I don’t see AI art as being fundamentally different from other forms of art. In particular, I would liken it to photography where the artists guides the AI to produce scenes that they find to be aesthetically pleasing or to convey some idea they want to share. If we consider photography to be art, then I don’t see why AI generated art would be any different.

AI assistance can also save artists a lot of time. For example, you can already make a rough sketch of something and have the AI fill in the details for you. I see this as evolution of tools like Photoshop which save a lot of time producing different effects that were labour intensive to create previously.

I would argue that art predominantly lies in what the artist is trying to convey, as opposed to the technical skill itself. From that perspective, I think that AI assisted art lowers the barrier for people to convey their ideas. I see that as a net positive.

Regarding the question of jobs, I think that’s entirely a problem with the capitalist system. A lot of artists toil to produce things like advertisements, which are completely soulless and I generally would not consider to be actual art.

I’ve seen AI fail miserably at drawing human skeletons. While it’s very good at making things that look realistic, or even beautiful, it’s still far from achieving complex illustration tasks (e.g. anatomically correct bones, architectural designs, comic strips that make sense, etc.).

You and other people have argued, and cogently, that the introduction of AI art will be a blight on the artistic professions under the economic burden of a capitalist system. However, I want to bring up the counterpoint that under capitalism, art is already being maximally removed from public life and either reduced to marketable commodities, or confined to private spaces as a hobby, and this has nothing to do with any influence on behalf of AI. Instead, I want to point out what a great thing this could be, if capitalists wouldn’t fuck us all over with it.

The essence of what AI does is to open the door towards artistic creation to all those who suffer from lack of talent, time, or education to become an artist themselves. In due course, everyone will be able to print out pretty pictures, unique in the world, and hang them into their living room. They will just have to tell the AI the motif they want, and perhaps the setting and the style.

But in time they will figure out to tweak little things about their painting, tell it to make a sunrise instead of a blue sky, tell it to add mountains to the flat land, dress their family portrait a little more formal on special occasions, or reroute the motorway around a view of their city. They will experiment with different colours and directions of light. They will attempt to micromanage the AI in finer and finer ways; and soon, without ever needing the skill to draw or paint, they will experience something approximating the decisions actual artists have to make when it comes to composing a painting. It will enable them to express themselves independently of technique, much like a keyboard allows you to bring across your point legibly even if your handwriting sucks.

Not only that, but once come to maturity, AI art can be a godsend for the many other professionals who have to work with imagery without being trained as artists. It may once be able to draw plans, construct 3D models, and even compose illustrative videos for city planners, architects, designers of all sorts, writers, engineers, textbook authors, or scientists and mathematicians who want to visualise concepts from their research without learning to tame complicated software; and in return, playing with it can also provide them with inspiration for their work.

Of course, people who learn to make art properly must be rewarded for it, and there are plenty of things AI cannot do such as actually painting the murals or laying the mosaics, but there are enough people out there who are just bad at drawing, and at some point it often becomes a severe impediment to the otherwise brilliant work they are doing, and under a better economic system, AI would be there to help them without disenfranchising trained artists like you.

I think it’s a typical case of automation, just in the field which was not even imagined to be possible by most people. If anything, it should be a impulse for artists to realize they are not some bourgeoisie freelancers or whatever, not safe from capitalism, but the proletarians they always were.

I think it’s interesting. Certainly as someone with no artistic talent who role-plays and often needs references for settings, items, characters it stands to potentially make my life a lot easier for that.

I agree with what China is doing, namely that all AI generated visual works should require mandatory watermarking built into the process doing it. It shouldn’t be some big ugly thing that distracts from the work, quite the contrary I believe it should be tiny and unobtrusive or even invisible to the naked eye but I believe we should protect the efforts of human artists by allowing people to identify what is and isn’t AI generated visual imagery.

The watermarking is also essential for combating disinformation which even if the whole western world were to fall tomorrow and socialism established worldwide by 2030 would still be an issue from lingering reactionaries for many many decades.

I do agree that it is like industrialization in what it will do to certain professions. People still hire tailors to create special pieces, you just need a lot of money to afford that, some minimum wage person had little hope of hiring a personal tailor for custom pieces before or after the fact but now has access to affordable clothing. It will be the same with art. Sucks if you’re an artist but the automobile and steam engine sucked for those whose profession was stabling and shoeing horses too, yet we can’t hold back progress. People will still commission artistic works, it’ll just revert to being very skilled artists and very wealthy people.

There is going to be an adjustment period. What we need is not to ban AI art but to adopt socialism. A society that reaches communism or even the high stage of socialism will not need fear from this. No artist will starve because computers can generate art and there will likely if anything be a resurgence of moderate and low skilled people creating art as a creative endeavor in newly found free time once exploitation has ended. Oh people will still use computer generated art for their DnD games or this and that but with so much free time and unlocking of human potential, no one is going to ask a computer to paint the ceiling of a great new building of the people or a train station, they’ll have local artists do so.

Capitalists are not about to allow banning of a cost-cutting measure any more than they would have allowed banning the steam engine or mechanical factories to save the jobs of workers. They’re just not. So what we need once again is a new economic mode, we need socialism. That will harmonize everything. Until then, things continue to decay, conditions get worse for workers, all workers. And all we can do is try to have solidarity with and support one another. But not to go around acting like luddites, that if we smash the machines we can change things. This course is set, it has been done, it will continue to be done. All we can do is push for regulation under this situation and of course push for socialism.