“Artist was already poor career choice”… only a short mind and miss-informed person could keep using cliches like this form last century. Good luck with your critical thinking.

Going back to the AI topic. This is a new fascinating tech that will open so much more possibilities and will be use by artist then selves as a new tool. But that said, you can’t neglect the lack of laws protecting the artist that these ai fees from atm (copyrights like in the ai music industry for example) that is harming the artist community.

backcountry164 – EVERY professional artist’s priority is to make money, as we have kids, mortgage, pets etc. just like everybody else. Second priority is being creative and honing a craft we love.
AI art is making it SIGNIFICANTLY harder to find work as an artist, as lower-tier work is already now being replaced by AI image generators. Album covers, book covers, private commissions etc. is what most artists start out doing before they get good enough to be hired by a studio or get high-end clients.
With the quality increase we see right now, it is only a matter of time before mid-tier work is gone too.
Furthermore, there are already cases of huge, very respected artists getting completely copied by image generators – the AI even adds the signature in some cases(!) – and amateurs are trolling them, pretending to be them, getting involved in nsfw and behaviour which hurt the original artists’ image.
AI image generators were trained by scraping millions of copyrighted works, without consent and without payment, so everything the AI generator creates is based on existing artworks.
So first the artists have their work stolen and now the thieves are putting the original artists out of work. It’s a double whammy which cant be defended.

Me too. I am extremely disappointed Tim Ferris promotes AI art. It is DESTROYING artists’ livelihoods! Why bother spending a decade mastering the craft, when every client can just get the art they want for free by typing in a prompt?
Some famous artists are getting plagiarized so well, trolls are imitating their designs and stealing their identity. Many artists have already lost revenue because bands and authors use AI generators for their book and album covers.
AI art is THEFT! The algorithms are trained on millions of copyrighted artworks without the artists’ consent.
If you indulge in AI art, even as a user, you are condoning art theft, helping destroy the art space and disrespecting artists from all over the world.

Maybe the AI should be viewed as a new style artists should adopt instead of fight. The words used are the new paint or photoshop tool,the AI is the canvas that helps you capture it.

I have to say, I am supremely disappointed in this move, mostly because it seems very ill-conceived and tone-deaf to the art community in general. I want to start out by saying that I have tried some of these programs. As an artist myself, it felt fun and I definitely got a good sugar rush out of it, but when I learned the ethical implications, I immediately backed off. Copyrighted artwork and imagery are in these datasets that are being used by these AI companies without assent and for profit. This alone is highly unethical and the basis for why many artists in the community are taking a stand against AI-generated artwork, myself included.

I hope I am speaking to your curious nature, Tim, of which attracted me to your work to begin with, and that you’ll at least research this topic further before going through on sending money to people who use these unethical AI programs that undermine the livelihoods of the artists who’ve unwillingly been fed to this machine.

Thank you for your time.

Places to start (not sure if I can post links, so just posting the titles):

– MIT Technology Review – “This artist is dominating AI-generated art. And he’s not happy about it. Greg Rutkowski is a more popular prompt than Picasso.” by Melissa Heikkilä

– Tech Crunch – “Image-generating AI can copy and paste from training data, raising IP concerns” by Kyle Wiggers

– Vice – “ISIS Executions and Non-Consensual Porn Are Powering AI Art” by Chloe Xiang and Emanuel Maiberg

– (Youtube) Steven Zapata – “The End of Art: An Argument Against Image AIs”

– Art Cafe Podcast #134

What a ridiculous thing to say. Artists don’t want to “make money” in the sense of “getting rich” through art. They do however want to live/survive like the rest of us. That is enough for them, and you’d leave them jobless for no reason at all. This plagiarism tool does not advance humanity or the art medium even. It’s an evil farce.

Congratulations on your meaningless platitude. Change for the sake of change is not good. This subject is complex, it can’t be cast aside with a simple platitude

The only constant things is change. Artists and art is changing. That’s all.