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Lots of artists are likely to lose their jobs, have trouble finding commissions, commission rates are going to be pushed down, etc. These artists will need retraining, which they’re really unlikely to get. For some, their primary method of putting food on the table will instantly become unprofitable. This will be bad for them.

But that said, the economics are both obvious and uninteresting. It’s the other stuff that I’ve seen most artists talking about, and what I want to at least touch on here.

I may be biased by the fact that my fucking job is the one this shit is coming for but I think the economics of this shit is very much worth talking about.

If I am a musician and I sample someone’s music, I have to pay them for the privilege. But this shit is evolving prompt books chock full of the names of working artists. Why don’t they have to pay (for example) James Gurney something every time someone types “fine art painting by James Gurney” into their prompt? Why don’t they have to work out licensing deals where Gurney can say “actually I do not want your black box to spit out anything based on my work at all, none of my work has ever been Creative Commons and I never gave you any kind of license to put any of my art into your database, you’ll be hearing from my lawyer soon”?

When videocassette recorders came out, the movie industry threw a fit over the prospect of home taping eating all their profits, and every blank tape you bought had a few pennies of its price go into their pockets to cover this. Maybe all of the money going into these AI tools should have a percentage diverted towards artists. How to spread that out is a problem, given that we are generally a bunch of freelance entities - maybe it’d be a good reason for me to finally join the Graphic Artist Guild if that was how that money got spread out. But if this shit is gonna eat all the cheap work then maybe a lot of its profit needs to go to subsidizing the people still trying to get to the point where they’re good enough for art to pay their bills.

All this shit is in a legal grey area, where the art it’s resampling and mashing up is assumed to be free to use and quite possibly may not be. This is something people have not understood for the entire life of the internet: just because an image is posted online does not mean it’s free for you to take and make money from. This shit may technically be “sufficiently transformative” under current copyright laws but I think there are some new copyright laws that need to be made here.

Also, if you are about to post a reply to me about the inevitability of progress, know that I hate you for it, and that I hope that we see a sequel to GitHub’s Copilot very very soon that makes you just as fearful for your job’s future as this one does mine.

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