On the long term yes it presumably is a threat to entire professions. On the short-mid term I think it will decimate the entry level tier of a lot of those professions first because it’s easier work to replace.
but isn’t the artistic field already a lottery when it comes to making a living doing it? Maybe I have the wrong impression, but I feel like if “I very likely won’t be able to make a living doing this” actually discouraged new art from getting created, it already would be doing that.
Art and Illustration are two related but different things when we’re talking about jobs. Commercial illustration is actually a pretty viable field to break into for people who have some artistic/design talent. I’ve been desinging for years but got into professional illustration around 5 years ago and have since done illustration work for Intel, YouTube, Penguin Books, High Times Magazine, Sierra Nevada Brewing, etc.
This is stuff like illustrating the cute characters websites/apps put into onboarding screens, the illustrations you see on food and beer packaging, the illustrations you see in editorial pieces (web articles, newspapers, magazines, blogs), the art you see on book covers and in books, the art you see on posters and fliers, the art on album covers, apparel, etc, etc, etc.
If you’re also a designer like I am you get to be a one stop shop for a company like a brewery that wants a cool new illustrated beer label (I’m working on such a job right now). You can then get the whole job of doing both the design work and the artwork for inclusion in the design work. That can be quite profitable.
Fine art on the other hand is indeed a shitty line of work and incredibly hard to be successful in for most. It’s like trying to make it as an actor or something.
That’s fair; the person I first responded to seemed to be discussing the “fine art” part.
How worried are you personally about these more advanced machine learning tools? Just a month or so ago I was playing a Pathfinder (rpg) video game and didn’t care or any of the built-in avatar images, so I hopped onto one of the websites that make an image based on a text prompt to make me an image that matched my character and it took a few times to get the right wording but in the end I got a pretty good image out of it. I vaguely know how it works. (vaguely is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence) and it still seemed kind of like magic.
Like I said earlier I think it will be the entry level shitty jobs that get gobbled first. Like drawing avatars for people is typically both low paying and the clients (no offense) tend to be less professional to deal with for that kinda work.
So those jobs? Yeah they’re going first and for me that’s fine but for new people cutting their teeth in this field that really sucks. How will people just getting into this line of work learn essential job skills like client management or get experience doing actual work for people?
On the long term I think my job is in jeopardy too and I’m still wrapping my head around what that means for me. It’s a rapidly moving target. It also involves my grappling with both ethical and creative dilemmas. These AI models are trained on other people’s work without their permission so my using them to stay afloat is problematic. And I got into this line of work because I actually like doing this work, learning how to improve at it, the process involved, etc. So farming out the process I enjoy so much to AI is not really what I got into this stuff for and at that point why am I doing it?
It’s a complicated situation and I’m not optimistic that society right now is well poised to respond to it in the most equitable sets of ways.
the clients (no offense) tend to be less professional
I don’t know what you mean by this precisely, but the “pretty good” end result I mentioned had a hand that melted into the sword-- so if you meant “low standard” then yeah, guilty as charged, haha. However, more interesting to me is that I would have never in 1000 years have paid someone to do that for me-- I just would have been low-level annoyed that my character and the avatar looked different the entire game.
I find the “they didn’t have permission to train from” argument is complete bunk. That’s not a right granted by intellectual property laws; there is no “right to control who learns from a work”.
What needs to happen is society (especially US society) needs to stop linking “working” and “enjoying a comfortable life”. Technology is coming for all our jobs, and the sooner we accept that and prepare for it, the better we’ll be when it happens.
I find the “they didn’t have permission to train from” argument is complete bunk. That’s not a right granted by intellectual property laws; there is no “right to control who learns from a work”.
Yeah, but is an AI LEGALLY learning? Or is it just a machine that spits out output based on its inputs? In that case, use of the work as input isn’t allowed under the copyright, which is that the work be used by reading it.
All these comparisons between what an AI is doing and what a human does when reading/learning/etc are not a given in a court of law. We don’t have any rulings yet that an AI is actually “learning” like a human when it is “trained.”
“Training” an AI is building a tool. A tool that can be used to profit. Can artistic works be used to build a for-profit tool without permission?
This is something that needs to be decided, and it will be decided in a way that whatever the rules are for AI can’t be applied to a human. Meaning if there is a requirement for permission for use in machine learning, that won’t change that a human can learn from it. So the comparison is pointless, because there is no way the courts are going to rule that these things are legally indistinguishable from people.
In the meantime, back to the original, there ARE precedents for use of performance because of recordings. That’s why the studios wanted that in the contract, they KNOW they cannot manipulate a person’s performance through AI without their express written permission. Is it REALLY so hard to believe this can be applied to writing or art? That they can’t use writing or art without the artist’s express permission.
We may see a new kind of copyright soon that specifically disallows use for AI, and another that is open for use with AI. Something to replace Creative Commons on the internet.
All right, I am not a lawyer but I’ve been around the internet long enough to know there is arguably a right to control learning and training. Because the Fair Use copyright law SPECIFICALLY allows for educational use. That means the default is that otherwise, it would not be allowed.
A judge could easily rule that AI training is not covered under Fair Use, as it is being used to create a profitable tool.
By that I mean that some dude looking for a game avatar or whatever isn’t as likely to be someone used to contracting people to do professional creative work for them. Professional clients who are accustomed to hiring creatives to do work for them are more likely to:
be quick to provide feedback and respond to emails
have feedback that is clear and actionable
communicate professionally
pay on time
be willing to pay a down payment and sign a contract
comprehend the hard work that goes into this stuff and value my time accordingly
don’t try to push a project (either intentionally or otherwise) into what is known as “scope creep” wherein they jockey for additional work outside of the initially agreed upon scope of work
And lots of other little things like that.
Am I saying that you are like that? No. But having done creative work for north of 15 years this is my informed opinion based on a lot of experience in this field.
I find the “they didn’t have permission to train from” argument is complete bunk. That’s not a right granted by intellectual property laws; there is no “right to control who learns from a work”.
That’s your opinion and you might feel differently if you had spent years working hard to achieve something in this specific field.
What needs to happen is society (especially US society) needs to stop linking “working” and “enjoying a comfortable life”. Technology is coming for all our jobs, and the sooner we accept that and prepare for it, the better we’ll be when it happens.
This I fully agree with. And I wouldn’t even necessarily have a problem with AI destroying creative jobs if it meant I was now more free to pursue a life of spending time doing things that I was passionate about because some kind of UBI or whatever was making that possible for me and others.
Like I kinda mentioned earlier, I don’t think society is in a good place to fight for this on at least the short term. Basically not until things get really bad. What I expect will happen for now is most all of the windfalls from automation will be siphoned up to to the upper class and corporations and wages will continue to stagnate for the working class and income inequality will continue to skyrocket.
That’s your opinion and you might feel differently if you had spent years working hard to achieve something in this specific field.
It’s not really an opinion; it’s just not a right granted by IP laws. I know that people that are financially dependent on this type of work really wish they had this right-- and I fully accept that if I were in the same boat, I would probably also wish I had this right, but that doesn’t magically add it to the law.
All the lawsuits you see popping up are hail marys (maries?); they’ll very likely all lose.
some kind of UBI or whatever was making that possible for me and others.
Something like this, set at a level that allowed a comfortable life (versus an austere one) would totally flip the whole employment dynamic. The pay for the worst jobs would skyrocket, because no one wants to do those jobs-- they only do them now to stave off starvation and homelessness.
siphoned up to to the upper class and corporations and wages will continue to stagnate for the working class and income inequality will continue to skyrocket
I can’t help but agree, with sorrow. I imagine it won’t get better (in the US, at least) until it impacts the wealthy-- as in, there aren’t enough people getting paid to buy the stuff that is getting created by automation. Capitalism needs money flowing to the bottom (traditionally, a wage) to sustain itself. If that flow of money dries up, the whole system collapses. We can either fix it by abandoning capitalism, or by patching capitalism by finding a way for money to flow down other than by wages. (A UBI, for example)
In my earlier comment in this thread I said my dilemma with using AI for my work was an ethical one, not a legal one. Ethics/morals inform laws for sure, but I think you’d agree that not everything that’s technically legal is also ethical. Especially so in a country like the US.
I think a lot of people would also agree that ethics are to some extent individual. Meaning that what I find ethical or not is going to differ from others. So whether or not this is all legal doesn’t mean that it’s going to jive with my personal view of what is ethical.
That dilemma is my own. Whether or not congress people who have a weak grasp of both technology and the arts think one way or another on the matter is a poor ruler for one’s own moral code of conduct in my book.
In any case, good chat. I appreciate that while we don’t agree on everything we kept it civil. Now back to work for me (before it gets taken by a robot).
Only if you’re looking at the very top of the profession, like people who hit it big as stars. There are a lot of other levels of employment and success short of Banksy or Beeple level.
My hope is that deep-faking tech might actually help lower levels of the profession, even if it’s at the expense of those at the top who get huge amounts of money because of how famous their face is.
Imho, Studios don’t even need to copy a famous actor’s face… just create a face of a person who doesn’t exist and make it into a new famous character by stamping it into a good (even if not top famous) actor.
On the long term yes it presumably is a threat to entire professions. On the short-mid term I think it will decimate the entry level tier of a lot of those professions first because it’s easier work to replace.
but isn’t the artistic field already a lottery when it comes to making a living doing it? Maybe I have the wrong impression, but I feel like if “I very likely won’t be able to make a living doing this” actually discouraged new art from getting created, it already would be doing that.
Art and Illustration are two related but different things when we’re talking about jobs. Commercial illustration is actually a pretty viable field to break into for people who have some artistic/design talent. I’ve been desinging for years but got into professional illustration around 5 years ago and have since done illustration work for Intel, YouTube, Penguin Books, High Times Magazine, Sierra Nevada Brewing, etc.
This is stuff like illustrating the cute characters websites/apps put into onboarding screens, the illustrations you see on food and beer packaging, the illustrations you see in editorial pieces (web articles, newspapers, magazines, blogs), the art you see on book covers and in books, the art you see on posters and fliers, the art on album covers, apparel, etc, etc, etc.
If you’re also a designer like I am you get to be a one stop shop for a company like a brewery that wants a cool new illustrated beer label (I’m working on such a job right now). You can then get the whole job of doing both the design work and the artwork for inclusion in the design work. That can be quite profitable.
Fine art on the other hand is indeed a shitty line of work and incredibly hard to be successful in for most. It’s like trying to make it as an actor or something.
That’s fair; the person I first responded to seemed to be discussing the “fine art” part.
How worried are you personally about these more advanced machine learning tools? Just a month or so ago I was playing a Pathfinder (rpg) video game and didn’t care or any of the built-in avatar images, so I hopped onto one of the websites that make an image based on a text prompt to make me an image that matched my character and it took a few times to get the right wording but in the end I got a pretty good image out of it. I vaguely know how it works. (vaguely is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence) and it still seemed kind of like magic.
Yeah I am fairly concerned.
Like I said earlier I think it will be the entry level shitty jobs that get gobbled first. Like drawing avatars for people is typically both low paying and the clients (no offense) tend to be less professional to deal with for that kinda work.
So those jobs? Yeah they’re going first and for me that’s fine but for new people cutting their teeth in this field that really sucks. How will people just getting into this line of work learn essential job skills like client management or get experience doing actual work for people?
On the long term I think my job is in jeopardy too and I’m still wrapping my head around what that means for me. It’s a rapidly moving target. It also involves my grappling with both ethical and creative dilemmas. These AI models are trained on other people’s work without their permission so my using them to stay afloat is problematic. And I got into this line of work because I actually like doing this work, learning how to improve at it, the process involved, etc. So farming out the process I enjoy so much to AI is not really what I got into this stuff for and at that point why am I doing it?
It’s a complicated situation and I’m not optimistic that society right now is well poised to respond to it in the most equitable sets of ways.
I don’t know what you mean by this precisely, but the “pretty good” end result I mentioned had a hand that melted into the sword-- so if you meant “low standard” then yeah, guilty as charged, haha. However, more interesting to me is that I would have never in 1000 years have paid someone to do that for me-- I just would have been low-level annoyed that my character and the avatar looked different the entire game.
I find the “they didn’t have permission to train from” argument is complete bunk. That’s not a right granted by intellectual property laws; there is no “right to control who learns from a work”.
What needs to happen is society (especially US society) needs to stop linking “working” and “enjoying a comfortable life”. Technology is coming for all our jobs, and the sooner we accept that and prepare for it, the better we’ll be when it happens.
Yeah, but is an AI LEGALLY learning? Or is it just a machine that spits out output based on its inputs? In that case, use of the work as input isn’t allowed under the copyright, which is that the work be used by reading it.
All these comparisons between what an AI is doing and what a human does when reading/learning/etc are not a given in a court of law. We don’t have any rulings yet that an AI is actually “learning” like a human when it is “trained.”
“Training” an AI is building a tool. A tool that can be used to profit. Can artistic works be used to build a for-profit tool without permission?
This is something that needs to be decided, and it will be decided in a way that whatever the rules are for AI can’t be applied to a human. Meaning if there is a requirement for permission for use in machine learning, that won’t change that a human can learn from it. So the comparison is pointless, because there is no way the courts are going to rule that these things are legally indistinguishable from people.
In the meantime, back to the original, there ARE precedents for use of performance because of recordings. That’s why the studios wanted that in the contract, they KNOW they cannot manipulate a person’s performance through AI without their express written permission. Is it REALLY so hard to believe this can be applied to writing or art? That they can’t use writing or art without the artist’s express permission.
We may see a new kind of copyright soon that specifically disallows use for AI, and another that is open for use with AI. Something to replace Creative Commons on the internet.
There simply isn’t a right to control even training. That’s just not a thing. It would need a change to the law.
All right, I am not a lawyer but I’ve been around the internet long enough to know there is arguably a right to control learning and training. Because the Fair Use copyright law SPECIFICALLY allows for educational use. That means the default is that otherwise, it would not be allowed.
A judge could easily rule that AI training is not covered under Fair Use, as it is being used to create a profitable tool.
By that I mean that some dude looking for a game avatar or whatever isn’t as likely to be someone used to contracting people to do professional creative work for them. Professional clients who are accustomed to hiring creatives to do work for them are more likely to:
And lots of other little things like that.
Am I saying that you are like that? No. But having done creative work for north of 15 years this is my informed opinion based on a lot of experience in this field.
That’s your opinion and you might feel differently if you had spent years working hard to achieve something in this specific field.
This I fully agree with. And I wouldn’t even necessarily have a problem with AI destroying creative jobs if it meant I was now more free to pursue a life of spending time doing things that I was passionate about because some kind of UBI or whatever was making that possible for me and others.
Like I kinda mentioned earlier, I don’t think society is in a good place to fight for this on at least the short term. Basically not until things get really bad. What I expect will happen for now is most all of the windfalls from automation will be siphoned up to to the upper class and corporations and wages will continue to stagnate for the working class and income inequality will continue to skyrocket.
It’s not really an opinion; it’s just not a right granted by IP laws. I know that people that are financially dependent on this type of work really wish they had this right-- and I fully accept that if I were in the same boat, I would probably also wish I had this right, but that doesn’t magically add it to the law.
All the lawsuits you see popping up are hail marys (maries?); they’ll very likely all lose.
Something like this, set at a level that allowed a comfortable life (versus an austere one) would totally flip the whole employment dynamic. The pay for the worst jobs would skyrocket, because no one wants to do those jobs-- they only do them now to stave off starvation and homelessness.
I can’t help but agree, with sorrow. I imagine it won’t get better (in the US, at least) until it impacts the wealthy-- as in, there aren’t enough people getting paid to buy the stuff that is getting created by automation. Capitalism needs money flowing to the bottom (traditionally, a wage) to sustain itself. If that flow of money dries up, the whole system collapses. We can either fix it by abandoning capitalism, or by patching capitalism by finding a way for money to flow down other than by wages. (A UBI, for example)
In my earlier comment in this thread I said my dilemma with using AI for my work was an ethical one, not a legal one. Ethics/morals inform laws for sure, but I think you’d agree that not everything that’s technically legal is also ethical. Especially so in a country like the US.
I think a lot of people would also agree that ethics are to some extent individual. Meaning that what I find ethical or not is going to differ from others. So whether or not this is all legal doesn’t mean that it’s going to jive with my personal view of what is ethical.
That dilemma is my own. Whether or not congress people who have a weak grasp of both technology and the arts think one way or another on the matter is a poor ruler for one’s own moral code of conduct in my book.
In any case, good chat. I appreciate that while we don’t agree on everything we kept it civil. Now back to work for me (before it gets taken by a robot).
Only if you’re looking at the very top of the profession, like people who hit it big as stars. There are a lot of other levels of employment and success short of Banksy or Beeple level.
My hope is that deep-faking tech might actually help lower levels of the profession, even if it’s at the expense of those at the top who get huge amounts of money because of how famous their face is.
Imho, Studios don’t even need to copy a famous actor’s face… just create a face of a person who doesn’t exist and make it into a new famous character by stamping it into a good (even if not top famous) actor.