Ok but what is an actually good solution to the whole AI art debacle?
I heard about C2PA and I don't believe for a second that it's not going to be used for surveillance and all that other fun stuff. What's worse is that they're apparently trying to make it legally required. It also really annoys me when I see headlines along the lines of "Is AI the end of creativity?!1!" or "AI will help artists, not hurt them!1!!" or something to that effect. So, it got me thinking and I tried to come up with some answers that actually benefit artists and their audience rather that just you know who.
Unfortunately my train of thought keeps barreling out of control to things like, "AI should do the boring stuff, not the fun stuff" and "if people didn't risk starvation in the first place..." So I thought I'd find out what other people think (search engines have become borderline useless haven't they).
So what do you think would be the best way to satisfy everyone?
I think if capitalism wasn’t involved in how AI evolves, we would be in a much better place. The fact that the first question about any tech is “how can we make money with it?” Already starts down a different path.
Seems like since we can’t solve that fundamental issue, best next bet is to learn to welcome AI into our lives in ways that enrich it. Use it to augment your work - alternatively, maybe start learning and specializing in things that are (for the time being) out of reach for AI. Human services that require another human or hand made high quality items where the purchaser is specifically interested in the hand made aspect.
Can’t say I have a perfect solution, other than to stay curious and adaptable to change.
This is a big part of the issue.
The truth is that most artists would still make their art if they didn't make money off of it provided that they are ensured basic necessities and enough time.
The whole idea of AI art would be much easier to brush away as a non-issue for many artists if it didn't immediately pose the question of "how is this going to affect my ability to live?"
I wholeheartedly believe this too. There's something so amazing about the feeling of creating things with your own hands and seeing what the rest of the world says about it. But the moment you rely on this to literally not starve, any unfairly advantaged competition becomes that much more dangerous.
Yes, indeed. And, in fact, it would probably make them happier if the bullshit commercial art that's bereft of meaning - a subset of commercial art, to be clear - was no longer something they had to concern themselves with in order to pay the bills.
If they - and the rest of us - could be granted the dignity of a good and comfortable life while perusing projects that were personally fulfilling, then there'd be little issue. But instead, their work is being used not only to line the pockets of investors and a handful of tech enthusiasts with the right connections (generative machine learning models aren't that hard for anyone with some programming skills and basic linear algebra to develop, the magic is in the money), but to directly undercut their paid work. And that's just not going to fly.
I went to art school, and I distinctly remember people talking about art being one of the few things that was safe from AI. "They'll have computers driving cars and doing office management but they can't do anything creative so it's going to be a good time to be an artist" and so on.
I guess you could make the argument that they're not really being 'creative' right now, but if the output is good enough for large amounts of the general public then it's still just as damaging for artists I think.
We have an art director at the corp I work for who is basically automated out of a job now. She is near retired and on good terms with the CEO so they will probably let her wrap up and not replace her.
Of course she still hasn't figured out how to use the new label maker, update the website, or use AI art generation so that has fallen to the rest of us.
Counter argument to pose, would be that a skilled artist with AI is now a faster producing artist than without - presumably (at least at the current tech), this combo pair up is best of both worlds. Artist can create art but still retains creative freedom and the talent of guiding AI prompts in specific directions a project may call for that a non-artist with an AI would struggle with.