@john I think it's useful to vocalize. So many use cases are piecewise within commercial products or services, so we aren't directly buying AI "art" or not. We often won't be aware of where it's used (in books, articles, advertisements, and so on) and will have a hard time avoiding it even if we know how to recognize it (which I don't, and not for lack of trying).
@iris AI will probably have an economic impact on people doing commercial illustration, for sure. But I actually don’t really think of many (any?) of those things as art anyway.
It's more of a general labour concern that anything to do with art and it's meaning.
@john whoa, gotta disagree there. Art for relaying information is a huge and valuable segment of art as a field, and I don't know the breakdown but I'm guessing a lot of what artists get paid for. Especially digital, which is what AI is trying to replace. Beyond that there's art in video games and the like, also controlled by companies and paid out for contracts or salaries.
@iris Yep, if your work was done for a commercial entity, you were mostly anonymised, and it was the type of thing AI can do to the standard that commercial entity requires, you're going to be replaced by AI.
@john and that line of thinking is why I'm vocalizing that AI art will never be acceptable -- it's all built on theft.
I hope the poisoning of AI art reaches the point of no return sooner rather than later. It's already a problem for new models that they're training on previous models' output, now that it's ubiquitous, and the effect is... noticeable. It's not a sustainable system. It won't last, but it puts artists out of work in the meantime, and I'd like to cut that as short as possible.
@john Except would NFT be as irrelevant if they weren’t made so socially uncool due to mass rejection? These investment memes can thrive on hype and can be injured and even killed through simple negativity FUD as they call it. And I’m the FUD Factory: importing and exporting FUD since 1908.
Like I used to find the nervous luddite currents among artists annoying “digital art has no soul wah wah wah” but I’ve aged into seeing it as a kind of immune system for work all too unprotected—
@futurebird Maybe, but I think NFTs were just fundamentally stupid, and the only people that would be interested long-term were crypto-fools. The very model of a fad.
AI image generation is a bit different. I think it will have impacts, in commercial illustration. But as art, I really think people that are interested in art at all find it pointless.
@john@futurebird you're right about what we're seeing so far being mostly stupid, but there's fundamentally non-stupid use cases too... in theory, right?
@iwein@futurebird Yes, I suppose so. Although interestingly it's hard to think of really impactful useful applications. That's not generally the case is it? That no one can think of anything much?
Indy game developers might find image generation useful to get some slick concept art/game art happening. Small companies can now afford to custom illustrations of people prancing about with idea bulbs and stuff adorning their websites. That's... all I’ve got.
@john@futurebird NFT could represent a plot of land, a tree this year's harvest; smart contracts for rent/mortgage/lease sale. This could make certain kinds of trade more efficient... maybe.
At least it doesn't have to be a jpg by definition.
@iwein@futurebird if any of that blockchain stuff was actually useful for such purposes, shouldn’t we be seeing it by now? I’m actually less down on blockchain than most of my corner Mastodon seems to be, but seriously it been around for ages now, with pretty serious money behind it, and it’s led to… absolutely nothing that’s useful in my life.
@futurebird@john I strongly agree with this. The whole reason NFTs and then LLMs got huge was a deliberate hype cycle aimed at capturing investment. The whole reason NFTs collapsed was people pointing and laughing at them. We need to do the same with LLMs.
@mike@futurebird I really don't think it collapsed because people pointed and laughed. I think NFTs collapsed because the idea was stupid, and didn't hold enough interest to get people to stick around.
@aral You mean AI military targeting? That's not what I'm talking about here, I'm an artist talking about art, and is the context most artists are using it in.
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