‘Charlotte’ draws for people. She’s good at it, and it’s her livelihood. People like her are hurting literally no one by drawing things. She enriches the lives of all the people who enjoy her work. She should have a choice in whether or not her works are used to make image generators. That’s it. It’s not complicated. You shouldn’t get to decide this for her, she never posted her images to the internet with the knowledge that someone would use them to figuratively build a machine with the expressive purpose of rendering what she does useless (even if it’s very bad at doing so).

AI art stands against everything that every artist had ever taught me. It’s spit on the face of art as a concept. It’s art devoid of creation. Art made out of very long, very complicated algorithms weighing weights adjusted by billions of pictures passed through it. It’s no more expressive or inspirational than an RNG function attached to a midi keyboard. It’s mimicry, mimicry that really only stands to benefit corporations. I’m not about it.

Most of this is personal opinion and snobbery that I can’t do much about except maybe ask that you examine how anarcho-capitalist your takes sound. Saying generative art will render what she does useless is like saying you quit singing in the shower because autotune exists. I just can’t follow that logic. Art is something you do for you, to enjoy making any way you know how.

I also feel like you’re ignoring the hundreds of open source models already available to everyone to use for free. Real tangible benefit that is being enjoyed by the everyman right now. I see others benefit every day and benefit from it myself. To say it really only stands to benefit corporations is a flat out lie. A tool that helps us better communicate, inspire, create, and connect with each other in ways they may not have been able to before is not a bad thing.

AI in pretty well any other case? I’m on board. Let’s automate human labor, all the things that we are forced to do for work. No more physical labor, no more 9 to 5, no more retail or fast food or corporate jobs. Do away with it all. I’m totally with you there. Doing away with human art? I mean, I’ve got no interest in that. If you like staring at what amounts essentially to nothing, then be my guest. I’m very open minded with art in general, totally down with avant guarde pieces, performance art, noise music, all the stuff at the fringe that offends the delicate sensibilities of those who seek to gatekeep what is or isn’t genuine human expression.

I mean, this part is pretty hyperbolic and pretty insulting, but thanks. No one is trying to do away with human art. It took us 100,000 years to get from cave drawings to Leonard Da Vinci. This is just another step for artists, like Camera Obscura was in the past. It’s important to remember that early man was as smart as we are, they just lacked the interconnectivity and tools that we have.

Pretty big difference there is all those things are made by people. People with talent. Artists. We are enjoy the fruits of their labor. Their rights should be respected. They should have a say in whether specifically AI is allowed to copy their works.

Anyone copying their works should be sued for infringement, but that’s not what’s happening here. People are trying to take another piece of the public’s increasingly limited rights and access to information. To fashion themselves as a new insidious owner class, owners of ideas. Even people you deem to not have talent have rights, and their rights aren’t any less important. You can’t now take those opportunities from them because it’s their turn now.

Art is about bringing your ideas into the world, anything beyond that is fetish. Needing to be born talented or spending hundreds of hours to learn a skill is not art, that’s work. If part of the work is how laborious was to make, that’s fine, but if it’s not, there’s nothing wrong with that.

It obviously benefits Meta by hindering the competition and by giving them another source of income.

As to OpenAI, I expect that Microsoft could supply them with quite some user data but I don’t think OAI would be a major beneficiary, at first. OpenAI is, after all, a comparatively recent start-up. I think the biggest immediate gains would go to the established Big Tech firms that have their fingers on a lot of user data.

Major content owners, like the NYT, would be able to sell their content again. They have that lying around anyway, so it’s pure profit for the owners. Corporations like Getty would also be able to make a killing, not just for being major content owners, but also because they are in the business of ensuring the “provenance” of media. If it’s necessary to ask everyone and keep proof on file then they got you covered, for a price.

In the long run, I would expect companies like OpenAI to come out on top. They have their fingers on content generation, so the inequalities would just compound.