Another AI company wrote us and here’s our response

https://warandpeas.com/2024/07/09/another-ai-company-wrote-us-and-heres-our-response/

by askl • 2 years ago

152 195 2 years ago

warandpeas.com

namanyayg4• 2 years ago

That was just cold email, so the authors could have probably ignored it

I doubt anyone on the other end will read their reply

Even if they do, it is unlikely that they will stop sending their AI spam outreach

This is just the normal state of the web now ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

dylan6042• 2 years ago

yes, but then they couldn't have blogged about it

namanyayg4• 2 years ago

exactly

Pingk• 2 years ago

I think you're missing the point, it doesn't matter if it was spam or not - The point is that automating creativity is not a useful way of facilitating content creation. We should be automating the tedious behind-the-scenes stuff.

tayo422• 2 years ago

There is still tedious stuff when your doing content creation. Like if your hacking a website together and need something that doesn't look bad as your favicon. maybe your making a 2d game and need a bunch of tree pictures

nox101• 2 years ago

lots of artists are using generative AI to help them make art.

namanyayg4• 2 years ago

While what you're saying is morally and ethically correct, unfortunately we have entered times where the capitalistic machine doesn't find this to be true.

wwweston• 2 years ago

Maybe some people will be shamed that they’re not only spammers but spammers whose product may as well be a machine that automates the consumption and enjoyment of ice cream?

pavel_lishin3• 2 years ago

I doubt anyone on the other end will read their reply

Hell, I doubt anyone on the other end even wrote the original email.

namanyayg4• 2 years ago

yup, it's probably an automated system end to end.

and it's definitely getting the spammers a lot of leads and sales.

ChrisMarshallNY7• 2 years ago

most artists love their work and do not want to outsource their passion to a machine that does this for them.

This was the money quote.

I love what I do (which tends to be programming, but I approach it as a craft), and often do things by hand, that others automate, because I love my work, and also the people that use it.

voidfunc• 2 years ago

Most artists, like most programmers are working in a commercial capacity. I see no reason why "their passion" should overrule profit-seeking.

Do art for the sake of art on your own time. But expecting companies to not embrace AI to do their jobs is foolish just like it's foolish to think corporate programmers will be a thing at some point in the future.

buttercraft2• 2 years ago

I see no reason why "their passion" should overrule profit-seeking.

This viewpoint is what fucked up the world.

ChrisMarshallNY7• 2 years ago

I suspect most artists (and I used to be one, at one time[0 - 1]), would take advantage of AI tools. I suspect that the posting was really just exhibitionism, on the part of the site owners (I really wouldn't bother with that kind of thing, myself).

But I think that telling people to do a good job "on their own time," kinda sums up the zeitgeist of today's tech industry.

[0] https://littlegreenviper.com/art/Cavalier.png

[1] https://littlegreenviper.com/art/Sentinels.png

i_am_proteus• 2 years ago

You don't have to see the reason why other people prefer their passions to profit-seeking. There might not even be a reason! That's how passions work.

jprete• 2 years ago

Profit-seeking is just another way of optimizing everything else out of existence, and that's an excellent reason to overrule it.

webdood90• 2 years ago

Capitalism - love it or leave it!

ToucanLoucan3• 2 years ago

Most artists, like most programmers are working in a commercial capacity. I see no reason why "their passion" should overrule profit-seeking.

The obsession that everything must go in a financial box or be relegated to the increasingly diminished "free time" available to oneself is a cancer that is destroying our society.

Things that are profitable =/= things that have value to people. They often coincide but it is not a direct correlation. Tons of things that make absolutely unethical amounts of profit have zero value to society. Conversely some of the most valuable things in human experience have zero monetization, in practice or theory.

Money is not everything.

Nicksil• 2 years ago

Most artists [...] are working in a commercial capacity.

How do we know this?

chamsom• 2 years ago

Created work even in a commercial capacity is protected IP. having AI train on those models for a publicly consumed LLM may not even be in the best interests of profit.

Law hasn't even evolved either. What if in the future people bring special tradecraft to companies that they don't want leaking elsewhere? who knows. the door is still open.

_jab• 2 years ago

I think your comment is emblematic of the very divide between Silicon Valley and the rest of the world that leads to frustration like what the artists here are expressing.

No one becomes an artist except because of passion for the work. It sure as hell isn’t for the money. That’s not so universally true in Silicon Valley, and I’m guessing you’re one of those people who views their job mostly as a means to fund the rest of their lifestyle.

robofanatic• 2 years ago

just like it's foolish to think corporate programmers will be a thing at some point in the future.

I don't think corporate programmers are obsolete. How will a sophisticated AI programmer in the future be any different than a human programmer in an outsourcing firm?

JohnFen5• 2 years ago

I see no reason why "their passion" should overrule profit-seeking.

Companies can and will do whatever they want.

However, on the level of the individual, I see no reason why profit-seeking should overrule my passion. I don't code to make money, I code because I love doing it. I make money to allow myself to engage in an activity I find rewarding, I don't engage in that activity to make money.

If that activity is no longer rewarding, there is no amount of money that can compensate for that.

Perhaps you're right, and that the future has no place for people like me. We'll see. Regardless, though, I'm not going to participate (either as a dev or as a customer) with processes that dehumanize people to such a degree.

scelerat• 2 years ago

Curious what you think of intellectual property law in general. Trade dress, trade marks, written words, lyrics, distinctive visual styles, processes, melodies etc are all protected under various IP laws.

The laws did not anticipate AI models hoovering up all known IP without any permission from or compensation to its creators, but that does not mean that we cannot correct that and it does not mean those creators cannot or should not be able to assert rights and be compensated for violations.

DonsDiscountGas• 2 years ago

The linked article is from a duo which publishes a webcomic. This is their own time.

anal_reactor2• 2 years ago

Most artists, like most programmers are working in a commercial capacity. I see no reason why "their passion" should overrule profit-seeking.

Ding ding ding.

I think that we're already experiencing all the downsides of having AI-generated content. Look at high-budget movies - they're completely bland, tell nothing, they're only optimized for getting money out of average uneducated customer. Ubisoft is known for making all games according to same template that works and makes money. Mobile gaming lasted three entire months before it was overtaken by those profit-driven.

Some time ago I went to an expensive concert, and I realized... those guys got loaded by playing literally the same songs they've been playing for twenty years. They found the golden formula and they keep on riding it.

Turning to AI only cuts the middle man.

I turned towards independent creators because those guys have a passion and want to share it. So not all hope is lost. It's just that true artists are going to be the minority, just like they always were, while the rest will keep slurping up the commercial slop, just like they always have.

woah2• 2 years ago

Limited edition source code print on archival quality acid free parchment, signed by the developer

jaredsohn• 2 years ago

I'd also like to see the results of hand-tracing of variable values done separately by the developer for each copy. Maybe have several developers do it as an extra check.

TeMPOraL3• 2 years ago

Little short for a prompt for the industrial replicator, but we'll fill in the blanks. How many million copies do you need?

card_zero2• 2 years ago

Tarn Adams could probably sell this.

qingcharles• 2 years ago

Do you offer framing services?

esafak2• 2 years ago

The mantra is "I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes".

- Joanna Maciejewska (https://x.com/AuthorJMac/status/1773679197631701238)

kapp_in_life2• 2 years ago

Sure, but many people who are bad at art and writing would like AI to make art and writing that's tailored to their tastes and are fine doing laundry and dishes since they're good at that and we have already automated 99% of it with dishwashers and dryers.

bronco210162• 2 years ago

I think the missing piece is the generative AI being tied to a physical embodiment. My point is, we need the physical machine but we also need to work on this generative AI aspect to manipulate the machine. Unfortunately, making pictures and writing text seems to be the lowest hanging fruit of the Transformer AI era since we have significant datasets already available. Several companies are working on creating datasets to train transformers to apply to other tasks and I suspect we'll start seeing the results in a couple to a few years. Not sure how long before we have a consumer bot doing the laundry and dishes though.

roughly• 2 years ago

SMBC with a similar sentiment https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/sad-2

VyseofArcadia• 2 years ago

I wonder to what degree generative AI came before e.g. as in the article an AI that does your taxes because it's hard to be wrong, creatively. If I ask an AI for a painting of a dog commanding a fleet of starships, I'd be hard pressed to define, specifically, an incorrect result. There's wiggle room. Some results are more wrong or right than others, but I don't know that I'd ever hand back a grade of 0. And even if I did, so what? The stakes are low. Try again.

On the other hand, doing your taxes wrong is a thing. You can enumerate the possible mistakes. They're codified in law[0]. And these mistake have big stakes.

Generative AI is "safer" than an AI to do a specific task that has consequences.

[0] Yes, yes, I know, there's wiggle room here too and that's why we have courts

stared• 2 years ago

I think that this quotation captures the essence of the problem.

It is nice to have the boring things automated - be it proofreading, generating mundane pieces of code, and stuff. The sad part

In programming (at least, for now), I feel that it is a net positive for my happiness - less stuff spent hunting simple omissions, checking StackOverflow, or checking (not always so complete) documentation of changes between version 0.4 and 0.5 of some library.

Yet, in other fields, it may be different. I am not a translator, but I did something for fun a few times (e.g. https://p.migdal.pl/blog/2019/10/the-statues-by-jacek-kaczma...). Now, with proper prompting, one can get very far (e.g. https://p.migdal.pl/blog/2023/05/genesis-az-by-gpt). For the first time, it gets me some existential chills, as it is taking away the joy of a linguistic puzzle of matching content, mood, atmosphere, and rhymes. It used to be an intellectual challenge only a real human being could do.

At some points, event sparks of genius in breakthrough scientific discoveries will be more like solving a crossword rather than something WE can add to the culture.

mbg7212• 2 years ago

Laundry and dishes don't pay well. Art does, but only once in a great while, and AI gives you a ton of attempts for little cost. Since rapid iteration is the biggest strength of advanced computing, people just invented cultural pollution machines in the hope of striking it rich.

surgical_fire2• 2 years ago

This is such an awful take, that I always roll my eyes when I see it being reproduced. It gets cringer every time.

suyash• 2 years ago

I think the problem is because AI is mostly created by engineers who have no clue about 'art', all they know is how to automate and optimise for the sole purpose of efficiency which has been the cause of AI eating creative fields including programming ironically as there an art to coding as well.

unraveller• 2 years ago

Well I don't think OP persuaded the AI start-up to pivot to laundry services. The start-up is going after the low hanging fruit, things easy to do, and no one likes to be thought of as easily replaceable least of all artists.

winternett2• 2 years ago

Ai is ages away from being able to emulate the passion and intuition behind music, writing, and art that humans have cultivated for centuries. It can only emulate that passion even still, so it relies on a theft from human intellect & reasoning as it very basis. This is why in the long run it will become apparent that undermining the source of creativity, and by ruining the ability of artists and writers to succeed properly in innovating nw things, eventually Ai will become bereft of new ideas, and easily turned into a source for garbage, cheap, copycat, and undesired output.

There is also the looming risk that current creators may well turn towards corrupting their work specifically to hinder the corrupt idea theft currently occurring with Ai profiteers.

JohnMakin• 2 years ago

Alternative viewpoint - some creative people don't enjoy the actual physical act of making a creation a reality. For me, I don't particularly enjoy programming, but I love building things. I had hoped that AI would allow me to build things in a way that skips past or trivializes the stuff I don't like (it hasn't, because I'm still a much more competent programmer than "AI" is).

With art, though - I have some disabilities I don't feel the need to mention here, and am not particularly gifted at drawing or making art. I love making comics but I can't draw. AI allows me to make things like that now. It's been fantastic for someone like me, although I completely understand the arguments presented here by people that create for a living, I do think this is inevitably a losing battle because creating visual stuff is something this current iteration of generative AI seems to be pretty decent at.

londons_explore• 2 years ago

The counterargument is that AI lets those without the skills take part too.

AI can help someone bring their musical ideas to fruition, draw pictures, or write stories.

There is still creative direction from a human - and now, rather than having to be a highly skilled human, it can now be almost anyone. In a way, AI brings creativity to the masses who aren't lucky enough to have the time to hone skills that would take thousands of hours to learn any other way.

rewgs4• 2 years ago

More people would be "lucky enough to have the time to hone skills" if investment in AI were directed towards solving actual problems.

As a former professional musician, let me tell you: the skills are not the problem here. People don't not make art because they don't have the skills. They don't make art because they have nothing to say, nothing to express.

The skills are a byproduct of having a worldview, a perspective. And unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately) AI can't help anyone with that.

Kiro2• 2 years ago

I don't think AI has made me enjoy programming less. If anything it has made me love it even more. The biggest benefit for me is that it has helped me with procrastination. Instead of "I'll do it tomorrow" I will just ask the AI when I need to do something I don't feel like doing.

rbetts• 2 years ago

"Please don't take my job. Take my accountant's job instead."

falcolas6• 2 years ago

"Take my bosses' job. Any of my bosses. I've got 8."

empath75• 2 years ago

I think that the way people are mostly interacting with generative AI is not as a producer but as a _consumer_. They describe what they want, the AI makes it, and they get some enjoyment out of it, then discard it. Maybe they share it with a handful of people, but I think only a tiny percentage of people interacting with Chatgpt or MidJourney are doing anything creative or think of themselves as artists and _that's fine_.

swayvil2• 2 years ago

We outsource making food, building the house, taking care of the kids...

Leaving us more time to focus on what matters : work.

Ha ha.

woah2• 2 years ago

Looks like the AI company already helped them create some content to get clicks on social media

Havoc• 2 years ago

Also on todays news - in the github copilot (and OpenAI) case about stolen content the judge dismissed majority of it:

https://www.theregister.com/AMP/2024/07/08/github_copilot_dm...

I do sympathise with the creatives on an emotional level but it’s looking like the laws won’t

xivzgrev• 2 years ago

These plaintiffs need a new lawyer, one experienced with going up against big corporations

you can’t be amateur hour in these cases. things like not requesting emails in the right way, or offering arguments the judge easily swats away.

The thrust of their case is important but if they’re fumbling the ball they’re going to get destroyed on procedure.

falcolas6• 2 years ago

Always worth remembering as we watch these cases go through the system that "legal" and "moral" (or even "benefits society") are not the same thing. They are usually intended to be the same thing, but the rule of law will never fully capture the intent, especially as time passes.

tim333• 2 years ago

It would be tricky do stop AI looking at content and making something inspired by it as humans have been doing that as a basic occupation for centuries. You'd have to differentiate between a human looking at stuff and then producing art and a machine doing it but what if a machine and human work together? I'm not sure how you'd differentiate legally.

timcobb• 2 years ago

Artists’ work has been harvested in order to train large language models

The idea of publishing something these days has become quite unappealing. For me, there's something dehumanizing about being used as LLM training data. Not that my thoughts are unique or interesting or special. But, man...

dtertman• 2 years ago

Years ago I went to a BBQ cooking class run by the owner of a small, one-location restaurant in Chicago. He said that Sysco and US Foods reps called him every single day to talk about outsourcing his pulled pork and brisket to them.

This feels oddly similar, except there's only a couple Sysco's and US Foods' and probably thousands of AI Content Farm startups at this point.

pavel_lishin3• 2 years ago

They were significantly more polite in their response than I would have been.

agrippanux• 2 years ago

I got hit up over several emails by a startup doing AI recruiting. I never replied back because it was hard to tell if it was actually the CEO reaching out to me because of my experience, or his AI system reaching out to me.

I thought, if I’m having this sort of issue figuring out if the contact is genuine, how will I feel working on this product? Even if it is genuine, is it ethical to have been recruited by a real person to work on a product that fools people into thinking they’ve been contacted by a real person?

victor9000• 2 years ago

A couple of years back I got a message on LinkedIn from Andrew Ng and I was blown away, then I quickly realized that this account was probably managed by a team of recruiters. I responded positively but mentioned some ML 101 concepts that could be applied to the problem, and the inability to engage confirmed my suspicion. So to some degree, deception has always been part of the game.

indoordin0saur2• 2 years ago

I really cannot fathom enjoying any "art" produced by an AI, excepting art that uses it as an assistant for boring tasks like texturing a video game.

Liquix• 2 years ago

but what will happen when "enjoyable art" and "AI art" are virtually impossible to differentiate between without tools?

https://i.imgur.com/XSCN9Aj.png

indoordin0saur2• 2 years ago

A very big part of art (probably the biggest part) is the meaning behind it. AIs have no internal "experience" or novel ideas so the art is ultimately meaningless, or only as meaningful as the idea behind the prompt the person put into it. This is why you can have an incredibly slick, high budget movie that is universally considered bad because it's soulless. If AIs become "conscious" or something and we actually have an interest in how they see the world I think their art could be interesting. Even without the consciousness I think that we can have interesting "art" that comes out of them based on how they see the world, which brings to mind things like the old Google AI Image generator hallucination/dream images from a few years back.

chrisBob• 2 years ago

There are different kinds of "art" with different use cases. Sometimes I want to look at something thoughtful and meaningful by an artist making a profound statement about humanity where I can see the emotion and motivation. Sometimes I want something that adds a bit of color to the office. One of those may never be the domain of AI, but if I just want something with a flower and a bird that matches the colors of the rest of the room....?

It is ok if you don't see any value in the second use case. Different people like different "art".

bloopernova• 2 years ago

Friend of a friend decided they could make art with generative AI, and they wouldn't need to practice any skills to do it. They honestly thought they were going to make billions from D&D art. They had also been incredibly jealous of the people who had practiced enough to get good at art or music. Generative AI art was their intended shortcut to money and respect, because practicing is difficult and tedious.

They gave up after being told that nobody wanted their pictures. Now they're even more resentful because in their eyes their "valuable skill" was mocked.

swayvil2• 2 years ago

"Muse". Lol. Good irony in that name. Like marrying your realgirl.

low_tech_punk2• 2 years ago

I'm curious how developers' sentiment towards code generation tools like Copilot compares to artists' sentiment towards art generation tools like MJ/SD/DallE.

As a developer myself, I want to see coding as a creative act and feel uneasy about the idea of relying on a tool that makes the code one tab away. But I also recognize most of the coding we do is in a commercial context where artistic expression is less relevant.

low_tech_punk2• 2 years ago

p.s. The Muse in that email is not even a art generation tool. It's a just a rent-seeking business that profits off of other people's work.

not2b• 2 years ago

My main concern about Copilot use is that, unless you're in a race to quickly produce a minimum viable product, it doesn't optimize the hard part. The initial coding is a very small piece of the work.

Code has to be designed, maintained, and extended, and for supportable code we want to have someone on the team that understands it well. If we want the code to be flexible, we want design decisions to appear in as few places as possible, ideally one. Copilot as an auto-complete, where it just helps fill in function names and the like, is fine and helpful (but IDEs do most of that already). But if it's used to write larger code chunks we quickly have the problem that there are code sequences no one on the team understands (it passed the tests though, yay!?) and we wind up with bloat from a lot of copy-paste like code.

ecjhdnc2025• 2 years ago

it doesn't optimize the hard part

This is universally true of Generative AI's impact on all art and craft.

It's a Dunning-Kruger thing. It makes the stuff that a novice thinks is hard apparently easier, but does not ever tackle the difficult stuff. So that novice is actively disadvantaged compared to how they would be if they worked with an actual artist to make what they wanted.

Kiro2• 2 years ago

Copilot makes me able to focus on the creative parts of programming instead of all the boilerplate and other unfun stuff.

Perz1val• 2 years ago

Imo it's suggestions are either: - hot garbage - something generic; I'm glad not having to write that

ilrwbwrkhv• 2 years ago

Copilot is just a glorified vim macro.

It is dumb as rocks so it doesn't ever get anything complicated. But it is good for "autofilling" like excel, a bunch of stuff, given a pattern.

falsaberN1• 2 years ago

I'm both an artist and a programmer, and indeed my opinions about them are very different. I work as sysadmin so both are activities are detached from my earnings, as a disclaimer. The artist opinion is a lot more abstract and feeling-based, while the programmer opinion is more pragmatic. Also note that I condemn anyone using AI for "evil". Anyone using it to deceive or harm is despicable and just makes things difficult for everyone.

---

As an artist I see stuff like Stable Diffusion to be very interesting, a fun toy or a potential tool to unclog your brain when needing ideas, and much faster than something like pinterest, specially with niche topics. Its ability to randomly combine concepts can be an starting point for inspiration as well.

I usually like to draw robots, which aren't a common thing in popular media anymore (at least not in the aesthetic I favor, think Armored Core) so having the AI generate a bunch of random robot slop is a good way to get my brain "in the zone", maybe stuff like "oh that pose is cool" or "I can try something with this type of joint". Or even "wow this is a hot mess but the way it placed that odd shape in the arm gives me an idea for a weapon" and let my brain juices flow and do the rest. If nothing else it can help you discard things that don't work.

However, I wouldn't let it replace my work, because the process of designing and drawing is what's fun to me. My favorite subject also requires a degree of consistency the poor thing just can't pull off even with assistance, specially when animating said robots with all the moving parts and stuff that splits and folds, so I'm on my own anyway.

Double however, the idealist in me also believes that anyone that can produce a fine piece, by whatever means, by putting effort and finesse with a tool IS an artist. I have seen some people intentionally working with the tools to do stuff and the results can be impressive. This however disqualifies most AI art you might be familiar with, because most stuff spammed in the internet is stuff that anyone (on the know) can tell is just default settings slop, done in batches with no soul, or even intent to deceive. The process I'm talking about involves multiple hand-made edits, knowing the quirks of the system and knowing what to do. I've seen it used, for example, by TTRPG nerds (not an insult) to generate images tailored for a scene in campaigns. Those people have imagination and a sense of aesthetics but no art skills, and the way they put together a full scene by editing, making multiple passes, repainting areas until it looks right, training the characters involved... is something I can respect because it's coming from a place of passion and is sincere.

I guess intent matters. Some people are just trying to do fun stuff, others are trying to scam you and putting out basic slop while asking you to subscribe to their Patreons like if they were real artists, or making deepfakes. I'll always side with the former out of principle, even if they are a minority overshadowed by the shenanigans of the later.

---

Now, as a programmer I see Copilot with utter disdain. I know for a fact that LLMs are extremely prone to mistakes, inconsistent, unreliable. Code is something that can easily have hidden gotchas that only an expert can notice. The consequences of people who have no idea what they are doing asking for code from a thing that has no idea what it's doing can have reaching effects that can, in the worst case scenarios, end up having consequences such as severe time, data or money loss. Or even death. I'd even question its use from seasoned programmers, because everyone can have a bad day and overlook a mistake.

delusional• 2 years ago

It's fucking NFTs again. The vague promise that it somehow creates value for your audience. The promise of "community". The completely empty platitudes about a new and exciting world. And of course the FOMO of "early leg up" on some inevitable future.

floren• 2 years ago

It's the same guys, pretty often.

tracker1• 2 years ago

When are we going to automate things like handyman or plumbing work? WTF are we automating artistic creation?

Mistletoe• 2 years ago

I probably live under a rock but I had never seen these comics before. Some of them are pretty funny. Can't imagine AI needing raunchy comics though, maybe I'm thinking too small for AI.

japhyr• 2 years ago

Storytelling is personal. It is a connection between the writer and the reader. Without this personal connection, storytelling loses its purpose.

I read a book many years ago called If this is your land, where are your stories? One of the sections described how a group of native people from western Canada successfully reclaimed some of their land by telling stories in court. They lost their case in a lower court, because the court ruled that they were just telling stories. A higher court ruled that their people's stories, while not always factually correct, do lay claim to the land they lived on.

Everyone has a story. It's a confusing world where machine-generated stories can be indistinguishable from actual human stories.

Trust in authenticity is going to be a valuable asset going forward; I appreciate people sharing responses like this. It's easy to be cynical and say this response won't change anything, but if the people at Muse and companies like it keep getting these responses, some of them will realize the emptiness of what they're doing and move on to more meaningful work.

https://www.amazon.com/Where-Stories-Finding-Common-Ground/d...

mrweasel• 2 years ago

The suggestion you can do "storytelling without the need for personal content creation." says a lot about how that company views content. Content is a means to make money, it's not about telling a meaningful story or conveying information, it's about eyeballs and revenue.

It's all rather terrible.

skiexperte• 2 years ago

If you struggle online selling your art because of AI, your Art is not good enough and AI was not the problem to begin with.

A lot of friends around me are really good in drawing. They do not sell anything. A friend can draw really really good like photoreal, he also can barley life from this.

All of this was before AI.

I want to use AI for customization and not because i don't appreciate art.

If an artist gets frustrated because of some AI companies, sry to say but i don't think you are honest to yourself.

I also still hate this 'companies grabed our art and now we hate it'. Everyone looked at art from others to learn from art. There is very little unique art styles and just because someone else did it, doesn't mean that someone else can't come up with it.

Btw. i do photography for 20 years. No one wants to buy my prints either. But i still don't mind AI training on all my pictures. Why? I really really believe that AI will enable us to do a lot more and is necessary to achieve a Star Trek like system were we will have time again to actually persue art because all the capitalism bullshit like ads ads ads and ads (don't forget ads) will be less relevant to us.

neontomo• 2 years ago

i'm a dev and a semi-successful artist and agree with you.

the way you sell art is not usually about skill, it's about how you market the art so that people will feel connected to it. it can be a story behind it, the people who are promoting it etc.

a lot of artists make art, don't sell anything and get angry at their audience for not buying it. now some of the blame is shifted to ai instead. i'm still not ok with ai being trained on artists work without permission, but it's not the only reason you're not able to sell art.

jedberg2• 2 years ago

This feels like back in the day when photo editing and publishing software started getting big. "True artists" would shun anyone using those tools as amateurs. And for the most part they were right. It was mostly used by amateurs to create stuff that didn't look very good.

That is where we are with AI art right now. Most of it is garbage created by people who don't know what good art is.

But just like back in the day, a few professionals decided to adopt the new tools instead of complain about them. And all of a sudden they were creating good art much faster than their competitors. And then those tools simply became the tools of the trade.

This is where AI art is going. It will be a tool in the artists toolbox, just like Photoshop is. A great artist will use AI to do most of the work, and then add their professional taste and talent to make it great.

The smart artist is learning how to integrate AI into their workflows.

* And I'm including software engineers here as well. The smart engineer is incorporating copilots into their software development workflows.

marban2• 2 years ago

The difference is that everyone thinks they're an artist now, skipping pesky things like talent or effort. GenAI is the ultimate tool for people who have the creativity of a potato.

jedberg2• 2 years ago

People with early versions of photoshop thought that too. Most were wrong, some were right.

BiteCode_dev• 2 years ago

Painters said that about photographs.

Artists are petty.

mronetwo• 2 years ago

Yeah but what if I don't want to use it?

Truth is that no one has the luxury to make that choice because everything is seen through the lens of productivity. It's the productivity that makes making art faster "good".

It sucks so hard that the choice is: either get on board or become irrelevant.

People have every right to complain about art, for many reasons. It's not comparable to Photoshop.

metabagel• 2 years ago

(Deleted)

throwaway71271• 2 years ago

you are replying in the wrong thread

hpen8• 2 years ago

The problem isn't that people are luddites and hate technology, it's that it has been built on the backs of peoples artistic work, and they haven't been asked or compensated for it.

rickydroll5• 2 years ago

The artists complaining about this have built their careers and revenue streams on the backs of thousands of years of artistic creation. Where's the compensation for those earlier artists? Did you get their permission to use their content to train yourself?

In almost every creative field, you learn by example. You watch what the Masters have done before you. You know their techniques, tools, and ways of expressing things, then mix those tools and techniques into something you think is original. It's almost guaranteed that somebody else had the same thought you did. Maybe they expressed it, maybe they didn't, maybe they rejected it, maybe it's not been published, but somebody else had the same thought that you did.

An individual is not unique, and people are not unique in feeling offended that they are not unique. People felt offended whenever animals did something previously thought to be uniquely human. People were offended when it was understood that humans and apes evolved from a common ancestor. People felt offended when it was discovered that the Earth was not the center of the universe.

Like Galileo, the current state of AI tells us, "And yet it moves."

hpen8• 2 years ago

Such bullshit. We have copyright protections to keep people compensated for their artistic work. Tech has changed, the copyright law didn't have foresight to protect against this. But that is definitely the intention of such law.

bjornlouser2• 2 years ago

"[Artists] would much rather be properly compensated for their work..."

'Properly compensated'... determined by the market, right? That's being driven close to $0, just like with software (and was headed that direction before the recent AI craze).

"Artists would much rather... focus more on fulfilling creative tasks."

Like the two penis jokes shown on that site? Incredible.

caconym_4• 2 years ago

Properly compensated'... determined by the market, right? That's being driven close to $0, just like with software (and was headed that direction before the recent AI craze).

This is just completely false, and there are so many obvious counterexamples I don't know where to begin, so let's just start with artists working in the film and video game industries. These are real working, earning people who do art and design as a career.

bjornlouser2• 2 years ago

"film and video game industries..."

Oh I thought they were talking about silly web comics and random art on the internet that was 'stolen'. Film and game industries of course embrace all types of tech to make money (didn't Disney use generative AI for the opening sequence of a Marvel series last year?)

a_c• 2 years ago

I generate stories for my children, based on topics they learn in school, with visual and music, you guessed it, also generated.

I’m the opposite end of an artist. But the generative AI is perfect for my use case. I wouldn’t be able to make “book” for my young without the help of genAI

laserlight• 2 years ago

I can't tell whether the email is poorly formatted because they used AI or because they didn't.

throwaway555333• 2 years ago

Social Media platforms cannot grow without engaging and original content, made by people. This is the basis for any user to join. Creators have – in large part – not been privy to the rewards that these platforms have generated over the years even though they are the reason for platform growth.

Disagree. People use social media for plenty of other reasons than to consume artists' content. Sharing news with family and friends, arguing with strangers on the Internet -- HN itself is the obvious counterexample.

relaxing3• 2 years ago

Since you apparently weren’t around for the rise of social media (ca. 2000-2020 C.E.), let me fill you in: user posts are content, too.

throwaway555333• 2 years ago

Ok, but the author referred specifically to "Creators", which usually means the minority of users who post things other than text.

If you read more of the author's post:

We are a webcomic duo that has been creating original comics since 2011 and sharing them on various platforms on the web
Any business model that does not acknowledge this and does not seek proper compensation for artists is not of interest to us.

My point is, while I agree with their sentiment, I believe they are mistaken that artists are the core driver of social media growth. (And by their assertion, the reason people use social media.)

chokma• 2 years ago

Looks like the screenshot and the text are different.

"Any business model that does not acknowledge this and does not seek proper compensation for artists is not of interest to us." -> screenshot of their reply is missing the first two "not"s.

buzzardbait• 2 years ago

I'm confused. The top reason for declining is this:

The surge in AI has been built on the backs of creative people like us. Artists’ work has been harvested in order to train large language models and they have not been informed or compensated.

The AI company is literally informing them that they want a partnership, which obviously involves discussing compensation. That is the polar opposite of harvesting all their comics to create a language model. So how is this relevant?

Thing is, AI is happening to creatives whether you like it or not, so you might as well play a part in directing its trajectory. Apple hired world class drummers for the new AI drummer feature in their flagship music production software. Dreamtonics hired a lot of vocalists for its flagship vocal synthesis software, which happens to be quite brilliant.

The last reason says:

Artists would much rather have an AI that actually helps with grunt chores, such as writing invoices, or helping with taxes in order to focus more on fulfilling creative tasks. Such an AI-tool would be of much more value to the artist community.

Such AI tools already exist in large numbers. It just so happens that the current frontier of AI is the creative arts. This is all rather similar to how people resisted personal computers in the 70s and 80s.

exsomet• 2 years ago

Artists would much rather have an AI that actually helps with grunt chores, such as writing invoices, or helping with taxes in order to focus more on fulfilling creative tasks.

As wild as it may seem, there are people who love accounting and tax work for the mental stimulation it gives them to find those little places to save money (I am not one of them, but I know several). So at some point the argument breaks down into “don’t automate MY job, just somebody else’s that I value less”.

This concept that there are things we like/are good at and things we dislike/suck at is why specialization and trade exists. AI breaks that model in ways that most people (in this case, the author) don’t consider or understand.

Another AI company wrote us and here’s our response

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