useful at all because its main point at the moment is remixing the same shit everyone's seen before for profit. To make mass produced lowest-common-denominator slop.
People used to pay lots of money to digital artists for various tasks. Now generative models like stable diffusion can do many of those things, just as graphic design. This is resulting in people paying less to artists.
I get that and there are a lot of jobs that people used to pay for and no longer do.
The entire horse industry has mostly collapsed. I couldn't get a job as scribe. With any luck, all the industries around fossil fuel will go away. We're going to pay less to most people in those industries too.
Well yes, since the economy is in shambles, us normal people will try to spend as little money as possible to make sure we are safe