I clarify my question:
How do you feel about the fact that art created by AI this year is not much different from art created by humans? I think those who have seen it themselves understand what I mean.
How do you feel about the fact that now and in the future, AI will do most of the creative work 80-90% instead of authors and humans, doing it at the highest level better than any human, and people will just train their AI models and create content with prompts?
I’m going to play devil’s advocate and present a hypothetical alternative here…
I’d argue that in some applications, this is fine. For example, corporate logos, the equivalent of clip art in presentations, etc. You can argue that that isn’t really ‘art’ in the sense that you’re describing it, but whatever you want to call it, personally, I don’t care if no artist has to do that BS. I highly doubt many artists really want to be doing that stuff. The problem isn’t that AI is being used to generate soulless art for soulless projects, it’s that it’s taking work away from real artists (and that we as modern humans, as a whole, put so much weight on employment).
If we gave UBI to creatives that covered all of their expenses and let them pursue whatever projects they wanted to work on (and thereby we still, as a species, got to enjoy the actual art by actual artists), would it be so bad that the shitty work is being done by a computer? Theoretically there’d be more ‘real’ art, since artists wouldn’t have to waste their time on the bullshit. Let’s go back to a system of patronage, where society as a whole become the patrons.
It sure can be. Like I said, a bit like an address book has its purpose. But even if it has pages and printed text in it, an address book is not a book anyone would want to read, it’s just a stack of pages.
I have not considered UBI to be honest, maybe I should give it more consideration.
What I worry a lot more about is the way ‘creativity’ (as the OP tried to frame it) is being hijacked and privatised by very few corporations/private interests. The same that pillaged so many of our art history and creations in order to make their own version of it they want to sell us back.
Completely agree with you here. If the technology was being developed and made available to everyone for non-commercial use, while they charged for the commercial use cases, I’d have less of an issue with it (aside from the obvious and serious objection that they’re functionally stealing creatives’ work and profiting off of it - but again, I think this objection could be invalidated with UBI.)
Agreed.