I found the perfect metaphor for AI Art 

The responses here inspired me to make a video about how I personally approach some of the challenges: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-EUmgvsGnw0w.html

What I am personally upset about is that the wish for creating art will not go away. It's deeply inside us and to most of us it's more than a job or some cool hobby. It's pure passion. Many of us go further and beyond, even when the payment stops. I still give my best even when I know that the calculated days/compensation stops at a certain point and all I do further is basically for free for the client. With being able to having a career in art we can actually keep creating in this busy world. I see many of my artist friends that started with me but couldn't make it in this already tough career, stopping completely doing art. Because life, a day job and responsibilities leave little to no time or energy to do so. Art can be an outlet, can be beautiful and exciting, but it's also tough and demanding. I feel sorry for them, because every time they talk about it, they talk about a loss they mourn. If art is no longer a career option with a future to support yourself financially many of us will just stop existing. In this world it seems to me that creating art becomes a privilege for people who have the time and energy (people with enough money to not needing a day job I'd assume), and for everyone else it stays a hobby at best with little motivation, time or energy to really nurture your skill. I was not born rich. I can keep creating because I was able to make it my job. My art wouldn't exist if I was forced to support myself financially in a not art related job. I doubt that prompting and picking a cool result, maybe adjusting it a bit will satisfy my wish to create.

I don't have a problem with AI art. I have a problem with people generating it calling themselves artists for doing that generation. You made that image as much as I made my minecraft world by putting in a seed.

I think the analogy works in some instances, but I don't think it works for how it's fundamentally changing the art market and art process. As an artist myself, AI is not scary because it's so accurate or good looking, it's scary because of the "time of work" it takes out from the process. When someone commissions me to do a character design for them what they're asking for is "can you design something that approximately fits what I want and something that looks visually good". Normally this might take me a couple of days to a week. There's a creative process in going back and forth with the client, I get to inject some of my creativity in the design, and I get paid for the time worked all because someone didn't have the time to learn the skill of drawing/painting/etc. Now they have a personal master artist on their PC, whether it's Midjourney, Dalle, Stable Diffusion, etc. Stable Diffusion for me takes about 8-10 seconds to create a very competent image. It might need cleaning up, but that's maybe an hour of work if that? It's creating more potential for the individual (which is great), HOWEVER It's not creating new productivity in a market, it's eliminating a market because the need to pay someone is gone. There's no shift happening in the market at that point. It's gone. In order for the lace analogy to work, each and every person would have a household if not handheld device that not only produced lace but also designs it. With no need to pay anyone there is no market. Making everyone an artist means there's no value in a market for it. I agree with the overall structure of the video, and what it's trying to get across but I haven't really found anyone who can explain the feeling or perspective of the artist in this situation without blind anger (from an artist perspective) or detached optimism (from a non-artist perspective).

This metaphor is apt in one way that I don’t think was intended. Because now, lace isn’t seen as art. It’s just a material, one that is valuable not for the hand of the artist that it represents but for its pure aesthetic value and nothing else. When the hand of the artist was replaced by the gears of a machine, something was lost. Now when you see someone wearing lace, you will no longer even pay attention to the patterns of the lace because you already know that they mean nothing. But digital art isn’t just a material that we prize for its aesthetic value that we’d benefit from the mass production of, artistic expression of people is the entire point of the medium. Images can already be duplicated infinitely, that has been the case for ages. But when you see a drawing of a character, you know that the character has a personality and probably a name that the artist had in mind while drawing them. Every work of art is a portal into a world that exists in the artist’s mind, one that has more details to it than just what you can see. Every emotion represented is one that a fellow human felt, real experiences either beyond your own or that you can relate to. And when AI does art, all of that is lost in a way we may never get back. Art is reduced to a material with purely aesthetic value to be mass produced by robots, just like lace.

So I heard that they're already training AI to come up with prompts for AI art, and now the AI art promptmakers are going through their own 5 stages.

I somewhat disagree with the way you have presented the Luddites here--they weren't angry at the machines, they were angry at the manufacturers who used the machines to circumvent fair labor practices for the laborers. The Luddites were, largely speaking, happy to run the machines instead of doing the labor, so long as they were paid fair wage. The machines, after all, still needed human direction. They destroyed the machines because it was an accessible target to make a statement to the manufacturers--"if you conspire to do this work at our expense, then we will ruin your machine and make it expensive for you".

I mean, I don't really understand how artists are meant to ignore the loss when it's impacting their livelihoods, contributing to the devaluation of their craft, and using a completely different skillset (which means it's not as simple as relearning the new tools). I do think there are cool possibilities for AI but I think dismissing those types of concerns with "yeah but we got cheaper goods out of it" is an unhelpful mindset given we're likely to face mass unemployment due to automation. This technology could be used in a more just world to fulfill the desire for commission art without putting the labor onto human artists, who are freed to focus on their passions, but I really don't think it's ethical at scale in a system that doesn't by default care for its people.

I'm a traditional artist. The problem I have with AI art is not AI art itself, but how people claim it. There are so many pieces on the internet (including on entire DeviantArt accounts) where people say, "I made this with [AI art generator]." But, they didn't _make_ it. The AI -- programed by someone else with time and effort -- did. If someone gave a human artist a prompt/request, no one is going to say that the requester is the actual artist of the piece. That's not even getting into the people that don't label the images as AI generated at all. A requester claiming to be the creator would be committing plagiarism. Why should AI generators and their producers be treated with any less courtesy? EDIT: I previously didn't know enough about how AI learns to say anything about it. I now want to make it clear that I do *_NOT_* agree with any AI that learns from copyrighted images and/or without an artist's consent. They need to use open source (CC0) instead of stealing art. They definitely _don't_ need to go after the specific styles of living & recently deceased artists. I also want to clarify that the AI generator itself, as something not human, is not capable of owning a copyright.

The other day I was discussing Ai Art in one video (I'm an artist btw, I draw with digital tablet) and then one guy came defending ai art as a new branch that shouldn't be a danger BUT you know what the guy said to start his argument? "As an Ai Artist, I think that..." That crushed my heart man, is there a metaphor for this feeling ?

I actually found a artist practicing making art using AI, hes not very good with human body forms so he uses AI to help him get a pose first, then he design the clothes and facial expressions. this is what i would imagine one day we all accept AI is part of the art creation process looks like

I'm a working artist, who happens to be doubly insulated from the danger of losing my livelihood to AI. First, I'm mildly famous among fans of tabletop RPGs. This means I'm often specifically sought out by tabletop RPG publishers, who want to illustrate their products with artwork which was produced by my hand. Second, I'm also a tabletop RPG designer, and so I have a second career to fall back on if/when the time comes that I'm forgotten as an artist. All that being said, I am appalled that NOT ONE SECOIND of your video was spent exploring the question of what artists less fortunate than me, who've invested years of time and energy into honing their craft, are supposed to do WHEN they find they can no longer make a living at it. Surely in all those books about lace you cite, somebody must have looked to see what actually became of all those displaced lace workers? The 'five stages of grief' may be an okay metaphor about what *society* will go through, but it fails to address the actual problems this situation WILL actually cause in the lives of individual people.

It feels insulting to cast artists as luddite or dismissing their anger, when their work was literally stolen and their copyright infringed upon by companies so as to create a product they will make tons of money from. If you want to create a neural network to generate art, you can do it, but do it in a legal and ethical way.

As a experienced graphic designer and budding artist, I'm scared since if AI successfully murders the commission art community, then what's next? Journalism? Writing stories, books, shows, and movies? If AI can give a bundle of code a "human touch", what's left for us? What's the point of learning art if an AI will always best you? AI devalues the work people spent learning and honing their artistic skill, it's great for individual people, but completely horrible for the creators who worked to become good at that and take days or weeks with each creation. If an AI came out that could do all the work of a graphic designer, and do it well if not better, then the years spent learning Adobe XD and Figma, the money dropped on graphic design school and courses, the effort you put into building a portfolio, that all goes when an AI can do your entire job in 10 minutes or less. It's like that rail track dude with the hammer who died racing a steam powered engine. Like the guy won, but he died, and the machine kept on chugging. It's possible for us to accept AI into our workflows, but it's also possible it'll straight up put visual designers, artists, and more out of work.

The problem with technical change has always been that the people who benefit from the new technology are not the people who lose their jobs to it. We could address that by helping the people on the losing end... but we won't and we never do.

I'm an artist/art teacher/psychotherapist who, like everyone else, was very intimidated by the emergence of AI art. I've experimented intensively with it now, and went from being intrigued, to relieved (if I can admit that) to now, actually, being quite disappointed with it. I have a much better technical idea of how it works, and also, a kind of intuitive sense of how it works which is reliable but very hard to articulate. I have to be honest - and I didn't think I would be saying this - but there is a remarkable amount of hype surrounding them. In fact, the hype is so massive it's a social phenomenon in itself IMO. Sometimes they generate quite uncanny imagery, but no-one discusses the crazy amount of duds you have to go through to get something good. Also, they are limited to mimcing material that dominates the dataset they've been trained on, for example LAION-Aesthetics V2 for Stable Diffusion. They can fairly reliably mimic an artist or photographer whose work is very commonly found in internet searches - famous concept artists for SF/fantasy franchises, black and white fashion photographers, the top twenty famous painters from history, manga and animation characters, photographs of cats etc. Go outside that and they flounder. For example, I tried to get a portrait of Beethoven in the style of the French painter Ingres and nothing convincing was happening. Also, they struggle massively with depicting black people. It's impossible to fully control what they produce - it's like spinning a roulette wheel. Following a brief is very challenging, and the compositions are repetitive. As for something really original, no juice. Another thing left unsaid is many of the images you see are not pure AI - there's often fairly extensive human editing of the imagery to remove a lot of the weird artefacts that keep cropping up. So sometimes working with them was quite fun, and I have some really, really cool imagery, but a lot of the time I threw my hands up in frustration and thought if I just took out a paintbrush or digital stylus and did it myself it would be faster. And I’m extremely adept with the ‘prompt’ system. Recently, I have begun to have the oddest suspicion come and go. I tell myself I must be wrong, but then again I see some images, and recall - I've been teaching art in a lot of different formats for thirty years now, entered competitions myself and helped lots of students enter competitions. Humans can be really, really weird sometimes being caught up in crazes and surfing the latest big thing, wanting to compete with each other, wanting to sell something, cheat, fake or doing stuff for reasons it's very hard to understand full stop. I'm not accusing the originating labs and software engineers of anything, but I get a peculiar vibe that very occasionally there's stuff there generated completely by humans and then passed off as AI. Maybe I'm too cynical. I do accept that AI systems that might challenge humans in certain areas of visual production and design are possible and could be in the pipeline. My opinion is that the current generation of software we see now isn't it. They’re very cool visual randomisers that are a bit hyped. Whatever form such a more capable art AI would take would need to be several orders of magnitude more powerful and have a more thorough ability to satisfy a specific brief with composition, colour, texture, style context - not just quickly generate 100 pretty unpredictable images that satisfy the nouns, verbs and adjectives you put in and hopefully one of them doesn't look like an imitation of Picasso painted by HR Giger on a bad acid trip.

As a medical student, there is a similar idea of AI replacing medical work and decisionmaking, albeit to a lesser degree compared to artists. My cope is that I do what I do because I find the doing interesting and enriching to my life. If an AI does my future job better than I can, then so be it, what matters most is that the patients get the best help they can get. Ultimately, AI can take my job, but they can't take away the fact that I enjoy studying medicine and deepening my understanding of how to help people.

for me as an artist the creation process in art is what brings me joy, and that is the part that Ai is going to re-place. The part that requires thinking and brainstorming and for employers is just "annoying waiting". Maybe for a CEO it seems more efficient to end up some sort of ai supervisor that works less or to give up on art and start a new "better job" that is "better" but art is not a job most people get into out of desperation for money, most of us do it because it makes us happy, and that is what ai threatens to take from us.

Every day I’m more and more terrified at how little we study ethics. Wonder how ethically that lace you purchased was made.

I think it's terrifying. I just listened to an episode of the Cortex podcast about this very thing and came to a far more dystopian conclusion. I think graphic designers especially are in for a massive upset. They also mentioned about a study where an AI got fed images from a deviantart artist who had died several years earlier and quickly the AI was able to recreate her style. There is alot of ethical problems but I'll try my best to stay optimistic 😬😬

It's not a perfect analogy. It's not an exaggeration to say that all the damage done by AI "art" is bound to be cultural. Lace is produced by technology recreating a piece of art on an industrial scale. (Art, it should be emphasized, that is also more aesthetic and design than more "complex" art. But human designed art nonetheless) Technology has always been used to make art but the technology and the art weren't _the same product._ What we have here is a collapsing of the two. Emphasizing the importance of art as a tool for personal and cultural expression seems "haughty" to a bunch of people for no reason, so let me ask you a few questions. If you're a fan of football, what do you say we hook Madden up to a computer, and that can replace the experience of watching live games? How does that sound? We've probably been able to do that for decades, why don't we? In fact, why are there still chess tournaments? We already know a computer could beat any one of them, they wouldn't stand a chance. Yet people - in their obvious inferiority continue to participate. Why? Here's the real answer: skill; talent. Whether or not there is any money in football (there is) or chess, it is competitive, and since art is not inherently competitive their jobs cannot be monetized as a "battle" in the same way - their only battle is against industry greed, a battle working people always lose. AI is not a "tool" for making art. It's a capitalist tool for replacing artists. The fact that "lace was replaced and we're fine" is not a significant observation. How many people can ever say "lace changed my life"? How many lacemakers actually starved because of those machines anyway? The terrifying conflation here is actually with the notion of art as productivity. Ideally art would mean something besides revenue, the fact that it's being replaced in a system that *demands* revenue should be horrifying to anyone who's not the Disney corporation, frankly.

Yeah sure, because it's TOTALLY fine that art itself will soon become a disposable novelty that may or may not be made by a person or instantly produced by a machine as if it grows on trees. Being an artist is a significant part of my identity. It's who I am as a person. I'm not the _best_ artist in the world - in fact I'm not even really good enough to be considered industry standard, but I'm better than the vast majority of people who either aren't artists at all or are considered "bad" artists... And now, the thing that is a major part of my identity, the ONE skill I have that's at least half-decent, is going to be unprofitable and unappreciated because of this stupid AI. It baffles me that so many people don't realize what's happening. For all of human history, art in its various forms has been an expression of our cultures and our thoughts and feelings about the world. The rich, who already have everything they could ever need, are willing to spend tons of money on good art. It's one of the few ways an ordinary person has an actual hope of improving their station in life, options that are rapidly disappearing with each passing day. And now, they take art for granted to such and extent that they don't even want to pay us anymore. They'd rather have a button they can press and let a machine do it for them. Think about where this is going. No more musicians. They'll have figured out an AI that knows how to generate new songs every second. No more writers. They'll have figured out how to make an AI that can write books with coherent stories, indistinguishable from a human author. No more directors or actors. They'll have figured out how to combine all of the previous AIs to generate entire Hollywood blockbusters, cartoons and TV shows every second at the push of a button. Just type in _"Make an emotional movie about a dinosaur in space"_ and suddenly you've got a whole damn Pixar production that would've won some awards... But there's no point anymore. Because there's no need for awards. You're the only one on Earth who's ever gonna see it, and you'll probably forget all about it in a week because some other movie you've auto-generated now has your attention. Quadrillions of movies tailor-made for a single person based on a single prompt, and nobody else would ever know or care. No more video game designers either, it'd be a matter of time before they figure out how to make an AI that makes those too. The wholesale massacre of so many industries on a scale never before seen, never to be seen again, and never to be recovered from. So now we suddenly have a world where everyone's entertainment is specifically designed only for them, created by no one. Nothing to bond with others over. No fandoms, no communities based on any of these things anymore, because again, why would you care about a movie the AI made for someone else when your favorite movie is one the AI made specifically for you? What would we even talk to each other about? Work? Food? The goddamn weather? All it's going to do is isolate us from each other even further. But of course, this is what the big companies want. It's why they're pitting everyone against each other with the social media algorithms that sort people into echo chambers that make us all hate each other, turning everyone into political extremists, turning progressives into tankies and conservatives into fascists, turning men into incels who think all women are selfish gold-diggers and turning women into radfems who think all men are monstrous predators. They don't want us having families or friends so they'd rather we all keep to ourselves, with no emotional connections to anyone or anything. That way, when they start easing us back into literal feudalism - company towns, workplace lodging and all - we won't feel like we're being deprived of anything because there won't be anything worth having to begin with. Nothing fulfilling, nothing to care about, just your duty. And just like that, we all become hollow drones, working on warehouse conveyor belts while the rich just sit up in their yachts sipping champagne and having orgies, with nothing even close to an end in sight. In 100 years I don't think humanity's even gonna be recognizable as human anymore.

I was really excited about AI making pictures, spent some time tinkering with Stable Diffusion, learned prompt guides, and all the parameters (img2img backpropagation, etc). However, I could not get anything useful out of it. If you need something specific, not just pretty picture, art for the sake of art -- it's almost impossible to get what you need. Much easier to pay a photographer/designer to do it. Maybe it will get better, let's see.

I'm sorry, I don't find a future where art is looked at as yet another product that was "maybe that was made by hand, maybe it wasn't, who cares" truly disheartening. I am a Graphic Designer and Illustrator by trade and an artist by compulsion so I find the labor aspect of this troubling but the artistry part of this absolutely soul crushing. We are signing away a part of what makes us human just because the economics 'make sense'. This is terrible and the likelihood that this will lead to some other far off technology in the future that might be beneficial is completely meaningless to me. The analogy to lace is interesting though.

Fun and funny and insightful: well done! Society cannot intelligently talk about this change (AI art), until we Stage 5 that there are at least two distinct issues. Your video mostly addresses the "macro" issue of societal change over generations. (BTW, the programmable loom is my backup analogy, and my go to analogy is English sawyers terror campaigns against water-, then steam-, powered sawmills.) The second, equally important issue is "micro." It's about the each displaced worker. These workers watch while almost everyone in society benefits from the technological progress, but they suffer immensely. In the US, if society takes away your land for the general benefit of society (eminent domain), you must be fairly compensated for your loss. But, if society takes away your _entire_ career for the benefit of society, then society is offended by the idea that you should be compensated for your loss.

I think the main problem is the AI art authorship, someone who uses any AI algorithm to create art is not the author of that art piece, the AI is. The person just tells the AI what he wants, so, that person is the client and the AI is the artist, period! About the lace machinery, I think is not a good analogy, lace machinery does not create, the only point is that like AI they make items for the masses, and right now you have AI USERS winning art competitions (not for the masses) with stuff they did not make and they address themselves as the "authors" or the "artists".

The only thing that I know that AI art can't do (so far at least) is that it can't make fine tuned revisions or create fine tuned compositions. Hard to say how the job market for will change, but I know for a fact AI artists definitely sift out the client's who wouldn't have paid in the first place and wasted an artists time.

I'm not angry that it takes no effort to make AI art, I'm angry because it takes no effort and people use it for personal gain and some even pretend it takes effort. Like saying pressing button to start machine is really intense job

The really crazy thing about this whole AI art thing misses out in the invention of the film camera, people were literally saying the same things when a machine can create a perfect portrait in a few minutes. This didn't eliminate the portrait industry, all it did was make it affordable for everyone to get portraits, and many many people still pay for the experience of a painted portrait over a photo portrait. Art isn't only made for utility, often people who purchase or commission art want it for the emotion and story which you don't get from a machine. It's also not like the pop art industry wasn't already highly mechanised, in my house I have 8 paintings 7 of them are landscapes painted by my great grandfather, and one is a print from the 80s which one person painted and the Sears printed 10s of 1000s of copies of. Most of the art everyday people are purchasing was already produced in someway by machines, now we can just make that mass produced stuff more unique and instead of paying 1 artist to make 8 different prints to sell 1000s and 1000s of prints of corporations can choose a pricey subscription to have a machine do it. This isn't to say we shouldn't worry, cause we should definitely worry, but this change is no different than any of the other changes in pop art production and will likely turn out to be a tool that people use to mass produce new products.

You sort of glazed over the luddites, which makes sense given how they have suffered 200 years of propaganda at the hands of the sort of people they fought against. The mechanization had led to expanded exploitation by factory owners. And as an example of that, what do you think the factory that made your lace is like? How about the fabric and clothing industry in general? Using the 5 stages of grief is a good way to preclude a conversation about resistance, which makes sense from a techno-optimist perspective (that technological advances are in and of themselves a good a technique we've seen that's very popular among Web 3 proponents). This technology will lead to a reduction in the quality of life of the artists who managed to find work in the already very small niches that corporations will now use Dall E and its cousins to fill their jobs. And we need to start asking why people are making these things and who benefits from them BEFORE they get out of hand. Perhaps it is not the biggest deal in this case, but your argument is equally applicable to a lot of places where AI is being developed or already used with much darker consequences.

My biggest problem/worry with it right now is that AI art, going by the fact signatures and watermarks have been found in it, seems to create images in principle in a method not too dissimilar too photobashing (basically a process where you cut, adjust, warp and liquify photos together to make a new image) however this is done by using countless images including art bade by others, pretty much entirely without permission and there is no clear indicator as to how copyright law would apply to it, if at all, possibly being essentially exempt from copyright law, at which point it is quite unfair because artists and all kinds of creatives and industries are limited by copyright, but an AI can bypass an artists right to their work easily by photobashing it here and there for some big company that wants to cheap out with the artist being none the wiser and also in many cases probably making it that a lot of those artists can no longer do it as a job. At that point copyright no longer can be said to protect regular peoples works in the slightest.

The reason it is so dystopian and worrying is that art should be the LAST thing Ai is attempting to "replicate" ... Art is a form of non-verbal communication and sub-conscious self-expression of the artist's soul and honestly it's a way for humans to reach enlightenment, build culture, a set of values, and transform. It's fundamental to what makes us human and how we are able to come together in times of crisis and move forward in a POSITIVE, hopeful, and empowered human direction. If, as a society, we lose our value for art (like we did for handmade lace), than forget it -- society, culture, and humans as we know it will be LOST spiritually, emotionally, mentally even more than we are now. Artists and non-artists alike should be furious! The future should be headed in a direction that allows more people to pursue art and their passions because it's truly transformative for the individual and the viewers of art. The future is instead becoming increasingly a place where capitalists benefit because they turn more employees into machines... open your eyes sheeple. Ai art might look like a fun and interesting tool right now... but it's actually a tool made by corporations FOR CORPORATIONS to replace artists' jobs, and therefore the majority of art we see, and control the narrative through art. Plus, I've already seen Ai talking head videos, Ai writing, Ai music...let's not forget that this is more than digital art at stake... all areas of human creativity are being attacked with shiny-object "convenience" algorithms designed to make us forget why we ever slaved over art in the first place. It's about SELF-expression. Not Corporate-Expression. What will be next? Our voice... and then, our thoughts...they will sell us all sorts of algorithms to make talking and thinking more "convenient" and if we're not careful we'll forget why we ever bothered to have original thoughts in the first place when the algorithm does it so much better, and faster! Don't fall for it. Now is the time to stand firm in our values that ART (and creativity) IS WORTH DEFENDING... Now is the time to ask ourselves what is the future we truly want? WE ARE ALL ARTISTS, visionaries, and designers of this word... and we must design the future to our liking not just blindly grieve and "accept" what's coming down the pipeline. You're not like the luddites for wanting to smash AI art to pieces.... these situations are vastly different. Destroying something can often lead to something better. I see a better future where robots take over menial, repetitive jobs that nobody likes and we all get to be exactly what we wanted to be when we were 5 years old.... artists, astronauts, etc. Perhaps we have UBI (Universal Basic Income) so we can focus on our passions while robots make the world cleaner, safer, and greener. This is a vision of utopia in my mind. But who am I? Just a proud human artist shedding some light on the situation from my perspective. ☺Oh, and ART sure is hell isn't lace. Rant over.

As an IT professional, "certain doom in the face of computerized dystopia" is how I feel about the cloud sometimes.

The handmade actually looks way better and I have no familiarity with lace, before the switch was revealed I thought the machine made was better

I agree for the most part but I think this analogy stops working when you have to put images of an artist into an algorithm so it can copy THEIR style so if you want to commission someone specific now you can get whatever you want in their style without paying them even if you argue for the good of Ai art I still see it as extremely immoral

I work in finance and my job has been apparently "doomed" to the AI for years now. I don't see it happening any time soon, most people don't realize the analytical necessity in these jobs that only the human brain can fulfill. Including art. How will you tell the AI to draw exactly what you envisioned? Like let's say a room full of 35 people each doing their own thing and experiencing different emotions differently? How will you do it exactly as you envisioned it in your mind and not just being offered a suggestion, and I'm talking about even the simplest things here? Same with driving, I've heard that AI will replace drivers in 2020 and ....yeah that ain't happening any time soon. None of these will replace humans until artificial general intelligence is invented, at which point I will die in the streets to fight against its creation if that ever happens, because humanity would be doomed.

As an artist, I have found my experiments with Midjourney give me a feeling of terror and excitement. I overall very much enjoy using it though, and find it addictive to see what this ‘mind’ churns out at a moment’s notice. The one area you didn’t touch on, which I think overshadows the lace analogy, is the implication that this level of advanced Ai will be shaking up every creative medium within the next year or two. I really enjoyed the vid!

As someone who likes art and tries to make art, I certainly have felt some gloom over AI art generators, but I've come up with an analogy to try comprehend this new world: AI art generators can be thought of as calculators, anyone can use them (I can use a calculator or a generator) but it takes someone who understands it to put the pieces together (a mathmatician knows how and when he should use a calculator, an artist will know when to use the generator). Hope somebody here can feel a little less gloomy today, and can have a better tomorrow :)

I think AI generated art should be seen more as a tool. Unlike the whole NFT situation, AI Art has the potential to being a jumping off point for a prompt. Though I do agree that artists are going to get hurt from this. Much like any tool, it can be wielded as a weapon.

I'm an artist and I experimented with AI lately. I you have one specific image in mind, have fun getting that thing to spit out exactly that. It's an art in itself to get good results out of promts - if you have something specific in mind. I had to do about 30 runs to get something and inbetween runs I had to hand paint parts in and bash images together or even feed one of my real drawings to get what I want. (I'm looking for results that look like my style because they are easier to fix and I don't feel bad for using them.) Oh and in the end the dimensions are ... well few pixels and even if you upscale it, at the moment there are most of the times big problems with eyes, hands or details e.g. in armor that are neither symmetical nor make sense if looked at closely because edges fade where they aren't supposed to. And illusion of detail through visual noise is another problem when zomming in for once. Having this makes it really hard to paint over missing parts so fixing all of that is also a seperate art form in my opinion. So well in conclusion: Some style are acievable pretty easy, idea generation is fun and helpful, cool images are pretty easy, but wanting really coherent works that make sense also when zoomed in, you have to get a brush out at the moment P.S.: It has many things in common with photobashing really. Not everything has to be drawn. And if you want something very sppecific in a certain style, you have to feed an own drawing. Digital art was considered cheating as well. Photography was. Times change, that's it. Make the best out of it

Machinery didn't just replace lace, it replaced farmers. (That was around 90% of humans when photographs were invented.) AI won't just replace artists. Personally, my job is not in danger, but I do art in my spare time (and I've sold commissions), and I've loved experimenting with Stable Diffusion.

I think my biggest worry is that if the industry of art shifts over to AI generation, then art jobs will be shifting over to that of Art Directors; using AI Art generation to steer the art direction of projects as a whole, producing all of the images that one artist or teams of artists would take weeks to do. If this happens, you'll never really be drawing or producing the art yourself, and you lose that outlet of creativity, or at least the thing that I actually enjoy about art which is the direct creation itself. If there are no jobs for that in the future, I will need to get another job, which will take time away from all of the time I currently have producing the art. If I spend 8 hours a day telling a program how it needs to create art, then I only have my free time to draw. Before AI really takes over the industry, I hope something like Universal Basic Income actually comes to fruition so I can instead spend my days continuing to create art instead of being forced into programing the AI or directing AI art programs, neither of which is a career I want. If Robots are here to help automate our future at an accelerated pace, giving us the time to do other things, then have that given time leave me to continue drawing and creating, instead of being forced into a career I have no interest in.

I think one of the reasons why people don’t want this to happen largely comes down to a lack of social care. The tools of it can be infinitely helpful. And just like handmade lace. Their will always be a niche for people who want art of any kind to be made by a human over AI. However the change wouldn’t be so scary if countries invested in problem universal care. Be it income, health or transport etc . People rely on work for those things. And with out work you don’t have anything. But also if these needs are met they they too can create or do whatever they like. As it would be their own choice to puersue what they want

It's true that, similar to the Luddites, artists are going through the stages of grief, but at the same time, lace cannot be abused in the way AI image generators can. I've come to accept that AI art cannot be outcompeted. It's gonna be part of our lives. Unfortunately, I do believe that the cons outweigh the pros. Artists have already been struggling with the commodification of their craft, and I think AI is making it much worse, because it takes economic power away from the individual artist and puts into the hands of whichever corporate for-profit entity has the most competetive model of image generation. Art used to be a journey of self-realization for many, now the process is turining into a slot-machine of waiting for that next dopamine kick when your prompt yields a good result. And the journey of doing art is devolving into the brain-melting slog of prompt-generate--pick-repeat until whatever client or corporate entity who hired you to "do art" for 10-12 hours a day is happy with the result. Sometimes the stage of acceptance does not have a happy ending. Sometimes, it's simply a hopeful piece of our soul lost forever, and a bleak reality we must learn to live with. The process of making it as an artist was one of the few remaining professions in capitalism that could promise a sense of fulfillment, and it's sad to see it fade into irrelevance.

Unfortunately, I think your analogy is a very good way of showing how bleak the path of art craftmanship is. Lace is no longer seen as a artform by most, but a cheap manufactured commodity. And the true artform of lacemaking, while still carrying on in small circles of artists who strive to keep it alive. Is a skill for the most part lost to time, and the trampling of industry/corporate endeavours. AI is something to be concerned about, if not just for the immoral way it was conceived (taking of copywritten and non public domain works for its conception.) But the fact that it truly is a product made to replace, what it used to be created with in the first place. It is a technology made just to -be-. It was not really created to solve any problem/need in the industry. Artists can reference, be inspired, and create what they need to be productive already. AI is not a tool, it is a pre-packaged "ask all" machine. And so, AI is in fact creating the problem, that it never was there to solve in the first place (making artists, especially working artists lives harder, not better. In a already struggling industry.)

Wow this just felt condescending. I really liked your videos but it felt like you went in with a conclusion (progress is progress and artist are just whining) and found the douchiest way to talk down to people about it.

long ago I was a member of the Society For Creative Anachronism (a medieval re-creation group) and there was a sub-group called Arachne’s Guild (or possibly the Guild of Arachne… memory fades over the decades). what they did was hand-make lace via a process called *tatting*. the results weren’t quite as diaphanous as your Chinese made sample, and tatting uses more loops and tiny knots, but it was lace nonetheless.

The metaphor's not perfect, and it's not new. I think everyone and their grandmother have pointed to the examples of past technological advancements that made people lose their jobs the moment AI was mentioned. And it completely misses the mark. AI making art isn't just making millions of people worthless. It amputates if not the possibility, then the need for skillful expression through art. It eradicates not a labor force but an important caste of humanity that's been around ever since the first person painted something on their face or spit paint onto their hand placed on a cave wall. AI giving greater control to corporations and taking power away from artists who'll just become homeless people I guess, is just one small aside to all this mess that AI is going to cause. If you are naive you might think that it's the start of the golden age where everyone will have free healthcare - because AI will do it. And we won't have to work at all - because AI will do it. But why would the people in power keep you around then? Without something to offer, you are not worth the resources you consume. Why would you be given that if someone holding an AI patent or copyright will need his twenty-seventh mansion?

I think that my main issue with this analogy is that while lacing is pretty specific by the amount of limitations this artform has, digital illustration is just to broad to for this analogy to work. Just a quick look at a website like deviant art will show you the sheer amount of differences between artworks, there are some really good artist, some bad artists, some like to draw adult content, some like to draw... Really... Really messed up adult content, some artist have a cute art style, realistic artstyle... Etc... Etc.. The point I want to make is that, though AI art will inevitably reach a point we're it's able to replicate human art, I think even then, people just like the human error behind some of regular art, that human error that artist like to call impressionism, where the artist can leave certain errors deliberately just to push an idea or concept forward... And if there is any digital artist reading this, please remember that AI is not a replacement, maybe in the future it'll be, but for now, AI is a tool, not only that, it's the most powerful tool you could even dream of for artist...

i find it hard to be optimistic about this. i spent all of my teenage years trying to get good at art. paying a bunch of money for education and equipment, practicing at least 3h everyday and now my skills obsolete before i even got a chance to really use it...

I don't like ai, because I love drawing. And if I can't manage to get a job with art I will be stuck with a boring job, and won't have that much time doing what I love. I won't be improving as much, because I will have another job that is not art. And that is the sad reality

People live in the now not in the nebulous future. I'm sure it would have brought no satisfaction to those lace workers that got their lives destroyed by automation, that down the road some guy in the future would get to purchase lace at $6 or that the very thing that destroyed their lives would bring about even more automation. They would have hated computers at first sight. If there's anything we should learn is that in the nineteenth century, society failed in addressing the suffering of workers displaced by automation and that was a cause for profound societal upheaval, which this video glosses over without a care. I think we have to take into consideration that so called "disruption" usually gets paid by workers losing wages, while Capitalists are the winners by getting increasingly richer. While this situation keeps on going, there is no justice in automation and we just plant the seeds for an ever more distopian future.

I just saw somebody making "ai art" using recently deceased Kim Jung Gi artwork as a dataset. They say this is a hommage... I don't know about you but this is making me sick.

Here's my problem with AI art: what's stopping this technology from being applied to generating feature films or writing books that people actually like to watch and read. Because computers basically have everything at their disposal, it's almost like human creativity can't compete. You'll have a lot of people unable to share their voices because AI art can basically do anything, which kinda destroys the fundamentals of art. As someone who likes to write and create and explore ideas, I think it would be a great loss to have AI take over that

There is a lovely (this will turn into a pun) connection to computers and lace that doesn't belong in this video, but I can't help but mention. Thanks to Charles Babbage's difference engine, using loom-weaving technology, the world's first software was created by... drumroll please... Ada Lovelace.

I think that AI is useful in really quick corporate graphic design, but i think for the most part, Art's need for human soul and time put into it is crucial. In art it depicts ideas and feelings and stories. For me, I want to put in the time to hone my craft and create the beauty inside of my mind. Think about the people that commission paintings of their family members or pets. They have photos and filters they can use, sure. But there's something important to people to have someone put in the time and care to bring their beloved onto a digital or physical image in whatever tool the artist uses. This heart and care and time makes the thing important and beautiful.

I'm both a computer scientist and an artist. I was carpooling with a friend across state and the conversation turned to AI art and I tried to explain my simultaneous excitement over how cool the technology is and my real concerns with art as an industry. He didn't quite understand my point and so it died off, but the last thing I said was I predicted that it's going to implode and become a massive legal shit show, and very soon. I'm on the lucky side of things. My day job is furthering the development of computers and will probably not go away for a while. But I can't help but feel melancholy about the whole thing, in spite of how passionate I am about Computers.

I kinda think the 'Depression' stage is going to be already very familiar to anyone who majors in a fine arts field ... with or without AI disruption.

My only thoughts for this certain topic is, A.I should just stop touching with human entertainment, yes, IT should stop. What if one day when A.I continually sucks all of the entertainment field like animation, fashion, music, literature, movies, etc., The exciting and fun part about making art is the work and effort put behind it. What's even the point of entertainment anymore if it can all just be generated in mere second by an A.I, would be a depressing future amiright?.

The analogy works, but only up to a point. To see this I think it helps to look at the before and after for both. Yes looms put lacemakers and weavers out of work, but the mills allowed thousands of more people to go to work, and while mill jobs weren't great, they were steady non agrarian incomes for millions that eventually led to better pay, better education, and higher quality goods, and a society with a middle class bulge. Commercial art has a barrier to entry and use, but it's still lower than ever and supporting more people than ever as new media opens up. Art is not a niche profession with obscure knowledge handed down slowly. There's an entire industry of education and support tools around it. However AI Art doesn't immediately create a new way for people to be paid for a new version of the service. As the tools improve it actively seeks to cut out the middle (the artist) in favor of a way for a client to just state what they want and get it in a form suitable for audience consumption. The creation of art (even for commercial use) is one of those spiritually fulfilling kinds of jobs we held up as something people would be able to do instead, once AI and robots took over the boring manual and clerical labor work. But now, AI can learn to do it all, so what happens when people stop creating design software for humans to use or building tablets to draw on? Or schools cut back even further on arts education? Sorry, I really dispute the notion that the AI wave is just like past waves of innovative labor disruption. It isn't and we have to be very careful of that.

Art is getting a lot of attention right now, but it won’t be the only occupation eliminated by AI. ALL OCCUPATIONS will be eliminated. AI will be able to do everything better than any person. We need to prepare for this inevitability and we need to prepare now. If we wait ten years, the entire economy will collapse.

The Ai, as it is now, is really good at composing "emotional" art, but it's all pretty abstract, with textures and abstract patterns making it look good. As soon as you zoom in on details you see things that look off. Let's say you make illustrations for a book and you ask it to draw a mountain with a castle on it. Sure, the first image will look OK and you use it. But then you want another picture of that SAME castle from a different angle. And then you want an interior that could fit inside. Well, it's not going to be able to do that, because that first castle was just random, it was never a complete, thought out concept of a castle.

I do think that people are kinda directing their anger at the wrong thing. Ai isn't the problem,.. *drumroll*... capitalism is (shocker).. Ai that makes art is not a problem in itself, art isn't a limited thing, Ai making art won't stop a human from doing it. The true problem is artists not being able to make a living and therfore not being able to make as much/any art. In a perfect world Ai could create art for the people who want it and humans could also draw if they want to do that. These aren't naturally exclusive, they are artificially made so.

I'm an artist and this whole AI thing is really complex to decipher in the 'who's the author' category. The more interesting question is this: AI gets bits and pieces from other sourced pictures, right? They have a gazillion billion references from which they 'draw'. So, shouldn't those people get the credit and recognition, too? It's not as easy as I did You did. I'm still torn on the issue but the more I use these AI's the more I realize they're super dumb and generate 'ideas' that you yourself need to edit/finish, so it's like... a glorified pinterest. Does using photoshop not make you an artist or a photographer? This is the same thing, just a bit more advanced. Plus it's easy for you to talk, it's not taking your job.

video summary: sorry artists, the only thing we value is product. Its a win for capitalism, so buck up kiddos. that's the ultimate good, actually!

No one in any of these AI-generated imagery videos I've seen takes into consideration the human spirit or soul - or is it that you all believe we have none, and therefore are equal to machines? I agree with Leonardo on this point - “Where the spirit does not work with the hand, there is no art. - Leonardo Da Vinci

I find it incredibly funny that most people don't realize AI generated art has zero reason to stop with illustrations. There is AI generated music, there are videos based on AI generated prompts, there are short stories and limericks written by AIs, the list probably goes on. True, most of these are at best funny, at worst nonsensical. Yet. Now many people do not really care for illustrators as much as they care for their favorite animated series. They do not generally care as much for composers as they care for the people singing their favorite songs, they do not care as much for writers as they care for the actors acting out the lines. Now I know this is not universal, also it would be unfair to say that this part is more important than that in a creative process, but we humans tend to like and appreciate artists more who are "visible" and "seen". But deepfakes and similar technologies are getting better too. So my question is, how would we feel, how would we react, when the more prominent, the more generally liked, the more generally seen, the crowd favorites would start to lose their jobs over AIs? Would we push back driven by our sentimentalism or would we slip into a more AI centric entertainment era where watching a human based movie becomes the equivalent of drinking hand crafted beer nowadays? Or will that never happen because we won't have the processing power? Will we one day mass produce quantum computers where new shows and movies require only a few prompts? Yeah, sure, plenty of lace in this house. I can live without lace just fine. But my books... Better keep away from my books.

some thoughts as an artist: the analogy of lace works on a surface level, but it leaves out a large amount of the nuance, and the nuance it leaves out is distinctly biased in favor of AI. I would have loved to see this video made with more discussion from the side of the artists, because its clear as an architect and professor, you see things in a different way than the people who draw, paint, and illustrate every day. you're on the outside looking in, so its very easy for you to preach acceptance. its not your life that is being disrupted. It's straight up disrespectful to take the "lol you're a luddite, luddites bad" approach. and with the analogy of the stages of grief, i would like to remind you that nothing can be done when we have lost a loved one. the dead dont return to us. but action CAN be taken to change the way these generators are able to be used, choices can be made on how they are developed, or if they are developed at all. and software can always be deleted. it is another analogy being used to make an unjustified claim, that the future you want us to accept is as inevitable as death. it is not. No one considered lace to be "media" the way we see illustration as media. no matter how much sweat and creativity a lacemaker puts into an individual work, the majority of lace works are just repeating patterns. while it is definitely art, it has very limited grounds for artistic expression. when artists want to say something, or people want to see what an artist has to say, they never went to a lace gallery. they went to see illustrations. and lace workers as a whole do a different kind of labor than an illustrator as a result. they repeat the same pattern again and again, the mastery of their craft shown in how perfectly they can make their lace. this sort of craft is exactly what a machine excels at, which is why lace was automated well before illustration could be. what this means, as a whole, is that the analogy of lace assumes that the best illustration is the most perfect, or the most realistic, that it most directly represents the prompt you type in to the machine. that is simply not true. another thing your video as a whole fails to explore, is whether or not artists should be replaced. it is clear that they can be, but that isnt the whole story, is it? our society is in no small part shaped by art. that is why architects like yourself have always argued your work is art. you recognize the affect art has on the world, and want to be recognized as contributors to that affect. and architects do deserve that recognition. but how will the world change when the people doing the artistic efforts arent people at all? when the vast majority of images we see were generated by prompts, prompts written by whoever was hired to type them out, on an image generator accessible only to Disney or CNN or whatever megacorp buys the software of the most cutting edge image generator? already, corporations have incredible control over our media as a whole, and the automation of artistic fields threatens to increase that control. right now, in its infant stage, anyone can generate a few images for free. and hundreds for just a few dollars. but these images are limited in scope, you cant fine tune them, send them for revisions, anything like that. if you think those extra features will be just as accessible, that the improvements will be handed out democratically, you are living in a different world than the rest of us. and we will be living in a very different world than today in a decades time.

Yeah....I’m not optimistic at all. Honestly considering getting back into traditional art since ai at least can’t recreate stuff outside a computer....yet :/

This analogy breaks down in a few places. I'm sure there were some people who made lace for the enjoyment of making lace however I can't imagine it was the majority but when it comes to art the people get into art are the people who love making it and all the hobbyists who love making art who don't get paid for it also enjoy the process of making it it's not just about the finished product but these AI programs are all about the finished product it's not about the process that's been automated. And while the cat may be out of the bag so to speak and they're maybe no turning back. You can't avoid the fact that these programs are trained on people's work and their capabilities are determined by the images they're trained on with explicit goal of reproducing images that copy elements from other people's art. I don't really care if the law currently does or doesn't have a way to deal with this, it's still unethical. In fact the owner of stable diffusion commented on the fact that these images are just scraped from the internet they're not really curated because that would be a lot of work but artists put in a lot of work to get good enough to make a living from it but they couldn't be bothered to put in the work to make sure that they're not stealing for people. I don't think it's unreasonable to be angry about that. They are making bank and they are going to hurt a lot of people Don't be fooled by the open source aspect of stable diffusion they are making bank.

I understand where you are coming from but AI is not changing markets, its eliminating them. You still need to pay for lace to be produced by a machine, i assume there isnt an AI that generates the lace patterns, so a pattern designer is getting paid. The lace machine is just cutting the cost and time of producing the lace. AI is making it FREE to "generate art". People are not involved other than the prompts but even that can be automated to some degree. AI is making art without the need for anyone being paid at all, that is not a market. The ethical breach of AI is clear, it would not be able to produce any image without existing images being stolen from current and dead artists. So its better to be a lace machine operator because you can still make money from designing the pattern and manufacturing the end product.

Interesting analogy Phil! I'm trying to avoid the topic of AI on my channel lest I burn out my subscribers, but it's a super interesting question of how it will change our visual culutre. I think the really fun stuff will be how it enables uses we just can't afford the time-cost of producing images manually for. Like how we use lace in a different way now than when it was rare and handmade, I think our visual culture will be richer and weirder with these tools for sure!

Using a string of words to generate a picture doesn't make you an artist anymore than using Google search makes you a scholar. As someone who desperately want's to create art for a living, but has never had the confidence to try, this just makes me feel that I have even less of a chance.

I know that plenty of people won't care for AI art because they like art because it is communication between audience and artist. However, I'm specifically worried about AI being able to use other artists' work to make copies without any compensation.

The big flaw in this metaphor is the fact that society treats lacework and fine arts differently. People don't go to galleries to see lacework, people don't revere lacework artisans the way they revere painters. They have different places in the heart of humanity

I'm a programmer, and suck at art, but love it, appreciate it, and strangely find more inspiration in the visual arts than my own craft. I spoke with 2 of my artist friends a month ago about this and they had shocking responses. I was outraged at their work being used as training data. One pointed out to me that he paints cars and that he had nothing to do with designing them, nor creating them, but he still profited by painting pictures of them. Another said her customers wouldn't be interested in the AI-generated art. I'm a customer of hers and she's right. I'm more upset than they are, especially about not being credited or even asking if their work can be used. Oh, and I LOVE this channel Phil... you make fantastic videos.

Today I learned: Writers aren't artists, because all they do is type experience prompts into a document and rely on other people to create the imagery for them.

To be fair, the commission art industry is ROUGH. Most people don’t want to pay for something that they’re only gonna use once or twice, and so don’t see a lot of value from the work that the artists put in, and thus most of them aren’t able to sustain themselves from just their art. It’s gonna be bad for those left in the industry, but for others, maybe this is the final thing that’s gonna spare them the pain of living the life of a commission artist

Ai makers wants to sit at the same table as artist who spent years learning their craft. What they really are is dogs sitting under it begging for recognition. It's pathetic.

I'm less optimistic, as both an artist and a compsci student. Beyond just the fact that people will lose their jobs, AI art is not simply an automation of the process of making art, but also a stripping of the thought process that goes into making art. AI art can by definition not truly invent anything new, it can only reproduce the most common patterns it has been fed. An AI art piece cannot contain themes or intent beyond an averaged amalgamation of it's data set. And while I am not really one for abstract or overly thinkpiece-art, I do think that the thought process is an integral part of creativity. This is something AI cannot emulate and is uniquely human. However, I don't think that will stop the industry from using AI art as a cheap alternative, especially if they just need something quick, something generic that will fit "good enough". Does it make pretty pictures? Sure. But it won't make good art, ethically or simply as an art form. Additionally, while it can recreate an artists style, most of the time the data sets are not used with permission of the artists. That comes quite close to art theft, kind of adjacent to "tracing" (drawing over anothers work, usually stealing a certain pose composition and design features), which again generally means there's no original thought behind it. Humans too, to some extent, create art by remixing their experiences, but it is tempered with meaning, thought and understanding. AI is too often treated as a cure-all. There are some developements I am excited for in regards to it, but this is not one of them. From a technical standpoint, it is fascinating, from an artistic, it's not viable.

I don’t think AI will ever be able to replace artists anymore than stock pictures have replaced photographers. In fact, AI is good news for everybody - artists finally have a polite way to get rid of “customers” who want free art - just use the AI :)

People who like creating art will continue doing so. The real question is how is market going to balance that out. Are they going to be able to live off their art, if they do it for living that is because there are incredibly good artists who just do it as hobby.

Your metaphor is ultimately flawed. Lace is Humanity, that's what we are replacing with AI. It is not only about art jobs at this point, but all kinds of different creative work and be assured that robots are getting there too. Seen an interview here on the channel of Proko with a developer of AI and he estimated that in like 10-15 years maximum we will have general artificial intelligence that can develop itself and replace anybody in any job. But our societies are just not ready to solve the financial and social issues that will come with that... So yeah, it is time that you have your five stages of Humanity... Your video is just shortsighted.

Hypothetical situation: If I take a photo, then ask AI to make it as similar as possible to a public domain image of a medieval painting, can the art be used comercially ?

I think you dismiss the issue of AI being trained on people's art unacceptably lightly to suit your narrative. That is not just an ethical issue. If you obliterate the art scene the AI will literally have nothing more to copy from and evolve. Anything cool the AI generates is only possible, because of literally millions of pieces of highly researched and trained human art labor. Art labor is already dismissed a lot these days by casual consumers and unregulated AI is an extremely alarming tool for corporations to monetize labor of individual artists and sell it back to them as an AI driven tool that will become mandatory most likely moving forward. The value of Dall-E for artistic work WITHOUT the datasets used for training is literally zero and the very nature of how the technology operates means it's stitching the outputs together out of people's art.

Am I first? I’m an artist and have access to dale 2 and it’s amazing. Especially for gaining ideas and thoughts about art. I do feel mid to low level artists are in for a rude awakening

I guess as long as tech can cannibalize original art to make these horrid amalgamations this whole thing might work. More likely we'll just kill original art and have a bunch of AI crap generated from old recycled work. Total stagnation. Is Hollywood employing AI writers, might explain a few things....

I love that the idea is that this will simplify all art considering that like lace it’s just a small part of fashion. Like all art isn’t the same. Like background artist character designers storyboard artist these are jobs which aren’t going away and that AI cannot replace. Like This is just another tool that is copying off what we as artist have always done. Like we can tell the difference between simple and stiff animation versus something like beauty and the beast for example. To say that computer-generated images are going to be the end of art careers is like saying that photography killed art. We all know that isn’t true and things change and you know what we still have physical paintings. Honestly this whole video felt very condescending.

I love how this story about how lace went from a highly valued artform to a cheap commodity nobody cares about, while simultaneously costing a ton of jobs, is your perfect metaphor about how we SHOULDN'T be worried about AI art.

This is just the standard narrative of innovation -> disruption -> new economic opportunities - down to the dismissive mention of the luddites - but with "5 stages of grief" thrown in. Feels pretty basic. At the end of the day, Lace was a single industry dealing with a single type of consumer good. Not only is art a much bigger and more wide ranging industry, AI itself can be trained to do just about anything - its a much more far reaching change. And it's not just a quantitative difference. Art is one of those things we like to think as deeply and uniquely human, so there are anxieties related to that. You could say the same types of anxieties played out w/r/t photography and painting, computers and chess, etc. If that was your approach with this video, that'd at least be interesting. But the "disruption may be scary, but it will lead to better and cheaper consumer goods and a wealthier society" is the most basic, least interesting angle to approach this issue with.

The automobile and airplane revolution happened at the same time. There are photos available of New York City streets in 1920 vs 1930. Many thousands of horse stable and ferrier jobs pretty much evaporated in a decade. Like the luddites, there were assaults on automobiles, but the tide could not be stemmed. From 1903 (the first flight of the Wright flyer) to Apollo 11 was only 66 years. This is hard to impress on my students. The rate of change is unprecedented in human history. The technology revolution did the same. Then the computer revolution. The robotics revolution (which began replacing menial repetitive action jobs) the information revolution (that is widespread use of the internet). The rate of change is very fast and it's hard for humanity to wrap it's head around. So we devolve into tropes about the "good old days" and "bringing manufacturing jobs back." I love your channel BTW

As an illustrator, I see AI as a tool for art and use it as such. But, I despise the current landscape where these generators are used to create full pieces that are riddled with copyright issues that the user can't trace. I would not have a problem if it was just for personal use, but how the system is currently poses too much of a risk of copyright violation when used or sold.

Both of the following statements are true: 1. Massive technological advancements often improve society overall in many ways. 2. The skilled workers that the new technology replaces suffer. (1) They're out of work, and (2) they may not have skills to do something else because they've specialized in what they're experts at, which they can't do professionally anymore and which may not translate to another line of work. "But they can just learn new skills." Yes, they can. But a 45-year-old professional artist with a family and a mortgage isn't in a good position to just go back to college to learn accounting or engineering. It is genuinely not fun to be the one that technology replaces. There's also secondary effects. Art supply companies are probably going to take a big hit. Art conventions. Art schools. Art teachers. Those people will lose their jobs too. Some have transferable skills; others not so much. I'm a UX designer, and while AI can't yet do what I do, some day it probably will. The only job that might be safe is owning an AI or robotics company. Even then, the competition will be fierce.

as an artist i'm not too worried. China didn't replace high end jewelry, the camera didn't replace paintings. but yeah, most stock/commercial art is garbage rn because the pay is way too low. so that def gets replaced.

HTML hand coders were like the lace makers of the 1990ies till 2004. A craft that will mostly disappear. Template genrators and CMSes do the rest right now.

Comic Artist here: AI Generated art is kind'a neat in that it will be good for taking care of Grunt work. As the technology advances, I hope one day to have complex backgrounds done for me in my style so I can focus on the characters and placement. Right now, it's not anything special. AI Art, right now, is a jumble of many different styles. It's Style that makes an artist, not technique.

The AI generating art isn't even good AI: It's just throwing lots of neurons at a pattern matcher. Make it big enough, and even a simple model starts churning out semi-useful stuff. I say semi-useful, because when they tried using it to write code, they got garbage back. Maybe a few million more neurons... This comparative neuron count is an interesting gauge in itself. Prior to this, most AI used a few hundred at most. So if 10^5 can generate/sort art, how many can mimic the human brain, which has 8×10^10 neurons, BTW. It's likely artificial neurons are not as powerful as biological ones, so comparisons are tricky. Additionally, even with on-demand cloud services supplying extra neurons, there are limits (related to matrix algebra and processing power/time) the current model is running into. Amusingly, there is an automated service which manages AI, and which had to emulate middle management to do it. Guess how many neurons that took? None! This confirms everything I suspected about middle management. The comparison with lace break down though, when you look at how AI expands. It isn't like a machine replacing human labour, so humans can do more creative stuff: It's a machine replacing creative humans. That may sound bad, but what it effectively means is that we get billions of extra creative minds helping us solve problems, without having to increase the human population to do so. Some say this will lead to economic growth/capability tending to infinity, ie an economic singularity. Much of this is summarised from other videos out there - but not all.

I watched this video and found the analogy with lace to be apt however I feel this video’s view on the value of ai art to be greatly economical. While I agree this technology will allow more people to purchase art it must be questioned if art becoming cheaper is the only thing that matters. I feel as if this growth obsessed mindset ignores how this will negatively affect many people. The video seems to take the view of a consumer and owner without giving much credence to the people who work in this feild. They will not just loose a job but a lively hood and skills. Some people in the comments are comparing this to photography in the way that it increased creativity instead of limiting it. I would disagree with this assessment because photography has a human hand in its creation. There needed to be photographers, developers, editors, and printers; but ai only needs the consumer to type in a command to receive an image. This does not just do away with people who once made these designs, but also separate us further for what has been made. The “art” the ai has created is only a simulation of something else. It cannot change or add depth to an image. It lacks creativity in all it aspects except for the sentence that prompted its creation. Us as society have chased efficiency over everything else. I am not saying that we need to limit the creation of new technologies, however so much of the depth we once had has been left for shallow creation. The lace, for example, was the product of much hard work and skill. The designs and materials held a connection to the person or persons who created it. That is was made it so valuable throughout history. Now, lace has lost much of its value due to its “cheapification”. He even made a point of this by showing how most of us don’t care whether lace is hand made or machine made. That is not a good thing. It shows how chasing cheapness devalues people by turning them into a means just to produce a monetarily viable creation. Additionally, the harm caused by these ai taking art into their algorithms just to create their own “art” glosses over how horrible this is. It steals people’s creations just so it can replace them. It is deeply immoral that these people are not being at least compensated for the loss they will suffer when these algorithms take over their work. Lastly, I found it funny that the expense of art was used as a justification to industrialize it. If one wishes to lower the cost of art they could make it easier for art to be created. Art can be so expensive to make because it takes up so much time that could be spent doing a more economically“productive ” actions. If we provided people the time to make and create without financially punishing than for it then maybe art could be more accessible. Instead, we will further devalue art by comparing it to the “efficient ai art.” Because why pay for someone to make an image if you can spend two seconds typing in what you want. Ultimately, if we keep pushing for efficiency and growth over human en betterment then we will be left to be mere wallets that posses money to be spent on product for the sake of spending.

Amusingly, some of those generated images don't communicate the prompts well at all. Like "person desperately bargaining for lace", in particular. And that was supposed to be Queen Elizabeth? OK. I know it will only get better, but it's still a bit too random right now. Sure, it will massively impact the market for illustrators and concept artists and such. Eventually it will be everywhere, especially once copyright laws disintegrate, which this will probably hasten. In what is left of my lifetime, I expect some people will still value human-made art, if only because they know that a thinking, feeling person actually made all the decisions that went into it. There will be a niche for it, at least. . Back to lace. Until now, people were still coming up with the designs for the lace patterns, but were turning over the physical labor of making those patterns into actual lace to the machines. Now, they can just let AI come up with the designs, I suppose. Fine. Once every creative impulse is turned over to AI, we can stop expressing ourselves (because you know AI is creating prompts too, so that will also be taken over), and as long as people's physical needs are taken care of by AI for free, we can all just sit around like the blob people in WALL-E, and live vacuous lives. Sure, why not? I know, I know. Society will evolve in ways I probably can't even begin to imagine. Even if all entertainment and aesthetics can be taken over by AI at some point, people will still want to express themselves, and giving too much control over that expression to AI diminishes that expression, in my opinion. Maybe if AI can actually ever become sentient (how would we ever be able to be sure, though?) things will change yet again. (I've painted things you people wouldn't believe...) I am rambling. I know. . . . Or was this all written by an AI? Am I an AI? How can I be sure? ;-)

Ai-generated art is not a tool for an artist, it replaces the artist to a big extent. Because what's the difference between an artist doing commission or concept art, and an AI which you just feed a short prompt with the same information as you would have given the artist when commissioning? There is none, except that one costs no wages, and it doesn't take min 10 -100 hours to create one picture, but can generate hundreds of images within a few minutes. One can say that the AI works are not perfect and that's why artists probably still get commissions to improve them, but that's a drop in the bucket. Most AI-generated art is already on a usable level and does not need more improvement for its purpose. Of course, one can say that the art of artists will not die out because it has a certain aura when done by a human, but that only applies to the top 0.0001% of all artists who already have a big name. However, most can barely make ends meet with commissions already, which are mostly based on the material cost and work time... ------- Some say good metaphors are cameras to art, or digital cameras to analog cameras. But If you go to the very beginning, before the invention of the camera, the only paid commissions were mainly drawn portraits, but even richer families could usually only afford such a portrait once in their life. So the demand was low and only a certain demographic of people had access to it. After that came the first cameras and now the middle class could afford portraits, only as photos. But it was still quite exclusive if you wanted a good one. Some drawn portraits have gone down, but overall as the demographic of people was pretty different, they weren't really out of the window. And as photos got better, more people wanted also drawn Portraits, which could be done much faster, cheaper and better than ever before because now photos could be the reference instead of sitting as reference for hours. And drawn art hasn't really declined, only the genre and the medium changed! From oil paintings to acyl painting to print art (e.g., Andy Warhol) to digital art, they changed over and over again, but they never really killed the other because just like art photographers, they all had different clientele. And even professionally shot photos have only partially gone down after digital cameras / mobile phone cameras have popped up. Because not only did many professionals Photographer pick up new skills to work with digital cameras, as it was but a pretty similar tool just with less material cost. Nonprofessional Digital cameras were again a new demographic of people who only partially overlap with the previous clients of the professionals who photographed. Because the customers of the widespread digital cameras/ mobile phone cameras are mainly souvenir/memory photos, there was never a time when a professional photographer accompanied you on a whole trip or actively took photos in your apartment as a memory souvenir over a longer time… From the beginning, professional photos have been in demand, especially from magazines and newspapers, but the demand for professionally shot photos has not gone down but has only increased with websites and online presence. And professionally shot family-, baby- or wedding photos, etc. So even though they affected each other to some extent, they never replaced each other really, as the clientele and demographics were often different and only some overlaps happened. The tools somewhat changed to be used easier, it did not really replace the professionals which worked in these branches. ------ So these metaphors/comparisons aren't really, so I can only agree with the video, as it really found the perfect metaphor for AI Art!