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Most artists, like most programmers are working in a commercial capacity. I see no reason why "their passion" should overrule profit-seeking. Do art for the sa

• buttercraft 2y ago
  > I see no reason why "their passion" should overrule profit-seeking. This viewpoint is what fucked up the world.
  • throwawaysleep 2y ago
    No, this viewpoint is the only reason a shirt doesn't cost a month's wages. Weavers once had similar arguments, decrying machinery that made cloth. Imagine how many more video games and movies can be made when we don't need anywhere near as many artists as before. How many more diagrams in textbooks. How many extra illustrations for Wikipedia. There are tremendous benefits to making art something anyone can get for dirt cheap.
    • temporarely 2y ago
      But Cotton is not Culture.
      • throwawaysleep 2y ago
        Most art is not culture either. It is mundane movie shots, textbook drawings, logos, etc. Tailored shirts have not gone away. Custom fabric patterns have not gone away. All that has disappeared is every shirt being tailored, custom, and expensive.
        • temporarely 2y ago
          I make art for pleasure and the magical post creation beholding of what has emerged - it's a serious high :) That is of course a private concern, and that said, in my mind there are good points on both side of this argument. It is not a black/white issue. To amplify my OP, there are certain intangibles regarding cultural artifacts which are strictly non-utilitarian. Culture is expression & is a product of the human psyche (of a coherent civilization). And past will affect the future. Culture minimally is a social tonic, maximally informs societal character. The germinal question in context of 'high culture' (arts and letters) is whether the omission of the 'bar to entry' that requires acquisition of skill, dedication, and 'a development of a vocabulary' (etc) will have a degenerative long term effect on high culture, given that cultural development is generational and progressive, and the process of becoming an artist is a filter.
    • JohnFen 2y ago
      I think the state of things today amply demonstrates that quantity cannot make up for lack of quality.
    • ToucanLoucan 2y ago
      > No, this viewpoint is the only reason a shirt doesn't cost a month's wages. But that shirt would last you decades with good maintenance, because it was a quality product that was made to be repaired by other craftspeople throughout it's service life (or even just yourself!). Now we have can have hundreds of shirts for that same money but all of them suck, are made cheaply, fall apart after a couple of years if we're lucky, and are made by people who can't afford to buy them in a country we've never seen. How is this an improvement in literally any way, apart from it makes fast fashion companies shitloads of money? It's worse for the people making the clothes, wearing the clothes, and selling the clothes. It's worse for the environment because now we're making and destroying millions of articles of clothing, not to mention shipping it here and there and everywhere. And, for all that, we still have people who don't have enough fucking clothing.
      • ChrisMarshallNY 2y ago
        Patagonia made a film for that: Shithropocene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4TsndZxysts https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4TsndZxysts
      • throwawaysleep 2y ago
        You mention many enormous improvements: > with good maintenance So modernity has eliminated my need to spend time looking after clothes? That is a big win. Not having to put time into repair and maintenance is a huge improvement. It has eliminated my need to be careful with my clothes? That is also a huge win. My grandmother used to spend hours at a time repairing socks. It is a huge win that nobody knows how to do that anymore, as time has value. > Now we have can have hundreds of shirts for that same money Even if we accept the decades of life for an old shirt, you only need tens of shirts to match its lifetime, so this is an order of magnitude reduction in cost. > are made by people who can't afford to buy them in a country we've never seen So? Plenty of employees cannot afford what their employer produces. And it is a step up from where they were before. We freed up more capable people in our own country to do more productive things than made clothing. You are right on the environmental part. > And, for all that, we still have people who don't have enough fucking clothing. Where would that be? Even the poorer African countries are chaffing at how much clothing is being dumped there. So the main loser is the environment. As a customer, I am otherwise a tremendous winner. And when AI takes over most mundane art, like animating instructional videos or making logos, I will also be a tremendous winner.
    • caconym_ 2y ago
      > Imagine how many more video games and movies can be made when we don't need anywhere near as many artists as before. How many more diagrams in textbooks. How many extra illustrations for Wikipedia. With the possible exception of Wikipedia illustrations, I wasn't aware we had a meaningful shortage of any of those things. On the contrary, there are more great video games and movies (and books, and TV shows, etc., etc.) already available than I could ever hope to get through in my lifetime. GenAI in anything resembling its current form can only dilute these markets with worthless slop and make it harder for consumers to find actual worthwhile media made by and for humans. This problem will be compounded if it also makes creative careers less viable for humans.
      • lolinder 2y ago
        > On the contrary, there are more great video games and movies (and books, and TV shows, etc., etc.) already available than I could ever hope to get through in my lifetime. As someone who has a very specific taste in video games, I beg to differ. If you happen to exist in the space targeted by AAA or if you don't have strong preferences for what you get out of an indie game the status quo is fine, but it's been a while since I've found a game I hadn't played before that scratches the itch. Automation allows what's popular to become extremely cheap and what's niche to become possible.
        • caconym_ 2y ago
          Right now automation allows neither of those things. The best you're going to get is existing games reskinned with AI slop assets---the new shovelware. In some hypothetical future world where GenAI content really is as novel and worthwhile as content made by humans, this will be a different conversation. Until then, I doubt it's going to satisfy even the tiny minority of people who literally want to play the same game, watch the same movie, read the same book, etc. over and over again until they die. But it certainly has the potential to severely damage the overall quality of the media landscape in the way I described, because people who care about money more than quality are in the driver's seat.
          • 2y ago
    • vundercind 2y ago
      > Imagine how many more video games and movies can be made when we don't need anywhere near as many artists as before. We have several lifetimes’ supply of good art in practically every medium already, even relatively new ones. Recording and mechanical reproduction have already enormously devalued creative talent and left us with a glut. Harming the value of artistic talent and skill even further, to get us more of something we’re already drowning in, isn’t really an improvement.
    • rewgs 2y ago
      Get back to me when the world is overcrowded with soulless, unavoidable AI-generated "art" and we'll see if you still think this way.
    • mrgoldenbrown 2y ago
      Weavers weren't concerned about "passion" for cloth, they were concerned about their economic ability to compete with machines that required huge capital outlays and centralized profit at the expense of the middle and lower class workers.
      • lolinder 2y ago
        Sounds like we're repeating history then. If it were just about passion then artists wouldn't worry about AI because it doesn't deprive them of their hobby. It's only a problem because it takes away from their income.
    • nicholassmith 2y ago
      Another take on this point, the race to the bottoming of shirts has been a disaster ecologically and has fostered a throwaway culture where people don't take care or pride in an item of clothing. There's benefits on reducing the barrier to entry, but profound downsides to it as well.
      • lovethevoid 2y ago
        That applies to everything, including food. Industrialization is fun isn’t it?
        • zihotki 2y ago
          Industrialization of culture is not fun at all.
    • buttercraft 2y ago
      > decrying machinery that made cloth You can be passionate about this advancement without placing profits first. > Imagine how many more video games and movies can be made... Again, you can do this with passion and without placing profit first > There are tremendous benefits to making art something anyone can get for dirt cheap I disagree strongly here. Art has value in large part because most people cannot produce it. I like stories, but not everyone has a good story to tell. When the story is AI-generated, there isn't a consciousness behind it to give it the passion required for good stories.
      • ben_w 2y ago
        > You can be passionate about this advancement without placing profits first. Given the riots inspired by this machinery, I don't believe this is possible. (Arguably also communism, but there was a lot going on back then). > I disagree strongly here. Art has value in large part because most people cannot produce it. I like stories, but not everyone has a good story to tell. When the story is AI-generated, there isn't a consciousness behind it to give it the passion required for good stories. I'm not sure either way on this. Possibly a simultaneous agree-and-disagree? I agree that art may be a "peacock's tail" where the difficulty is the point, and making it cheap makes it cease to be art. In this case, some hypothetical AI which everyone agrees is totally conscious and also that it creates works of exquisite and sublime wonder, still won't be "art". But the other view of art is that it may also be simply "nice stuff"; if so, then the ability to discern good art from bad art is sufficient, even if you regard an LLM as little more than "fancy autocomplete" — it doesn't need consciousness* of its own, the consciousness of the user is sufficient. I suspect there's a lot of people in both groups. * by whichever of the many meanings you intend for that
• ChrisMarshallNY 2y ago
  I suspect most artists (and I used to be one, at one time[0 - 1]), would take advantage of AI tools. I suspect that the posting was really just exhibitionism, on the part of the site owners (I really wouldn't bother with that kind of thing, myself). But I think that telling people to do a good job "on their own time," kinda sums up the zeitgeist of today's tech industry. [0] https://littlegreenviper.com/art/Cavalier.png https://littlegreenviper.com/art/Cavalier.png [1] https://littlegreenviper.com/art/Sentinels.png https://littlegreenviper.com/art/Sentinels.png
  • card_zero 2y ago
    I like 'em, but visiting /art in search of more gave me a 403. Fantasy art forbidden!
    • ChrisMarshallNY 2y ago
      I don't allow directory listing. Here's a dir listing: https://littlegreenviper.com/art/Cavalier.png https://littlegreenviper.com/art/Cavalier.png https://littlegreenviper.com/art/Chat.png https://littlegreenviper.com/art/Chat.png https://littlegreenviper.com/art/DragonRider.png https://littlegreenviper.com/art/DragonRider.png https://littlegreenviper.com/art/Dragonstar.png https://littlegreenviper.com/art/Dragonstar.png https://littlegreenviper.com/art/Elric.png https://littlegreenviper.com/art/Elric.png https://littlegreenviper.com/art/Fugitive.png https://littlegreenviper.com/art/Fugitive.png https://littlegreenviper.com/art/Gym.png https://littlegreenviper.com/art/Gym.png https://littlegreenviper.com/art/Island.png https://littlegreenviper.com/art/Island.png https://littlegreenviper.com/art/Olympus.png https://littlegreenviper.com/art/Olympus.png https://littlegreenviper.com/art/Seer.png https://littlegreenviper.com/art/Seer.png https://littlegreenviper.com/art/Sentinels.png https://littlegreenviper.com/art/Sentinels.png https://littlegreenviper.com/art/Skeletor.png https://littlegreenviper.com/art/Skeletor.png https://littlegreenviper.com/art/Tarsus.png https://littlegreenviper.com/art/Tarsus.png https://littlegreenviper.com/art/Tigress.png https://littlegreenviper.com/art/Tigress.png https://littlegreenviper.com/art/WaterSports.png https://littlegreenviper.com/art/WaterSports.png https://littlegreenviper.com/art/WhaddyaMean.png https://littlegreenviper.com/art/WhaddyaMean.png
• i_am_proteus 2y ago
  You don't have to see the reason why other people prefer their passions to profit-seeking. There might not even be a reason! That's how passions work.
  • its_ethan 2y ago
    That's perfectly fine at the individual level (and probably encouraged for most people + their passions), I think the guy above is trying to get at something more like: just because some people are passionate about their thing, doesn't mean other people shouldn't allowed to pursue it for profit-seeking. As someone else has mentioned, just because weavers were/are passionate about what they do, that doesn't mean people shouldn't have been allowed to invent the loom + mass production techniques for clothing. Everyone on the planet has benefited mightily from this, and there are other similar examples. Maybe there are restrictions that should be enforced to prevent this in some cases, or curtail it to some degree. There's likely not a one size fits all rule, and a lot of it is determined as net-good or net-bad in hindsight.
    • falcolas 2y ago
      One thing missing from this analysis is how the profit-seeking platforms for AI were directly created from the works of the passionate - something not seen when the loom (or machining tools, etc) was created. Most hobby artists see it as stealing, even if the laws may not agree. And yes, even a hobbiest has the right to make money off their work.
      • its_ethan 2y ago
        I don't disagree that this is part of what makes this a particularly tangled situation, but it's also true that the loom/ machining tools were created by essentially copying the methods and styles that their non-automated artisans were using. I won't comment on any of the potential legal differences between AI being trained on an artists work without their knowledge versus Jacquard studying hand-made clothmaking techniques. It's certainly something that needs careful consideration.
• jprete 2y ago
  Profit-seeking is just another way of optimizing everything else out of existence, and that's an excellent reason to overrule it.
• webdood90 2y ago
  Capitalism - love it or leave it!
  • rewgs 2y ago
    Except you can't leave it. Ain't it grand?
    • jokethrowaway 2y ago
      You can, just stop trading with other humans. Go to some unclaimed patch of land or sea without governments that can pretend they own it. Go to North Korea if you want a country with little capitalism.
• ToucanLoucan 2y ago
  > Most artists, like most programmers are working in a commercial capacity. I see no reason why "their passion" should overrule profit-seeking. The obsession that everything must go in a financial box or be relegated to the increasingly diminished "free time" available to oneself is a cancer that is destroying our society. Things that are profitable =/= things that have value to people. They often coincide but it is not a direct correlation. Tons of things that make absolutely unethical amounts of profit have zero value to society. Conversely some of the most valuable things in human experience have zero monetization, in practice or theory. Money is not everything.
  • anal_reactor 2y ago
    > Money is not everything. What's your TC?
• Nicksil 2y ago
  >Most artists [...] are working in a commercial capacity. How do we know this?
  • Balgair 2y ago
    Yeah, for real! I'd say the exact opposite. Most artists have day jobs.
• chamsom 2y ago
  Created work even in a commercial capacity is protected IP. having AI train on those models for a publicly consumed LLM may not even be in the best interests of profit. Law hasn't even evolved either. What if in the future people bring special tradecraft to companies that they don't want leaking elsewhere? who knows. the door is still open.
• _jab 2y ago
  I think your comment is emblematic of the very divide between Silicon Valley and the rest of the world that leads to frustration like what the artists here are expressing. No one becomes an artist except because of passion for the work. It sure as hell isn’t for the money. That’s not so universally true in Silicon Valley, and I’m guessing you’re one of those people who views their job mostly as a means to fund the rest of their lifestyle.
• robofanatic 2y ago
  > just like it's foolish to think corporate programmers will be a thing at some point in the future. I don't think corporate programmers are obsolete. How will a sophisticated AI programmer in the future be any different than a human programmer in an outsourcing firm?
  • throwawaysleep 2y ago
    The role will remain, but the job will change dramatically into one with a higher level of product focus. The "software craftsmen" type will become more obsolete than they are already. RAM used to matter. Now, who even looks at how much RAM their app uses?
    • ori_b 2y ago
      Both product and middle management seems just as ripe a target for automation as coding. Why do you think that can't be automated away?
    • smegger001 2y ago
      And that is why everyones phones an computers are slow because every application eats as much RAM as possible.
      • ChrisMarshallNY 2y ago
        Obligatory Comic: https://x.com/iamdevloper/status/1072503943790497798 https://x.com/iamdevloper/status/1072503943790497798
    • JohnFen 2y ago
      > Now, who even looks at how much RAM their app uses? I do, constantly. In large swaths of software engineering, RAM and other resources are still scarce enough to require careful consideration in their use.
    • olyjohn 2y ago
      And this is why we have tons of trash software that runs like garbage, and nothing but low quality trash products on the market. People who don't give a fuck about anything but profit.
• JohnFen 2y ago
  > I see no reason why "their passion" should overrule profit-seeking. Companies can and will do whatever they want. However, on the level of the individual, I see no reason why profit-seeking should overrule my passion. I don't code to make money, I code because I love doing it. I make money to allow myself to engage in an activity I find rewarding, I don't engage in that activity to make money. If that activity is no longer rewarding, there is no amount of money that can compensate for that. Perhaps you're right, and that the future has no place for people like me. We'll see. Regardless, though, I'm not going to participate (either as a dev or as a customer) with processes that dehumanize people to such a degree.
  • ChrisMarshallNY 2y ago
    I appreciate the post (for what it's worth). I suspect that we are probably considered "anachronisms," in today's culture. I am retired. I didn't want to be retired, but I was told that I'm too old (I was 55, when I retired in 2017) to be playing at programmer; that it's a young man's game, and I should just go and carve decoy ducks in my garage or something. Fortunately, I had enough set aside, that I was able to just accept that no one wants to play in my sandbox, and work on my own. The scope is more humble, but I am absolutely thrilled with the work that I do, and so are the folks that benefit from it (I tend to write stuff for people that can't afford the kind of stuff I write). Money isn't everything, but I suspect a lot of folks don't realize that, until it's way too late.
    • JohnFen 2y ago
      > I was told that I'm too old (I was 55, when I retired in 2017) to be playing at programmer; Maybe you were ready to retire anyway so this doesn't matter -- but you shouldn't believe what you were told on this matter. There are tons of software engineering positions where being on the older end of things isn't considered a handicap. I'm pushing 60 and find there is plenty of opportunity. About half of the engineers I've worked with over the last 30 years or so have been over 40, many over 50. I have a coworker on my team right now who is one of the best devs I've worked with and is 73.
• scelerat 2y ago
  Curious what you think of intellectual property law in general. Trade dress, trade marks, written words, lyrics, distinctive visual styles, processes, melodies etc are all protected under various IP laws. The laws did not anticipate AI models hoovering up all known IP without any permission from or compensation to its creators, but that does not mean that we cannot correct that and it does not mean those creators cannot or should not be able to assert rights and be compensated for violations.
• deleted 2y ago
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• DonsDiscountGas 2y ago
  The linked article is from a duo which publishes a webcomic. This is their own time.
• anal_reactor 2y ago
  > Most artists, like most programmers are working in a commercial capacity. I see no reason why "their passion" should overrule profit-seeking. Ding ding ding. I think that we're already experiencing all the downsides of having AI-generated content. Look at high-budget movies - they're completely bland, tell nothing, they're only optimized for getting money out of average uneducated customer. Ubisoft is known for making all games according to same template that works and makes money. Mobile gaming lasted three entire months before it was overtaken by those profit-driven. Some time ago I went to an expensive concert, and I realized... those guys got loaded by playing literally the same songs they've been playing for twenty years. They found the golden formula and they keep on riding it. Turning to AI only cuts the middle man. I turned towards independent creators because those guys have a passion and want to share it. So not all hope is lost. It's just that true artists are going to be the minority, just like they always were, while the rest will keep slurping up the commercial slop, just like they always have.
• anothercoder43 2y ago
  [flagged]