No, this is not a Black Mirror episode.
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?
On the long term yes it presumably is a threat to entire professions. On the short-mid term I think it will decimate the entry level tier of a lot of those professions first because it’s easier work to replace.
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.
Art and Illustration are two related but different things when we’re talking about jobs. Commercial illustration is actually a pretty viable field to break into for people who have some artistic/design talent. I’ve been desinging for years but got into professional illustration around 5 years ago and have since done illustration work for Intel, YouTube, Penguin Books, High Times Magazine, Sierra Nevada Brewing, etc.
This is stuff like illustrating the cute characters websites/apps put into onboarding screens, the illustrations you see on food and beer packaging, the illustrations you see in editorial pieces (web articles, newspapers, magazines, blogs), the art you see on book covers and in books, the art you see on posters and fliers, the art on album covers, apparel, etc, etc, etc.
If you’re also a designer like I am you get to be a one stop shop for a company like a brewery that wants a cool new illustrated beer label (I’m working on such a job right now). You can then get the whole job of doing both the design work and the artwork for inclusion in the design work. That can be quite profitable.
Fine art on the other hand is indeed a shitty line of work and incredibly hard to be successful in for most. It’s like trying to make it as an actor or something.
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.
Yeah I am fairly concerned.
Like I said earlier I think it will be the entry level shitty jobs that get gobbled first. Like drawing avatars for people is typically both low paying and the clients (no offense) tend to be less professional to deal with for that kinda work.
So those jobs? Yeah they’re going first and for me that’s fine but for new people cutting their teeth in this field that really sucks. How will people just getting into this line of work learn essential job skills like client management or get experience doing actual work for people?
On the long term I think my job is in jeopardy too and I’m still wrapping my head around what that means for me. It’s a rapidly moving target. It also involves my grappling with both ethical and creative dilemmas. These AI models are trained on other people’s work without their permission so my using them to stay afloat is problematic. And I got into this line of work because I actually like doing this work, learning how to improve at it, the process involved, etc. So farming out the process I enjoy so much to AI is not really what I got into this stuff for and at that point why am I doing it?
It’s a complicated situation and I’m not optimistic that society right now is well poised to respond to it in the most equitable sets of ways.
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.
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.
Yeah I’ve had a similar discussion with people before about how this will impact fresh talent in my industry (design/illustration).
The thing AI is gonna clobber first is the entry level work. The lower level clients that just want the thing cheap and aren’t the greatest to work with and generally don’t value creatives as much as they should.
These people suck to work for but that kinda work is precisely the the sort of stuff you need to do early on to learn some really valuable lessons. You learn patience, being diplomatic yet assertive, learning how to identify red flags, and also just getting the hours in designing/illustrating that it takes to become truly good at the job. And you need some kind of income even if it’s not great at that phase of things.
If I hadn’t had those kinds of jobs on and off for the first X number of years I wouldn’t be where I am today. School really can’t teach you all of that in practical terms either. So where does that leave beginners? 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. Or just people who are content to be the AI button pushers for clients who don’t care to learn to press the buttons themselves (but that will get stupid easy as time goes on). And those button pusher jobs are not going to pay as much and there’ll be plenty of people out there pushing those buttons too.
I fear that it’s gonna just be real damn challenging to become an actually good designer or illustrator with any kind of decent career in the future. And probably within 10 years the AI will be coming for the higher level jobs too so I have no idea where that will leave me.
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.
I think viewers need to be prepared to never pay for a film that contains AI-generated assets that steal actors’ looks.
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 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.
