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?
That’s a difficult question to answer :) I’ll leave that one to those more involved in the art world than I am.
You’re correct that labour is always involved in producing value. But labour is not always compensated for the full value they produce. The photoshop programmers, and all the people whose work went into feeding them, lighting the rooms they worked in, powering the buildings they worked in, mining the energy for the power, and so on… were all compensated for their work.
Obviously they weren’t fairly compensated. This is capitalism we’re talking about after all. And yes, there are limits to compensation, arrived upon by collective decisions made by society and spelled out in legal agreements (and yes of course, under capitalism, only a small subset of society makes those decisions). E.g., the photoshop programmers are not entitled to a piece of the sale of every artwork that an artist creates when using photoshop. Incidentally, this is part of why photoshop is so phenomenally expensive.
But as communists, we believe that labour is entitled to all value it produces. And in this scenario, the value that was created by these artists through their labour hasn’t been compensated at all, much less the full value. Stable Diffusion is absolutely worthless without a massive training dataset, and that dataset is produced by the labour of combined millions of artists and their works, none of whom granted permission to these tech companies to use their work.
Good points!
And I think you’re right to avoid the philosophical question. Given the debate after the OP asked their question, I was brave to even hint at mine.
Although… People pay for Photoshop? I’m kidding, of course; shaky text you wouldn’t steal a bike…shaky text
Unless you were an AI company and it was a picture of a bike, apparently.
That’s a shitty move by the tech companies. They’ve got very sure of their right to information, especially since they started mass harvesting our data and we, generally, agreed to hand it over willingly for cheap shots of dopamine. I guess that famous saying is right: information wants to be free. Particularly if the person who wants it is willing just to take it.)