Every artist does this all the time. The actual problem is “IP” - a system of capitalist control whereby the rich control everything and workers are still exploited.
put the workers whose skills were stolen out of a job.
Nobody can steal another person’s skills. If people are losing their jobs, the problem is being forced to serve capital in order to survive. That’s a much bigger and more important problem than “AI slop”.
Without artists, gen AI would have nothing to train on.
Without artists, artists would have nothing to train on. But in reality artists will always exist.
wage theft
This is the biggest form of theft under capitalism but somehow people only complain about it in terms of “AI”. Again this is a direct result of the exploitation of worker by capital. There is nothing inherently exploitative about making art on a computer (apart from the manufacturing of the computer which is extremely exploitative).
And the other end that gets hate is the people who consider themselves to be better than artists because the prompt they put into an LLM created an image that they consider to be better than what artists make. They’re jealous of people creating something and want the reward without putting in the effort so they can hold it over others.
If this is even real? It seems like two completely difference category. And more importantly who cares? Petty AF.
AI bros fall into 2 categories in my experience, the “who cares, picture making machine go brrr” group and the “I can make works that rival the great artists like Da Vinci with just a few words, thus making me the winner and better than any so-called artist” group.
As for your argument about artists doing the same thing all the time, there’s a fundamental difference between artists and AI: a person learns the rules/reasons behind something while AI merely generates a statistical average. An AI is incapable of understanding concepts like perspective and lighting, nor can it learn anatomy. It’s much closer to tracing art than it is to going “I really like the way that guy does hands, I’m gonna learn to do that.” If you write a haiku, you’re not stealing your poem from other writers. You know the rules that make a poem a haiku. But an AI, asked to write a haiku, doesn’t know what makes a haiku a haiku, it just knows that its statistics say that x number of syllables is followed by a line break, etc.
If artists can’t exist without having artists to train on, then where did the first artist come from? Where did Impressionism come from? It hasn’t always existed as an art form. Who created the art that the Mona Lisa was generated from? I can tell you: the actual person that Da Vinci was drawing and the years upon years of study of things like anatomy and lighting that he had. The cavemen who drew stick figure horses on cave walls didn’t train on other stick figures, they drew what they saw in nature through the lense of their own interpretation and creativity.
Nobody can steal another person’s skills.
Look at your own words here: Nobody. No person. AI isn’t a person stealing the skills of another, it’s a tool using patterns and schematics created by people to make knockoffs. And just because this is a problem of capitalism stealing from workers doesn’t mean that it’s not a problem that we should address.
Again this is a direct result of the exploitation of worker by capital. There is nothing inherently exploitative about making art on a computer (apart from the manufacturing of the computer which is extremely exploitative).
This is what I’m saying. Making art using digital tools? Totally fine, I do it myself and even have a side business from the stuff I make in Blender. Using the tools created by companies committing wage theft rather than paying artists a living wage because it’s cheaper and easier for you? Not okay. It’s like buying stuff from Temu. You don’t have to subscribe to Netflix and watch all the latest shows. You don’t have to use Stable Diffusion to make memes any more than you have to use Reddit.
If 2 things were to change, nobody except for the stupid “photography will kill painting” people would care: people using AI to avoid paying people a living wage, and people who think that using AI makes them better than others.
Every artist does this all the time. The actual problem is “IP” - a system of capitalist control whereby the rich control everything and workers are still exploited.
Nobody can steal another person’s skills. If people are losing their jobs, the problem is being forced to serve capital in order to survive. That’s a much bigger and more important problem than “AI slop”.
Without artists, artists would have nothing to train on. But in reality artists will always exist.
This is the biggest form of theft under capitalism but somehow people only complain about it in terms of “AI”. Again this is a direct result of the exploitation of worker by capital. There is nothing inherently exploitative about making art on a computer (apart from the manufacturing of the computer which is extremely exploitative).
If this is even real? It seems like two completely difference category. And more importantly who cares? Petty AF.
AI bros fall into 2 categories in my experience, the “who cares, picture making machine go brrr” group and the “I can make works that rival the great artists like Da Vinci with just a few words, thus making me the winner and better than any so-called artist” group.
As for your argument about artists doing the same thing all the time, there’s a fundamental difference between artists and AI: a person learns the rules/reasons behind something while AI merely generates a statistical average. An AI is incapable of understanding concepts like perspective and lighting, nor can it learn anatomy. It’s much closer to tracing art than it is to going “I really like the way that guy does hands, I’m gonna learn to do that.” If you write a haiku, you’re not stealing your poem from other writers. You know the rules that make a poem a haiku. But an AI, asked to write a haiku, doesn’t know what makes a haiku a haiku, it just knows that its statistics say that x number of syllables is followed by a line break, etc.
If artists can’t exist without having artists to train on, then where did the first artist come from? Where did Impressionism come from? It hasn’t always existed as an art form. Who created the art that the Mona Lisa was generated from? I can tell you: the actual person that Da Vinci was drawing and the years upon years of study of things like anatomy and lighting that he had. The cavemen who drew stick figure horses on cave walls didn’t train on other stick figures, they drew what they saw in nature through the lense of their own interpretation and creativity.
Look at your own words here: Nobody. No person. AI isn’t a person stealing the skills of another, it’s a tool using patterns and schematics created by people to make knockoffs. And just because this is a problem of capitalism stealing from workers doesn’t mean that it’s not a problem that we should address.
This is what I’m saying. Making art using digital tools? Totally fine, I do it myself and even have a side business from the stuff I make in Blender. Using the tools created by companies committing wage theft rather than paying artists a living wage because it’s cheaper and easier for you? Not okay. It’s like buying stuff from Temu. You don’t have to subscribe to Netflix and watch all the latest shows. You don’t have to use Stable Diffusion to make memes any more than you have to use Reddit.
If 2 things were to change, nobody except for the stupid “photography will kill painting” people would care: people using AI to avoid paying people a living wage, and people who think that using AI makes them better than others.