I’ve been trying to understand various perspectives on AI “art” generation, and a few things have finally made me understand why it’s so problematic. It’s not just like a normal dataset, like say, weather. But it’s ingesting peoples’ creative works whole. And since it’s not “generative” in the same way that that word’s usually used, it’s using people’s not-public-domain work and hacking it into pieces and regurgitating those pieces to create composite stuff that uses their *actual work* to then also rip off their style.
I’d been thinking about it like other machine learning stuff, where data’s a little more abstract, and not directly someone’s creative output. Like “Oh, the algorithm analyzed this art and learned the distinctive style” would be a much harder argument. But as it is, it’s not like a sewing machine (which is how I’d been thinking about it) – it’s like you broke into an artist’s house, stole all their work, chopped off an arm and attached it to a machine that then used that artist’s knowledge and their work and their arm to create something that would then work directly against them that then took a bunch of money and investment and handed all that “value” to techbros.
I think the AI problem is inevitable, and there’s no putting the genie back in the bottle. The inflection point has already passed. But I hadn’t realized the depths to how fucked over artists have been by this, and I’m assuming that most people who’ve tried out Lensa have something a lot more like my previous understanding than my current one.
Thanks to all the folks speaking up and helping laypeople understand the issues at hand.
I will always value artists, and the time I’ve spent working with many artists have been the best, most pleasurable periods of my career. I *hope* that there’s a way forward that uses AI tools and machine learning to actually empower artists using ethically-sourced datasets. I think that’ll be a massive challenge – but that at some point there’ll be an iTunes to the current landscape’s Napster. And that there’s a better, more sustainable, more equitable destination than the AI art equivalent of Spotify.