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Comment by dorkwood | Hacker News Reader

> Is it art? I don't know. I don't care. I was not able, now I am able, and the people who are able complain.

> Screw 'em. This is what tools are for. The strong should not tell the weak they cannot use props.

Really? This famously maligned group of people, who have endured a lifetime of jokes about their useless art school degrees and student loans they'll never repay, we're now calling "the strong"?

Artists aren't upset because a few developers made a machine that can generate pictures. They're upset because the machine couldn't have existed without their work, which they did not consent to being used, and it's now on the way to destroying their livelihoods all across the globe.

Can't you see the tragedy in their story?

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When a talented person tries to ban the tools that make an average person able to do the same stuff the talented person can do, this is intentionally disabling people to preserve a class privilege.

If there was a pill that gave people +40 points of IQ would we have born-smart people trying to ban it? Yes, some.

If we had a machine that put knowledge right into people's heads by nanobot magic would we have people trying to ban it? "This four week doctor training is an unacceptable threat to the medical industry" You bet it is pal, you bet it is.

This is not to say that *art is not vitally important* but it's not so important that we should ban talentless people getting access to the ability to make something that you will not be able to visually distinguish from art just to protect the monopoly of the talented-and-trained ones.

I can't draw. Now I can draw-with-machine-assistance. Maybe it's not the same as "drawing" for some numinous reason. I'm too talentless to care.

Somebody is going to take this away from me to protect the people who can draw?

No.

>When a talented person tries to ban the tools that make an average person able to do the same stuff the talented person can do, this is intentionally disabling people to preserve a class privilege.

And now we're back to denigrating merit again. No denominator. No distinction. Everybody gets the same gold star.

No, I don't want a gold star, I want a robot that can draw for me when I want something done.

I'm not trying to pretend AI image generation is art. I have no interest in that question right now.

What I'm saying is that it's completely unreasonable to ban a tool that ordinary people find massively useful and empowering to protect people who have training and talent.

Billions can't make the images in their heads real to protect the class privilege of a few hundred thousand professional artists worldwide?

No.

You're not thinking about the consequences of your position. What I said stands.

"Billions can't make the images in their heads real to protect the class privilege of a few hundred thousand professional artists worldwide?"

I thought about that extensively before I wrote it down.

If you think it is flawed explain why, please.

This appears to be basically the same argument I responded to originally, but rephrased in a different way -- that the privileged artists want to prevent anyone else from attaining their power and it's not fair.

You didn't address my original point, which is that your drawing-assistance-machine was only made possible by surreptitiously training on a vast amount of artist's work without their permission.

To use your nanobot analogy, would you see any problem if the nanobot company attained its power by secretly scanning the brains of surgeons without their permission, so that it could mimic their neuron structure and give its users the same memories and motor skills? Or is the process by which the power was attained a non-issue for you?

All artists study other artists.

Are we to ban this too?

You're not making a serious attempt to engage with anything I've said so far, so I don't want to keep arguing with you.

I am not willing to change my mind based on the case you have presented.

I have engaged. I am not persuaded.

No machine could have been invented without taking from the human work that came before it. Those people provided the inventor with a task to be done.

As they tell inventors, you can't patent an aim, only a method, and only for a time. Indeed, the aim is everything they mean to promote by patents... better, faster, cheaper ways of operating in the world.

I thank the artists for their aim. That some don't want what they were aiming at to fall into lesser hands tells me they never did art for the right reasons. The accolades becoming diluted is no tragedy.

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