[majormajor]

I think "cultural" is a better word there than "political."

But Banksy wasn't originally Banksy.

I would imagine that you'll see some new heavily-AI-using artists pop up and become name brands in the next decade. (One wildcard here could be if the super-wealthy art-speculation bubble ever pops.)

Flickr, etc, didn't stop new photographers from having exhibitions and being part of the regular "art world" so I expect the easy availability of slop-level generated images similarly won't change that some people will do it in a way that makes them in-demand and popular at the high end.

At the low-to-medium end there are already very few "working artists" because of a steady decline after the spread of recorded media.

Advertising is an area where working artists will be hit hard but is also a field where the "serious" art world generally doesn't consider it art in the first place.

[ehnto]

Not often discussed is the digital nature of this all as well. An LLM isn't going to scale a building to illegally paint a wall. One because it can't, but two because the people interested in performance art like that are not bound by corporate. Most of this push for AI art is going to come from commercial entities doing low effort digital stuff for money not craft.

Musicians will keep playing live, artists will keep selling real paintings, sculptors will keep doing real sculptures etc.

The internet is going to suffer significantly for the reasons you point out. But the human aspect of art is such a huge component of creative endeavours, the final output is sometimes only a small part of it.

[Uehreka]

Mentioning people like Banksy at all is missing the point though. It makes it sound like art is about going to museums and seeing pieces (or going to non-museums where people like Banksy made a thing). I feel like, particularly in tech circles, people don’t recognize that the music, movies and TV shows they consume are also art, and that the millions of people who make those things are very legitimately threatened by this stuff.

If it were just about “the next Banksy” it would be less of a big deal. Many actors, visual artists, technical artists, etc make their living doing stock image/video and commercials so they can afford rent while keeping their skills sharp enough to do the work they really believe in (which is often unpaid or underpaid). Stock media companies and ad agencies are going to start pumping out AI content as soon as it looks passable for their uses (Coca Cola just did this with their yearly Christmas ad). Suddenly the cinematographers who can only afford a camera if it helps pay the bills shooting commercials can’t anymore.

Entire pathways to getting into arts and entertainment are drying up, and by the time the mainstream understands that it may be too late, and movie studios will be going “we can’t find any new actors or crew people. Huh. I guess it’s time to replace our people with AI too, we have no choice!”

[irishcoffee]

> I think "cultural" is a better word there than "political."

Oh. What is the difference?

[simonra]

I’d say in this context that politics concerns stated preferences, while culture labels the revealed preferences. Also makes the statement «culture eats policy for breakfast» make more sense now that I’ve thought about it this way.