I disagree with this, AI makes making art easier and by doing so, if anything it both increases the supply of art and enhances the human experience by enabling anyone to create art. As an example, my drawing skills are so bad that I couldn’t express myself visually before but now Midjourney enables me to express myself. I don’t see how that could be a bad thing.
Does it harm existing creators? Probably, in the sense that it enables new entrants to the market and creates more competition but that should be acceptable. We live in a market society (since every other economic form has been a failure) and we need to acknowledge that sometimes that means people get their livelihoods destroyed. If we start picking and choosing, who deserves to keep their livelihoods we fall into political traps which aren’t ideal (why do we care about artists but not coal miners?).
Another point I want to get at here is that in a world of abundant art, I would expect art to be more compelling. I don’t know about you but one thing I find a bit frustrating about Anglophone art is that too often it follows the same tropes and happens in the same locations. A world of abundant art can solve that.
> if anything it both increases the supply of art and enhances the human experience by enabling anyone to create art.
It increases the supply of derivative art. I agree to some extent it "enhances the human experience by enabling anyone to create art" in the sense that they can adorn their environment or works with pretty things that they like, but they aren't actually creating anything in the traditional sense.
Barring major rapid advancements, I expect art generated by AI (and anything else) to be derivative of what it's consumed. I wouldn't expect for it to develop its own style of painting or music, I would just expect to see the same stuff rehashed over and over again. Stagnation. That's not something I want.
I don’t think that it would be derivative — sure, for those who go to midjourney, try out a single query to feel good and then never generate another image it won’t be “art”. But these things already have integrations into photoshop and such, and a more collaborative between human and AI approach could easily result in actual art.
Think of something like, I asked for a portrait of a women, similar in layout to Mona Lisa, then click on some area I don’t like too much, and ask the AI to change it to something else. You don’t have to imagine many iterations before it could give you “real art”, especially that you are free to draw/edit/add layers at any step of the process, or even draw the initial sketch.
> Another point I want to get at here is that in a world of abundant art, I would expect art to be more compelling
I expect the exact opposite will be true.
Consider for a moment that most people who are naturally inclined to art, even with years of practice and training, do not produce much that is novel or of any real interest. If we’re talking about truly great art, even accounting for all the inherent subjectivity in that classification, it’s a tiny fraction of these people.
Now, let’s take masses of people with no particular knowledge of art or ability to reason about how good images are constructed and set them loose typing into “magic” image producing boxes, responding to whatever appeals to them in the most uncritical fashion imaginable. How would this make art more compelling? All it will do is make art “more” in the sense that food is cheaper and comes in bigger packages at a Walmart than a farmers’ market.
Does it harm existing creators? Probably, in the sense that it enables new entrants to the market and creates more competition but that should be acceptable. We live in a market society (since every other economic form has been a failure) and we need to acknowledge that sometimes that means people get their livelihoods destroyed. If we start picking and choosing, who deserves to keep their livelihoods we fall into political traps which aren’t ideal (why do we care about artists but not coal miners?).
Another point I want to get at here is that in a world of abundant art, I would expect art to be more compelling. I don’t know about you but one thing I find a bit frustrating about Anglophone art is that too often it follows the same tropes and happens in the same locations. A world of abundant art can solve that.