I think there are important differences between this situation and your chef/frozen food analogy that cause it to break down:

* A digital image is permanent. A meal, by design, is consumed and has a very specific lifespan.

* A digital image is trivial to duplicate and consume again. A meal can be very hard to duplicate (and may even require another chef, or food scientists). No two people can consume exactly the same meal.

* A digital image is not required to survival. Regular intake of food and water is (at least for humans).

and so on.

Food is essential to our survival. No matter how much effort you put into making food, you have to make something to eat or you buy food that is cooked by someone else. So making it more accessible for people who don't have time, money or necessary skills has completely no downsides.

Art is just something we do and consume for fun. We don't need to make art more efficient, because there is already too much art to consume in a lifetime. Also there is no requirement to consume as much art as possible. And automating art making means that there will be even more average art that anyone interested will have to sift through to find something nice.

Overall all of this effort could be put into automating something that will make everyday life easier, like if you want to make art more accessible then for example automate translations so we can read books or watch movies that we previously couldn't.

But it is not like that ... at all. Analogies run the risk of being completely wrong.

A frozen food is made of real food, the process all starts from scratch with "natural" ingredients (well ingredients).

The frozen food vs fresh cooked food is more like a film vs live acting. Or listening on tape vs a live concert. Even this analogy is lacking, a frozen food is made fresh at some point, it is about mass production not origin and ownership.

The frozen food is not food from your kitchen (or trashcan) remixed and added onto other people's plate.

I have gone from using midjourney for hours a day in amazement to being completely sick of it and anything it outputs in less than a month.

I have seen hundreds of perfect variations on Duchamp's Fountain in my life too. AI Art is very much like Fountain variations without the human Duchamp involved. Then some AI Art fool extrapolating from that and believing Home Depot has an entire section dedicated to museum quality variations on Fountain.

The actual output is a very small aspect of the phenomena of "art".

The people who wrote the Photoshop source code were paid for their contributions with full consent that their work would be included in the product and sold for a profit by Adobe. The artists whose work was fed into these systems did not consent, nor were they paid for their contribution. In fact, I have seen a few reports of people using these systems to generate lookalike artworks intended to resemble the work of specific working artists—artists whose livelihoods depend on client commissions. The only way that these systems could produce knock-off artwork after receiving a prompt containing that artist's specific name is if the artist's own copyrighted work was used in the training data.

Do you have any doubt that many working artists' copyrighted work was included in the the training data that produced these systems, without those artists licensing their work for that purpose?

It's not gatekeeping to insist that a project obtain a voluntary license from the people who contribute their work to a project.

And it's not gatekeeping to point out the fact that these platforms have only been successful by using working artists' copyrighted work in violation of their rights, without asking permission or providing compensation.

It’s not gatekeeping to value the outcomes of work created this way less than you would from the mind of a human.

Saying that I agree with you in that I see this technology as a tool that can be used by humans to make amazing things. No one really has yet as the outputs have just been blunted, sloppy things. But if I’m an artist I see these tools as the latest tool to help make things.

What is wrong with gatekeeping? It's not like everyone needs to be able to make art. Also, i don't know much about Photoshop, but most digitatl filters usually act the same as analog mixers. They do not automate anything.

It usually trends to the way over time.

When you're demonstrating or studying a tech (like we're doing with gpt now), there's a tendency to go "here's what it can do." Once people start using it for more mundane work, the focus becomes "here's what I can do with it."

It probably doesn't matter what children's stories language models can write themselves. It matters what stories people can write using them. Same for software/graphic design/law/etc. These are just tech demos.

This becomes clearer once demos play out. 2 years ago, scripting a philosophical debate using language models felt like AIs expressing their opinion. By now, we're past that.

There is the notable difference in the speed and scale at which a computer can be trained. The analogy doesn't really hold up in my opinion.

Morality aside, an artist who entirely copies someone else's work would be looked down upon because they are not original or creating anything novel or new.

The difference is that a human made the artistic stroke-for-stroke reproduction through human skill and expertise. Even a counterfeit painting is an exercise of perception and interpretation. The value is in the human's hand in the output.

This is kind of a tired reasoning. I don’t know what the goal of this kind of reasoning is. The fact is that virtually no one learns or dies art this way. No one in any statistically meaningful amount has a photographic memory and uses such memory to create new art stroke by stroke.

Have you read "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote" by Borges?

Part of the conceit of the story is that even a mechanical copy of a known work can become something else because of the inner experience of the person reproducing it. Menard's Quixote, his fictional author thought, was different because Menard knew things and lived through things that Cervantes before him didn't, and so the exact same words are injected of different connotations because of this.

It's absurd, but it explores something about authorship.

ChatGPT and AI have no inner lives, no authorial perspective, and so they cannot use this defense. In their case, a copy is truly "stolen" with no additional value.

Do you think it's moral for a big corporation to profit on pirating works from small artists?

> Painters literally said the same thing about Photography.

I think this is itself a bad take, for several reasons.

First, that something false was said in the past doesn't make it false today for a different thing.

Second, that wasn't the argument painters "literally" used. Did they claim that taking photos was "stealing" their paintings/reality?

What some may have claimed is that it took no skill or that it was cheating, or that it would put painters out of work. We now know all of these assumptions were wrong.

Photography doesn't "automate" creativity, as anyone struggling to take an interesting photo that tells a story can tell you.

This “gatekeeping” accusation is so stupid. It’s a laughable conclusion of the current woke/victimization culture. I have seen people on HN refer to the idea of needing sone kind skill to do something creative/difficult as “ableist”.

The square root of 3.5 is always the same value, so why bother doing it less efficiently? The same is not true for creativity.

Mathematical concepts are in the public domain. The art used to train these models are not