This is just one action in a coming conflict. It will be interesting to see how this shakes out. Does the record industry win and digital likenesses become outlawed, even taboo? Or does voice, appearance etc just become another sets of rights that musicians will have to negotiate during a record deal?
This will definitely be setting some precedent on how AI music is treated. I’m on the side of the monkey with a camera and that anything made by these large models is public domain. I’m sure these record companies would be ecstatic if they could license an artists voice without having to have them sing anything new
Hopefully that is how it goes down. That precedent has already been set for images at least for text generated images.
Unfortunately the music industry has alot of money to throw at lawyers and i could seen an argument that this is a little bit different if your directly using someone’s likeness like a voice.
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Maybe but I would argue everything you said has already happened many times over. People were probably saying the same thing when cameras were invented. Because why would a people sit for hours waiting for a painter to paint them when they can sit for 30 seconds for a photograph to get taken. That arguably is a more accurate representation.
Or how about computer animation. I am sure many artist lost their job during that switch over as well. Computers could just figure out the in between frames instead of a person manually having to draw frame by frame.
But artists have adapted over the years and now we have entirely new forms of artist like 3D animators and photographers. Even game designers. YouTube Thumbnail creators, ad designers, drone operators etc…etc… Artistes have more way to create art then ever before and have more way to monetize their art. More importantly normal people have more time to consume art then ever before to the point It is almost becoming a problem.
I really don’t see AI as being any different. Sure I am sure it will drastically change the industry and if artist don’t adapt they will be in trouble but that is nothing new. It has happened many times before and will happen many more times in the future. But in every case I would say art has become better each time technology has advanced.
Right, this is what people always say about AI art, but they are never specific about what that adaptation would even look like in this case.
What is the artist’s role honestly going to be? Churning out content for pennies on the dollar to feed an AI so the AI can keep making novel content and so people can use it to cheaply replicate the artist’s work?
Artists themselves don’t need AI, they can just make the art themselves. This only benefits non-artists who want to exploit the skill that goes into creating art, without actually acknowledging the intrinsic link between art and the human being creating it.
It will work for a while, but without actual human beings inputting content for the AI, it will dead end. A cotton gin doesn’t still need the cotton pickers to still keep picking cotton for it to fulfill its function, an AI will still need the artists though.
I don’t think AI is like other inventions and advancements, it’s something that human beings and society at large are really not mentally equipped to deal with, even the people designing it don’t understand the ramifications of what they’re doing.
Why not just a new tool for artist to use? Sure it will replace artists in some scenarios and it will enable less artistically adept people. But I look at how it is used in Photoshop you select a section and tell the AI what to replace and it does and you do a little bit of cleanup to make it presentable. But end of the day I think you will always need some artistic vision in the majority of cases to tell the AI what you want it to do. If you give the AI tools to an average person vs an artist the artist would be far superior every time.
Does a photo editor really want to spend 3 hours removing aunt Beth obliviously photo bombing the bride and groom’s wedding photo? When they could just use AI and be done in 10 minutes? Or how about an artist using some AI art as a starting off point or some inspiration to start their own creation.
That is how I see AI, a very powerful tool in an artist toolbox.
Your assuming all Human created art will stop. I seriously doubt that will ever happen, if anything I see it increasing as AI will help Humans create art faster.
I don’t think I would say humans were really ready for the electricity, Nuclear technology, internet, cell phones, social media, the microwave. But we haven’t killed our self off yet. Maybe it is just slowly killing us or driving us crazy. But for better or for worse it is part of our life’s and their is no removing it now. AI is here to stay.
I’m not so much talking about tools that use AI to edit or adjust art like photoshop, I’m talking more about AI that is using human created art as fuel to produce art whole cloth (like Midjourney/Stable Diffusion).
I can just add a tag “Simon Stalenhag” and it replicates his style, and it knows how to do that because of the scraped content it uses, content that Stalenhag himself created. It’s a novel style that he developed over a lot of time through effort, observation and thought, it’s an expression of him as an individual and his life long experience in the world, all just for a tech bro to scrape all his art off the internet, blend it into his art slurry and say “Thanks man, best of luck with your career now that some random can reproduce your work with a few sentences, no hard feelings, just adapt.”
It’s pretty insulting honestly. Someone writing a string of words is not an artist, they’re still just a client. So when you say “some artists will be replaced” you’re talking about the actual creatives themselves. They will be replaced by techs essentially. And no one will undersrand why that matters until all the media they consume starts to look and feel the same.
Humans won’t stop producing art, but they will be more reticent to publish what they personally create in a professional arena if the hard earned novelty of their own work is just going to inevitably get hoovered up and cookie-cuttered by a computer. Why would they bother offering anything of themselves in any professional capacity if in the end they just end up at the same level as someone who has never picked up a pencil in his life? It’s the dronification of artists that is disturbing, as if the individual who creates the art is simply a obstacle that needs to be overcome to get at the value they can produce.
I think you’re right about photographers, but not when it comes to digital versus traditional art.
I know there are instances where AI can be used to clean things up, re-colour things, put filters on, yeah okay. But that is not the problem - generative AI is the problem.
Digitally created animation and artwork requires the same kind of knowledge, ability (and time to learn) as traditional artwork. Computers can take away some of the more laborious aspects, but it’s still a time consuming, difficult thing to create artwork and animation, whether digital or traditional. I think a lot of people defending AI art don’t understand how time consuming and involved producing art actually is.
The fact that you can type “draw a cat in the style of this artist” - and get a damned good, perfect result? How is that artist named in the prompt supposed to feel?
The growth of AI has come on the backs of artists, having been trained using people’s art (without their permission.) Now instead of hiring an artist, customers can just type in a prompt. Artists who were once able to support themself are now screwed.
I don’t mean to be negative here, (apologies, this just fires me up) but generative AI is a catastrophy for artists.