Do you have any personal opinions you can share about the use of AI art generation for magic? I personally think it’s really cool but I’m also concerned about what it could do to the artists.I think ‘AI’ art is shit (this goes for AI 'writing’ too). It’s bad on every possible axis. Sure, it’s novel, but that doesn’t mean good.
The only reason the technology is even possible is through at best dubiously scraped data and at worst outright theft of intellectual property. It is, in effect, one giant plagiarism machine, even if it does so broadly enough that it’s not always noticeable. A human being inspired by or even imitating something is not the same thing as an algorithm averaging values of stolen work and spitting something back out. You can tell there’s a different because a human being looking at their own work enough doesn’t suddenly stop being able to produce art. And that’s what happens with 'AI’, you feed it enough AI derived work and you get model collapse, like a xerox of a xerox of a xerox, the output quality degenerates.
From a business perspective, you’d certainly save money in the short term, which is probably all most care about, but in the long run you’re producing art you don’t actually own. And eventually, model collapse will happen and you’re left with a useless tool, because you’ve flooded the inputs into the system with AI garbage. The only reason these AI models work right now is because all the data they’re scraping are made by humans, but widespread AI usage would kill that quality input and replace it, again, with AI generated garbage.
As for artists, they’re being stolen from, and at best the companies producing AI art will want to pay them a pittance to 'fix’ the art AI produces. Same goes for writing. But of course, it wouldn’t be obvious (to business folks) that widespread usage of these tools will ruin entire industries until it’s too late, in the same way 'pivoting to video’ decimated journalism.
