It's not change but theology that's the problem; meaning, purpose, direction.

Ex: If you can't agree that a nation can be sovereign and determine its own future, you're gonna justify invasion and violence as a necessary evil. Drones and deep fakes litter the battlefield as nonchalantly as soda cans.

The problem is with AI art specifically, not change/advancement in general. Art is a fundamentally crucial thing for humans - it gives more meaning to our existence as a means to express ourselves and leave our lasting mark on the world. Even right now with how it's being generated en masse, the world of art is quickly becoming over-diluted, expressionless and without purpose. It's essentially like an insult to humanity itself, like saying "there's no point for you to create any more".

You say that we should be perceiving this as a positive thing, and yet we are already seeing the results, and people are very much not "enjoying the thrill of discovery".

My thought is that you may be undervaluing the potential risks/consequences of all these new discoveries. While I agree that most recent discoveries are not made with ill intent, the current political, physical, social, etc. climate around the world reinforce the ideas that humans don't always plan ahead, listen to science/common sense, work together, and that there are many bad actors with bad motives that will use any means to achieve there goals (consequences be damned).

Given that reality, and how hard it still is for laws to even adapt the to internet, there's good reason (in my opinion) to be cautious and thoughtful about how new discoveries could be used and try to consider disincentives to limit bad actors.

It's a balancing act that no one person, agency, or country can get 100% right but the more we think together the more we can be prepared to integrate new discoveries to the benefit of all people.

The rise of AI generated art, music, etc. is the tip of a new ethical iceberg. Copyright laws will be challenged and fair use laws put into place one would hope. Artists continually struggle to view the world through their own lens/constructs then reinterpret it back to us. The essence of AI corrupts this process, manipulates and even misinterprets existing art by changing its very essence. I think there are so many ethical questions at play here and technology is progressing at a rate that ethical questions are being answered on the fly. With all our societal and spiritual norms being questioned (with good reason)I think new societal constructs will emerge. We are constantly pivoting and questioning not only our future but our past. We have learned that we have been sold a bill of goods when it comes to our own history. The future is upon us and there really isn’t a way to predict outcomes. Welcome to the new Wild West.

So we will be healthier/happier with ai art and music as it snuffs out our creativity ?

I believe people are greatly underestimating the potential damage that a proliferation of AI generated art will have on visual expression as a medium. I don't think even the negative voices in this thread see the true potential danger in AI art.

I foresee AI art being the end of this golden age of internet based artist collaboration. And I foresee a future where the only art you will ever see in your day to day life or anywhere on the internet is AI generated. I foresee a future where even those with the dedication and talent to try to learn to create visual art will find their resources greatly limited and no community to participate in. And I foresee a future where the hard core of remaining human-hand artists are closed off, bitter, and unwelcoming to the rest of the world.

Those who defend AI art generators say that they are no different than other tools that help artists, that the human still participates creatively. I'm not here to argue whether or not this is true, but what participation the human has is not visual art. It is, at a fundamental level, creative/technical writing. There is artistry to be found in this medium, but it lacks some of the core features that make visual art an evolving and collaborative process.

Visual artists do not render a scene or paint a painting pixel by pixel. At least not after you get out of the age of finger painting. The most elementary lessons of anyone who pursues visual art are how to deconstruct the image in your brain, and then how to build that image onto the paper. Not pixel by pixel, but by the rules of construction, anatomy, skeletons, perspective. Through these lessons the artist understands how to build a 2D image out of 3D space. The AI knows none of this, and the person prompting the AI learns none of this either.

But it goes deeper than this. Any artist that starts out will inevitably take inspiration in their "Style" from other artists around them. Having the ability to construct a scene is one thing, but applying colour, linework, shading, texture onto your framework takes knowledge and thoughtful direction. Those defending AI say that AI is doing the same as new artists, learning by example. But growing artists do something AI does not. By learning the techniques of those who came before them and emulating their styles, new artists nearly inevitably alter or experiment with those techniques to create a personal style. Something unique to that artist that makes their contribution to the art world special and personal. Every new artist that joins the community to learn eventually gives back by inspiring others with the unique techniques that they themselves pioneered. AI cannot do that. And while the AI prompter may learn tricks or keywords that produce results they like, they cannot describe a new brush technique to an AI without actually understanding what a brush can or cannot do. (even if the AI knew what a brush was)

In this way, AI on its own cannot evolve or grow. Prompters will undoubtedly be able to keep producing unique and interesting looking art, and what becomes popular with society or a community dedicated to it may change, but the art of building an image and the unique contributions that artists make to the medium will be lost. Art has always evolved and improved as artists learned from the techniques of those who came before them, and adapting what they learn to their tools, their interests and contributing back something new. Tools enable artists to make art more easily, but no artist should need any tool. If you hand an artist a blank wall and a bottle of ketchup and say "make a cat", they will still be able to make something you can recognize as a cat. And if you gave them a week to work on their ketchup skills they might get really good at it. If you take the AI generator away from a prompter, they cannot do anything. They have the image in their head, but without the specific tool they require, all they can do is describe it to you in words. Maybe beautiful words, maybe words that would make an amazing poem or story. But only words. If you can't do it without the tool, you can't do it.

Learning to be a visual artist, the kind who can improvise with ketchup, takes a very, very long time for a human being to do. It takes serious dedication, passion, and a desire to share the images in their head with the world. And no matter how much you want to do it, or what resources you have available, you will ALWAYS start off terrible at it. To get past being terrible and into making your own style and thus contributing back to the ecosystem takes a lot of effort. Prior to the advent of AI art, the only way to put a picture in your head into the real world (other than commissioning another human being to do it) was to do it yourself with your hands and whatever medium you liked working in. This motivated a lot of young artists to learn the skill simply because there was no other option. With the advent of AI, fledgling creators looking to draw their Sonic the Hedgehog Self Insert or their DnD Warlock or sassy cartoon hamburger cartoon could either spend half an hour producing something terrible while learning from the experience, or they could type "pink bat in the style of sonic the hedgehog with six arms" into an AI prompt and get 50 images looking like they came straight from Sega Studios in ten seconds. Great for your sonic RP Discord server, not so much for learning to draw. Many young artists will simply seek the instant gratification of AI generated art rather than learn to draw themselves.

Another thing that will discourage people from learning to draw is that there will simply be any potential jobs where producing artistic digital assets pays money. Nobody will pay an artist for slow hand crafted art when AI art is quick and free. The hand-crated art may be more appealing to some, but "quick" and "free" are extremely hard words for corporations to resist. Many artists in the industry are already losing their careers as they're forced out by AI replacements. With no visual art related jobs in the modern world, nobody will pursue learning to draw as a career choice. Jobs in visual design will be about wrangling AI prompts. And again, neither the AI or the Prompter is actually learning anything about constructing images, and neither is contributing back to the evolution of art.

This will lead to another problem, the drastic reduction in tools or instructional courses in how to draw or paint. With few children inspired to draw, and nobody wanting to make a career out of drawing, the only people who will pursue advanced learning in drawing or painting will be those independently wealthy enough to do so. Services will be fewer and far between, and far more expensive as the niche market pays top dollar for them. Drawing and painting will become something only the rich have access to and there will not be any free resources, because in the end game...

There will be no hand-crafted art anywhere on the internet. In a hypothetical future where AI art is quick and free, the only advantage a human has in this environment is the ability to work 50 years at it and create a unique style that the AI has not yet learned to replicate. However, in order to preserve that advantage, the artist must NEVER allow their art to be seen by an AI image scraper. If a scraper can get enough samples of their art, the AI will be able to learn the nuances and in seconds, destroy what value the human artist has earned. As such, no human who wants to be valued at drawing will ever put their art on the internet. The rich people who can afford the elite instruction in the decaying institutions will create a private clique insulated from the rest of the world where art can only be viewed in person without cameras present. Even those looking to hire real artists to create digital assets will not find any people willing to take the jobs offered. Every piece of artwork you as an average person will see on a day to day basis will be AI generated, by people who do not actually understand how to draw or paint without the AI generator. But it only gets worse from here.

With few new artists in newer generations, and those artists STRONGLY incentivised to never let you actually see their art outside of galleries and museums, the AI generators will have no new material to add to their scrapers other than more AI generated images. AI will feed off itself and wind deeper and deeper into mediocrity. Even the human prompters who are making the most earnest efforts to be creative and twist something unique out of the AI generators will be at a distinct disadvantage because the only thing in their world to get inspired by is more AI generated art, actually muddling their imagination.

This is the future of unregulated AI art. A small, insulated elite community of people who keep knowledge, originality and growth to themselves and a world where a single tool generates every picture you ever see and there are no people left who can function without it.

Edit: If you've actually managed to read through this wall of text, I commend you. I apologize for the rant. This has been stewing in my head all last night and at work today as I was reading the comments in other sections of people basically laughing at artists for having wasted their lives learning to draw. It really hurt. I needed to express that this utopia of free art they're imagining isn't nearly as wonderful as they think it is.

And yes, it hurts a lot that the skill I've been working on for 30 years and the only chance I had to leave something in this world I could be proud of is now just something to be laughed at by people who think I'm dumb for wasting my time.

Gonna say again that problem with AI art is not the fact that it generates images.

Its more of an ego problem, people thinking they can be on the same level of artistry and skill without going through the most important part of what makes the art amazing, which is the process.

Seriously, only a month after the mainstream release of DallE or MJ, theres already a ton of ego fucks who think theyre hot shit who think they can beat artists because they type a couple of tags and change a bit of sliders here and there. Theres no process to it other than referencing off AI models. Seriously its like cryptobros all over again.

Here's the thing, though. Remember that last season of Prison Break, where they revealed the video used to incarcerate the buff Scoffield brother was fake? How they went over every frame with MS Paint and recorded a superficially convincing gun shot to make it look like he'd fired that gun?

We're not just at a point where we can make shit like that nearly indistinguishable from the real thing, but at a point where anyone with a mid- to high-end GPU can render these deep fake images and videos.

I can't bring myself to be overjoyed about living in a world where so many dastardly things could happen. Imagine getting blackout drunk and losing your job the next day over a video of you beating up a homeless guy with the company logo on your shirt. You're pretty sure you took off that shirt before going out that night...or did you? Everything's a haze. You've never been violent when drunk, you surely wouldn't do anything like that...right? But there it is, the damning evidence, and it looks so real that you don't even think it could be a deep fake. You know your life is over.

I, for one, am not comfortable with AI being so good at recreating people's faces, no matter how fruity marshmallow you make it out to be with your pseudo-spiritual talk about our perceived reality and the flow of time.

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I think you grossly overestimate latent diffusion models and their long term potential.

On a curmudgeonly note, I've always hated calling this stuff "AI" rather than "machine learning".

The discoveries themselves are nothing to be feared. It’s the timo act it will have on real people that puts us into a philosophical quagmire. These changes have real human cost, this one potentially being larger than we even know.

It’s a really cool time to be alive, but there’s nothing wrong with lamenting or trying to change the toll it’ll have on many human’s lives

This is beautiful. However, I asked ChatGPT to improve it.

AI Art and Positivity

The rise of artificial intelligence (AI) in art has sparked significant debate and a largely negative reaction from artist communities. However, I believe that this development is inevitable and that rather than fearing it, we should embrace it.

Discovery and progress are natural human tendencies and AI technology is no exception. Just as photographs and digital filters have transformed the way we think, work, and live, so too will AI change the role of image artists. Rather than being "visualizers," we may see a shift towards "refiners" who start with AI-generated art and tweak it until it is suitable and "re-inventors" who seek novelty and new input from AI in order to create something new and artistically valuable. Additionally, we may see the emergence of "AI artists" who use this technology as a new "brush" to depict reality.

It's natural to feel sadness or fear about these changes, but it's important to remember that technology is here to stay and will continue to advance, regardless of our emotions. While its use cases may be difficult to predict and regulate with our current ethical frameworks, we can be sure that AI will continue to be developed and applied in pursuit of optimization and societal progress, just as we have seen with bioengineering.

Rather than worrying about the potential negative consequences of AI in art, we should embrace our innate curiosity and excitement about the unknown. The world is vast and full of possibilities, and the thrill of discovery and innovation is a fundamental part of the human experience. Change is the only constant in life, and rather than fighting it, we should embrace it and enjoy the unique journey that we are on. Remember that everything we know and who we are can change, and that this is a natural and exciting part of life.

Yes there is a bunch of extra rage going on.

But what matters is the core argument: the AI tech takes from artists and repurposes it for profitable gain.

This is a legal issue, and people are passionate to get it figured out. Nothing wrong with that.

Also the problem of, in the context of sharing professional art, individuals are sharing AI art. And people want that to instead be shared elsewhere. That’s also just something to be worked out in the context.

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There is a lot more noise.

But just as you are trying to make an argument, it’s good to pay mind to what are the core arguments that make sense and exist for a reason.

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This is in response to a section in the middle of your post that addresses AI art.