alt Hacker News> I can't commission an artist without questioning if they are using AI, which isn't acceptable in the projects I am commissioning for.
We've always judged the output, so why stop now. AI is just a tool. The artist still owns the output.
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> We've always judged the output, so why stop now. AI is just a tool. The artist still owns the output.
But we didn't. We relied heavily on a mix of trust and maybe occasional sampling. Having to verify everything is inefficient and exhausting.
Imagine a relative passed and you commission someone to draw a portrait of them to show at the funeral. The artist has good reviews and all their work looks impressive; their portfolio has hundreds of amazing photorealistic portraits. It's expensive, but nothing is too good for a passed loved one.
After weeks of waiting, you finally get the portrait ...aaaaand it looks nothing like them. There's weird artifacting all over it and it looks like a supermodel imposter with meat-moss hair. You try to contact the artist, but they've completely vanished: socials deleted, emails unreplied, just gone.
Oh well, they owned the output, right?
We pretty much never only judged the output. An oil painting is valued because it's an oil painting among other things. If people know you have worked on something for a long time, it's valued more than something you just came up with this afternoon. A chair crafted by a woodworker, even if it's worse in some ways, is valued over an IKEA chair produced in a fraction of the time.
Generative models are like outsourcing to cheap mass production factory, not an advanced woodworking tool in your basement.