I can see your distain for all of this in the first remark, @leoplaw. "Why not go all the way?", well, because I do value human inspired art and words and Hive has always been a therapeutic platform for me to share my own thoughts on the world. The tsunami of AI disrupting is part of that world, it effects me, thus, I'm going to write about it.

I'm certainly not dismissing the concern of untold numbers of artists that are having existential crises right now and I can extract that you're one of them. That's fair. Personally, I'm not worried about it. I just did a fantastic interview with @gric on this technology and he put it best, "This technology is using me, so I'm going to use it.". I've been doing the same thing. I generate images [...I won't call them art, but images], and they give me inspirations for compositions I wouldn't have otherwise come up with on my own. I use most of these images as reference for my own art. It's a tool, and from the beginning of time, humans have found better, more efficient tools to create art and every time, there's a previous generation of, "traditional" artists that have a problem with it. Think about when animation transitioned from sheets of vellum and onion skinning to digital when Toy Story came out. It was a massive disruption, many animators adapted and some did not.

I think the real ethical dilemma is the honesty about whether not the images and writings are, in fact, AI generated. I do not like seeing artists or writers attempt to pass off AI generated content as their own without a disclaimer. I've actually gotten in to Twitter wars with, "artists", releasing entire NFT sets without a single mention that they were ALL AI generated images.

One point I want to make that I feel often gets overlooked in this debate; although millions of artists [...especially concept artists] are having their careers and livelihoods undermined and replaced with AI, it DOES give opportunities to creative people that may not be gifted with visual art skills. @tarotbyfergus is one of my closest friends and he has been given a tool to help him express his insights and tarot readings in a way he couldn't have imagined a year ago. There are millions of skilled, talented people that just aren't gifted with drafting emails or writing resumés and that is the same thing.

I'm sympathetic because there are going to be a LOT of jobs wiped out by this. Right now, it's deeply impacting artists and writers [...which ironically, I thought would be the last careers effected by AI], but don't think this isn't coming for everyone. It is. The only jobs I can really think of that are safe — for a while — are tattoo artists, massage therapists and sex workers. Eventually, I see no way this ends without some kind of UBI implemented socially to offset the insane amount of unemployed people, but in the interim, it's going to be devastating for most of the global population.

The last thing I'll say, @leoplaw, is that as far as artists go, I actually think you're going to relatively safe. You art a brilliant artist in the truest sense. Same with @gric. I think there will always be collectors wanting to buy actual painting. You may find yourself selling more paintings than ever, even at a premium, BECAUSE they were done by you. I think in the next few years, commodity artists like creature, character design and concept artists are really fucked. Same with 3D sculptors and software engineers. People who actually make things with their hands will probably survive, maybe even thrive.