LogFAQs > #973165030

The question of ethics is never precise enough. Which ethics exactly?

We have plenty of software now that crawls through large amount of other people's data to help you out, like Google and autocomplete. You can also be an artist and directly take from other styles. We largely agree that this is not a big deal, as long as you cite your sources. The new AIs are terrible at that (Bing is trying to get there but it's still bad). This is plagiarism ethics.

Then there's the socioeconomic ethics. Jobs will change, some will lose, some will benefit, how does that affect them, how does that ripple across the entire economy, etc.

The real issue though is, imagine if aliens came from space and gave us a magical box that did the same thing as Midjourney, and the aliens also gave all previous artists $5 mil so they never had to work again. Can people now use the magical box and call themselves artists without an ethical issue? I think people would still feel like something was stolen there, since people feel that the struggle of practicing and creating art is synonymous with humanity itself. The mere existence of this box is a threat to humanity. This is artistry ethics and everything eventually comes down to this.

Problem is that we've been reducing the struggle of art using tech forever. At every step the "defend humanity" sentiment has come out. Photoshop has had AI functions for years, tools that are trained on others' art, and other kinds of automatic algorithms. That's its entire value. But our generation is quite accustomed to those tools since we still perceive that it requires lots of artistry to make something good. That was obviously not always the case, there were big controversies in the past too