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I understand what you're saying here, but I think it's an effect of the fact that the vast majority of people have nothing to say, rather than being some special vice that's unique to artists. The probability that a randomly selected person has something to say is tiny - the probability that they have something to say and they're a good artist is even smaller.
People who are really good at X tend to be, unsurprisingly, really interested in X, and not much else. Most programmers don't care about using their technical skills for social good; they'd rather contribute to an obscure open source OS or programming language or text editor, something that will only be appreciated by a small audience of their fellow programmers. Mathematicians gleefully extol the uselessness of the frightfully abstract theories they spend so much time on, actively avoiding thinking about the philosophical or practical implications of their work. The average musician doesn't give a shit about the elaborate philosophical underpinnings of Schoenberg's atonal system; they just want to jam. And, naturally, the average artist just wants to draw pretty pictures.
Historically, people with "something to say" have gravitated towards literature, philosophy, and other forms of non-fiction writing because, well, words are how you say things. Words tend, on average, to be better at it than pictures. In my view, the very idea of "saying things with pictures" didn't become fully developed until the invention of animation, video games, and (modern) comic books, all of which are very young media historically speaking. So criticizing artists for having "nothing to say" doesn't seem very fair, because that's never really been their job description, and if you do have something to say, the philosophy department is right down the hall.
Nonetheless, there are examples of people in the modern era who used their artistic ability to "say something". One of my personal heroes is Hideaki Anno, who was involved in the animation, writing, and directing for one of the greatest films (animated or otherwise) of all time, End of Evangelion. The post-war Japanese manga industry furnishes plenty of other examples of talented author-artists: Yoshihiro Togashi, Eiichiro Oda, Akira Toriyama, etc. They probably wouldn't fit your personal definition of "having something to say", but the millions of people who bought their books would presumably say otherwise.
Well that's obviously not true. If that was true, then companies wouldn't be spending millions of dollars to build machines to replicate their work. Who cares whether you think the value is "really" in the "technique" or the "creativity". Everyone plainly agrees that the work itself is highly valuable.
This doesn't sound very plausible.
Well there are a lot of people who think your "beauty and meaning machine" is blatantly evil and anything it produces is automatically disqualified from being meaningful and beautiful, so you may have to go back to the drawing board.
As a wordcel I agree, but that wasn't my point (perhaps it could be better said, but again, character limit). You can still «say» things non-verbally. It's just that artists who scream the loudest now are mere illustrators – and pin-up and smut illustrators at that, especially if you go to twitter, to furry dens. They were of the (correct, up to a point) opinion that it was a good career fit for their natural talents, it wasn't a calling of the heart or whatever. I know a guy who went into coom drawing to build a capital to begin trading! They don't have any special mood (unlike, surprisingly, many low-skill sketchers whose content is vastly harder for the AI to grok), any really interesting ideas beyond technical gimmicks to their art, they're just cynically exploiting human degeneracy, and when they start to whine about AI being «demonic» and «satanic», man, it's so fucking funny. I have seen sagely advice like «don't bother with fingers anon, no commissioner scum looks there and it wastes time, on the other hand you have good anuses and cunts which is key to raking in cash, but they're too dry, put more liquids there, like calm does...», and to know that the same people then go and accuse AI of lacking comprehension or some other essential human quality because it draws hands badly is... hahaha, «get bent, clowns» is all that comes to mind.
«Something that's not in my material self-interest of maintaining market scarcity of certain products I possess the otherwise non-transferable means to produce is blatantly evil because, ehh, whatever» is not the profound insight you lot seem to believe it is. And such cavalier shallow moralism, in my opinion, disqualifies you, and all artistic guilds, from having an authority in this issue, and suggests that your outsized role in the distribution of content influencing emotions and attitudes remains a major threat to the polity.
I dunno, man.
I never go on twitter. Like, at all. I just straight up don't read twitter except through screencaps that get reposted on 4chan. Maybe that's why this sounds so strange to me.
I mean, "smut illustrators scream the loudest"? Really? When I think of vocal and influential political blocs, coom artists are not high on my list.
What I'm getting from this is that you don't like porn art. Maybe that's where the heart of the disagreement is. I like porn art a lot. I think it's underexplored as a vehicle for serious aesthetic expression.
You yourself acknowledged here that using artists' own work, without their permission, to attempt to destroy their entire industry, is ethically questionable at best. I've written about my moral and aesthetic objections to AI art here and on reddit - the objections that have nothing to do with economics, I mean.
You seem to think I'm an artist. Well, I'm not. Not under any reasonable definition of the term. I would like to be one someday, but I'm not currently. I've never made a single dollar off of art, nor have I publicly posted any of my work anywhere, except to ask for feedback on some crude sketches on /ic/.
The ironic thing is that I've been trying to learn how to draw for a long time, but I'm absolutely terrible at it. I've never struggled so much with anything. My brain architecture is simply built on a fundamental level for symbolic processing, not spatial processing. People with less than a quarter of the hours I have invested in it are able to easily surpass my skill level.
I originally wanted to learn how to draw so that I could make my own art for my video game projects. So I should be the exact target market for AI art, right? Hey, Mr. Game Programmer! Stop struggling, put down the pencil, just ask the computer to draw for you! Sounds great, right?
Well, you know my thoughts on the matter.
Well you could go and see comments on AI-related tweets. Very often it's some cartoonish beg-mid level furry fetish coom pronouns-in-bio type artist, a politically involved one to boot, who's using /ic takes about soul and tech bros, and what's especially hilarious, who rails against «caputalist ethic inherent to tech assholes» while protecting his tiny patreon turf from the deluge of post-scarcity imagery. It's just an unthinking, cuckoo-like, instinctively self-serving attitude, something beneath human dignity in my book. I think I can find a few even starting here. (One hilarious find: pro-Ukrainian coom artists canceling their Russian peer for being pro-war and drawing Genshin's Venti Wagner style; artists are snakes and their intuitive sense for policing networks is uncanny). I mean folks like this and this and this and so it goes all over the place (it's not universal though. Counterexample: this guy). Goofy NSFW is the bread and butter of art scene. I didn't try hard here, it's really ubiquitous.
I'm okay with porn art. I just don't see the point of having humans spend their lives on learning to do it, and to the extent that they go into Luddism to defend such a career choice, I believe they're selling out their essential humanity. I do not care to protect this incredible niche for aesthetic expression; if they have extra libido that somehow needs a release in the form of pictures, they can do it without getting paid. Otherwise they can use it on their partners or maybe wait for robo waifus. In the general case you know as well as I do that coom art is almost purely driven by market demands and not some self-guided aesthetic development, it's just a way to earn a living.
Right. Exactly.
Which makes me think that your value system is even more alien and deserving of deeper oblivion than those of natural artists. Maybe it's a blessing that you won't apply this tech to more efficiently make games that send some message and influence other people's views.
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It seems to me that the Artistic class is an outlier both in per-capita vacuity, and in per-capita outspokenness. Speaking as an insider, the art world is highly politicized and supremely concerned with "message", with "starting conversations", with "ethical concerns" which mostly seem to play out as grifting by connected individuals. I've been in it for nearly two decades, and his description rings true.
This sentence is difficult to square with my personal experiences with "artists' statements", general artistic activism, and what I see in the art world around me. A supermajority of the fine-art world is shitty philosophy and warmed-over social theories perched atop a mountain of narcissism bordering on the solipsistic. To say that the pop-art world is better would be damning with faint praise; it is better, but still has serious issues. Watch an average Oscars speech, and then understand that the difference between one of those big-shots and a lot of the minnows is talent and scale of audience, not temperament or worldview. It's hard to avoid people who think they're Making A Difference, and inquire pointedly about your allegiances.
I strongly disliked those people back when I was a doctrinaire progressive in the Obama era, because I thought they were clowns and their art was bullshit. My feelings toward them have not improved now that they're front-line troops in the culture war. I could be wrong, but it seems to me that's the fault-line being gestured at in the passage you quoted: people boasting emptily of how they intend to change the world, now demanding the world not change when it inconveniences them.
"Their work" isn't what people want. It's the outputs that work generates, the results. And those outputs can be had without the moralizing and pretention and activism and drama.
It sounds pretty plausible to me, speaking as an artist. Non-artists just don't get how much of what we do is just trivially-simplistic mechanics. You need a lot of practice to actually learn how to do it, but what you're doing is often not terribly complex, it's just tedious and tiring and counter-intuitive. 3-point perspective is not some deep mystery. Neither is shading, highlights, brush-strokes and so on, any more than playing a guitar is some great mystery.
There's a lot of people who claim to think that. I am extremely skeptical that they'll actually pass the artistic Turing test, out in the real world. Absent a concrete objection to the material itself, it seems to me that this is just bigotry, pure and simple. What's the difference to people not liking Jazz because it's made by black people?
What are you talking about? Anime and manga is a multi-million dollar industry. Of course people want the work. Again, why the fervent desire to build machines to replicate it if people don’t want the work?
This doesn’t actually matter. Two objects can be physically identical and still have different relational properties. If you make an identical replica of a Van Gogh painting, one is still the original and one is still a fake.
Naturally, I also contend that “beauty” and “meaning” are at least partially relational properties.
It's just untrue. Overgeneralization of the concept 'original'. If you have two copies which are actually identical, neither is more original than the other.
The original must have the quality "created first." Doesn't that impose a limit on how perfectly identical any copy can be?
Let's say you have content-addressed Content-addressable file system. It supports mirroring of any piece file onto multiple devices. When user saved a new file, it is saved, identifiable only through its content hash, onto two or more devices.
If you unplug any of them and plug it to a different computer, both computers will have the file.
Which is the original file and which is a copy? Neither is original, it makes no sense to talk about 'original' in digital realm (usually).
And yes, files, digital data - abstract stuff. Maybe for 'real' objects it is different? Identity Isn't In Specific Atoms
But to what do you attach this metadata, if you are presented with two bit-by-bit (or atom-by-atom) identical objects? If it's a 'real world' painting on a canvas, and you make that copy, the only way to discriminate between them is some metadata - like position in space of its center of gravity or sth. That seems rather arbitrary.
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Apologies, terminology failure. People want "work", meaning the things the artists produce as an end-product. They don't generally care much about "work", the specific labor involved in making them. How many hours of marvel movies have you watched? how many hours of "behind the scenes" footage for those movies have you watched? I'd guess there's a serious disparity there, no?
...Provided you can tell which is which in some reliable fashion, and in an extremely rarified and highly-manipulated market, yes. Neither condition generalizes. If your bastion against the AI apocalypse is to hope that general art consumption conforms to the fine-art model, I think you're setting sail for disappointment.
Elaborate?
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