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You're not taking into consideration how the actual artists actually feel. And, from the first hand - the feeling is horrible. Most artists love to draw, the pr

You're not taking into consideration how the actual artists actually feel. And, from the first hand - the feeling is horrible. Most artists love to draw, the process itself is incredibly satisfying. Just like a musician loves his instrument. This is destroying them, stealing the joy from the thing they devoted decades of life. My wife is extremely depressed by this, to the point I think she'll need serious therapy. She still has most of her job, but yeah recent developments like ControlNet? Well, shit.

gonzo41 4y ago
Sorry if this comes off as harsh but, AI is not stopping anyone from drawing. The person looking at AI and then fretting about the future, and then not drawing is the person preventing the drawing from happening. The same thing happened to bank tellers with the ATM. Jobs change and so do industries. Art's become more niche.
- Riverheart 4y ago
  You're right. This is harsh. Some people make a living off art. Having valuable skills is good for people's self esteem. We're not replacing a factory line job, we're automating something that takes people 100hrs of classes and self practice to master and people have put themselves in debt to achieve. But they can doodle in their spare time while they search for another job that isn't being phased out or spend most of their day crafting text prompts. Maybe go back to college take on some more debt.
  - tylersmith 4y ago
    Many people have hobbies that are low value skills and they have to work doing things outside their passion if they want to be higher value. This isn't unique to people who draw for a living it's just new to them and they'll have to adjust.
  - fipar 4y ago
    You’re not wrong, but when we replace a factory line job that person also goes through their own little hell, and they probably don’t even have the possibility of going back to college and taking more debt. If anything, if it is true that AI will render lots of jobs obsolete (I have my doubts), at least there’s a chance this may allow some empathy to grow in those affected. Perhaps we finally get some meaningful social change.
    - Riverheart 4y ago
      I'm unclear how people got the impression that I'm okay with people's lives getting upended by automation. As I elaborated on elsewhere, my post was to say there was a difference in what is being automated, highly skilled labor with high time/money/education costs vs something you shouldn't require a degree to learn to do.
      - fipar 4y ago
        As you elaborated elsewhere: > Honestly this whole "adapt" thing is a load of nonsense parroted by people who aren't immediately under threat and have nothing to fear. Who is going to adapt at 30/40/50 years old? How about people who just graduated art school? Go right back into college? Please. I agree completely, I just don't think a degree being involved has anything to do with it. I assume most people work the best job they could land, so someone doing menial work and losing it due to automation is in about as much pain as someone facing the same situation on a very specialized role. If anything, the person with more education has a much better chance at getting another (perhaps lower paying) job. I interpreted your first reply as conveying the message that it's not so bad if low skilled labor is automated, and it's a bigger problem if it's high skilled labor that is replaced. My apologies if I misunderstood you.
        Riverheart 4y ago
        I understand why I might have come across that way but it wasn't my intention. I could have phrased it better. I agree that losing a job, particularly to automation is painful all around. My take is that low skilled labor getting automated is problematic because people need work and frankly I don't think everyone can/should go to college to make a living and I feel much automation is about margins. We need a strong middle class of homeowners and consumers and enough jobs that people can reasonably achieve it. But automation has been coming for low skilled work for ages and the wisdom was that high skilled work was supposed to be safe(r). I think it is extraordinarily problematic if high skilled workers are forced to start competing for a diminishing pool of low skill jobs. Moving into another high skilled job would be best but without free/subsidized education puts undue burden on people and who is to say what work is safe 10yrs into the future now? Once high skilled work starts getting automated it means there is no protection and therefore no stability. How can we grow the middle class in such an environment? This also means automation of low skilled work will accelerate. Order kiosks will be replaced by a specialized ChatGPT customer service version. Acts and sounds like a real person. Maybe it's got a floating head avatar while an automated process in the back assembles the food. One store manager and a guy who inspects the equipment across town. Today it's the artists but tomorrow it could be IT workers. Companies are pyramids and the room at the top is finite. A healthy economy is not a pyramid.
  - brookst 4y ago
    Your lack of empathy for factory workers is hurting your case. They are real, and train for their jobs, and care about the families they provide for. “technical disruption is hard on people” is a much more sympathetic position than “artists should be exempt because they’re special”. We all face risks. We all have to adapt. We all have opportunities from adapting to the world rather than clinging to the past. Artists are no different from factory workers (or programmers, or bus drivers)
    - Riverheart 4y ago
      No a lack of empathy here. OP was saying there is little difference between automating art and automating a bank teller. For factory workers, I'm not saying its a job that requires no training but it doesn't requires years of college and 40/60k in debt. Clearly the ceiling for getting a decent paid job to raise a family without massive time/money/education investments is skyrocketing but I didn't point that out in my post so obviously I don't care. Honestly this whole "adapt" thing is a load of nonsense parroted by people who aren't immediately under threat and have nothing to fear. Who is going to adapt at 30/40/50 years old? How about people who just graduated art school? Go right back into college? Please. Edit: For the record, I care about anyone getting displaced but not all displacement is of equal level. If highly educated/skilled labor is now at risk this world isn't prepared for what's about to come. Edit2: Removed my mischaracterization comment. Was wrong to assume bad faith in this response.
      - Zababa 4y ago
        Maybe not as big as what's happening with AI, but I can see my parents constantly having to adapt to Microsoft's new redisign of Windows, or <software> having a new version, or laws changing. And that's for jobs considered relatively safe and boring (accounting). As for art school, I've always heard that it was more fun than IT/computer science/accounting but way more dangerous, as in you weren't guaranteed a job at all. Not everyone has heard that, of course, not everyone has the time/skills/resources to plan their career. I don't really know what to say except that it sucks for them. On the other hand the lower bar of entry may bring way more art in general, like it did with digital art.
  - robswc 4y ago
    I was under the impression that it has _always_ been hard to make a living as an artist. I think this is just a truth people will have to accept. I used to make music and quickly realized I would have to dedicate 1000s of hours to it if I ever wanted to make it a career. This is simply because there were 1000s of other people that wanted to also make it a career.
  - pixl97 4y ago
    Whenever I read a thread like this it makes me wonder how little most individuals know about the history that came before them. I could take artist out of your statement and put blacksmith in and it would be difficult to tell if this was wrote in 1890. Everyone seems to fight automation in an individual/industry battle rather at the society level. We keep measuring our worth based on work and when we finally run out of work we're going to have a problem.
    - Riverheart 4y ago
      "We keep measuring our worth based on work and when we finally run out of work we're going to have a problem." Yeah, because work pays the bills. Guess what happens when you automate faster than social policy changes? More unemployed artists than blacksmiths. Also people resist change when it threatens their way of life. It's almost like the luddites resisting automation are saying slow down automation people "when we finally run out of work we're going to have a problem".
      - pixl97 4y ago
        Unfortunately the luddites were not very effective at slowing down the technology. And with the modern police state being more aligned with wealth and corporate interests the general outlook is "the problem is coming at us full speed". This is not an artist problem, this is an everyone problem that is unavoidable. Of course here in the US we're playing right versus left instead of a few trillionaires will own everything versus the starving huddled masses that this path seems to be leading to.
        Riverheart 4y ago
        I agree.
- Shaanie 4y ago
  One big difference is that art is typically a passion job, whereas most of the previously automated jobs weren't. Being able to draw for a living also takes way longer to learn than being a bank teller, or data entry etc, did. Not that it matters, AI is only going to get better from here. I'd also feel depressed if I made my living doing digital art.
brookst 4y ago
The human impact is real, but how is it different from how carriage drivers felt about the automobile, or how typists felt about the word processor? I’ll submit that people who feel horrible have mistaken the commodity and value-add aspects of their jobs. AI does not make someone an artist, but nor does great hand-eye coordination and good brush technique. The actual art is concept; brushes and canvas and AI are tools. I’m sorry that the decoupling of creation from performance is making people you care about feel bad, but really this is hundreds of years old news for most artists (musicians, architects, sculptors, etc). People who enjoy drawing can still draw, just like people who enjoy playing instruments can still play instruments.
- bryanrasmussen 4y ago
  >The human impact is real, but how is it different from how carriage drivers felt about the automobile, or how typists felt about the word processor? it's probably different in the way that the parent poster described, that artists found drawing an emotionally satisfying process whereas people typing probably didn't think setting styles in MS Word made them complete.
  - DennisP 4y ago
    People who have never found their paid work so emotionally satisfying are worse off, not better. At least professional artists have gotten to spend some of their working lives that way.
  - philippejara 4y ago
    there is nothing stopping them from doing the thing that "makes them complete" for leisure like most other people. AI art doesn't stop you from drawing, it might very well impact the commercial viability of it for sure but all that's lost is that.
    - jhbadger 4y ago
      Exactly. People play chess, even though computers can beat anyone these days. Or participate in track events even though cars and airplanes are vastly faster than a runner on foot.
sdiacom 4y ago
Obviously I don't get to tell your wife, or anyone else, how to feel about this. And there is a very real and very impactful thing in that, if you enjoy and make a living out of hand-drawn art, AI art will make it harder to make a living out of something you enjoy. There's no way around that, and I don't mean to deny that feeling. It always sucks when the circumstances around your craft and your source of income change. But I don't think AI art can possibly take away from the beauty and enjoyment that can be found in drawing and making art. You mention how a musician loves playing their instrument. I can download a music edition software and summon a virtual orchestra out of my speakers in seconds. But does this take anything from the musician? Is their feeling any less true, their music any less meaningful to themselves and to those who listen? If I bring my laptop to a party and play Vivaldi's seasons on it, will that elicit the same reaction as if I play it in the living room's piano? If language models eventually get good enough at programming that I'm out of a job, I won't derive any less enjoyment out of programming. I'll be a lot poorer, sure, but I will still enjoy the process of coming up with a way to express constraints in code, even if a machine can do it for me in the blink of an eye. Just like I find it relaxing to do the dishes myself when I'm anxious, even if I have a perfectly good dishwasher. Just like how people who enjoy solving Sudokus don't find it less fun just because automatic Sudoku solvers exist. The journey is the destination. And for the record, I don't think human art will disappear because of AI art, or human programming will disappear because of AI programming. If there's one thing that's demonstrably true through the history of humanity, is that humans have a strong human-centric bias. The sooner we commodify something and remove the human element from it, the sooner we bring that human element back, now elevated to the status of luxury and catered to a niche. Let me explain what I mean: I can buy black garlic in a plastic container for cheap, but I can also go to the weekend farmer market and pay three times as much for black garlic from a lady who lives up the mountains and can tell me the shape of the jar she fermented it in. IKEA makes perfectly good furniture that you can use to play board games for less than a hundred, but board game enthusiasts pay hundreds or thousands for custom furniture with nooks and bezels to stop the tokens from sliding out. Glass blowing as a form of art continues to exist, regardless of the availability of perfectly fine, industrially-made glass appliances. It's just in artisanal fairs in Venice, not in your living room. And sure, you won't be able to make a living anymore out of cranking out uninspired corporate Memphis for bay-area startups, or drawing cartoon furries for Twitter randos on commission. And, in a way... thank fuck for that, right? The combinatorial space of drawing people with smooth curves in fantasy skin colors using technological appliances in collaborative settings can be exhausted by an AI, and you can actually focus on making art that breaks the mold, art that hasn't been made before, art that is meaningful to you. You can imbue art with meaning and use art to communicate with other humans, while the "art" that ticks out boxes and replaces placeholders in landing pages can be cranked out by AI. Yes, it will be harder to make a living out of that, but I'm sure it won't be impossible. Computers have been able to generate Mondrian paintings since the 80s, and that hasn't made Mondrian paintings any less valuable. An AI may be able to produce the exact same drawing that you do, but it can't imbue human meaning in it.
egypturnash 4y ago
<3 Good luck to your wife. This is fucking horrible. Being in an industry that Silicon Valley shitheads are ruining sucks.
- shubb 4y ago
  It is definitely coming for the programmers too. They said coding would eat the world but I guess it ate itself...
  - kaba0 4y ago
    It will only come for programmers when GAI is here, and that will change almost everything either way. I wouldn’t hold my breath for that though.
flangola7 4y ago
I feel for your wife. It helps her any, many other careers and passions are not far behind. I foresee many intellectual tasks being automated in as little as three to five years. A friend works in law, mostly handling workplace discrimination cases His job will be safe for now, but not those of his paralegals and staff who research case law, write drafts, and handle everyday communication with clients and the courts. Many of them have been in it for years and are passionate about helping victims who have been hurt by racism and homophobia. One of his most tenured employees is an elderly black man well past retirement age, who greatly enjoys that he can now help stop the sort of discrimination he experienced when he was young. None of these people will be able to meaningfully contribute to their passion in ten years.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

gonzo41 4y ago

Sorry if this comes off as harsh but, AI is not stopping anyone from drawing. The person looking at AI and then fretting about the future, and then not drawing is the person preventing the drawing from happening. The same thing happened to bank tellers with the ATM. Jobs change and so do industries. Art's become more niche.

Riverheart 4y ago
You're right. This is harsh. Some people make a living off art. Having valuable skills is good for people's self esteem. We're not replacing a factory line job, we're automating something that takes people 100hrs of classes and self practice to master and people have put themselves in debt to achieve. But they can doodle in their spare time while they search for another job that isn't being phased out or spend most of their day crafting text prompts. Maybe go back to college take on some more debt.
- tylersmith 4y ago
  Many people have hobbies that are low value skills and they have to work doing things outside their passion if they want to be higher value. This isn't unique to people who draw for a living it's just new to them and they'll have to adjust.
- fipar 4y ago
  You’re not wrong, but when we replace a factory line job that person also goes through their own little hell, and they probably don’t even have the possibility of going back to college and taking more debt. If anything, if it is true that AI will render lots of jobs obsolete (I have my doubts), at least there’s a chance this may allow some empathy to grow in those affected. Perhaps we finally get some meaningful social change.
  - Riverheart 4y ago
    I'm unclear how people got the impression that I'm okay with people's lives getting upended by automation. As I elaborated on elsewhere, my post was to say there was a difference in what is being automated, highly skilled labor with high time/money/education costs vs something you shouldn't require a degree to learn to do.
    - fipar 4y ago
      As you elaborated elsewhere: > Honestly this whole "adapt" thing is a load of nonsense parroted by people who aren't immediately under threat and have nothing to fear. Who is going to adapt at 30/40/50 years old? How about people who just graduated art school? Go right back into college? Please. I agree completely, I just don't think a degree being involved has anything to do with it. I assume most people work the best job they could land, so someone doing menial work and losing it due to automation is in about as much pain as someone facing the same situation on a very specialized role. If anything, the person with more education has a much better chance at getting another (perhaps lower paying) job. I interpreted your first reply as conveying the message that it's not so bad if low skilled labor is automated, and it's a bigger problem if it's high skilled labor that is replaced. My apologies if I misunderstood you.
      - Riverheart 4y ago
        I understand why I might have come across that way but it wasn't my intention. I could have phrased it better. I agree that losing a job, particularly to automation is painful all around. My take is that low skilled labor getting automated is problematic because people need work and frankly I don't think everyone can/should go to college to make a living and I feel much automation is about margins. We need a strong middle class of homeowners and consumers and enough jobs that people can reasonably achieve it. But automation has been coming for low skilled work for ages and the wisdom was that high skilled work was supposed to be safe(r). I think it is extraordinarily problematic if high skilled workers are forced to start competing for a diminishing pool of low skill jobs. Moving into another high skilled job would be best but without free/subsidized education puts undue burden on people and who is to say what work is safe 10yrs into the future now? Once high skilled work starts getting automated it means there is no protection and therefore no stability. How can we grow the middle class in such an environment? This also means automation of low skilled work will accelerate. Order kiosks will be replaced by a specialized ChatGPT customer service version. Acts and sounds like a real person. Maybe it's got a floating head avatar while an automated process in the back assembles the food. One store manager and a guy who inspects the equipment across town. Today it's the artists but tomorrow it could be IT workers. Companies are pyramids and the room at the top is finite. A healthy economy is not a pyramid.
- brookst 4y ago
  Your lack of empathy for factory workers is hurting your case. They are real, and train for their jobs, and care about the families they provide for. “technical disruption is hard on people” is a much more sympathetic position than “artists should be exempt because they’re special”. We all face risks. We all have to adapt. We all have opportunities from adapting to the world rather than clinging to the past. Artists are no different from factory workers (or programmers, or bus drivers)
  - Riverheart 4y ago
    No a lack of empathy here. OP was saying there is little difference between automating art and automating a bank teller. For factory workers, I'm not saying its a job that requires no training but it doesn't requires years of college and 40/60k in debt. Clearly the ceiling for getting a decent paid job to raise a family without massive time/money/education investments is skyrocketing but I didn't point that out in my post so obviously I don't care. Honestly this whole "adapt" thing is a load of nonsense parroted by people who aren't immediately under threat and have nothing to fear. Who is going to adapt at 30/40/50 years old? How about people who just graduated art school? Go right back into college? Please. Edit: For the record, I care about anyone getting displaced but not all displacement is of equal level. If highly educated/skilled labor is now at risk this world isn't prepared for what's about to come. Edit2: Removed my mischaracterization comment. Was wrong to assume bad faith in this response.
    - Zababa 4y ago
      Maybe not as big as what's happening with AI, but I can see my parents constantly having to adapt to Microsoft's new redisign of Windows, or <software> having a new version, or laws changing. And that's for jobs considered relatively safe and boring (accounting). As for art school, I've always heard that it was more fun than IT/computer science/accounting but way more dangerous, as in you weren't guaranteed a job at all. Not everyone has heard that, of course, not everyone has the time/skills/resources to plan their career. I don't really know what to say except that it sucks for them. On the other hand the lower bar of entry may bring way more art in general, like it did with digital art.
- robswc 4y ago
  I was under the impression that it has _always_ been hard to make a living as an artist. I think this is just a truth people will have to accept. I used to make music and quickly realized I would have to dedicate 1000s of hours to it if I ever wanted to make it a career. This is simply because there were 1000s of other people that wanted to also make it a career.
- pixl97 4y ago
  Whenever I read a thread like this it makes me wonder how little most individuals know about the history that came before them. I could take artist out of your statement and put blacksmith in and it would be difficult to tell if this was wrote in 1890. Everyone seems to fight automation in an individual/industry battle rather at the society level. We keep measuring our worth based on work and when we finally run out of work we're going to have a problem.
  - Riverheart 4y ago
    "We keep measuring our worth based on work and when we finally run out of work we're going to have a problem." Yeah, because work pays the bills. Guess what happens when you automate faster than social policy changes? More unemployed artists than blacksmiths. Also people resist change when it threatens their way of life. It's almost like the luddites resisting automation are saying slow down automation people "when we finally run out of work we're going to have a problem".
    - pixl97 4y ago
      Unfortunately the luddites were not very effective at slowing down the technology. And with the modern police state being more aligned with wealth and corporate interests the general outlook is "the problem is coming at us full speed". This is not an artist problem, this is an everyone problem that is unavoidable. Of course here in the US we're playing right versus left instead of a few trillionaires will own everything versus the starving huddled masses that this path seems to be leading to.
      - Riverheart 4y ago
        I agree.
Shaanie 4y ago
One big difference is that art is typically a passion job, whereas most of the previously automated jobs weren't. Being able to draw for a living also takes way longer to learn than being a bank teller, or data entry etc, did. Not that it matters, AI is only going to get better from here. I'd also feel depressed if I made my living doing digital art.

brookst 4y ago

The human impact is real, but how is it different from how carriage drivers felt about the automobile, or how typists felt about the word processor? I’ll submit that people who feel horrible have mistaken the commodity and value-add aspects of their jobs. AI does not make someone an artist, but nor does great hand-eye coordination and good brush technique. The actual art is concept; brushes and canvas and AI are tools. I’m sorry that the decoupling of creation from performance is making people you care about feel bad, but really this is hundreds of years old news for most artists (musicians, architects, sculptors, etc). People who enjoy drawing can still draw, just like people who enjoy playing instruments can still play instruments.

bryanrasmussen 4y ago
>The human impact is real, but how is it different from how carriage drivers felt about the automobile, or how typists felt about the word processor? it's probably different in the way that the parent poster described, that artists found drawing an emotionally satisfying process whereas people typing probably didn't think setting styles in MS Word made them complete.
- DennisP 4y ago
  People who have never found their paid work so emotionally satisfying are worse off, not better. At least professional artists have gotten to spend some of their working lives that way.
- philippejara 4y ago
  there is nothing stopping them from doing the thing that "makes them complete" for leisure like most other people. AI art doesn't stop you from drawing, it might very well impact the commercial viability of it for sure but all that's lost is that.
  - jhbadger 4y ago
    Exactly. People play chess, even though computers can beat anyone these days. Or participate in track events even though cars and airplanes are vastly faster than a runner on foot.

sdiacom 4y ago

Obviously I don't get to tell your wife, or anyone else, how to feel about this. And there is a very real and very impactful thing in that, if you enjoy and make a living out of hand-drawn art, AI art will make it harder to make a living out of something you enjoy. There's no way around that, and I don't mean to deny that feeling. It always sucks when the circumstances around your craft and your source of income change. But I don't think AI art can possibly take away from the beauty and enjoyment that can be found in drawing and making art. You mention how a musician loves playing their instrument. I can download a music edition software and summon a virtual orchestra out of my speakers in seconds. But does this take anything from the musician? Is their feeling any less true, their music any less meaningful to themselves and to those who listen? If I bring my laptop to a party and play Vivaldi's seasons on it, will that elicit the same reaction as if I play it in the living room's piano? If language models eventually get good enough at programming that I'm out of a job, I won't derive any less enjoyment out of programming. I'll be a lot poorer, sure, but I will still enjoy the process of coming up with a way to express constraints in code, even if a machine can do it for me in the blink of an eye. Just like I find it relaxing to do the dishes myself when I'm anxious, even if I have a perfectly good dishwasher. Just like how people who enjoy solving Sudokus don't find it less fun just because automatic Sudoku solvers exist. The journey is the destination. And for the record, I don't think human art will disappear because of AI art, or human programming will disappear because of AI programming. If there's one thing that's demonstrably true through the history of humanity, is that humans have a strong human-centric bias. The sooner we commodify something and remove the human element from it, the sooner we bring that human element back, now elevated to the status of luxury and catered to a niche. Let me explain what I mean: I can buy black garlic in a plastic container for cheap, but I can also go to the weekend farmer market and pay three times as much for black garlic from a lady who lives up the mountains and can tell me the shape of the jar she fermented it in. IKEA makes perfectly good furniture that you can use to play board games for less than a hundred, but board game enthusiasts pay hundreds or thousands for custom furniture with nooks and bezels to stop the tokens from sliding out. Glass blowing as a form of art continues to exist, regardless of the availability of perfectly fine, industrially-made glass appliances. It's just in artisanal fairs in Venice, not in your living room. And sure, you won't be able to make a living anymore out of cranking out uninspired corporate Memphis for bay-area startups, or drawing cartoon furries for Twitter randos on commission. And, in a way... thank fuck for that, right? The combinatorial space of drawing people with smooth curves in fantasy skin colors using technological appliances in collaborative settings can be exhausted by an AI, and you can actually focus on making art that breaks the mold, art that hasn't been made before, art that is meaningful to you. You can imbue art with meaning and use art to communicate with other humans, while the "art" that ticks out boxes and replaces placeholders in landing pages can be cranked out by AI. Yes, it will be harder to make a living out of that, but I'm sure it won't be impossible. Computers have been able to generate Mondrian paintings since the 80s, and that hasn't made Mondrian paintings any less valuable. An AI may be able to produce the exact same drawing that you do, but it can't imbue human meaning in it.

egypturnash 4y ago

<3 Good luck to your wife. This is fucking horrible. Being in an industry that Silicon Valley shitheads are ruining sucks.

shubb 4y ago
It is definitely coming for the programmers too. They said coding would eat the world but I guess it ate itself...
- kaba0 4y ago
  It will only come for programmers when GAI is here, and that will change almost everything either way. I wouldn’t hold my breath for that though.

flangola7 4y ago

I feel for your wife. It helps her any, many other careers and passions are not far behind. I foresee many intellectual tasks being automated in as little as three to five years. A friend works in law, mostly handling workplace discrimination cases His job will be safe for now, but not those of his paralegals and staff who research case law, write drafts, and handle everyday communication with clients and the courts. Many of them have been in it for years and are passionate about helping victims who have been hurt by racism and homophobia. One of his most tenured employees is an elderly black man well past retirement age, who greatly enjoys that he can now help stop the sort of discrimination he experienced when he was young. None of these people will be able to meaningfully contribute to their passion in ten years.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]