Comment by d1sxeyes | Hacker News Reader

Comment by d1sxeyes | Hacker News Reader

I'm undecided how I feel about this at the moment. I don't think we as a society are ready for this technology, certainly not from a copyright perspective.

It is absolutely 100% legal (and so it should be) for me to learn to paint by copying others' styles. In fact I'm fairly confident that the artists complaining here will have copied the styles of others in developing their own—perhaps even synthesising some of the ideas and blending them to create something distinctive.

But when you're able to do this at scale, and with no individual creative input (at least, beyond the prompt), it has the effect of devaluing the original art.

If I can type something like 'Dragon battle with a man at night in the style of Greg Rutkowski' and get the quality of output illustrated in the article, then how will Greg ever be able to sell his work? And if he can't sell it, why would he create it (or at least, why would he publish and market it) in the first place?

So unless we do something to protect these artists, then overall, creativity may decline, and we will end up looking at facsimiles of pictures created by artists a long time ago.

I'm not sure copyright is the answer, but I don't know what is.

> "And if he can't sell it, why would he create it (or at least, why would he publish and market it) in the first place?"

And this is the crux of my biggest issue with people who are against AI art. The question "if artists can't make money on it, why would they make or share art in the first place?" is so incredibly depressing, dystopian, and frustrating to me. I understand we live in a largely capitalistic world, for better or for worse (mostly worse), but making a cash profit should not be the primary motivation to create and share art. The joy of creation and aesthetic appreciation should be. Art is only a human endeavor if it's done for intrinsic value or to share an idea or an emotion. Once the main -- or indeed only -- reason for creating something becomes "how many dollar bills will people put in my bank account if I let them see this?", it ceases to be art, in my opinion, and becomes conditioned capitalistic greed.

Don't get me wrong, if you make art that people want to pay you for, that's great! But if you remove the paycheck and suddenly can't think of any good reasons to continue creating, then it is my humble opinion that you were never making art in the first place. You were simply chasing currency, the nature of which you almost certainly don't understand anyway.

As someone giving money to a number of creators via patron… it’s been absolutely heartbreaking to hear them fall to adding adverts one by one like dominoes as the cost of living has kept rising.

Some have been able to make a living as a niche podcast host for years now but now it’s not enough… and they aren’t even in a field where they are competing against the AI art… yet (I struggle to imagine how pointless and devoid of meaning an AI generated podcasts would sound)

I dunno how long the house of cards can keep stacking up, but eventually it will collapse and we’re going to have to change how we do capitalism… or it will need replacement. If a 25k up front domestic robot with 1k per year maintenance costs, plus electricity costs (solar & wind just gets cheaper with amortisation) can do basic factory work, how many people from the bottom tier of society can have no job prospects before it collapses? The average IQ is not 100, it’s lower, 100 is the ideal, there’s a lot of people who aren’t going to get robot programmer jobs who would have been drivers or low skill tradesmen/general contractors…

I’m genuinely not sure what will happen but it just seems inevitable without the same sort of changes that will help Artists have a living while producing art.

First up, I'm not against AI art - I think it's incredible what we can do with computers nowadays, and AI art generation is a fantastic idea. However, I would say your statement that 'Art is only a human endeavor if it's done for intrinsic value or to share an idea or an emotion' casts an interesting pall over AI art, and its role in terms of human culture.

Overall though, perhaps I've oversimplified. The question I should have asked should have been 'if artists can't make money on it, then how can they afford to dedicate time to developing their craft and producing their art?'

Personally, my suggestion would be something like Universal Basic Income, but there are a lot of people who would be against that.

>Art is only a human endeavor if it's done for intrinsic value or to share an idea or an emotion. Once the main -- or indeed only -- reason for creating something becomes "how many dollar bills will people put in my bank account if I let them see this?", it ceases to be art, in my opinion, and becomes conditioned capitalistic greed.

Truly, go live in the real world of being an artist who's struggling to get by at even a basic level and doesn't have all the soft cushions in life that provoke absurdly rigid and privileged sentiments like the ones you wrote here.

Creativity and the desire to express it don't put a person outside the essential pressures of economic need and its emotional roller coasters. On the other hand, when those needs aren't really satisfied, it can quickly become damn hard to be creative even if you're sincerely emotionally passionate about your creative expression. It's nice to spout crap about how people shouldn't create art just for "capitalistic greed", but for someone straining just to pay monthly rent and basic expenses, there's nothing greedy about having their creative motivation lubricated along with some decent sales or financial sponsorship. What nonsense to assume otherwise.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com