AI art is going to have consequences

I think automation is the ultimate refutation to "trickle down economics." In theory, automation should be objectively good: reducing the labour required to produce a good result should always be a positive, but the benefits of that labour aren't distributed to all the people who made the tool possible or the society in general, they go directly to those who already wield enough power to take it for granted, while the labourers are discarded. That is the true horror of this society: in service of the powerful, we became like machines, and now that machines are becoming more efficient, we become like fuel to them.

i'm an artist myself, and i've seen my commissions completely dry up because people are willing to justify TO MY FACE that AI art is just cheaper. people i thought were friends, who were supportive, have said to me personally that because they can't find anything similar to what they 'made' with an AI art tool on a reverse google image search, it can't be stolen. I've also had people on twitter argue that legally, it isn't stealing, and copyright law is bad anyway. but copyright law is the only shield we have anymore. we tried the moral arguments. we tried explanations of how our labor was being stolen. they weren't listened to. yes, the argument for copyright is flawed, and copyright law is more often used as a bludgeon by large companies who would have us sign away the whole of our creativity. unfortunately, it's the last line of defense that we still have. i'm disabled. i can't hold down a 'real job'. i imagine that art and writing were the last bastions of semi-stable income that a lot of disabled people like myself could still find; it's certainly true in the communities i tend to frequent. now i'm wondering how I'll pay for rent and food in a world where everything is getting more expensive and fixed incomes don't even try to keep up. i don't know if I'll be able to pay my phone bill this month. my EBT card is tapped out. i don't know where i was going with this; I've been shouted down for saying this sort of thing in comment sections before. but it's the lived, material reality of a lot of artists, and i'm glad not everyone is ignoring it.

"Ai Artists" are the equivalent of someone who says their dream job is to be the "Ideas guy".

As an artist who's been sacrificing so much time and money to turn my hobby into an eventual career it has been an absolute nightmare to see "AI" art popping up everywhere taking away opportunities that I might have pursued. Of course my goal has primarily been to go independent but even then "AI" art potentially threatens that opportunity. I am scared of what the future may hold, but I still must remain hopeful because without that hope I can't possibly keep my dream alive. Thank you for making this video

"AI art is not generated by AI" is a good point to start when talking about this topic, to demystify the application of AI as a tool instead of using it as an accurate statement. Edit: Thank you to the kind folks that know more about AI and what it actually means. I know that I know nothing, even more today.

My refutation for “is the prompter of the ai an artist?” is “are you a cartographer for plugging an address into Google maps?”

I feel bad for every artist out there who has to compete with AI generated images. As a customer I always have very specific needs for the art I want. AI images might get close, but in the end after 1000-2000 attempts with AI images I only could use a few of those as inspiration for the things I actually wanted. I prefer to be able to talk to a real human and tell the artist, I want this and that to be changed to get exactly the image I want. AI is far from doing that and it probably never will be able. AI even has problems changing eye color and refuses to change eye color when the character has a certain ethnicity. Yeah, AI refuses to give an Asian character blue eyes, even if it would be possible with contact lenses. But also, Asians with blue eyes exist.

There's an anime called "Carole and Tuesday" that takes place in a sci-fi future where the use of AI is the norm in the creation of music. On one hand, it's depressing how as time goes on that prediction becomes less exaggeration and more actual reality. But it's also reassuring because the theme of the show is that 'despite how hard the systems in our lives try to rip the soul out of it, humanity and art will always find a way to persevere ."

I'm not a visual artist, but I am an aspiring voice actor, and all the AI floating around concerns me. Getting in the industry in the first place has had me very worried, and hearing someone I watch frequently speak out about something like this lightens my heart.

Thank you. As an artist who does art as a hobby, this whole AI debacle has even made me pessimostic of the future. I can't even imagine what professional artists are going through... #SupportHumanArtists

16:05 This is something that isn't said enough; a lot of AI proponents don't seem to realize that what will just happen is they worsen their own job security. If your program can be easily picked up by anyone with a quick tutorial, if that's literally the marketing of it, companies will only treat you worse than employees. They know you can literally generate art in a few minutes, so they won't care about giving huge workloads for bad pay. And if this sounds like pessimism, oh boy do people not know how much people will not give two birds about screwing over artists. Ex: this entire situation. Like, seriously, what do people think is the end result of standardizing programs that can do the efforts of entire teams in a few minutes? You're not going to be respected at all because the people who actually were are now fired. You're not going to have unique skills, because automation doesn't need major skill. The only end result to automation without regulation is losing your voice and power.

Commenting for the algorithm because more and more people should see and understand how and why AI Art, despite being a morally neutral tool, represents a horrific and unethical future for not only the livelihoods of artists, but also the quality of art moving forward.

Its so depressing because you cant really compare the artist struggle in this situation with a struggle in any other field. As an actor, I can complain all I want about the massive amount of "competition" which is just a huge amount of people wanting easy access into a hard field, but that difficulty can weed the "fat" out. However for artists, the workfield is already so willing to let go of them, and these "tools" are being refined just to replace the entire population of the workfield rather than assist in the creation. Id love to think that one thing I saw about assisted coloring on animations is to help animators, but its just there to eliminate those who work to color the products.

Thank you for so eloquently putting all the points artists have been talking about for years on this video. It really does boggle my mind when people say that AI art will "give power to the common people to go against the studios" when we already see studios testing the waters with this technology...

Ai art has most definitely impacted my commission income, by a large margin. Considering I have a baby to feed its just sad and depressing. Im sure others are struggling way more than I but it really is just a slap to the face to be told my art is trash and then stolen to use for ai. Its just all really gotten to me :'(

The problem is capitalism, its so obvious at this point

Finally a sensible critique that doesn't just brush these things aside and say dumb things like they're 'soulless'. These companies like stable and open AI know exactly what they're doing - hit it fast and deal with the legality later - Artists need to understand what these things can do and how to navigate this new landscape instead of just being afraid and thinking to avoid engaging it will make it go away

The weaving example is actually a pitch perfect metaphor for this situation; what a lot of people don't realize is that hand-woven fabrics were better than the fabrics we have now. They were stronger, more flexible, and had a much higher thread count. In quite a few fairy tales someone is sent on a quest to find fabric so fine it could be pulled through a ring; that isn't magic. It was a real fabric thar existed for centuries, as recently as the 1820s, and it was made in Pakistan from local linen. If AI automates art the way the industrial revolution automated looms, we are going to lose so much. We will be sacrificing quality for quantity in the worst way.

The fact that so many of these tech bro's ignore history and actively WANTS to repeat it is MINDBLOWING for me. Like why do we even learn history???

19:57 Unlike stuff like looming, there isn't really any societal benefit to automating art. Isn't the whole point of art for people to express their creativity?