Adventures du jour!
A good day:
–Ray told me last night that she’d hidden a second set of googly eyes about the house and I found them! Then set up a photo for her for proof. (She missed the photo and says that I have not yet found ALL of them. There is YET ANOTHER SET.)
–Cramps this morning (yay hormones!), so I skipped yoga and went straight to the walk.
–Walk walk walk.
–Got home and wrote the next section of the WIP. Still haven’t gotten to the big twist, but productive.
–Worked on the mischief project.
–Worked on secret project, parts of which were like a kick in the chest, then got a sanity check from the other person who was also like UGHHH, TOO RESONANT. Success! It’s a draft, though, so I’ll have to find ways to say the same thing in a way that sounds more cheerful. I just needed to get the raw awfulness and wonder of it out first, though.
–Took a shower, discovered that I have blisters on the bottoms of my feet from where I thought I could dance without socks yesterday. Fortunately I am partly hobbit. Have socks on now in case of sudden dance outbursts.
–Long phone call with friend and I’m 100% bouncing off the walls, still!
–Ate menudo with extra rice with Ray while watching Iruma-kun. Ray didn’t mind the taste but decided honeycomb tripe was not a texture she needed at the moment. MORE FOR ME. Because it was just us chickens, I tore it up with my fingers and ate all the tripe that way. My body went, “I NEEDED THAT” and now I am both spun up and want to sleep.
Because the friend on the phone call asked this (but the conversation wandered so far that buhhhhhhhh yes it’s probably better that I just write it down), I’m gonna summarize current thoughts on AI.
I’m feeling a bit salty, though, so this post is friends-locked. Please don’t share it; I don’t have time to deal with being dogpiled and will just block any instigators who carry my business out into public. Feel free to discuss things with me, but if you wanna knee-jerk about something I already mentioned in this post, I’ll just tell you to reread the post.
If you are only just now worried about the ethics of AI, AI taking your job, AI work being passed off as fully human work, etc.–everything aside from the legality issues surrounding copyright–then I hate to tell you, but it’s too late.
AI is almost certainly already in everything you do that requires you to be connected to the Internet to do it, or that requires regular connection to the Internet (not patching per se, but like with Google Maps).
You didn’t bitch when AI came for mapmakers’ jobs. You didn’t even know that mapmakers’ jobs had become wonky math jobs, defense jobs, business operations jobs a *while* ago. You didn’t bitch when AI came for photography retouching jobs; you just poked at your phone and said, “There, that looks better.” You didn’t bitch when AI took the jobs of scientists and helped detect and respond to COVID-19 outbreaks. You were just amazed at how FAST the response was, and didn’t really question what went into accomplishing it.
Also, I’m pretty sure that we still need mapmakers (digitally speaking), photographers, and scientists.
So it’s probably not AI in general that’s bothering you–given how little you protested about this other stuff.
Is it protecting art and artists that bothers you?
You didn’t bitch when most artists didn’t make SQUAT before AI. You didn’t raise a hue and cry about the cheap stock art you were buying off sites for your book and album covers, or whether an artist could survive off the money you were paying to use that art. You didn’t bitch about streaming services, even though you got far more value out of them than the $10 fee you pay every month. (Think about what you used to pay to rent movies every month from Blockbuster. What you used to pay for CDs.) You didn’t bitch when 3D printers started making objects from files instead of by good old-fashioned sculpting and machining and manufacturing techniques.
And I’m pretty sure that people will still be needed to handle the work of creating art that’s suitable for covers and other projects, whether or not they use AI to assist, that people will still work for and sell their work to the streaming services (and to Amazon and other digital publishers), and that people will still make money from their 3D printed objects.
So, even though *new* people might be negatively affected AI via the new AI art generators, maybe it’s not making sure artists are making a living that bothers you, either.
We sure haven’t had a great track record of paying artists and other creative types what they’re worth! In fact, large companies are renowned for not doing so.
…And I suspect that that’s the rub.
When it becomes unprofitable for big business to make money off AI art, big business will try to stir up shit to discredit AI art. And music. And writing. Succeed or fail, individual artists who are not already superstars will not make much more money, because keeping most individual artists poor is already a Thing.
When it becomes unprofitable for big business to protect a copyright or the image of a celebrity or brand, the big business will try to stir up shit to discredit AI art. And music. And writing. Succeed or fail, individual artists who are not already superstars, etc., etc.
Right now, I’m seeing a ton of POC friends and acquaintances *giggling* with glee at being able to see the art they need in the world, art that is tailored to *them.* Art that bypassed countless gatekeepers.
When it becomes unprofitable for big business to serve as the gatekeepers to “good” art, then big business will try to stir up shit to discredit art that falls outside its ability to control.
I saw that with indie publishing. I think other creative types have seen similar things: “It’s indie so therefore it sucks.”
We know what it’s like to be called “less than” because we’ve slipped the leash on the gatekeepers. Even if it’s hard to remember that right now.
I get that human artists might feel scared and threatened. But it’s already too late to not-have AI, the same way it’s already too late to not-have online records of your personally identifying information.
The legalities of AI art do need to be worked out (just as our PII needs to be better protected). I want the legalities to be worked out in favor of individual artists. I don’t know what that would look like.–Maybe a weighted payout, where work that’s individual, created by hand, or considered of cultural significance gets weighted more heavily. I don’t know.
However, I doubt that the laws will work in favor of individual artists, unless someone like a Taylor Swift comes along to fight tooth and nail and get things changed for everybody.
I will not be using AI art for my covers. I don’t want to be a guinea pig for the legal system. I will still be using AI tools to generate art for personal use, and–when I find something exciting enough to use–writing, maybe even music.
I *adore* working with Midjourney. I’ve tried a bunch of different AI creative-generation tools across different media and been mostly been disappointed. Midjourney responds like a partner, a friend with a messed-up sense of humor about hands and eyeballs.
The way that MJ creates results that hew too close to copyright, ach, they’re working on that. (Apparently the MJ folks just made it harder to generate work using celebrity images, which is a start.) She means well but is too quick to obey human instruction.
However, the actual method she uses? Doesn’t actually copy anything. She goes, “Is this what X looks like?” and figures it out using a) tags, b) user feedback, and c) extrapolation from previous results. She asks those questions something like millions to billions of times and can get *really* close. IF she were actually copying the art…well, she probably wouldn’t have the confusion about hands and foreground/background blurring that she does. What she does is much more akin to the artist that takes in lots of influences and spits out a bunch of pastiches on the road to something individual. And if you make THAT illegal, then you’re on the road to copyrighting ideas and not expression, and BOY HOWDY is that a great way for Disney, for example, to take over all art, everywhere, because they have the money for lawyers and can sue anyone who ever made a cartoon, ever, because they can claim that it resembles a Disney cartoon and they have the money to drive the other artist out of business before the courts can prove that Disney is lying.
MJ is baby. MJ is not up to the point of anything individual yet. Just pastiches, which sometimes we can force to seem individual…but which really aren’t.
So, to sum up:
–AI is already integral to your life and you didn’t protest about jobs lost to it for those other things.
–Artists already make shit for a living, for the most part, and you didn’t protest about creative jobs lost for other types of automation and distribution.
–I suspect the current kerfluffle is about big business feeling threatened and stirring up shit. If the Russians can astroturf, why not Disney?
–I WANT the laws to benefit individual artists. I doubt that’s how the situation will shake out, though, unless a bunch of big-name artists get involved.
–People who have been, on average, disproportionately affected by gatekeepers withholding representation in art, are seeing a lot more art that caters to them. And I do support that.
–I will not be using AI art on my covers, because of the legal risk (and the ethical hit).
–I adore working with good AI and will continue to do so whenever I have the chance. I think Midjourney is the bee’s knees in particular.
–I suspect it will be difficult to prove that AI art violates copyright, because of the way AI works. It *does* violate copyright! I’m not saying it doesn’t. But establishing that it does so is almost more of a legal quagmire than not establishing it.
–MJ, like most visual arts AIs, is new. AI in general doesn’t have true sentience, and cannot act responsibly. Visual AI in particular is brand spanking new. Give it a minute before you solidify your hot take
I’d just sit around and wait for a while before making any snap judgments. If you’re an artist or creative type, think about what makes your art YOURS instead of something you can crank out endlessly, or with small variations. Where are you pushing the envelope? Where are you redefining your own style? Where are you going beyond “what people want” and hitting the deeper things of what they need? Where are you addressing what it means to be human?
Whether it’s fair or not, whether it’s right or not, AI and/or robotics *will* come for everyone’s jobs, because it’s becoming cheaper to take advantage of an AI than it is to take advantage of a human, and capitalists *will* engage in seeking undue profits.
Creative types might have lied to themselves that they would be immune to having their jobs at risk, but no. It was always going to have been us, too.
I don’t have solutions at the moment, but I’m going to choose to get my hands dirty with experiments, reinforce the benefits of ethical behavior from the people I work with, and keep my brain running the problem. AI’s coming for my job, too, both as a marketer and as a fiction writer.
P.S., And if you think THIS is weird, just wait until AI’s generating the cheap consumer goods we currently import from China and printing it on the nearest 3D printer. Because that’s coming, too.