[imiric]

> It plagiarizes then effectively puts them out of business.

Isn't that a concern for any artist? We've had this discussion with digital art and photography, and decades ago with electronic music, remixes and sampling.

AI is just enabling this on a larger scale, which will disrupt many fields, but copyright law will broaden, and artists will find ways to adapt or change careers.

[haswell]

> We've had this discussion with digital art and photography, and decades ago with electronic music, remixes and sampling

We had very different discussions about all of those things.

There is a certain structural similarity between AI and these past advanced in the form of: new thing disrupts old thing.

But I think it’s deeply problematic to take that analogy much further. Take digital art. I don’t think it’s fair to compare the impact of the advent of digital painting tools with the advent of tools that systematically ingest all paintings and the remove the need for the original artist entirely.

If removing the artist entirely was part of that discussion, I suspect the tooling and legal landscape would look rather different today.

> AI is just enabling this on a larger scale, which will disrupt many fields

“This” and “larger scale” are doing a lot of heavy lifting here.

Nuclear weapons just enable this (blowing things up) at a larger scale. But these weapons also show us that scale introduces risks and factors not present in any prior iteration of the profession of blowing things up.

My point is not that AI art tools are as dangerous as nuclear weapons, obviously, but that “it’s just x at larger scale” breaks down when the shift in scale is large enough.

The result is something entirely new, for which the past rules of engagement no longer apply.

[imiric]

I do agree in part. Scale matters, and the challenges humanity faces with AI are much greater than with any disruptive technology of the past.

That said, we've had similar challenges before, and society has adapted. I'm pessimistic about the long-term existential risks of AI, but the short-term disruptions to jobs and the legal changes that will be required seem manageable, and are not the doomsday scenario that the media makes them up to be.

> But I think it’s deeply problematic to take that analogy much further. Take digital art. I don’t think it’s fair to compare the impact of the advent of digital painting tools with the advent of tools that systematically ingest all paintings and the remove the need for the original artist entirely.

The invention of photography in the 19th century certainly had the same, if not greater, impact for painters. Yet artists adapted, and paintings were able to coexist with the new technology. Photography opened up new avenues for art, but it didn't eliminate the demand for the traditional art form.

So will happen with AI-produced art as well, I think. The markets and our media feeds will be flooded with it, but the demand for human-produced digital art will still exist. It will be challenging to filter and curate human art, especially as the line will be blurred, and many human artists will take advantage of AI. But I don't think any of it will entirely make human artists obsolete.

Anyway, this is all speculation from my side, so I concede that I may be wrong, but it's interesting to think about, and time will tell.