• Norgur@fedia.io
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    6 months ago

    From what I learned over the years: AI isn’t likely to destroy income for entry-level artists. They destroy the quagmires those artists got stuck in. The artists this will replace first and foremost are those creating elevator music, unassuming PowerPoint presentation backgrounds, Stock photos of coffee mugs. All those things where you really don’t need anything specific and don’t really want to think about anything.

    Now look how much is being paid for those artworks by the customers on Shutterstock and the like. Almost nothing. Now imagine what Shutterstock pays their artists. Fuck all is what. Artists might get a shred of credit here and there, a few pennies, and that’s that. The market AI is “disrupting” as they say, is a self-exploitative freelancing hellhole. Most of those artists cannot live off their work, and to be frank: Their work isn’t worth enough to most people to pay them the money they’d need to live.

    Yet, while they chase the carrot dangling in front of them, dreaming of fame and collecting enough notoriety through that work to one day do their real art, instead of interchangeable throwaway-stuff made to fit into any situation at once, Corporations continue to bleed them dry, not allowing any progress for them whatsoever. Or do you know who made the last image of a coffee mug you saw in some advert?

    The artists who manage to make a living (digital and analog) are those who manage to cultivate a following. Be that through Patreon, art exhibitions, whatever. Those artists will continue to make a living because people want them to do exactly what they do, not an imitation of it. They will continue to get commissioned because ´people want their specific style and ideas.

    So in reality, it doesn’t really destroy artists, it replaces one corpo-hellhole (freelancing artist) with another (freelancing AI trainer/prompter/etc)

    • iarigby@lemmy.world
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      6 months ago

      I will keep that perspective in mind, thank you. I am very held back by the amount of resistance and pushback by myself against ai developments, and it is very hard to warm up to something being shoved down by these huge malicious corporations and not be worried about how they will use it against us.

      It sounds like one of the most impressive things in recent history and something that would fill me with joy and excitement but we’re in such a hostile environment that I am missing out on all that. I haven’t even managed to get myself to warm up to at least trying one out.

      • Norgur@fedia.io
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        6 months ago

        It’s really not that exciting. Quite the opposite. The rush for AI in everything is absolutely bonkers, since those LLMs are just stupid as fuck and not suited for any sort of productive performance they get hyped up to achieve.

        • iarigby@lemmy.world
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          6 months ago

          ah so you were only annoyed that people are against doing the stupid computations in the datacenter and there will be less efficient grid version?

          • Norgur@fedia.io
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            6 months ago

            I’m annoyed that we’re going crazy because computers manage to spew out bullshit that vaguely sounds like the bullshit humans spew out, yet is somehow even less intelligent. At the same time, people think, this empty yapping is more accurate and totally a miracle, while all it really shows is that computers are good at patterns and language and information follow patterns - go figure.

            I’m annoyed that Silicon Valley tech evangelists get away with breaking every law they fucking want, once again in the creation of those tools.

            Yet, I’m neither worried about the ecological impact nor about the impact on the workforce. Yes, jobs will shift, but that was clear as day since I was a kid. I don’t even necessarily think “AI” will be the huge game changer it’s made up to be.

            When they run out of training data (which is fueled by slave labor, because of fucking course it is) or AIs start ingesting too many AI-generated texts, the models we have today just collapse, disintegrating into a blabbering mess.

            • iarigby@lemmy.world
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              5 months ago

              I think the same I just really grasp every opportunity to get convinced otherwise because it’s such a bummer