I asked over there about how to spot "AI" images, now I need some pictures to practice this on, and IDK where to find pictures that are definitely "AI"-generated

  • iie [they/them, he/him]
    ·
    4 days ago

    labor aristocracy is a matter of how much you get paid, not whether you work up a sweat. Most artists already do not make a living off of art.

    also, part of what makes something a bullshit job is that it provides no value to society, but doesn't human expression enrich people's lives? Don't people have cultural needs on top of material and social needs? I don't think all of modern art can be dismissed as mere slop and consumerism, it's not all artists begrudgingly fulfilling commissions for big-titted Elsa or whatever. I still see people expressing themselves and their experiences and getting paid for it.

    Maybe AI won't threaten that, maybe the people who use AI were never going to pay for art anyway, but if entertain the notion, if AI did hurt artists' incomes, I think it would be a bad thing worth caring about, even if artists aren't doing heavy physical labor and they're not perpetuating socialist ideals.

    • marcie (she/her)@lemmy.ml
      ·
      3 days ago

      also, part of what makes something a bullshit job is that it provides no value to society, but doesn’t human expression enrich people’s lives?

      The average artist isnt going to have AIs trained on their stuff. Its only cream of the crop stuff (greg rutkowski, who is rich, or van gogh or something) or styling from big companies that gets trained on. These people all benefit from passive income, they can get fucked

      • iie [they/them, he/him]
        ·
        2 days ago

        I think the AIs scrape everything, but you raise a good point that only big names are mentioned in prompts, so big names are the only ones AI users specifically mimic (as far as I know).

        But is direct mimicry the only way AI hurts artists? Or will regular, non-rich artists suffer in other ways? Will they land fewer commissions as cheap or free AI images become increasingly indistinguishable from real stuff? Will they have a harder time attracting a following as convincing AI starts to dilute the airwaves? Will AI users start to pass off generative AI as their own work, out-competing artists who have to spend hours of labor on each piece?

        further ramblings

        Is there also a cultural effect?

        Will we start to lose organic evolution of stylistic trends as more and more artists use AI in their workflows, and the stylistic choices artists see each other making are increasingly not human choices? Will that artificiality erode the dialogue between stylistic trends and broader cultural trends, because AI has no sense of the collective mood of society from one moment to the next, and a text prompt can only convey so much?

        It's hard to say how much I'm overreacting, because we're still in the early years.

        I also think many artists are worrying, "Will this devalue me in society? Will my years of practice no longer be respected or valued to the same degree amid a flood of increasingly polished AI images that can be generated in seconds?" You might say, "so what, you learned how to do crosshatching." But is it only technique that gets devalued? Or is it the entire journey of self-exploration and cultural exploration that goes into developing an artistic style? I think, in part, the online backlash against generative AI is a backlash against the cultural direction it is seen to represent. People see the soullessness of the crowd that accumulates in generative AI spaces, and in NFT spaces, and they wonder if that's where we're headed.