Interesting. I know few artists and even their lawyers and not one of them see AI art as a threat — alas this might be them not having the full picture of course. And while I know that everyone can call themselves an artist, I certainly don’t want to gate-keep here, for context I’ll add that I mean friends who finished actual art schools. I know this because I use AI art in my virtual tabletop RPG sessions I play with them and they seem more excited than worried about AI. What follows is based on my casual pub discussion with them.
As for me, I don’t like my adventures to feel like a train ride so I give a great degree of freedom to my players in terms of what they can do, where they can go, with whom they can speak. During the game, as they make plans between themselves, I can use AI generators to create just-in-time art about the NPC or location they are talking about. This, together with many other tricks, allows me to up quality of my game and doesn’t take away work from artists because sheer speed required to operate here was a factor prohibiting to hire them here anyway.
However — this only works because my sessions require suspension of disbelief by default and so nobody cares about the substance of that art. After all, we all roll dice around and pretend they mean how well we wave a sword around so nobody cares if styles or themes slightly differ between sessions, it’s not an art book.
For anything that’s not just fun times with friends you will still need an artist who will curate the message, modify or merge results from multiple AI runs, fine-tune parameters and even then probably do quite a lot of digital work on the result to bring it up to standards that passes the uncanny valley or portrays exactly what movie director had in mind.
Or is AI already here that’s capable of doing those things by itself with one or two sentences from an executive and churning out a perfect result? Because I’ve worked with many models and have yet to see one that wouldn’t require further creative work to actually be good. AFAIK all award winning AI-generated content was heavily curated, not some random shots.
It feels to me like low-level art is going to be delegated to AI while artists can focus on higher forms of art rather than doing the boring things. Just like boilerplate generators in code. Or they’ll be able to do more boring things faster, just like frameworks for developers pushing out similar REST apps one after another. And base building blocks are going to become more open source while the value will be in how you connect, use and support those blocks in the end.
This may allow a lot more people to discover their creative, artistic side who couldn’t do it previously because they lacked mechanical skill to wave a brush or paint pixels.
I write this comment haphazardly so sorry if my thought process here are unpolished but overall it feels like a massive boost to creativity and a good thing for the art, if not potentially the greatest artistic boost to humanity since ever.
AI is a new brush that requires less mechanical skill than before. You must still do creative work and make Art with it.
In many countries it may even be a reverse!
For example in Poland you have a duty to help another person and NOT doing so will get you sued by the state, exemption being of course if said help cannot be performed without endangering yourself as non-professional rescuer’s safety always comes first in order to not end up with more dead bodies obviously.
Courts will almost always assume that at one point in life - at school, in boy/girl scouts, when doing your driving license, in myriad of other places - you have gone through basic training and so there’s no defence of not knowing the skills.
Moving someone away from a car is included in emergency help and AFAIK there’s no differentiation of medical and non-medical actions.
Even if someone cannot be rescued and is clearly dying there might be a duty of care to comfort them through last moments of their life until emergency services arrive but in practice that’s not so stringent.
You being in shock turns you into a casualty as well and of course may be an exemption, depending on severity, later medical assessment of you etc. etc.
Fun phrase: translating from Polish civil law, if there is an emergency situation you literally “receive a task/quest from a state” to help and I think (very much check me on it) this is what grants you power to break some other laws while performing help (trespassing etc.)
Source: paraphrasing from pap.pl, Polish Press Agency — also: I’m not a lawyer and take my translation with a grain of salt.
Without a source but from my own empirical experience of being a non-pro rescue unit in scout boys (and saving people from crashes and drownings that occurred during our travels, luckily not to us) I can also add that once you call 112 (EU-wide equivalent of 911) then following prompts from the operator falls under this law as well, and depending on severity they may allow you to stand down completely or remind you of your duty if you’re trying to chicken out of helping altogether even if AED is there.
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Thank you for pointing this one out @michaelkeenan - it is often a case that in the English-speaking part of the Internet people write about the state (and thus law) as if everyone was living in the US. Going online as a diversity loss function for Europeans, that’s going to be a title of my next post ;-)
I’d like to hear from folks with degrees in psychology what they think about the dangers of staring into the abyss and possible strategies to do it well because I'm pretty sure running through worst case scenarios is quite a common part of certain type of psychotherapy sessions on anxiety and must be rigorously researched and living in textbooks for a long time now.
Being said that, without any credentials on my side to back up that claim mind you, it does read to me like a cunningly purposeful weaponisation of pessimism and certainly strikes tone with School of Life’s multiple works (articles, videos) on pessimism I’ve been going through lately.
I work in a field (computer science) that at least in Europe doesn’t require much accreditation at all.
In fact, I started to work in my domain before I started my first semester. I didn’t care for examination of my hard skills that much though it was fun to challenge myself, I admit.
When I applied for my degree I did so exactly because I was missing all the other benefits it provides: access to equipment and labs, Erasmus, grants for projects which are non-profitable, understanding practices I do at work by having deep talks about theory of it etc. etc.
Exams are the most boring and least teaching part of the uni.