Ordering Food Doesn’t Make You a Chef , Writing Prompts Doesn’t Make You An Artist.
Time for an accurate analogy as to what Gen AI “artists” are. Customers. Not Creators.
The majority of people on this planet would NEVER presume to order food at a restaurant, get the order, eat it and then march into the kitchen and now claim to be a chef.
Yet that is exactly what AI “artists/prompt engineers/whatever the hell they’re calling themselves” do. They order up an image using adjectives, settings and names of other ACTUAL artists and then get a series of images delivered to them from the AI engine. They don’t have any actual knowledge of the reason you use those settings, the years that artists put into creating a style that was unique and different, and the “prompt engineers” don’t care that they don’t. They think the act of ordering the image is enough to allow them to claim “they made it” .
No. You didn’t. AI did using billions of images and 1000s of lifetimes worth of effort that it sucked into it’s database to cobble together an image to fit your order.
Let’s explore this analogy further.
“But Kat, what if I do cook at home.”
1. Good for you.
2. You still paid for the ingredients, which in the case of the analogy would be the art that Gen AI stole.
Let’s say you do cook at home. Would you ever, in your life, blithely walk into a grocery store and just steal all the things you use to make your meal?
No. You pay for them, every time.
Yet AI “prompt engineers/monkeys” have yet to pay a SINGLE CENT to the artists whose art is the ingredients AI uses to fill their image orders. Not only that, but many of them feel that they SHOULDN’T HAVE to PAY artists.
Hmm, if you stole all those ingredients off a shelf in a store you would be committing a crime. Same rules should apply here, and in fact do. They’re called copyright laws.
Continuing this analogy even further.
But Kat…what if I grow my own veggies? Raise chickens?
Once again, good for you. You are putting in ACTUAL EFFORT TO CREATE YOUR MEAL from scratch. Unlike AI “prompt engineers” who merely type in descriptions and expect instantaneous output of images.
Continuing this analogy one step further.
So Kat, you’re saying AI is like a kitchen, with a staff, and a chef. So then…that means that AI is creating things sooo there, you Luddite, AI is not stealing stuff, it is CREATING and I am just the chef telling it what to create.
WRONG! AI does nothing on it’s own. A chef, cooks they know why you combine certain spices, they know a myriad of techniques to make basic ingredients into fantastic dishes. Someone not trained in those skills wouldn’t have a clue. Not to mention, chefs and cooks make food on their own, without being told by anyone. They cook because they love it.
AI waits there for input, AND without the billions of images that were sucked into it’s database it knows nothing.
If you removed AI, the majority of “prompt engineers” couldn’t create a stick figure. Which is why they love AI.
But let’s take one final step into the analogy.
But Kat…I bought cook books, watched vids, followed recipes. All those people aren’t pissed if I make their dishes. Why should artists get all mad?
Because…THOSE PEOPLE GOT PAID. Also, THOSE PEOPLE CONSENTED TO THE IDEA OF YOU USING THEIR RECIPIES. YOU’RE ALSO NOT THREATENING THEIR JOBS.
You bought a cookbook…the author got paid. You watched youtube vids. If it’s monetized, the person got paid. Say you followed family recipes given to you by someone else. THEY WERE GIVEN FREELY FOR YOU TO USE to learn from.
NOT A SINGLE ARTIST THAT AI WAS TRAINED ON HAS BEEN PAID OR GIVEN CONSENT!
Above all that, you can still only cook a limited number of dishes in a set amount of time. Gen AI massively changes the limit for how much art a single person can create in a set amount of time.
What about Fair Use and Creative Commons? Artists put things in creative commons to help other artists…not to be put out of a job by AI. Different use entirely.
Fair Use has a whole list of criteria it has to meet to be considered Fair Use and Gen AI scooping up billions of images to make a few investors rich as fuck is not on that list.
So..to sum up this analogy…
Using Gen AI to make art puts you on the same level as a shoplifting arrogant food critic that everyone on this planet would hate and should be in jail.
Is that really something that makes you proud? Hmm “prompt engineers”?
