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Notes -
This is the good and the bad of AI art all wrapped up in one short post.
The Good: Low stakes things like rpg character art is now free to get quickly and at a pretty decent level of quality. Most people would never have paid for this and their having access to it is good. Even those who did pay for it before now get it cheaper, and with the ability to refine the prompts are more likely to get exactly what they want.
The Bad: Some people were paying for this, and it cuts the legs out from under those artists. I'd have more sympathy, but tons of people have gotten screwed by technological change or cheaper markets and this is special pleading. But at the same time, this is also the kind of thing people do when they are just getting into art. The first step to being good at something is being bad at it, and easy replacements which are superior to the Bad At It stage seem likely to demoralize/discourage people from working through this step cause why bother.
I also think this is why normies who are not artists and have only to gain from this change are still so rabidly anti-AI. Cause art is fun, and rewarding, and gives us a sense of accomplishment and helpfulness to the group even if its just a picture of our characters storming the castle. We always imagined the robots as mine labor, or housemaids, etc. because we wanted them to do the drudgery so we could all do art. Not have them take over all the art and leave us to do the manual labor.
Artists are engaged in special pleading, and they didn't care other people's ox got gored. But the reason people empathize more with them is that no one dreams of being a factory worker so who cares if the robots take those jobs. But if the robots take all the artist, novelist, musician, and philosopher jobs then what is there left for the post scarcity world except sitting on your ass watching netflix like those jerks in Wall-E?
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