Say no to exploitation of the many by the few <3
AI's true potential sits in offloading humanity from the tasks that are unwanted, tedious, or even dangerous. Having AI & technology take care of those while humanity reaps the socialized benefits in quality time & ressources spent exploring humanistic pursuits.
One of those pursuits that is deeply rooted in humanity and expressing human feelings and emotions, especially in the userbase of a site like artstation, is artmaking.
That a platform who's purpose is to assemble working artist and facilitate contact between them & the employers seeking their expertise be demeaned into a mere marketplace where you can buy 500 versions of the same autogenerated products ad nauseam should be a main concern right now.
Too much noise in a signal distorts it to the point it cannot be read anymore. That's what we are already starting to see in artstation's product pages, and even sometimes on the frontpage.
AI image generation has been built recklessly by companies enjoying a combination of legal grey area, lack of precedent, and tedious & pedantic language to obfuscate what it really is. As of right now, datasets are trained on unwilling artists, scraped off the internet without their consent, when it's self evident artists have been using the internet for 20+ years a both a means of networking, communication, expression & promotion, that has nothing to do with surrendering all rights to their work without so much as a respectful way to OPT IN. Opt out is insufficient and has been used in many cases to continue immoral or illegal user data (for exemple in exercing friction against Europe's RGPD)
AI in it's current state is not an ideation machine, but a remix machine. It does not create, it essentially puzzle together from multiple sources at a scale & with datasets that were previously impossible to attain, thus creating at best the illusion of creation, at worst litteral plagiarism of artist's signatures.
Moreover, having companies being built around creating unethical models without the consent of their artists, then SELLING access to their models is, in fact, straight up stealing from artists. If a model's value resides in it's dataset (and it does), then the value created from using the model belongs to the creators of the data. The artists.
Current AI is already losing the field of illustration some paying clients, impoverishing a field that has already been undervalued for the last century. If tech statements are to be believed, AI's capacity will exponentially rise, in faster & faster increments. We're seeing fringe models with the abality to generat poor (for now) looking WIPs, with the express intent of harming artists.
That a human being spent decades of work to build a skill, only to be immensely devalued by thieves acting in a legal grey area & moral bankruptcy shouldn't be something celebrated, encouraged, or given a platform. It should be something we legislate on, including usecases where AI is beneficial to humanity, and cases where it's not. Opening the floodgates preemptively on a site like Artstation is again, reckless, anti-artists, and would void it's main function of being a one stop global hub for the industry.
