PhDs and professors are paid a living wage (though less so over time as federal funding for higher institutions has dwindled).

Academia is a carefully constructed system whose incentive structure is based on highly visible explicitly measured citations and reputation.

People aren't generally just trying to maximize wealth. They're trying to maximize their sense of personal value, which tends to be a combination of wealth, autonomy, and social prestige. Academics (and some creative fields) tend to be biased towards those who prioritize prestige over wealth.

No it's not-- researchers generally get paychecks. Even if they're small, they can pay for their housing and buy their kid food.

Artists don't see a single red cent from their work being sucked up into some AI content blender. Their work is being taken and used-- often in service of others making a profit-- and they receive nothing. Not even credit.

Edit: Well, they don't receive nothing-- they get a bunch of people telling them they're selfish jerks for wanting to support themselves with their work.

The majority artists never receive a single red cent from the humans who consume their work.

This is how it has always been, and fundamental to the economics of art. Things people are willing to do regardless of financial compensation rarely pay well.

Putting commercial artists, aspiring fine artists, and hobby artists in the same bin doesn't make sense. There are a ton of career commercial artists that make money solely off of their work. If you think there are more aspiring career fine artists that don't end up making it than career commercial artists, you're wrong. They're not even in the same business.

Did you notice how you called all of them artists?

You're not serious, right? How about sandwich artists? Custodial artists? Con artists? Are Social engineers, microsoft certified systems engineers, cisco certified security engineers, mechanical engineers, technical support engineers, train engineers, and agricultural engineers all functionally and economically equivalent? Are professional cooks and home cooks economically equivalent because they're both cooks?

Nobody is necessarily owed money for creating art, regardless of whether it was done by hand or with machines (unless they were specifically commissioned to create the work). The economics of art are subject to market forces, and they always have been - long before AI became an additional factor (among many others) in why an artist may not earn a living from their art.

Deviantart in the 00s was a huge repository of art people were mostly making for free. Some people got lucky and turned that into a full time occupation, but the vast majority didn't.

The vast majority of the world's population doesn't have the privilege of going to art schools and training for years to render their ideas.

AI allows more people to be artists without the skill barrier, and that is a social good.

I'm sorry that the mechanistic portions of your art career are rapidly losing economic value, but I think free tools like StableDiffusion (and the better tools that are coming in the future) should be available to every child (and adult) in the world. And the world will be a better place as a result.

Haha... Nice ham-fisted non-sequiturial attempt to make the artists the privileged ones here. Who can and can't go to at school is irrelevant. My example clearly showed that you're understanding of the "economy of art" is not even close to representative. Commercial artists operate at all levels of society, all over the world, and have for a really long time. Nobody making beautiful hand-carved and painted signs for local businesses started out as an independent fine artist using signs as a medium, hoping to get their big break. They learned the arts of carvin, painting, lettering, illustration, and so forth, and the craft of making and finishing durable outdoor wooden structures, and started a career.

The utilitarian argument is only philosophically defensible in the street car scenario; when people are deliberately pulling the levers unprompted and it could have been done ethically but it wasn't because it was just to darned inconvenient and/or expensive, the greater good argument doesn't work. It's the same argument people used to defend the Tuskegee experiment and its ilk... And roman public slaves. If we're willingly throwing people into the spinning wheels of progress because it will be wonderfully convenient and neat for non-artists to use other people's skills instead, there is just no ethical defense. Knocking the stool of from under someone using a tool they built and you didn't even have permission to use is just not ethical. You and many others end up falling back on right-wing platitudes about the free market.

I'm actually a technical artist— my skills are now dramatically more valuable. That doesn't make it any more ethical even if it works on my favor.

I was a developer for 10 years, and have seen this unadulterated hubris in nearly every group of developers I've ever encountered— when you find yourself explaining someone's job and industry to them, you might want to stop and ask yourself... "Am I pulling a Dunning-Krueger right now?"

> non-artists to use other people's skills instead

Here is where I think you're wrong: Everyone is a potential artist.

Many never have the opportunity because of economic reasons: some people don't have the time to cultivate the mechanical skills necessary to render their vision.

All artists pull from the work of others constantly. That is 'using other people's skills'. It is absolutely privileged to have the opportunity to devote time cultivating art production skills (which is usually done by studying and replicating the process of the artists that came before them).

If someone is born to a single mother, grows up having to raise their siblings, then has to immediately start working to help support their family, they don't have the privilege or time to explore art production skills. Technology has been making art production more accessible for hundreds of years, and that's a clear net good. I want everyone to be able to make art if they want to.

It up to the artist if they want to manifest their vision without creating the pigments and brushes themselves, or using a drawing tablet, or using generative AI tools - it all can be art that is meaningful to the person who creates it and more art in the world is a good thing.

Commercial art isn't a very good representation of the artists soul: they are constrained by market forces or their patron rather than producing what their own heart desires. We should all be happy to sacrifice commercial art jobs if it means that every person in the world gains the ability to render the art that comes from their soul.

So, in summary, no professional artist's socioeconomic wellbeing matters because all artists are really the same... and everybody is an artist really, and not all artists start with the same socioeconomic advantages so this is really about about equality... but at the same time, it's about "sorry, that's the market and you lost" capitalism, and blah blah blah.

Being a professional artist isn't fucking magic. It's not winning the lottery or even getting drafted for a pro sports team. It's a large group of regular fucking careers just like any other but creativity makes up a larger percentage of their professional cognitive toolkit. I know a workaday oil painter who's neither well-known nor rich but went to college to learn how to be an oil painter and that's how he comfortably pays his bills. He paints seaside landscapes, wealthy people buy them to put in their vacation homes, and that's how he makes his money. He was in college right along side with graphic designers, animators, architects, product designers, user interface designers, and all manor of other professional artists. Just like any other non-licensed white collar profession, people who didn't go to school are in the business, but it's harder. I also know a professional comic book artist, many animators, sculptors that work in product development, and plenty of other professional artists that built normal careers like any other white collar professional. The fact that not everybody can go to art school to build an art career doesn't change the disposition of professional artists any more than not everybody being able to afford to go to medical school affects the disposition of doctors, and having "the soul of a healer" doesn't really enter the goddamned equation, does it?

Whether you're being deliberately obtuse or are painfully ignorant about something you've got a lot of strong, baseless opinions about, you're obviously not going to cut the bullshit and be honest with yourself. The reason you have to delve into all of these pseudo-philosophical mental gymnastics is because you're wrong, but you really don't want to be, so you're trying to construct a reality in which you're right. That's not how reality works. Using people's work without their permission to make a for-profit system to compete with them in their professional marketplace is not moral no matter how big of a castle of bullshit logic you build around it.

Bye bye. I'm going to let you hang out in your little land of make-believe by yourself.

Interesting discussion. I notice a lot of artists on HN get riled up particularly when AI media generation is brought up, while coders get riled up when AI code generation is brought up, while each side dismisses the other. Fundamentally, this shows me that it's not really about the morals at all but the economics of losing one's livelihood. Fortunately for one and unfortunately for the other, technology will continue to march on, it seems.

> it's not really about the morals at all but the economics of losing one's livelihood

That's a false dichotomy. Just because the economic issue and cultural impact are separate doesn't mean they're mutually exclusive. If a mugger stopped taking people's money and instead just walked around making people afraid for their lives by intimidating them or beating them up, that would still be immoral.

In your point of view it's immoral, not from everyone's, it seems. Either way, technology still arrives.

> Fundamentally, this shows me that it's not really about the morals at all but the economics of losing one's livelihood.

Whether people consider it immoral has no bearing on whether or not the cultural and economic issues are mutually exclusive-- they're not. You can't say that the argument is only about the economic issue simply because there is an important economic argument. It just doesn't make sense.

yeah, but they also get to work on what they love as opposed to what ever the corporate interest currently is. it's rare you get paid will for doing what you love i.e. music, teaching, designing hand bags etc

Well, researchers usually have to get their own grants and must thus work on whatever various funding sources deem worthy. Further, academic positions typically have duties that researchers may not like - administration, reporting, teaching, etc

"Maybe the future model in business and sales is more like the academic researcher" funny how nobody ever suggests that.

To the contrary, the future of the academic researcher is business and sales.