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Meanwhile Pixiv embraced AI and is basically a unifans export vehicle. The nobility of the author is secondary to being able to spam endless niche content users actually care for. Unless you're the top tier of artists whose work itself is stylistically unique enough to be differentiatable but not legacy enough to be prompted in, AI will generate whatever the fuck you want. Deviantart Literotica AO3 Wattpad etc survive on fulfilling authorial actualization and paid commissions, both of which were focused on restricted fetishistic content and not creator skill. AI is killing off the lower tier skill tree of this band of creators, and I'm not sure its a bad thing.
It's going to kill off the livelihoods and acclaim for any artist who operates on any site susceptible to AI spam (which includes mainstream ones like Amazon), as the spam will make it impossible for new artists to attract notice and will even make it difficult for established artists to attract new fans. The AI spam doesn't work by creating equal or superior products, it works by simply existing in vast quantities and being hard to distinguish at a casual glance from legitimate products. It's a form of counterfeit goods when used this way.
Furthermore, it kills off a sort of broader cultural enthusiasm for art which exists and accounts for much of our society's interest in it. Fed by AI content mills and their inferior simplistic content, you might be left with satisfied degenerates who don't care about complexity or meaning and are wholly content with endless repetitive images of their favorite anime characters or whatever, but you won't have the kind of cultural underpinnings that sustains either fandoms, forum media discussions, critical appreciations, or anything else that makes art socially engaging.
This will in turn kill off the production of any sort of non-hyper-commodified art. Who wants to put effort into things if no one's A) going to notice or buy it, or B) even possess the cultural capability of caring?
It is a form of inferior goods, but not counterfeit goods unless it claims to be that which it is displacing.
In addition to many spammers putting AI-gen up on websites that specifically prohibit AI-gen, or putting AI-gen up on websites that require disclosing AI-gen without doing so, there's a very annoying gimmick where people will claim to either have produced something themselves or (more rarely) by AIgen, and then running scraped works through just enough of an img2img process to beat anti-duplication algorithms.
This isn't a counterfeit of this in the sense that a fake dollar is a counterfeit of a real one, but it's closer to counterfeit in the sense that a book getting cloned by a scummy print-on-demand shop is counterfeit, and even closer to a book on bookbinding from a scummy print-on-demand shop. Even though it's advertised as AIgen you could produce with the tools on that site, it's still making promises it couldn't cash out: you couldn't make this sort of image using the tool they presented as part of their site capabilities, because it didn't support img2img.
(It's also substandard, but if you could imagine a non-crap output...)
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It does claim to be that which it is displacing, though. There generally isn't open acknowledgement that AI goods are made by AI, and many sellers attempt to actively claim otherwise.
In either case, I'd say there's currently an implicit assumption by many buyers that, when they're purchasing a book, say, they're buying something that an intelligent mind constructed using skill and artifice (with plot twists, character arcs, and so forth), and not something that reads beautifully on the first page but never builds up to anything or has anything to say. AI's utility in this regard is its ability to both impersonate more meaningfully crafted human products and to exploit the sort of assumptions that book customers have built up through former habits.
The result will be the death of those 'former habits', as book customers do not gain the same pleasant experiences from their current purchasing habits, insofar as they inadvertently purchase AI products, and so the market will shrink and utility will be destroyed. If AI products were merely inferior, they could simply be ignored and filtered by such customers. It is their ability to mimic which makes them destructive. They can inhabit certain aspects of outer forms but not provide the same deeper experiences.
Maybe the case is less true for AI drawings, which are more of a what-you-see-is-what-you-get affair, in which case, no, it wouldn't count as a counterfeit to my mind. Unless the buyer was hopeful for some sort of engagement with an actual human that they weren't actually getting, or if they thought they were buying a more complex work that could be intensively studied to extract meanings which weren't immediately obvious, only to eventually realize it's an AI gestalt of several other works which only mimics their qualities superficially, say.
Which seems like a probable enough outcome.
That assumption (which was never true before AI) does not make the goods counterfeit.
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I agree that in a lot of cases, there is AI-generated content where the authorship is concealed.
Isnt the whole genesis of this thread the converse whereby authors conceal their AI generated content?
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Likewise many stock photo sites are now so full of AI slop that they're becoming useless unless they have a search feature to only search pre-2022 era photos. Otherwise the results are full of the same generic third rate obviously AI photos.
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