Raw LLM Responses

My second comment here, supplementing the last one on the topic of generating images with the help of ai. About artists being endangered: In short... I agree. I mean, I agree that artists are in a subjectively bad position, and that they may lose the purpose of creating artistic content for money because there will be lower demand for their work. After all, AI image generators are free. But I don't agree with opinions that it's a universally bad event, or that it gives artists any grounds to demand that AI should be removed or that it should not use those artists' works as data. If we talk about generalities, then I say that the emergence of AI and the suppression of artists is morally neutral. It is a mere historical event that gets tagged with different narrative labels by different groups of people depending on their approach and interests. Do artists have the right to feel threatened? Yes, they are quite at risk; their interests are at risk. Does this entitle them to feel resigned and angry? Sure. Is it wrong? Yes... for them. But it's good for anyone who doesn't have the artistic skills to create something, for every little game creator, music production enthusiast, school project creator who doesn't have the skills or resources to create something keeping up with his ambition. We are talking about a lot of people who, due to the lack of financial funds in their childhood, or enough time, were not allowed to create and become artists. This is also beneficial for producers of all kinds, who are always willing to save money wherever possible. I can see that the last example can easily be a foregone conclusion as completely negative. But maybe let's reconsider whether the desire to save money when you have the opportunity to do so is immoral? Maybe it would be if we were saving money on, I don't know, a baby car seat. In this example, we pay for security. In artists’ case we pay them not because we have an altruistic desire to support them financially, but because they create content that we like. Maybe we donate them, but it's because their works happen to be to our liking and it’s in our interest that they continue creating what we like. When there is a way to get such content without having to pay, what is immoral on our side that prevents us from doing so? And finally, do artists have the right to somehow counteract to this? YES, but only in a morally positive way both to them and to other people. They can't just prohibit the use of tools or prohibit the desire to save money. Many artists will probably give up creating artistic content for more or less logical reasons, but at the same time many non-artists will gain the obvious advantage of having the power to create beautiful content that they could only dream of before. Maybe even this extremely fascinating reversal of causality will happen – the AI may inspire someone to learn to draw who never knew how to even start learning and find motivation. Anyway, the positive benefits will also affect artists, and perhaps MAINLY them, because who will be the most adept at visualizing an idea, manually correcting the AI work, and manipulating styles, if not those who can recreate the world by hand? I'll use an analogy. There was a time when cameras were not widely available, light in weight and easy to use. Back then, the camera was an expensive, complicated tool that only a professional photographer knew how to use. A good photographer was not only the one who knew how to use the tool, but also knew how to choose the right composition. He was paid for his work and could live only by taking pictures. However, as you know, there came a time when relatively light film cameras appeared. They became lighter and cheaper. Naturally, they also became more popular, and with them the ability to take pictures personally became more common. Behind the possibility of amateur photography, people's skills in capturing beautiful compositions have generally increased. Everyone has become a little more of a photographer-artist. Due to the progress, many photographers lost their jobs or had to spend extra time to get more money because amateurs could afford not to call a photographer and learn how to take pictures themselves. The advent of cameras available to everyone is probably something you associate with something completely positive, although for these photographers it was a threat. A specialized field of life exclusive only to a small group of well-trained and equipped people has become available and dispersed throughout society. Now everyone has some pretty good camera skills, and knows at least intuitively how to take a good picture. The analogy can go further. Before photographers, there were painters. And they, too, were not happy with the emergence of a device capable of capturing the world in seconds by an operator without the artistic skills, an ability to recreate the world by hand. But let’s get back - have the photographers disappeared? No - nowadays they are people who mostly combine taking pictures with their graphic processing on a computer (computers - another threat!). Each point in time is what all progress before it was heading towards. The photographer is now able to combine completely different styles, techniques, mediums and influences in his work. They too will be using AI, whether it's to upscale their photos, remove the red eye effect, erase an unwanted person in the background, or completely transform your photo into another work of art. It's not bad or good - it just is. On the other hand, trying to stop progress has no purpose in the age of the Internet and is bound with multiplying negative attitudes and giving negative moral values to ordinary events. I suppose some of you know the myth of the Promethean fire? Many people who teach how to install and use image generators are also artists, be it illustrators or already mentioned photographers. Of course they could have rejected AI, could have said there's no room for some mystical creative activity when using it, and there’s no use in investing time in it at all. What are they actually doing? They enthusiastically use and teach how to use image generators which have been trained on someone else's work. They're talking about simplifying work, not losing it. They integrate their manual skills, creativity, the ability to select compositions and modifications in a graphic processing program with AI. Said AI shows them the ways in which they can go during a creative crisis, how to overcome it. At the same time, they create a base on which they can work to quickly create something amazing otherwise possible to create only in many hour sessions of work. You get the idea of what I mean, this argument is all about an ability to adapt to change. I will also refer to my claim that artists have the right to counteract the threat of unemployment through positive moral actions for them AND OTHERS. By this I mean that having introduced their works to the outside world, they have no right to prohibit their use for inspiration. You know the reason for that from my previous comment. BUT THEY CAN: (1) learn to use AI to create more work, create it faster, and be inspired by the generator. Also, (2) they may try to counter the immoral sale of AI-generated plagiarism... the same way as they would do with non-AI-generated plagiarism. Here is a place for me to rephrase my words from the previous comment a bit. There is a problem with AI, that I initially didn’t consider, namely that it can generate an image very similar to an existing one, because, even inadvertently, using prompts, the user specified the scope of inspiration for the generator to too few images, and in the case of human inspiration there is no such risk, because, generally speaking, a human either creates very similar image to an existing one without an intention to plagiarise, or with an intention to plagiarise. We can try to eliminate cases of generating plagiarism with AI unintentionally, but here, the responsibility lies on the side of AI generating community to promote some kind of ‘AI image generation savoir vivre’, and also on programmers’ side, to ensure that the AI never outputs images identical to those on which it was learning. That ‘AI image generation savoir vivre’ could be something like: no one will stop you from selling what you generated with AI, but it would be best if you modified the image enough to eliminate the risk that the AI spit out an image identical to some artist’s work. At least as long, as on the programming level such a possibility is not eliminated (I hope that such a protection wouldn’t completely limit the generator’s abilities). You have tools to fine tune selective areas of the image, so use them to make it more unique, and make sure it’s indeed original, because after simple one time generation you don’t have such certainty, and you may be falsely accused of plagiarism. If you want to sell these pictures, it's a responsibility on your side to make them unique.