Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

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

Reply on news.ycombinator.com