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0 pointssilver_silver1y ago0 comments

According to this survey [1] of 1000 visual artists, 95% believe they should have a say in whether their art is used for training. That much should be obvious. As for hating it with a passion: that's an anecdote from my circle and the discussions I've seen online outside of tech bubbles.

You say it's more efficient but I think if artists were fairly compensated for their work, or at the very least had a say in the process, it would be too expensive or not have good enough output to compete. On top of that, it uses A LOT more energy - which should be enough to exclude it as an option considering the current trajectory of climate change.

Aside from that we need to consider the more philosophical question of whether we want to make creative dream jobs even more impossible to find. Should we degrade the public space even more with an avalanche of "good enough" imagery simply to improve margins for the executive class? Computers have already made every level of developed economies significantly more productive and yet individuals are worse off financially than they were in the 90s. All this pipedream of replacing workers with AI will do is relegate them to manual labour or lock them into some barely-enough universal basic income scheme.

[1] https://www.dacs.org.uk/news-events/artificial-intelligence-...

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soulofmischief1y ago· 2 in thread

The anti-compute pro-climate argument is so tiresome and it ignores that compute requirements decay non-linearly over time.

Additionally, as an artist myself I don't really much care what "the majority" of artists I think, I didn't become an artist to follow trends and outsource my own critical thinking. As a software engineer, I have a level of understanding behind these models that far surpasses the average artist. As a technological visionary, I understand where the technology will lead, as well as its inevitability. The cat's out of the bag. So I don't very much value the average uninformed opinion.

> Aside from that we need to consider the more philosophical question of whether we want to make creative dream jobs even more impossible to find

Technological progress always leads to the destruction and creation of jobs. People similarly bashed the loom, the printing press, calculators, computers, the internet, cars, planes, you name it. There's no benefit in being a Luddite. Intelligent and aware engineers and artists are incorporating these tools into their workflows today, or at least staying informed, so that they find themselves still employed in whatever future is ahead of us.

silver_silverOP1y ago

It is a fact that the majority didn't consent to this, not an opinion. The foundation of these tools is, in my opinion, copyright violation. Building a product by transforming a collection of works cannot be fair use by any stretch of the imagination. The artists aren't being compensated because it would cause the business model to collapse.

This isn't ludditism. Ethical ML artistic tools do exist but none of these prompt-based generators fall into that category. None of the tools you mentioned are directly equivalent because they don't depend on a collection of existing work to produce derivatives.

All I will say about the climate is that emissions have to peak next year, and be halved by 2030 to meet the Paris Agreement goal. I have to assume from your casual dismissal that you're not aware of the consequences of missing it.

soulofmischief1y ago

> Building a product by transforming a collection of works cannot be fair use by any stretch of the imagination.

A) The courts are deciding this now, and B) we already live in a sick reality distorted by the DMCA and we need a major copyright reform.

> I have to assume from your casual dismissal that you're not aware of the consequences of missing it.

You managed to completely ignore what I said about diminishing energy requirements for compute. You're arguing disingenuously and now you're attempting to insult my intelligence instead of focusing on the argument.

It's really telling that this is the typical fashion in which these argument play out. I have no interest in continuing a conversation like this if you can't make good-faith assumptions in your argument as per the Hacker News guidelines.

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