4 ms·

Pieces like this all seem to be written with an unspoken assumption that anyone who wants to make a living wage from being an artist should be able to, as if it

Pieces like this all seem to be written with an unspoken assumption that anyone who wants to make a living wage from being an artist should be able to, as if it's some sort of right. It would be nice if that were true. AI has exacerbated this issue. Suddenly we're faced with the uncomfortable truth that much of human artwork is "mid" as the kids would say and people aren't willing to pay for songs, writing, and/or graphics the way they otherwise might. Anyway, I'm very curious if anyone has a good argument for why anyone who wishes to be an artist is owed a living wage for merely their desire to be recognized as economically valuable.

palmotea 7mo ago
> Pieces like this all seem to be written with an unspoken assumption that anyone who wants to make a living wage from being an artist should be able to, as if it's some sort of right. Comments like yours seem to be written with the unspoken assumption that everyone's life should be hard unless they can please the market, which technology makes increasingly difficult. It's deeply anti-human. > AI has exacerbated this issue. Suddenly we're faced with the uncomfortable truth that much of human artwork is "mid" as the kids would say and people aren't willing to pay for songs, writing, and/or graphics the way they otherwise might. Is that news to anyone? But mid people exist, they worthy people, and they need to eat. AI is leading us to a dystopia where, unless you're in the top 0.1% of talent, the market has no use for you. And guess what happens to you then? > Anyway, I'm very curious if anyone has a good argument for why anyone who wishes to be an artist is owed a living wage for merely their desire to be recognized as economically valuable. Because that was the last promise the tech bros made: our tech will replace you, then you get to be an artist, be creative! Now it will take your creative job, and free you up for draining monitoring tasks and manual labor.
- y-curious 7mo ago
  People are only willing to pay for quality, mostly. I can’t just say that I’m a neurosurgeon because I want to be one. There has always been reward for merit and suffering for lack of merit. Nothing “anti human” about social Darwinism
  - wolvesechoes 7mo ago
    > There has always been reward for merit and suffering for lack of merit. But conflating merit with economical value is very recent invention. > Nothing “anti human” about social Darwinism It didn't arise until rise of capitalism and bourgeoise (lack of) morality. For most of human history, and among countless cultures, social Darwinism wasn't the case. Peak ideology, btw.
    - lotsofpulp 7mo ago
      What is the definition of “social Darwinism”? I am under the impression that for most of human history, the ability and willingness to inflict violence was what determined the social hierarchy. Would that not be the reason that almost all tribes were patriarchal? It seems to be a very, very recent phenomenon that simply selling goods and services can elevate one in the hierarchy, due to the advent of legal systems and policing (e.g. women’s rights).
      - defrost 7mo ago
        The social Darwinists that ran with nature red in tooth and claw and took survival of the best fitted to mean the physically fittest and most aggressively dominant win are the ones responsible for your impressions. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Darwinism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Darwinism They're very much a fork from the Alfred Russel Wallace / Charles Darwin theory of natural selection.
      - wolvesechoes 7mo ago
        > I am under the impression that for most of human history, the ability and willingness to inflict violence was what determined the social hierarchy. As most things people today believe, this is not really true, at least not in such universal way as usually implied. > Would that not be the reason that almost all tribes were patriarchal? There is no data to assert that.
        lotsofpulp 7mo ago
- Unai 7mo ago
  I share the same opinion that, just because someone is or wants to be an artist, doesn't mean they deserve to make a living wage out of it. But I'm not a capitalist, far from it. I actually think people shouldn't have to work at all if they don't want to, but we're just not at all there yet. From experience, this seems to be a very unpopular opinion. Everyone see themselves as hard working, and hate lazy people. But since a few years ago, all of the sudden, and mostly in relation to AI, everyone thinks all artists deserve to make a living. I find this hypocritical. If you're not providing enough value for others to give you money, that's just how things are, artist or not. Too bad the mediocre work of a machine is good enough. The day the system changes, and it will, will be for everyone, so no one is required to provide value to be able to feed themselves. Artists are not special just for declaring themselves an artist.
- balamatom 7mo ago
  >if anyone has a good argument >Because that was the last promise the tech bros made Tech bros are to be believed?! >And guess what happens to you then? Nothing as simple as you might hope for ;-)
- adamtaylor_13 7mo ago
  No, life is hard on its own unless you can please the market. Why is it anti-human to suggest that an underwater basket weaver should not make the same amount of money as a neurosurgeon?
  - palmotea 7mo ago
    > Why is it anti-human to suggest that an underwater basket weaver should not make the same amount of money as a neurosurgeon? Because that's a hyperbolic exaggeration to make you feel fine about ignoring the plight of others? The machine should serve society, society shouldn't serve the machine. Unfortunately, what we have is far closer to the latter.
  - wolvesechoes 7mo ago
    > No, life is hard on its own unless you can please the market It is funny when such claims are put with an aura of harsh, but brilliant insight, yet they are nothing more than expression of ideology.
conception 7mo ago
Software engineers should be asking themselves that same question day in and out. All know workers actually. The cost to produce art has dropped to zero. The cost to get knowledge on a topic - effectively zero. The cost to write basic software - effectively zero. The cost to produce today’s software will never be higher than today. In six months the chances that it’s significantly cheaper to do so are very high.
- onion2k 7mo ago
  The cost to produce art has dropped to zero. The cost to produce an image has dropped to pretty much zero, but whether an image is 'art' is a question people have been struggling with for a long, long time. Art is usually considered to be the expression of something more meaningful than just making a picture, and in order to express something as a work of art you need to live, feel, and experience that thing (or a proxy of that thing.) There's a reason why we have entire art movements called things like "impressionism"; that's the artist creating what they believe impressed something on themselves, and trying to transfer some of that feeling on to the viewer of their artwork. That is entirely missing in AI generated artwork. The problem for artists is that very few people care about that aspect of art, and just want something nice to hang on a wall.
  - ehnto 7mo ago
    I am on the side of humanity here, but people don't pay for art. People pay for status, consumption, image and authenticity. But commercial art consumers, where most artists make a living, ie ad agencies, game studios etc, they actually don't give a shit about any of that. Some do, you can probably think of some, but they are the notable minority. Most don't, most are just out here to make money. They begrudgingly pay artists, and will love the day they can stop (some already have stopped) Can we see that in their output? Absolutely, but if it doesn't affect their bottom line they will not care. Anyway, to the GPs point, that is true for software in a much larger way. Nobody ever cared about the soul and craft of software except the developers. The moment we can be replaced for cheaper, it will be nothing but business.
    - 7mo ago
jemmyw 7mo ago
I think that AI isn't the only thing exacerbating this issue. More people are doing artistic like things as hobbies. The internet makes it easier to learn and the cost of entry has gone down - paints, canvases, brushes, guitars, pianos, film equipment, the low end has gone up in quality and down in price. I do some painting and I've met quite a few local artists. Some are amazing and some not so much. I haven't met anyone making a living from it though, not the creative stuff anyway. A couple of them do make a living by doing commercial work. One friend, who seems to try the hardest, does book illustrations, runs classes, prints and sells her own work, and makes a loss every year so is supported by her partner, who is a builder. There are two art galleries in town. I go to both regularly. The work has never been flying off the shelves. And some of it deserves to. None of the above has anything to do with AI. It was the same before AI, and AI doesn't paint physical pictures anyway. I've seen some digital art prints but they're really not popular for whatever reason. To answer your question then: my argument is that most artists don't expect to earn a living from it at all. And if more people are engaged in creation (not a bad thing) then it would logically follow that there is less chance of making money. Probably the most tragic thing in my opinion is that if I visit the art exhibition for my local town, the artwork on display is wonderfully varied in quality, style and imagination, and when I visited a national gallery recently displaying the works of modern artists who have "made it" to that level, it was all absolute shite. Actual technical ability seems to be being relegated to poverty artists.
- balamatom 7mo ago
  >Probably the most tragic thing in my opinion is that if I visit the art exhibition for my local town, the artwork on display is wonderfully varied in quality, style and imagination, and when I visited a national gallery recently displaying the works of modern artists who have "made it" to that level, it was all absolute shite. Actual technical ability seems to be being relegated to poverty artists. The artist becomes the artwork. The artifice here is precisely in "making it", in the act of convincing others of the value of the piece. It's an acquired taste; I agree with you that not all people appreciate it. But surely, at the end of the pipeline, all this money must buy something of value? And with passively consumable art such as music (which you can have playing in the background while looking at something else) it's that much easier. IIRC Blixa Bargeld predicted Spotify decades ago. Music on tap - like the power line and water mains; and that's all.
balamatom 7mo ago
>Pieces like this all seem to be written with an unspoken assumption that anyone who wants to make a living wage from being an artist should be able to, as if it's some sort of right. Yeahp, it's pure ideology. In contemporary civilization, the role of creator of shared aesthetic constructs (artist) is left to an elect few. This is, on the whole, a reduction in average individual capacity. So how about this instead: anyone making a living should be making art, as if it's some sort of obligation. The media technologies of the XX century (recording, photography, motion photograpy) made it that much easier to be audience, and that much pointless to be artist. This effectively robbed the common person of any reason to participate in the collective meaning-making process that is art. Eventually this was substituted by the clicktivism, the dogpiling, and all that. If you are never permitted to develop a sense of scale beyond the ouroborically narcissistic, participating social media fills a much similar psychological niche, to you, as influencing people through creative media. Those who aspire to star status must first sacrifice a fixed amount of integrity to reproducing the kayfabe. Speakers of dead balamatomic languages may be wise to observe induction into "artist" status by humiliation-transfer - those natives were so dumb they thought they had to show publically how it's done at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CBaC0IRc1Bk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CBaC0IRc1Bk >Anyway, I'm very curious if anyone has a good argument for why anyone who wishes to be an artist is owed a living wage for merely their desire to be recognized as economically valuable. Anyone [cut] is owed a living [cut]; done. No person asks to be born; much of "what you are" and "what your function in society is" is involuntary and immutable; nobody is owed a useful function; nobody is owed a meaning. But, through art, one can make one's own meanings, and share them in a voluntary way; as opposed to resource-constrainments (money) which is at its root an instrument of coercion. That's the thing about art which has always terrified the money people. Eager beavers that they are, they've built (well, more like had us build for 'em) these whole elaborate semi-sensible institutions for reducing art to a special ritual for emitting high-denomination banknotes (paintings, album profits, walking banknotes in the form of performing artists who "made it big (sus)" - always loved the honesty in how the Japanese call their pop stars literally "idols"...)
drewbeck 7mo ago
I believe that everyone deserves food housing and and security regardless of what they do or don’t do professionally. I have no logical argument only a moral one, which I sense would not be sufficient to convince you.
- adamtaylor_13 7mo ago
  It's hard to be convinced by your moral argument when you don't actually provide it.
armchairhacker 7mo ago
Nobody has an intrinsic right to anything, but I believe art makes the world a much nicer place to live in, inspiring people to behave and advance society in more direct ways. It’s hard or impossible to fairly select people, because someone has to produce food, shelter, etc. But I believe society should strive to allow more people to spend little enough time and effort in other work so they can devote themselves to art and other creative pursuits.

palmotea 7mo ago

> Pieces like this all seem to be written with an unspoken assumption that anyone who wants to make a living wage from being an artist should be able to, as if it's some sort of right. Comments like yours seem to be written with the unspoken assumption that everyone's life should be hard unless they can please the market, which technology makes increasingly difficult. It's deeply anti-human. > AI has exacerbated this issue. Suddenly we're faced with the uncomfortable truth that much of human artwork is "mid" as the kids would say and people aren't willing to pay for songs, writing, and/or graphics the way they otherwise might. Is that news to anyone? But mid people exist, they worthy people, and they need to eat. AI is leading us to a dystopia where, unless you're in the top 0.1% of talent, the market has no use for you. And guess what happens to you then? > Anyway, I'm very curious if anyone has a good argument for why anyone who wishes to be an artist is owed a living wage for merely their desire to be recognized as economically valuable. Because that was the last promise the tech bros made: our tech will replace you, then you get to be an artist, be creative! Now it will take your creative job, and free you up for draining monitoring tasks and manual labor.

y-curious 7mo ago
People are only willing to pay for quality, mostly. I can’t just say that I’m a neurosurgeon because I want to be one. There has always been reward for merit and suffering for lack of merit. Nothing “anti human” about social Darwinism
- wolvesechoes 7mo ago
  > There has always been reward for merit and suffering for lack of merit. But conflating merit with economical value is very recent invention. > Nothing “anti human” about social Darwinism It didn't arise until rise of capitalism and bourgeoise (lack of) morality. For most of human history, and among countless cultures, social Darwinism wasn't the case. Peak ideology, btw.
  - lotsofpulp 7mo ago
    What is the definition of “social Darwinism”? I am under the impression that for most of human history, the ability and willingness to inflict violence was what determined the social hierarchy. Would that not be the reason that almost all tribes were patriarchal? It seems to be a very, very recent phenomenon that simply selling goods and services can elevate one in the hierarchy, due to the advent of legal systems and policing (e.g. women’s rights).
    - defrost 7mo ago
      The social Darwinists that ran with nature red in tooth and claw and took survival of the best fitted to mean the physically fittest and most aggressively dominant win are the ones responsible for your impressions. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Darwinism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Darwinism They're very much a fork from the Alfred Russel Wallace / Charles Darwin theory of natural selection.
    - wolvesechoes 7mo ago
      > I am under the impression that for most of human history, the ability and willingness to inflict violence was what determined the social hierarchy. As most things people today believe, this is not really true, at least not in such universal way as usually implied. > Would that not be the reason that almost all tribes were patriarchal? There is no data to assert that.
      - lotsofpulp 7mo ago
Unai 7mo ago
I share the same opinion that, just because someone is or wants to be an artist, doesn't mean they deserve to make a living wage out of it. But I'm not a capitalist, far from it. I actually think people shouldn't have to work at all if they don't want to, but we're just not at all there yet. From experience, this seems to be a very unpopular opinion. Everyone see themselves as hard working, and hate lazy people. But since a few years ago, all of the sudden, and mostly in relation to AI, everyone thinks all artists deserve to make a living. I find this hypocritical. If you're not providing enough value for others to give you money, that's just how things are, artist or not. Too bad the mediocre work of a machine is good enough. The day the system changes, and it will, will be for everyone, so no one is required to provide value to be able to feed themselves. Artists are not special just for declaring themselves an artist.
balamatom 7mo ago
>if anyone has a good argument >Because that was the last promise the tech bros made Tech bros are to be believed?! >And guess what happens to you then? Nothing as simple as you might hope for ;-)
adamtaylor_13 7mo ago
No, life is hard on its own unless you can please the market. Why is it anti-human to suggest that an underwater basket weaver should not make the same amount of money as a neurosurgeon?
- palmotea 7mo ago
  > Why is it anti-human to suggest that an underwater basket weaver should not make the same amount of money as a neurosurgeon? Because that's a hyperbolic exaggeration to make you feel fine about ignoring the plight of others? The machine should serve society, society shouldn't serve the machine. Unfortunately, what we have is far closer to the latter.
- wolvesechoes 7mo ago
  > No, life is hard on its own unless you can please the market It is funny when such claims are put with an aura of harsh, but brilliant insight, yet they are nothing more than expression of ideology.

conception 7mo ago

Software engineers should be asking themselves that same question day in and out. All know workers actually. The cost to produce art has dropped to zero. The cost to get knowledge on a topic - effectively zero. The cost to write basic software - effectively zero. The cost to produce today’s software will never be higher than today. In six months the chances that it’s significantly cheaper to do so are very high.

onion2k 7mo ago
The cost to produce art has dropped to zero. The cost to produce an image has dropped to pretty much zero, but whether an image is 'art' is a question people have been struggling with for a long, long time. Art is usually considered to be the expression of something more meaningful than just making a picture, and in order to express something as a work of art you need to live, feel, and experience that thing (or a proxy of that thing.) There's a reason why we have entire art movements called things like "impressionism"; that's the artist creating what they believe impressed something on themselves, and trying to transfer some of that feeling on to the viewer of their artwork. That is entirely missing in AI generated artwork. The problem for artists is that very few people care about that aspect of art, and just want something nice to hang on a wall.
- ehnto 7mo ago
  I am on the side of humanity here, but people don't pay for art. People pay for status, consumption, image and authenticity. But commercial art consumers, where most artists make a living, ie ad agencies, game studios etc, they actually don't give a shit about any of that. Some do, you can probably think of some, but they are the notable minority. Most don't, most are just out here to make money. They begrudgingly pay artists, and will love the day they can stop (some already have stopped) Can we see that in their output? Absolutely, but if it doesn't affect their bottom line they will not care. Anyway, to the GPs point, that is true for software in a much larger way. Nobody ever cared about the soul and craft of software except the developers. The moment we can be replaced for cheaper, it will be nothing but business.
  - 7mo ago

jemmyw 7mo ago

I think that AI isn't the only thing exacerbating this issue. More people are doing artistic like things as hobbies. The internet makes it easier to learn and the cost of entry has gone down - paints, canvases, brushes, guitars, pianos, film equipment, the low end has gone up in quality and down in price. I do some painting and I've met quite a few local artists. Some are amazing and some not so much. I haven't met anyone making a living from it though, not the creative stuff anyway. A couple of them do make a living by doing commercial work. One friend, who seems to try the hardest, does book illustrations, runs classes, prints and sells her own work, and makes a loss every year so is supported by her partner, who is a builder. There are two art galleries in town. I go to both regularly. The work has never been flying off the shelves. And some of it deserves to. None of the above has anything to do with AI. It was the same before AI, and AI doesn't paint physical pictures anyway. I've seen some digital art prints but they're really not popular for whatever reason. To answer your question then: my argument is that most artists don't expect to earn a living from it at all. And if more people are engaged in creation (not a bad thing) then it would logically follow that there is less chance of making money. Probably the most tragic thing in my opinion is that if I visit the art exhibition for my local town, the artwork on display is wonderfully varied in quality, style and imagination, and when I visited a national gallery recently displaying the works of modern artists who have "made it" to that level, it was all absolute shite. Actual technical ability seems to be being relegated to poverty artists.

balamatom 7mo ago
>Probably the most tragic thing in my opinion is that if I visit the art exhibition for my local town, the artwork on display is wonderfully varied in quality, style and imagination, and when I visited a national gallery recently displaying the works of modern artists who have "made it" to that level, it was all absolute shite. Actual technical ability seems to be being relegated to poverty artists. The artist becomes the artwork. The artifice here is precisely in "making it", in the act of convincing others of the value of the piece. It's an acquired taste; I agree with you that not all people appreciate it. But surely, at the end of the pipeline, all this money must buy something of value? And with passively consumable art such as music (which you can have playing in the background while looking at something else) it's that much easier. IIRC Blixa Bargeld predicted Spotify decades ago. Music on tap - like the power line and water mains; and that's all.

balamatom 7mo ago

>Pieces like this all seem to be written with an unspoken assumption that anyone who wants to make a living wage from being an artist should be able to, as if it's some sort of right. Yeahp, it's pure ideology. In contemporary civilization, the role of creator of shared aesthetic constructs (artist) is left to an elect few. This is, on the whole, a reduction in average individual capacity. So how about this instead: anyone making a living should be making art, as if it's some sort of obligation. The media technologies of the XX century (recording, photography, motion photograpy) made it that much easier to be audience, and that much pointless to be artist. This effectively robbed the common person of any reason to participate in the collective meaning-making process that is art. Eventually this was substituted by the clicktivism, the dogpiling, and all that. If you are never permitted to develop a sense of scale beyond the ouroborically narcissistic, participating social media fills a much similar psychological niche, to you, as influencing people through creative media. Those who aspire to star status must first sacrifice a fixed amount of integrity to reproducing the kayfabe. Speakers of dead balamatomic languages may be wise to observe induction into "artist" status by humiliation-transfer - those natives were so dumb they thought they had to show publically how it's done at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CBaC0IRc1Bk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CBaC0IRc1Bk >Anyway, I'm very curious if anyone has a good argument for why anyone who wishes to be an artist is owed a living wage for merely their desire to be recognized as economically valuable. Anyone [cut] is owed a living [cut]; done. No person asks to be born; much of "what you are" and "what your function in society is" is involuntary and immutable; nobody is owed a useful function; nobody is owed a meaning. But, through art, one can make one's own meanings, and share them in a voluntary way; as opposed to resource-constrainments (money) which is at its root an instrument of coercion. That's the thing about art which has always terrified the money people. Eager beavers that they are, they've built (well, more like had us build for 'em) these whole elaborate semi-sensible institutions for reducing art to a special ritual for emitting high-denomination banknotes (paintings, album profits, walking banknotes in the form of performing artists who "made it big (sus)" - always loved the honesty in how the Japanese call their pop stars literally "idols"...)

drewbeck 7mo ago

I believe that everyone deserves food housing and and security regardless of what they do or don’t do professionally. I have no logical argument only a moral one, which I sense would not be sufficient to convince you.

adamtaylor_13 7mo ago
It's hard to be convinced by your moral argument when you don't actually provide it.

armchairhacker 7mo ago

Nobody has an intrinsic right to anything, but I believe art makes the world a much nicer place to live in, inspiring people to behave and advance society in more direct ways. It’s hard or impossible to fairly select people, because someone has to produce food, shelter, etc. But I believe society should strive to allow more people to spend little enough time and effort in other work so they can devote themselves to art and other creative pursuits.