What’s up, Hive? I just sat down at almost 1:00a.m. to write about some of the exploration I’ve been doing with MidJourney and AI generated art. I’ve been fascinated with this since it became available to the public last year. The text based chat and ChatGPT is as much of a curiosity for me as the image generation. It really is that; a curiosity. I had dinner with @lovejoy tonight at Gorkha Palace and we talked about where this was going and the people in our society that aren’t ready or able to change with the coming tide. It is coming. There are now very few jobs I can think of that are going to be, “safe”.
Even as I’m writing about this, it occurs to me that I could just have ChatGPT write my entire blog post. Is that already happening? I’m sure it is. What are the implications for a platform like Hive where thoughtful posts are rewarded? I suppose there will be a way for AI to review written content and discern whether or not it was written my AI. On a site like ours, here, reputation is going to go along way. I imagine there will be some kind of commitment that as a contributor, you’ll be known as a genuine, “human”, blogger. It’s amazing that I’m talking about these scenarios as real possibilities.
Although I’m still deeply fascinated by AI, especially the art generated AI platforms like MidJourney, I am noticing a drop off in the controversy that was being caused a few months ago. All of my Instagram feed was artists bent out of shape with giant memes with the words, “AI”, crossed out. @swarddraws and I were even hosting livestreams on Instagram each week to debate all this. Lately, it seems to have diminished while everyone has now moved on to the East Palestine train disaster, or whatever else.
I’m seeing troubling signs of political and social biased and if you’re here on Hive and on Twitter, I’m sure that’s been troubling for you as well. There is a heavy left biased in most companies, media outlets and websites and although I consider myself center left, I do acknowledge the mob-like mentality that is typically associated with folks leaning left on that spectrum. I don’t like the idea of that manifesting itself through AI or ChatGPT. For now, though, I’m just sharing some thoughts and new art I recently generated with MidJourney. Have a great night!
Did you use ChatGPT to write the post? You used AI "art" as part of the content. Why not go the whole way?
Are you missing something here?
On one hand you appear to dismiss human artists facing a tsunami of automated machine generated images, yet on the other, you seem to champion human created text content.
What then when Hive is flooded with AI generated articles, when your own articles cannot gain attention as they are drowned in the automated AI flood (spam), as you, a mere human cannot keep up with it? Will then the artists protestations not seem so bent out of shape? Or will it be, if you can't beat them join them?
Where will this leave,
I'm interested to hear your feedback.
You brought up some other interesting points
But I'll keep that for another thread.
I can see your distain for all of this in the first remark, @leoplaw. "Why not go all the way?", well, because I do value human inspired art and words and Hive has always been a therapeutic platform for me to share my own thoughts on the world. The tsunami of AI disrupting is part of that world, it effects me, thus, I'm going to write about it.
I'm certainly not dismissing the concern of untold numbers of artists that are having existential crises right now and I can extract that you're one of them. That's fair. Personally, I'm not worried about it. I just did a fantastic interview with @gric on this technology and he put it best, "This technology is using me, so I'm going to use it.". I've been doing the same thing. I generate images [...I won't call them art, but images], and they give me inspirations for compositions I wouldn't have otherwise come up with on my own. I use most of these images as reference for my own art. It's a tool, and from the beginning of time, humans have found better, more efficient tools to create art and every time, there's a previous generation of, "traditional" artists that have a problem with it. Think about when animation transitioned from sheets of vellum and onion skinning to digital when Toy Story came out. It was a massive disruption, many animators adapted and some did not.
I think the real ethical dilemma is the honesty about whether not the images and writings are, in fact, AI generated. I do not like seeing artists or writers attempt to pass off AI generated content as their own without a disclaimer. I've actually gotten in to Twitter wars with, "artists", releasing entire NFT sets without a single mention that they were ALL AI generated images.
One point I want to make that I feel often gets overlooked in this debate; although millions of artists [...especially concept artists] are having their careers and livelihoods undermined and replaced with AI, it DOES give opportunities to creative people that may not be gifted with visual art skills. @tarotbyfergus is one of my closest friends and he has been given a tool to help him express his insights and tarot readings in a way he couldn't have imagined a year ago. There are millions of skilled, talented people that just aren't gifted with drafting emails or writing resumés and that is the same thing.
I'm sympathetic because there are going to be a LOT of jobs wiped out by this. Right now, it's deeply impacting artists and writers [...which ironically, I thought would be the last careers effected by AI], but don't think this isn't coming for everyone. It is. The only jobs I can really think of that are safe — for a while — are tattoo artists, massage therapists and sex workers. Eventually, I see no way this ends without some kind of UBI implemented socially to offset the insane amount of unemployed people, but in the interim, it's going to be devastating for most of the global population.
The last thing I'll say, @leoplaw, is that as far as artists go, I actually think you're going to relatively safe. You art a brilliant artist in the truest sense. Same with @gric. I think there will always be collectors wanting to buy actual painting. You may find yourself selling more paintings than ever, even at a premium, BECAUSE they were done by you. I think in the next few years, commodity artists like creature, character design and concept artists are really fucked. Same with 3D sculptors and software engineers. People who actually make things with their hands will probably survive, maybe even thrive.