An artist friend of mine just found that some of her work has been “scraped” for use by AI. She is not thrilled to be an unwilling part of the AI “atelier,” Tim. Artists can’t escape putting their work up on various websites if they want to publicize their art these days, but it is these same sites that are being used as fodder for AI “creativity.” So what about the small scale artists who provide the fodder for these second-order users of AI? Should they just resign themselves to feeding the machine, or should they commit commercial suicide and take their work completely off-line? There’s a technophilia in your recent posts that I’m wondering about. I’m not ready to go post-human quite yet.
I think they should either resign themselves or go off-line entirely, and in going off-line resign themselves to producing work that no one will pay for. I mean, what do you do two days after John Henry beats the steam shovel and dies in the process? You live in a world where the steam shovel is an established fact, two days later. No philia involved, just recognition. I think there are moves to make that aren't just surrender or resignation, but they involve leveraging a knowledge of how art is made and an aesthetic vision into some more-skilled-than-most use of the AIs that are now appearing, thinking of them more as new tools and less as robot overlords (though they are that too).
Photographers have long known that they either do high-value original compositions that they keep (mostly) offline or they put their work online and see it reproduced in lower-resolution, lower-quality form in various ways. I've found my own entirely mediocre work offered as screensavers at giant rip-off sites. Nobody's had any great ideas about preventing that from happening for the last twenty years.
An artist friend of mine just found that some of her work has been “scraped” for use by AI. She is not thrilled to be an unwilling part of the AI “atelier,” Tim. Artists can’t escape putting their work up on various websites if they want to publicize their art these days, but it is these same sites that are being used as fodder for AI “creativity.” So what about the small scale artists who provide the fodder for these second-order users of AI? Should they just resign themselves to feeding the machine, or should they commit commercial suicide and take their work completely off-line? There’s a technophilia in your recent posts that I’m wondering about. I’m not ready to go post-human quite yet.
I think they should either resign themselves or go off-line entirely, and in going off-line resign themselves to producing work that no one will pay for. I mean, what do you do two days after John Henry beats the steam shovel and dies in the process? You live in a world where the steam shovel is an established fact, two days later. No philia involved, just recognition. I think there are moves to make that aren't just surrender or resignation, but they involve leveraging a knowledge of how art is made and an aesthetic vision into some more-skilled-than-most use of the AIs that are now appearing, thinking of them more as new tools and less as robot overlords (though they are that too).
Photographers have long known that they either do high-value original compositions that they keep (mostly) offline or they put their work online and see it reproduced in lower-resolution, lower-quality form in various ways. I've found my own entirely mediocre work offered as screensavers at giant rip-off sites. Nobody's had any great ideas about preventing that from happening for the last twenty years.