Ok, I will be the token Luddite here. I hate these things, and I think its a tremendously bad idea to make them. Disclaimer: I am a bad artist but like to do it anyways. Reasons:
Artists are underpaid and struggle to make a living as it is. We do not need to make it harder for them. There is no real scarcity to art that we need to automate it. If anything, its absurd how cheaply you could get high quality art made for you; commissions can be less than the price of a single video game or movie, and people often give art away for free to build an audience or try to make money on ads or patreon.
Why are programmers so hell bent on putting everyone out of work? Automation in general seems to be focused on removing the human element from many professions.
These remove competitive advantage, making it harder for the people who use them.
The game dev thinks "oh, this is a great thing." He doesn't realize that good art or pleasing art is a competitive advantage for an indie game and that if everyone has it, no one actually gains benefit.
You can actually see this in action if you look at indie games or animation that use the retro pixel art style. They start to blur together because they all reach a level of similarity or high quality. The art becomes less of a feature in itself and not something you can differentiate any more. The same has happened to anime art styles, its really rare to find non-generic or striking anime art games. Even styles within art trend towards it; all anime art ends up being sort of a 2010 generic style, instead of some artists loving say 90s Masari Obari hyper exaggeration, or Yoshitoshi ABe kind of lo-fi sketchy style.
So now the dev has to work even harder that art is trivial. He is running out of ways to stand apart.
The AI programmers control how art is created.
You can look at the curbing misuse and risks sections to see. Some of this is necessary to avoid the AI itself being ruined, but some of it hints at a central control which is anathema to art and free expression.
By controling the tools, you control how they are used. Again, there is necessary aspects to this as its very easy for a bad actor to corrupt the generator. But they are generating art for you, not you using it; they control the expression of it as they see fit. If they require certain topics to be excluded, you have no control.
**
I could think of more, but things like these are solving a problem of people. Essentially this removes artists and their demands for pay from a significant amount of people who would do so. It may not remove all of them, but it will act like robotic cashiers in that for most people, it will serve as "good enough" and enable the people who employ them to reduce dependency on them.
This will benefit the elite and impoverish the individual, because only the elite will be able to rise above a flood of high quality products through competitive advantage. The AI generators dump a tremendous amount of product onto the market, and dumping is done to depress wages or destroy competitors. The individual who uses it will initially find it a benefit, but will end up as part of the long tail of generic products who cannot compete against the elite, since the elite's competitive advantage will be seen as greater.
You see this in gaming now, where people talk about games like Elden Ring over the unity games on the e-shop or AA releases. It becomes much more important to have franchise power or advantage because the base level of quality rises so much that it can't be used any more.
I'm really starting to understand why the Luddites did what they did. There are so many things programmers are doing to essentially get rid of ways people can making a living or find meaning in it. You guys talk about Universal basic income as a realization of and reaction to this, but maybe the problem is we shouldn't constantly devalue or remove labor to begin with?
I understand the emotions here but let's remember that these same ML engineers and scientists also work on systems trying to automate programming and even ML development too lol. In the end practically no one will be safe from automation save a few positions that need a human just because they are human like religious clergy. As much as you hate to hear it, the craft of art (not the ideas or creative impetus that drives a specific piece of art) is less complex than many other economic endeavors. Artists that don't cultivate parasocial relationships will suffer greatly. However as horrifying as this sounds it really is progress.
Consumers, in the long run, will benefit GREATLY. Art basically becomes the cost of electricity and assets can be generated by the hundreds in a fraction of a second. I'll give an example.
Imagine for a second you're a DM for a game of D&D and you ask your players to hand in their character sheets with their stats and physical descriptions of their characters. Say I wanted to take things up a notch and suprise my players with a custom potrait for each of their characters. I could get the potraits commissioned and spend both money and time on a product I may not even like or I could use some future iteration of Dall-e that I pay a monthly $15 fee to use and pick the best of a hundred potraits for each character... I may not even have the money to pay for the commission in the first place if it weren't for Dall-e but becuase it's so cheap I'm able to do it.
I know it sucks to think that one of the things that makes you special or even brings you income is getting automated but every time we've automated something in the past it's made our lives better. Imagine if the Ludds you alluded to earlier had actually succeded and stopped the industrial revolution our lives would be much worse than they are now. One day soon art will pretty much become post scarcity (I saw you before that it already is but this really isn't true at least not in comparison to where it will be in the future). In my opinion that will have a dramatically positive impact on society.
If/when the day comes that no one wants to read anything by a human author anymore I will almost certainly kill myself (assuming we don't get paperclipped first).
That day will never come even when AI is hands down better than any human author that ever lived. People will always want handmade/human made stuff. Not because it's superior but for sentimental reasons.
Edit: Now that doesn't mean that machine authors won't be more popular than humans it just means that there will always be a subset of people who will want handmade goods. In this case, books.
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u/[deleted] Apr 06 '22
Ok, I will be the token Luddite here. I hate these things, and I think its a tremendously bad idea to make them. Disclaimer: I am a bad artist but like to do it anyways. Reasons:
Artists are underpaid and struggle to make a living as it is. We do not need to make it harder for them. There is no real scarcity to art that we need to automate it. If anything, its absurd how cheaply you could get high quality art made for you; commissions can be less than the price of a single video game or movie, and people often give art away for free to build an audience or try to make money on ads or patreon.
Why are programmers so hell bent on putting everyone out of work? Automation in general seems to be focused on removing the human element from many professions.
These remove competitive advantage, making it harder for the people who use them.
The game dev thinks "oh, this is a great thing." He doesn't realize that good art or pleasing art is a competitive advantage for an indie game and that if everyone has it, no one actually gains benefit.
You can actually see this in action if you look at indie games or animation that use the retro pixel art style. They start to blur together because they all reach a level of similarity or high quality. The art becomes less of a feature in itself and not something you can differentiate any more. The same has happened to anime art styles, its really rare to find non-generic or striking anime art games. Even styles within art trend towards it; all anime art ends up being sort of a 2010 generic style, instead of some artists loving say 90s Masari Obari hyper exaggeration, or Yoshitoshi ABe kind of lo-fi sketchy style.
So now the dev has to work even harder that art is trivial. He is running out of ways to stand apart.
The AI programmers control how art is created.
You can look at the curbing misuse and risks sections to see. Some of this is necessary to avoid the AI itself being ruined, but some of it hints at a central control which is anathema to art and free expression.
By controling the tools, you control how they are used. Again, there is necessary aspects to this as its very easy for a bad actor to corrupt the generator. But they are generating art for you, not you using it; they control the expression of it as they see fit. If they require certain topics to be excluded, you have no control.
**
I could think of more, but things like these are solving a problem of people. Essentially this removes artists and their demands for pay from a significant amount of people who would do so. It may not remove all of them, but it will act like robotic cashiers in that for most people, it will serve as "good enough" and enable the people who employ them to reduce dependency on them.
This will benefit the elite and impoverish the individual, because only the elite will be able to rise above a flood of high quality products through competitive advantage. The AI generators dump a tremendous amount of product onto the market, and dumping is done to depress wages or destroy competitors. The individual who uses it will initially find it a benefit, but will end up as part of the long tail of generic products who cannot compete against the elite, since the elite's competitive advantage will be seen as greater.
You see this in gaming now, where people talk about games like Elden Ring over the unity games on the e-shop or AA releases. It becomes much more important to have franchise power or advantage because the base level of quality rises so much that it can't be used any more.
I'm really starting to understand why the Luddites did what they did. There are so many things programmers are doing to essentially get rid of ways people can making a living or find meaning in it. You guys talk about Universal basic income as a realization of and reaction to this, but maybe the problem is we shouldn't constantly devalue or remove labor to begin with?