> We don’t get sentimental about the traffic cop obsolesced by the traffic light
But the traffic cop did something very mechanical meant to save lives and prevent accidents: pointing traffic batons this way and that. Of COURSE we're happy with this part of life being automated. The traffic cop didn't make art. But we also didn't like when the traffic cop made mistakes.
I know the violinist only moves their bow "this way and that" to make music, but they're making art.
OTOH, if my AI composes me a beautiful violin piece, and I'm moved by it, should I or the violinist be any angrier that it wasn't composed/performed by a human? Maybe not. But should all violinists get a royalty if an AI somewhere makes a piece of violin music because it was trained on all violin music? Maybe YES!?
It's hard to enforce this, which is why I'd like to see some of the profits and dividends from the AI companies go towards a basic universal income for all artists.
Indeed, this seems to embrace the slippery slope a bit too gladly, if I were uncharitable I could satirize it by "well, now that I hit that person, I might as well kill them, what's another wrong ?"
This is way too much of a consumer view, creating is supposed to be "good for the soul" !
My parents in their teenage years used to often sing with friends (and not like in a formal setting), I think we lost something there.
It's also likely that every time that economic pressure makes some artisanal work uneconomical, the world actually becomes a worse place for humans (see : Luddites), and it's not clear that the economic benefits for everyone would always be worth it even IF they were sustainable...
The marvel about art comes from skill. Someone's abilty to put together existing elements to create something. Despite repeated tropes and ideas, a movie or a comic's quality depends on the artist's ability to put together this ideas and how they execute them. Maybe AI can do the same more effectively and faster, but since there's no skill involved, it doesn't feel the same.
It's like sports: people doing actions under certain rules, and we like sports because of people's varying ability to perform under those rules. Rationally, yes, maybe a robot can perform the best in a soccer match, but then what's the point?
I'm basically at the point where I assume that any illustration that looks like it spent more than two hours in Photoshop/Illustrator was made by a robot. (Another facet of They Walk Among Us Internet Theory?)
I'm dating myself here, but a loooong time ago I made a sprite comic. It was a pretty good one, I promise—and it kind of bummed me out that no matter how much effort I put into writing it, and no matter how good the jokes were, there were people who just dismissed it out of hand because it was a collage of ripped NES graphics with word bubbles. And now here were are, and I suddenly find myself relating to the anti-sprite people when I read posts/tweets/screeds/etc. by AI art advocates.
> I'm basically at the point where I assume that any illustration that looks like it spent more than two hours in Photoshop/Illustrator was made by a robot.
This assumption, luckily, is simply untrue.
> I'm dating myself here, but a loooong time ago I made a sprite comic. It was a pretty good one, I promise—and it kind of bummed me out that no matter how much effort I put into writing it, and no matter how good the jokes were, there were people who just dismissed it out of hand because it was a collage of ripped NES graphics with word bubbles
You didn't do just that though, you also made original sprites and backgrounds, and even if you take into account only the already existing sprites you took from somewhere else, there were still conscious choices made by you: which sprite to use , where you placed them, the context behind them... which is not the same as generating art writing some words with AI models that train themselves using tons of stolen art without permission nor credit.
In your case I think the complaints were more about not understanding the idea: getting mad at sprites in a *sprite* comic seems to me like getting mad at horror movies because they're scary. I mean, yeah... they're supposed to be.
I was wondering if somebody would call me out on the Malthusian trap remark, and thank you for rising to the occasion. Because you aren't wrong—and (I think I've written about this before) the same TESCREAL se[c]t that's so gung-ho about AI are indeed motivated by the conviction that they and their buddies/patrons can sneak out the exit before the bill is delivered.
"We don’t get sentimental about the traffic cop obsolesced by the traffic light, the elevator operator put out of a job by push-button controls, the replacement of drugstore cashiers by automatic check-out lanes, or the 411 operators made obsolete by smartphones and Google. "
Probably because most of us now living didn't experience these things (except cashiers, and actually I do resent being drafted as unpaid labor to check out my own stuff). Maybe people did get sentimental, but we as individual little people don't have a choice in these substitutions.
>>I do resent being drafted as unpaid labor to check out my own stuff
In a world where supermarkets and big box stores laid off their cashiers, installed self-checkout kiosks, and passed the savings onto consumers through commensurately reduced prices, would you feel differently?
although as long as we're talking about impossible worlds, I might as well ask whether we'd rather build our castles made of candy in the clouds or under the sea
> We don’t get sentimental about the traffic cop obsolesced by the traffic light
But the traffic cop did something very mechanical meant to save lives and prevent accidents: pointing traffic batons this way and that. Of COURSE we're happy with this part of life being automated. The traffic cop didn't make art. But we also didn't like when the traffic cop made mistakes.
I know the violinist only moves their bow "this way and that" to make music, but they're making art.
OTOH, if my AI composes me a beautiful violin piece, and I'm moved by it, should I or the violinist be any angrier that it wasn't composed/performed by a human? Maybe not. But should all violinists get a royalty if an AI somewhere makes a piece of violin music because it was trained on all violin music? Maybe YES!?
It's hard to enforce this, which is why I'd like to see some of the profits and dividends from the AI companies go towards a basic universal income for all artists.
Indeed, this seems to embrace the slippery slope a bit too gladly, if I were uncharitable I could satirize it by "well, now that I hit that person, I might as well kill them, what's another wrong ?"
This is way too much of a consumer view, creating is supposed to be "good for the soul" !
My parents in their teenage years used to often sing with friends (and not like in a formal setting), I think we lost something there.
It's also likely that every time that economic pressure makes some artisanal work uneconomical, the world actually becomes a worse place for humans (see : Luddites), and it's not clear that the economic benefits for everyone would always be worth it even IF they were sustainable...
The marvel about art comes from skill. Someone's abilty to put together existing elements to create something. Despite repeated tropes and ideas, a movie or a comic's quality depends on the artist's ability to put together this ideas and how they execute them. Maybe AI can do the same more effectively and faster, but since there's no skill involved, it doesn't feel the same.
It's like sports: people doing actions under certain rules, and we like sports because of people's varying ability to perform under those rules. Rationally, yes, maybe a robot can perform the best in a soccer match, but then what's the point?
I'm basically at the point where I assume that any illustration that looks like it spent more than two hours in Photoshop/Illustrator was made by a robot. (Another facet of They Walk Among Us Internet Theory?)
I'm dating myself here, but a loooong time ago I made a sprite comic. It was a pretty good one, I promise—and it kind of bummed me out that no matter how much effort I put into writing it, and no matter how good the jokes were, there were people who just dismissed it out of hand because it was a collage of ripped NES graphics with word bubbles. And now here were are, and I suddenly find myself relating to the anti-sprite people when I read posts/tweets/screeds/etc. by AI art advocates.
> I'm basically at the point where I assume that any illustration that looks like it spent more than two hours in Photoshop/Illustrator was made by a robot.
This assumption, luckily, is simply untrue.
> I'm dating myself here, but a loooong time ago I made a sprite comic. It was a pretty good one, I promise—and it kind of bummed me out that no matter how much effort I put into writing it, and no matter how good the jokes were, there were people who just dismissed it out of hand because it was a collage of ripped NES graphics with word bubbles
You didn't do just that though, you also made original sprites and backgrounds, and even if you take into account only the already existing sprites you took from somewhere else, there were still conscious choices made by you: which sprite to use , where you placed them, the context behind them... which is not the same as generating art writing some words with AI models that train themselves using tons of stolen art without permission nor credit.
In your case I think the complaints were more about not understanding the idea: getting mad at sprites in a *sprite* comic seems to me like getting mad at horror movies because they're scary. I mean, yeah... they're supposed to be.
> It’s just another episode of that creative destruction that rescued us from the Malthusian trap during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
We have only dug a bigger trap for ourselves. And the bill is starting to come due (and already came decades ago for many other living beings).
> Even the replies could conceivably come from opinionated and eloquent bots
This has been a nightmare of mine for a couple of years now - that's when they already crossed this threshold for me for comments of this size.
I was wondering if somebody would call me out on the Malthusian trap remark, and thank you for rising to the occasion. Because you aren't wrong—and (I think I've written about this before) the same TESCREAL se[c]t that's so gung-ho about AI are indeed motivated by the conviction that they and their buddies/patrons can sneak out the exit before the bill is delivered.
"We don’t get sentimental about the traffic cop obsolesced by the traffic light, the elevator operator put out of a job by push-button controls, the replacement of drugstore cashiers by automatic check-out lanes, or the 411 operators made obsolete by smartphones and Google. "
Probably because most of us now living didn't experience these things (except cashiers, and actually I do resent being drafted as unpaid labor to check out my own stuff). Maybe people did get sentimental, but we as individual little people don't have a choice in these substitutions.
>>I do resent being drafted as unpaid labor to check out my own stuff
In a world where supermarkets and big box stores laid off their cashiers, installed self-checkout kiosks, and passed the savings onto consumers through commensurately reduced prices, would you feel differently?
although as long as we're talking about impossible worlds, I might as well ask whether we'd rather build our castles made of candy in the clouds or under the sea