>The human impact is real, but how is it different from how carriage drivers felt about the automobile, or how typists felt about the word processor?

it's probably different in the way that the parent poster described, that artists found drawing an emotionally satisfying process whereas people typing probably didn't think setting styles in MS Word made them complete.

People who have never found their paid work so emotionally satisfying are worse off, not better. At least professional artists have gotten to spend some of their working lives that way.

there is nothing stopping them from doing the thing that "makes them complete" for leisure like most other people. AI art doesn't stop you from drawing, it might very well impact the commercial viability of it for sure but all that's lost is that.

Exactly. People play chess, even though computers can beat anyone these days. Or participate in track events even though cars and airplanes are vastly faster than a runner on foot.

> The human impact is real, but how is it different from how carriage drivers felt about the automobile, or how typists felt about the word processor?

Because driving a car or typing is entirely different from making art.

> People who enjoy drawing can still draw, just like people who enjoy playing instruments can still play instruments.

"You can just sit at home and play your little instrument, and not bother anyone, is that good for you?"

Your contempt for art and artists is just awful. It makes me despair for humanity.

Eh, using your line of thought in a reductionist manner would simply lead to "it was a mistake to crawl down from the trees".

Humans change technology, technology changes humans. It is a tale older than civilization.

Also, many people would consider racing a car a form of art in itself. Same with riding horses that cars caused the general replacement of.

99% of artists have never been able to make a living at it. If you love art, you have to do it for the love, not the monetary rewards. Welcome to how the rest of the world lives.

yes, and every time an artist shares their exiting new drawing to the world at large, a computer program instantly mapps it and gives it away for free before the artist can even make a living off it. AI is driving out the ability to afford to make and share original art. Those 'menial tasks', by the way, are often the bread and butter that allow artist to make a living and continue to create.The end result will be a great loss of creativity and culture. The great misconception is that AI learns art just like humans by devouring preexisting art. Humans learn skills to manipulate MATERIALS, to then create imagery. AI copies those hard earned skills without permission like a library of stolen blueprints. Sad that so many people don't (or don't want to understand the difference). If I make a beautiful dress and you have the skill to copy it, so be it. If I make a beautiful dress and you take the pattern pieces I created to make the dress (since you do not have the understanding nor skill to make the pattern for yourself, but must rely on my patternmaking) well that is stealing in my book.

Any loss of creativity and culture from unviably commercial art will be massively overshadowed by the gain of creativity and culture this technology brings to the fingertips of... literally everyone with Internet and a few bucks to spare.

Art shouldn't be the privilege of only those dedicating a lifetime to holding a brush.

You just need better social security.

Art is the privledge of those who make it. Artists come from all walks of life and express their creativity through whatever materials move them. The loss of manual skills to transform materials to create new art to 'teach' your 'learning tool' can only cumulate in stagnation. If 'art from a menu' is your idea of the new culture, then I am sad for you.

There's no loss of manual skills, only the transfer of time and energy from a now irrelevant historically necessary executive action to a higher space of creation. You wouldn't demand that a sculpture loses all meaning if the sculptee didn't excavate the block of marble from a cliff with their bare hands, nor that a graphics artist's work is invalid unless they place every pixel individually (though that's a specific subgenre, pixel art).

No clue what you mean by 'menu'. Artists have always chosen from a selection of available possibilities - colors of paint, size and shape of canvas, notes of music, words to write... A book is no less art just because the author had to pick from a menu of 26 letters. Nothing stops you from hacking and molding and mixing the results down to the finest details of every atom if you feel so inclined.

Maybe you can't envision any future for AI in art, but that only says something about you as an artist, or lack thereof.

Artists transform materials (whether they buy them at Hobby Lobby or hack them out of a cliff themselves). AI is a dictionary of preexisting imagery. Not bad in and of itself. My problem with it is that it takes from the manual labor of artists without which it could not exist and gives the fruits of that labour to others. The argument that all art has already been done is contradicted by the fact that certain artists can be recognized by their works. The hand of the artist is a discernable thing, an artist's bread and butter if you will.

So start giving artists bread and butter, and we can let their hands pass into the side of history. That's literally what automation has always been about - machines make our bread now. Spread the wealth.