Comment on Artists lose first copyright battle in the fight against AI-generated images

• kromem@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  The same was said about Photoshop decades ago.

  Also reminds me of this.

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  • ParsnipWitch@feddit.de ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    To compare this with what happened when Photoshop came up is not a fitting comparison at all.

    Digital art pushed more people into learning how to draw (with traditional and digital media) leading to a surge in courses, books, workshops etc. Digital drawing made it affordable for more people to get into drawing. And it also encouraged them to learn traditional drawing to improve their skills and expand their portfolio.

    This is not comparable to what is happening now with AI image generators.

    Photography versus traditional media realism paintings like still lifes and portraits is a better analogy. But photography only touched one specific area of drawing/painting not all of it. And in this case it really did lead to a skill becoming incredibly rare.

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    • kromem@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      I have a feeling you may not have seen the difference between how digital artists are using generative AI in workflows and users just creating generative AI images from a prompt with no additional work.

      The idea that digital art capabilities are going to disappear because diffusion models can generate digital art may be a bit too binary of a consideration from the reality.

      You are right, that photography did replace a lot of still life work, such as in magazine ads, etc. But it only reduced the market for the skill set, and many people still produce ‘photorealistic’ art today.

      I’d agree the market for drawing and especially prototyping is going to be made more efficient, but I’m skeptical it’s going to be entirely reduced as you put forward by your analogy.

      Making something like a movie poster already went from making 10 mock-ups by hand from a team of artists to making a hundred mock-ups compositing using asset libraries and moving forward will likely end up in a place where there’s 1,000-10,000 versions which are each run though virtual focus groups to create a selection set for the client.

      But the final product will absolutely still involve digital artists, and if anything the component that’s mostly being replaced is the asset library, along with around a 10x or more time savings on an individual artist’s generation.

      That will either result in a 10x increase in variations or 1/10th the staffing or somewhere in between, but as mentioned parallel advances in AI mean that significantly increased output is very likely going to have significantly increased return, so you may even ultimately see slightly larger digital art teams from today as time goes on.

      There’s a bizarre assumption that modern labor output represents a demand cap and as such efficiency in supply means less people making the same amount of things.

      That’s almost never historically been the case during industrialization and unless the role becomes entirely obsolete, scaling up productivity with a new tool will bias towards increased output not decreased suppliers - outside of decreased demand for suppliers who have eschewed the new technology and efficiencies.

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      • ParsnipWitch@feddit.de ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        You are only arguing about labour output and corporate work but I explicitly wrote about the impact on how many people in the future will invest in learning skills like digital illustration, drawing and painting.

        As you probably know, it’s not a three year apprenticeship and then you have an artist.

        People learn how to draw, which takes an enormous amount of effort and time and often money as well, because they want to visualise their ideas as convincing as possible. On their way of doing that communities like Deviant Art are created and filled with their work.

        I for example will not continue digital illustration, especially not posting it somewhere online. My work is easily replaceable by AI. I did commissioned fan art mostly and sci-fi illustrations for collectors sometimes. But it was only a side gig, I am in one of the bigger groups of artists who barely can pay for their hobby with what they earn. That’s over now.

        Why would I continue investing so much time and money in a skill that’s not appreciated or paid anymore? When a younger person asks me if they should invest the tens of thousands of hours necessary to become a good artist I will tell them to better learn something else.

        Perhaps there will be an increase in traditional drawing skills learned. But that’s vastly more expensive. Most people don’t have the money and space to learn how to create oil paintings for example.

        Will companies still higher some people who know about digital art? Probably, for a while. But that’s not what I was writing about.

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      • Fungah@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        God DAMN that’s a well reasoned and written comment that demonstrates a lot of familiarity with the material.

        I hope digg 2.0 never happens to reddit. Lemmy needs to stay like this forever.

        Only thing id add is that for the moment any ai generated art needs quite a bit of human intervention for it to be exactly what the artists envisions. You’re argument about the lack of cap on demand for what AI can generate is a great point, because that would need to be the case for people in some industries to keep jobs as ai progresses. In image generation were already starting to see the prompts needed to generate what one wants be less cryptic and more like natural language, though we ain’t there yet. It’s moving quickly though.

        I think a lot of the uncertainty lies in not knowing for sure where a lot of this tech will land. Will it be able to write engaging, novel, and new scripts / books, or even entire movies one day? Or is it always gooing to be the eloquent, stupid dumpster firebthay is chatgpt?

        If the tech never becomes seamless, competent, and all around useful, the need for human intervention increases. If it does, it decreases. Which doesn’t mean there won’t be jobs dealing with creating the input and directing the output, but unless regulations cut off access to these tools to all but the richest individuals and companies those jobs will be handling a commodity that is essentially post scarcity.

        Most jobs today focus either on selling things people have created and are all governed in some way by scarcity - of natural resources, of the time it takes to create software or art, supply chains, etc. If ai is good enough the human input needed is trivial or even nonexistent, and the output governed only by computing resources, efficiency of the code, etc. Both of these CAN be(aren’t always - the compute cost of AI has ready raised eyebrows and running dozens of enterprise-grade GPUs isn’t exactly gree) so trivial st scale that the driving force behind what’s crested is a demand for curation stronger than any weve seen in the world. The noise:signal ratio is going to get so bad, and it wouldn’t surprise me if one day thousands of novels better than any human being has ever written lie unread on magnetic tape .

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