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Notes -
A few followups to last week's post on the shifting political alignment of artists:
HN: Online art communities begin banning AI-generated images
The AI Unbundling
Vox: What AI Art means for human artists
FurAffinity was, predictably, not the only site to ban AI content. Digital artists online are in crisis mode, and you can hardly blame them -- their primary income source is about to disappear. A few names for anyone here still paying for commissions: PornPen, Waifu Diffusion, Unstable Diffusion.
But what I really want to focus on is the Vox video. I watched it (and it's accompanying layman explanation of diffusion models) with the expectation it'd be some polemic against the dangers of amoral tech nerds bringing grevious harm to marginalised communities. Instead, what I got was this:
So, although artists are organising a reactionary/protectionist front against AI art, the media seems to be siding with the techbros for the moment. And I kind of hate this. I'm mostly an AI maximalist, and I'm fully expecting whoever sides with Team AI to gain power in the coming years. To that end, I was hoping the media would make a mistake...
Reminds me of that bodybuilding/math article someone was looking for in the Sunday thread. The premise is that there are two types of 'hard', bodybuilding hard (where we know how to do something, but you have to put in the effort), and math hard (where it's hard to figure out, but once you do, it's easy).
AI is basically just plowing through the 'math hard' stuff. And for the most part, creative arts are mostly 'math hard'.
But how much will society really suffer if art, on average, becomes higher quality (because low-quality art basically vanishes when an AI can do it well for free). It reminds me a bit of projectionists in movie theaters. For many years you heard projectionists sounding the alarm about what would happen if they were replaced, how the theater experience would drop. But the honest truth is that most projectionists were teenagers who had no idea what they were doing, and the average experience for theater goers was that the film would be poorly lighted, framed incorrectly, that reels wouldn't be changed properly, that sound and video would be out of sync.
Sure, in a few large cities there were great projectionist made a film dramatically better. But for the whole of society, the death of the projectionist was a net benefit.
Anyways, the average artist (and the crappy artists) probably benefit the most from AI art, because they can increase their output and potentially their quality. For those who get stuck (like writers block) AI is a great way to blow through that. And maybe society as a whole benefits if people who have great vision, but not the skill to put their vision on paper, have the tools to be able to do so.
Most 'great' artists will survive fine, since most 'great' artists are actually just 'good' artists who built a brand. At some point AI will figure out how to build a brand, an audience, a following, and that'll be a major changing point for humanity.
Who knows, maybe the rise of AI in digital media will lead to an increase in demand for in-person, local arts, like theater. If everyone can simply type an idea into a prompt and get a theatrical quality film, then the real treat is going to be seeing performances live (just like with concerts).
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