A lot of discussion on how AI-generated art will impact the artist community and art-making in general. I'm encouraged to see artists starting to organize around what happens next.
It will be a difficult near-future for anyone who doesn't want anything to do with these technologies. They're pretty solidly as transformative as the synthesizer, if not the camera. And they're pretty irrevocably here. So what happens next?
One angle I've seen some convincingly-pleasing presentations on is challenging the legality of how these tools were constructed. I think that's a pretty vertical cliff to scale (hard to draw a clean line that kills this tech without also killing other transformative uses of other people's work that are already accepted as non-infringing of copyright).
For the sake of argument, I'm going to assume that such legal challenges carry the day and Stable Diffusion / OpenAI are dismantled / banned from any legal use.
What I need people to understand is it won't be enough, and the next part is much harder.
There is a problem that I call the Balder problem. There is, I'm sure, a better term for it in the literature around collective labor action, but I cop to my ignorance of the space. In Norse legend, when Balder was slain, an opportunity was given for him to come back to the realm of the living... If every living being expressed their sorrow at his passing. One single giant, Thokk, did not. As a result, Balder would be kept in the underworld until Ragnarok.
If the current set of tools are found to be illegally-generated, the *next* set won't be. It will be more than worth it for every major media and advertising company to pay scads of cash to a small subset of artists to generate seed material for their own diffusers. The big ones could *easily* afford to make a hundred or even a thousand artists *lifetime-career-rich* for exclusive rights to their art.
The only way to stop that front is for every visual artist out there to say no to that money unless the money comes with solid guarantees that the livelihood of every artist is preserved.
That's a hell of a temptation, and it will be dangled in front of every visual artist in the world. I'm an optimist, but the odds of all artists standing together with one voice and demanding a right to survive on their talent that doesn't exclude other artists are poor.
But if I could think of any one demographic in this country at least that I have the highest hope for pulling it off, it's them. My optimism knows no bounds.
