I have seen a lot of articles and social media pushes to stop AI image creation because it can be trained to the style of a specific artist. It's constantly about how the poor artist won't be able to make mo ey because the AI can do their art for them.
I doubt this. Artists have multiple styles and are more well known for the story within their pictures. If I hired an artist who could repeat that style and do something similar then it's ok?
This makes no sense. Instead, I bet it's a big business trying to protect itself. Disney has a full department that decides on styles for art and presentations. Genie must look this way in all pictures and all artists must repeat it perfectly. Only Disney can sell products with this genie or anything close to it.
If I had AI make Genie doing something and then printed that out, there is very little Disney could do to stop it. This is the music industry vs Napster all over again.
Kudos for using a genie as an example, because this genie is most definitely out of the bottle.
AI producing similar, but legally distinct, works finesses copywrite law as written. You don't get to yell 'theft' when the digitally produced work is distinct from what it's based on.
AI is absolutely standing on the shoulders of giants-- who are all human artists, but much like there are now chess programs that are stronger at the game than any human, AI art can't be stopped. Art is forever altered by this development, and crying 'theft' doesn't make that any less so.
Adapt or die.
More like, you no longer churn out soulless dogshit that your art director or client loves for some reason, now you polish the genie's soulless dogshit because it's cheaper and no one likes good or skillful artwork anyway - as that falls out of vogue, across all illustration we will see a long generation of shit art with hands tacked onto it - no one cares about a fucked up eye or a weird torso, so long as it vaguely looks like a Great Value!™ Sakimichan everyone loves it even if it is a bastardization of the good, the bad, and the ugly. Even with the old masters to train on it still looks like dogshit 90%~ of the time. Might get better, but I'd curb your enthusiasm.
Bastardization sample and begets bastardization output as the world become uglier, which will be because nobody actually cares. It's almost what we deserve.
But you know what? I'll humor you. Charging you up the nose to sample my work IS adapting, if not creating an adjacent industry for suing people with an equal and opposite AI that detects used artwork.
Do it, if you can. The supply of easily accessible sample imagery vastly exceeds demand, and AI-generation only makes that problem worse. (Just don't post on Deviant Art, or any other hosting platform that can be bought.) Your task is essentially Sisyphean, but godspeed.
Do it. Seriously. That might be the only answer to the threat you're facing if you're making whole-ass art in an AI-image-as-basis market. Expect all people profiting from AI art to leverage their income flows to stop you.
That or turn to streaming, and build a community of people paying more for your performance as artist, rather than the image-as-product.
Either way the threat to artists remains existential, and I stand by 'adapt or die.'
If you are an artist, you have my sympathy-- a reckoning is at hand, and this brave new world will be the poorer for it.
It has the potential to be, but I imagine Sisyphus is quite happy with himself. All those wonderful pools of sample collection will become like a frog-nail on the slip n' slide since legal cowardice is part of running a site. Deviantart proved that to some extent.
Handful of the most in-demand doing this is enough to knock the programming socks off half this rhetoric.
It already exists as far as I am aware, back in 2014~ artists would get struck down by pulling images off google for photobashing. Even the most minute portion of a cloud with a royalty on it could screw you over if you were mainstream. Many of the higher folk went on to do their own photography and sold their image collections on gumroad - invigorating both ends.
Though I would rather see AI starve, because if you get to wave around some bastardization knowledgeably sampled from my work and say "fuck artists lol! just take the blackpill :) There's nothing you can do lmao! Thanks for the 10+ years of samples ROFL! FOr FREEEEEEEEEEEEEE~~" - (like I see everywhere to the point where the agenda sticks out because nobody gives enough of a shit about artists this much to blackpill and concernpost about them) then by what right do you not expect to get slapped upside the head if it is possible if not probable? Should I instead offer you my wife? Should I hang my head and gwumpus? uwu
I think I'd rather play as dirty as everyone else.
Why on earth would I not then retort "pay up, tranny"?
Why would I not make this difficult for you, knowing that this not only guarantees that I lose my craft and way of life, with the promise of an aesthetically lacking culture abound, but also imposes the exact nepotistic troon stranglehold that turned my industry into an adult daycare onto what might have been the last bastion of artistic meritocracy? Why would I not be rallying right along with everyone thinking the exact same thing?