"Are we saying we don’t want artist to be a viable profession?"
Of courst not. I think a large part of the problem has been the publishing industry and their copyright term extentions. These have sought to make art a little too viable in fact. Viable, that is, for those involved in the publishing industries - not the artists themselves.
If I install your plumbing, you don't pay some corporation every time you turn your taps on for the next 100 years. But that's where we are with copyright and the publishing industry that lives off it.
If you're worried about struggling artists, worry about fixing the pubishing industry and its toxic effects. AI art is just sideshow to that.
Cue standard retort to "theft" framing in digital media: if somebody makes a copy of your picture, you still own the picture.
In practice, in a world where copying is cheap and easy, and now that AI art is making production easier still, it's obscurity - not piracy - that's the biggest threat to artists. Copyright enforcement in such a situation is powerfully counter-productive.
A sub-controversey is the extent to which human "prompt craft" plays a part in generting AI art. This depends on how you create the image (eg from a seed image, or using plugins or different training sets) and can get pretty involved. Not much more involved than learning how to use, say, ffmpeg or awk perhaps, but complex enough to warrant numerous tips and tricks sites and discussions. A simple prompt like "Cyborg Batman" will certainly not come up with much as far as I know.
To get a feel for the current (and rapidly improving) state of things, I can recommend lurking in the Stable Foundation and Midjourney Discord servers. These communities discuss images generated by various people of different skill levels and technology deployments.
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"Are we saying we don’t want artist to be a viable profession?" Of courst not. I think a large part of the problem has been the publishing industry and their copyright term extentions. These have sought to make art a little too viable in fact. Viable, that is, for those involved in the publishing industries - not the artists themselves. If I install your plumbing, you don't pay some corporation every time you turn your taps on for the next 100 years. But that's where we are with copyright and the publishing industry that lives off it. If you're worried about struggling artists, worry about fixing the pubishing industry and its toxic effects. AI art is just sideshow to that.
Cue standard retort to "theft" framing in digital media: if somebody makes a copy of your picture, you still own the picture. In practice, in a world where copying is cheap and easy, and now that AI art is making production easier still, it's obscurity - not piracy - that's the biggest threat to artists. Copyright enforcement in such a situation is powerfully counter-productive.
A sub-controversey is the extent to which human "prompt craft" plays a part in generting AI art. This depends on how you create the image (eg from a seed image, or using plugins or different training sets) and can get pretty involved. Not much more involved than learning how to use, say, ffmpeg or awk perhaps, but complex enough to warrant numerous tips and tricks sites and discussions. A simple prompt like "Cyborg Batman" will certainly not come up with much as far as I know. To get a feel for the current (and rapidly improving) state of things, I can recommend lurking in the Stable Foundation and Midjourney Discord servers. These communities discuss images generated by various people of different skill levels and technology deployments.