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Another AI company wrote us and here’s our response

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Re: Another AI company wrote us and here’s our response

#131

Post by neontomo »

skiexperte wrote: post #63

If you struggle online selling your art because of AI, your Art is not good enough and AI was not the problem to begin with. A lot of friends around me are really good in drawing. They do not sell anything. A friend can draw really really good like photoreal, he also can barley life from this. All of this was before AI. I want to use AI for customization and not because i don't appreciate art. If an artist gets frust…

i'm a dev and a semi-successful artist and agree with you.

the way you sell art is not usually about skill, it's about how you market the art so that people will feel connected to it. it can be a story behind it, the people who are promoting it etc.

a lot of artists make art, don't sell anything and get angry at their audience for not buying it. now some of the blame is shifted to ai instead. i'm still not ok with ai being trained on artists work without permission, but it's not the only reason you're not able to sell art.

Re: Another AI company wrote us and here’s our response

#132

Post by rickydroll »

hpen wrote: post #77

The problem isn't that people are luddites and hate technology, it's that it has been built on the backs of peoples artistic work, and they haven't been asked or compensated for it.

The artists complaining about this have built their careers and revenue streams on the backs of thousands of years of artistic creation. Where's the compensation for those earlier artists? Did you get their permission to use their content to train yourself?

In almost every creative field, you learn by example. You watch what the Masters have done before you. You know their techniques, tools, and ways of expressing things, then mix those tools and techniques into something you think is original. It's almost guaranteed that somebody else had the same thought you did. Maybe they expressed it, maybe they didn't, maybe they rejected it, maybe it's not been published, but somebody else had the same thought that you did.

An individual is not unique, and people are not unique in feeling offended that they are not unique. People felt offended whenever animals did something previously thought to be uniquely human. People were offended when it was understood that humans and apes evolved from a common ancestor. People felt offended when it was discovered that the Earth was not the center of the universe.

Like Galileo, the current state of AI tells us, "And yet it moves."

Re: Another AI company wrote us and here’s our response

#133

Post by buzzardbait »

I'm confused. The top reason for declining is this:

> The surge in AI has been built on the backs of creative people like us. Artists’ work has been harvested in order to train large language models and they have not been informed or compensated.

The AI company is literally informing them that they want a partnership, which obviously involves discussing compensation. That is the polar opposite of harvesting all their comics to create a language model. So how is this relevant?

Thing is, AI is happening to creatives whether you like it or not, so you might as well play a part in directing its trajectory. Apple hired world class drummers for the new AI drummer feature in their flagship music production software. Dreamtonics hired a lot of vocalists for its flagship vocal synthesis software, which happens to be quite brilliant.

The last reason says:

> Artists would much rather have an AI that actually helps with grunt chores, such as writing invoices, or helping with taxes in order to focus more on fulfilling creative tasks. Such an AI-tool would be of much more value to the artist community.

Such AI tools already exist in large numbers. It just so happens that the current frontier of AI is the creative arts. This is all rather similar to how people resisted personal computers in the 70s and 80s.

Re: Another AI company wrote us and here’s our response

#134

Post by ilrwbwrkhv »

low_tech_punk wrote: post #31

I'm curious how developers' sentiment towards code generation tools like Copilot compares to artists' sentiment towards art generation tools like MJ/SD/DallE. As a developer myself, I want to see coding as a creative act and feel uneasy about the idea of relying on a tool that makes the code one tab away. But I also recognize most of the coding we do is in a commercial context where artistic expression is less releva…

Copilot is just a glorified vim macro.

It is dumb as rocks so it doesn't ever get anything complicated. But it is good for "autofilling" like excel, a bunch of stuff, given a pattern.

Re: Another AI company wrote us and here’s our response

#135

Post by BiteCode_dev »

marban wrote: post #89
jedberg wrote: post #71

This feels like back in the day when photo editing and publishing software started getting big. "True artists" would shun anyone using those tools as amateurs. And for the most part they were right. It was mostly used by amateurs to create stuff that didn't look very good. That is where we are with AI art right now. Most of it is garbage created by people who don't know what good art is. But just like back in the day…

The difference is that everyone thinks they're an artist now, skipping pesky things like talent or effort. GenAI is the ultimate tool for people who have the creativity of a potato.

Painters said that about photographs.

Artists are petty.

Re: Another AI company wrote us and here’s our response

#136

Post by caconym_ »

bjornlouser wrote: post #125
caconym_ wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Properly compensated'... determined by the market, right? That's being driven close to $0, just like with software (and was headed that direction before the recent AI craze). This is just completely false, and there are so many obvious counterexamples I don't know where to begin, so let's just start with artists working in the film and video game industries. These are real working, earning people who do art and des…

"film and video game industries..." Oh I thought they were talking about silly web comics and random art on the internet that was 'stolen'. Film and game industries of course embrace all types of tech to make money (didn't Disney use generative AI for the opening sequence of a Marvel series last year?)

> Oh I thought they were talking about silly web comics and random art on the internet that was 'stolen'.

It is extremely common for "silly web comics and random art on the internet" to be meaningfully monetized by their creators, whether or not they make a living that way.

> Film and game industries of course embrace all types of tech to make money (didn't Disney use generative AI for the opening sequence of a Marvel series last year?)

Yes, and they also employ legions of human artists.

---

edit: I checked out the OP artists' Patreon and they are, at a minimum, making over $2500/mo that way. That's a lot more than $0!

Re: Another AI company wrote us and here’s our response

#137

Post by relaxing »

kapp_in_life wrote: post #39
esafak wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The mantra is "I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes". - Joanna Maciejewska ( https://x.com/AuthorJMac/status/1773679197631701238 )

Sure, but many people who are bad at art and writing would like AI to make art and writing that's tailored to their tastes and are fine doing laundry and dishes since they're good at that and we have already automated 99% of it with dishwashers and dryers.

Did you really just write most people are fine with doing chores and think that they are good at them?

Re: Another AI company wrote us and here’s our response

#138

Post by esafak »

renewiltord wrote: post #126
stared wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that this quotation captures the essence of the problem. It is nice to have the boring things automated - be it proofreading, generating mundane pieces of code, and stuff. The sad part In programming (at least, for now), I feel that it is a net positive for my happiness - less stuff spent hunting simple omissions, checking StackOverflow, or checking (not always so complete) documentation of changes between ve…

My wife is a creative director and she loves using this stuff. It's just another thing that she's added to her toolkit. It's actually remarkable to me how different people react to this stuff and just one more reason she and I are well-matched. Our reactions to LLMs and Diffusion Models are very similar. These are just new tools for us to accomplish what we want to do. She used to draw on paper, then a Wacom, now she…

You can get work done with LLMs but you will not learn if you don't reflect on it. Some things are not worth learning and that is okay.

Re: Another AI company wrote us and here’s our response

#139

Post by ryandrake »

JohnFen wrote: post #52
voidfunc wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most artists, like most programmers are working in a commercial capacity. I see no reason why "their passion" should overrule profit-seeking. Do art for the sake of art on your own time. But expecting companies to not embrace AI to do their jobs is foolish just like it's foolish to think corporate programmers will be a thing at some point in the future.

> I see no reason why "their passion" should overrule profit-seeking. Companies can and will do whatever they want. However, on the level of the individual, I see no reason why profit-seeking should overrule my passion. I don't code to make money, I code because I love doing it. I make money to allow myself to engage in an activity I find rewarding, I don't engage in that activity to make money. If that activity is n…

AI is going to have to get a lot better before "Programmed by a human" is an anachronism. I played around with Copilot over the weekend because everyone on HN urged me to try it and thought it would change my mind about AI. It's pretty terrible still. I tested three things on a few existing C++ and Objective-C code bases: 1. Have it explain existing code to me: This worked reasonably well. I give it an A-minus. AI seems to be able to analyze and explain code at the level of a junior CS student in college. 2. Have it write new code to do a few tasks: I give it a C grade. Not bad, but a lot of the code it writes just isn't how I'd do it, and I saw a couple of subtle bugs. 3. Suggest improvements/refactors to existing code: I give it an F. It's terrible, and often provides suggestions that don't make sense (the return value for foo() should be bar, when it already is bar!) or that will actually make the code worse.

I think it will be a long time before AI produces code of such quality and correctness that I'd give it a passing grade in a college-level CS/programming course.

One thing I give it credit for, it will confidently spit out code when you ask it, often code that works, but it's pretty terrible code.

Re: Another AI company wrote us and here’s our response

#140

Post by falcolas »

its_ethan wrote: post #60
i_am_proteus wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't have to see the reason why other people prefer their passions to profit-seeking. There might not even be a reason! That's how passions work.

That's perfectly fine at the individual level (and probably encouraged for most people + their passions), I think the guy above is trying to get at something more like: just because some people are passionate about their thing, doesn't mean other people shouldn't allowed to pursue it for profit-seeking. As someone else has mentioned, just because weavers were/are passionate about what they do, that doesn't mean peopl…

One thing missing from this analysis is how the profit-seeking platforms for AI were directly created from the works of the passionate - something not seen when the loom (or machining tools, etc) was created. Most hobby artists see it as stealing, even if the laws may not agree.

And yes, even a hobbiest has the right to make money off their work.

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