> Ahh yes, that well known human impulse to produce stock artwork for newspapers and to illustrate corporate brochures. I can't imagine what the world would be like if we let cold, soulless processes design our corporate brochures!
As someone who works on the side in creative endeavors, I assure you that work that I do even that I would prefer to not carries with it my principles as a designer and a small piece of my humanity, every last thing, even the most aggressively bland and soulless contains an enigma of tiny choices based upon years of making things that most people will never notice. Or at least, I always thought they didn't notice, until you start putting even bland corporate art next to AI generated garbage. Then they do.
From the creative perspective, that's what I think lends it that... smoothed over, generic vibe. An artists "voice" even in something like graphic design, even in an oppressive and highly corporatized environment, would be best characterized as a thousand tiny choices that won't overall really impact a ton on their own in terms of the final product, but do give a given work it's "humanity" that no machine can touch. When I, for example, design an interface: why do I consistently use similar dimensions for similar components and spacings? I honestly couldn't tell you. To me, it "looks nice," a word choice that undermines decades in my industry but nonetheless is the most fitting. And all of those are subject to change by committee later on to be sure, but even so, they rarely are.
AI takes these thousands of tiny choices that contribute to this feeling and replaces it with a rounded mean of previous choices made by innumerable artists with different voices. It takes the "voice" as it were and replaces it with an cacophony of conflicting ones, which is subject to change it's tone with each pixel. This, IMO, is it's core failing.
> I suppose this argument works for Art(TM), but why is it relevant to the soulless, mass produced art? Should it be okay to discard all the artists who merely fill in interstitial frames of an animation? Is "human expression" actually relevant to that?
For the love of everything, yes. And you say "why is it relevant for soulless mass produced art" but we already know why it is, Disney spent billions of dollars showing us what happens when the content mill becomes so utterly and completely detached from the art it was meant to be with the MCU. The newer movies just... look like shit, and not because of AI (probably?) but because all the movies are made down to a formula, down to a process, no vision, no plan, just an endless remixing of previous ideas, no time for artists to put in actual work, just rushing from task to task, frame to frame, desperately trying to crank it the hell out before their studios go bust.
People rag on generic, popular art but even popular art is art, and if you take away the humans (or as Disney did, beat them into such submission they can no longer be human) people definitely notice.
> Pick one: either this is about speed or it isn't. Would you actually be fine with AI art if it was just slower? If not, then stop bringing up distractions like this. If this really is just about scale, it's a very different conversation.
It's relevant because you're bringing up industrialized mechanization as a comparison, and it's really an ill-fitting one. The printing press, MAYBE, could be an example on the scales we're talking about, and the main difference there is mass produced books basically didn't exist and literacy of the common people was substantially rarer, ergo, the number of scribes displaced in their skills was much lower.
But the vast majority of "technology replaces workers" type things can be (and you have invoked this already) compared to the industrial revolution, but again, the difference is scale. They didn't build a horseshoe maker by analyzing 50,000 horseshoes made by 800 craftsman that could then produce 5,000 of the things per day.
And sure, those horseshoes all suck ass, they're deformed, don't work well and the horses are visibly uncomfortable wearing them, but the corporate interests running everything don't care and so shit tons of craftsman lose paying work, horses are miserable, and everything keeps on trucking. That's what I see, all around me, all the time these days.
> Sorry, when did Rembrandt paintings stop being toys for the wealthy?
I mean, the art market being a tax-dodge and money-laundering scheme is a whole other can of worms that we really shouldn't try to open here.
> So, again, it's just that progress is moving too fast? If we just slow things down a bit and give the artists time to flee, that makes it okay?
I'd be substantially more pleased with a society that cared for the people it's actively working to displace, yeah. I don't think any artist out there is dying to make the next Charmin ad, and to your earlier point of soulless corporate art, yeah I'd imagine everyone would have a lot more fun making anything that isn't that. The problem is we have millions of people who've gone to school, invested money, borrowed money, and constructed a set of skills not easily transferable, who are about to be out of work. And in our society, being out of work can cost you everything from the place that you live, to the doctors that heal you to the food that nourishes you. I don't, and I doubt anyone gives a damn about maintaining the human affect in corporate art: apart from the fact that those humans still need to eat, and most of them are barely doing it as it stands now.
> We haven't talked before, so I didn't know whether you were someone who was okay with automation putting people out of work. That's hardly zero substance. I'll assume this means you're fine with it, since you don't think it's even worth discussing.
On the whole, less work is a-okay by me. Sounds great! The problem is we as a larger collective of workers never see that benefit: Instead of less work, we all just produce more shit, having our 40-hour week stuffed with ever more tasks, ideas, and demands of management as they add more automation and cut more jobs and push the remaining people ever harder.
We were on the cusp of a 30-hour workweek in the 1970s and now? Now we have more automation than ever but simultaneously work harder and produce more shit no one needs than we ever have.
> Okay, so, bottom line: you're saying that if they spend a few billion to license all that art, and proceed to completely replace human artists with a vastly superior product, you're OK with that outcome? (I'm not saying this is inconsistent, just trying to understand your stance - previously you were talking about the importance of artists expressing themselves and the speed at which AI can do things - what's actually important, here?)
What's important is I want people to survive this. I'm disillusioned as hell with our society's ongoing trajectory of continuously trying to have more, to do more, always more, always grow, always produce more, always sell more. To borrow Greta's immortal words: "Fantasies of infinite growth." I see the AI revolution as yet another instance where those who have it all will have yet more, and those who do not will be ground down even harder than they already are. It's a PERFECT solution for corporations: the ability to produce more slop, more shit, infinitely more, as much as people can possibly consume and then some, for even less cost, and everyone currently working in the system is now subject to even more layoffs so the executives can buy an even bigger yacht.
If you don't see how this stuff is a problem I don't think I can help you.