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this post was submitted on 21 Jan 2024
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Seems like Disney is as eager to adopt this technology as anyone
A few goofy Steamboat Willie knock offs pale beside the benefit of axing half your art department every few years, until everything is functionally a procedural generation.
They're playing both sides. Who do you think wins when model training becomes prohibitively expensive to for regular people? Mega corporations already own datasets, and have the money to buy more. And that's before they make users sign predatory ToS allowing them exclusive access to user data, effectively selling our own data back to us.
Regular people, who could have had access to a competitive, corporate-independent tool for creativity, education, entertainment, and social mobility, would instead be left worse off and with less than where we started.
We passed that point at inception. Its always been more efficient for Microsoft to do its training at a 10,000 Petaflop giga-plant in Iowa than for me to run Stable Diffusion on my home computer.
Already have that. It's called a $5 art kit from Michael's.
This isn't about creation, its about trade and propagation of the finished product within the art market. And its here that things get fucked, because my beautiful watercolor that took me 20 hours to complete isn't going to find a buyer that covers half a week's worth of living expenses, so long as said market place is owned and operated by folks who want my labor for free.
AI generation serves to mine the market at near-zero cost and redistribute the finished works for a profit.
Copyright/IP serves to separate the creator of a work from its future generative profits.
But all this ultimately happens within the context of the market itself. The legal and financial mechanics of the system are designed to profit publishers and distributors at the expense of creatives. That's always been true and the latest permutation in how creatives get fucked is merely a variation on a theme.
AI Art does this whether or not its illegal, because it exists to undercut human creators of content by threatening them with an inferior-but-vastly-cheaper alternative.
The dynamic you're describing has nothing to do with AI's legality and everything to do with Disney's ability to operate as monopsony buyer of bulk artistic product. The only way around this is to break Disney up as a singular mass-buyer of artwork, and turn the component parts of the business over to the artists (and other employees of the firm) as an enterprise that answers to and profits the people generating the valuable media rather than some cartel of third-party shareholders.
You don't need industrial level efficiency or insane overhead costs, that's why it's a big deal. It's something regular people can do at home.
An art set from Michaels can only do so much. Having access to the most cutting edge tools and techniques has always propelled artists and art forward. Imagine not having access to digital art tools, computer animation, digital photography, digital sculpting, and interactive media tools to expand artistic expression, and allow for the creation of new forms, styles, and genres of art that weren't possible before?
Fighting their fight for them won't help in the end, don't make it easier for them.
It isn't necessarily a competitor or a threat, the tools are open source and free for all artists to use to enhance their creative process, explore new possibilities, and imagine novel outcomes. You can use it to help you reach new audiences, and discover new forms of expression. It's not a zero-sum game like you suggest.
That would still leave the baby-disneys with way more money than your average Joe, solving nothing. Training models isn't so expansive that they wouldn't enough have the money to train their own, that cost is only prohibitive to the working man.