Source (Bluesky)
Big fan of Sarah Andersen but this is a terrible argument.
It’s like a white man in the 1930s saying, “You’re telling me getting a job is a privilege? Then how come I can get many different kinds of job?”
Because you aren’t the one struggling here.
Not following you? Artist is stating art is accessible to anyone. Even if you do it terribly at least you did it. Yes people who do it well and practice should get paid well for it.
Doesn’t change that the masses have access to making art with a random marker and a notebook. They always had access. Yes they shouldn’t get paid or anything. Just enjoy your own art.
What AI does is give people art without soul or the discipline. Skipping A all the way to Z. Like handing an AK-47 to a child and saying now you’re a soldier because you can kill people! A lot more nuance to get there.
I generally dislike AI for a swathe of fairly generic reasons, but their rebuttal doesn’t refute the accessibility argument. AI art is miles more accessible than any other art. You just shouldn’t be comfortable claiming it as your art.
image generation ran on at least 4 gigabytes of gpu chugging datasets of millions of artists - accessible VS Picking up a pen accesible. Ai media generation is not more “accesible” to make art, people don’t need an education to make art. people don’t need technical talent or proficiency to make art. Generative media is a convenient vending machine to churn out something resembling a product. The whole point of our current generative art systems is in making something that has some kind of production or market value without a care of where that content was scraped.
I’m going to argue that stealing and masquerading to manufacture a product is a lot more effort than just picking up a pencil.
What is more accessible, staying in a shack or your own home? The shack is several miles away, but required only hours to construct for the small family that crafted it. Your home required months to finish by a large team of skilled laborers. Which is more accessible to you?
What is more accesible for me at the moment is pointing out that you are really straining this metaphor. This is typical, we are talking about accessibility IN ART and all of the sudden it’s all about living in a shack, skill laborers and the most out there metaphors one could muster!
What makes it accessible?
I would think a pencil and paper is much more accessible than a thousand dollar phone or computer.
[edit] Is it that people with hand tremors can type instead of draw?
In the west, education and time are less accessible than electronics. It’s, unfortunately, that simple. There are arguments to be made elsewhere and elsewhen, but that is the current state of things.
Oh.
In that case, I don’t think this is an accessibility I respect.
Skill in any medium is accessible only to those who have been educated in that skill. I get that it’s expensive, but that is unfortunately just how attribution works.
I’m not interested in the musings of a philosopher whose philosophy is written for them. I’m not interested in the artistic expression of someone whose expression is decided for them. Your ideas have to come from you.
If someone wants a colorful backdrop to something else they’re doing, then images are more accessible, but art is not.
I think op fight a strawman here, AI is just like a tool, it can speed up the process .A lot of people can think of a cool thing but can t actually make it/ draw it. In this sense you could see that just like photoshop ,a tool that speed thing up . I saw the prompts/ software that people use on r/stablediffusion and AI in itself need work to do a good art.
Exactly. Sarah is well aware that it’s not a pencil and paper that’s out of reach for most people, but the time, effort, and talent it used to take for an individual to produce anything worthwhile.
She doesn’t like that the ability to make the pictures in your head appear in real life has been opened up to everyone. She’s strawmanning to gatekeep just like the boomers who say “I had to pay for my school loans and so you should too”.
Tbf, her issue with AI art is that is now possible to prompt “make me a 4 panel comic where x happens, in the style of Sarah Anderson”. Her reasoning is this might make it harder to find her real comics, and devaluate them because there is no quality control. Which are valid points. However, in the two or so years AI imaging had been around, I haven’t seen it happen jet. My guess is this is because people without talent also will not have ideas for comics. On the other hand, it just takes one person staffing for a political campaign to think of it and the artist is basically screwed.
Person with fine motor controls and dominant arm that functions says accessibility not a problem…go figure.
Besides a little creativity, all you really need is a protruding body part and some sand
Here is a video of a disabled artist drawing with their mouth: https://www.instagram.com/g.darkins/p/DCPqpuihYCz/?img_index=1
Final Result:
Please do not insult disabled artists like that.
Another thread:
AI images may may or may not be art, but it will never be YOUR art, any more than the art of artists I employ is my art. It just isn’t.
However, I think any AI argument that doesn’t mention capitalism as a factor is incapably reductive. As other commenters indicate, even very physically restricted individuals can and will create art.
Because they often have the means that many under capitalism do not: they often have time because they aren’t under full time employment. They have extra mental energy, the “spoons”.
Once again, the issue is ultimately a deflection from systemic issues that the upper class insist they aren’t intentionally worsening 🫠
