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        310 months ago

        Who do you think wins when model training becomes prohibitively expensive to for regular people?

        We passed that point at inception. Its always been more efficient for Microsoft to do its training at a 10,000 Petaflop giga-plant in Iowa than for me to run Stable Diffusion on my home computer.

        Regular people, who could have had access to a competitive, corporate-independent tool for creativity, education, entertainment, and social mobility

        Already have that. It’s called a $5 art kit from Michael’s.

        This isn’t about creation, its about trade and propagation of the finished product within the art market. And its here that things get fucked, because my beautiful watercolor that took me 20 hours to complete isn’t going to find a buyer that covers half a week’s worth of living expenses, so long as said market place is owned and operated by folks who want my labor for free.

        AI generation serves to mine the market at near-zero cost and redistribute the finished works for a profit.

        Copyright/IP serves to separate the creator of a work from its future generative profits.

        But all this ultimately happens within the context of the market itself. The legal and financial mechanics of the system are designed to profit publishers and distributors at the expense of creatives. That’s always been true and the latest permutation in how creatives get fucked is merely a variation on a theme.

        instead be left worse off and with less than where we started.

        AI Art does this whether or not its illegal, because it exists to undercut human creators of content by threatening them with an inferior-but-vastly-cheaper alternative.

        The dynamic you’re describing has nothing to do with AI’s legality and everything to do with Disney’s ability to operate as monopsony buyer of bulk artistic product. The only way around this is to break Disney up as a singular mass-buyer of artwork, and turn the component parts of the business over to the artists (and other employees of the firm) as an enterprise that answers to and profits the people generating the valuable media rather than some cartel of third-party shareholders.