I’m someone who talks about AI a lot on lemmy, people might call me pro AI although I consider myself to be neither pro nor anti, but admittedly, optimistic about AI in general. I work with people in the creative industry, artists, writers, designers, you name it.
As others have mentioned already, your question to my knowledge does not reflect most people’s view on AI neither online and even less so in real life. And I talk and participate in communities that are overwhelmingly pro AI. The “AI bros” you mention sound like caricatures to me.
There are some who have become bitter by lies and misinformation spread about AI that are intentionally hateful as a kind of reverse gotcha, but thats about it. You have those on the anti AI side as well for different reasons.
I dont consider AI to be anywhere close to being a threat to the industry, other than indirectly through the forces of capitalism and mismanagement. Your question indeed seems very insane to me. Most people that use and talk about AI to me seem more interested in using it to make new creative works, or enhance existing works to greater depth in the same time. Creative people are human too and have limited time, and often their time is already cut short by deadlines and their work has been systematically undervalued even before AI.
AI as it currently stands on its own simply has no feeling of direction. Without much effort you can get very pretty, elegant, interesting, but ultimately meaningless things from it. This cannot replace anyone, because such content while intriguing doesnt capture attention for long. It also cannot do complex tasks such as discussing with stakeholders or remaining consistent across work and feedback.
With a creative person at the wheel of the AI though, something special can happen. It can give AI the direction it needs to bring back that meaning.
This is a perspective a lot of people miss, since they only see AI as ChatGPT or Midjourney, not realizing that these are proprietary (not open source) front ends to the technology that essentially hide all the controls and options the technology has, because these things are essentially a new craft on their own and to this day very little people are even in the progress of mastering them.
Everyone knows about prompts, but you can do much more than that depending on the model. Some image models allow you to provide your own input image, and even additional images that control aspects of the image like depth, layout, outlines. And text models allow you to pack a ton of pre existing data that completely guide what it will output next, as well as provide control over the internal math that decides how it comes to its guess for the next word.
Without a creative and inventive person behind the wheel, you get generic AI material we all know. And with such a person, you get material at times indistinguishable from normal material. These people are already plentiful in the creative industry, and they are not going anywhere, and new people that meet this criteria are always welcome. Art is for everyone, and especially those who are driven.
Really the only threat to the creative industry in regards to AI is that some wish to bully and coerce those who use the technology into submission and force them to reject it, and even avoid considering it altogether like dogma. This creates a submissive group that will never learn how to operate AI models. Should AI ever become neccesary to work in the creative industry (it currently doesnt look like it) these people will be absolutely decimated by the ones that kept an open mind, and more importantly, the youth of tomorrow that always is more open to new technologies. This is a story of the ages whenever new technology comes around, as it never treats those that reject it kindly, if it sticks around.
The loom and the Luddites, cars and horses, cameras and painters, mine workers and digging machines, human calculators and mechanical calculators, the list goes on.
So no, being pro AI doesnt neccesarily mean you are participating in the downfall of the creative industry. Neither does being anti AI. But spreading falsehoods and stifling healthy discussion, that can kill any industry except those built on dishonesty.
Thanks for clarifying. I get your point, I honestly dont doubt someone or a group with such opinions exists out there, I just dont think it represents anywhere near a critical mass.
Sadly, when there’s big money to be made such as for blockbusters, even some human work before AI was already pretty ‘sanitized’ or ‘toned down’ in terms of human creativity, as it must be as uncontroversial and mainstream appealing as possible. So yes if AI got good enough it would definitely be used by some of those companies.
However, I dont see any path for current AI technology to get there without at least 1 or 2 breakthrough similar to the advent of current AI technology.
I also dont think it will replace anything beyond the works of companies with great profit incentive. We have a massive amount of communities where human creativity is central in all shapes and forms, producing works that arent appealing to everyone, but to the people it resonates with, it is so uniquely special that its irreplaceable. This kind of art thrives on it’s human creativity rather than it’s ability to make money. The human desire to produce and consume art that resonates with them is so strong it wont go anywhere as long as people have the time and ability to produce it.
Rest assured, there is basically no talk of replacing anyone with AI in my corner of the creative industry.
Should the day come that AI truly becomes that good it can compete with human creativity, its likely that AI will have become far more human in terms of how it creates art, and would start exhibiting the same tendencies to share human experiences and memories. Then the difference will start to fade and indeed we might go the way of the horses, but such a scenario is essentially sci-fi tight now - we may never even get close and art might have made many radical shifts before we get there. And like the camera didnt kill hand painted portraits, there will still be a place for human creativity, just less.
But so long as the incentive is there, it might eventually happen. And so we should be ready to safeguard creativity in some manner along the way. But currently the most effective ways of doing so entail mostly to curb our capitalistic society, and not at the technology. Because doing so could in the worst case lock creatives out from the technology and start a race for the capability to keep up, and large companies would surely win out if we let them.
They have more means of doing things and more data than smaller creators, and AI does seem to pull some of that power back to smaller creators, hence why even thought it might seem big companies are all pro AI, dont be surprised if they are totally fine taking a powerful tool away so they can take it just for themselves.