alt Hacker News> There are people who say that you should use a real artist instead of AI due to AI's water use.
Nobody I know says this. In fact, I've never heard of this ever before, and I read artist and hobby communities pretty hostile to AI, but I never once read this nice strawman you've built.
People say you should use a real artist instead of AI for a multitude of reasons:
- Because they want to enjoy art created by humans.
- Because it provides a living to artists, even artists for minor work like advertising or lesser commercial illustrations.
- Because AI "art" is built by stealing from human artists, and while human art has a history of copying and cloning, never before has tech allowed this in such a massive, soulless scale.
Sam Altman gave a deranged, completely out of touch reply, and he should be called to task for it, not defended. A human being is not some number on a spreadsheet, built over 20 years in order to achieve some "smartness" goal. That's a very stupid thing to say.
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>Nobody I know says this.
>I never once read this nice strawman you've built.
The instance of it I found was in a YouTube comment section.
It's that second point. We live in an age of artificial scarcity created by a system of social organization that we've mostly not argued about since the 50s, that's now showing it's stretch marks.
If it weren't for the need to 'earn' a living, I'd say to the other two points: Por que no los dos? Save for the capital argument (which is valid, I'm not saying it isn't. You will starve if you don't make money), why is it necessarily true that the two (AI and people) are in competition?
In fact, I think "actual" artists would benefit incredibly from the use of AI, which they could do if it weren't a shibboleth (like I said, for good reason). You'd no longer have to have an army of underpaid animators from vietnam to bring your OC to life - you could just use your own art and make it move and sing. We'd not need huge lumbering organizations full of people who, let's be honest, work there making other people's dreams come to life in large part because it's a better bet than taking a joe-job at the local denny's (after all, you're doing the thing you love even if it isn't truly "yours").
I've had this discussion with younger folks, who are legitimately shook by the state of things. They're worried that all the work they've done to this point is going to be moot, because they've correctly assessed that the whole capital system isn't going anywhere any time soon, and they've been prepping to try and get a job at netflix, or disney, or paramount - because that's the world we've handed them. They see those positions drying up and what else are you going to do? They have the power financially and politically and without them you're doing "not art" for work, which sucks because you need to work.
I say; eat the rich. General wildcat strikes until UBI. Tax the everloving shit out of capital gains and peel back personal income taxes. We (the millenials) were handed a steaming pile of shit for a world, so at least we know what would constitute not an absolute disaster for Zeds, Alphas, etc. Have I gone totally off the rails for a conversation about AI? Actually, I don't believe so. The cultural pushback is a function of a busted system. After all, it's the economy, stupid.