You removed the value and authenticity that artist in 30 minutes, you applauded it, and defended that it should be the norm.
OK then, we can close down all entertainment business, and generate everything with AI, because it can mimic styles, clone sounds, animate things with gaussian splats, and so on.
Maybe we can hire coders to "code" films? Oh sorry. ChatGPT can do that too. So we need a keypad then, only the most wealthy can press. Press 1 for a movie, 2 for a new music album, 3 for a new book, and so on.
We need 10 buttons or so, as far as I can see. Maybe I can ask ChatGPT 4 to code one for me.
Artists style is not copyrightable, at least in the US.
And if they changed that because of "AI"? My word, the lawsuits that would arise between artists...
You can't copyright style of a Rolex, but people pay a fortune to get the real deal. Same thing.
> My word, the lawsuits that would arise between artists...
Artists imitate/copy artists as a compliment, at least in illustration and comics world. Unless you do it in bad faith, I don't think artists gonna do that. Artists have a sense of humor to begin with, because art is making fun of this world, in a sense.
Pixar, Disney and Dreamworks have different styles, same for actors, writers, and designers, too. You can generally tell who made what by reading, looking, listening, etc.
I can recognize a song by Deep Purple or John Mayer or Metallica, just by their guitar tone, or their mastering profile (yes, your ear can recognize that), in a couple of seconds.
If style was that easy, we could have 50 Picassos, 200 John Mayers, 45 Ara Gulers (A photographer) which you can't tell them apart, but it doesn't work that way.
XKCD took a couple of guest artists because of personal reasons. It was very evident, even if the drawing style was the same.
People, art, and hand made things are much more complex than it looks. Many programmers forget because everything is rendered with their favorite font, but no two hand-made thing is ever the same. Eat the same recipe from two different cooks, even if you measure the ingredients independently and give them beforehand, you'll have different tastes.
Style is a reflection of who you are. You can maybe imitate it, but you can't be it.
Heck, even two people implementing the same algorithm in the same programming language doesn't write the same thing.
Isn't this an argument that AI-generated artwork will never be more than a lesser facsimile? That'd suggest that human-made works will always be more sought-after, because they're authentic.
When the replacements become "good enough", it'll push the better things because of being cheaper and 90% being there. I have some hand-made items and they're a treat to hold and use. They perform way better than their mass produced ones, they last longer, they feel human, and no, they're not inferior in quality. In fact it's the opposite, but most of them are not cheap, and when you want to maximize profits, you need to reduce your costs, ideally to zero.
...and the writers' guild, too.
But once it is? I mean, yeah, it'll replace Hollywood.
People will tell Netflix, "hey I want a move about X in the style of Y and I want Z to star in it", and bam -- your own bespoke movie.
I mean, once the capability's there, it's just inevitable. And yeah -- acting will become a hobby, just like sewing is today.
I want to see what the person has imagined, what the story carries from the author, what the humans in it added to it and what they got out of it.
When I read a book, I look from another human's eyes, with their thoughts and imagination. That's interesting and life-changing actually. Also, the author's life and inner world leaks into the thing they created.
The most notable example for me is Neon Genesis Evangelion. The psychological aspects of it (which hits very hard actually) is a reflection of Hideaki Anno's clinical depression. You can't fake this even if you want.
This is what makes human creation special. It's a precipitation of a thousand and one thing in an unforeseen way, and this is what feeds us, albeit we are not aware of this and love to deny it at the same time.
Thinking our creation has some kind of 'specialness' to it is like believing in a soul, or some other stupid thing. It's pure hubris.
There are many breakthroughs and realizations in science which excite me more than "this thing called AI": Bacteria have generational memory. Bees have a sense of time. Mitochondria (and cells) inside a human body communicate and try to regulate aging and call for repairs. Ants have evolved antibiotics, and expel the ones with incurable and spreadable diseases. Bees and ants have social norms, they have languages. Plants show more complex behavior than we anticipated. I'm not entering the primates' & birds' region because only the titles will be a short chapter.
While some of them might be very simple mechanisms on chemical level, they make a much more complex system, and the nature we live in is much sophisticated than we know, or want to acknowledge.
I'm not looking from "Humans are superior" perspective. Instead, I'm looking from "our understanding of everything is too shallow" perspective. Instead of trying to understand or acknowledge that we're living in a much more complex system on a speck of dust in vast emptiness, we connect a bunch of silicon chips, dump everything we babbled to a "simulated neural network", and it gives us semi-nonsensical, grammatically correct half-truths.
That thing can do it because it randomly puts a word after word after a very complex and weighted randomization learned from how we do it, but imitating it blindly, and we think that we understood and unlocked what intelligence is. Then we applaud ourselves because we're one step closer to strip a living thing from its authenticity and making Ghost in the Shell a reality.
Living things form themselves over a long life with sight, hearing, communication, interaction and emotions, at least, and we assume that a couple of millions lines of code can do much better because we poured a quadruple distilled, three times diluted version of what we have gone through.
This is pure hubris if you ask me, if there's one.
The objectively superior product is the one that people pay for. They are exchanging labor/capital for the item/content.
I could make the best movie ever conceived, the movie to end all movies. If nobody watches it, it has 0 value.
No, that assumes perfect discovery of options. The product people see first is often chosen.
> I could make the best movie ever conceived, the movie to end all movies. If nobody watches it, it has 0 value.
Things only have intrinsic value if validated by others? That's just not true.
The market selects for that, and only that. Other qualities of the product are secondary, making any statements to the effect of "the best product [outside the context of simply making the most money] will win" misguided at best.
What will actually happen is people will think "meh good enough", shitty AI art will become the norm, and we'll be boiling frogs and not realize how shitty things have become.
For one moment, let's think it this way. You are a 20-year experienced engineer who is making whatever money you are making. Suddenly, your skills are invalidated because of a new disruption. And you have another friend in, the same situation.
Fortunately for you, luck played out and you could transition! You found a way into life, meaning and value. Your joy and your everyday life continued as it is.
But the other friend enjoyed the process, and liked doing what they were doing and there was no suitable transition for them. Humans are adaptable, but to them, nothing mattered because the whole existence didn't offer any value. The sole act of doing was robbed WITHOUT ANY ALTERNATIVE. The experience and value of a person rendered worthless.
Can you relate to that feeling? If yes, thank you.
If no, your words are empty and hold no value.
Artist went through the similar phase during the invention of photography. Now, it is rather soul-crushing because anything an artist make can easily be replicated, making the whole artistic journey a moot.
> If no, your words are empty and hold no value.
Being sympathetic towards those people doesn't mean you should bend to their will if you don't believe it's the right thing to do. I can be sympathetic to a child who cries over not being able to ride a roller coaster because they aren't tall enough without thinking the height requirement should be removed.
It would be as if instead of cars running on gasoline, they ran on chopped up horseflesh. Not good for the horses, and not sustainable in the long term.
Obviously this is a bit facetious, but basing your ethical framework on utilitarianism and _nothing_ else is pretty radical.
I agree that the current crop of artists are worse off with AI art tools being generally available. But consumers of art, and people who like making art with AI art tools, are better off with those tools being available. To me it’s clear that the benefit of the consumers outweighs the cost to the artists, and I would say the same if it was coders being put out of jobs instead. You can prove this to yourself by applying it to anything else that’s been automated. Recording music playback put thousands of musicians out of work, but do you really regret recorded music playback having been invented?
P.S. Adobe firefly is pretty competent and is only trained on material that adobe has the license to. If copyright were the real reason people didn’t like AI art tools, you would see artists telling everyone to get Adobe subscriptions instead of Midjourney.
Worse how? As defined by whom?
You could make a pretty compelling argument that "the world" would be better off by, e.g., forcing cancer patients through drug trials against their will. We basically could speed run a cure to cancer!
These longtermist, ends justify the means, ideas can easily turn extremely gross.