It's shocking and offensive to artists and to like-minded others because AI labs have based the product that is replacing them off of their existing labor with no compensation. It would be one thing to build a computerized artist that out-competes human artists on merit (arguably happening now), this has happened to dozens of professions over hundreds of years. But the fact that it was built directly off of their past labors with no offer, plan, or even consideration of making them whole for their labor in the corpus is unjust on its face.

Certainly there are artists with inflated egos and senses of self-importance (many computer programmers with this condition too), but does this give us moral high ground to freely use their work?

How many people is it OK to exploit to create "AI"?

Every piece of work is built off of previous work. Henry Ford designed his car based off of the design of previous cars, but made them much more efficiently. No difference here. It's always been the case that once your work is out in the world the competition is allowed to learn from it.

compensation for previous products just hasn't been the norm, and if it becomes the norm, countless humans will suffer due to the slowing of progress.

we will never be able to automate anything because the risk:reward ratio simply won't be there if you have to pay off millions/billions of people. progress will grind to a halt but i guess we'll have preserved some archaic jobs while our children are denied a better world

certainly the Industrial Revolution would never have happened with this mindset

I read this comment as implying a similar kind of exceptionalism for technology, but expressing a different set of values. It reminds me of the frustration I’ve heard for years from software engineers who work at companies where the product isn’t software and they’re not given the time and resources to do their best work because their bosses and nontechnical peers don’t understand the value of their work.

The opposite is also true, the tech world views itself as more sacred that any other part of humanity.

You say it's obvious that the existence of AI is valuable to offset a few artists' jobs, but it is far from obvious. The benefits of AI are still unproven (a more hallucinatory google? a tool to help programmers make architectural errors faster? a way to make ads easier to create and sloppier?). The discussion as to whether AI is valuable is common on hackernews even, so I really don't buy the "it's obvious" claim. Furthermore, the idea that it is only offsetting a few artists' jobs is also unproven: the future is uncertain, it may devastate entire industries.

> One thing I've noticed - artists view their own job as more valuable, more sacred, more important than virtually any other person's job.

> They canonize themselves, and then act all shocked and offended when the rest of the world doesn't share their belief.

You could've written this about software engineers and tech workers.

> Obviously the existence of AI is valuable enough to pay the cost of offsetting a few artists' jobs, it's not even a question to us

No, it's not obvious at all. Current AI models have made it 100x easier to spread disinformation, sow discord, and undermine worker rights. These have more value to me than being able to more efficiently Add Shareholder Value

I have noticed this, but it's not artists themselves. It's mostly coming from people who have zero artistic talent themselves, but really wish they did.