>>The people freaking out definitely seem like they have never had to deal with purchasing a stock image or getting permission for music sampling.
I think it's important to note that individual purchases usually aren't how the-people-freaking-out *sell* their work, either. The people I've seen freaking out are artists who operate through Patreons and tip jars, with few or no paywalls.
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>>Artists have not been paid what they’re worth for a long time, either by exploitation or outright theft of their work.
It's interesting that you don't have a flinch response to the phrase "artists should be paid what they're worth". I associate that phrase with people yelling at me for being unwilling to pay $100 for a painting I value at $10.
I do not value visual art very highly, and somehow this is "demeaning the artist" rather than "reasonable mental variation". I don't *steal* paintings; I don't say to artists' faces that it was wasteful of them to spend $100 of labour making a $10 object (I assume they are trying to cater to some very different kind of mind that *is* willing to pay $100); just *not buying* artworks raises an awful lot of people's ire.
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>>It's hard for me to imagine AI generated art replacing huge swaths of the art market with "free" art where it wasn't before, because the US government has prevented that from happening repeatedly -- from photocopiers, to VCRs, to Napster, ad nauseum.
I was very confused by this statement at first. I guess by "prevented from happening" you mean "drove underground"? I suppose driving artbots underground *would* stifle them quite a bit, probably far more so than driving music piracy underground since the usual goal regarding an artbot's end result is to be shared rather than kept in a personal collection (so it would be far easier to catch).
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>>The term "AI art generators" obfuscates what these programs are actually doing, and that's *laundering intellectual property*.
This does not seem essential to what artbots are doing. It's *easier* to build an artbot if you compile its dataset without regard for intellectual property, which is probably why the first ones to come out have done so, but I see no reason why it would be *mandatory*. We have Wikipedia, which has overwhelmed closed-data encyclopedias pretty much entirely; perhaps more telling, we have OpenStreetMap, which is overall inferior to Google Maps but still usable, and organisations looking to pay money in exchange for maps will in many cases do this by *paying surveyors to contribute to OpenStreetMap* rather than by paying Google.
I suspect next-gen artbots will get ordinary individuals' drawings of flowers from their backyards by *donation*, rather than by theft.
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Date: 2022-08-20 04:21 am (UTC)I think it's important to note that individual purchases usually aren't how the-people-freaking-out *sell* their work, either. The people I've seen freaking out are artists who operate through Patreons and tip jars, with few or no paywalls.
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>>Artists have not been paid what they’re worth for a long time, either by exploitation or outright theft of their work.
It's interesting that you don't have a flinch response to the phrase "artists should be paid what they're worth". I associate that phrase with people yelling at me for being unwilling to pay $100 for a painting I value at $10.
I do not value visual art very highly, and somehow this is "demeaning the artist" rather than "reasonable mental variation". I don't *steal* paintings; I don't say to artists' faces that it was wasteful of them to spend $100 of labour making a $10 object (I assume they are trying to cater to some very different kind of mind that *is* willing to pay $100); just *not buying* artworks raises an awful lot of people's ire.
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>>It's hard for me to imagine AI generated art replacing huge swaths of the art market with "free" art where it wasn't before, because the US government has prevented that from happening repeatedly -- from photocopiers, to VCRs, to Napster, ad nauseum.
I was very confused by this statement at first. I guess by "prevented from happening" you mean "drove underground"? I suppose driving artbots underground *would* stifle them quite a bit, probably far more so than driving music piracy underground since the usual goal regarding an artbot's end result is to be shared rather than kept in a personal collection (so it would be far easier to catch).
---
>>The term "AI art generators" obfuscates what these programs are actually doing, and that's *laundering intellectual property*.
This does not seem essential to what artbots are doing. It's *easier* to build an artbot if you compile its dataset without regard for intellectual property, which is probably why the first ones to come out have done so, but I see no reason why it would be *mandatory*. We have Wikipedia, which has overwhelmed closed-data encyclopedias pretty much entirely; perhaps more telling, we have OpenStreetMap, which is overall inferior to Google Maps but still usable, and organisations looking to pay money in exchange for maps will in many cases do this by *paying surveyors to contribute to OpenStreetMap* rather than by paying Google.
I suspect next-gen artbots will get ordinary individuals' drawings of flowers from their backyards by *donation*, rather than by theft.