It’s worth reading William Deresiewicz‘ The Death of the Artist. I’m not entirely convinced that marketing that everyone can create art/games/whatever is actually a net positive result for those disciplines.
This is an argument based in Luddism.
Looms where not a net positive for the craftsman that were making fabrics at the time.
With that said, looms where not the killing blow, instead an economic system that lead them to starve in the streets was.
There are going to be a million other things that move the economics away from scarcity and take away the profitability. The question is, are we going to hold on to economic systems that don't work under that regime.
What we’re really talking about here is the consolidated of power under a few tech elites. Saying it’s a luddite argument is a red herring.
So long as Nvidia doesn't nerf their consumer cards and we keep getting more and more vram I can see open source competing.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/02/technology/ai-artificial-...
Saying 'I think society should have artists' is not Luddism.
For example take this line of mine
>The question is, are we going to hold on to economic systems that don't work under that regime
Currently artistry requires artists get paid somehow in our current system. That means instead of making the art they want, they have to make art that's economically useful to a paying customer. And yet for some reason you don't consider that part of a stagnating culture.
I highly recommend reading the book I mentioned as you don’t seem to have a particularly nuanced understanding of the actual struggles at play.
Perhaps an analogy you’ll understand is what happens to the value of a developer’s labour when that labour is in many ways replicated by AI and big AI companies actively work to undermine what makes your labour different by aggressively marketing that anyone can so what you so with their tools.
I'm not unsympathetic to the problems this introduces to those workers, but I'm really not sure how it could be prevented; we can of course mitigate the issues by providing more social support to those affected by such progress.
In the case of artistic expression becoming more accessible to more people, I have a hard time looking at it as anything but a net positive for society.
The problem is that folks seem to be confused between artistic expression and actually good art. Let alone companies like Spotify cynically creating “art” so that they can take even more of the pie away from the actual artists.
> Mind you this is barrier to entry. These are shovelware quality assets and I’m not running a business. But now I’m some guy on the internet who can fulfil a hobby of his and develop a skill. Who knows, maybe one day I’ll hit a goldmine idea and commit some real money to it and get a real artist to help!
So apparently they recognize what's going on. In the same vein as me being able to enjoy silly crude animations on YouTube while also enjoying high-quality animations like Studio Ghibli; we can do both.
As for how companies will use AI to enrich themselves whenever possible; absolutely agree, but that's a separate discussion.
My contribution to this scam
Not sure why digital artists get mad when I ask. They’re no Michelangelo.
And to add, like many of his contemporaries, Michelangelo likely didn’t do much of the painting that’s attributed to him.
This isn't me saying digital artists need to practice mixing physical pigment, but anecdotally, every single professional digital artist I know has studied physical paint -- some started there, while others ended up there despite starting out and being really good digitally. But once the latter group hit a plateau, they felt something was lacking, and going back to the fundamentals lifted them even higher.
I can tell you with confidence that physical color mixing itself is a really small part of what makes a good traditional artist, and I am indeed talking about realistic paintings. All the art fundamentals are exactly the same, wether you do digital art or traditional oil, there are just some technical differences on top. I have been learning digital painting for a few years and the hardest things to learn about color were identical to traditional painters. In fact, after years of learning digital painting and about colors, it only took me a couple of days to understand and perform traditional color mixing with oil. The difficult part is knowing what colors you need, not how to get there (mixing, using the sliders, etc.)
And just to add a small bit here: digital artist also color mix all the time and need to know how it works, the difference here is that mixing is additive instead of subtractive.
Do you sneer at those who use industrial pigments instead catching and crushing their own cochineal beetles?