The problem being solved by these decisions is that AI art is a visible threat to the livelihoods of the people the site is designed to support and uplift. Art sites have already had rate limits for years.
These communities are explicitly saying "no" to this disruptive technology. If you want to go make a new gallery site for showing off your prompt engineering that's your own lookout, have fun trying to build a community and figure out how to keep the site funded. But you can't come spam our existing communities of people who've dedicated decades to their craft with the messy, incoherent results of the whole six months you've spent learning to be a "prompt engineer".
> The problem being solved by these decisions is that AI art is a visible threat to the livelihoods of the people the site is designed to support and uplift.
That's not a solvable problem. Art will be made by computers, it's inevitable. Eventually it will get good enough to be indistinguishable from human made art. It's already good enough that a human can use the AI to get 90% of the way there and then finish it themselves.
> Art sites have already had rate limits for years.
Clearly not good enough if every one of them is saying some variation on "our site is getting flooded with AI art"
> These communities are explicitly saying "no" to this disruptive technology. If you want to go make a new gallery site for showing off your prompt engineering that's your own lookout, have fun trying to build a community and figure out how to keep the site funded. But you can't come spam our existing communities of people who've dedicated decades to their craft with the messy, incoherent results of the whole six months you've spent learning to be a "prompt engineer".
I agree, people shouldn't be spamming crap directly from the AI. But good luck keeping out the people who tweak the AI generated art to make it look pretty good. A smart site would embrace this kind of art, perhaps make a new category for it. But trying to ban it from the community is a lost cause.
If every art site bans AI spam and there's nowhere left to post it, and a healthy market for young artists to do beginner work for beginner prices, then the problem sounds solved to me.
And none of this is inevitable. If everyone trying to improve this technology hears from artists who are intensely unhappy about it and quits working on it, if AI art becomes inherently tacky so that it's embarrassing to work on and funding dries up, then progress on it stops. We were all gonna be using full color e-paper displays by now but all the funding for that dried up because emissive displays got real cheap and nobody wants to bother with reflective display technology any more.
I just can't see every site banning AI art. As long as there's a demand for a place to post AI art there will be places where that happens. I can't say how much it will impact beginner prices, but I'm 100% sure that the world isn't going to stop developing or investing in this technology because it makes artists upset.
You're right about one thing though, economics are a massive driver in results. If human art became cheaper than AI art I'd put my money on human art, but I don't think human artists want to work for less than AI does.
I'm not saying this means artists will never work again. Clearly many will, but I'll bet more than ever it will be only the most talented and creative who can make any money doing it and that it's very likely that most of the artists who make money today primarily due to websites like DeviantArt and furaffinity are going to lose most of that income.
I don't think artists will ever stop doing what they do even if their work ever did become commercially worthless. I don't think artists can stop themselves from doing it, even it just continues to give training data for AI that will out compete them. Their will be more art than ever for humans, but less of it than ever will be made by humans.
I am pretty pessimistic about all this to be honest. My main hope is that people will come to see all this as kind of tacky, and/or that there will be some reconsideration of what "fair use" means that renders existing work in this realm illegal.
Artists need to eat too, if our audience stops paying for our work because this shit is good enough for their needs then we are not going to afford to spend all day making art any more. Unless someone can wave a wand and provide basic income to everyone and I sure do not see that happening in the capitalist hell of the US economy any more.
These communities are explicitly saying "no" to this disruptive technology. If you want to go make a new gallery site for showing off your prompt engineering that's your own lookout, have fun trying to build a community and figure out how to keep the site funded. But you can't come spam our existing communities of people who've dedicated decades to their craft with the messy, incoherent results of the whole six months you've spent learning to be a "prompt engineer".