whilst i kinda agree, i don’t think it was intentional on their part (as with most of these controversies)… i think they paid a 3rd party for an artwork, and then that 3rd party took shortcuts - whether whole cloth, or with things like content aware fill - and wacom didn’t ask questions (which they probably should have, because this image in particular is really obviously AI generated)
they should all probably update their contracts to ensure artwork is 100% done by a human with big penalties for infringement though - they just haven’t caught up because it’s a relatively new problem
People will buy the cheapest product that meets their needs. AI is unstoppable and we already saw something similar when Adobe was created in the 80s, there were artists that refused to use their products and they became irrelevant and lost their jobs. Today every artist uses Adobe products without question.
But how much will we accept? Every step of tech was only ever used to increase production while workers got zero benefits. Now, artists will be expected to churn out way, way more because they have AI. Their pay won’t go up. If anything it will probably try to go down—if that was possible for artists.
Just because these things seem inevitable and fighting them is like fighting the tides, the conversation needs to be about how can we spread out the benefit. Share the wealth of easing the workload. And when something like that is suggested, the initial reaction is one of hesitation and “well, that’s not gonna work.” Because we’ve been conditioned into this insane world of benefit going up and workload being shoved down the ladder.
It’s created an already unsustainable world where people are worked to death while profits, profitability, and productivity soar, quality goes down, worker standard of living goes down, buying power of our paychecks go down and prices for everything only go up, profits are hoarded, untaxed, inequality explodes and we are all meant to just take it.
And then there are plenty of workers among us that think, “eh, what are you gonna do? It’s inevitable.” We can’t think like that. The line needed to be drawn fuckin ages ago. Accepting more of the same should be out of the question.
People fighting AI are fighting to keep this broken system. AI has the potential to, over the course of this coming century, eliminate all human labor.
Our objective shouldn't be to fight that, but to ensure that as it happens, humans are taken care of and the benefits of this propagate to us all, because those who are trying to hoard the benefits to themselves are happy to see people fighting to 'limit' the use of AI or to 'save jobs' because it means those people are not fighting them.