No, this is not a Black Mirror episode.
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That’s fair; the person I first responded to seemed to be discussing the “fine art” part.
How worried are you personally about these more advanced machine learning tools? Just a month or so ago I was playing a Pathfinder (rpg) video game and didn’t care or any of the built-in avatar images, so I hopped onto one of the websites that make an image based on a text prompt to make me an image that matched my character and it took a few times to get the right wording but in the end I got a pretty good image out of it. I vaguely know how it works. (vaguely is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence) and it still seemed kind of like magic.
Copyright needs reforms, it’s broken as fuck.
The music and film industry have been exploiting this for decades and changing the entire model to a system where artists don’t hold copyrights or get compensated for their work, content or (soon) bodies. Art does not enter the public domain anymore. Greed is all there is.
Burn it all down.
Copyright law? Oh you mean Disney Protection Law?
A typical point that I severely miss from most discussions about AI is what it means for future artists or, in this case, future actors. And therefore what it means for us as a society.
By taking the art from the artists, regardless of whether it’s an actor, illustrator, author, etc…, the way it is done currently, we will see much fewer people who will even try to learn these skills, or share them. At some point there won’t be anything new anymore.
Maybe I’m overlooking something, but isn’t the actual change that doing these things will no longer be a viable way to earn a living?
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but isn’t the artistic field already a lottery when it comes to making a living doing it? Maybe I have the wrong impression, but I feel like if “I very likely won’t be able to make a living doing this” actually discouraged new art from getting created, it already would be doing that.
Only if you’re looking at the very top of the profession, like people who hit it big as stars. There are a lot of other levels of employment and success short of Banksy or Beeple level.
My hope is that deep-faking tech might actually help lower levels of the profession, even if it’s at the expense of those at the top who get huge amounts of money because of how famous their face is.
Imho, Studios don’t even need to copy a famous actor’s face… just create a face of a person who doesn’t exist and make it into a new famous character by stamping it into a good (even if not top famous) actor.
That’s true, it’s entirely uneccessary for people like Tom cruise to exist.
So far it looks like that’s not their plan, though, with the offer to digitize extras for a one-time payment of $200. So they’ll just entirely replace extras forever with AI for what they’d normally make for 2-3 days of shooting.
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No. Before you could actually live (albeit barely) on being a designer or an illustrator, small gig actor or author for articles, musician for jingles, etc… Even when you weren’t the best and famous already. Artists are already seeing this slipping away and with further advances in AI you really do need to be one of the already famous people to do these types of art as a viable job.
That’s the problem - it take a lot of practice and experience to get really good at graphic design or illustration. When people are paying you to do it, you can afford to do it all day. If not, you need to spend the majority of your time doing something else, so it takes longer to advance in skill. I see this in my own field with hobbyists/people who do art on the side vs people who do it full time.
Most artists can’t earn their entire livelihood by their craft alone. Even those considered good, in most cases, need a main job.
But even the little money you make from your art can at least pay for art supplies (which are very expensive). Learning to be a good in your craft costs an enormous amount of patience, time and money as well. With no money at all to be made out of it, no commissions, and your work immediately flowing into the AI pipeline, new artists will be further discouraged from even trying to hone that craft.
You may very well be right on the money here, but I find it at least plausible that a market for “human-made” art becomes a thing if computer-made art becomes a thing.
It will only be rich people who can afford to do that, then. It won’t be a job anymore and even less likely to be a profitable endeavour for the many who can’t just pour all their time and money into a hobby just to become that good at it one day.
That’s not necessarily true. Certainly plausible, but just as plausible as it working out like “cage free” eggs, where a perceived value pushes the market into a direction that it wouldn’t go for purely financial reasons.
It will mean that not only do you need to compete with your peers, you’ll need to compete forever with all the best talent that has ever worked.
And those talents, at a certain point, will cost less. They’ll be able to do more for less money because they’ll be on to other things or dead, and thus are handling their living (or not) expenses differently. While you’ll still need an apartment near the studios and food to survive.
There’s no real up side for 99.99% of people. The only ones who will make any real money from these changes are the executives and producers.
I do not disagree with anything you said.
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These are my thoughts exactly as well. I find it especially infuriating how in some discussions and articles about AI people try to spin a tale of artists being these allegedly elitist “bourgeois” individuals. And with AI now supposedly “the little man” can finally unfold their creative potential. In truth I suspect it’s more the other way around.
It looks to me like the only kinds of people who could afford to get into my line of work in the future are people with rich parents or something
Someone from a not so well-off background but with dedication and grit was more likely to get their feet into illustration, für example, then they are now.
Instead people who already probably come from a privileged background (PC, technical knowledge, money to pay for AI credits) can just swarm the market without needing to dedicate much time at all.
I saw a comment on reddit a while back on the topic that I thought really hit the nail on the head in terms of the typical discourse I keep seeing on AI with respect to art and other creative work
“If they [tech bros] don’t value art that’s fine, but it’s sad that people who don’t value art are the ones who think they should be deciding what direction art goes in.”
We are doing all the AI thing wrong. We were supposed to be replacing hard repetitive manual work with technology. Not replace the art creation.
puts on Obi-Wan’s beard
“Technology, you were the Chosen One! It was said that you would destroy the need for work, not join them! Let us focus on culture and enlightment, not leave us with the hard manual work!”
The problem is that replacing art is an entirely software task. You don’t have to figure out a robotics issue for actual manual labor to be done. And for white collar work, art doesn’t have an objectively correct finishing point, spreadsheets and reports do.
We were supposed to be replacing hard repetitive manual work with technology.
That already happened, for the most part, 30-40 years ago in manufacturing and industrial applications. Factories employ a fraction of people they did before the 80s.
There is still a lot of hard manual (and underpaid) work left that AI and robotics sadly did not replace. Instead it seems to go for the jobs some people actually might enjoy first.
I feel online platforms like the Fediverse are a conceivably bad place to discuss this, though. Because I assume a lot of people here do work in technical jobs they often enjoy at least a bit.
But a huge chunk of people works in delivery, in warehouses, at assembly lines, as cleaners, in construction, the not so nice parts of elderly care, etc. etc.
Factories employ a fraction of people they did before the 80s.
Depends on the industry. Automobiles? Yeah, that has been largely automated. Trailers? The most common trailer brands I can think of are still built manually.
CNC machines still need operators, and those operators are still doing manual labor. An entire factory only needs one guy on a computer to manage all the programing those CNC machines need. Everything else is about making sure the material is correctly positioned and the machine is working correctly.
Manufacturing isn’t nearly as automated as you might think. Not as many industries have adopted the rote programing robotic arms that you’re imagining from some Ford production line.
Plus factories and industrial are only a fraction of the manual labor world. Agriculture, construction, forestry, trades, all sorts manual labor jobs exist that have nothing to do with factories. And that’s not even counting other unskilled labor fields like the service industry.
Don’t worry, this is only a problem until they can fully generate actors from scratch. It’s just a matter of time.
So much this, creating actor’s looks and personality from scratch to fit the demographics is an Hollywood exec wet dream.
“I’m thinking, muscular, gruff looking white man who loves his kids”.
Years ago a music studio generated an Asian pop artist. (I can’t provide details about it because when I web-search for it I get a hundred results telling me how I can do the same thing myself.)
It’s already been done, it’s _being _done now, and we’re not far away from it being relatively undetectable.The little secret of AI is that it can’t generate shit from scratch. It relies on a large and diverse training dataset in order to make anything at all.
To put it in perspective they want to have a background actor on set for one day, scan them, then use that forever and not just for that movie. And only pay them for one day of work.
That’s fine. Than we will only buy one movie and get all the other ones for free, since we already paid for one…
The actors should get license fees everything their likeness is used. The movie studios already rake in a ton of money.
Book authors also get royalties when their books are published, why not use a similar system.
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the clients (no offense) tend to be less professional
I don’t know what you mean by this precisely, but the “pretty good” end result I mentioned had a hand that melted into the sword-- so if you meant “low standard” then yeah, guilty as charged, haha. However, more interesting to me is that I would have never in 1000 years have paid someone to do that for me-- I just would have been low-level annoyed that my character and the avatar looked different the entire game.
I find the “they didn’t have permission to train from” argument is complete bunk. That’s not a right granted by intellectual property laws; there is no “right to control who learns from a work”.
What needs to happen is society (especially US society) needs to stop linking “working” and “enjoying a comfortable life”. Technology is coming for all our jobs, and the sooner we accept that and prepare for it, the better we’ll be when it happens.
I find the “they didn’t have permission to train from” argument is complete bunk. That’s not a right granted by intellectual property laws; there is no “right to control who learns from a work”.
Yeah, but is an AI LEGALLY learning? Or is it just a machine that spits out output based on its inputs? In that case, use of the work as input isn’t allowed under the copyright, which is that the work be used by reading it.
All these comparisons between what an AI is doing and what a human does when reading/learning/etc are not a given in a court of law. We don’t have any rulings yet that an AI is actually “learning” like a human when it is “trained.”
“Training” an AI is building a tool. A tool that can be used to profit. Can artistic works be used to build a for-profit tool without permission?
This is something that needs to be decided, and it will be decided in a way that whatever the rules are for AI can’t be applied to a human. Meaning if there is a requirement for permission for use in machine learning, that won’t change that a human can learn from it. So the comparison is pointless, because there is no way the courts are going to rule that these things are legally indistinguishable from people.
In the meantime, back to the original, there ARE precedents for use of performance because of recordings. That’s why the studios wanted that in the contract, they KNOW they cannot manipulate a person’s performance through AI without their express written permission. Is it REALLY so hard to believe this can be applied to writing or art? That they can’t use writing or art without the artist’s express permission.
We may see a new kind of copyright soon that specifically disallows use for AI, and another that is open for use with AI. Something to replace Creative Commons on the internet.
There simply isn’t a right to control even training. That’s just not a thing. It would need a change to the law.
All right, I am not a lawyer but I’ve been around the internet long enough to know there is arguably a right to control learning and training. Because the Fair Use copyright law SPECIFICALLY allows for educational use. That means the default is that otherwise, it would not be allowed.
A judge could easily rule that AI training is not covered under Fair Use, as it is being used to create a profitable tool.
That’s a right to make copies and distribute them for educational purposes. This is specifically not involving distribution of any kind. Arguably copyright law doesn’t even apply, but even under the broader term of “intellectual property”, it doesn’t hold up, even without trying to make a comparison between humans learning and AI training. (which is more of an analogy)
Edit: and to be fair, I’m not a lawyer either, but IP law (especially regarding how terrible it has become) is kind of a hobby of mine. But I can’t claim to be any type of authority on it.
Okay, well my hobby is ethics.
And the thing is, if they are using works written by others to build an AI for profit without permission, that’s exploitation. Copyright law is horrible and exploited by corporations constantly. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t cheer on the little guy when they try to use it to defend against exploitation by corporations. Because the big tech companies are exploiting creatives in their drive to build and sell this tool. They are exploiting creatives to make their replacements. So I’m going to go off on any comparison analogy.
Whatever the actual basis of the lawsuits against the AI companies, actual lawyers do think there’s a basis in IP law to sue because a few high profile lawsuits have been filed. And clearly there is some legal basis to sue if they use AI to create using performances, or this contract would not have been proposed.
If you’re leaning on morality, then the comparison to humans becomes relevant again.
Lawyers taking a high profile case is not any indication to go by.
I could be off base here, but are you financially impacted if AI starts making commercial art? Like, is that how you make income, too?
I don’t know what you mean by this precisely
By that I mean that some dude looking for a game avatar or whatever isn’t as likely to be someone used to contracting people to do professional creative work for them. Professional clients who are accustomed to hiring creatives to do work for them are more likely to:
- be quick to provide feedback and respond to emails
- have feedback that is clear and actionable
- communicate professionally
- pay on time
- be willing to pay a down payment and sign a contract
- comprehend the hard work that goes into this stuff and value my time accordingly
- don’t try to push a project (either intentionally or otherwise) into what is known as “scope creep” wherein they jockey for additional work outside of the initially agreed upon scope of work
And lots of other little things like that.
Am I saying that you are like that? No. But having done creative work for north of 15 years this is my informed opinion based on a lot of experience in this field.
I find the “they didn’t have permission to train from” argument is complete bunk. That’s not a right granted by intellectual property laws; there is no “right to control who learns from a work”.
That’s your opinion and you might feel differently if you had spent years working hard to achieve something in this specific field.
What needs to happen is society (especially US society) needs to stop linking “working” and “enjoying a comfortable life”. Technology is coming for all our jobs, and the sooner we accept that and prepare for it, the better we’ll be when it happens.
This I fully agree with. And I wouldn’t even necessarily have a problem with AI destroying creative jobs if it meant I was now more free to pursue a life of spending time doing things that I was passionate about because some kind of UBI or whatever was making that possible for me and others.
Like I kinda mentioned earlier, I don’t think society is in a good place to fight for this on at least the short term. Basically not until things get really bad. What I expect will happen for now is most all of the windfalls from automation will be siphoned up to to the upper class and corporations and wages will continue to stagnate for the working class and income inequality will continue to skyrocket.
That’s your opinion and you might feel differently if you had spent years working hard to achieve something in this specific field.
It’s not really an opinion; it’s just not a right granted by IP laws. I know that people that are financially dependent on this type of work really wish they had this right-- and I fully accept that if I were in the same boat, I would probably also wish I had this right, but that doesn’t magically add it to the law.
All the lawsuits you see popping up are hail marys (maries?); they’ll very likely all lose.
some kind of UBI or whatever was making that possible for me and others.
Something like this, set at a level that allowed a comfortable life (versus an austere one) would totally flip the whole employment dynamic. The pay for the worst jobs would skyrocket, because no one wants to do those jobs-- they only do them now to stave off starvation and homelessness.
siphoned up to to the upper class and corporations and wages will continue to stagnate for the working class and income inequality will continue to skyrocket
I can’t help but agree, with sorrow. I imagine it won’t get better (in the US, at least) until it impacts the wealthy-- as in, there aren’t enough people getting paid to buy the stuff that is getting created by automation. Capitalism needs money flowing to the bottom (traditionally, a wage) to sustain itself. If that flow of money dries up, the whole system collapses. We can either fix it by abandoning capitalism, or by patching capitalism by finding a way for money to flow down other than by wages. (A UBI, for example)
In my earlier comment in this thread I said my dilemma with using AI for my work was an ethical one, not a legal one. Ethics/morals inform laws for sure, but I think you’d agree that not everything that’s technically legal is also ethical. Especially so in a country like the US.
I think a lot of people would also agree that ethics are to some extent individual. Meaning that what I find ethical or not is going to differ from others. So whether or not this is all legal doesn’t mean that it’s going to jive with my personal view of what is ethical.
That dilemma is my own. Whether or not congress people who have a weak grasp of both technology and the arts think one way or another on the matter is a poor ruler for one’s own moral code of conduct in my book.
In any case, good chat. I appreciate that while we don’t agree on everything we kept it civil. Now back to work for me (before it gets taken by a robot).
I understand that you may not reply because you feel the discussion has run its course, but I wanted to clarify that I was, indeed, not following that you were speaking from a personal morality standpoint. Sorry about that.
No worries
Working people need to all be ready to reject a new wave of AI-powered exploration, the scope and scale of which we have never seen before.
I think viewers need to be prepared to never pay for a film that contains AI-generated assets that steal actors’ looks.
I mean, yeah, no kidding. If my employer could get my skills at a fraction of the price, I would be out of a job before lunch.
