Is that not the work of commercial creative workers? Did it not exist pre AI? There's an argument to scale, certainly, but the idea that "things were better in the past before these <<new technologies>> came out" is generally a suspect argument.
To your broader point - new tools for creating creative work come out all the time. Did we suffer greatly at the loss of image compositors when Photoshop arrived? On the flip side, did digital art gut painting and sculpture? Isn't this just another tool for creative expression?
Art is a way of seeing, not a way of creating. I don't think the technology is taking that away.
The fact that all of that stuff was crap is central to my point. You might just need to give it another read.
> Art is a way of seeing, not a way of creating. I don't think the technology is taking that away.
I'm really sick and tired of the tech industry's bumper-sticker-level-reductive pseudo-philosophical generalizations about "what art is," what it means to be an artist, and all of that. Art is a whole lot of things, and the most important thing it unambiguously is in this context is a class of professions. Glib decrees based on a razor-thin slice of one of the broadest topics in the human experience that conveniently exclude or dismiss the stakes of those with the loudest criticism and the most to lose is obviously self-serving. If you're going to take the libertarian "well that's the market for ya" stance," at least be honest about it. If you're going to try to define art to exclude the concerns of the people getting screwed over because you think the optics are better or it helps you not feel icky about it, well you better expect to get some really pissed off responses from people you casually decided aren't really artists or do work that doesnt meet your legitimacy criteria.
You can disagree! Folks who are impacted have every right to be pissed, organize, take action. All of these creative endeavors existed _post technology updates_ though - that's my entire point. The need for art doesn't disappear - it changes. Standing athwart the change is a choice, but I'm not sure it is an effective position.
>> Art is a way of seeing, not a way of creating.
> There's no glib decree
This is a glib decree and it completely ignores most of what art actually is in our world, rather than the quaint little box that most people in the NN business try to stuff it into. Your patronizing tone doesn't lend any authority or add depth to your initial analysis, which you essentially just restated using more words. The "art vs craft" dichotomy doesn't even approach the depth and complexity of the interplay of art and commerce in the worlds like video game development, music, cinema and television, and writing... hell even advertising. Like most tech dudes that assume their incredible mental might gives them some kind of pan-topic expertise allowing them to casually dismiss subject matter experts in other fields based on a few a priori thought exercises, you simply don't know how much more you need to learn to make informed decisions about this topic.
There is a direct line between music piracy you did in the past and the status quo of Spotify paying millidollars to artists today. Another POV is, find me musicians who prefer a world with Internet piracy compared to one without.
That has absolutely no impact, at all, on my fitness to criticize this current wrong.
I agree there will be winners and losers of some proportion here. But I also think the people that want to pay for art will continue to pay as their motives and values are different. There's plenty of cheap knock-off art, but people still pay premiums for art to support the artist and their work.
As someone else replied to you, it's similar to piracy. The people that pirate were never going to pay in the first place. To tie it back here, the people listening to AI generated <whatever> were never going to pay in the first place - which is why so many podcasts get their money from ads.
The big difference is the type of artist. People selling fine art won't be affected much. The vast majority of artists are commercial artists, the the idea that being a commercial artist is morally or creatively bankrupt— a common sentiment among those who want to imagine that this is all just fine— is nonsense. It's pilfered commercial artwork that makes up the bulk of these tools commercial utility, and the people that made it stand to suffer the most.
That said, I'd still make the same point that people who value art and the artist will buy from and support the artist. Those that don't value it, won't. But now we're on a larger scale.
The chances anyone will come across the artist when their marketplace is flooded with increasingly plausible simulacra become more and more slim as time goes on.
AI is choking off any hope for artists supported by patronage, simply by virtue of discoverability being lost and trust being eroded.
>But now we're on a larger scale.
It's simply a bad problem, made worse!
I think I agree with your larger point, but is this part true? When Spotify provided a much simpler UX to get the goods, people were happy to pay $10/month and Napster et al basically died.
This, times a million. Add to that the ancient quote from Plato(?) criticizing writing or the other ancient quote complaining about the irresponsibility of the youth, unthinkingly deployed to attempt to delegitimize any kind of critique of nearly anything.
The technology industry seems to be overflowing with so-called "rational" people who mainly seem to use use whatever intelligence they have to rationalize away responsibility for whatever problems their beloved technology has caused. It's a really stupid and obnoxious pattern; and once you see it, it's hard to not see if everywhere and be annoyed.
I think one element of it is naked greed (especially from the entrepreneurs) but I think another big part is a kind of stuntedness and parochialism that's often fueled by overconfidence (because of success in software engineering, forming an identify around "being smart" etc).
Nobody is getting "ripped off" by ML models any more than by other humans. When a human wants to launch a high-quality podcast, they survey the market, listen to a lot of other high quality podcasts, and then set to creating their own derivative work.
What ML models are doing is really no different. It's just much, much faster.
Everything humans create is derivative of other works. Speed is the only difference.
Or is it that, at some nebulous point, a difference in speed between two things impacts the way humans choose to direct their efforts to such a great extent that, for all intents and purposes, the two things are qualitatively different?
That's like sayin "The only difference between drinking 1 gallon of water and 100 gallons of water is death." Yes, the quantity of something for a given use-case is bound to give different results.
What the parent comment was commenting is that the actions being taken by these models should not be morally classified as wrong in abundance just as humans following the same process would never be regardless of the output they produced.
>What ML models are doing is really no different. It's just much, much faster.
I take this argument to be that (a) what the ML models are doing is fundamentally the same as what humans already do (I agree with this part), (b) that we have no moral problem with humans doing this already (I agree again), and that (c) the fact that AI does it much faster is not sufficient to cause any moral difference (I disagree with this part, and gave a counterexample to show how, in general, a difference in speed can make a moral difference, because that speed difference can have a large impact on how other people decide to behave).
Commercial creative workers are vulnerable because there's a billions-of-dollars industry effort to copy their professional output and compete with them selling cheap knock-offs.
I see this sort of convenient resignation all the time in the tech crowd... "creative workers only can blame themselves for tech companies taking their income because their art just isn't any good anymore!"
The poor quality "content" that's been proliferating recently has been created, largely, using the very tools that AI has built, or their immediate precursors. AI, for all its benefits, has only made that worse.
If you're saying, in good faith, that most of the infomercials, televangelist programs, talk radio, celebrity autobiographies, self-help books, scandalous expose books, and health/exercise fad books etc etc etc that came out 50 years ago were made for no reason beyond advancing human knowledge, you're either too young to remember any media from before our current era and haven't looked beyond survivorship bias.
Tech folks love sentiments like this because it entirely emotionally places the onus on the people getting ripped off by big tech companies for being ripped off. If their work was that awful, companies wouldn't be clamoring to vacuum it up into their models to make more of it. Nearly all of the salable output from these models exists solely because it took a creative product someone made with the intention of selling it and it's using it to sell a simulacra.
It's using nostalgia to deflect guilt for harpooning the livelihood of many people because it's just more convenient and profitable to empower mediocre "content creators" they use to justify doing it.