art isn’t something you can generate as such. having a model that can copy the Mona Lisa pixel perfectly hasn’t stolen the Mona Lisa. it’s the shitty kids’ movies and TV ads and company logos that are at stake.
art is about effort and ingenuity and is centered around people and places and times and can’t be simply replicated by an industrial process, as much as Disney wants that
My kids are growing up in this environment and they already have an eye for ai slop. I suspect it's the same thing that led to OpenAI's TikSlop "product" is getting canned. After society had gotten over the sugar rush excitement of new and shiny toys I suspect the interest will fade and people will crave the connection you get from real art made by real people.
At least I hope that is what will happen. We might have to do something to hold the tech companies accountable for their dopamine trigger machines though.
Depends. Are they still making negative money with it? If so, then I'm gonna say no.
It's kind of like robbing a bank, killing everyone inside, then running out without taking anything, dropping your wallet in the process
No and the hyperbole around this gives AI authority that it does not deserve. I love art, and one of the things that has peeved me off in the last 10-15 years is how many times I have stood in a gallery and all around me are people with a phone out snapping a pic to say I have been there.
There is only one of that item. One, and in real life if you take the time to view, you can appreciate the delicate lines, the brush strokes, the variation of colour and technique, the grain of the canvas that have stood the test of centuries, and you can marvel that it was once held by its creator. It has the ability to stir something inside you.
Pure art still holds. as another posted alluded digital art is where it changed. It is nothing more than endless reproduction, I am not criticising digital art, it is a movement, and and employer but with it you lose uniqueness and compromise authenticity. It's hard to hear but its the nature of the format. AI is just another form of mass production and I would argue a graduation of the movement.
In short, anyone who thinks this needs to step inside a gallery and assess if AI content can achieve and hold credence.
No. They're giving AI too much credit this way.
No it was photography.
William S. Burroughs called photography "obscene and sinister", while many 19th-century critics dismissed it as a "mechanical" activity lacking soul or a refuge for "failed painters"
Edvard Munch Dismissed the medium by stating, "The camera will never compete with the brush and palette until such time as photography can be taken to Heaven or Hell".
Susan Sontag described photography as "soft murder" and a form of voyeurism, asserting it turns people into possessed objects.
And lastly
“This industry, by invading the territory of art, has become art’s most mortal enemy.” - Quote from 1859 about photography.
Strange, as the above quote sure sounds like it is about AI.
It is more like taking someone's style without consent at all, and for profit.
Few societies and institutions teach about art appreciation to everyone, and the understanding of one's expression through art is also emotional investment, that's why creatives in traditional manual endeavors are understandably enraged at AI and its investors being tactless in taking their style and then mass-producing the generated media for aesthetic but soulless consumption.
Yes. They stole everything and are diverting markets to their newly acquired storehouses. Many many many markets. All AI companies are criminal operations. If you've built a body of work and had it scooped up by a billionaire to have it output simply by referencing your name.... its easy to see this point. Of course the non-creator's voice, who has no work absorbed by these corporations, will be the loudest to defend AI.
no
even accusing AI of theft is a puerile misattribution of copyright infringement that was tossed aside in the late 90s, so let's just get over that bullshit right now.
yup
AI bad, upvotes to the left please.
digital art became worthless in the early 00s
Biggest. Greatest implies there’s something impressive about it. It’s the biggest, most mundane art heist
Yes.
It's not theft if the perpetrator is rich; then it's just a "business model".
So uncreatively and transparently illegal and corrupt in every way.
Plagiarism and creative exploitation on an unprecedented industrialized scale.
Controversial take incoming: framing art as an intellectual property phenomenon is itself a capitalist stance and it highlights our lack of imagination with regards to what contributes value.
My point being that intellectual property law is fundamentally broken and that it serves capital by definition
I don't see it as a heist. it's just an excellent counterfeiting operation.
All the so-called AI companies are [expletive redacted] that often obtained their training data in questionable ways. And they should be sued and made to pay.
What is missing in my opinion from a lot of artists, who now hold one fist in the air and a pitchfork in the other marching on Silicon Valley, is an acknowledgement of risk that they took when they put their artwork themselves on the internet. The risk used to be other people could take, copy, duplicate it but this was balanced by being able to monetize it. That nothing that ends up online is ever safe was known two decades ago. If your stuff was stolen from galleries and coffee table books, I'm not talking about you. If you made your stuff available so search engines and social media sites could bring you costumers, you're it.
Also, why are companies able to obtain training data in "creative" ways? Because you and me and all of us like cutting corners and getting shit for free. So we steal, copy, duplicate, torrent stuff. Sure, point your finger at Facebook for torrenting together their model. Also point your finger at the people who provided the training data this way. Many people will end up pointing their fingers at themselves here.
I think the author invokes the Luddites and doesn't realize that we might just see history repeating. The Luddites were skilled artisans fighting against slave labor automization. They lost. Many were displaced by industrial progress, a smaller number remained. Fast forward to today and visual artists like the author fight the evil automated LLMs. They will also lose; a small number will prevail.
Every technical advancement has brought these upheavals and we are in one right now. There are far fewer landscape and portrait painters around today because they had to go Picasso or impressionist when photography rolled around. There are far fewer negative developer jobs these days as entry level jobs in photography because use of film has fallen off a cliff. We also have fewer manual typesetters and no cavalry to speak of. Shit changes. Shit is changing now.
Art will prevail. Human made one will be sought after. But there market will not be the same. The only thing we can do now is trying to catch all those people and jobs this technological leap will shuffle loose. Like we tried our best with coal miners or factory jobs that went to China.
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