I guess you've missed the times were i have agreed with you on certain things.
On the contrary, I have been paying attention, and what stands out to me the most is how many facts I have presented, sources cited, companies and individuals examined, only to have those facts ignored. It makes what you agree with trivial when you are ignoring the facts.
It's called devil's advocate otherwise this would be an echo chamber of "AI is bad because of..." or "Ai is currently bad because of"
Again, education relies on neutrality, you can't take either side of an argument when trying to improve education. Sometimes playing Devil's Advocate can help in doing this, but it also runs the risk of making you look unsympathetic to human beings that are currently losing their livelihoods, their life's work, and the hope that people are not looking to screw each other over for a g-damn percentage.
As someone on another forum an artist themselves pointed that being an artist isn't the most stable occupation to begin with,
This is no justification for destroying someones livelihood. So since they were never stable to begin with, its cool to completely disrupt their lives for the sake of profit? I simply don't agree.
AI in general can and so far has lead to a number of things both helpful ( the aforementioned medications, and other points I have posted in this thread) and not (deep fakes etc). Data scrapping as the law currently exist is legal and yes there's a distinction between legality and ethics. As @Scribe pointed out the ends are the differences in between the two. Generative AI has allowed the masses to do something only a few were able to do before, is this a good or bad thing? Well that depends on your world view. Folks spend time learning their craft/hobby be it from watching Bob Ross on youtube or taking a class at night or just learning as they go but along comes Fred who used Dall-E 3 along with hours of prompt tweaking, in-painting and generating to get his prefect image should Fred be told to "bugger off" just because he did something differently? I see AI as yet another means to an end, which is allowing people to do something that was once limited. See the thread over in the D&D section on Dall-E 3 and my own prompt thread here.
Nothing was stopping you from picking up a pencil, then and now. You are presenting this as if before gen-ai people somehow couldn't pursue making art. Which is preposterous. So your "means to an end" is really just the ends justify the means, which is just you justifying theft.
Also, the "masses" were always able to make art,
if they were motivated to. The thing you are missing is that art is not an end product,
it is a process. The output is not even 10% of the artistic process, 90% of the artistic process takes hard work and dedication to your craft. This can take a lifetime to master, this is not a profession for weekend warriors or armchair philosophers, this is for people who actually know what they are doing, and not relying on an image generator to provide them with inspiration.
What you are talking are hobbyists, which have no relevance to a thread that is talking about gen-ai taking jobs away from creatives. Hobbyists do not understand the work it takes to become a professional. This is a simple statement of the facts. Nobody cares about what you do as a hobby, please try to understand the difference between a hobbyist and a professional artist.
Companies and consumers will always chase the cheapest way to do something in order to keep that bottom line/spend the least amount of money. People in third world countries have always been exploited for cheap labor so them being exploited for data training isn't anything new other than the job. There's no other way to say it without sounding like a naughty word.
I have covered this before, whataboutism's do little to contribute to the conversation. Neither does the justification for exploited labor.
To prevent corporations from letting AI do all the work, we must force them to comply with our demands as consumers. We should demand the highest quality of work possible. We should demand that companies fully staff their art teams. We should demand that they use the best voice acting they can. Do not accept products where the company cut corners on staffing and tries to sell you the resulting mess. Do not buy their products.
Yeah I agree, but I have already chosen do do this on my own. I know that corps don't listen to anything but money so I am indeed speaking with my wallet when I refuse to support gen-ai and companies that utilize it as a replacement for a real artist.
What we should not do though, is enforce such compliance through law. These technologies can allow small indie developers to make products that are in competition with the major companies more easily. And while their quality might suffer a little for use of AI, it still helps ants to fight giants. Then when those small groups release their next title, they can replace that AI use with real Artists on the back of the first work.
Well, without the law to enforce anything, big tech corporations are free to "move fast and break things" without fear of consequences.
While I might agree with an appeal to helping indy devs, I should point out that plenty of indy game devs have been doing just fine for decades without gen-ai. In fact, I would say that gen-ai is going to hamper progress for indy's because of the legal ramifications. Gen-ai images are not valid for copyright, making any product that includes the material vulnerable to bad actors that will take your work and repurpose it using gen-ai to create a competing product, and you won't have any legal recourse due to the fact that you don't have the rights to any of the images you used.
Furthermore, relying on gen-ai is going to cost you in social goodwill, as many customers will not want to buy a book that has gen-ai in it when a real artist could have been used. There are artists of across the spectrum of both skill and affordability, I think if you tried opening a dialogue with an artist I think they would be willing to figure something out.
Not to mention that there are games that use stock art and public domain art to great effect, Mork Borg and their ilk have proven that you don't need massive art budgets to make a good game.
Finally, when did this become a competition to "fight giants?" Most indy devs are just trying to do their own thing, they are not trying to be the next Paizo or Wotc. Unless by competition you mean the oncoming deluge of ai-generated slop folks will be churning out without some kind of regulations in place to protect creators.
The laws have always been slow to catch up the pace of technology so nothing new there.
Yeah I have said this repeatedly myself in this thread.
Why should artist be afford protections that other jobs weren't when those workers lost those jobs due to technological progress?
They should be afforded the same protections that anyone that creates copyrighted materials are afforded under the law, the ability to continue to create without having that work stolen from them wholesale without their consent.
While you are painting a picture of disruption due to technology as being nothing new, perhaps you are forgetting that previous disruptions to labor happened gradually over years. Workers had time to retrain and find new jobs. With Gen-ai this happened literally overnight.
We can have empathy for displaced workers while embracing the technology that replaces them. I have the utmost empathy for coal miners in towns that are dying out from the move to green energy. That does not mean that I must cede to the continuation of coal as a primary energy source out of care to keep those jobs thriving.
Red herring fallacy: Again you are comparing current tech progress with previous disruptions, when they are nothing alike. The difference is both time (instant instead of gradual) and scale (it is happening across the entire world instead of just in one region). This affects artists across the globe, this is not a labor disruption limited to any particular location.
Instead, we must ensure that displaced workers have a safe place to land. That their skills can be redirected into adjacent fields, or that they can be retrained into other careers. The skills of an Artist as a judge of quality, aesthetic value, composition, color, and more have varied and broad uses in many fields and in many forms of artwork. Even if a particular niche is replaced by automation, I have no doubt that a talented artist can find work utilizing their well honed abilities.
Now this I actually agree with, as I know a lot of artists that have used their skills to great effect in other professions. The problem again is the speed of disruption (instant instead of gradual), and the scale. There are currently no programs to help workers who are facing loss of income due to the situation, and false promises like UBI are not realistic solutions to problems that are facing artists right now today.
Some music artist have embraced the use of AI by the common people to the point of saying "split any money you make with me" others have rejected AI.
That is kind of the point of art, that its is your choice what you do with it once you make it. I am not going to speak for other artists as to their personal choices, because that is on them. However, i think that it is interesting that you choose to show that some artists are choosing to use gen-ai, while ignoring that other artists are having their work stolen without any choice at all. What do you have to say about the blatant theft of countless artists work who never consented to any of this?
Misinformation, deep fakes, and illicit uses of imagery is a concern, and AI does accelerate the problem. But it is a problem that has been plaguing the internet for many years. There are sensible laws in the works to ban deepfake usage in Political campaign ads. Efforts are underway to protect against mass media botting like we saw in 2016 Elections. And we can bring in common sense legislation like publicity and likeness rights to ensure remuneration for those whose likenesses are distorted by malicious actors.
Deepfakes have been a problem for years, but they were typically limited in scope as not everyone could make them. Now anyone with a smart phone can do it. They have enabled millions of bad actors who have neither the techical expertise not the willingness to learn how to do it manually. They have enabled the lazy and the malicious to sit back and generate fakes & disinformation with the press of a button. This is completely new, as before this it was at a completely smaller scale.
And we can bring in common sense legislation like publicity and likeness rights to ensure remuneration for those whose likenesses are distorted by malicious actors.
This right here is kind of the crux of the argument. Right to publicity laws are not yet established, but they do have potential.
For me one of the key issues are going to be likeness rights. For example, I am a typographer, all of my artwork is covered extensively with my handwriting, lettering, & my signatures (multiples), and handwriting should be a distinction of an individuals likeness. Copying an artists signature (and any signed works) should come with penalties, and if that is the case, then works of art should also be affored the same protections.
But let’s not detract from the truth here, this is bad people doing bad things. And it's the same bad things they’ve been doing for years. A rising tide lifts all boats. Unfortunately the pirates are in the marina with us.
Of course it is bad people doing bad things, that is exactly what we've been talking about for over a year now.
And no, rising tides do not lift all boats. The recent OGL debacle should prove that some companies don't want to benefit others, only themselves. Nobody is profiting off of gen-ai except the ones making the shovels (like NVidia), everyone else is bleeding billions, and risking going bankrupt by the end of the year (go look at OpenAI's finances).
