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One of my favorite bands just took a bunch of AI accusations, I guess, and he wrote a somewhat-pissed Substack post. That lead singer doesn't often step into culture war stuff, but this was close enough, I think:
and goes on to say that fighting AI art in this way is fruitless:
I regret that the culture war is poking random people in a new way in the last couple of years, and I can't help but cynically laugh at it. Not to mention how short-sighted it is. In that post, the lead singer details how much of a pain it is to do graphic design for music, and videos, and other art, and he hates it. Imagine if you could get a machine to do it? Also, it actually lifts up people who do not have money and allows them to make art like the people who have money do. Look at this VEO 3 shitpost. Genuinely funny, and the production value would be insane if it was real, for a joke that probably wouldn't be worth it. But now, someone with some Gemini credits can make it. This increases the amount of people making things.
I'm not sure I have any real thesis for this post, but I haven't been very good at directing discussion for my own posts, so, reply to this anecdote in any way you see fit. I thought it was interesting, and a little sad.
Yes but artists are a holy protected class and anything that takes their jobs away is evil. Nevermind that it has been known for centuries that art is an extremely bad way to make a living and that cameras already caused a crisis in the art world that every sophomore art student has a postmodern fit about.
My view is opposing AI art is anti-humanist. For every artist that can produce something anyone wants to look at, you have perhaps 1000x as many people who see something in their mind's eye but they don't have the skill to render it. That thing, maybe even that stunningly beautiful thing, never sees the light of day and dies with them.
Rest assured, most people have nothing beautiful to render or interesting to write in the first place, so it's not like we have some insane well of cognitive surplus waiting to be tapped into. Even with amazing AI tools most people will never put out anything interesting. But the true intellects and creatives only have time to specialize in so few things right now and I look forward to any leverage AI tools give them.
EDIT: lol, I posted that VEO3 video to my Facebook timeline saying something about how even kings could not commission shitposts like this and two different libtards unfriended me over it because of how wrong-side-of-history it is to support this technology that puts artists out of business. Of all of the gray tribe stuff I post that gets me a bunch of unhinged leftist reactions, praising AI stuff was The Line.
In my experience so far, for every one AI-generated artpiece that was a genuine improvement over the alternative of "nothing" or "imagining it by reading a text meme", there are 10 thousand pieces of absolute slop that should have never been published with less effort than it took me to scroll past. I'm willing to take the tradeoff: a few true intellects publish a few less gems, in exchange for no more slop. We were not in danger of not having Enough Shit To See On The Internet as it was.
If I was AI regulation czar I'd consider the middle ground: you can generate all you want for personal use but you can't clog other people's eyeballs with it.
Aren't you describing usual power law stuff though (w.r.t. art, the top <1% is the best and the rest is generally ignorable)? Is the ratio that different from human generated content?
I don't know about the ratio of technical quality. But as it stands right now, AI art is largely samey and even the best specimen (that I could identify, obviously) have the trademark sameyness and do not exceed the best human artwork.
Suppose you searched for a particular topic on a picture website, before AI boom it'd be a normal distribution from, say, 30% human ability to 99% (with the bottom tail cut off because the people who can only draw stickmen with a pencil usually don't publish them). After, we get a massive injection of 60%, and it's all in the same style.
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