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Comment by omnimus | Hacker News Reader

"AI artist" doesn't add any of its "own flair". It builds exclusively on past experience and work of humans. And it also directly completes with them without any thought of credit or compensation.

People are really underplaying how damaging this is going to be for the industry. It's going to completely decimate it. You can already see people using names of artists in the DALL-E prompt to get "their" work for few dollars avoiding any copyright or social issues.

Artists will suddenly be competing with AI on price and time - why we should pay you living wage when we instantly generate something close enough.

Why would anyone try to create some new aesthetic or push anything further if their effort will be replicated next week when the model gets updated with new source data. Everything is gonna get stuck to aesthetic of 2025 and before.

It's completely inhuman.

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The synergistic effect of all the AI's inputs absolutely results in a unique new 'flair', with extensions, reversals, and mash-ups of styles just as in human-made artistic styles.

And AI "builds exclusively on past experience and work of humans" just like any young new human artist equally does. In many cases, you can even tell the different models' outputs apart, not by raw quality or glitches, but by hard-to-describe aesthetic tendencies.

I share your concern on the effect on human artists – both the market for their work, and even their morale, when learning, knowing that decades of practice will still be outproduced by seconds of computation.

But I don't think the genie will be put back in the bottle, by either expansive interpretation of existing copyright law, or even new laws.

Indeed the genie is out. And while we will get some interesting AI uses ultimately this is degenerative tech. In the end we end up with less authentic, less unpredictible and less delightfull art. Instead we get the perfectly suited to us, predictible, mediocre stuff.

I said it in comment above - yes people build on work of others but they also bring lots of their originality and intelect. Part of what people do is truly uniquely theirs and piece by piece we progress as a whole.

The crutial detail is that AI learns only from visual patterns from past and cant think at all. And humans learn from everything around them and think about it deeply.

I don’t believe we will lose the capability to create new original styles. If a prompter can describe the creation of a new style, the AI can create it. Using both iterations of image & text prompts, unique styles will come.

The thinking is still done by the human prompter.

The value of the image is in the human prompter (in the overall concept) but the overall style - the aesthetic is stuck in the past. Its almost impossible to describe aesthetic in text without referencing examples of that aesthetic. Its the case of one image says more than thousand words. It has to be seen.

I am not sure finding new aesthetics is even the playingfield nowdays. Its probably not because we’ve been stuck for decades. Its more about cyclic trends of things forgotten. So who cares. But this will just solidify that even more. But yeah it has already happened and since the tech will be firmly in private hands everybody will be just exploited and pushed by it instead of it helping anyone.

One could make the same case about humans, nobody works in a vacuum. Even though he used it in a pejorative sense, Sir Isaac Newton, the famous English scientist, once said, “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.”

That humans are capable of developing their own style could still be argued that it's just a intermixing of previous work that they've seen, but they've combined it in a different way, which effectively is exactly what these generative systems do.

Of course humans build on work of other people. And what they do is partialy a mashup. But their work is not only replication of visual patterns. Its thinking its other non visual experiences its their politics and world views combined in their work. Often its their life project.

To think that artists only mash up what was before them is quite obviously wrong.

But its exactly only thing the tech does.

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