Commercial artists today remind me of travel agents in the early 2000s. You used to have to talk to human on the phone or in-person to book trips. They were knowledgeable about destinations and rates. Today you Google and use Expedia.
Generative AI is going to do the same to art.
A key difference is that travel agents weren’t on social media talking about how technology had stolen their jobs. It did and no one wants to go back to the old ways for booking a trip or getting custom art made.
@carnage4life And how did they Generative AI get trained to produce that art?
It isn’t just “they took our jobs” rhetoric. There is significant amounts of copyright theft being perpetrated by very rich people against those with far less.
@mattcjordan @carnage4life How can you consider generative AI to be a thief, but not the artists themselves, who have been building their own work upon other art for centuries?
@LouisIngenthron @mattcjordan @carnage4life Because a human artist doesn't reproduce works they "trained" on verbatim, including watermarks, for one thing. Also, as George Harrison can tell you, even humans can't get away with "building upon others" if the results are too similar to the original.
I'm not even going to go into the hundreds of ways generative AI differs from human thought. Suffice to say the "this is just what humans do" argument isn't very convincing.
@cholling @mattcjordan @carnage4life
> Because a human artist doesn't reproduce works they "trained" on verbatim
Except, yes, they can, and often do. There has historically been an entire industry dedicated to this.
> humans can't get away with "building upon others" if the results are too similar to the original
Which is clearly true of AIs as well, since they keep tweaking the algorithms to avoid that and produce more unique outputs.
> hundreds of ways generative AI differs from human thought
Of course it's not the exact same, but from a legal perspective, I don't see enough of a difference to require separate rules. I also don't see enough of a difference to classify only one of the two as "theft". Seems that label would apply equally to both or neither.
@cholling @mattcjordan @carnage4life Pretty sure the laws about spam don't actually have a quantity requirement.
Also, "express goal of replacing them" is pretty funny. That's like claiming that McDonalds is expressly trying to put high-end steakhouses out of business.
@LouisIngenthron @mattcjordan @carnage4life The ease with which email could be automated caused unsolicited mail to be a much greater problem than it ever was before; the strain on information systems of this increased volume is referenced as one motivation for the CAN-SPAM act.
And genAI has been billed as a way to not have to hire illustrators and copywriters. Not to mention Google's AI results are designed to keep the user from having to click through to the sites they were trained on.
@LouisIngenthron @mattcjordan @carnage4life
> I don't see enough of a difference to require separate rules
I do. Just like it's not illegal to send an unsolicited email to one or a few people, but it is to automate sending them to thousands of people (without following specific rules regarding opt-outs and such), so is the mass scraping of millions of artists' work with the express goal of replacing them not even remotely similar to someone being influenced by what they've read.