Just to play devil's advocate - I'm surprised you (and many other people apparently) are unable to tell the operative difference between something like:
1. (real illustration vs digital illustration)
2. (composing on sheet music vs composing in a DAW)
and
3. illustration vs Stable Diffusion
4. composing vs generative music models such as Suno
What's different is the wide disparity between input and output. Generally, art has traditionally had a closer connection between the "creator" and the "creation". Generative models have married two conventionally highly disparate mediums together, e.g. text to image / text to audio.
If you have zero artistic ability, you'd have about as much success using Photoshop as you would with traditional pencil and paper.
Whereas any doofus can type in the description of something along with words like "3D", "trending on artstation", "hyper-realistic,", and "4K" and then proceed to generate thousands of images in automatic1111 which they can flood DeviantArt with in a single day.
The same applies to music composition whether you are laboriously notating with sheet music or dropping notes using a horizontal tracker in a DAW like Logic. If you're not a musician, the fanciest DAW in the world won't make you one.
I don't think you realize the sheer scale of people that are working their asses off to leverage AI in their work in creative ways, often times bending over backwards to get it to work.
I spent 48 hours two weeks back (with only a few hours of sleep) making an AI film. I used motion capture, rotoscoping, and a whole host of other tools to accomplish this.
I know people who have spent months making AI music videos. People who painstakingly mask and pose skeletons. People who design and comp shots between multiple workflows.
The specific phrase used was "everything you see and hear" (emphasis mine). You weren't arguing this would be an optional tool that could be used in the creation of art. You were arguing that this will replace all other art. That isn't an argument that photography is an art equal to painting, it is an argument for it to replace painting.
> You were arguing that this will replace all other art.
The population of people who want to create art is higher than the people who have the classical skills. By sheer volume, the former will dominate the latter. And eventually most artists will begin to use AI tools when they realize that's what they are -- tools.
Now combine that with the photography and painting analogy that you made in the previous post. Photography was invented some 2 centuries ago. Do you think the world would be better if every painter of that era, including the likes of van Gogh and Picasso, picked up a camera instead of a paintbrush?
Surely there's some point where it ceases being a tool though. We can't both be making AIs out to be comparable to humans while simultaneously calling them tools. Otherwise people who commission art would be considered artists using a tool.
Many many successful artists from the Renaissance until today are not actually artists but just rich people with a workshop full of actual artist they commission works from. The rich person curates.
Many times this also happens with artists themselves. After a point, you are getting way more commissions than you can produce yourself, so you employ a small army of understudies that learn your techniques and make your pieces for you. So what you describe has existed for hundreds of years.
A short list could include old ones like Rembrandt or Rubens and a new ones like Jeff Koons or Damien Hirst.
What I find bizarre is people gatekeeping the process that helps get things from imagination onto canvas.
Artists and "creative" people have long held a monopoly on this ability and are now finally paying the price now that we've automated them away and made their "valuable" skill a commodity.
> Artists and "creative" people have long held a monopoly on this ability and are now finally paying the price
I've seen a lot of schadenfreude towards artists recently, as if they're somehow gatekeeping art and stopping the rest of us from practicing it.
I really struggle to understand it; the barrier of entry to art is basically just buying a paper and pencil and making time to practice. For most people the practice time could be spent on many things which would have better economic outcomes.
> monopoly
Doesn't this term imply an absence of competition? There seems to be a lot of competition. Anyone can be an artist, and anyone can attempt to make a living doing art. There is no certification, no educational requirements. I'm sure proximity to wealth is helpful but this is true of approximately every career or hobby.
Tangentially, there seem to be positive social benefits to everyone having different skills and depending on other people to get things done. It makes me feel good when people call me up asking for help with something I'm good at. I'm sure it feels the same for the neighborhood handyman when they fix someone's sink, the artist when they make profile pics for their friends, etc. I could be wrong but I don't think it'll be entirely good for people when they can just have an AI or a robot do everything for them.
Your argument rhymes with:
- "Let's keep using horses. They're good enough."
- "Photography lacks the artistic merit of portrait art."
- "Electronic music isn't music."
- "Vinyl is the only way to listen to music."
- "Digital photography ruins photography."
- "Digital illustration isn't real illustration and tablets are cheating."
- "Video games aren't art."
- "Javascript developers aren't real programmers."
Though I'm paraphrasing, these are all things that have been said.
I bet you my right kidney that people will use AI to produce incredible art that will one day (soon) garner widespread praise and accolade.
It's just a tool.