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Comment by kelsey9876543 | Hacker News Reader

when will artists accept genai as a tool not a competitor? all artists with genai tools easily outclass a non artist fiddling around

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My artist cousin uses AI to be able to take more customers. He's very happy with it. Just go back to the 70s and read all the discussions about the jobs killed by computers. Before computers, more artists were needed for the same output, while now artists can do things that could only be dreamed a generation ago.

Also, when artists finally get compensated for training, expect Spotify-style cents. Artists won't be able to stop this, they are just not strong enough as a group, for better or worse.

clearly recall the arts world of the 1970s. Manual arts, manual publishing tasks and the business around that employed many orders of magnitude more people in many large metro areas. Fast Forward to post-Lucasfilm digital era and the size of the largest media companies magnified by 1000x, while sign shops closed and local typesetting and design firms had to go digital or die. Fast forward again to post-covid, and I believe that you would be lucky to find a few of the earlier activities at all, in any city. Meanwhile games employ thousands of anonymous artists remotely, and very, very few individuals run their own business with any stability.

Digital arts has been a magnifier for the largest companies, and the literal death of thousands of stable, small business, in fifty years.

I think artists on the low end might suffer. I have commissioned some images and models for some hobby projects, even while I paint and model myself. Probably would use AI to generate images today.

Innovation tends to wipe out the low end everywhere. At the same time, more people can generate their own images without having to find an artist. In practice, images that wouldn't be created because of costs will now be created.

True. Image generation is a godsend for rapid prototyping. Although with low end I meant a financial sense. Skill is often not enough to be financially successful as an artist, there is luck and opportunity involved. So we could still lose something here.

Also AI is still atrocious to come up with any new concept that wasn't meticulously trained. To me this is still just an algorithm as intelligence would suggest something different. But nonetheless an impressive and mighty tool.

GenAI really is a competitor for a lot of commercial illustration and photography. It isn't a complete substitute, but there are lots of situations where a layman fiddling around with a GenAI will get a perfectly acceptable result in a couple of minutes. If it doesn't already exist, I can easily foresee that online publishing tools will have integrated GenAI features to autogenerate an image from a caption, or an illustration based on the text of an article.

Some artists may well benefit from being able to produce more work more quickly and be able to capitalise on their ability to use GenAI effectively, but I expect that many won't; they are likely to see their incomes decline, or lose their livelihoods altogether.

That isn't an argument for stigmatising or banning GenAI, but we do need to recognise that it's a real problem for the people affected.

I mean it took many years for photoshop to be accepted. Change takes time, doubly so if its seen as a threat to one's livlihood.

> when will artists accept genai as a tool not a competitor?

When non-artists stop using it to compete with them?

This is a very conservative and limiting definition of “artist.” I was always told that anyone can be an artist, even if their work isn’t classically “good.” Now the ladder has been pulled up by formerly inclusive artists. That’s too bad.

OK, to explain. I used to commission artwork to illustrate articles in the print media. We used to pay well and commission about 5 images a month.

These days we’d probably have the office intern tinker with some prompt writing for most of those.

Those people have just lost their living

Same with people that made buggy whips for horses.

And that’s fair enough. The original commenter asked ‘when artists would stop treating AI as competition’.

You are just reinforcing the fact that AI is competition.

Did you have a bad experience in art class growing up? Equating the two smacks of resentment.

They're literally equal as classes for this subject matter.

It will be a while. There is a large group of people who don’t willingly uses new tools when those tools enable all comers to make better, “competing” work product.

That will progress a funeral at a time until the stigma is gone and you have critical masses of people really pushing the art of the possible. Lots of the SAF-AGRA protest is based on this reasoning.

The SAG and WGA protest have almost nothing to do with this. The AI debacle their worried about is either being replaced by AI versions of their likeliness (without pay) or being paid less and remaining uncredited because AI was used to write/edit (a portion of) a script, respectively.

>or being paid less and remaining uncredited because AI was used to write/edit (a portion of) a script, respectively.

Here are the demands from the WGA:

https://www.wga.org/uploadedfiles/members/member_info/contra...

Their proposals were:

>Regulate use of artificial intelligence on MBA-covered projects: AI can’t write or rewrite literary material; can’t be used as source material; and MBA-covered material can’t be used to train AI

I agree some aspects are about writers protecting themselves from being replaced by AI, but the outright ban on use of them (ie. "can’t write or rewrite literary material") and prohibiting them from being trained seems consistent with the parent's claim of "There is a large group of people who don’t willingly uses new tools when those tools enable all comers to make better, “competing” work product"

>when will artists accept genai as a tool not a competitor? all artists with genai tools easily outclass a non artist fiddling around

If that AI is being trained to emulate their work , using their work to do so, without asking their permission to use their work.. then it's not unreasonable for them see it as a competitor.

They don't have the same army of lawyers film studios have though, so it looks like SA etc got away with the heist.

And (questions of efficacy aside) they're perfectly within their rights to add hidden data to their images to stop it being scraped and used to train a a competitor.

> all artists with genai tools easily outclass a non artist fiddling around

Personally, I find today's music utter shit. Must be an age thing.

You will be much happier after you concede the fact that the music you grew up listening to isn’t better, you just grew up listening to it. It is ok to say you got older, stopped trying to discover new music, and would rather listen to the old songs you know you like.

But it is such a tired trope to say all new music is shit. Especially when Spotify, Soundcloud, and other services have made it far easier for new artist to get their work out there and to discover them. You also now have access to the entire world of music, and not just music in your own language or from a similar region.

You will also be more pleasant to be around when people think of you as someone with a preference but is open to hearing new things.

> music you grew up listening to isn’t better, you just grew up listening to it

Well you also don't remember all the bad songs just the good ones.

I find it very amusing people we're outraged about "WAP" and considering it a new low for music.

The songs popular when I was a child and a teenager:

"Baby Got Back"

"Kim"

"The Bad Touch"

Going one generation deeper, "Timothy" by The Buoys.

Or back to the 20s and 30s, Lucille Bogan's "Shave 'Em Dry" or any number of options from the dirty blues.

> "Baby Got Back"

If you remember the maniacal focus on thinness in the 2000s, this was actually an important and supportive song.

(Also, he's a hobbyist electrical engineer now.)

I think i was too young at the time to get that. An interesting point.

Your not wrong. When I say shit, I mean they're all created unnaturally. I am not saying don't let computers aide music design, to really obtain the first sample you need the music instruments.

I have yet to hear an official AI rock band play guitar in quill to the skill that was produced.

Manufactured vs Independent

Have you heard any rock bands? I didn't think there are any countries left where rock is popular except Japan.

There is still Christian rock in the US, and sometimes people just don't notice they're listening to it.

Some of the music from other decades is certainly better than some of what's getting put out today. Growing up, I often preferred (much) older artists that were still known to whatever was bubbling up on the Billboard charts.

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