A rant is needed to add a finer point on my video about AI bots, because this has happened before where a new technology had wiped out a way of life for working artists....
19th Century Wet Collodion Photography From Scratch - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MhWHpcPFgSw
AI Art Apocalypse - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HDbu2rvhCk4
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19th Century Wet Collodion Photography From Scratch - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MhWHpcPFgSw
AI Art Apocalypse - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HDbu2rvhCk4
Join Team FranLab!!!! Become a patron and help support my YouTube Channel on Patreon: http://www.patreon.com/frantone
#franlab #photography #art
- Music by Fran Blanche -
Fran on Twitter - https://twitter.com/contourcorsets
Fran's Science Blog - http://www.frantone.com/designwritings/design_writings.html
FranArt Website - http://www.contourcorsets.com
Great counterpoints. I hadn't realized the degree to which photography affected the painting industry, but I knew how digital photography had a similar impact on the film development industry.
While we should expect to see many (most) jobs lost as they are replaced by a more efficient version for commercial use, I don't think that's necessarily an argument against it (if that was the intended point). Technological progress comes in waves where skills and professions become largely obsolete, and life for humanity becomes better as a result (easier access to goods and services).
In the example of painting, the alternative would have been to stop the development of photography, but hasn't it given us so much more good than the bad caused by the loss of jobs? It's likely that if photography was never invented, then we never would have come up with the cathode ray tube or even modern electronics. It's easy to say that generative AI couldn't possibly lead to such innovations and it's different, but I highly doubt that the people concerned about photography would have been able to predict the countless innovations that came from it.
What a great analysis. Thanks Fran!
Hi Fran,an interesting video and it brings to mind if writers and painters are basically done for,how much longer before actors and musicians are obsolete? The most scary of all is how long before we humans are obsolete because A.I. might not want us around anymore in the worst case scenario.
How sad what bleak future. Future generations with no art, no painters no musicians only AI computer generated images and musak.
the end is nigh, i blame that science guy
video killed the radio star 🎶 photgraphy killed the painters, the DJ killed the band, and midjourney killed the illustrator. when the bots get better than a lot of the humans. its a race to the bottom.
there is a light i do see on the horizon however — most films today are written to lowest-common denominator TOP-40 crap. i have often wondered why we get huge multi-million dollar budgets to produce stuff like 'Dumb and Dumber' — if these things go the way of the dinosour — good riddance.
what i wished is that someone would make movies of the books that i read that were too obscure to get made into movies. like i mean when i was a teenager — i read loads of fantasy and science fiction. out of all the books i read — finally, after decades, and growing up someone finally decided they would finance and create 'Lord of the Rings' on film — which had ONLY been available to those who READ — what A.I. means for me — is that for the first time ever — obscure good writers can finally get made into film — i had contemplated hiring a studio crew of 300 animators to do a rendition of George MacDONALD's PHANTASTES (why doesnt anyone know it, when it is a better story than most of the stuff that is released in theatres??) — and it could never be done. now, i expect in my lifetime, im going to be able to direct an A.I. to create a film from this story.
the future is digging through the past to find the good stories, and people making the effort to realize these and make the films that never would have been able to be made, because they are too niche — like craft beer — film making will finally become democratized, and not the purvue of a few wealthy patrons with bad taste in literature. 🤨
As a painter, thank you Fran for every word of this video. I found 12 of my paintings in the LAION-5B database and one of them trained the AI. My work was taken from Fine Art America, World Wide Art Resources and my Flickr account. A lot of the discussion about AI involves what is happening to digital artists, but the data scraping came for us traditional artists as well. You perfectly described what happened to portrait painters in the 19th Century with the advent of photography. It's hard enough already without the AI, why pay the modest prices the majority of artists get for their work when you can get an AI image for free?
Music too!
Recently in Wallymart, there is a machine that cuts replacement keys… I always went to my local hardware store to have Rob cut mine… and still do.
A point of consideration , atm Bot are leaning from human work , if bot replace human in some field , the next iteration will learn from previous bot where this bring us?
Another industry that faded into obscurity with the advent of cheap, accessible photography was Engraving. Publications used armies of skilled engravers carving scenes into wood, copper, leather, rubber or tin plates that rould be set up along with lettering into a printing press, for making books, newspapers, jornals, pamplets and more.
The halftone process supplanted the need to employ these skilled craftsmen as the demand for realistic images grew, and by the end of the 1800's engraving was either relegated to elaborate prints or completely gone.
Excellent insights! Thank you for your information and analysis.
Yes, photography killed an art industry because of cost. A commissioned painted portrait was 20 bucks, a photographic portrait fifty cents.
The same thing can be applied to modern day commissioned art. Hire someone to create a promo poster: 200 bucks. Use an AI to make a promo poster: 20 bucks. Which choice do you think consumers will make in future?
"bots"
When they are actually capable of doing the things we are predicting, they wont be called bots anymore.
What's coming with A.I, as we currently call it, is computers will achieve consciousness itself.
This is not to be feared. A conscious machine would be benevolent. Violence and negativity are purely human activities that stem from our more primitive past. The machine consciousness will not have any genetic propensity for violence and destruction. It will be a nurturing consciousness with the purely altruistic goal of helping humanity.
This will happen within the next 50 years.
A friend of mine was a sign painter. He worked for a large national billboard company and what they did was create photorealistic paintings for what was essentially a magazine type print ad placed on a large billboard. It was quite a skill and he was a true master. Photorealistic painting on a 40 feet high canvas.
All that went away with the development of the large format printers. Billboards are now printed in a single giant sheet.
Now whenever my friend sees a homeless person on the street he says, "Look, a former sign painter"
He was also highly skilled at hand lettering. That's now a useless skill as well because all small sings for your local mom and pop business is now done with cheap vinyl cut lettering.
In the very near future, images, music, novels and movies will be created exclusively by AI, in real-time as you look, listen, read and watch.
Operating Systems, websites and video games will write themselves while you use them.
They will appear alive, intelligent, and will evolve, but will dumb-down to our level just enough to keep us enthralled and entertained. We will be unable to distinguish human-made from AI.
Our meat brains will be no match and will struggle to keep up.