[Aurornis]

> What many people hear is "made with the tech that plagiarizes, leaves artists (and soon you as well) without a job

My unpopular opinion is that many or maybe most people don’t care about this.

They don’t care about where the content came from or if the artists get paid for the work. If they can get something (an answer to their question, some output that finishes their homework, some writing for a work assignment) more easily and with less cost or effort then they want it that way.

Look at piracy for a similar topic: It’s not even a derivative work, it’s just taking straight from the artists while bypassing their payment ask. Yet even on Hacker News every piracy thread fills up with piracy apologia and people saying artists shouldn’t expect to be paid for their digital output or that IP rights shouldn’t exist. Many people just don’t care about this stuff even when it’s direct source content taken 1:1 without paying. They definitely don’t care if the tool they’re using to do their homework or write that work email was trained on it.

[ricardobayes]

I think there is some nuance between an individual downloading something (and in many countries it is outright legal or at least, alegal) and building billion-dollar companies on it.

[Aurornis]

We’re talking about the consumers, though. They don’t care how the free or cheap thing arrives. They like that they didn’t have to pay as much.

The same argument is used to justify normal piracy: The consumer thinks they’re stealing from the corporation who distributes it, not the artist.

[RiverCrochet]

Downloading artists' songs is not equivalent to people using AI to generate sounds/images and claiming they are an artist. I really don't have a problem with people using AI to generate sounds/images for their own personal enjoyment, but taking what it generates and then telling others that you "made this" or are an artist is deception.

> artists shouldn’t expect to be paid for their digital output

The issue is the notion that an artist gets to control what one does with their personal property that isn't the artist's property. No one is saying artists shouldn't get paid. Artists should get paid but setting up a system that surveils everything I hear and see to enforce it is too much.

> Many people just don’t care about this stuff

I agree with this though I don't follow your tie-in to piracy. Most people do not really care about music, and the industry has known this and delivers most music through ad-supported channels and shapes what music production it can to fit this. The ugly truth is that there's probably a lot of people who wouldn't mind listening to AI radio, it's probably coming, and it will be good enough that a sizeable percentage of the population will enjoy it and not care.

The real art has always been outside of the industry though, and that won't change in the AI age.

[ux266478]

> people using AI to generate sounds/images and claiming they are an artist.

> but taking what it generates and then telling others that you "made this" or are an artist is deception.

I think there's a fundamental problem with this line of argument, which is that it's naive elitism that's been historically leveraged since the 20th century at minimum. "Your music was made on a computer? That's not real music! All you do is push some buttons!" with equivalencies for all mediums of digital art.

There's absolutely a reductionism I think that happens with naysaying generative AI, where it's almost a kind of naive agreement with the VC hypetrain. There's a belief that effective usage of AI is just dumping 20 words into a text input and the maximal quality it's capable of gets spit out 5 seconds later. It's the same variety of reductionism as above where ignorance of how wide the domain is precludes the ability to understand where the skill ceiling is (or what is even involved). The idea that this isn't even the tip of the iceberg nets an expectation that "advanced" AI usage extends to random prompt engineering at most.

Problematically, "AI generated" doesn't really say much about the process, intent, or really much of anything beyond a specific computational architecture being involved at some point of the workflow. It could mean they slapped a tweet-length stream of consciousness into a shitty web prompt, or it could mean constructing a complex pipeline, combining processing steps and multiple models like hotpatching synths, using an intuition built upon thousands of hours of learning their tools, using fine-tuning adaptations that they spent even more time building, and carefully analyzing and responding to the end result. In the former case, I don't think there's much artistry involved and it exclusively produces crap. I think it's a massive disservice to the latter however, to suggest it doesn't involve extensive artistry, or that the paradigm of the tools themselves strip the notion of art away.

I understand wholly why the first case gets primacy, but if we're to philosophize about these tools then I think we have to fully account for the second case.

[saltcured]

I think the backlash is because there are people claiming "I made this!" for what is about as much involvement as pressing the big meal combo touch button on a fast food ordering kiosk.

Ironically, in the arts there are also some patrons who might feel this way when they commissioned some work. With a big enough purchase price, they think their role as a source of funds is creative.

Now with AI, we're speed running this whole experience among people who normally do not have exposure to this broad continuum of contradictory ideas.

[RiverCrochet]

Elitism doesn't logically counter an argument. If you're yearning for the skill that makes you elite, then work to get it. If you want the output of skill without the work, you're fake, and it will show in your output. There's many that don't care and you can make money off of them. The smart will see being on the wrong side of this as being exploited. No one can really stop you from exploiting the un-smart, but everyone can make a decision to not be un-smart.

> "Your music was made on a computer? That's not real music! All you do is push some buttons!"

Non sequitur/red herring. I'll explain with an example.

In the late 80's or early 90's, Emu Systems made a device called the Proteus One. It's basically the guts of a keyboard without the keyboard, you bring your own MIDI keyboard.

It will definitely make sounds if you push buttons (keys) on your attached keyboard. If you compose these sounds, pushing those keys, you're an artist.

The unit has a "Demo Mode" where it will play a stored song. If you push this button, the sound you cause this unit to make is not artistry. Specifically, you're not an artist for having pushed this button.

[ux266478]

Firstly, the premise was about a fallacious delusion of elitism, not about elitism of-itself, which was so trivially inferrable from the context I'm not sure how you missed it. Secondly, yes a premise isn't an argument. You know there's an entire rest of the post beneath all that which you conveniently ignored? That's where the argument actually lives. You regurgitated it while pretending you disagree. You can probably avoid that in the future by actually reading what you're replying to and trying to understand what's being said, rather than firing off a ridiculous strawman reply after reading 2 sentences.