I don't feel bad about automation that improves society on the whole. I don't think this is very hard to roughly evaluate: the standard of living increased for everyone (all classes, all countries) in the last 200 years. Job losses were more than replaced by a greater number of better jobs. In 1800, 80% of people were peasants; automation did not consist of killing off that now-useless 80%; it created a much larger and better-off population.jcb wrote: ↑Wed Mar 20, 2024 1:57 amZompist, I assume you print your own documents on a printer. Don't you feel bad that you're bypassing the typesetters' union and contributing to its death? ( https://jacobin.com/2017/09/typesetting ... n-printing )People who need small-scale art and can't draw— portraits of their D&D characters, visualizations of their fantasy worlds, very specific fetish porn, whatever— should pay a damn human artist instead of techbros. There are plenty of artists who would will do something for $50 or $300. Using free AI services is exactly like accepting a free dose from your friendly local drug dealer: it is a pretend savings, it is not really free.
I suspect you are assuming that all technological change is good and that this replacement process is some kind of eternal law. I'd suggest looking out the window. Not all tech is an improvement, eliminating all the good jobs is not a good idea, destroying our own ecosphere with fossil fuels is not a good idea, and for the last forty years tech change has benefitted only the top 10% of the US, not everyone. That mechanism of generalizing prosperity no longer works for most people.
Besides who the money goes to, the other factor to consider is what we want humans to do. Ultimately no one ever really argued that humans really liked working in coal mines, shoveling horse manure, hand-planting rice, or typesetting. It was an improvement to work in a factory, work as a clerk or teacher or journalist or artist or bureaucrat. So long as the number of jobs kept going up, it was even an improvement to get rid of mindless clerking and let the computers do that. But, to be blunt, why do you want to take away the good jobs? There's some subset of jobs that are not only worth doing, they're work that people like. It would make a lot more sense to automate the CEO jobs away, not the artists.
Of course, one of the main objections to AI is who the money goes to. Still, that's not the only problem.I feel like most of the (very real) anxiety over "AI" is not about AI, but is actually about how techbros own AI. Imagine for a moment a different world, where each artist has their own AI trained on their own images and art style, and only they can use it. I think that instead of articles from artists about how AI messes up hands and how it will never be as good as a human artist, we'd get articles from artists about how AI, although imperfect, saves them so much time when they make another panel for their webcomic (or whatever) by producing the general outline for what they need, freeing the artist from drawing the same character or background over and over again (repetetive boilerplate art, essentially).
One is the carbon cost of AI. It costs billions to train and run AIs and, like crypto, has the energy requirements of an large country. The cost, as I said, is hidden because the enshittification process hasn't started yet: the dealers are handing out free samples.
But also, though I can think of use cases for AI in a non-techbro world, your scenario sounds kind of horrible to me. The last thing I want from an artist is a pastiche of their own earlier work; when a writer or artist or moviemaker starts doing that, we usually consider that they've run out of things to say, that they're not what they used to be. I know a lot of consumers think that's what they want: if only Tolkien wrote LOTR again, only somehow a little new and different! But that mindset is how you get The Sword of Shanara. Or an increasingly repetitive catalog of superhero movies or Simpsons episodes. Or a Kindle store full of extruded AI-written babble.
For that matter, if an artist can't produce the basics of their profession-- the next panel of their webcomic-- maybe they're in the wrong field or genre. I read a lot of comics, and I saw the last wave of computer assistance-- 3-D modeling. Yeah, it enables a mediocre draftsman to produce far more detailed work. But it rarely actually made for good comics. Those efforts look embarrassing today-- 90s computer graphics don't hold up-- but actual hand-drawn stuff still looks fine.
