[aqsalose]

>But I'm also a musician/artist and so I find some of these conversations odd. The problem with them I see is that they are oversimplified. To get better at drawing I often copy other works. Or I'll play a piece exactly as intended. Then I get more advanced and learn a style of someone I admire and appreciate. Then after that comes my own flair.

>So I ask, what is different between me doing it and a machine?

You are a human. If you practice art as a hobby you can feel pleasure doing it, or you can get informal value out of the practice (there is social value in showing and sharing hobbies and works with friends). One could try to formalize that value and make a profession out of it, get livelihood selling it.

When all that "machinery" to (learn to) produce artistic works was sitting inside human skulls and difficult to train, the benefits befell on the humans.

When it is a machine that can easily and cheaply automate ... the benefits are due to the owner of machine.

Now, I don't personally know if the genie can be put back into bottle with any legal framework that wouldn't be monstrous in some other way. However, ethically it is quite clear to me there is a possibility the artists / illustrators are going to get a very bad deal out of this, which could be a moral wrong. This would be a reason to think up the legal and conceptual framework that tries to make it not ... as wrong as it could be.

It could be that we end up with human art as a prestige good (which it already is). That wouldn't be nice, because of power law dynamics of popularity already benefit very few prestige artists. So it could get worse. But could we end up with a Wall-E world where there are no reason for anyone to learn to draw any well? When a kid asks "draw me a rabbit", they won't ask any of the humans around, they ask the machine. The machine can produce a much more prettier rabbit, immediately and tailored to their taste.

[godelski]

> One could try to formalize that value and make a profession out of it, get livelihood selling it.

I really think it is bad to frame this about profits. I mean in my case I am doing it purely for the pursuit of pleasure. I'd argue that these models allow more people to do so as it lowers the barrier to create quality work. It can also be used as a great tool for practice, as you can generate ideas and then copy and/or edit them. It is also a great tool to make quick iterations as you explore what certain ideas and concepts might look at. But I do not believe that it is anywhere near ready to be a replacement for humans. Especially since it is highly limited in its creativity (something not discussed).

Also, I want to add that these methods allow for new types of art that didn't exist before. There are artists working and exploring this path. Questioning how these tools can be used to modify things or create things to be modified.

> When it is a machine that can easily and cheaply automate ... the benefits are due to the owner of machine.

In what way? If you are not paying for the system and it is freely handed over, why is it not "you" who is benefiting? I would understand this comment if the benefit was behind a paywall (e.g. Dall-E) but it isn't (e.g. Stable Diffusion).

> Now, I don't personally know if the genie can be put back into bottle with any legal framework that wouldn't be monstrous in some other way. However, ethically it is quite clear to me there is a possibility the artists / illustrators are going to get a very bad deal out of this, which could be a moral wrong. This would be a reason to think up the legal and conceptual framework that tries to make it not ... as wrong as it could be.

I guess part of the issue I have with this is that it sounds a lot like the arguments made when digital art itself was beginning. How do we differentiate the "I hate it because it's new" from the "I hate it because it is unethical?" This is not so obvious to me to be honest, because one can think the former and say the latter. I am not going to shy away from the fact that transitionary periods can be rough, but I'm not convinced it is going to kill artists' livelihoods. Especially since there is a lot of effort that is still needed to produce high quality images.

I think this might be a point where people working on these machines (like me) vs the people that aren't (maybe you? idk) have different biases. All day I see a ton of crap come out of these. But if you just payed attention to articles like this or Twitter you'd think they are far more powerful than they are. These selected images are being created by expert artists too, that deeply understand aesthetics and the prompt engineering required to make high quality work. Maybe we'll get there, and that makes the point moot, but I'd argue that we're still pretty far away from that. I don't think this is going to kill off professional artists by any measure (especially because this exclusively affects the digital media domain and no other form) but may make the barrier to entry slightly higher (but it also might help artists become more creative as you can quickly explore ideas).

> The machine can produce a much more prettier rabbit, immediately and tailored to their taste.

Actually I'd argue the opposite. While this may be true for your average person making a drawing I still have significant doubts that the machines will be able to create better results than professional artists within the next 5-10 years (plenty would bet against me though, so that's fair). I also think there's issues with the diversity of these images and that it can't be resolved simply by adding more data (the "scaling" paradigm). I think they will rather reinforce that certain things look a specific way. Especially since these models do not understand a lot of basic concepts that we humans take for granted (a fundamental problem in AI: causal understanding). I don't think these issues are insurmountable, but they are a lot harder than many give credit for.

But I do want to make it clear that while we disagree I respect your position and still do think you bring up some good points. But I do think we also have fundamentally different vantage points. Which probably makes it a good thing that we're actually discussing this together and not in our respective bubbles.