No, this is not a Black Mirror episode.
A typical point that I severely miss from most discussions about AI is what it means for future artists or, in this case, future actors. And therefore what it means for us as a society.
By taking the art from the artists, regardless of whether it’s an actor, illustrator, author, etc…, the way it is done currently, we will see much fewer people who will even try to learn these skills, or share them. At some point there won’t be anything new anymore.
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These are my thoughts exactly as well. I find it especially infuriating how in some discussions and articles about AI people try to spin a tale of artists being these allegedly elitist “bourgeois” individuals. And with AI now supposedly “the little man” can finally unfold their creative potential. In truth I suspect it’s more the other way around.
It looks to me like the only kinds of people who could afford to get into my line of work in the future are people with rich parents or something
Someone from a not so well-off background but with dedication and grit was more likely to get their feet into illustration, für example, then they are now.
Instead people who already probably come from a privileged background (PC, technical knowledge, money to pay for AI credits) can just swarm the market without needing to dedicate much time at all.
I saw a comment on reddit a while back on the topic that I thought really hit the nail on the head in terms of the typical discourse I keep seeing on AI with respect to art and other creative work
“If they [tech bros] don’t value art that’s fine, but it’s sad that people who don’t value art are the ones who think they should be deciding what direction art goes in.”
Maybe I’m overlooking something, but isn’t the actual change that doing these things will no longer be a viable way to earn a living?
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but isn’t the artistic field already a lottery when it comes to making a living doing it? Maybe I have the wrong impression, but I feel like if “I very likely won’t be able to make a living doing this” actually discouraged new art from getting created, it already would be doing that.
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That’s fair; the person I first responded to seemed to be discussing the “fine art” part.
How worried are you personally about these more advanced machine learning tools? Just a month or so ago I was playing a Pathfinder (rpg) video game and didn’t care or any of the built-in avatar images, so I hopped onto one of the websites that make an image based on a text prompt to make me an image that matched my character and it took a few times to get the right wording but in the end I got a pretty good image out of it. I vaguely know how it works. (vaguely is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence) and it still seemed kind of like magic.
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the clients (no offense) tend to be less professional
I don’t know what you mean by this precisely, but the “pretty good” end result I mentioned had a hand that melted into the sword-- so if you meant “low standard” then yeah, guilty as charged, haha. However, more interesting to me is that I would have never in 1000 years have paid someone to do that for me-- I just would have been low-level annoyed that my character and the avatar looked different the entire game.
I find the “they didn’t have permission to train from” argument is complete bunk. That’s not a right granted by intellectual property laws; there is no “right to control who learns from a work”.
What needs to happen is society (especially US society) needs to stop linking “working” and “enjoying a comfortable life”. Technology is coming for all our jobs, and the sooner we accept that and prepare for it, the better we’ll be when it happens.
Copyright needs reforms, it’s broken as fuck.
The music and film industry have been exploiting this for decades and changing the entire model to a system where artists don’t hold copyrights or get compensated for their work, content or (soon) bodies. Art does not enter the public domain anymore. Greed is all there is.
Burn it all down.
Copyright law? Oh you mean Disney Protection Law?
We are doing all the AI thing wrong. We were supposed to be replacing hard repetitive manual work with technology. Not replace the art creation.
puts on Obi-Wan’s beard
“Technology, you were the Chosen One! It was said that you would destroy the need for work, not join them! Let us focus on culture and enlightment, not leave us with the hard manual work!”
We were supposed to be replacing hard repetitive manual work with technology.
That already happened, for the most part, 30-40 years ago in manufacturing and industrial applications. Factories employ a fraction of people they did before the 80s.
There is still a lot of hard manual (and underpaid) work left that AI and robotics sadly did not replace. Instead it seems to go for the jobs some people actually might enjoy first.
I feel online platforms like the Fediverse are a conceivably bad place to discuss this, though. Because I assume a lot of people here do work in technical jobs they often enjoy at least a bit.
But a huge chunk of people works in delivery, in warehouses, at assembly lines, as cleaners, in construction, the not so nice parts of elderly care, etc. etc.
Don’t worry, this is only a problem until they can fully generate actors from scratch. It’s just a matter of time.
So much this, creating actor’s looks and personality from scratch to fit the demographics is an Hollywood exec wet dream.
“I’m thinking, muscular, gruff looking white man who loves his kids”.
Alternatively, it might be a way to introduce AI blackface. The consumers want diversity? Fine they’ll generate a queer POC, and naturally fuck it up because AI datasets are already biased towards white people
Years ago a music studio generated an Asian pop artist. (I can’t provide details about it because when I web-search for it I get a hundred results telling me how I can do the same thing myself.)
It’s already been done, it’s _being _done now, and we’re not far away from it being relatively undetectable.The little secret of AI is that it can’t generate shit from scratch. It relies on a large and diverse training dataset in order to make anything at all.
To put it in perspective they want to have a background actor on set for one day, scan them, then use that forever and not just for that movie. And only pay them for one day of work.
That’s fine. Than we will only buy one movie and get all the other ones for free, since we already paid for one…
I think viewers need to be prepared to never pay for a film that contains AI-generated assets that steal actors’ looks.
Working people need to all be ready to reject a new wave of AI-powered exploration, the scope and scale of which we have never seen before.
And nothing of value would be lost
I mean, yeah, no kidding. If my employer could get my skills at a fraction of the price, I would be out of a job before lunch.
