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Comment by karpierz | Hacker News Reader

> If I want to intentionally participate in the economy by dragging a carriage with people in it around in exchange for money, no one is going to employ me because my services are obviously inferior to those that a car can provide.

So here's the misunderstanding. The job of an artist is not to paint, or take photos, that's just the medium. Just like a software engineers job isn't to write code.

The artist's job is to elicit emotion. The means by which they do that, whether it's painting, photoshop, or running 10,000 prompts through DALLE till they find the thing they're looking for is irrelevant.

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I’m a professional artist and while this is true to an extent, most of my job - and a lot of what I enjoy about it - is “drawing”. Running a thousand prompts through an AI black box sounds infinitely tedious compared to drawing stuff. I don’t want to live in that world.

Don't worry, you won't have to. AI-generated images aren't possible to copyright, and as they're all derived from existing sources (read: plagiarized), you're not going to be replaced any time soon.

They're not necessarily plagiarized anymore than a human artist plagiarizes from looking at an existing image. If you accepted this, Disney would basically own every animation ever made.

StableDiffusion is a 10GB model made from 100TB of images, so there probably isn't even room to have memorized inputs - there's also some built-in defenses against that.

It's possible to make an AI that does explicitly make collages out of inputs (that goes under "fine tuning") and such a thing would be useful. OpenAI has a similar paper about a text AI that cites its sources called WebGPT.

Saying "The artist's job is to elicit emotion" is such a broad statement that it stops being a meaningful lens to look at the world and draw conclusions from. If you say that, then you say that a painter is the same as a cinematographer, or a fine chef, or a therapist, or my family. The conversation that this blog post brings up is about the very precise boundary of people who create art through static visual mediums. Saying that their job is the same as a cinematographer - when a professional artist has probably spent ten thousand hours learning to draw, and virtually zero on film, is meaningless.

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