Who knew the first AI battles would be fought by artists?

At the dawn of mechanization, these same arguments were being used by the luddites, I'd recommend you to read them, it was quite an interesting situation, same as now

The reality is that advances such as these can't be stopped, even if you forbid ml legislation in the US there are hundreds of other countries which won't care same as it happens with piracy

As long as the world is not entirely made of AI, there will always be some expertise to add, so instead of being afraid, you should just evolve with your time

I completely agree with it. Take a contemporary pianist for example, the amount of dedication to both theory and practice, posture, mastering the instrument and what not, networking skills, technology skills, video recording, music recording, social media management, etc.

It's up to us to distribute those gains back.

Because in my time the stakeholders in companies have never actually been decisive when scoping features.

Co-pilot is indeed the endgame for AI assisted programming. So I would say for art, someone mindful could train an AI on their own dataset and use that to accelerate their workflow. Imagine it drawing outlines instead of the full picture.

The job market will always keep on changing, you have to adept to it to a certain degree.

Now we can talk about supporting art as a public good and I am all for that but I don't see how artists are owed a corporate job. Many of my current programming skill will be obsolete one day, that's part of the game.

* Can a Copilot-like generator be trained with the GPL code of RMS? What is the license of the output?

* Can a Copilot-like generator be trained with the leaked source code of MS Windows? What is the license of the output?

If an AI will take care of most of the finicky details for me and let me focus on defining what I want and how I want it to work, then that is nothing but an improvement for everyone.

I think the two biggest differences between art AI and code AI are that (a) code that's only 95% right is just wrong, whereas art can be very wrong before a client even notices [0]; and (b) we've been expecting this for ages already, to the extent that many of us are cynical and jaded about what the newest AI can do.

[0] for example, I was recently in the Cambridge University Press Bookshop, and they sell gift maps of the city. The background of the poster advertising these is pixelated and has JPEG artefacts.

It's highly regarded, and the shop has existed since 1581, and yet they have what I think is an amateur-hour advert on their walls.

What do you think cloud computing did? A lot of sysadmins, networking, backups, ops went the way of dinosaurs. A lot of programmers have also fallen on the side by being replaced with tech and need to catch up.

Wallowing in pity is not going to make help, we saw a glimpse of this with github-copilot. Some people built the hardware, the software behind these AIs, some others are constructing the models, applying it to distinct domains. There's work to be done for those who wish to find their place in the new world.

It still needs a human to tell it what to paint, and the best outputs generally require hours of refinement and then possibly touch-up in photoshop. It's not generating art on its own.

Artists still have a job in deciding what to make and using their taste to make it look good, that hasn't changed. Maybe the fine-motor skills and hand-eye coordination are not as necessary as they were, but that's it.

So I don’t think art is “harder”. It’s just harder for the average practitioner/professional to find “success” (however you like to define it).

Art and programming are hard for different reasons.

The difference in the AI context is that a computer program has to do just about exactly whats asked of it to be useful, whereas a piece of art can go many ways and still be a piece of art. If you know what you want its quite hard to get DALL-E to produce that exactly (or it has been for me), but it still generates something that is very good looking.

There’s an awful lot of analogy there, if you think about it.

The steady progress of the Industrial Revolution that has made the average person unimaginably richer and healthier several times over, looks in the moment just like this:

"Oh no, entire industries of people are being made obsolete, and will have to beg on the streets now".

And yet, as jobs and industries are automated away, we keep getting richer and healthier.

Edit: Typo

Rendering was only ever a small part of the visual arts process anyway. And you can still manually add pixel perfect details to these images by hand that you wouldn't know how to create an AI prompt for. And further, you can mash together AI outputs in beautifully unique and highly controlled ways to produce original compositions that still take work to reproduce.

To me, these AI's are just a tool for increased speed, like copy and paste.

Art is more difficult than programming for people with talents in programming but not in arts. Art is easier than programming for people with talents in arts but not in programming. Granted, those two sentences are tautology, but nonetheless a reminder that the difficulty of art and programming does not form a total order.

You'll find out because you're now an enlightened immortal being, or you won't find out at all because the thermonuclear blast (or the engineered plague, or the terminators...) killed you and everybody else.

Does that mean there won't be some enterprising fellas who will hook up a chat prompt to some website thing? And that you can demo something like "Add a banner. More to the right. Blue button under it" and that works? Sure. And when it's time to fiddle with the details of how the bloody button doesn't do the right thing when clicked, it's back to hiring a professional that knows how to talk to the machine so it does what you want. Not a developer! No, of course not, no, no, we don't do development here, no. We do prompts.

But at least every job I've had so far also entailed understanding the entire system, the surrounding ecosystem, upstream and downstream dependencies and interactions, the overall goal being worked toward, and playing some role in coming up with the requirements in the first place.

ChatGPT can't even currently update its fixed-in-time knowledge state, which is entirely based on public information. That means it can't even write a conforming component of a software system that relies on any internal APIs! It won't know your codebase if it wasn't in its training set. You can include the API in the prompt, but then that is still a job for a human with some understanding of how software works, isn't it?

Now imagine a future where AI can assist in law. Or should we not have that because lawyers pay so much for education and they work so bitterly? Should we do away with farm equipment as well? Should we destroy musical synths so that we can have more musicians?

It’s one thing to say we should have a government program to ease transitions in industry. It’s something else to say that we should hold back technological progress because jobs will be destroyed.

How do we develop a coherent moral framework to address this matter?

I dont think that is absolutely something a society must guarantee. People are made obsolete all the time.

What needs to be done is to produce new needs that currently cannot be serviced by the new AI's. I'm sure it will come - as it has for the past hundred years when technology supplanted an existing corpus of workers. A society can make this transition smoother - such as a nice social safety-net, and low-cost/free education for retraining into a different field.

In fact, these things are all sorely needed today, without having the AIs' disruptions.

But that is not "programming". That is glueing together bullshit until it works and the results of that "work" are "blessing" us everyday. The gift that keeps on giving. You FAANG people are indeed astronomically, immorally, overpaid and actively harm the world.

But, luckily, the world has more layers than that. Programming for Facebook is not the same as programming for a small chemical startup or programming in any resource-restricted environment where you can't just spin up 1000 AWS instances at your leisure and you actually have to know what you're doing with the metal.

I fully expect there will be zero reciprocation. There will, instead, be a strong expectation that that empathy turns into centering of fear and a resulting series of economic choices. AI systems are now threatening the ability of some artists to get paid and those artists would like that to stop.

I think we're seeing it right now. You shift effortlessly from talking about empathy to talking about the money. You consider the one the way to get the other, so you deplore the horrifying lack of empathy.

Let me put it another way. Would you be happy if you saw an outpouring of empathy, sympathy, and identification with artists coupled with exactly the same decisions about machine learning systems?

In a program, you can't really afford that. A small mistake can have dramatic consequences. Now, maybe in the next few years you'll only need one human supervisor fixing AI bugs where you used to need 10 high-end developers, but you probably won't be able to make reliable programs just by typing a prompt, the way you can currently generate a cover for an e-book just by asking midjourney.

As for the political consequences of all of this, this is yet another issue.

It would be very easy to make training ML models on publicly available data illegal. I think that would be a very bad thing because it would legally enshrine a difference between human learning and machine learning in a broader sense, and I think machine learning has huge potential to improve everyone's lives.

Artists are in a similar position to grooms and farriers demanding the combustion engine be banned from the roads for spooking horses. They have a good point, but could easily screw everyone else over and halt technological progress for decades. I want to help them, but want to unblock ML progress more.

Programming is definitely easier to make a living from. I'm a very mediocre artist and developer and I'm never making enough off of art to live on, but I could get a programming job at a boring company and it would pay a living wage. In that sense, it's definitely 'easier'.

I would turn this around to you: if a braindead AI can do these astonishingly difficult art, maybe art was never difficult to begin with, and that artists are merely finagling dumb, simple things to their work. Sounds annoying and condescending right? If you disagree what I said about art, maybe you ought to be more aware of your own lack of empathy.

Art currently requires two skills - technical rendering ability, and creative vision/composition. AI tools have basically destroyed the former, but the latter is still necessary. Professional artists will have to adjust their skillset, much like they had to adjust their skillset when photography killed portrait painting as a profession.

At the end of the day though, i think i'm an oddball in this camp. I just don't think there's that much difference between ML and Human Learning (HL). I believe we are nearly infinitely more complex but as time goes on i think the gulf between ML and HL complexity will shrink.

I recently saw some of MKBHD's critiques of ML and my takeaway was that he believes ML cannot possibly be creative. That it's just inputs and outputs.. and, well, isn't that what i am? Would the art i create (i am also trying to get into art) not be entirely influenced by my experiences in life, the memories i retain from it, etc? Humans also unknowingly reproduce work all the time. "Inspiration" sits in the back of their minds and then we regurgitate it out thinking it as original.. but often it's not, it's derivative.

Given that all creative work is learned, though, the line between derivative and originality seems to just be about how close it is to pre-existing work. We mash together ideas, and try to distance it from other works. It doesn't matter what we take as inspiration, or so we claim, as long as the output doesn't overlap too much with pre-existing work.

ML is coming for many jobs and we need to spend a lot of time and effort thinking about how to adapt. Fighting it seems an uphill battle. One we will lose, eventually. The question is what will we do when that day comes? How will society function? Will we be able to pay rent?

What bothers me personally is just that companies get so much free-reign in these scenarios. To me it isn't about ML vs HL. Rather it's that companies get to use all our works for their profit.

The solution isn't to halt technological progress to try to defend the few jobs that are actually available in that sector, the solution is to fight forward to a future where no one has to do dull and boring things just to put food on the table. Fight for future where people can pursue what they want regardless of whether it's profitable.

Most of that fight is social and political, but progress in ML is an important precursor. We can't free everyone from the dull and repetitive until we have automated all of it.

Most of coding is routine patterns that are only perceived as complex because of the presence of other coders and the need to "talk" with them, which creates a need for reference materials(common protocols, documentation, etc.)

Likewise, most of painting is routine patterns complicated by a mix of human intent(what's actually communicated) and the need for reference materials to make the image representational.

Advancements in Western painting between the Renaissance and the invention of photography track with developments in optics; the Hockney-Falco thesis is the "strong" version of this, asserting that specific elements in historical paintings had to have come through the use of optical projections, not through the artist's eyes. A weaker form of this would say that the optics were tools for study and development of the artist's eye, but not always the go-to tool, especially not early on when their quality was not good.

Coding has been around for a much shorter time, but mostly operates on the assumptions of bureaucracy: that which is information is information that can be modelled, sorted, searched. And the need for more code exists relative to having more categories of modelled data.

Art already faced its first crisis of purpose with the combination of photography and mass reproduction. Photos produced a high level of realism, and as it became cheaper to copy and print them, the artist moved from a necessary role towards a specialist one - an "illustrator" or "fine artist".

What an AI can do - given appropriate training, prompt interfaces and supplementary ability to test and validate its output - is produce a routine result in a fraction of the time. And this means that it can sidestep the bureaucratic mode entirely in many circumstances and be instructed "more of this, less of that" - which produces features like spam filters and engagement-based algorithms, but also means that entire protocols are reduced to output data if the AI is a sufficiently good compiler; if you can tell the AI what you want the layout to look like and it produces the necessary CSS, then CSS is more of a commodity. You can just draw a thing, possibly add some tagging structure, and use that as the compiler's input. Visual coding.

But that makes the role a specialized one; nobody needs a "code monkey" for such a task, they need a graphic designer...which is an arts job.

That is, the counterpoint to "structured, symbolic prompts generating visual data" is "visual prompts generating structured, symbolic data". ML can be structured in either direction, it just takes thoughtful engineering. And if the result is a slightly glitchy web site, it's an acceptable tradeoff.

Either way, we've got a pile of old careers on their way out and new careers replacing them.

The value of work is not measured by its difficulty. There's a small amount of people who make a living doing contract work that may be replaced by an AI, but these people were in a precarious position in the first place. The well-to-do artists are not threatened by AI art. The value of their work is derived from them having put their name on it.

If you assume that most programming work could be done by an AI "soon", then we really have to question what sort of dumb programming work people are doing today and whether that wouldn't disappeared anyway, once funding runs dry. Mindlessly assembling snippets from Stackoverflow may well be threatened by AI very soon, so if that's your job, consider the alternatives.

What about the horse-powered carrioles devastated by cars !!

That said, I don't think AIs ability to generate art is a major milestone in the progress of things, I think it's more of the same, automating low value-add processes.

I agree that AI is/will-be an incredibly disruptive technology. And that automation in general is putting more and more people out of jobs, and extrapolated forward you end up in a world where most humans don't have any practical work to do other than breed and consume resources at ever increasing rates.

As much as I'm impressed by AI art (it's gorgeous), at the end of the day it's mainly just copying/pasting/smoothing out objects it's seen before (training set). We don't think of it as clipart, but that's essentially what it is underneath it all, just a new form of clipart. Amazing in it's ability to reposition, adjust, smooth images, have some sense of artistic placement, etc. It's lightyears beyond where clipart started (small vector and bitmap libraries). But at the end of the day it's just automating the creation of images using clipart. Re-arranging images you've seen before so is not going to make anyone big $$$. End of the day the quality of the output is entirely subjective, just about anything reasonable will do.

This reminds me a lot of GPT-3... looks like it has substance but not really. GPT-3 is great at making low value clickbait articles of cut-and-paste information on your favorite band or celebrity. GPT-3 will never be able to do the job of a real journalist, pulling pieces together to identify and expose deeper truths, to say, uncover the Theranos fraud. It's just Eliza [1] on steroids.

The AI parlor tricks started with Eliza, and have gotten quite elaborate as of late. But they're still just parlor tricks.

Comparing it to the challenges of programming, well yes I agree AI will automate portions of it, but with major caveats.

A lot of what people call "programming" today is really just plumbing. I'm a career embedded real-time firmware engineer, and it continues to astonish me that there's an entire generation of young "programmers" who don't understand basic computing principles, stacks, interrupts, I/O operations.. at the end of the day their knowledge base seems comprised of knowing which tool to use where in orchestration, and how to plumb it together. And if they don't know the answer they simply google and stack overflow will tell them. Low code, no code, etc. (python is perfect for quickly plumbing two systems together). This skill set is very limited and wouldn't even get you a junior dev position when I started out. I'm not suprised it's easy to automate, as it will generally have the same quality code (and make the same mistakes) as a human dev that simply copies/pastes Stack Overflow solutions.

This is in stark contrast to the types of problems that most programmers used to solve in the old days (and a smaller number still do). Stuff that needed an engineering degree and complex problem solving skills. But when I started out 30 years ago, "programmers" and "software engineers" were essentially the same thing. They aren't now, there is a world of difference between your average programmer and a true software engineer today.

Not saying plumbers aren't valuable.. they absolutely are as more and more of the modern world is built on plumbing things together. Highly skilled software engineers are needed less and less, and that's a net-good thing for humanity. No one needs to write operating systems anymore, lets add value building on top of them. Those are the people making the big $$$, their skillset is quite valuable. We're in the middle of a bi-furcation of software engineering careers. More and more positions will only require limited skills, and fewer and fewer (as a percentage) will continue to be highly skilled.

So is AI going to come in and help automate the plumbing? Heck yes, and rightly so... They've automated call centers, warehouse logistics, click-bait article writing, carry-out order taking, the list goes on and on. I'd love to have an AI plumber I could trust to do most of the low-level work right (and in CI/CD world you can just push out a fix if you missed something).

I don't believe for a second that today's latest and greatest "cutting edge" AI will ever be able to solve the hard problems that keep highly skilled people employed. New breakthroughs are needed, but I'm extremely skeptical. Like fusion promises, general purpose AI always seems just a decade or two away. Skilled labor is safe, for now.. maybe for a while yet.

The real problem as I see it, is that AI automation is on course to eliminate most low skilled jobs in the next century, which puts it on a collision course with the fact that most humans aren't capable of performing highly skilled work (half are below average by definition). Single parent workig the GM line in the 50's was enough afford an average family a decent life. Not so much where technology is going. At the end of the day the average human will have little to contribute to civilization, but still expects to eat and breed.

Universal basic income has been touted as a solution to the coming crisis, but all that does is kick the can down the road. It leads to a world of too much idle time (and the devil will find work for idle hands) and ever growing resource consumption. A perfect storm.... at the end of the day what's the point of existing when all you do is consume everything around you and don't add any value? Maybe that's someone's idea of utopia, but not mine.

This has been coming for a long time, AI art is just a small step on the current journey, not a big breakthrough but a new application in automation.

/rant

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA

The people who generated the training data should have a say in how their work is used. Opt-in, not opt-out.

Developers will be fine because software engineering is an arms race - a rather unique position to be in as a professional. I saw this play out during the 2000s offshoring scare when many of us thought we'd get outsourced to India. Instead of getting outsourced, the industry exploded in size globally and everything that made engineers more productive also made them a bigger threat to competitors, forcing everyone to hire or die.

Businesses only need so much copy or graphic design, but the second a competitors gains a competitive advantage via software they have to respond in kind - even if it's a marginal advantage - because software costs so little to scale out. As the tech debt and the revenue that depends on it grows, the baseline number of staff required for maintenance and upkeep grows because our job is to manage the complexity.

I think software is going to continue eating the world at an accelerated pace because AI opens up the uncanny valley: software that is too difficult to implement using human developers writing heuristics but not so difficult it requires artificial general intelligence. Unlike with artists, improvements in AI don’t threaten us, they instead open up entire classes of problems for us to tackle

You're comparing apples to oranges. Digging a trench by hand is also vastly more difficult than art or programming.

There's just as much AI hype around code generation, and some programmers are also complaining (https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/8/23446821/microsoft-openai...).

Overall though the sentiment is that AI tools are useful and are a sign of progress. The fact that they are stirring so much contention and controversy is just a sign of how revolutionary they are.

As a developer/manager i am not yet scared of AI because i have had to already correct multiple people this week who tried to use chatGPT to figure something out.

It’s actually pretty good but when it’s wrong it seems to be really wrong and when you don’t have the background to figure that out a ton of time is wasted. It’s just a better Stackoverflow at the end of the day imo.

People should stop giving work all this meaning and also they should study economics so they chill.

Learn and chill.

With no training, I, or even a 1 year old, could make something and call it art. I wouldn't claim it's very good but I think most people would accept it as art. The same cannot be said for programming.

I'm just as excited for myself as I am for artists. The current crop of these tools look like they could be powerful enablers for productivity and new creativity in their respective spaces.

I happen to also welcome being fully replaced, which is another conversation and isn't really where I see these current tools going, though it's hard to extrapolate.

That is absurd. Sure some basic AI tools have been helpful like co-pilot and it's sometimes really impressive how it can help me autofill some code instead of typing it out... but come on, there is no way we are anywhere close to AI replacing 99.99% of developers.

>making art is vastly more difficult than the huge majority of computer programming that is done

I don't know.. art is "easy" in the sense that we all know what art looks like. You want a picture of a man holding a cup with a baby raven in it? I can picture that in my head to some degree right away, and then it's just "doing the process" to draw it in some way using shapes we know.

How in the heck can you correlate that to 99% of business applications? Most of the time no one even knows exactly what they want out of a project.. so first there is the massive amount of constant changes just from using stuff. Then there is the actual way the code is created itself. Let's even say you could tell it "Make me an angular website with two pages and a live chat functionality" and it worked. Well, ok great it got you a starting template.. but first, maybe the code is so weird or unintuitive that it's almost impossible to really keep building upon- not helpful. Now let's say it is "descent enough", well fine.. then it's almost like an advanced co-pilot at this point. It helps with boilerplate boring template.

But comparing this all to art is still just ridiculous. Again, everyone can look at a picture and say "this is what I wanted" or "this is not what I wanted at all". Development is so crazy intricate that it's nothing like art.. I could look at two websites (similar to art) and say "these look the same", but under the hood it could be a million times different in functionality, how it works, how well it's structured to evolve over time.. etc etc. But if I look at two pictures that look exactly the same, I don't care how it got there or how it was created- it's done and exactly the same. Not true of development for 99% of cases.

Jobs have been automated since the industrial revolution, but this usually takes the form of someone inventing a widget that makes human labor unnecessary. From a worker's perspective, the automation is coming from "the outside". What's novel with AI models is that the workers' own work is used to create the thing that replaces them. It's one thing to be automated away, it's another to have your own work used against you like this, and I'm sure it feels extra-shitty as a result.

I would argue because most AI imagery right now is made for fun and not monetary gains, so it is actually a purer form of art.

This is a moment where individual humans substantially increase their ability to affect change in the world. I’m watching as these tools quickly become commoditized. I’m seeing low income first generation Americans who speak broken English using ChatGPT to translate their messages to “upper middle class business professional” and land contracts that were off limits before. I’m seeing individuals rapidly iterate and explore visual spaces on the scale of 100s to 1000s of designs using stable diffusion, a process that was financially infeasible even for well funded corps due to the cost of human labor this time last year. These aren’t fanciful dreams of how this tech is going to change society - Ive observed these outcomes in real life.

I’m empathetic that the entire world is moving out from under all of our feet. But the direction it’s moving is unbelievably exciting. AI isn’t going to replace humans, humans using AI are going to replace humans who don’t.

Be the human that helps other humans wield AI.

Some programmers are upset and already filing suit.

When was making living through art guaranteed? Society has mocked artists for centuries.

Let them make art and give them a UBI.

AI will replace programmers too; if a user can ask a future AI to organize their machines state into an arbitrary video game, photorealistic movie, generate reports from sources abc, weighing for xyz on a bar chart; only the AI code base (whatever boot strapping and runtime it needs) becomes necessary.

Why would I ask an AI that can produce the end result to produce code? Code is just minimized ideal machine state.

You’re correct; there is a lot of empathy lacking in our culture, but it’s not just when it comes to art.

The thing is, empathy doesn't really do anything. Pandora's Box is open and there's no effective way of shutting it that is more than a hopeful dream. Stopping technology is like every doomed effort that has existed to stop capitalism.

Probably has something to do with years of artists trash talking engineers.

I think you need to see there are 2 types of people:

- those who want to generate results ("get the job done, quickly"), and

- those who enjoy programming because of it.

The first one are the ones who can't see what is getting lost. They see programming as an obstacle. Strangely, some of them believe that on the one hand that many more people can produce lots more of software because of AI, and simultaneously expect to keep being in demand.

They might think your job is producing pictures, which is just a burden.

I am from the second group. I never choose this profession because of the money, or dreaming about big business I could create. I dread pasting generated code all over the place. The only one being happy would be the owner of that software. And the AI model overlord of course.

I hope that technical and artistic skill will gain appreciation again and that you will have a happy live in doing what you like the most.

I'd reframe this to: making a living from your art is far more difficult than making money from programming.

> also be able to do the dumb, simple things most programmers do for their jobs?

I'm all for Ai automating all the boring shit for me. Just like frameworks have. Just like libraries have. Just like DevOps have. Take all the plumbing and make it automated! I'm all for it!

But. At some point. Someone needs to take business speak and turn it into input for this machine. And wouldn't ya know it, I'm already getting paid for that!

You're projecting your own fears on everyone else. I'm a programmer, too, among other things. I write code in order to get other things done. (Don't you?) It's fucking awesome if this thing can do that part of my job. It means I can spend my time doing something even more interesting.

What we call "programming" isn't defined as "writing code," as you seem to think. It's defined as "getting a machine to do what we (or our bosses/customers) want." That part will never change. But if you expect the tools and methodologies to remain the same, it's time to start thinking about a third career, because this one was never a good fit for you.

This argument has come up many times in history, and your perspective has never come out on top. Not once. What do you expect to be different this time?

The lack you find depressing is natural defensiveness in the face of hostility rooted in the fear, and in most cases, broad ignorance of both the legal and technical context and operation of these systems.

We might look at this and say, "there should have been a roll out with education and appropriate framing, they should have managed this better."

This may be true but of course, there is no "they"; so here we are.

I understand the fear, but my own empathy is blocked by hostility in specific interactions.

Basically, the argument is that you should not have ever charged for your art, since its viewing and utility is increased when more people see it.

The lack of empathy comes from our love of open source. That's why. These engineers have been pirating books, movies, games for a long time. Artists crying for copyright has the same sound as the MPAA sueing grandma 20 years ago.

Creating art is not that much harder than programming, creating good art is much harder than programming. That's the reason that a large majority of art isn't very good, and why a large majority of Artists don't make a living by creating art.

Just like the camera didn't kill the artist, neither will AI. For as long as art is about the ideas behind the piece as opposed to the technical skills required to make it (which I would argue has been true since the rise of impressionism) then AI doesn't change much. The good ideas are still required, AI only makes creating art (especially bad art) more accessible.

1. Proprietary software is harmful and immoral in ways that proprietary books or movies are not.

2. The creative industry has historically used copyright as a tool to tell computer programmers to stop having fun.

So the lack of empathy is actually pretty predictable. Artists - or at least, the people who claim to represent their economic interests - have consistently used copyright as a cudgel to smack programmers about. If you've been marinading in Free Software culture and Cory Doctorow-grade ressentiment for half a century, you're going to be more interested in taking revenge against the people who have been telling you "No, shut up, that's communism" than mere first-order self-preservation[1].

This isn't just "programmers don't have fucks to give", though. In fact, your actual statements about computer programmers are wrong, because there's already an active lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft over GitHub Copilot and it's use of FOSS code.

You see, AI actually breaks the copyright and ethical norms of programmers, too. Most public code happens to be licensed under terms that permit reuse (we hate copyright), but only if derivatives and modifications are also shared in the same manner (because we really hate copyright). Artists are worried about being paid, but programmers are worried about keeping the commons open. The former is easy: OpenAI can offer a rev share for people whose images were in the training set. The latter is far harder, because OpenAI's business model is charging people for access to the AI. We don't want to be paid, we want OpenAI to not be paid.

Also, the assumption that "art is more difficult than computer programming" is also hilariously devoid of empathy. For every junior programmer crudly duck-taping code together you have a person drawing MS Paint fanart on their DeviantART page. The two fields test different skills and you cannot just say one is harder than the other. Furthermore, the consequences are different here. If art is bad, it's bad[0] and people potentially lose money; but if code is bad it gets hacked or kills people.

[0] I am intentionally not going to mention the concerns Stability AI has with people generating CSAM with AI art generators. That's an entirely different can of worms.

[1] Revenge can itself be thought of as a second-order self-preservation strategy (i.e. you hurt me, so I'd better hurt you so that you can't hurt me twice).

Creative professionals might take the first hit in professional services, but AI is going to come for engineers at a much faster and more furious pace. I would even go so far as to say that some (probably a small amount) of the people who have recently gotten laid off at big tech companies may never see a paycheck as high as they previously had.

The vast majority of software engineering hours that are actually paid are for maintenance, and this is where AI is likely to come in like a tornado. Once AI hits upgrade and migration tools it's going to eliminate entire teams permanently.

As a crude analogy, there are a lot of great free or low-cost tools to create websites that didn't exist 15 years ago and can easily replace what would be a much more expensive web developer contract 15 years ago. And yet, in those last 15 years, the "size of the web pot" has increased enough that I don't think many professional web developers are worried about site builder tools threatening the entire industry. There seem to be a lot more web developers now then there were 15 years ago, and they seem to be paid as well or better than they were 15 years. And again, that doesn't mean that certain individuals or firms didn't on occasion experience financial hardship due to pressure from cheaper alternatives, and I don't want to minimize that. It just seems like the industry is still thriving.

To be clear, I really have no idea if this will turn out to be true. I also have no idea if this same thing might happen in other fields like art, music, writing, etc.

To be perfectly honest, I absolutely love that particular attempt by artists, because it will likely force 'some' restrictions on how AI is used and maybe even limit that amount 'blackboxiness' it entails ( disclosure of model, data set used, parameters -- I might be dreaming though ).

I disagree with your statement in general. HN has empathy and not just because it could affect their future world. It is a relatively big shift in tech and we should weigh it carefully.

All these talking points about lack of empathy for poor suffering artists have already been made a million times in those other debates. They just don't pack much of a punch anymore.

a) the panic is entirely misguided and based on two wrong assumptions. The first is that textual input and treating the model as a function (command in -> result out) are sufficient for anything. No, this is a fundamentally deficient way to give artistic directions, which is further handicapped by primitive models and weak compute. Text alone is a toy; the field will just become more and more complex and technically involved, just like 3D CGI did, because if you don't use every trick available, you're missing out. The second wrong assumption is that it's going to replace anyone, instead of making many people re-learn a new tool and produce what was previously unfeasible due to the amount of mechanistic work involved. This second assumption stems from the fundamental misunderstanding of the value artists provide, which is conceptualization, even in a seemingly routine job.

b) the panic is entirely blown out of proportion by the social media. Most people have neither time nor desire to actually dive into this tech and find out what works and what doesn't. They just believe that a magical machine steals their works to replace them, because that's what everyone reposts on Twitter endlessly.

Because those things, while dumb and simple, are not continuous in the way that visual art is. Subtle perturbations to a piece of visual art stay subtle. There is room for error. By contrast, subtle changes to source code can have drastic implications for the output of a program. In some domains this might be tolerable, but in any domain where you’re dealing significant sums of money it won’t be.

1. This is theft and that's bad.

2. People who do this are getting gains without putting the work and that's bad. (And, per quite a few commenters I've seen, are talentless hacks.)

I have a lot of empathy for the first, and think it has merit, and have a much smaller amount of empathy for the second.

I ended up reading a lot of the quote tweets on this guy the other day: https://twitter.com/ammaar/status/1601284293363261441/retwee...

Here's just a few of thousands in the vein of number 2:

> No talent or passion whatsoever

> He thinks he created something

> Why don't you subscribe to writing and art classes?

> This so ugly and shows real disrespect for people who have made stuff by themselves for years.

> Men will literally sell AI trash and call it "art" instead of go to therapy

> Can’t write or draw but wants to do both

> This is nothing but a HUGE disrespect to all the writers and artists around the world, and all it does is belittle their REAL work and effort. > > This is not art. > Nothing to be proud of.

> I just spent 8 months illustrating a children’s book by hand—working, not “playing”—after a lifetime of training. > > FUCK OFF!

There are also plenty people are complaining about "theft", but it honestly, re-reading through it now, it feels like a minority. If this were done using fully public-domain content, does it sound like any of the people I quoted above been okay with it?

There's a clear disdain for "non-artists" creating art in a new way. I very much feel for the people who see their careers going away, and I can also empathize people who spent a long time acquiring a creative skill that's now "unnecessary". Programming has this too—those darn kids programming in Python rather than Assembly, or doing bootcamps that don't teach big-O notation. This is a normal, human way to feel, and I feel that too from time to time. BUT, I also resist that feeling. I choose not to express disdain for newcomers using new technology, or skipping the old ways.

A large (or at least loud) part of the art community seen here is expressing absolute disdain for those of us who are "cheating" not because "copyright infringement" but because we're using new technology that bypasses years of learning and that's very much eating into my empathy for the community in general. I find it toxic in the programming community and I find it toxic in the art community. Right now, it's exploding in the art community in a way far beyond what I've witnessed in programming.

Get a grip me old fruit. You've basically described "growing up". The world is a pretty wild place and you need to find your niche or not (rince/repeat). You are not a failed artist at all. You probed at something "had a dabble" if you like and it didn't work out. Never mind. Move on and try something else but keep your interest in mind.

There are loads of professions that I'd like to have done but as it turns out I'm me and that's who I am. Personally speaking I'm a MD of a little IT firm in the UK that can fiddle up a decent 3-2-1 conc mix and do fairly decent first and second fix wood work. I studied Civ Eng.

"The lack of empathy" - really?

If you fancy your chances as an artist then go for it. At worst you will fulfill your ambition and create some daubs. At best, you will traverse reality and be a wealthy living artist.

Just do it.

And yes, it will transform art completely, initially by lowering the barrier for producing quality art, and then by raising the bar in terms of quality, it's coming for every artistic field, 3d, film, music etc

If you want a career in these fields, you will need to ride this AI wave from the get go, but even that career will eventually succumb to automation, this is the inevitable end point, as an example, eventually you will be able to give a brief synopsis to an AI and it will be able to flesh that out and create a full movie of it with the actors you choose.

That is only because the vast majority of computer programming that is done is not very good.

My primary empathy is with end users, who could be empowered with AI-based tools to express their dreams and create graphics or software without need to pay professional artists or programmers.

For me at least, Stable Diffusion has been this great tool for personal expression in a medium that was previously inaccessible to me: images. Now I could communicate with people in this new, accessible way! I've learned more about art history and techniques in the last 3 months than in my entire life up to that point.

So I came up with a few ideas about making some paintings for my mother, and children's books for my nieces and nephew. The anger I received from my artistically inclined colleagues over this saddened me greatly, so I tried to talk to more people to see if this was an anomaly. There was more anger, and argument for censorship! I have to admit I struggled to maintain any empathy after receiving that reception.

I'm personally really excited about a future where we don't have to suffer to create art, whether it's code, an image, or music. Isn't more art and less suffering in our lives a good thing? If there are economic structures we've set up that make that a bad thing, maybe it would be fruitful take a critical look at those.

Presently I'm looking at creating a few small B2B products out of various fine-tuned public AI models. The first thing I realized is that I'd be addressing niches that were just not possible to tackle before (cost, scale, latency). The second thing I noticed is I'd need to hire designers, copywriters, etc. for their judgement -- at least as quality control. So at least in my limited scope of activity, the use of AI permits me to hire creative professionals, to tackle jobs that previously employed zero creative professionals (because previously they weren't done at all, or just done very poorly, e.g. English website copy for small business in non-English-speaking developing economies).

I do feel for people that have decided that they need to retool because they feel AI threatens their job. I do that every couple of years when some new thing threatens an old thing that I do, it's a chunk of work, and not always fun. To show better empathy, I think I'm going to reach out to more artists and show them what the current AI tools can and cannot do, to help them along this path. So thank you for your post, because it gave me the idea to take this approach!

...and on the weekends, I can still write code in hand-optimized assembly, because that's the brush I love painting with.

Ultimately those who are able to integrate it into their creative process will be the winners. There will always be small niche for those who oppose it out of principle.

It’s blatantly obvious that regardless of if it will work or not, they’re trying to get companies with enough money to file law suits to make a move and do so.

> I don’t see the point.

…or you don’t agree with the intent?

I’m fine with that, if so, but you’d to be deliberately trying very hard not to understand what they’re trying to do.

Quite obviously they’re hoping, similar to software that lets you download videos from YouTube, that tools that enable things are bad, not neutral.

Agree / disagree? Who cares. I can’t believe anyone who “doesn’t get it” is being earnest in their response.

Will it make any difference? Well, it may or may not, but there’s a fair precedent of it happening, and bluntly, no one is immune to law suits.

So in effect, they are pitting Disney's understanding of copyright (maximally strict) against that of the AI companies (maximally loose).

Even if it's technically the responsibility of the user not to publish generated images that contain copyrighted content, I can't imagine that Disney is very happy with a situation where everyone can download Stable Diffusion and generate their own arbitrary artwork of Disney characters in a few minutes.

So that strategy might actually work. I wish them good luck and will restock my popcorn reserves just in case :)

The problem I see though is that both sides are billion dollar companies - and there is probably a lot of interest in AI tech within Disney themselves. So it might just as well happen that both sides find some kind of agreement that's beneficial for both of them and leaves the artists holding the bag.

It doesn't necessarily matter if they're affected. My thought when seeing this is that they want some legal precedent to be set which determines that this is not fair use.

<https://waxy.org/2019/12/how-artists-on-twitter-tricked-spam...>

If art streams are tree-spiked with copyrighted or trademarked works, then AI generators might be a bit more gun-shy about training with abandon on such threads.

It's a form of monkeywrenching.

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_spiking>

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabotage#As_environmental_acti...>

Would you mind if AI starts creating art like yours?

What if your clients tell you they bought the AI generated art instead of yours?

Your line of reasoning sounds like “ah, we already won so your protest doesn’t matter anyway”, but did you already win actually? Do you really not need all their development to draw on the same level? Just show that.

I think attempting to prevent this is a losing battle.

Also I'm not sure most artist jobs are middle-upper class.

Personally, I'm new in my career, and I'd like to not have the rug pulled out from under me. If I were a student again, I would have to consider whether the university debt was going to be worth it in the long term or if I should look at a more traditional field to be in.

My first job was to write C code for industrial machines that replaced humans doing manual work. Sometimes I even had to go watch them work so I could fully understand what they were doing.

In my second job as a developer, I wrote a Django application that automated away a whole department in the company. I saw 100 people getting fired due to a script that I wrote.

That was all happening in the third world country were I came from. These were real people getting fired, with families that depend on them. Most of them were already in poverty even before being fired.

These artists complaining sound like a very 1st world problem to me. I doubt that anyone actually "lost a job" because of this technology so far.

I would think that generating those images is okay by Disney, the same as if I painted them. The moment Disney would object is when I start selling them on merch, at which point it is irrelevant how they were created.

Am I mistaken?

On the other hand, nobody owns a copyright on a specific style. If I go study how to make art in the style of my favorite artist, that artist has no standing to sue me for making art in their style. So why would they have standing to sue for art generated by an AI which is capable of making art in their style?

[1] https://fishstewip.com/mickey-mouse-copyright-expires-at-the...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_American_Frontier...

Edit: confused SAF with Nova!

AI replacing artists functionally is just the surface fear. The real problem is using AI as an automated method of copyright laundering. There's only so much hand waving one can do to excuse dumping tons of art that you didn't make into a program and transform it into similar art and pretend like you own it. People like to pretend that it's like a person learning and replicating a style, but it's not. It's a computer program and it's automated. That the process is similar is immaterial.