[DrewADesign]

Of course everyone can make art. Toddlers make art. The hard truth is that getting good technical art skills, be they visual, musical, literary, or anything else is like getting stronger— many people that want to do it are too lazy or undisciplined to do the daily work required to do it. You might be starting too late (Maybe post-middle-age) or don’t have the time to become an exceptional artist, but most art that people like wasn’t made by exceptional artists; there are a lot more strong people than professional athletes or Olympians. You don’t even need a gym membership or weights, and there’s limitless free information about how to do it online. Nobody is stopping anyone from doing it. Just like many, if not most gym memberships are paid for but unused after the first, like, month, many people try drawing for a little while, get frustrated that it’s so difficult to learn, and then give up. The gatekeeping argument is an asinine excuse people make to blame other people for their own lack of discipline.

[KineticLensman]

Classic gatekeeping quote: "Everyone has a book in them, but in most cases that's where it should stay"

[DrewADesign]

Hitchens was, first and foremost, a critic. Most of the so-called gatekeeping that people accuse artists of is actually born from art criticism-- a completely different group of people rarely as popular among artists as they are among people that like to feel cool about looking at art.

[CamperBob2]

I prefer Stephen King's version: something like "Everybody has four crappy books in them. Get them done and out of the way as soon as possible."

[scotty79]

> Of course everyone can make art. Toddlers make art.

That's my entire point. Artists were fine with everybody making "art" as long as everybody except them (with their hard fought skill and dedication) achieved toddler level of output quality. As soon as everybody could truly get even close to the level of actual art, not toddler art, suddenly there's a horrible problem with all the amateur artists using the tools that are available to them to make their "toddler" art.

[DrewADesign]

Most artists don’t give a flying fuck about what you do on your own. Seriously! They really don’t. What they care about is having their work ripped off so for-profit companies can kill the market for their hard-won skills with munged-up derivatives.

Folks in tech generally have very limited exposure to the art world — fan art communities online, Reddit subs, YouTubers, etc. It’s more representative of internet culture than the art world— no more representative of artists than X politics is representative of voters. People have real grievances here and you are not a victim of the world’s artists. Most artists also don’t care about online art communities or what you think about them. Not even a little bit.

[scotty79]

> you are not a victim of the world’s artists

I will be if they manage to slow down development of AI even by a smidgen.

> Most artists also don’t care about online art communities or what you think about them. Not even a little bit.

Fully agree. They care about whether there's going to be anyone willing to buy their stuff from them. And not-toddler art is a real competition for them. So they are super against everybody making it.

[DrewADesign]

Well drat, you’ve exposed all of us, from art directors to VFX artists to fine art painters to singer-songwriters to graphic designers to game designers to symphony cellists as a monolithic glob of petty, transactional rakes. Fortunately, everyone is an artist now, so you can make your own output to feed to models and leave our work out of it entirely! It clearly has no value so nobody should be mad about going without it. Problem solved!

[scotty79]

If you think human art was anything but a bootstrap for AI you are kidding yourself. I don't think artists are going to be as happy as you think though, because market for their services will drop even further towards zero and they will go back to being financed by the richest on a whim. The way it always used to be before the advent of information copying and distribution technologies. Technology giveth, technology taketh away.

[DrewADesign]

Why are so many AI art boosters such giant edgelords? Do you really think having that much of a chip on your shoulder is justified?

You obviously can’t un-ring a bell, but finding ways to poison models that try to rip artists off sure is amusing. The real joke is on the people in software that think they’re so special that their skills will be worth anything at all, or believe that this will do anything but transfer wealth out of the paychecks of regular people, straight into the pockets of existing centibillionaires. There are too many developers in the existing market as it is, and so many of the ones that are diligently trying to reduce that demand further for an even larger range of disciplines, especially the in-demand jobs like setting up agents to take people’s jobs. Well, play stupid games, win stupid prizes.

[cvwright]

Well but then they spent 100 years telling us that the toddler stuff was the good stuff. Just as long as it was created by a “real artist”.

[DrewADesign]

Making value statements about art is pretty much exclusively the realm of art critics and art historians. They're no more representative of artists than general historians are representative of politicians and soldiers.