Re: The Computer Is Hungry
Dec. 13th, 2022 08:03 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rynlingi don’t know what else to say except that AI art is no longer simply a source of creativity or a wonder of human creation
https://rainboq.tumblr.com/post/703360565640298496/weve-spent-the-past-20-30-years-enjoying-a-brief
There is nothing benevolent or celebratory in this, it is purely about theft and exploitation. It’s about violating the copyright of artists in order to churn out content that’s Good Enough to suit the needs of capitalists. Do you think that the publishing industry will continue to pay authors for their works if they can just hand an algorithm a prompt and get a completed work in a handful of minutes or hours, and then pay someone to edit it into something coherent (if they even need to)?
The original post has some solid examples of how AI-generated art is flat-out stolen, but I want to respond to the reblog, which has a lot of hand-wringing about Capitalism™ without any acknowledgment of how it relates to the concept of "pure" art. I feel like there's a lot of misunderstanding in this discussion about what "fine art" is and about how museums and galleries work.
Simply put, "fine art" is a direct expression of "capital." If a work of creative expression does not have financial value that can be used to diversify an investment portfolio, then it is not "fine art." This has nothing to do with the skill of the artist(s) or the originality of the piece; rather, it has everything to do with the prestige of the creative studio and the authenticity of the provenance, which is weighed as a financial investment. If a work of creative expression has relatively little monetary value, then it is not "fine art" that can be displayed in a museum, sold in a gallery, or studied by professional art historians. You cannot separate fine art from capital. Simple as.
The art world is notoriously shitty and horrible, and illustrators and comic artists have been struggling against the concept of "fine art" for decades. It's not like there aren't strategies to combat creative exploitation, but retreating into the abstract discourse of "fine art" is not one of them. The strategy I tend to favor is "take back the means of production," but you still need to be an adult with sufficient capital and knowledge of the creative market to make that happen.
Also... I have some bad news for the OP about algorithms being used to generate written "works" lmfao. This has been going on since at least 2017, and it's one of the reasons why you can't find anything on Google or Amazon anymore. It's wild to see special-issue magazines sold for $20 at CVS that are all stock photos accompanied by text written by a single "author," and I dare anyone to actually read a page of the Disney-branded early reader novels that they sell at stores like Walmart and Target. I've started to see local news sites publish articles generated by an algorithmic template as well, and don't get me started about machine translation. Honestly I don't think anyone is even being paid to edit AI-generated text these days.
https://rainboq.tumblr.com/post/703360565640298496/weve-spent-the-past-20-30-years-enjoying-a-brief
There is nothing benevolent or celebratory in this, it is purely about theft and exploitation. It’s about violating the copyright of artists in order to churn out content that’s Good Enough to suit the needs of capitalists. Do you think that the publishing industry will continue to pay authors for their works if they can just hand an algorithm a prompt and get a completed work in a handful of minutes or hours, and then pay someone to edit it into something coherent (if they even need to)?
The original post has some solid examples of how AI-generated art is flat-out stolen, but I want to respond to the reblog, which has a lot of hand-wringing about Capitalism™ without any acknowledgment of how it relates to the concept of "pure" art. I feel like there's a lot of misunderstanding in this discussion about what "fine art" is and about how museums and galleries work.
Simply put, "fine art" is a direct expression of "capital." If a work of creative expression does not have financial value that can be used to diversify an investment portfolio, then it is not "fine art." This has nothing to do with the skill of the artist(s) or the originality of the piece; rather, it has everything to do with the prestige of the creative studio and the authenticity of the provenance, which is weighed as a financial investment. If a work of creative expression has relatively little monetary value, then it is not "fine art" that can be displayed in a museum, sold in a gallery, or studied by professional art historians. You cannot separate fine art from capital. Simple as.
The art world is notoriously shitty and horrible, and illustrators and comic artists have been struggling against the concept of "fine art" for decades. It's not like there aren't strategies to combat creative exploitation, but retreating into the abstract discourse of "fine art" is not one of them. The strategy I tend to favor is "take back the means of production," but you still need to be an adult with sufficient capital and knowledge of the creative market to make that happen.
Also... I have some bad news for the OP about algorithms being used to generate written "works" lmfao. This has been going on since at least 2017, and it's one of the reasons why you can't find anything on Google or Amazon anymore. It's wild to see special-issue magazines sold for $20 at CVS that are all stock photos accompanied by text written by a single "author," and I dare anyone to actually read a page of the Disney-branded early reader novels that they sell at stores like Walmart and Target. I've started to see local news sites publish articles generated by an algorithmic template as well, and don't get me started about machine translation. Honestly I don't think anyone is even being paid to edit AI-generated text these days.
