[incrudible]

Artists need to get over it, period. If you put your image online, someone can rip off its style. It has nothing to do with prompting per se. If you can not accept this, hide your art from the public.

The current systems are very far from reducing your work to a prompt. There are many problems that are unsolved, a lot of curation is necessary, and in the end the flaws in the details will still be visible. If that was good enough for your client, too bad, but they never needed your work to begin with. The first skill commercial artists (and developers) need to develop is to live up to someone elses standard, not theirs.

[culopatin]

It’s funny how when someone even mentions web scraping here on HN you have multiple users expressing that one shouldn’t do it, but when it’s applied to art it’s not quite the same.

I think artists are used to humans using their art as “inspiration” but automated mass scraping is not cool with them in the same way web scraping is not cool with devs/admins. It’s the same fear some devs have of GitHub being scraped for GPTs

[baobun]

I think those don't care at all about the scraping but about the processing that comes after.

[nhinck3]

So no books should ever be published now that shitty photocopiers exist?

[tweetle_beetle]

Publishing a book is selling your work to someone who effectively uses a shitty photocopier to sell lots of copies to lots of consumers (I'm aware that publishers can, in an ideal world, provide access to quality editors whose involvement improves the work, but I think my point still stands). Or, in a minority of cases, releasing work for free.

But in both cases, the writer is actively inviting people to consume what they have made. Those people will plagiarise to a greater or lesser extent on a large spectrum from drawing personal inspiration on a subconscious level to AI powered supercharged fraud.

I believe the grandparent comment is saying that an expectation of privacy and freedom from plagiarism is incompatible with the act of publishing, be it through traditional third parties (publishing houses) or modern ones (social media).

I would tend to agree. Publishing is primarily a commercial action.

[dgimla20]

> The current systems are very far from reducing your work to a prompt. There are many problems that are unsolved, a lot of curation is necessary, and in the end the flaws in the details will still be visible. If that was good enough for your client, too bad, but they never needed your work to begin with.

Exactly. The current systems are very far from reducing your work to a prompt.

However, I'm sure the current state of these AI models isn't the end goal of those working on them. And therein lies the reason why they're continuously consuming more training data, including in this context, art scraped from social media sites like Instagram that artists have published there.

Most artists are concerned about what's to come, not what is here now. Even then, what is here now is already viable for commercial use, and is already being used as such (in ads, articles, illustration work). Somebody starting out from zero probably wouldn't bother looking at art as a job given the current state of the AI models and rate of progress, and many very talented artists (who are always developing) are probably concerned about being overtaken.

A commercial artist needs to publish their work online to get visibility. Of course that opens their work up to being plagiarised. They'd be open to plagiarism showing their work anywhere. Before, there was a natural defence to this, which entailed somebody being able to actually recreate the work to a similar or better standard (something that requires talent in its own way). Now the defensive barrier is much lower, and continually getting lower.

If somebody told me that writing a text prompt to paint a waterfall was as difficult as actually painting a waterfall, I'd think they're either delusional, or ignorant/spiteful towards creatives and their work/ability.

Some people come across very unsympathetic to those already affected by AI models. It will be interesting to see if these same people can cope in the same manner if/when AI models can replace years of their own learning and work, especially if it does so by training on their own work.

Others come across very naïve about where this is headed. Personally, I don't think we're heading for an AI driven utopia where nobody has to work and AI can do everything. More likely we're heading for many people losing their jobs, insufficient numbers of jobs to meet demand, and monopoly of power in the hand of even less people/organisations than today.

[incrudible]

Art is not a job though, it was already a poor career choice to begin with, the fewer people that pursue it with that intent, the better.

I am no more sympathetic to illustrators losing work to AI than I am to baristas losing work to a vending machine.

I also expect no sympathy should software development jobs be automated away, that would only be fair considering the colossal amount of resources we waste, just because we can.

We have never and will never run out of jobs, and there will be no AI monopolies unless we let regulators create them.