An actual plan would involve regulation, otherwise we are just complaining loudly while things march on anyway.

I fully expect things to march on anyway. I have no idea how it plays out for creative industries, I am still thinking and observing in that regard.

At this stage there is just protest and reaction.

> Businesses have already replaced several background artists gambling on the uncopyrightable status of "AI" output being ignored. In a comercial setting, one can't sell what they never owned in the first place.

I'm skeptical of this line of reasoning. Major content providers have no problem with copyright, even when content is completely produced by anonymous contributors. Is this supposed to become an issue when you eliminate some anonymous contributors?

Regarding generative images, it's more of an issue because the effects are different.

Software tends to be a "living" project, so just vibe coding with 0 software knowledge is not yet fully sustainable for maintaining a project. But with art, the AI just spits out a completed image.

The generated images compete directly with the people the data was sourced from, and there have also been many cases of abuse, eg people using AI to impersonate a popular artist and selling comissions under that artist's name.

The copyright situation for generated imagery is also tricky, so people pretending to be artists only to be sharing work that isn't copyrightable can cause a ton of trouble and financial loss for customers.

Most of these issues don't apply to software in the same way. That's why I was surprised by the backlash to this as it's just touching the software side, I don't see this as threatening artist's work.

When I was dabbling in image generation (~StyleGAN2 era), my vision for image generation models was as a support tool for artists (back then I was generating small character thumbnails to help me brainstorm ideas for drawing), believing that people valued art for the human effort. Even then I would have considered what Anthropic are trying to do here as the preferable way to use AI in art workflows.

I'm an artist turned CTO. My perspective is really simple - theft is theft. You (not you specifically per se) can sugar coat it however you like, but copying open source codebases/work is different from stealing proprietary/licensed work without permission. It would have been ok if stealing/sharing copyrighted work was heavily normalized, but no, a lot of people have gone to prison for simply pirating DVDs and CDs and now you're telling me it's somehow ok if a corporation does it?

Yes?

For example, you could least feel that the world is large enough to have people with other needs, drives and ownership levels of their work.

You could also consider that this is not an even trade; artists had all their works ingested and didn’t get a commensurate stake in openAI.

You can consider that you had a choice to share when you contributed to open source. Then imagine how a counter culture artist, who despises corporate culture, must feel to have their work consumed by another rapacious tech entity.

Or you can be the filmmaker whose clients are now showing up with entire ad clips, and then decide they would rather not spend the money on CGI to complete the video - essentially demolishing work overnight.

This isn’t to say that there are not artists who are excited by this, or artist who are happy to have their art ingested. Just that the way you phrased your question evoked this answer.

So basically artists are cool with developers not getting paid so long as they do...

> coming soon

The developers are literally on the bleeding edge here, it might be the most developed of the AI use cases right now. The most advanced tooling for LLMs revolves around SWE work, there are multiple prolific benchmarks that the labs are actively targeting in this area, and new ones are being built, whole product categories being spawned, software companies bleeding money for tokens.

It's the other professions that are to follow once the training data is in place to go reach for their livelihoods. SWEs got the early taste of what is coming. And the blender news is exactly that.

How and why did it change your income?

[flagged]

Do you have any idea how hard it already is to make a living in a creative field?

This is a very first degree analysis.

AI is seen as an oppressor and a threat, and AI providers are seen as oppressors. It's understandable that people don't want to collaborate with their oppressors, either direct or by association. If you were a Jew, would you buy shoes from the Nazis just because you were individually safe from them at that moment? Or would you if you were of a minority they hadn't started exterminating yet? Or if they were not exactly the Nazis killing your people but some affiliated group?

This sounds extreme until you realize they are under threat of losing their likelihood for good.

They are right to not accept your inevitability point without a fight, this is a human thing that can be fought, revolutions have happened, and will continue to happen.

I don't necessarily agree with this but I do understand it.

> I can understand not wanting models that have been trained on questionably sourced data, but otherwise they're opposing essentially a UX change, not based on UX concerns but on ideological fears.

"If you ignore their biggest, their primary, concern, their other concerns seem almost trivial".

>AI removes all these hurdles and directly presents you with the end problem - communication.

Which is why 99.9% of AI art is worthless. There's literally nothing personal or interesting about getting grok to fart out some picture you thought about while sitting on the toilet in the morning.

AI art will never be good without actual artists embracing the medium.