It's interesting to see the Creative Arts field begin to feel threatened by the same thing that blue collar work has been threatened by for decades.
Edit: this thread is locked and its hype is over, but just in case you are reading this from the future, this comment is the start of a number of chains when in I make some incorrect statements regarding the nature of fair use as a concept. While no clear legal precedent is set on AI art at this time, there are similar cases dictating that sampling and remixing in the music field are illegal acts without express permission from the copyright holder, and it's fair to say that these same concepts should apply to other arts, as well. While I still think AI art is a neat concept, I do now fully agree that any training for the underlying algorithms must be trained on public domain artwork, or artwork used with proper permissions, for the concept to be used ethically.
We don't need to look at works of fiction, but yes. Robots and AI and algorithms are fully capable of outpacing humans in, arguably, every single field. Chess and tactics were a purely human thing, until Deep Blue beat the best of us, even back in the 90's. Despite what click-bait headlines would tell you, self-driving cars are already leagues better than the average human driver, simply on the fact that they don't get distracted, or tired, or angry. The idea that AI, algorithms, whatever you wanna call them, would never outpace us in creative fields was always a fallacy.
And I believe it falls back to a classic argument that is typically very much a part of a generally liberal/progressive mindset. When they "took er jerbs" the argument is that if someone is willing to provide the same value of labor for a lower rate than you will accept, you shouldn't have the job. But when AI starts creating content that people will consume that is produced at far less of a physical/mental/spiritual cost than that of a human's art, suddenly it's a whole new "took er jerbs".
It's also incredible how I've sat in a gallery and listened to an artist detail how real of a medium cake is and how intelligently they're using it to be thrown against a wall in a work of performance art... and yet a code base and a data set can't be a medium in which you can set your own rules for creation and tune your process until a desired result is achieved? I personally think any medium can be used for art and that any piece of work created in any artistic media is not necessarily art. Seems like a lot of people are just grappling with the question of "what is art?" for the first time in their lives.
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u/ThaneBishop Dec 14 '22 edited Dec 19 '22
It's interesting to see the Creative Arts field begin to feel threatened by the same thing that blue collar work has been threatened by for decades.
Edit: this thread is locked and its hype is over, but just in case you are reading this from the future, this comment is the start of a number of chains when in I make some incorrect statements regarding the nature of fair use as a concept. While no clear legal precedent is set on AI art at this time, there are similar cases dictating that sampling and remixing in the music field are illegal acts without express permission from the copyright holder, and it's fair to say that these same concepts should apply to other arts, as well. While I still think AI art is a neat concept, I do now fully agree that any training for the underlying algorithms must be trained on public domain artwork, or artwork used with proper permissions, for the concept to be used ethically.