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Comment by quest88 | Hacker News Reader

> Commercial creative workers are vulnerable because there's a billions-of-dollars industry effort to copy their professional output and compete with them selling cheap knock-offs.

I agree there will be winners and losers of some proportion here. But I also think the people that want to pay for art will continue to pay as their motives and values are different. There's plenty of cheap knock-off art, but people still pay premiums for art to support the artist and their work.

As someone else replied to you, it's similar to piracy. The people that pirate were never going to pay in the first place. To tie it back here, the people listening to AI generated <whatever> were never going to pay in the first place - which is why so many podcasts get their money from ads.

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> The people that pirate were never going to pay in the first place.

I think I agree with your larger point, but is this part true? When Spotify provided a much simpler UX to get the goods, people were happy to pay $10/month and Napster et al basically died.

That's a good point, my statement isn't so black and white as after all.

> But I also think the people that want to pay for art will continue to pay as their motives and values are different.

The big difference is the type of artist. People selling fine art won't be affected much. The vast majority of artists are commercial artists, the the idea that being a commercial artist is morally or creatively bankrupt— a common sentiment among those who want to imagine that this is all just fine— is nonsense. It's pilfered commercial artwork that makes up the bulk of these tools commercial utility, and the people that made it stand to suffer the most.

I haven't seen that idea (artists being morally bankrupt), like you I'd strongly disagree. I also agree it's a shitty situation that artists invested hundreds of hours of their own time to create something only to be repackaged and sold by some AI tool.

That said, I'd still make the same point that people who value art and the artist will buy from and support the artist. Those that don't value it, won't. But now we're on a larger scale.

>That said, I'd still make the same point that people who value art and the artist will buy from and support the artist.

The chances anyone will come across the artist when their marketplace is flooded with increasingly plausible simulacra become more and more slim as time goes on.

AI is choking off any hope for artists supported by patronage, simply by virtue of discoverability being lost and trust being eroded.

>But now we're on a larger scale.

It's simply a bad problem, made worse!

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