I get some of the surface level reasons, and those annoy me too. Cramming AI into everything is dumb and unnecessary.
However, I do feel that at a deeper level, it has a lot of useful applications that will absolutely change society and improve the efficiency and skills of those who use it. For example, if someone wants to learn to code, they could take a few different paths. There are the traditional paths, just read or go to school and learn to code that way. Or you could pay for a bootcamp or an online coding education platform. Or, you could just tell an AI chatbot you want to learn to code, and have them become your teacher, and correct any errors you make in real time. Another application is in generating ideas or quick mock ups. Say I’m playing a game of d&d with friends. I need a character avatar so I just provide a description to the AI and it makes it up quick. It might take a few prompts, but it usually does a pretty good job. Or if I have a scenario I need to make a few enemies for, I could just provide the description of those enemies and have a quick stat block made up for them.
I realize that there are underlying issues with regard to training the AI on others work, but as someone who is a musician myself, and a supporter of open source as often as possible, I feel that it’s a bit hypocritical for people to get upset about AI “stealing” work with regard to code or other stuff that people willingly put out there for free for others to consume. Any artist or coder could “steal” the work of others for inspiration for their work, the same as an AI does, an AI is just much more efficient about it. I do think that most of the corporations that are pushing some new AI feature or promising the world or end of the labor force is full of shit, and that we are definitely in some sort of an AI bubble, but the technology itself is definitely useful in a lot of ways, and if it can be developed on a more localized and decentralized scale (community owned AI hubs anyone?), it could actually be a really powerful and beneficial technology for organizations and individuals looking to do more with less.
But AI is being used as a tool by humans to generate the images. It won’t do anything on its own.
What it has done is allow people to get inspiration out of their head and into the physical world with a much lower barrier for entry than ever before.
There are still people who don’t consider digital artists to be real artists because they use digital tools instead of physical ones. The hate for people using genAI is basically the same thing.
There are a lot of valid criticisms of genAI, but this one in particular has always seemed silly to me.
If you tried to digest every piece of intellectual property ever created by humans for free, they would lock you up. But OpenAI and Meta get to do it, and sell you a subscription to the AI they created with it - Making Zuck and Altman richer than God by destroying the ability for artists to make a living, and making every bit of art created from now on a shitty derivative pasted together by an AI from the memory of human art. It’s an episode of Black Mirror.
Not all genAI is OpenAI and Meta. There are ethically trained image generation models.
People are conflating all generative AI with tech giants, which is a critique on capitalism, not the technology.
The technology is actually quite amazing with regards to image generation.
Which ones are those?
The one Adobe offers is trained on licensed works.