Ethical AI art generation? Adobe Firefly may be the answer

Adobe trained new AI generator on Adobe Stock, licensed content, public domain.

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[lucubratory]

Two options.

1. This splits the anti-AI art movement between Luddites (not as a slur, just the best word for it) and copyright devotees. Copyright devotees will be happy with a solution like this because it fits the magic rules as well as any stock image database does. If a large enough bloc of copyright enthusiasts split off from the anti-AI movement over this, I strongly suspect that there's no longer any political space for the Luddites to get anything done at all. The response will basically be "They made it legal and now everyone's happy with it, what's the holdup?". The resulting implosion of the anti-AI movement is likely to mean that even "non-ethical" AI art tools like Stable Diffusion are eventually widely used if what they're doing is found to be legal in the US. There won't be any organised campaign left to oppose them, and it'll end up just being: If you want to have "ethical AI art", you use the models of very large corporations like Adobe, Microsoft, Disney etc, and if you don't view current AI art as unethical you can use open source or research derived AI art programs.

2. Most anti-AI people aren't actually copyright devotees, but rather Luddites that are just grabbing the most useful argument at this current moment. If this is the case, there won't be a substantial bloc splitting off from the anti-AI movement regardless of how legal and ethical a training database is made, and it will either succeed as an activist movement in forcing the government to make concessions (or splitting industry with boycotts), or it will fail after enough time has passed.


I don't know which way this goes. It's also leaving aside the questions of "Is Firefly actually any good at all, considering the inherently limited training data?" and "Will the United States government let any 'ethics' movement prevent the US remaining the best place for AI researchers to do their research, given the ongoing effort by China to recruit those researchers with better pay and benefits as the two powers enter a new Cold War?"


I am also really interested in what ends up happening with the EU and UK if the anti-AI movement succeeds in getting legal bans etc in the US. The EU has been unequivocal about supporting AI researchers, and the UK has gone well beyond that and given copyright exemptions for basically anyone doing AI research in the country, with no requirement of separation between researchers and businesses. Even if the anti-AI movement succeeds in the US, I don't see how that translates to success in the EU or the UK (or Japan, or China, etc).

 

[lucubratory]

I was talking a while back to a marketing head at a uni. He was observing that the art & design students liked interning for him because he paid them. Most shops had a pool of interns that had to compete for projects. They designed some page layout / picture / etc and then the company paid for one of the pool.

I listened to an interview with the art director at Fantasy Flight Games during the LCG heyday. She observed that to generate hundreds of art pieces for a monthly or bi-monthly release required many artists. She had a website requesting specific art pieces with styles described and artists submitted pieces. She'd buy some of them and use them. The rest were left unused.

Back to the marketing head at the uni, I asked him what the average graduate made going out into the world with a credible deign degree. He observed that the average pay was around $35k per year in our region (lower cost of living), but compare that to the estimated baseline of $41k at the time for a family (all necessities and a few extras).

The point I'd make is that people talk about all the artists being put out of work. Are they though? I'm not an expert in the field, but from what I can tell, it's already a brutal field. Many of them seem to have day jobs and do art on the side because they want to. At best, this might reduce the likelihood of people running a side gig or alternatively, AI assisted art might make provably human generated art that much more valuable. It could boost the incomes of the mid-tier / top-tier artists.

I have worked in commissioned art as a freelancer.

It is not a viable career for the vast, vast majority of people who do it. I would say it's similar to music in terms of what percentage of people can make their living with it vs what percentage are trying to, maybe worse. It's not even particularly close to an actual side job like Uber. I have similar feelings about it to what I have about the music industry, or professional sports: it's not really a "career" in the way we think about it. It's a lot more like the lottery. I'm not saying all people are equally good or equally dedicated, that's obviously not true, but luck on some level is the determining factor, not skill or dedication. For every Justin Bieber there are thousands of others who were just as good, just as dedicated, and who simply didn't get lucky. The idea that you can just "be a musician"/"be an artist"/"be a basketballer" in the same way that you actually can just "be a carpenter" or "be a lawyer" if you get the appropriate accreditations, is not true.

That said, there are what we would think of as more traditional careers, making art. In games, you will have artist positions. In animation as well. It's not as sexy as the idea of a starving artist who's so good they attract a patron, or its modern equivalent the freelance commission artist over the internet, but those jobs at least actually exist and you can realistically get them if you develop the skills and make some industry connections. Those jobs are going to be affected by AI art, long term. In particular, artists that refuse to use anything AI related are likely going to lose work simply because they won't be able to produce the same quality of work in the same timeframe as artists who are using the best tools available, eventually.


I would like to think there will be something like the streaming explosion for TV, where we end up making a lot more art and so require a lot more artists, even if those artists are individually (for example) twice as productive as they used to be able to. But whether that happens or not, the reality is that we live in capitalism, and unemployment is a built-in part of the system. The priests of our system will tell you with a straight face that "full employment" means significant unemployment by their own definition, plus all of the uncounted unemployment that happens from people no longer looking for work even though they want it. This system isn't kind to people, and technological unemployment is a cruelty it's more than willing to promise. If we lived in a more humane society, then maybe we could have automation always accompanied by re-training and new jobs for everyone displaced, but we don't. I don't believe the solution in any society is to try to ban the new technology, but it can certainly feel like it to people who have zero confidence their society will care for them if their jobs are automated.