Yeah, I do get that—if the possibility exists and it’s just curtailed (e.g. you have some kind of protectionist law that says book covers or movie posters must be illustrated by humans even though AI can do it just as well), it feels like a bad joke anyway. The genie’s out of the bottle, personally I think to some extent it’s bad that we let it out at all, but we can’t put it back in anyway and it’s not even particularly realistic to imagine a world in which we dodged this specific application (after all it’s a pretty natural generalization of computer vision).
The copyright issue is separated—having copyright BUT letting corporations violate it to train AIs that then are used to generate images that can in turn be copyrighted would absolutely be the worst of both worlds. That said, even without copyright you still have an asymmetry because big companies have more resources for compute. We’re not going to see a post-scarcity utopia for sure if we don’t find a way to buck this centralization trend, and art is just one example of it.
However, about the fact that the “work of making art” can be easily automated, I think casting it as work at all is already missing the point. It’s made into economic useful work because it’s something that can be monetized, but at its core, art is a form of communication. Let’s put it this way—suppose you can make AIs (and robots) that make for better-than-human lovers. I mean in all respects, from sex to just being comforting and supporting when necessary. They don’t feel anything, they’re just very good at predicting and simulating the actions of an ideal partner. Would you say that is “automating away the work of being a good partner”, which thus should be automated away, since it would be pointless to try and do it worse than a machine would? Or does “the work” itself lose meaning once you know it’s just that, just work, and there is no intent behind it?
The thing you say, about art being freed from the constraints of commercialism, would be a consequence of having post-scarcity, not of having AI art generators. If you have AI-generated art but you still struggle to make ends meet you won’t be able to freely create art, you’ll just be busy doing some other much shittier job and then come home and enjoy your custom AI Netflix show to try and feel something for a couple hours. There is no fundamental right of people to have as much art as possible and as close to their tastes as they want, any more than there is to have the perfect lover that meets their needs to a T. To turn those things into products that we’re entitled to leads pretty much to losing our own humanity. It’s perfectly fine to say we should all have our material needs satisfied—food, housing, clothing—but when it comes to relationships with others (be it friendship, love, or the much less personal but still human rapport between an artist and an admirer of their art), I think we can’t stop doing the work ourselves without losing something crucial to our nature, and ultimately, losing our identity as a species.
Yeah, I do get that—if the possibility exists and it’s just curtailed (e.g. you have some kind of protectionist law that says book covers or movie posters must be illustrated by humans even though AI can do it just as well), it feels like a bad joke anyway. The genie’s out of the bottle, personally I think to some extent it’s bad that we let it out at all, but we can’t put it back in anyway and it’s not even particularly realistic to imagine a world in which we dodged this specific application (after all it’s a pretty natural generalization of computer vision).
The copyright issue is separated—having copyright BUT letting corporations violate it to train AIs that then are used to generate images that can in turn be copyrighted would absolutely be the worst of both worlds. That said, even without copyright you still have an asymmetry because big companies have more resources for compute. We’re not going to see a post-scarcity utopia for sure if we don’t find a way to buck this centralization trend, and art is just one example of it.
However, about the fact that the “work of making art” can be easily automated, I think casting it as work at all is already missing the point. It’s made into economic useful work because it’s something that can be monetized, but at its core, art is a form of communication. Let’s put it this way—suppose you can make AIs (and robots) that make for better-than-human lovers. I mean in all respects, from sex to just being comforting and supporting when necessary. They don’t feel anything, they’re just very good at predicting and simulating the actions of an ideal partner. Would you say that is “automating away the work of being a good partner”, which thus should be automated away, since it would be pointless to try and do it worse than a machine would? Or does “the work” itself lose meaning once you know it’s just that, just work, and there is no intent behind it?
The thing you say, about art being freed from the constraints of commercialism, would be a consequence of having post-scarcity, not of having AI art generators. If you have AI-generated art but you still struggle to make ends meet you won’t be able to freely create art, you’ll just be busy doing some other much shittier job and then come home and enjoy your custom AI Netflix show to try and feel something for a couple hours. There is no fundamental right of people to have as much art as possible and as close to their tastes as they want, any more than there is to have the perfect lover that meets their needs to a T. To turn those things into products that we’re entitled to leads pretty much to losing our own humanity. It’s perfectly fine to say we should all have our material needs satisfied—food, housing, clothing—but when it comes to relationships with others (be it friendship, love, or the much less personal but still human rapport between an artist and an admirer of their art), I think we can’t stop doing the work ourselves without losing something crucial to our nature, and ultimately, losing our identity as a species.