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Comment by laidoffamazon | Hacker News Reader

It genuinely confuses me how much AI generated content has become a left-wing culture war item overnight. Is this actually out of concern for graphic designers, many of which are the ones using the genAI tools in question?

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I don't think the concern is out of graphic designers, but the diminishing of humans from the creative process. Art is meant to be expressive of human experience. It's a translation of feeling and ideas (intangible) into a medium (tangible). One could argue AI still achieves this to a degree, and there ARE some really good AI generated artwork out there that does achieve this well but most of it isn't commercial art.

I think the actual concern people have with AI generated art is that the bar for entry has been lowered (expected) but we're ignoring the attention to detail or verifying/confirming the output. Too much trust is being put into AI generated output and we rush to publish stuff that doesn't convey the original idea. With it being commercially driven art, the incentives aren't there to properly review when you are emphasizing quantity over quality.

Take the swan and army boat in Los Angeles lake example. Before fully AI generated art existed, a human would have looked and reviewed that and ask the artist, "why the hell is there a swan there?" There could be a dialogue to defend or change that.

Even without AI, this problem still would have existed if your goal is producing as much distinct art at scale with less humans in the loop. Things are bound to slip through but it only winds up being smaller issues that might not impact expression of idea. Adding fully generated AI art has amplified this problem to a point where we don't have time to review at all.

The Hollywood movie industry has always been about business not art.

It’s hard for me to see it as anything but a moral panic.

It's not a moral panic, it's a financial panic. Just people who are worried about their career futures. I'd wager that although this is a divisive issue, the majority opinion is on "Yes more generation please, this is so cool."

What makes you say it's a "left-wing culture war item"? I've gotten the impression opposition to using AI-generated content like this typically comes from artists who might have been paid for similar content in the past

Many artists and digital tradespeople (including developers) are uncomfortable with how current models acquired their training data and how their use of that training data may disrupt real human livelihoods before affected people have a chance to respond or weigh in.

The politics of the people taking that stance are all over the map, and the arguments are about personal economics and immediate human impact.

You may think it's all nonsense, but I don't know how you get to "left-wing" or "culture war" from that.

I find this argument to be fiction. The training data does not matter. Let’s say it all came from art that was sold for pennies. Or from another country where it was legalized. Do you really think artists are going to feel differently if they’re in the same boat but confident that “their” art was not used without consent?

No.

The problem is the economic impact on artists.

you say "The problem is the economic impact on artists" like it's a bad thing that artists are concerned about their livelihood being taken by greedy corporations

I don’t feel I implied any such thing.

I’m just saying the training data issue is a dumb hill to die on. Because it will get sorted out eventually and the “best case” is some loose change thrown at a current generation of artists.

It is an ineffective argument if your goal is to help artists.

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