😱🤯🤓🤩🤑 Resistance is futile.
A new stage in our technological industrial revolution. It will disrupt a lot, empower many people, and hurt people who are not able to take advantage of it. But if you’re techy and motivated, it will probably affect you positively!
“AI won’t replace _____. But _____ who use AI will replace ones who don’t”
Whether you’re an illustrator or a truck driver, the robots are coming! For now they live inside computers. People and companies will use the AI to work faster and produce more.
“Anything that can be automated will”
It’s actually been happening since the start of the industrial revolution. Even with intellectual work it’s already been happening for decades. Think about the term “content”. Humans are currently deconstructing and reconstructing “content” from all over the internet. Blog articles and YouTube videos are often just paraphrased content from elsewhere. Generative AI does this much faster.
Illustration - an ethical problem
AI models have been trained on millions of copyrighted images that were created by living artists - with no consent or compensation. Any new images being generated by the software is actually a reconstruction of the training images, no matter how “creative” it looks. The artists who worked hard on the original images that were used for the training data do not get paid for their copyrighted works. Even if there was an opt-out feature for an artist to remove their works from the training data, the AI still radically changes demand for all illustrators.
It doesn’t seem legal. However, the AI is sophisticated enough to change the images enough to create a “new” image that does not obviously resemble the original. So in court, it will be difficult or impossible for artists to defend their works which were downloaded and used as training data.
Arguably the way AI references images and renders a derivative is exactly what human artists do. But AI does it instantly and cheaply, at scale, and doesn’t simply look at images for inspiration. Instead a machine aggregates all the images, copying bits from each one. The result may look like a “creative” work, but in practice it’s not creating but aggregating.
Good reads
The creative war against AI art has already been lost (blog article)
Things are changing very fast (short video)
The end of art (long video rebutting the arguments defending AI)