• Thomas D. Embree 🇨🇦@me.dm
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    1 month ago

    @apotheotic The issue with copyright is an inevitable misstep that was bound to happen while figuring out this technology. However, some of criticisms aren’t about ethical issues surrounding copyright, they are about the marketability of skills (such as painting) that you either had to learn yourself or otherwise needed to pay someone to do for you.

    Now you can do that with an AI. Great for disabled people who can create freely now, bad for the artists who exploited that for financial gain.

    • The_Sasswagon@beehaw.org
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      1 month ago

      I don’t think ‘disabled people’ need a computer to generate content to participate in art creation, and I don’t think artists making art is exploitation. The artists, meaning anyone who ever had their art posted online, are the ones being exploited here, their work was stolen and made to work for tech investors.

      Even if these were tangible benefits they are a small compensation for the accelerated degradation of our shared planet, the mass robbery of nearly everyone on earth, and the further damage to our ability to critically think and create. And on top of that, the stuff it generates isn’t even very good.

      • Thomas D. Embree 🇨🇦@me.dm
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        1 month ago

        @The_Sasswagon AI is not destroying the planet, it literally didn’t exist until a few years ago. The way we produce energy is the problem, and that won’t go away if we banned AI.

        AI is actually accelerating the timeline on a lot of important research, things that were decades away are now just years away. That alone might be what saves the climate.

        If it was as simple as using less electricity by using less technology, it wouldn’t be so hard to abandon your smartphone.

      • Thomas D. Embree 🇨🇦@me.dm
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        1 month ago

        @The_Sasswagon They do if they aren’t physically capable of holding a brush, instrument, etc.

        This allows people like that to paint, create music, etc. entirely on their own, by their own hand (or voice), without relying on the services of a skilled artist who might not be able to capture what that person is imagining.

        People who don’t have time to learn painting can now bring beauty into the world that would have otherwise never left their head.

        Artists are complaining about that. Fuck them.

    • apotheotic (she/her)@beehaw.org
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      1 month ago

      I don’t disagree that its a misstep, but it feels like one that is not going to be corrected. It is going to be treated as the normal thing to do with training AI.

      I would hazard that there wouldn’t be nearly as many artists complaining about AI if it hadn’t been trained on immorally obtained inputs. The fact that it can effortlessly recreate the style of an artist that was added to the data without their consent is, I think, what gives most artists the visceral reaction that they have. “Not only is it doing what we can do (to some degree), it is doing so because our work was used without our consent”.

      AI is a valuable tool for art if used correctly, I don’t know if I agree that it is a disability aid. I can perhaps concede that someone who is entirely without fine motor ability can now make colours and shapes that vaguely resemble what they had in mind where perhaps they couldn’t before, but its difficult for me to consider that case “creating”. It is creating in the same sense as describing to your friend what you want and them trying to draw what you describe. There’s an output that resembles your input description, which might be enough for some?