arguments about AI art are, i feel, a great example of the how deep the tendrils of private property and wage labor are sunk into our unconscious ways of thinking, and how reluctant we often are to question this. such arguments would be greatly improved if we stopped thinking about the situation at hand as a problem of "stealing" artwork - thus validating the idea that artwork should even be property in the first place - and instead thought about it as a problem of artists being denied wages and moreover, the fact that human needs are gated behind wages and labor to begin with. yet more often, we retreat into the comfortable incoherence of appealing to IP laws to save us from capitalism and when that fails, we retreat further into the mysticism of Human Nature.
but art shouldn't be obliged in the first place to earn its right to exist, by forcing artists to work for it and earn money. no artist should be obliged to earn their right to exist, to create! a capitalist economy always fundamentally limits and hinders the production of art except to the extent that it's useful to facilitate the growth of money, whether AI exists or not.
if there is any long-term solution, then it isn't stronger copyright protections for the little guy, it's policies that push private property and wage labor itself closer toward irrelevance. i'm not saying i have a solution worked out myself, but let's broaden our imagination! for artists employed by a proper business, we need to hinder companies' ability to fire workers and lower wages. for artists who take freelance commission work, especially for artists taking commissions from individual consumers, our goals are perhaps more unclear but i don't think the problem is unsolvable - subsidies for purchasing from indie artists, perhaps, or direct state benefits and funds for independent artists, maybe mandatory minimum prices on art, to give a few possibilities. these are the conversations we need to be having - not excitedly joining the likes of Disney to push for stronger IP law, or seeking bans on AI research altogether.
also, the dust has hardly settled. i think society has ingrained this Hollywood mindset in us, where every major world-historic event that happens is the precipice we've just dove off toward the imminent end of the world where every bad thing is extrapolated to infinity, this perverse yearning for anything bad to be basically the next World War 2 (i.e. the last time anything happened in the First World). but we don't really know what role AI is going to play in the art world in the long term, and we won't know for some years yet to come.
i'm not saying that capitalists aren't going to try and leverage it to cut labor costs like any other technology. but that doesn't mean it's the only application it will see even in a capitalist economy. any tool that makes image creation easier is a huge potential boon to artists, legitimately. so much of artistic passion today is exhausted in the rote and mechanistic aspects of creation rather than in creativity itself - all these repetitive tasks that must be done, drawing the same construction lines, the same body shapes, the same architectural elements etc over and over that might be more easily done by a machine - and that genuinely sucks, just like the back-breaking manual labor that machine tools both legitimately freed workers from while also "freeing" many to starve in the 18th-20th centuries.
our world is already not so different from the AI future we fear is coming. the immense growth of art and artists on the modern internet is a good example of the shades of grey in the way new technologies are deployed and used in capitalism. before we wax poetic about how art is about the process and not the goal, consider that digital art tools and the internet have already automated and abstracted away much of the expense and labor requirements that held people back from creating art in the pre-digital age - think of brush engines and customizability, layers and layer control, the transform tool, selection and erasers, blend modes, shaders, procedural generators, asset libraries, among many others - and enabled everyone to share art knowledge, guides, blueprints and even the tools of production for cheap or even free. and yet, everyone's still fucking poor, and selling copious volumes of art for pennies. actually, this is a great thing for businesses because it gets consumers and artists themselves to fund the growth of the pool of artist labor, while driving down wages by forcing the growing numbers of artists to compete against each other for indie work and professional gigs alike. yet the fact we are living in a time of creativity and expression unprecedented in human history is not a bad thing! these two realities coexist - great evil and great good - and that makes the evil no less worth fighting, but it also makes the good no less worth having.
