So in the end it turns out that the art was never so much about creativity as about gatekeeping. And "everyone can make art" was just a fake facade, because not really.
Of course everyone can make art. Toddlers make art. The hard truth is that getting good technical art skills, be they visual, musical, literary, or anything else is like getting stronger— many people that want to do it are too lazy or undisciplined to do the daily work required to do it. You might be starting too late (Maybe post-middle-age) or don’t have the time to become an exceptional artist, but most art that people like wasn’t made by exceptional artists; there are a lot more strong people than professional athletes or Olympians. You don’t even need a gym membership or weights, and there’s limitless free information about how to do it online. Nobody is stopping anyone from doing it. Just like many, if not most gym memberships are paid for but unused after the first, like, month, many people try drawing for a little while, get frustrated that it’s so difficult to learn, and then give up. The gatekeeping argument is an asinine excuse people make to blame other people for their own lack of discipline.
Hitchens was, first and foremost, a critic. Most of the so-called gatekeeping that people accuse artists of is actually born from art criticism-- a completely different group of people rarely as popular among artists as they are among people that like to feel cool about looking at art.
> Of course everyone can make art. Toddlers make art.
That's my entire point. Artists were fine with everybody making "art" as long as everybody except them (with their hard fought skill and dedication) achieved toddler level of output quality. As soon as everybody could truly get even close to the level of actual art, not toddler art, suddenly there's a horrible problem with all the amateur artists using the tools that are available to them to make their "toddler" art.
Most artists don’t give a flying fuck about what you do on your own. Seriously! They really don’t. What they care about is having their work ripped off so for-profit companies can kill the market for their hard-won skills with munged-up derivatives.
Folks in tech generally have very limited exposure to the art world — fan art communities online, Reddit subs, YouTubers, etc. It’s more representative of internet culture than the art world— no more representative of artists than X politics is representative of voters. People have real grievances here and you are not a victim of the world’s artists. Most artists also don’t care about online art communities or what you think about them. Not even a little bit.
I will be if they manage to slow down development of AI even by a smidgen.
> Most artists also don’t care about online art communities or what you think about them. Not even a little bit.
Fully agree. They care about whether there's going to be anyone willing to buy their stuff from them. And not-toddler art is a real competition for them. So they are super against everybody making it.
Well drat, you’ve exposed all of us, from art directors to VFX artists to fine art painters to singer-songwriters to graphic designers to game designers to symphony cellists as a monolithic glob of petty, transactional rakes. Fortunately, everyone is an artist now, so you can make your own output to feed to models and leave our work out of it entirely! It clearly has no value so nobody should be mad about going without it. Problem solved!
If you think human art was anything but a bootstrap for AI you are kidding yourself. I don't think artists are going to be as happy as you think though, because market for their services will drop even further towards zero and they will go back to being financed by the richest on a whim. The way it always used to be before the advent of information copying and distribution technologies. Technology giveth, technology taketh away.
Why are so many AI art boosters such giant edgelords? Do you really think having that much of a chip on your shoulder is justified?
You obviously can’t un-ring a bell, but finding ways to poison models that try to rip artists off sure is amusing. The real joke is on the people in software that think they’re so special that their skills will be worth anything at all, or believe that this will do anything but transfer wealth out of the paychecks of regular people, straight into the pockets of existing centibillionaires. There are too many developers in the existing market as it is, and so many of the ones that are diligently trying to reduce that demand further for an even larger range of disciplines, especially the in-demand jobs like setting up agents to take people’s jobs. Well, play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
> Why are so many AI art boosters such giant edgelords?
You got it the other way around. Many edgelords became AI art boosters. Some became AI art dissers. It's a good topic for edgelords to edge about.
> finding ways to poison models that try to rip artists off sure is amusing
Yes. It is, but for other reasons. It looks like trying to turn a river with a stick. Little bit of water in one spot for a moment goes backwards and that one specific niche of people cheer. You made your song unfindable with Shazam. Good for you! Now I can't find you if I hear your music accidentally, because even if I catch some lyrics they are also heavily copyrighted. Step 2: ?, Step 3: Profit! Let me encounter your output the classic way, by being heavily marketed to for inordinate amounts of advertiser money. The way God intended!
> The real joke is on the people in software that think they’re so special that their skills will be worth anything at all
I fully expect to be completely replaced within few years. The same way my other skills were replaced by mobile diggers and powertools before I even acquired them.
Some IT people don't believe they will not get replaced and I think they have fairly strong argument. Software breeds more software. Coding breeds more need for coding. Even if only 5% of coding will be done by humans it still might be more than 100% from few years ago. Juniors are screwed though until we decide to extend college age to 35.
> There are too many developers in the existing market as it is
Junior developers. If you could magically turn them all into AI senior researchers they would all have a job in a month.
> believe that this will do anything but transfer wealth out of the paychecks of regular people, straight into the pockets of existing centibillionaires
This is progressing for 50 years. Sure, it's a flimsy hope that it can be changed, but there are no other hopeful things to look forward to. Next best thing is a WWIII because the previous one turned out to be great societal equalizer.
I didn’t say there was a causal relationship between being an edge lord and AI art— it’s definitely like a drain screen for nihilism, which is a world view that is attractive to people with nothing, but has repeatedly proven to be useful to nobody that isn’t already rich— the whole dog-eat-dog mentality is a lie many rich tell themselves to feel badass instead of fortunate, and a fairy tail many poor tell themselves to feel like they have more control than they do. Humans got to where we are because we were smart enough to cooperate to benefit our collective wellbeing, despite the people dumb enough not to realize that.
There’s no point in letting good be the enemy of perfect.
Making value statements about art is pretty much exclusively the realm of art critics and art historians. They're no more representative of artists than general historians are representative of politicians and soldiers.
