I'll care a little more about the creatives' arguments when they start paying royalties to every drawing, painting, illustration, tv show, or movie they've ever seen. Until then, it's just a cash grab. No individual is all that creative, and anyone accomplished is standing on the shoulders of past giants to get there.
The "what will we do for jobs argument?!?" would've applied to stage actors when movies came out a century ago and farm workers before the invention of tractors. Audio records, printing press, and so on. The world keeps getting better as technology advances, and people will adapt to the new changes.
And if you think art created by real people is more valuable, then there will be a market for the creatives. Focus on that.
> If we want to empower humans over machines, that seems perfectly acceptable.
But that’s not what’s happening here. This is a faction of humans fighting to maintain their power and control over how the rest of humanity is allowed to produce artistic works.
Creatives who fight against generative AI are trying to empower themselves over everyone else. Corporations who develop closed-source AI like OpenAI are also trying to empower themselves over everyone else. The main problem in both cases is the way a select few are trying to amass power for themselves.
Generative AI has fundamentally shifted the scope of what it means to be creative, and prohibiting it from being trained on the collective works of humanity doesn’t empower humans over machines. It empowers some humans at the expense of other humans. Big AI companies acting exploitatively and trying to figure out how to build their own moats so only they are allowed to control the technology does the same thing, so this shouldn’t be allowed to happen either.
This is not the first time, nor is it likely to be the last, that a major disruption happened in creative arts due to technology. The invention of the phonograph decimated live musicians. Hundreds of thousands of jobs in cinemas, radio stations, and restaurants were permanently lost[0], but I don’t think anyone today would argue that we’d be better off if record labels hadn’t been allowed to reproduce the works of other artists.
Instead of retreading the same tired arguments about generative AI itself, let’s instead focus on how to ensure creatives can adapt and not end up homeless and penniless, and on how to ensure a few giant tech companies don’t monopolise an otherwise democratising technology. That, more than anything, will ensure that we are empowering humans over machines.
Once again people think they can productivity their way to results as if it's a quantifiable and profitable resource. Culture, Creativity and Art are HUMAN expression of a HUMAN condition. To generate it with a computer means to create 'content' for the sake of profit. Not ART for the sake of expression. At the start of every argument reducing any human output to nothing more than a repeatable and reducible resource is the same arrogant fallacy thinking that, and anything we create just will appear in a vacuum. The worlds people benefit from standing on each others shoulders. This reduces that to the company with the biggest pockets. Otherwise, why secrets?
Everything you argue facilitates the reach of human expression. This pilfers and silences it. This plagiarism machine cannot even deal with 'current stimuli' in ANY way what so ever so it cannot express anything. It can only remember what you've told it, and it can barely do that successfully. It can't hold a fact for 2 messages. It cannot feel, it cannot predict, it cannot agree or disagree. It outputs based on master's filter and its expression based on financial agenda.
To think artists want to retain control over their own voice and ideas, and not have a company steal the aesthetics of it and sell its skeleton at a discount, and not realise the hypocrisy of trying to shift the power away from the individual to a private single for profit company is just... Beautifully poetic in its own right.
> the invention of the phonograph decimated live musicians
What history have you been smoking? The invention of a technology that could mechanically reproduce the message of an artist only sought to spread awareness and increase musical access and interest. It cannot replicate the aura of art which is why people to this day squeeze into expensive live shows. You argue the phonograph has completely cleaned live music off the table. It hasn't. It facilitated its growth.
You can replicate the art, but you can't create the artist. If ever I hear a balanced argument from the other side that includes the word 'aura' I'll have known they didn't just spend half a night researching these matters and deciding it's easier to remain ignorant.
"in the age of mechanical reproduction and the absence of traditional and ritualistic value, the production of art would be inherently based upon the praxis of politics."
I never said generative AI was itself capable of creativity. Generative AI is a tool, not an entity. I said it enables more people to be creative, in the same way that other tools like Photoshop enable more people to be creative. Using a sampler to create a song rather than arranging and playing all the instruments doesn’t make it less creative, or devoid of creativity. It’s just a different, more accessible form of expression, enabled by technology.
I agree that generative AI, due to its nature, trends toward the average and thus is incapable of engaging with the extremes of human experience—but not every creative expression has to be at the extreme. Every Marvel film, every shovelware game, every summer pop jam, panders to the average. There’s enormous value in having a tool that allows professional artists to work more quickly at the average—and, perhaps more critically, for everyday people to approach the average in the first place. I don’t believe it is fair to suggest that such things are valueless “not ART”, but I’m not definitely not here to engage in philosophical discussion of the definition of “art”.
As far as history goes, I did provide a citation, which I encourage you to actually look at (and it cites several dozen more books and other articles if you need more primary sources). You are objectively incorrect in your assertion that the phonograph facilitated the growth of live music(ians), but I suspect you may not even understand what is meant by “live musicians”—not because of you, but because the phonograph was so revolutionary that it fundamentally changed what it meant to be a musician—and even redefined what a “song” is[0].
It is only with the benefit of hindsight that you can state so confidently that audio recording is a net benefit to music. Many felt that the phonograph was an abomination at its conception. They claimed that the essence of music was in its ephemeral nature, that the uniqueness of each performance contained the creative expression and the sheet music itself was just a skeleton for creativity. They said mechanical recordings deprived listeners of the true experience, and that individual artists lost their autonomy. They spoke in terms exactly like you are now, and those ideas were wrong then, and they are almost certainly wrong now.
Hindsight being the premise for confidence in this context is precisely why the hubris of factual speaking on the what-if's of the future can be pretty easily ignored as self infatuated authority. The rest of your arguments are still conflating the problem. One enhances the voice of an individual the other extinguishes it.
Regardless your semantics on your phonograph argument the reality remains. The artist remained as part of the contract of societys growth. Once again, this isn't a blank vinyl or a canvas or an empty parking lot where freedom of expression takes priority. The priority is the financial incentives and retaining control.
For you to argue there's any creativity that would come out of that is like arguing I'm being creative when I put coins into a vending machine and receive cigarettes. I'm as creative as the conditions the puppets of profit have allowed me to be. Money doesn't own this world despite its deep and confused hope. It steals from it.
> They spoke in terms exactly like you are now, and those ideas were wrong then, and they are almost certainly wrong now.
No, they were right then and they're right now. Otherwise based on your argument anything beyond a phonograph would be unnecessary. So why do people seek anything beyond their MP3? Why do they go to live shows? Why do people still visit the Mona Lisa even though they can see it at home for free with a google? Please, as much as you refuse to debate philosophy and art, those are the exact things being debated. So either listen to those who've spent their lives in their domain (it's why I don't falsify my Python accolades) or pretend you know better. But don't conflate. Do read Walter Benjamin's essay from 1935 on Works of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. I know, you won't.
Next you're going to tell me AI hip-hop has the same value, incentive and understanding as the people from Cabrini Greens trying to escape poverty and violence by creating something beautiful and relatable out of the human condition. Then you'll tell me it's not your fault they haven't 'out created' themselves to keep up with the theft of their very self. If the vultures could at the very least just fuck off until the person isn't alive enough to bare witness to it, you could at least feign some IP argument. It's otherwise just hot air hoping.
This will be a major point of contention if machine learning continues to go the way it’s going.
In the future if the Turing test is fully passed I think morality will boil down to preferring humans if and only if it’s a situation of competing scarcities.
In the case of “showing pictures to computer people”, showing pictures to a computer doesn’t prevent you from showing it to a human so this framework imply no moral justification for a human preference.
The world keeps getting better as technology advances, and people will adapt to the new changes.
That's making the very large assumption that there are no qualitative differences among our various leaps in technology. It's not hard to make the argument that AI is a different and larger and more disruptive leap than the invention of the tractor.
This is a complex issue that people on both sides of the argument tend to oversimplify. Figuring out how we should regulate and integrate this new technology is going to take time and a lot of back and forth.
People do pay to see movies, to read books, to go to the museum, and for formal education… Do you think the ratio of cost to go to film school per video made for an individual is the same ratio as the cost for stock video library per video made for an AI?
>The world keeps getting better as technology advances
Will it, forever? Is that a given? Technology might also destroy the planet.
And the genie is already out of the bottle. As we've seen with LLMs, soon there will be open sourced versions of this essentially trained on everything. And with transfer learning the training will probably promiscuously propagate to inform future models. In essence in the limit case, all future models 5 years from now will have been "influenced" by nearly all work on the publicly accessible web today.
And there's no problem with that really -- all humans are a bit influenced by everything they've seen in their lives like you said, including tons of heavily copyrighted and trademarked stuff.
The first part is pseudo-argument. You compare apples and oranges. You treat education and massive steal of IP the same.
The second part seems to be a religious rehash of "The world keeps getting better as technology advances" this is not something guaranteed to continue and the world is not getting better from everyone. You seem to "overfit".
The third part does not guarantee a sustainable income for human creativity. Again your argument is shallow at best.
IP is a fiction we created to encourage artists to create. Arguably it was a trade off where we encourage producers of creative works by giving them a limited monopoly for the benefit of the consumers. IP is a price we paid for the benefit of consumers. It's not an inalienable right.
As for sustainable incomes, I'm sure you heard the arguments about buggy-whip manufacturers going out of business when we got trains and cars. It really wasn't that much of a tragedy in the big picture of things.
Who is 'we' in your arguments. Master? And why do you think laws exist? It's to protect the rich from being burned at the stake by reality. Societal agreements go both ways. You think it's to feign appeasement to the little piggie complaints and get them back to growing for your market day? You continue to dehumanise 'them' -- your neighbour into nothing more than an idiot who takes from your bottom line. Humans aren't a one way street to a compute problem, friend.
I'm going to ignore everything that sounds too weird to address. Philosophy major? Drinking on a Tuesday?
As for laws, we're almost in agreement. People want to argue about rights, but it seems to me the rules are a lot more about control. I could ramble on quite a bit about corruption at every level from local police to federal politicians. ... to copyright enforcement.
However, most of the rules were made before the current batch of super rich people got super rich, so there's something oversimplified in thinking it's just about protecting wealth.
My bottom line? Compute problem? Whatever. I think the rest is just more weirdness I can't make sense of.
This is exhausting. Just read a history book. Yes, power started with families. Then big families - kings and queens and y'know, we slowly but surely woke up to being a kinder humanity not a more brutal one. You'd have thought.
If you take a box and fill it with dog shit. You're more than welcome to chop, blend, dilute, fling or even eat this shit. But in the end, it's still Pepper's Poop.
Sell it like it isn't. Add sprinkles. It's Pepper's Poop.
When Pepper dies. Do you think the model is going to invent Gold all of a sudden?
They're saying that creativity isn't in a vacuum. Both Bach and Shakespeare were both inspired, and drew upon many things in their life. Just like how anyone who makes anything or does anything leans at least a little on past experiences. And I really think that line of arugment is a dead end, and only hurts, or we'd have to round up and arrest every highschooler making shitty anime fan art.
Not just based off, but in some cases blatant ripoffs. Shakespeare was famous for swiping the plots of Italian plays. Ever notice how many of his plays are set in Italy? This was before "remix" was a word.
Shakespeare's specialty was writing clever dialog (and to give credit where it's due, he was very, very good at that), not coming up with totally original plays.
If copyright as we know it had existed in Shakespeare's time, he would have been sued into a smoking crater.
Neither Bach nor Shakespeare had copyright over their works, as the very concept of copyright didn't exist until the Statute of Anne in 1710. Germany (really, Saxony, as Germany wasn't even a unified country at the time) was much later.
Shakespeare got paid by people buying tickets to the Globe Theatre, of which he was part owner. Bach got paid by various princes and the church, and was expected to compose new music every week in return for his pay.
Neither argued that they should continue to get paid for the same work for 90 years.
I'll start caring about my fellow humans rights when I see each and everyone one of their tax returns. Until then my assumptions will appease my ability to remain ignorant.
I don't understand what you're saying. Am I the uncaring ignorant one? It seems unlikely that you're really referring to yourself there, and maybe you're using a rhetorical trick to try and skirt HN's policy about being civil to each other.
My recommendation, civil or otherwise is to at least feign a moment of empathy and understanding for your fellow man in order to balance an otherwise repeat cliche that fundamentally argues for self. An inability to empathise first stops any ability to listen to, or accept alternative opinions to your own.
I'm not sure what's more insulting overall, my sarcasm or your immediate jump to insult any artist based on the fact they're outraged about the financial fall out of this situation and not take them on the merit of every other argument included. Philosophical, moral and otherwise. It's fingers in ears and it's assuming the only thing artists care about is the money leaving their pocket.
We can think a little beyond that cave. It's inclusion in the argument is because it is the guiding star for the greedy to nullify the realities. Visual AI has revealed the trickster.
> No individual is all that creative
It's nice to meet you too. I promise, you underestimate your neighbours.
Ok, now that you've clarified: My take was correct, right? Your first instinct was to attack my character instead of discussing the topic, and you knew you had to be sneaky about it to not obviously break the rules.
Your empathy isn't showing so clearly, and honestly I have more friendly discussions with ChatGPT than I am having with you.
As for what artists care about - nobody is taking away their cameras or brushes. They can keep creating all they want. It really seems like it's about money to me.
To clarify, the 'caring about money' mentioned here refers to millions of humans genuinely worried about how they'll continue to survive and support their families in the society in which they live, as their profession is decimated over the course of a year or two, a fraction of the time it takes to learn a new one.
Once upon a time there were millions of people working the fields to make enough food. Nothing has been decimated in the last year or two, and I don't think anything will be in the next two either. But yeah, the world is changing, and some current careers won't be viable in a decade or two. I'm not sure we could find a point in the last century where that wasn't true.
To clarify, 'yeah, the world is changing' mentioned here refers to millions of humans genuinely worried about how they'll continue to survive and support their families in the society in which they live, as their profession is decimated (yes, decimated) over the course of a year or two (yes, a year or two), a fraction of the time it takes to learn a new one.
I'm reiterating this because I think it's important not to simply toss out a platitude and dismiss this staggering, unprecedented situation befalling millions of our fellow humans. If one's goal is to insulate themselves from their fellow humans, they might find it less important to do so.
Indeed, someone with such a goal could invent enough preconditions to caring for their fellow humans that they need never care! Preconditions like 'I don't care about you because I don't think your situation is changing fast enough' or 'I don't care about you because you value money while living in a capitalist society'. Dust hands off, problem solved, goal achieved, am I right?
I have no desire to be sneaky. Creatively pointed. Please report me if needed, I have no qualms exercising my ability to express humanity when someone attempts to dehumanise. Especially if I can do so in a way that opens up an avenue for reflection. Most just double down. Being silenced on this platform is an expected conclusion, not a concern.
So you're expressing humanity with your flowery (or sarcastic) language to call me ignorant, uncaring, and dehumanizing. I want to say that's hypocritical, but it really isn't. You are a pretty good reflection of humanity, and a fine example of why I don't care that some people will have to move on to survive. It's not like they (or you) were all that nice in the first place.
Your beliefs and words are stripping me of my talents, livelihood, journey, meaning, finances and goals and you're upset that I call it ignorant, uncaring and dehumanizing. Hypocritical or not, these are not my attempts at creatively insulting you. They're the smallest of reality checks you need and I have absolutely no delusion to believe you'll ever think otherwise. How YOU became a victim in this discussion lends to nothing beyond an eye roll. You still haven't uttered a word of empathy for anything that doesn't fit your position. History will appreciate these discussions and who fought for what exactly.
Now tech thinks its an expert on philosophy, history and art. Hubris is something folks should lead with more often in place of ego.
edit: It'd be real easy to conflate my response to dehumanising each other with the larger arguments at play. Continue to hunt for your 'gotchas'
>Your beliefs and words are stripping me of my talents, livelihood, journey, meaning, finances and goals
There it is. If it wasn't obvious, all your posts are really just you being upset about tech advancements threatening your job. You could have just said that instead of the nonsensical posts about ai weapons somehow being rated to diffusion models etc. My advice: move on and adapt like the rest of us
Dude, I'd totally love to be paid lots of money to work on my pet projects. Just think of the beauty I could bring in to the world. My talents, livelihood, journey and so on just can't find a market though.
The "what will we do for jobs argument?!?" would've applied to stage actors when movies came out a century ago and farm workers before the invention of tractors. Audio records, printing press, and so on. The world keeps getting better as technology advances, and people will adapt to the new changes.
And if you think art created by real people is more valuable, then there will be a market for the creatives. Focus on that.