In addition to the new graphics that Nate's wife has been producing, I see that Bryan has produced some new work that apparently also uses new technology.
Just to be clear, Gen (my wife) did not use any kind of an image generator or an AI-based tool on her neo-Classical adaptions that she is selling through her Etsy store. Each of those images took her days-to-weeks of editing using professional applications for which she has acquired professional licensing. She has been working as a self-employed photographer and graphic designer for over a decade (long before AI-based web apps were hosted), and a lot of what you see in her art are adaptations from models she has shot and pictures we own using Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator. All of this art took a lot of time, and, also, investments in materials, tools, and education. One danger of using AI apps to produce art is that the users do not have any initial investment in either materials education, and every other kind of artist has a big expense at the beginning of their work just to get started in the first place.
I am not a fan of AI generated artwork for various reasons. Using "tools" is one thing. Plugging in text and getting AI to spit out an "original" artwork is something else.
Agreed whole-heartedly (and the recent issues brought up due to the Writer's Strike can help inform us about the dangers of infringement). In bums me out as an songwriter and instrumentalist that other performers can gain notoriety as "musicians", when they neither play an instrument (including vocals), nor write lyrical poetry, nor compose melodies, and cannot perform live music without relying on engineers to process their sounds. In that same light, it is a bummer that my wife can spend months designing a Hollywood-authentic costume, but doesn't get as much attention as some amateur model who purchases all of their pieces online and produces nothing of their own but selfies; likewise, it is even more frustrating for her as a visual artist to have her work quietly appropriated without accountability.
I can say from experience that there are a lot of really excellent artists out there that are hungry for work, and will provide the kinds of images that we crave for a fair commission. AI can be helpful for inspiration, but there are other avenues that would actually lead to much higher quality art than what even AI can produce.
I think that the most responsible option would be to commission artists to do this work so that the actual creator can be appropriately credited. Otherwise, we really have no idea who is personally responsible for the images from which the Generators are taking. It risks completely robbing artists of their agency and limited their reach.
Imagine if you could just write, "Give me a 3-minute love song in 4/4 time, like the Beatles and Moody Blues" and in a few seconds, a future music generator could do what takes me months of work, months of recording, editing, balancing, re-recording ... employing the decades of practice and rehearsal and failure and marginal success, and thousands of hours of studying and rehearsal and applying trigonometric functions to balance the gain structure of multiple tracks, and quitting out of frustration with digital tools, and then returning with the constant, obsessive curiosity of an artist, and dozens of shows, and many of them were failures, and struggles with self-esteem, and personal victories in being brave enough to share your skill. All that persistence and struggle is utterly absent from AI-produced material.
AI could completely eliminate a company's obligation to compensate their talent, so I think if anything is going to be represented as being the production of a studio, business (or a website), the actual artist needs to be credited, and AI limits our ability to do that. For example, since my wife's images are public, AI-generators will see her #Epicurus #Hashtags and pull from her art (due to the limited number of Epicurean images out there). We have absolutely no way of knowing which generators are now using her images to inform their reproductions.
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