I make and teach drawing for a living. My work was scraped up by Stable Diffusion, without my permission, a text to image generator that has swallowed 2.3 billion images. I need to make money from the art and ideas of drawing…Stable Diffusion is free to use.
The arguments why I should ‘learn to stop worrying and love the bomb’, have ranged from equity for people that can’t draw, luddites 2.0– misplaced hysteria over the printing press and mechanized looms, and artists just copy from past artists—-nothing is original.
But, it was the tractor. A journalist I respect and disagree with—-I think that is what respect means, suggested that worrying about A.I. is similar to resistance to tractors. Tractors, fucking tractors! A.I. is not a tractor, if it develops the next great vaccine, it will also incentivize the anti-vaxxers so that a huge number of people will never take it.
So, here is my pledge. Let’s create space for human flourishing by finding meaning in the making of images by people. If there is anything we learned in the past 3 years is that human connection and community is the only antidote to our shared existence on this planet.
So, let’s not hop on the Kanamit space ship just yet ( Twilight Zone 1962-https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_Serve_Man_(The_Twilight_Zone) and ensure that A.I. ‘serving humans’ doesn’t have a recipe for you.