[deadbeeves]

I'm not sure what you mean when you say different implications existing is subjective, since they clearly aren't, but regardless of who has more say in general terms, the author of a work can decide how to publish it, and no one has more say than them on that subject.

[MichaelZuo]

What are you saying?

Of course it's subjective, e.g. 3 million years ago there were no 'different implications' whatsoever, of any kind, because there were no humans around to have thoughts like that.

[deadbeeves]

I'm using "implication" as a synonym of "effect". If a human learns to imitate your style, that human can make at most a handful of drawings in a single day. The only way for the rate of output to increase is for more humans to learn to imitate it. If an AI learns to imitate your style, the AI can be trivially copied to any number of computers and the maximum output rate is unbounded. Whether this is good or bad is subjective, but this difference in consequences is objective, and someone could be entirely justified in seeking to impede it.

[MichaelZuo]

Ah okay, I get your meaning now, I'll edit my original comment too.

Though we already have an established precedent in-between, that of Photoshop allowing artists to be, easily, 10x faster then the best painters previously.

i.e. Right now 'AI' artistry could be considered a turbo-Photoshop.

[deadbeeves]

Tool improvements only apply a constant factor to the effectiveness of learning. Creating a generative model applies an unbounded factor to the effectiveness of learning because, as I said, the only limit is how much computing resources are available to humanity. If a single person was able to copy themselves at practically no cost and the copy retained all the knowledge of the original then the two situations would be equivalent, but that's impossible. Having n people with the same skill multiplies the cost of learning by n. Having n instances of an AI with the same skill multiplies the cost of learning by 1.

[MichaelZuo]

Right, but the 'unbounded factor' is irrelevant because the output will quickly trend into random noise.

And only the most interesting top few million art pieces will actually attract the attention of any concrete individual.

For a current example, there's already billions of man-hours worth of AI spam writing, indexed by Google, that is likely not actually read by even a single person on Earth.

[deadbeeves]

Whether it's irrelevant is a matter of opinion. The fact remains that a machine being able to copy the artistic style of a human makes it so that anyone can produce output in the style of that human by just feeding the machine electricity. That inherently devalues the style the artist has painstakingly developed. If someone wants a piece of art in that artist's style they don't have to go to that artist, they just need to request the machine for what they want. Is the machine's output of low quality? Maybe. Will there be people for whom that low quality still makes them want to seek out the human? No doubt. It doesn't change the fact that the style is still devalued, nor that there exist artists who would want to prevent that.