#maybe i'll clean this up and render it someday

[fullmetal-scar-simping]

TOXIC. YURI.

[j1r4ch2]

I'll admit that my opinion is probably colored by the cynicism of never succeeding at making money being a creative and instead constantly scrambling back and forth from various min wage entry level industries just to make ends meet, but i think that the way artists are conceptualizing AI video rendering as the end of the world is kind of ridiculous.

Obviousely the possibility of artistic jobs being downsized is very real. There is a present reality of AI taking good jobs from real people. It sucks. It's awful. Real people are suffering; I'm not denying that.

But at the same time this technological paradigm isn't going away any time soon, and as it is now, is way too resource intensive to replace every artist making a living with thier work.

Maybe someday down the road enough GPU farm services will be widely enough available where it is feasible for companies to use generative AI for all of their media needs, thus eliminating countless jobs for artists who spent decades of their life honing a skill, but if being demoted from a professional artist to a hobbyist is the end of the world for some people I seriously question why they practice their craft in the first place.

If it was always for the money, then let the robots take the burden of performing the role of a artist from you, and please relearn creating just to feel something inside of you.

We've had knitting machines and mass produced clothing and textiles for ages, yet in this day where my car can drive itself, people spend hours learning to do fibercrafts etc. And you aren't hearing about etsy fiber artists making 60k/year from their work yet they still enjoy the creative process of it!

This is a nuanced conversation, and a lot of people in poverty situations are going to lose access to their jobs as it becomes automated away, in a more exponentially growing version of what's been going on since 2008 and even back to the 90's.

Its a real problem, but the majority of creators i see whining about this on tumblr, YouTube etc. are middle class or higher individuals who's only experience in blue collar work is the half year they spent working part time at their university campus Starbucks.

A lot of people think they're mad because automation is threatening the validity of their job, but they're actually mad because they think learning a creative skill makes them better than your average blue collar worker and they're appaled at the idea of being the same as the people who run their electric grids, clean their sewers, and stock their supermarkets.

Theyre just using the cultural backlash against explotative machine learning (which is a justified backlash, it's fucking wrong for these generative models to be stealing existing work of art and incorporating it into its training, that's not what I'm defending here) as an excuse to dodge the awareness that they don't think anyone should be doing blue collar work because surely they never dreamed of doing it.

As it stands now generative AI models are too resource intensive to truly replace the scale of workers people act like they will, and the advancement of ML algorithms has enough real potential to better people's lives that its not going away, so I think aside from doing the work of protecting our existing art with things like nightshade etc, it's important to be realistic and give up the fantasy that we are at war with AI companies, and must win, or even more delusion at war with the very concept of machine learning.

Its reminiscent of people who were afraid of computers in 1995 and now can't function in their daily life without the help of their gen z loved one to help them navigate the most basic of user interfaces.

Society will advance, regardless of how we like it, all we can do is be resourceful about it, and find ways that the advancement benefits us.