by seec | 2025-05-25 03:56:35+00:00
I agree that you don't see it as accurate but only because you are engaged deeply in self-deception.

You say you didn't have the budget, which basically means, "human illustrator is too expensive for the value I get out of it". From this we could infer that either the value actually created is extremely low or that you want a larger share of profit or that there is a market problem.

Yet you said you created value with AI. This does mean that even though the finished work may not have a broad commercial value with a price that is relatively easy to figure out, it does have value, at the very least for one person. You may not be able to make money off it but that's not very relevant, people do all kinds of things where they spend a lot of money on things that mostly (and sometimes only) create value for themselves.

So, it is pretty clear that you value having an artwork but it's just that you are unwilling to pay the price of a human who has the skill and put in the time would require. If a human illustrator could produce the artwork at the same price (close to zero) you would take it without much more consideration.

And this is exactly where your "point of view" is extremely dishonest. You are acting as if having to artwork at all is the same thing as having an AI artwork. It is absolutely not. And you pretend this doesn't affect the illustrators. Sure, there is no direct link, but what you just did is redefine the value of artwork in the market as close to zero as possible. Over time many more people will make the same choice, because they "figure out" that paying an illustrator is too expensive (regardless of if they have the means or not) and they go with AI. Over time, the illustrator job market dries up and soon enough you won't find a lot of them if at all.

The irony is that AI cannot exist without the previous work of the illustrator, the only reason it has been able to produce artwork for so cheap is because it could use a massive amount of past work without either paying for it. If AI companies had to charge people not just for the capital of compute, power and R&D but also for the value of all the works they have ingested, suddenly the AI wouldn't look so good purely on price.

But I guess it's nothing new under the sun, people are willing to exploit the labors of others the moment they get an imbalance of power in the form of capital.

Your examples are pretty bad; they are hardly comparable. Photography is not a strict equivalent to portrait painters. Those still exist and they still sell their craft to rich people; it's just that it's much less popular, (especially for new rich types) or they sell paintings of some other people/things. At 20yo I had a friend who made and sold large scale painting (usually 1to1) to rich people, for example he had a sexy rendition of "Little Red Riding Hood" (had it in our colocation living for a bit) which he sold for 12K. His work cannot be replaced by photography, it's not an equivalent at all, and of course he is not getting replaced by AI any time soon.

Even if we agree that photography replaced portrait painters it is still not comparable at all. First of all, photography still needs a human operator and there are still a lot of skill/knowledge involved even with modern technology. And we want to pretend to have relative equivalency, you need a physical output, which involves more humans and cannot be fully replaced by AI.

As for widespread literacy, I have a hard time seeing the parallel. It's something that we decided to teach to all humans, in order to make like fairer, the equivalent would be to teach all humans how to be an illustrator not to replace them with an AI. On top of that you take a weirdly specific and reductive definition of the world. It's not like if letter writers were a very widespread job and it's not like if it doesn't exist in some other form. If you take a look at many "social work" type of jobs, plenty of them do exactly the same kind of work: they write/correct/enhance CVs, letters of recommendation and the likes for people whose literacy isn't very good (and unlikely to ever improve). This is just one example, there are many more if you don't take a narrow-antiquated definition.

But I guess they should get replaced by AI as soon as possible. And the problem is not just that they are getting replaced, it's that the profit from the value created goes in the pocket of the capitalist controlling the AI tools and to some extent to the people who can exploit the AI to "improve" their output without involving humans (so, like you).

The people getting replaced don't even get to see the value float around in their community/country, it just goes somewhere else entirely. In other cases of technological disruption, people could at least adapt and learn new skills; and the new technology usually created new types of jobs that were still constrained by physical/geographical limits.

AI has is currently pushed/exploited is nothing like we have seen before. It is much closer to theft than its defenders would like to admit and it's not even good enough to actually replace humans for jobs they typically don't like to do. But we surely are going to replace the interesting ones, like illustrations and writing. Having artwork and writing as expensive things was not a bug but a feature. In fact, one could argue that it had already become too cheap, in no small part because of IT, making it cheaper was not really a problem. But since profit can be made from it, it will happen, because the one profiterring will never have to pay for the externalities.

Now you may find AI useful, but don't kid yourself on ethics.