As an artist, I think it is a net negative for us. Disregarding the copyright issue, I think it’s also consolidating power into large corporations, going to kill learning fundamental skills (rip next generation of artists), and turn the profession into a low skill minimum wage job. Artists that spent years learning and perfecting their skills will be worth nothing and I think it’s a pretty depressing future for us. Anways thoughts?
I was leaning towards being opposed to AI art, but you’ve convinced me the other way.
I imagine the same debates that happened twenty years ago will come round again, on whether digital art is really art. I’d say so. It seems much more obviously art than something AI generated, but there will be fine art buffs who reject it.
And before then, there would have been a debate on natural or artificial pigments or the virtues of rabbit skin glue over a synthetic alternative, and so on.
The employment thing is the problem, rather than the technology. But that’s not new. It’s even a meme to be a starving artist.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to finish this cave drawing.
PS There’s a good podcast episode on art history. RevLeftRadio,I think. Could be Proles of the Roundtable. Spoiler to hide sensitive description:
spoiler
The episode talks about a pigment made by crushing Egyptian mummies. The damn Europeans had no fucking respect.
That’s basically how I look at it. Every time a new medium shows up people panic about it, but in the end we just end up with more ways to express ourselves. The real problem is capitalism as usual.
And thanks for the tip, gonna have to take a listen.
I think the problematic AI tool here isn’t AI that helps artists finish artwork or automate menial tasks, but AI that has been fed with every copyrighted artwork on the internet and is sold as an artist-replacement tool.
That is problematic. It seems like just another type of exploitation. It’s more visible because the artist works alone, for hours, days, weeks, to produce one output. They can see their labour being stolen if it gets subsumed by an algorithm (or simply ripped off by a corporation if we’re talking general copyright violations). Whereas another type of worker, maybe an editor or an accountant, has the fruits of their labour stolen the old-fashioned way, through the wage relation. And it’s harder to identify which bit of the final ‘output’ was their doing.