Sarang: Show me a job that will be more rewarding than music composition, acting, painting, writing, etc. The replacement job will be a dogshit job. NO ONE has a dream of becoming some bullshit job of managing AI. Granted that new job becoming ANYTHING of value is only under condition of them being allowed to lie and not being required to label AI on any new project esp. AI acting, composition, writing, etc.
If you can work on your own stuff, it sure is rewarding. But who of us has a chance to do that? And who pays for that?
Most of “art” is working on marketing, writing training material, technical manuals, documenting private events or events of public interest, writing on-demand magazine content, providing translations, et cetera.
Who has the money to pay for that, except big business? And big business, unfortunately, rarely has big creative ideas. Something to do with a necktie, limiting the flow of oxygen to the brain.
Translating a normal-sized 350 pages novel, for example, is a project that costs 10,000-20,000 Euro when a human does it. A good part of this budget is post-translation edits and change management. For most authors (and publishers), that's a lot of money.
But 95% of books never break even. If you sell 1000 copies, consider yourself lucky. At the current rates that publishers provide, the creative individual earns less than 1 Euro per copy sold. The only reason you can buy books at 10 bucks a pop or even less is that the people writing these books do it more or less for free. They are taking the financial hit for you, that's how.
Ergo: It is not AI that is breaking the market. AI is introduced to a market, that is broken to begin with, and that cannot possibly earn artists a living, unless they somehow produce more+faster+cheaper.
This is made worse by business models like Kindly Unlimited, which favor mass over class. An author, with 100 books on dinosaur porn, will easily outearn the philosopher writing a key piece changing the understanding of their entire field. Because that one guy has 1 book, and the other has 100. One guy has a niche audience, and the other has intercourse with dinosaurs. Who do you expect is taking home the bacon? The algorithm doesn't care if a book changes your life, it only cares about the number of pages read.
In addition, there is a lot of “casual consumption”, where consumers of art (who are, unfortunately, still the source of your income) don't care much for quality. It doesn't need to be perfect, it only needs to be “good enough”, comfortable to use, and “perfectly” affordable.
Unless you introduce radical changes to the system, you will always have an unhealthy relationship between economic pressure to sell more pieces, and artistic liberty. Where your artistic liberty ends where your bills begin, and you have to cater to whatever sells (and fast), rather than taking your time to produce great art.
Labelling “AI generated work” won't help either, when the difference in price is 10,000 Euro for the human artist vs. a 10 Euro monthly subscription for the AI.
Which brings me to my last question to everybody who is vocal against machine generated work: Do you get your shirts still handmade by an artisan tailor using original designs, as you should? Or are you going with the mass-produced “good enough” machine-made knock-off designer shirts you find for 5 bucks in your favorite mall?
AI may be a symptom, but it is not the root of the problem.
The issue is that we are living in an economy, where too few people have the kind of money necessary, to have the liberty to properly appreciate high-quality artistic work at the price needed to make it profitable. Whereas, the price that the majority of people are actually willing and able to pay can only generate profit, if the product in question is mass-produced and (at least partially) machine-made. Thus creating pressure to lower the quality while increasing the number of publications.
