> The people running these companies give interviews every few months where the gleefully proclaim that AI will eliminate thousands of jobs.

That was not the original narrative by any company. I was here ten years ago when WaveNet and DeepDream were first published.

The media started shitting on this stuff immediately. DALL-E and Midjourney were not describing themselves as artist destroyers. GPT-3 was not hailed as a white collar job killer. Yet the news media hounded the industry relentlessly.

Labs started co-opting this narrative from the news media to create FOMO for investors and possible customers.

I work in AI. I had a coworker quit a job four years ago because his sister had a long talk with him that "AI destroyed art", which is something she learned from YouTube. Four years ago.

No AI CEO was saying any of this stuff back then. It was all seeded by the news media and certain YouTubers.

I can remember when John Oliver was joking around with Midjourney and DeepDream on his show and laughing about how fun and cool it was. He can't do that now because he'd be crucified for it.

I can go back and do an archeological dig if you like.

I am a working artist. Professional visual artists were furious about DALL-E and Midjourney immediately. If you didn’t see this, or you weren’t aware of it, it’s a self-selection problem.

Sam Altman was talking about how we neeeed UBI because AI was going to take everyone’s job very early in the development of LLMs. I have no idea why you don’t remember that, but it’s in writing everywhere.

Oh sure. But that was a different tone and audience.

The "it's stealing" arguments have quieted down. Especially since there are weights trained on fully licensed materials by Adobe and others.

Now that code models can do it, it's a moot point. Data can be found anywhere, and models are pretty good at generalizing out of domain, not unlike human brains.

Engineers finding out these models are good is drawing a lot of the same "slop" / "clanker" arguments that non-artists have been using. These arguments are much less interesting than arguments about copyright and control.

No, the “it’s stealing” argument has not died down, and if you think this it’s because you don’t actually spend time with artists.

What happened is that anyone who makes commercial art, like anyone who (used to) write software for a living, is now forced to use AI to survive, or else switch careers.

That's life. Supply and demand is simply life. I understand as an artist it might hurt you. But see from the other side, paying 50 dollars to some stranger on the internet to paint something is not something even most people in first world economies do for fun. Today people can satisfy maybe 60% of such impulses with free tiers. Bump it up a few percent points for paid tiers. Most of what is paid for on artstation, deviantart etc isn't radical new art but permutations/combinations of shipping characters, outfits, etc. Commercial art as in product art, store signs, etc also doesn't have RADICAL tier of creativity requirement for the bread n butter tier of it.

I come from software dev, so sure it irritates me that its cutting my market ability down, but think calmly about the opposite side. Actually I think software is safer in some ways, software isn't just WYSWYG, it needs good thinking and engineering to make things work safely and consistently. But art? That's the oldest impulse and for many branches of art WYSWYG.

> I work in AI

"Eat meat, said the butcher"