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Comment by huimang | Hacker News Reader

The problem is these discussions are being had by STEM/tech people who don't respect or value art or the effort behind it, not by artists. They simply do not get the concerns that artists have.

It truly boggles the mind that people equate machines that can output thousands and thousands of images in short time spans in any ingested style... with humans who have to hone styles and can only produce a result every so often.

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This is how technology works. Bulldozers effectively replaced people with shovels. Excel effectively replaced accounting clerks. Generative AI effectively replace artists (to some capacity).

Most people care only about the output of a system, not about who the system replaces.

yeah, we did not ask for farmers permission before producing Farming machines

We are able to create bulldozers without using any shovels. We can create Excel without accounting clerks. But we cannot create generative models without using existing artwork. Because existing artwork is so critical to the inventions replacing artists, it’s more exploitative.

If we required workers consent to directly use their works, we would be able to build bulldozers and excel but not stable diffusion. It’s very different that way.

I fail to see how so, outside of some ulterior desire to see "art" as something inherently superior. Manual labor was used to build bulldozers that replaced manual labor, to give an example.

Using existing artwork for training model is only the process that generative AI came to be.

If you’re talking about the labor needed to build a bulldozer, it is paid consenting labor. That’s the point. It isn’t that art is superior, it’s that the required labor to create these things is going uncompensated and without consent.

If you had a conversation with a STEM person, they'd probably say everything is 100% fine, society and all. If you had a conversation with an artist, they'd probably say AI is pure evil theft and society is collapsing.

If you solely listen to either side, you'll be blinded by madness. On that note, how many people respect or value the effort behind software? Most don't, not most artists either. That is the nature of life.

Is it because it seems the value can be imitated so easily?

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