Automation and job replacement is a good thing. The reason it feels bad is because we’ve tied the ability to satisfy our basic needs to employment. In an economic model that actually isn’t a dystopian hellscape, robots replacing jobs is something to celebrate.
And to switch our economic model to one in which a person can thrive without pissing the vast majority of our lives away on the grind; we just need to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps!
This is so important.
An aspect of post scarcity is that people shouldn’t have to work. AGI might allow that; LLM is starting to fill some niches.
The problem is how it’s being done. Rather than benefiting society as a whole, it’s enriching a few. In an ideal world, people whose jobs are replaced should get a stipend. We should all be eagerly awaiting that time when our jobs are replaced and we get a paycheck - maybe a little reduced - but now we’re free to pursue our interests. If that means doing your old job, only now it’s bespoke, artisan work, great.
The other missing factors are free energy and limitless resources; but we’re making progress on energy, but resources are an issue with no solution on the horizon. Plus, we’re killing the planet by just existing, so there’s that.
We have a lot of problems to solve but AI is part of the solution, except that it’s being done wrong. And expensively.
but resources are an issue with no solution on the horizon.
We’ve got tons of resources, and the means the produce more. The problem is that’s not going to make some people lots and lots of money, so they don’t do it.
Scarcity is not a problem of “can’t” right now, it’s a problem of “won’t”.
We’re going to run out of oil in the next 30 years, and it’s not just cars that will affect. The mass produced factory farmed food that feeds 90% of the world’s population is utterly dependent on fossils fuels. There are almost no “Tesla” giant combines. And the trains that transport food to the cities run on fossil fuels. Cities will collapse. Air transport and ocean shipping will cease, destroying the global economy.
Many of the remaining oil reserves are in deep water, which are each and every one a man made environmental catastrophe waiting to happen, and as the easy reserves dry up, offshore drilling will become more common.
Meanwhile, we’re running out of precious metals needed to make cheap consumer electronics. And while we’re finding new reserves and the finite limit may not be a close, as computers and phone components become more expensive, and only the well-off will be able to afford them. The income disparity we see within our countries will become global, with entire countries falling behind.
And then there’s fresh water. This will become a bigger problem as time goes on, and water wars will become large scale events.
We’re living on a finite planet of finite resources. Our only hope for space exploration is a couple of commercial companies run by the 21st century equivalent of robber barons. If we do start mining asteroids for materials, those resources still be utterly monopolized by a single handful of individuals.
I don’t understand your belief that we still have plenty of resources, when the scientific community has been warning that we’re running through our reserves ever faster, for years.
We’re going to run out of oil in the next 30 years
- everyone since 1900
No. 20 years ago it was “50 years,” so we’re pretty on track.
More reserves are accessible to us now with modern technology, but it’s being harder, more expensive, and more dangerous to get at. We’re stretching it some, but… do you imagine there’s infinite crude oil in the planet?
Again, those things are a matter of “won’t” rather than “can’t”. It costs “too much” to find alternatives, so companies don’t. Funding for alternate resources simply don’t exist at the level that’s necessary because it doesn’t make anyone lots and lots of money.
Those scientists are warning that we should start looking for alternatives, not that we should give up because it’s simply not possible to find an alternative.
I understand that you don’t want to look further than that, but I judge you for it. Maybe stop taking things at face value and look a little deeper.
There is a distinct difference between believing that we can’t, or should give up - which is what you’re accusing me of doing - and recognizing the reality that we aren’t and by all evidence, won’t. Certainly not before it’s too late.
and recognizing the reality that we aren’t and by all evidence, won’t.
That’s… literally what I’ve been saying. Have you been ignoring that? My entire point was about motivation, not ability. Your entire point seems to be that there’s no other options and nothing we can do about it. About how it’s the end of the world and we can’t do anything about it.
Sure, people aren’t right now, but a big part of that is because people aren’t accepting why. You can go on and on and on about how we’re not, but unless you put the least amount of thought into why and how to do something meaningful about it, it’s just doom-posting to trick people into thinking we should all just give up.
So. If you want to prove to me, or others, or even to yourself, that that’s not true… maybe start thinking about what we can do, or just shut up. Because we don’t need more people talking about how it’s all pointless and there’s nothing else we can do. We get plenty of that every day from people much smarter than random people on the internet.
or just shut up.
Ok. Fuck you.
Right you got me thinking so here’s my thoughts. Not looking to argue just discuss the points you’ve made.
1st paragraph:
Global economy crashing is a good thing. Like you have pointed out it is completely dependent on a non-renewable resource on top of that it is one of the biggest contributors to worldwide exploitation. It also a contributes to cultural colonialism.
more info: youtube.com/watch?v=4UJSf_oyVAo.When it comes to farming. People will come up with solutions. I believe that farmers are competent enough that when we run out of oil they aren’t just going to go. “welp guess I starve now”. They are going to innovate and do what they can to keep going. Also swapping out an ICE motor for an electric one doesn’t seem that complicated.
Also Interesting that you didn’t mention plastics. The most used oil product in the world. I’ll be so glad when they’re finally gone.
2nd paragraph is just a continuation of the first.
3rd paragraph
The key word in this paragraph is make. We don’t really need to make any more electronics. We’ve already made enough. How many processors do you think are just sitting in some warehouse never to be used because a newer model came out. How much of those precious metals are inside cars that are going to be useless once oil runs out. We need to focus on recycling and reusing existing things and devices instead of making new ones.
4th paragraph
Water is a cycle. It doesn’t just disappear. We already recycle most of our water. Although I’m not that knowledgable on the topic so I can’t say much about it.
5th paragraph
skip.
6th paragraph
The scientific community has made those assertions with the assumption that we are going to keep doing what we’re doing. Mindless consumerism, buying and making new things, and abusing our planet. And they are right. What I and the commenter you’re replying to are (probably) saying is that the problems with resources are caused my how we live our lives and the problem disappears without capitalism, consumerism and the constant resource abuse they create. A more sustainable shift in society and economics will solve these problems
Also
I sidestepped you’re points about money, because I am an anarchist. I see capitalism and money as the precise reason for this artificial scarcity and natural abuse. Like you even said in you’re comment even if we get infinite resources in the form of asteroid mining it still won’t be distributed properly due to monopolies. Having more resources won’t fix anything because the problem is the market that distributes them being inefficient due to running entirely on profit motive. The solution is to end capitalism and when we do we are going to find that we have more than enough without needing to do asteroid mining. Where would we even get the fuel? doesn’t that require oil?
Global economy crashing is a good thing.
Takes like this are why I think it should be illegal for anyone under the age of 25 to express any opinions about anything whatsoever
I can get everything I need to comfortably live from a 20km radius, or I could If my country hadn’t outsourced clothes production to china. why does my life need to rely on a regime that’s half the planet away while destroying the said planet in the process?
The fucking gall to post that on whatever device you are currently using to access the internet.
Okay, but @Zorque stated that “we have plenty of resources,” and that’s what I was disagreeing with. If your belief is that we need a global famine, more wars, and the collapse of civilization - and that, somehow, if we recreate civilization without access to the easy resources because we already used all those up the first time, we’ll do it better next time… we’ll agree to disagree.
I don’t want global famine and more wars but people seem insistent on creating them so I’m not going to pretend like I can stop them, I’m also not going to pretend like they (the people in power and those who allow them to remain there) somehow aren’t responsible. As for the collapse of Civilization: here’s another video youtube.com/watch?v=k0_w87J9Dj0. If you don’t want to watch. I’ll just ask you one of the main questions of the video: “what is the meaning of civilisation?”. Who does it benefit and why do we need it?
I don’t want people to suffer. Right now they are. This civilisation is making them suffer. If we could get rid of the poison of archy that plagues this civilisation without destroying it I would be grateful. But the lack of resources is not an issue. It’s a symptom of mindless consumerism and rampant capitalism. If capitalism goes, so does the scarcity.
My belief is that every person is good, kind-hearted and capable of incredible things. My belief is that greed, cruelty, and everything else that is turning this planet into hell is the fault of the systems we are raised in, the motivations we are given, and how we are treated. If this civilisation ends I won’t care. The cruelty it so efficiently creates has made sure of that. But I’m also don’t actively wish for it because I know it’ll still cause a lot of pain. The only world I’m willing to fight for is one where the power structures that allow idiots to destroy the world don’t exist.
Also I think civilisation is a lot stronger than people think. Humans are incredibly strong and capable beings. It’s going to take more than the collapse of capitalism (currently synonymous with economy) to destroy civilisation, but then again nukes exist. oh well whatever happens, happens. Not like we had any hope of seeing 2040 anyway.
Purple have always suffered, haven’t they? Some more than others, but we’re mostly homo sapiens because we were more successfully violent than our cousins, and we wiped all of the other hominids out. Like, full on genocide. If the world reverts to a state where protections of the Weak don’t exist, the Strong will just become even more dominant - again.
This isn’t a cycle we can break without a lot more evolving in a slowly improving society. And I do think we’d been improving, slowly; there have been ups and downs, and it’s been unequal progress globally; and there have been concerning developments in State exercise of powers around there globe; and the US is showing every sign of being in the declining stage of an empire. But if we do a global reset, I don’t believe we’ll ever recover, and the best we can hope for is a small agrarian population full of people whose lives are short, lack advanced medical and dental care, uneducated, and filled with brute labor.
We have a lot of problems to solve but AI is part of the solution, except that it’s being done wrong. And expensively.
There’s also a conversation to be had about which jobs shouldn’t be automated, either because current technology isn’t suitable, or because it might never be suitable. And I’d say that pretty much everything that we are calling ‘AI’ right now falls under that - I’ll say that robots are part of the solution, but I don’t think ‘AI’ is.
Even if AI is, what we have now is mostly A with only the semblance of I. “Real” “AI” is not yet “real.”
I agree. LLMs are not AGI. But there are some jobs they can do, and a lot of jobs they can assist.
But I think we’re still another generation of apparent AI stagnation, maybe another 20-30 years, before someone figures out there next link; and that might be AGI.
The reason it’s bad is because the political leaders don’t have a grasp about automation and has not made any effort to provide a safe net for people whose jobs got replaced. If UBI was a thing and automation was in full swing, I don’t think there would be a lot of negativity.
What’s a personal?
Came here to say this… Personal?
This strip was made by AI, wasn’t it? WASN’T IT??!?!?!
It 100% is the new 4o image generation which appears very good in producing crisp panel comics with readable text exactly like this.
The most scary thing is all the people responding with denial, oblivious to this not being human made.
It might be. The doctor ear has different colors. And each robot has a slight difference in shading and shape. An human artist will just simply copy paste all the robots.
brown teeth lady
I disagreed until you pointed that out.
I think those are lips.
Might ?!
It’s very human.
Nothing personnel
Its just business.
My bet is personal assistant / personal trainer
there a whole Black Mirror episode dedicated to the idea of an AI personal assistant. We may not be that far yet, but we’re more than halfway there. We’ve come a long way from Clippy.
Maybe they meant personnel
*teleports behind you*
Nothing personnel, kid
Personnel for what?
Yes
Personal trainers are called simply personal in Brazil, and the original comic is in Brazilian Portuguese. This is an AI translated version.
“Personal?” Personal what?
We will never know, because this comic was produced by AI.
And it made a glaring mistake? Who will verify these errors to ensure they don’t occur? 🤔
Maybe we can make an AI-driven editing software!
You’re one of several people saying this is from AI. I’m more familiar with the AI giveaways in text or fake photos, but not so much with comics. What makes this comic look so obviously AI generated to you?
This artistic style is specifically generated by ChatGPT 4o when you ask it to create a comic. You get a feel for it pretty quick once you have seen it a couple times, the same way you think “hey I’ve seen this artist’s work before”.
The text also looks generated - it’s too consistent to be handwritten, but too sloppy to be a font.
I definitely get generic kids book illustration vibes from it. Most of the comics I see tend to go for a more distinctive art style. I hadn’t even considered the writing, though. Thanks for sharing.
The link you posted supports that it’s AI
The original comic wasn’t produced by AI, though.
Yeah, and this one was.
Okay, but the word “personal” still presumably had some meaning in the original Portugese. An AI did not come up with that word. Google Translate isn’t sure what it could translate to in English apart from “personal”, but presumably, there’s some meaning there that the artist intended.
I’m presuming “personal assistant” and it got cut off due to being itself AI-generated slop.
Maybe it’s supposed to be “personnel”? HR hiring processes is dominated by bots now.
KOLANAKI
Credit to the original artist.This… Almost looks like the op of this post used AI to translate and change the art style of this comic.
Replaced by AI:
traductorAlso modified the art style to make it less violent and subversive, so cross “artist” of that list as well.
With the original, we clearly understand that it should all have been filled with humans, but there was a progression in the center line where AI (killed and) replaced professions that were always thought to be irreplaceable by AI.
Artist is the second the robot killed
Seems the translated variant misses a big point of the original artist too, notice how the gun slowly comes into view? It’s trying to make a point that the replacement isn’t quite organic, but rather forced on us. Probably would have been better to just translate the text in place and include the rightful credit.
Ironic. The translator and artist were the first ones to be killed, and now we got this bastardized AI “translation” that’s actually an entirely different image, but worse.
This is why so many were confused about “personal,” I believe it’s a borrowed term in Brazil that popularly means personal trainer.
Not personnel, not HR, not personal assistant, nor an AI hallucination, even as some confidently claimed them, all because the original work was discarded for a shitty alternative, much like workers themselves.
Thank you for finding it. I will leave his IG here and in description, since my original post was just a copy, unfortunately.
I’m deeply moved
Personal is a career?
Probably a hallucination of the AI that generated this
The original meme this was copied from is Brazilian:
I assumed it was supposed to be Personal Assistant, but the text got cut off.
Why is lemmy filling up with AI posts? Its worse that this is on c/comicstrips
It’s not a Lemmy thing, it’s a global phenomenon. Humans are using AI more than ever, and believe it or not, humans use Lemmy.
But its not a gradual change. AI posts used to be rare, in 2 days i found more AI posts outside of a community made for AI generated pictures than in the 2 years i have used lemmy
That’s because this is the first time AI comics have been passable. The quality simply wasn’t there before.
Yeah humans are still far better, but this could be considered “good enough”.
This isnt just comics. c/politicalmemes has so many ai generated images
Source? I’m not sure I’d want to be part of a community full of stink apes.
I think the point of this comic in particular is to show that AI is already taking over art but since it’s done badly, at what cost is it taking over these jobs?
When on c/comicstrips, i dont think its unreasonable for people to expect the art to be from real people
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But you’re living in capitalism. Unless government forces billionaires to fund social programs, they will just keep getting richer, just like it’s happening right now (if we ignore the crashing markets, but you get the idea)
That’s why we used to tax the morbidly rich at a 90% rate in the 50s
AI generated slop. Reported
Why is this AI comic upvoted as much?? There are mysteries I will never get…
I think folks are genuinely unable to tell. The poster, who’s also a mod, did not know it was AI generated
As an automechanic, my job will never replace by AI, but instead we’re fucked by low wages and the black box automobile has slowly become.
I wanted robots to do my menial unpleasant chores for me so I’d have more time to do art, writing, and analytics. I didn’t want robots to do all the art, writing, and analytics so I had more time for chores & menial tasks 😭
Any personals here?
The rich will always have money to pay better people to make beautiful things for them
Just be useful to the rich and you’ll survive
Just like they planned it
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I just watched a movie (Geostorm) where these obviously super wealthy people were in a skyscraper and the movies like “oh no, they might die if no one stops this!”
Good? I’m more concerned about all the people below them getting swept away. These rich fucks should finally feel fear for fucking once.
Zero argument here
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Correct. But it has made Translators more productive so we need fewer of them. But the productivity gains will create other jobs and so on. So it’s not as clear cut as people think. What will likely happen is that some jobs will vanish (anyone here remember elevator operators?) while some jobs will change and in other cases new professions will be created.
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Well if it’s forbidden and wrong it sure didn’t stop one company I worked for from throwing all the strings in their app into Google Translate before giving the humans a crack at it. Maybe try being less hostile and accept that your experience isn’t universal.
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Well you’ve definitely made one thing clear: that you’re an asshole. I will just disregard everything else you’ve said because I don’t respect the opinions of assholes especially ignorant ones.
I have done professional translation, as a side gig. The usual workflow involves a first run through machine translation (Deepl is my favorite), then opening the machine translation in a translation program (I use CafeTran), which is used to make the second pass, by the human translator. This program doesn’t translate (they can use one of the main translation engines) but provides a bunch of tools to make the translation refining process easier.
Pure machine translation is a hack. AI can’t grasp nuances, contexts, etc… You will often see many words that may have several meanings, used incorrectly, for example.
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You think maybe your experience isn’t the only workflow that exists for translation and different audiences might require different levels of scrutiny and authenticity? No, you think the other person is completely full of shit instead and just decided to be an ass about it. Titles don’t mean shit by the way, I’ve handed so many Sr. Architect titles to admins even though they can’t see the forest from the trees or understand the business side of anything just to shut them up while I found someone to replace their ego. Flippantly throwing around a title lets everyone else that knows what’s actually going on that you can’t stand on your own merit, that’s all, get over yourself and stop being flippant towards people sharing their experiences just because they were different than your own, it’s childish.
I think frosty pieces is salty because their pieces are cold and dead. Sounds like they got a lateral “promotion” to a place where their toxic bullshit would be someone else’s problem.
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Did you miss the “usual” part? I know there are translations that need to be done strictly by humans, but they are definitely not the majority. In my country there is a group of translators that are “official” translators, people with an actual masters in translation, and who must pass a very hard official exam. They translate things like official documents, legal matters, etc, but they do a very small percentage of translations.
Yeah I find most of the AI art generators are just allowing people who aren’t artistic to make their own stuff which they wouldn’t have paid someone for anyways if AI wasn’t there, they would have just gone without, so it’s not really a lose to artists.
There’s a small, relatively low value market of commissioned online art that has been and will continue to be impacted. People who may have paid $50-60 for a (furry) OC will start going to AI image gens as the process becomes more refined and allows them to add detail to the end result without much effort.
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Having worked for a software company that needed translation services, I can confirm that translation software is indeed very necessary.
People would notice when the word “date” is interpreted as “date on a calendar” in one file and “romantic event” in another, but AI sure doesn’t.
Even Google’s apps have broken Dutch translations by reusing existing strings for different contexts that don’t mean the same elsewhere. “Search” gets translated to different words depending on if it’s used a noun or a verb, for fucks sake!
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It’s true that it can’t replace a skilled profession. But I honestly believe you could replace most middle management with AI already. Of course the bar is incredibly low on that.
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Everyone thinks their own line of work is safe because everyone knows the nuances of their own job. But the thing that gets you is that the easier a job gets the fewer people are needed and the more replaceable they are. You might not be able to make a robot cashier, but with the scan and go mobile app you only need an employee to wave a scanner (to check that some random items in your cart are included in the barcode on your receipt) and the time per customer to do that is fast enough that you only need one person, and since anyone can wave a scanner you don’t have much leverage to negotiate a raise.
And that’s a good thing, if and only if you provide pathways to other jobs or phase workers out slowly i.e. by retirement.
Or provide UBI to share the wealth generated by increased societal productivity
I have had a number of conversations with relatively reasonable conservatives, where I’ve brought up the dangers of so many jobs moving toward automation with no additional job creation. And steering the conversation carefully, I got them to at least consider the idea of UBI funded by taxing any and all automation. I also got them (with the “everybody should have to work, people shouldn’t get life handed to them for free” mentality) to agree that the rise in automation should mean people working less hours each, so everyone still has jobs (basically, UBI and changing “full time” to 25 or 30 hours, where people get overtime past that… creating more jobs while peoples needs are still covered).
It’s amazing, sometimes, how starting with some similar premises (people should have to work, which I mostly agree with) and shared threat (automation taking jobs) can lead to some more open minds for things that they would otherwise be adamantly against.
This is the lump of labor fallacy. The error you are making is assuming that there is a fixed quantity of work that needs to be performed. When you multiply the productivity of every practitioner of a trade, they can lower their prices. This enables more people to afford those services. There’s a reason people don’t own just 2 or 3 sets of clothes anymore.
When you multiply the productivity of every practitioner of a trade, they can lower their prices.
I’m sorry, but that’s some hilarious Ayn Rand thinking. Prices didn’t go down in grocery stores that added self-checkout, they just made more profit. Companies these days are perfectly comfortable keeping the price the same (or raising them) and just cutting their overhead.
Don’t get me wrong, if there are things they could get more profit by selling more, then they likely would. But I think those items are few and far between. Everything else they just make more money with less workers.
Are you sure self checkout is actually a labor-saving device? Does it actually save costs on net, once you factor in increased theft and shrinkage? Remember, just because companies adopt something, doesn’t mean it’s actually rational to do so. Executives are prone to fads and groupthink like anyone else. And moreover, this is a bit of an inappropriate example for two reasons. First, the demand for groceries is relatively fixed. Even if the price of groceries was cut in half, you probably wouldn’t suddenly double the calories you consume. Second, self checkout is a small marginal cost to the cost of goods in grocery and retail stores. Self checkout doesn’t improve the actual production process of the goods being sold in a store.
But I’m sorry, yes, you can cherry pick a few examples. But the general rule is and always has been that increased automation leads to lower prices. This is the entire story of the Industrial Revolution. People used to own only two or three outfits, as that’s all they could afford. A “walk in closet” was an absurdity 200 years ago. The clothing industry industrialized, and the cost of clothing was driven to the floor, completely contradicting what your model predicts. The 19th century textile barons didn’t mechanize production and then simply pocket the savings.
Hell, the only reason you can afford any kind of consumer electronics is because of automation. The computer, phone, or tablet you’re using now? It would cost 100x as much without automation. This is why niche electronics like specialized lab instruments cost so much money. If you’re only building a few of something for a tiny market, you can’t invest in large scale automation to bring the cost down.
Look at how quickly and dramatically the price of LiDAR has declined. LiDAR was once the purview of specialized engineering and scientific instruments. But because of driver assistance technologies, the demand for LiDAR has exploded. This allowed LiDAR manufacturers to invest in more automated production chains. They didn’t automate and keep charging the same price, as you would assume.
For an example of this in a white collar field, consider something like architecture. How many people actually hire an architect to custom design them a home? Very few. Most people buy mass produced tract homes. Tract homes benefit from a lot of automation and economies of scale, so they’re cheaper than one-off custom-built homes designed by architects. Yet if an architect could rely on specialized AI systems to vastly lower the number of hours required to design a set of home plans, they could charge less. Many more people would then be able to afford the services of an architect.
Yes, you can cherry pick a few examples of industries that have little competition or fixed demand, where they automate without substantially lowering prices. But even those big box stores with their automated checkouts are examples of automation lowering prices. There’s a reason the giant chains can charge less for products than small mom-and-pop shops. A giant grocery chain is big enough to invest in a lot of automation and other economies of scale that a small co-op can’t afford.
In some extent this is true and correct, but when it comes to automate individual thought and creation then ethical problems arise which should be looked at and asserted carefully and with dignity, because there should be boundaries on how much automation can extent in human life, in the end humanity does not compete with anybody except itself, we are humans trying to live and most of all communicate with each other, Jobs are also a way to communicate and socialise but as we already saw they try to take that away in any way they can.
“Theft” only applies to the poor. Rich assholes and their megacorps will pay judges to tell you so
Those images look nothing alike unless you stop looking beyond the contrasted regions… Which, fair enough, could indicate someone taking the outline of the original, but you hardly need AI to do that (Tracing is a thing that has existed for a while), and it’s certainly something human artists do as well both as practice, but also just as artistic reinterpretation (Re-using existing elements in different, transformative ways).
It’s hard to argue the contrast of an image would be subjective enough to be someone’s ownership, whether by copyright or by layman’s judgement. It easily meets the burden of significant enough transformation.
It’s easy to see why, because nobody would confuse it with the original. Assuming the original is the right, it looks way better and more coherent. If this person wanted to just steal from this Arcipello, they’re doing a pretty bad job.
EDIT: And I doubt anyone denies the existence of thieves, whether using AI or not. But this assertion that one piece can somehow make sweeping judgements about multi-faceted tech by this point at least hundreds of thousands if not millions of people are using, from hobbyist tinkerers to technical artists, is ridiculous.
You are speaking bollocks, there are already many lawsuits by artists against the so called Ai engines, there are boundaries on how much you can copy from a specific artwork, logo, design or whatever, for example if you take the coca cola logo and slightly change it even if it doesn’t say coca cola you will still face the laws of copyright infringement, nobody denies the existence of thieves, so that’s why people do whatever they can to protect their work
Lawsuits, yes. But a lawsuit is not by default won, it is a assertion for the court to rule on. And so far regarding AI, none have been won. And yes, there are boundaries on when work turns into copyright infringement, but those have specific criteria, and regions of contrast do not suffice by any measure. Yes, even parts of the Coca Cola logo can be reinterpreted without infringing. Why do you think so many off brands skirt as close as possible to it without infringing?
They don’t! And most of those lawsuits are still in process
Thats what I said, yes.
AI can absolutely produce copyrighted content if it’s prompted to. Name drop an artist in Midjourney and you will be able to prompt their style - see this list of artists and prompted images. So you can just tweak the settings a bit to heavily weight their name, generally describe the composition of the work you’re looking to approximate, and you can absolutely produce something close to their original works.
The image is wrong because the original artwork is not stolen. It is part of a dataset by LAION (or another similar dataset, basically a text-image pair where the image is linked at its original source). To train the imagegen, its company had to download a temporary copy, which is exempt from infringement by copyright law. There is no original artwork somewhere in a database accessible by Midjourney, just the numerical relationship generated by the image-text pair it learned from.
On the other hand, AI can obviously produce content in violation of copyright - like here. But that’s specifically being prompted by the user. You can see other examples of this with Grok generating Mickey Mouse and Simpsons characters. As of right now, copyright violations are the legal responsibility of the users generating the content - not the AI itself.
I think you meant to respond to someone else, as I pretty much agree(d) with everything you’re saying and have not claimed otherwise. In fact in my very post I did say in more layman terms it was very likely this person used img2img or controlnet to copy the layout of the image, I think it’s less likely they got something this similar unguided, although it’s possible depending on the model or by somehow locking the prompt onto the original work.
But the one point I do disagree with is that this is a violation of copyright, as I explained before. For it to be a violation it would need to look substantially more similar to the original, the one consistent element between the two is the rough layout of the image (the contrasted areas), for the rest most of the content is very different. You notice the similarity of the contrasted area much more easily by it being sized down so much.
I hope you understand, as you seem to be more knowledgeable than the people that downvoted without leaving a comment, but you are allowed to use ideas and concepts from others without infringing on their work, as without it the creative industry literally couldn’t function. And yes, this is the responsibility on anyone using these models to avoid.
This person skirts too close in my eyes by pretty much 1:1 copying the layout, but it’s almost certainly still fine as again, a human doing this with an existing piece of work would also be (eg. the many replica’s / traces of the Mona Lisa).
Hell, if you take a look at the image in this very lemmy post, which was almost certainly taken from someone else, it has a much better case of copyright infringement, since it has the same layout, nearly identical people in the boxes, general message and concepts.
But in the end, copyright is different per jurisdiction and sometimes even between judges. Perhaps there is a case somewhere. It’s just (in my opinion) very unlikely to succeed based on the limited elements that are substantially similar.
EDIT: Added the section about the Mona Lisa replica’s for further clarification.
Hm yeah on second look the images aren’t as comparable as I expected. I just saw the general composition in the thumbnails and assumed more similarity. I do think they probably prompted the original artist in the generated work, though, which kind of led to my thoughts in my op.
Yeah that’s also fair enough conclusion, I think it’s a bit too convenient the rest of the image looks a lot worse (Much more clear signs of botched AI generation) while the layout remains pretty much exactly the same, which to me looks like selective generation.
