Comment by tehjoker | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tehjoker | Hacker News Reader

tbh i think it's a good thing when people can make art in a style they love. most people make kitsch, that's ok. people who study will make stuff that reaches the emotional and intellectual heights of the best.

it does make me uneasy if OpenAI charges more than at-cost to help people do so though. it's the profiteering off others' work that is gross.

a quote from "The Communist Manifesto" about the nature of capitalism:

"Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind."

> it does make me uneasy if OpenAI charges more than at-cost to help people do so though. it's the profiteering off others' work that is gross.

i think they shouldn't be able to sell anything at all. violation of copyright isn't a excuse to sell stuff at-cost, let alone feed Nvidia with trillions of USD by releasing open-source (if they ever release) technology

tbh i not a huge fan of copyright, but it is crazy that OpenAI is allowed to privatize the results of training on a significant fraction of media produced by humans let alone a technology that was produced over a long duration in great part through public funding

Let them privatize, Id rather not subsidize the losses

>tbh i think it's a good thing when people can make art in a style they love

I agree. But people aren't making art in a style they love, people are telling a machine to make an inferior copy of something resembling art in a style they claim to love.

I say "claim to" because I find it hard to believe someone could be a fan of Ghibli and treat the studio's work in a way that Miyazaki would despise. This isn't love so much as exploitation.

If people value the Ghibli style so much, they could learn the art of drawing and animation, and actually make art instead of insulting the studio's talent and legacy by avoiding the craft and seeking an endorphine high from AI slop. It doesn't have to be perfect or even good to be satisfying, but it will be yours.

That's true, but you're basically just describing kitch. That's what most people make, and often they are happy with it. I agree that more effort and thought will produce a piece they will be happier with and feel a sense of ownership of.

You can love an art style and want to create images in that style without wanting to be an artist.

My family and I absolutely love Ghibli films. I ran some family photos through 4o and my wife was thrilled. It made her day.

You can call it slop, you can say I'm not truly a fan, but I made my wife happy, and I can't see the harm.

How is it "insulting their legacy"? You think people writing Harry Potter fan fiction are insulting J.K. Rowling?

The harm comes from AI "entrepreneurs" making a business out of cloning Miyazaki's style - and the styles of countless lesser known artists - and flooding the market with garbage that cheapens the value of the original work and undermines the market for human talent. And from the people in the AI community who are already claiming this is superior to the original and celebrating the death of human art. And from the likelihood that people will become dependent on this technology - which will be forced down our throats whether we want it or not - and consider themselves artists having never bothered to learn how to express themselves or develop their own talent, or even be allowed the tools to do so beyond the bounds of what an AI intermediary allows.

No one cares about your family photos. This isn't about you.

>No one cares about your family photos. This isn't about you.

My wife cares. That was the point of my comment.

The point of your comment was to imply that because you personally made some AI photos for your wife, and it made you happy, any argument that AI art could be harmful was null and void.

You're like the person who comes into threads about gun violence and says they don't see what the problem is, since they only shoot watermelons in their backyard.

Like, OK. You refuse to recognize the bigger issues at play, noted.

What if the concept of art was like a gun?

People writing harry potter fan fiction are not just pressing the "make fan fiction" button (or at least they weren't in the past, maybe some are with chatgpt these days)

I'd like to add that fanfiction is also generally disallowed to make any money, unless all of the original influence is removed from it.

And so the problem isn't with people who find joy in something they saw, but in people who make money from derivative work without explicit permission

The dopamine from an image edit like this is such a short term gain for all the long term effort that went into perfecting and performing a specific art style and it becoming a name and cultural _thing_. Groups of people staking their careers around something.

If the technology stays, the commercial incentives to produce art with such a depth and craftsmanship will cease to happen (unless perhaps new styles would be generated to feed an LLM as part of an art pipeline? Maybe? Wishful thinking most likely). You won't be able to stand up a company like Studio Ghibli in the new market. You'll have a harder time even standing up a career as an artist in general, let along getting enough to come together to form a studio. This will be the last time art creation like this happens. You may love Ghibli, but this will kill the process the allowed Ghibli to form.

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Spread across all such art styles, art itself no longer signals any quality of the minds or depth of effort behind its creation. We will have to look elsewhere for things to love and that have meaning.

> people are telling a machine to make an inferior copy of something resembling art

So art ended when someone created a photo camera?

No, obviously it didn't, and obviously LLMs are not "photo cameras."

but cameras also allowed people to use a machine to make an inferior copy of something resembling art

No, photography is actually art.

Why do variations of this rant get spammed every time AI art is discussed? No one cares for an argument that boils down to "git gud"

Six sentences can hardly be considered a "rant."

When you realize that your imagined disappointment is a proxy for jealousy, some of the subtle seething whimpers delicately packed into your every reply on the topic might start to subside. You're upset that people wasted their time developing a specific skillset that is a useless unfruitful timesink for the vast majority was ultimately replaced by a simple to use tool at an extraordinarily faster rate. We never needed the 'ghibli artstyle' to tell ghibli stories, we needed the direction and tone and messaging his works created to be in a consumable format that captures people. Languishing on the experience being cheapened because the landscape of art presentation has changed is a regressive stance that has no basis in reality and many counterpoints.

Here's the oft repeated analogies that never have a proper response to hopefully help guide you out of your self created mental labyrinth, but trigger warning! (for people like you): photographers, printing press, classical music.

Nope, sorry. I'm not whimpering and seething with jealousy.

Did you get ChatGPT to write this copypasta for you?

> when people can make art in a style they love

It's not making, creating. It's consuming.

Wrt. the Communist Manifesto: it's precisely the bourgeoisie and the church who are responsible for the greatest art, and its development. As you say, the workers love kitsch.

Lol, the bourgeoisie and the church pay for art because they have surplus cash and it is almost always workers that produce it.

And what do you think artists are going to do when nobody pays them? Something that does pay the bills, obviously. It really is a danger to the continuation of the arts.

And let's be honest: communist art is generally rather poor. The state, or the avant-garde of the proletariat for that matter, does not have good taste, but does tend to towards nepotism.

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