That they didn’t talk about the resource consumption is part of the problem. Discussing whether the output of a genai system is ‘art’ or not is a fine philosophical debate, but ignores both the costs of creating the output, and the way the data to do so was sourced and processed.
If human ‘artists’ burned through the same amount of power, water, and other resources just to produce their art there would also be an outcry. If the raw materials that ‘art’ was created from were so blatently copied from others there would also be an outcry. Indeed, when a human is found to be copying another’s work and passing it off as their own, there is an outcry.
Whilst I agree with your point about strawman arguments in general, that isn’t really the case here. The OP explicitly said “It’s funny, and it doesn’t hurt anyone” when, in fact, it does. This appears to be their primary justification for using it, whilst ignoring the well known costs of that use. I conceed that a, very charitable, reading of their comment might be that they are simply unaware of the environmental and authorship issues and are only focused on whether their image is “funny” and not directly causing harm. However, those issues are so well known that I, and aparently other commenters, do not feel they can reasonably overlooked in any discussion about whether the use of genai can be justified in general.
The other issues you brought up are very real too and, in many ways, more insidious that the obvious ones discussed before. How we overcome those, now that the genie is out of the bottle, I don’t know.
That they didn’t talk about the resource consumption is part of the problem. Discussing whether the output of a genai system is ‘art’ or not is a fine philosophical debate, but ignores both the costs of creating the output, and the way the data to do so was sourced and processed.
If human ‘artists’ burned through the same amount of power, water, and other resources just to produce their art there would also be an outcry. If the raw materials that ‘art’ was created from were so blatently copied from others there would also be an outcry. Indeed, when a human is found to be copying another’s work and passing it off as their own, there is an outcry.
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Whilst I agree with your point about strawman arguments in general, that isn’t really the case here. The OP explicitly said “It’s funny, and it doesn’t hurt anyone” when, in fact, it does. This appears to be their primary justification for using it, whilst ignoring the well known costs of that use. I conceed that a, very charitable, reading of their comment might be that they are simply unaware of the environmental and authorship issues and are only focused on whether their image is “funny” and not directly causing harm. However, those issues are so well known that I, and aparently other commenters, do not feel they can reasonably overlooked in any discussion about whether the use of genai can be justified in general.
The other issues you brought up are very real too and, in many ways, more insidious that the obvious ones discussed before. How we overcome those, now that the genie is out of the bottle, I don’t know.
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