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Artists lose first copyright battle in the fight against AI-generated images
(www.computerworld.com)
this post was submitted on 01 Nov 2023
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You are only arguing about labour output and corporate work but I explicitly wrote about the impact on how many people in the future will invest in learning skills like digital illustration, drawing and painting.
As you probably know, it's not a three year apprenticeship and then you have an artist.
People learn how to draw, which takes an enormous amount of effort and time and often money as well, because they want to visualise their ideas as convincing as possible. On their way of doing that communities like Deviant Art are created and filled with their work.
I for example will not continue digital illustration, especially not posting it somewhere online. My work is easily replaceable by AI. I did commissioned fan art mostly and sci-fi illustrations for collectors sometimes. But it was only a side gig, I am in one of the bigger groups of artists who barely can pay for their hobby with what they earn. That's over now.
Why would I continue investing so much time and money in a skill that's not appreciated or paid anymore? When a younger person asks me if they should invest the tens of thousands of hours necessary to become a good artist I will tell them to better learn something else.
Perhaps there will be an increase in traditional drawing skills learned. But that's vastly more expensive. Most people don't have the money and space to learn how to create oil paintings for example.
Will companies still higher some people who know about digital art? Probably, for a while. But that's not what I was writing about.
There haven't been sword duels in a long time. And yet people still learn fencing (which tends to only cost money and not make it).
The commercial market for clothing doesn't require people to learn to hand knit, and yet that's a skill that's still pretty popular.
If you think people are going to stop drawing as a hobby, I guess I just don't really see it that way.
You may stop drawing out of a concern that an AI can use your images to learn how to draw similar images (though do keep in mind your images in the training set is about the relative equivalent of spitting in the ocean).
And that's entirely your prerogative. It's your skill and output to do with what you want.
But there's plenty of artists who will continue to produce art both professionally and others as a hobby that they enjoy, and many will continue to share it.
And the idea that drawing as a skillset is going to disappear is ridiculous.
Did computerized synthesizers cause people to stop learning to play musical instruments? Because one half of US households today have someone who plays, even though there are alternative technologies to create very similar end results without the same investment of skill and patience.
Edit: Also, regarding this:
I'd recommend learning about the overjustification effect - it's pretty insidious to a life well lived.
You are building a strawman. I never said the skill of drawing will vanish or no one ever will learn how to draw anymore. This is what I wrote:
And right now you have wrote nothing to dispute that. Quite the opposite, you seem to agree with it. You just disagree with the strawman that no one will draw by hand anymore.
The dynamics are also very different depending on the specific activity. Making music and sports as a hobby have other perks that drawing doesn't have. And not everybody who doodles from time to time is an artist (in the sense of someone honing the craft).
To make the ideology more fitting you would have to ask: How many people will continue to learn how to fence if we had ultra fast learning, extremely competent and getting even better fencing AI robots? They copy the fencing styles of all people they see fencing. They will from now on be at most fencing tournaments, they will be at all local gyms, Olympia, can be booked as teachers and used in movies. Instead of fencing themselves your opponents can just put a fencing AI robot into the duel.
Do you really think this wouldn't have a significant impact on the motivation to pursue fencing as a skill?
Photoshop was also said it would make drawing less common of a skillset as I originally said. But you took issue with that comparison because in your follow-up suggesting photography as a better analogy you specified that in that case it made the skill "incredibly rare" - your words, not my strawman.
And no, what you described about fencing is exactly what happened to the hobby of 'chess.' AI could learn from players' games. Could then compete against them and beat them. Copy their styles. And you can just play against it instead of humans.
Has AI existing which can beat any human player in chess made that a dead hobby? (Hint: chess is experiencing a huge boom right now).