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Comment by ethanbond | Hacker News Reader

It’s always funny seeing how utterly divorced from the world of actual art all the “new artists” are.

> “If he contacts me asking for removal, I'll remove this.” Lykon said. “At the moment I believe that having an accurate immortal depiction of his style is in everyone's best interest.”

No dude, the scarcity and the mortality is the point. He spent decades developing this style and it’s obviously counter to his goals to have it “immortalized” under the name of anyone with an internet connection and a keyboard. If that wasn’t obvious prior to his opting out, it sure is obvious after that, isn’t it?

Gee wiz I hope people still choose to spend their lives developing novel art forms and styles, knowing full well they’ll be “immortalized” and mass-produced as soon as they reach noteworthiness. Art is a profession for Christ’s sake, not a charity project.

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There's something depressingly callous about those types. Nobody celebrates or appreciates the cost, effort and labor involved in making anything. It shows in their own generated derivatives.

It takes one click for me to do what Rutkowski spent decades creating, so he can just...make like an artist and go die now or something. We don't need him anymore. Enjoy endless uninspired pieces of corporate motel art fashioned in his style.

It's demoralizing. At this point, every one of us exists to be exploited. Create anything original and instead of being appreciated, it will be taken from you as you're spit on and told to eat shit.

What’s even more depressing is how you’re reducing the artist only to the stuff they make and not the impact or the journey the artist had to get to this point. Art is more than just visual junk food for our brains to feed on, art is there to push the boundaries of what art is. Which Rutkowski surely did and perhaps now his current style will be washed away but I can promise you, art is not going to just stop because the artist knows a computer can copy them. It’s up to people like Rutkowski to move the needle forward again even with new tools like generative art.

I can confirm that least in my circle, creativity has never been this high. We are going to see some art that you can’t even fathom come out in the next few years and it’s all going to be due to this generative AI push we’ve seen the last few months. Art will change, artists aren’t going anywhere.

It’s like saying we shouldn’t use these fancy new washing machines because the people who hand washed them for years would be left with nothing to do.

So what is Rutkowski's journey, his story, his sufferings, his trials, his tribulations? If that is how it came to be that I see a work of art in his style, what is it? The art (style) I can see for myself, but that journey can't be faked.

Art is expression, it exists outside of capitalism and has for thousands of years. Illustration can be a profession. It's not funny seeing seeing artists contextualize art as a purely capitalistic endeavor, it's depressing.

Anyway this was inevitable and I called it as soon as artists started demanding their removal from AI image sets, you can't stop some rando with a little money and time from fine tuning existing models on whatever images they want.

Art exists at the caliber that it does because people are able to feed their families by developing the craft to that caliber.

When art patronage disappears or where it doesn’t exist, the craft doesn’t develop.

Sure, anyone can make art. That’s not what’s being discussed here. This is a guy trying to feed his family and a bunch of assholes working to destroy his living under the guise of “art exists outside of capitalism.”

Sure art does — but grocery bills don’t.

Uh, sure. Every single piece of art that anyone knows by name was created professionally. It was created in order to feed the person who developed a craft to a sufficient level to be noteworthy.

Sure, anyone can (and should!) express themselves creatively and yes, that is art. But that’s clearly not what’s going on here, regardless of how dumb anyone wants to play.

Yeah, Van Gogh was a real celebrity.

edited to add what I was actually responding to

I didn’t say they were celebrities? Van Gogh was making art to sell it (unsuccessfully).

By most he accounts he made art for the sake of it, selling works was a means to an end. A single painting sold doesn't make for much of a "profession". That's my main issue with your POV, I think you're projecting your own values on to a lot of artists who don't share them.

Nope, Van Gogh was always sketching and making art, but he didn't produce any noteworthy pieces until he actively decided to become a full-time artist. He made the decision to become an artist after several failed career paths... that's a hint.

It indicates that social safety nets in the 1800s weren't very extant and that dedicating more time to artistic work produces better works.

Van Gogh's choice to turn his hobby into a career wasn't their first choice? That's a hint. Cavemen weren't scrawling on walls to pay off their 401ks, there's more to art than commerce.

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