People on twitter at each other’s throats for a recent trend in which you can use imageai filters to reproduce images in Studio Ghibli style.
Lots of people are throwing around the Miyazaki quote where he calls AI an “insult to life itself” - it’s worth noting that this came after he witnessed a simulation using AI animation to make a zombie body crawl across the ground. Miyazaki remarked that he has a very disabled friend he sees regularly, and that he can't find this usage cool or interesting. He goes on to remark about generative AI later in the clip, but let’s be clear, that specific statement was disconnected.
I’m curious what the Lemmy opinion is here. Is this a short-lived fad or does it speak to larger ramifications in the creative industry? Is this a silly little image filter or a harbinger of global artistic doom?
Well, I think we have to come up with a lot of answers to the new questions AI raises... But that's kind of always the case with fundamentally new things. Even more so if they're disruptive. I certainly wouldn't like to see proper art (like the Ghibli movies) getting replaced by AI. But we somehow need to deal with it. I believe AI is here to stay.
I believe the main issues currently are, AI lacking depth, so if it replaces things, it replaces them with inferior things. And secondly, this makes it more difficult to make art. Both to reach an audience and to earn money with it. I'm (personally) not directly opposed to AI, the issue is just that it tends to drown out other things. Often at the cost of quality (currently) so it's bad as of now. In the long term the question is slightly different: What aspect of humanness do we value? Why? What's our place and the place of AI and what's our incentive to do things? I mean if AI can properly replace humans, we can't earn a living with labor anymore. And the same applies to art. It needs to have a different motivation than money anyways. But none of that applies currently. AI needs human content to be trained. And companies just take that (without consent) and they'd need to contribute something back for it to be healthy. Either some form of direct compensation. Or something meaningful. And I think once the copyright issue is settled and the companies stop to steal everything they get a hold of, but instead start to license that content for training purposes... We can start to discuss whether generative AI contributes something meaningful to the world.