No artists are losing income because of this and no industry is being upended. This is a new product that's available because of a technology advanced.
Why the focus the artist? Everytime you order in food online you take away a tip from a host, server, bartender and take away a job from a person who answers a phone. Why focus on artists when so many have been affected by technology.
https://www.poplocal.com.au/product/bum-man-colouring-book/
He's 'Bum Man'. A man (actually it's asexual) who is a bum. I mean c'mon.
It's about applying your outrage evenly. Why put artists over a servers? Why do you drive when not using horses means many blacksmiths positions disappear. Technology that is accepted by society changes society. Artists will continue to evolve and create messages about those changes. No need to worry about their plight. Worry about translators or other industries that can't easily provide the same value. Artists are the one group who will survive and thrive.
This is how art works and has always worked. Artist should be using the same AI tools that the general public use but create things that the general public cannot. That’s what artists have always done.
Any attempt to compare the A.I. stuff to some analogous scenario is deeply flawed if it does not include 1) that A.I. instances are not humans, but computers run by companies, and 2) the incredible scale at which it can operate.
The actual actions taking place are secondary at best, and the situation cannot be judged on that alone. It must be debated in the context of the actions being undertaken by machines, owned by companies, motivated by profit/market share/growth/whatever, with little communication or collaboration with the humans who created the works, and that they can now generate outputs based on those works at a scale, frequency, level of precision several orders of magnitude higher than a human can ever compete with. It cannot be compared to any sort of person-to-person scenario. The enormous scale this operates at, by actors that are not human, is the core of the situation.
Running a restaurant is a trillion other things. Ordering the right amount of ingredients. Hiring, training, and keeping staff. Cleaning the bathrooms. Replacing stolen silverware.
You're not paying for the secret recipe. There isn't one. You're paying for the insane amount of work that goes into putting cooked food on a plate.
Images are much more about the specific process that went into creation. The intellectual part that can be taken is a much higher fraction of the product.
I reached out to multiple artists, and got one image back (from a good friend). I gave up on commissioning actual artists, and traced the images myself on a tablet. I imagine someone with the right knowledge of where to find artists and the willingness to wait on their schedule could have done it faster, but I'd have used this service if it had been around.
Almost nobody is paying $100 or more for a custom 5-page coloring book.
This service isn’t taking work from human artists.
The intention and cost of something like that is not at all comparable to what is being offered here.
Sure, not now. Not tomorrow. But less than 1000 years from now? Definitely, imo.
And by all I mean the AI companies owe a huge debt to all humans who wrote or designed or drew anything. The vast majority of the benefit of this technology relies on volume: the billions of pages and lines of code we wrote for other humans, but have now been repurposed. This technology relies on bulk, which was mainly unprofessional or freely given content, by those who intended it for other humans. It was not 100% built only on the output of the few who charge for their exquisite words or designs, even if their output is higher quality.
Alternatively, let the AI companies go for it but everyone who uses any kind of AI should understand that they’re standing on the shoulders of the millions of developers and nonprofessional writers whose work has now been repurposed. Not the few artists and journalists. So those artists and journalists should both refuse to contribute to, and use, AI.
* I’ve written very little of this useful content, but would be happy to pay my share to those that have built what we have. I also turn off training on my content, but I pay a lot for models. Feel free to help me think through this with comments of your own.
There is certainly a contribution in improving how the body of work is represented but we treat the “AI” as the smarts, when really it’s a lens on the collective knowledge we have built. You can make the lens better, bit not claim ownership of the body of work. Right now that’s what’s happening, with a few edge cases for artists and publishers.
Cool idea. I can see keeping colored pages of these by my kids up on the fridge a lot longer than what’s on there now!
I guess what you see as “stealing” I see as inspiration. I also believe that there will be artists who use these new artistic image generation models in ways that are new and interesting just like the first person who used spray paint for graffiti was ripped off by everyone else.
It delighted my kids to see themselves depicted in coloring sheets in situation where they are currently interested. There is no world where I would have paid an artist to make these photos, and we would have just colored on blank paper.
Again, I get that real people’s content was devoured by these big companies, but at the same time I am much more concerned about bigger issues and would rather focus on getting ahead of AI rather than fighting it.
Anyway, the problem isn't with automation, as per usual it's with animalistic, selfish human beings who would rather hate each other while the rich get richer, rather than vote to implement a well needed framework to set up UBI, proper taxation of corpos, etc.
But nah, that person has a different skin colour than mine, that person has different sexual preferences to mine.
I do hope the machines take the reigns at some point.
I don't think you're worthless at all. And families come in many shapes and forms.
I'm a furry, I commission a decent bit of art and furry artists (unless they're super popular) tend to actually be much cheaper than normies.
Commissioning a comic is >$100 for a page, from a popular artist at least several hundred.
And that's also for personal use with no commercial rights whatsoever - it's actually an impasse because they technically still own the art, you technically own the character in the art, so it's in licensing purgatory, which is fine for conbadges, smut, icons and whatnot.
I used to work at an agency that shared a floor with an art studio, commercial rights for art, especially something as complex as a comic page can easily run into $1-10k or more.
Don't get me wrong, artists deserve the money they get, but as with everything that gets automated, there's a financial incentive to do so. Inb4 someone drops all the etsy links of sellers doing AI art as well or (as has been done for a loooong time) using a non-ml based filter to achieve the same thing.
There are definitely cheap-er options available from Brazil, China, Venezuela etc (same as fursuit commissions) but that's also another interesting topic in relation to ai; we already outsource heavily.
Some of these replies seem rather dismissive to the artists’ plight.
You can see where this is going, right? In the end, humanity and even artists will be fine overall, even if the world changes.
We'd rather be tribal and hate on race, gender, sexuality, religion, location, etc than actually act our neuron counts.
for the cost of showing ads?
Artists have been around and existed in more repressive societies throughout time. The best art is usually produced from the greatest struggle. Artists will engage and create art in this new world. The cost of not providing a new surface for artists to explore is what kills art.