As soon as Apple announced its plans to inject generative AI into the iPhone, it was as good as official: The technology is now all but unavoidable. Large language models will soon lurk on most of the world’s smartphones, generating images and text in messaging and email apps. AI has already colonized web search, appearing in Google and Bing. OpenAI, the $80 billion start-up that has partnered with Apple and Microsoft, feels ubiquitous; the auto-generated products of its ChatGPTs and DALL-Es are everywhere. And for a growing number of consumers, that’s a problem.
Rarely has a technology risen—or been forced—into prominence amid such controversy and consumer anxiety. Certainly, some Americans are excited about AI, though a majority said in a recent survey, for instance, that they are concerned AI will increase unemployment; in another, three out of four said they believe it will be abused to interfere with the upcoming presidential election. And many AI products have failed to impress. The launch of Google’s “AI Overview” was a disaster; the search giant’s new bot cheerfully told users to add glue to pizza and that potentially poisonous mushrooms were safe to eat. Meanwhile, OpenAI has been mired in scandal, incensing former employees with a controversial nondisclosure agreement and allegedly ripping off one of the world’s most famous actors for a voice-assistant product. Thus far, much of the resistance to the spread of AI has come from watchdog groups, concerned citizens, and creators worried about their livelihood. Now a consumer backlash to the technology has begun to unfold as well—so much so that a market has sprung up to capitalize on it.
Obligatory “fuck 99.9999% of all AI use-cases, the people who make them, and the techbros that push them.”
Knee-jerk stupidity. Not all AI development revolves around “tech bros”.
I’ve never understood the supposed problem. Either AI is a gimmick, in which case you don’t need to worry about it. Or it’s real, in which case no one’s going to use it to automate art, don’t worry.
Or it’s both depending on the wide variety of actually unintelligent things labelled as “AI”.
I’m sure it will be used a lot in the corporate space, and porn. As someone who did b2b illustration, good riddance. I wouldn’t wish that kind of shit “art” on anyone.
The problem is that shit art is what employs a lot of artists. Like, in a post-scarcity society no one needing to spend any of their limited human lifespan producing corporate art would be awesome, but right now that’s one of the few reliable ways an artist can actually get paid.
I’m most familiar with photography as I know several professional photographers. It’s not like they love shooting weddings and clothing ads, but they do that stuff anyway because the alternative is not using their actual expertise and just being a warm body at a random unrelated job.
It is already used in porn. I have heard that there is at least one quite active Lemmy community about it.
They should go ahead and be against Photoshop and, well, computers all together while they’re at it. In fact spray paint is cheating too. You know how long it takes to make a proper brush stroke? No skill numpties just pressing a button; they don’t know what real art is!
Real artists mix their own pigments, ask Leonardo da Vinci (*).
(*: or have a studio full of apprentices doing it for them, along with serially copying their masterpieces, some if them made using a “camera obscura” which is totally-not-cheating™, to sell to more clients. YMMV)
Maybe the AIs should mix their own pigments as well, instead of taking all the other artists’ work and grinding that up.
