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AI and yourProfession(Job)
3 years ago
Over the past few months I've been inundated with videos on YouTube, scrolling through Journal entry after entry about concerns over AI, AI stealing art without an artist's consent or other users feeding an artist's work into AI without their consent and all other variations of what is essentially either grounds for Copyright Infringement or concerns about humans being replaced by the old 1s and 0s (bots).
I'm not here to talk about the former but rather about the latter. I'm not here to tell you to love AI or accept it- it is the future. No, I'll leave that up to you and the collective to decide AI's fate. What I am curious about is, and let's suspend the notion that the house is on fire and we're in the house for a moment, are there possibly some parts of your workload where AI could be useful?
Hear me out here. Let's say that you could feed the AI your particular style of whatever, writing, backgrounds, cityscapes, skyscapes, alien worlds, alien environments, etc etc, or just things you absolutely detest doing yourself.. then have the AI perform that work for you. Would that be useful? Could it decrease your workload while staying true or close to your style? Or are you a purist?
I ask this since chatting with a friend about AI, we talked about things like the radio and newspapers. He explained that artists believed that the radio would replace them but instead they ended up going to the studio more often and making more money. Newspapers, people don't buy them as often, now you get your news online with a healthy dose of local and Google Ads to boot. The Newspaper itself has a wider audience base and opportunities to make more money based on regular fees to get into the paper AND online advertising.
So my questions above remain. If we could all step out of the burning house for a moment and take a serious look at our work loads and challenges.. how would or could you use AI art to your benefit? Could it free you up to take more work or make more money?
I'm not here to talk about the former but rather about the latter. I'm not here to tell you to love AI or accept it- it is the future. No, I'll leave that up to you and the collective to decide AI's fate. What I am curious about is, and let's suspend the notion that the house is on fire and we're in the house for a moment, are there possibly some parts of your workload where AI could be useful?
Hear me out here. Let's say that you could feed the AI your particular style of whatever, writing, backgrounds, cityscapes, skyscapes, alien worlds, alien environments, etc etc, or just things you absolutely detest doing yourself.. then have the AI perform that work for you. Would that be useful? Could it decrease your workload while staying true or close to your style? Or are you a purist?
I ask this since chatting with a friend about AI, we talked about things like the radio and newspapers. He explained that artists believed that the radio would replace them but instead they ended up going to the studio more often and making more money. Newspapers, people don't buy them as often, now you get your news online with a healthy dose of local and Google Ads to boot. The Newspaper itself has a wider audience base and opportunities to make more money based on regular fees to get into the paper AND online advertising.
So my questions above remain. If we could all step out of the burning house for a moment and take a serious look at our work loads and challenges.. how would or could you use AI art to your benefit? Could it free you up to take more work or make more money?
However, due to the nature of the world we live in and the capitalist hellscape that fashioned it, there is no way for that to ever become a reality without it being abused to hurt people in some way, either by trying to replace them or feeding their work into datasets without consent, or by creating an environment where very little true creativity exists because these tools are not capable of producing anything unique by the simple fact they have no capacity for thought or intelligence.
So I guess the tl;dr is: Could it be useful and could it have amazing application? Yes, absolutely. Can it be useful and harmless? Not within our current socio-economic system.
Maybe this could help with artist block and other similar challenges, keep you churning out work or new ideas?
As a software developer myself I see the current implementation of AI as a very crude engineering test bed, designed to grow their own development of the technology. This is in no way a solution that should be commercialized at this point.
Having said that, Google can detect the origin of art pieces so it's entirely plausible to have AI attribute or credit artists according to what pieces were used as the sources of art pieces and then to pay them royalties accordingly.
The most hopeful outcome here is that the fad will die out once people realize it isn't really good at being the perfect content machine they want it to be, and that the industry will pivot towards more useful things, but I'm afraid the damage is probably already done.
Regardless, there's an issue that even providing royalties (extremely unlikely) or using only content that has been approved for such use (worse training sets) wouldn't resolve, and that's the fact that the only driving force for corporations will always be profit. They aren't interested in creativity beyond the profit it may provide, and if this offers an opportunity to minimize expense, they will definitely go for it. The only way to mitigate this would be heavy regulation which I doubt would ever be adequate even if it was ever implemented. With all that in mind, there is no chance of any kind of technology like this to ever be used ethically within the capitalist framework.
I think the two posts before me hit on any major points I was going to make. I think it could be used ethically to enhance the lives of artists... but thats not how it will be used.
The problem with some Engineers is that we solve things for a technical and mechanical perspective however the social aspects tend to evolve over time.
As I am no visual artist, I was wondering what features would actually be helpful to artists say if an AI artist centered application came to being.