In my opinion, AI just feels like the logical next step for capitalist exploitation and destruction of culture. Generative AI is (in most cases) just a fancy way for cooperations to steal art on a scale, that hasn’t been possible before. And then they use AI to fill the internet with slop and misinformation and actual artists are getting fired from their jobs, because the company replaces them with an AI, that was trained on their original art. Because of these reasons and some others, it just feels wrong to me, to be using AI in such a manner, when this community should be about inclusion and kindness. Wouldn’t it be much cooler, if we commissioned an actual artist for the banner or find a nice existing artwork (where the licence fits, of course)? I would love to hear your thoughts!
Not the OP but I’ll put my PoV.
AI allows to cut junior and entry level artists. Companies only need to retain top 1% talent orchestrating hordes of AI.
While it is still a craft, commercial art is not about being genuine; it is to deliver product and meeting deadline while passing QA. AI’s output rate outpaces human labor, and the top 1% can certainly identify what aspect makes AI output slop. Which means they can cherry pick “OK” part of AI, review, iterate, tweak to deliver product while keeping quality. The process previously involved comunication between senior and junior artits. Now companies don’t need the rest of the 99% anymore as workforce.
What will happen in the long run? Who knows. Companies are known for only keen on immediate profit.
This tendency is widespread and not limited to art field, nor related to the argument of intrinsic value of art. I can argue this is more of labor (and capitalism) issue, on top of people whose art stolen not getting enough compensation for their work. While I’m not against AI technology itself, its effect on peoples livelihood and climate impact makes current AI landscape hard to defend.
Thanks for your input. I agree with you that it is a labour and capitalism issue. This seems to be where your perspective differs from the OP.
I guess my fundamental disagreement is that we should deny ourselves technological advancement because we live under capitalism. Yes, that is the system we will live under for the foreseeable future. I don’t like it and don’t like how capital takes advantage of technology. The way capital takes advantage of AI isn’t unique. Generally, significant advancement will bring change and the biggest impact of that change will be felt by the proletariat. That sucks and we shouldn’t have to put up with it.
Circling back to the topic of the post, OP uses this negative impact as justification to disagree with the apparent use of AI in the community banner art. This is non-sequitur. No one is making a living off of designing Lemmy community banners. The people that run the community simply decided not to arbitrarily deny themselves what they felt to be the best tool for the task. What I’m defending isn’t necessarily the current AI landscape as such, just the technology part I’m interested in.