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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   25295 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 1, 2024

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Sorry I'm a bit confused here, are you saying that this has already come to pass or are you offering this as a hypothetical?

I don't think it's already come to pass, or even that it'll be some clear demarcation between going to happen and has happened, but it seems the likely result of netrunnernobody's hypothetical, where :

the year is 2045. no one can tell the difference between machine-made art and the work of masters. the supposed painter has been with his wife for twenty years without learning she was male at birth.

their opposition still exist, but are as rare as people without smartphones.

We're clearly not there right now, but it's definitely plausible, and maybe the timeline is pessimistic on one end or the other. Yet to actually resolve the conflicts and culture wars, the fighters would have to accept everything they wished for at the cost of even mentioning quite a lot of what they really wanted.

People are still making money as professional artists and selling commissions online. AI has definitely impacted the market, but artists are still making money regardless. In fact the number of graphic design jobs on Upwork has increased since the release of DALL-E 2 and StableDiffusion.

I've seen that story bounce around a few times, but I'm not sure it's avoided the streetlamp effect. 'Jobs on Upwork' makes sense as a metric, but only because there's not much better visible data -- in addition to some number of these jobs revolving around, they're also long-been a saturated mix of a wide variety of roles, for which 'creating art' isn't all of it and might not even be a lot of it. More critically, even the more optimistic uses of AIgen would drop the price-per-job, either by reducing time investment or at least lifting some tedium, which could leave as many 'jobs' on the tables from Upwork's perspective, but far fewer artists able to live off them.

I don't think we're at the point where the average manager puts together something in Midjourney, then bills a rando freelancer a pittance to launder the corp's use fine-tune the piece, but if we were, it'd still look pretty good from Upwork's metrics.

Admittedly, I can't find better data, so I still have to recognize it.

The average non-specialist isn't going to mess around with running a local model, training custom LoRAs, using ControlNet and inpainting... it's still involved enough that it's reasonable to outsource the process to someone else.

Eh... outsourcing can remain, specialists can remain, and the market for artists can still fall apart. If a specialist exists that can output thirty times the speed that a conventional artist can, it might even pay better than the thirty people doing the same work previously combined... but it's going to mean thirty fewer artists in that field.

Edit: Uh, you might have been able to generate more discussion by waiting ~12 hours and posting this in the new week's thread?

Yeah, that's fair. I'm not sure this is really worth a ton of discussion, though, and not just for the reasons I didn't quote netrunnernobody's full hypothetical in the starting post.

Then again, the other post I'm ruminating on now is "Against Hyper-Dunbar Thinking", so maybe I'm just over-privileging the 'scream into the void' side of internet discussion.

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