The stuff is there on the bed, and now it should go into the suitcase, but I can’t bring myself to pack, so I write…
I’ve started reading Patrick Stuart’s blog post about artificial intelligence and art, and I immediately thought of a post by Judd Karlmann I recently saw on Mastodon.
@Judd said:
Entered the following terms in Midjourney: doskvol, cityscape, prague, vienna, ultra-detailed, intricate, crowded buildings, in the style of a dark victorian photograph, and got...
A haunted cityscape in black and white, with skeletal buildings
It’s haunting! And makes me wonder about the future… What about the artists? It would be good enough in a book of mine, that’s for sure!
Earlier, Judd had said:
When I fed Midjourney’s algorithm the terms, Death D&D Style, I did not anticipate an unholy window to be opened up from which the dead PC’s and NPC’s from my gaming career could gaze upon me w/ empty eye sockets from some otherworldly gallery.
A sequence of half dead faces, a bit like a painting by H.R. Giger
Wow.
I think this is the context in which to read Patrick’s post.
This made it clear to me that this is not a ’thing to think about’ but something happening right now. It’s pretty clear that we have already reached the point where human beings are in the act of ’putting ourself out of business’. – The Makers Hand
Indeed, I keep thinking about this. I work in programming. My job is to put people out of business because that’s what efficiency usually means, these days. It’s … an uncomfortable position.
Even without AI generated art, people are trying to avoid paying artists. Some people resort to the public domain. After all, why pay when there is a near infinite fundus of art to draw upon. It’s never quite as relevant as new art, of course, but it’s there. This is the copyright deal: limited protection for a time, then access for all. Or in my case, I forced myself to draw my own pictures and discovered that I liked doing it. A win for me!
Some people might say that the recording industry did not completely do away with live performances, nor did the cinema replace the theatre. Or should I add: at least not *completely*, for surely all these forms of entertainment are now diminished, it’s rare to hear live performances these days, the economics only work for large concerts, of when the artists make very little money. I don’t think there’s an easy answer: like Patrick said, in the end we got more of our *wants* satisfied, and fewer people get paid for it. The great lottery of being Michael Jackson.
My wife saw the Michael Jackson movie and says, there was a gym full of amazing dancers. All of them were fantastic! The best of the best of the best were picked to dance for him. But all of them were fantastic! The lottery continues all the way down, the winner takes it all. Second place is first loser.
This is not great.
This is a bit like capitalism. In capitalism, they who win use their wealth to make the things we want, plus some more wealth, which they then use to expand, for ever and always, eating the planet, starving the poor, dooming us all.
We have shackled capitalism again and again, of course. We limit the economic freedoms here and there to stop the exploitation of … of … of everything. We can do it again.
But let me come back to artists. Michael Jackson wins the music lottery, his dance team wins the dance lottery, and most of the other musicians and dancers keep going to schools, keep struggling with small gigs, keep working money jobs. They are diminished.
My own answer is to think smaller, just like them: I only write the documents I want for myself and my table, I teach myself the skills I need (painting, layout, text editing), I try to enjoy the *do it yourself* spirit (even though much less gets done, of course), I focus on the amateur aspect of it (amare = love!), and thereby accept that many artists will not be able to make ends meet. I cannot see how I can make money making the software I love, write the books I love, draw the pictures I love, and so instead I do it for love, not money, and expect most others to do the same.
I don’t need artists anymore because the art is something we can all do, as amateurs, and therefore nobody gets paid, nobody needs anybody.
Perhaps, in a way, we can see this as the anti-capitalist rebellion. The ultimate act of resistance is to be happy, without needs, and not participate. If you win the rat race you’re still a rat. But you can quit, or at least you can decide not to participate again and again.
Can we escape? Of course not. The rest of the world still goes down in flames. You still need to pay rent, buy food, you still need a job and you still need money unless you’re living in the wilderness without dentists and medics, without tools and without help. Not I!
You can buy a few shiny D&D books, or some nice indie games, you can order a character portrait, or join a Kickstarter for the new book of a blogger you like, or other such things, and a handful of people will be able to do it for a living. But most of them – most of us! – cannot.
We have put ourselves out of business. Or perhaps putting ourselves in business was the first sin? Or perhaps to see everything through the lens of business is the beginning of our problems?
I think I’m thinking small because it’s all very depressing.
When I focus on the fact that I learned to illustrate my own PDFs, I feel joy. I think I need to focus on that, and forget the bigger picture for a bit.
#RPG #Economics
(Please contact me if you want to remove your comment.)
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Game making is already a creative endeavour so involves creative discovery and decision making, including about the art it uses.
With new technologies can come new forms of art making. Think about the evolution of electronic music, some of which began with Jean-Michel Jarre...
It’s also possible that we are still figuring out how to configure tech such that it supports creativity. I’m thinking about the energy at Indie Hackers, for example. Small businesses supporting even tech writing and art. But that likely requires a lot of passion and various variables of contextual support.
As a parenthetical, through game making you discovered you were more artistic than you had anticipated!
– Greta 2022-07-25 10:20 UTC
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Indeed. I think this is one side of the argument: they say that technology enables new jobs, or new forms of creativity. Or perhaps, so says the cynic in me: for a few of them, yes, and consumerism for the rest. We all had to sing and dance in pre-industrial times to entertain ourselves, and now we can watch TV or read what others have to say on social media.
On Mastodon, @Sandra said:
“Obviously, research regarding technological unemployment is as vital today as further refinement or production of labor saving and comfort giving devices.” — Amelia Earhart. In 1935.
Technical unemployment is good point, and how to deal with it.
@ansuz added:
I wish we lived in the universe where Buckminsterfuller’s ideas about automation came to pass. – Buckminster Fuller Rails Against the “Nonsense of Earning a Living”: Why Work Useless Jobs When Technology & Automation Can Let Us Live More Meaningful Lives
– Alex 2022-07-25 10:34 UTC
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I’ve been thinking for a long time that artist is not a viable career option. Lottery puts it quite well. Sometimes artists start making enough money to make a living with their art, but that’s really just luck, not something you can anticipate. And the commercial entertainment industry is completely unsuited to creating art, because their financial model is based around being a money multiplier for investors. And I think that’s fine. Making art does not have to be a viable way of creating wealth. A world in which people make art because they enjoy the process of artistic expression is absolutely fine with me. And if you’re really good, you can still become somewhat famous for it. Even if you don’t make money with it. (Something that people don’t think about when they proclaim “youtube won’t exist anymore in 5 years!”)
And it’s not like image generators produce interesting images by themselves. You still have to feed them an input of parameters. Which I think wouldn’t be much different from photography. Photographers also only define the parameters. Camara placement, exposure, focus, and so on. And when it’s all decided they press one button and it’s done. And then you still end up with 99 images that are nothing and maybe 1 that’s really good and artistically interesting. Yet photography is still considered to be art. With image generators becoming more responsive to specific inputs, I see them becoming more viable as tools of artistic expression. Perhaps you can quickly create something in 10 minutes that would take 10 hours to paint by hand, and can be done with much less practice. But you’d still be expressing artistic creativity.
– Yora 2022-07-28 08:52 UTC
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Hm, good point. I need to think about the comparison with photography some more. The advent of photography added a new medium for artistic expression, and also changed the existing art form of painting.
– Alex 2022-07-28 09:22 UTC
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The entire discussion of about generated art, or self-made art, and the need for artworks, reminds me of this blog post:
Now imagine these two different attempts to recruit young players to fantasy role-playing games. In one attempt, you pass around colorful, glossy D&D books and tell them you are going to play *Dungeons & Dragons*, a game played by millions of players over the last fifty years. The new players see and appreciate the fantastic art on every page of the lavish hardback books. They see that you have invested at least a hundred dollars on these books. The art communicates genre expectations to them faster than you can speak. Even though it is so complex that they can’t understand it all at once, they see that rules are codified in a system attempting to accommodate whatever they might meaningfully attempt to do in the game. They trust that the rules are legitimate as they are in print. … In the other attempt, you hold up a notebook and tell the new players that they are going to play a fantasy role-playing game, something you designed in line with a gamer subculture. … This is a game you imagined, with rules you wrote yourself, and you will have to teach them what they need to know. The only codification is the notes you wrote in a notebook and what is in your head. You have no artwork to show them. They rely entirely on your oral description of things in the setting to assemble any genre knowledge that they might apply. You drew a map of the imaginary world by hand, and you show them your amateur design. They know that the peoples of this fantasy world are just things you made up. The rules are apparently your arbitrary fabrication.… I can tell you from experience that kids new to fantasy role-playing games will choose, every single time, to play D&D, with its shiny books, over my scribbled house rules, with my lone testimony that my rules are better. – The Commodification of Fantasy Adventure Games
The Commodification of Fantasy Adventure Games
– Alex 2022-08-02 15:25 UTC
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I wonder. They work hard at avoiding the reproduction of Micky Mouse by trample the rights of all the other artists that went into the training set?
There are the many known issues that OpenAI’s acknowledged and worked to mitigate, like racial or gender biases in its image training set, or the lengths they’ve gone to avoid generating sexual/violent content or recognizable celebrities and trademarked characters. – Opening the Pandora’s Box of AI Art, by Andy Baio, for Waxy
Opening the Pandora’s Box of AI Art, by Andy Baio, for Waxy
– Alex 2022-08-27 09:59 UTC
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@DanMaruschak writes:
… the indie RPGs with flashier production values tend to follow the pattern of big and mid-tier RPG publishers: they pay freelance artists a flat fee up front rather than trying to do complicated revenue or profit sharing. That solves the practical problem of not needing high levels of trust or solid accounting systems, but it also means that artists are always first in line to get paid, ahead of indie game designers. That implicitly puts game design at the bottom of the heap, which kind of sucks since this is the only place that TTRPG designers can hope to have their art seem valued. – Indie TTRPGs can't live beyond their means
Indie TTRPGs can't live beyond their means
And I concur! I have been thinking along similar lines: how come I ought to pay $200 to an artist for my RPG if I am not getting $200 as the author of the text, that doesn’t seem fair and the sad fact is that there seems to be just enough money for one one of us and therefore my games have free art, or self-made art…
Dan suggests changing our expectations (”If there was an audience that was willing to look at bare-bones games then the indie TTRPG-o-sphere might be in a healthier place.”) or changing the order of how things are done (”Nobody is stopping an artist from hiring a freelance game designer to build a game around their art.”) – I am particularly intrigued by the later. If an artist were to draw some cool maps and scenes and monsters that I liked, I might be willing to create an adventure to go along with it.
I tried to introduce this element in my collaboration with @Sumire, telling her about the stuff I was thinking of, hoping to get her inspired, and then putting the stuff she drew into the adventure. It went both ways. Anyway, since no money was involved, it was all about two creatives interacting, and me partially trying to change the order of how things are done.
@masukomi also has a blog post on the topic:
I’ll show how the uproar is ultimately just an emotional knee-jerk reaction by people ignorant of the reality of art, illustration, and these AI systems. – On the "problem" with AI generated art
On the "problem" with AI generated art
A great discussion of how the visual arts are taught, how humans learn, how style isn’t protected by copyright, how limited the understanding of the artificial intelligence involved in image generation is, and how I shouldn’t be writing about all this:
If you’re not an illustrator, and you’re not paying illustrators for their art, then please shut up. Your attempts to help are ignorant, and if you succeed you will screw all the arts massively. It’s hard enough to make a living as an artist without your “help”.
Good point. 😶
– Alex 2022-09-21 21:47 UTC
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There remains the ethical component of people not wanting to contribute faces to MegaFace which was used to help build facial recognition stuff.
This academic-to-commercial pipeline abstracts away ownership of data models from their practical applications, a kind of data laundering where vast amounts of information are ingested, manipulated, and frequently relicensed under an open-source license for commercial use … academic researchers took the work of millions of people, stripped it of attribution against its license terms, and redistributed it to thousands of groups, including corporations, military agencies, and law enforcement – AI Data Laundering: How Academic and Nonprofit Researchers Shield Tech Companies from Accountability
AI Data Laundering: How Academic and Nonprofit Researchers Shield Tech Companies from Accountability
Then, train the models, and you’re good to go. Perhaps the best countermeasure would be to think of certain uses as undesirable, and the participation in the enabling technologies as undesirable, too. Plenty of people don’t want to work in the weapons industry, in the surveillance industry, and so on.
But now we’re moving away from picture and film generation.
– Alex 2022-10-01 08:29 UTC
