Today, artists are protesting against the AI companies using their creations, designs and art styles to train and copy their AI. This not only hurts their years of hard work, but their work also gives cheap copies patronage, which makes them useless. A similar incident happened with Indian artisans in the 19th century.
Sir John Forbes Watson, a British surgeon and a former employee of the East India Company became the director of the India Museum in London, who later became the V&A Museum. He researched and investigated the Indian textile industry, their materials, design, and techniques, and developed a category of 18 volumes with 700 samples of clothing, called ‘combination of textile manufacturers in India’.
This catalog was then used to copy the same textile products using industrial machines and was widely printed to sell at a very cheap price. These copies were made in the UK through the manufacture of cities like Bradford, Liverpool, Manchester, and Edinburgh, and in India, and in the preparation of cities like Allahabad, Nagpur, Bombay and Calcutta. As a result, people found cheap alternatives to artisan textiles, and due to this and other unpleasant factors, it led to destroying the traditional Indian textile industry by abusing their work. Globally, there is still something similar.
Today, some of these traditional textiles are alive, but they are ending. They need government support to stay in business, and patronage of elite users. Artists who develop artwork for business, such as writing, graphic design and so on, can easily replace AI for their practical purposes. Only those who have the emotional purpose of artists are obliged to survive, but will be expensive than AI, and can only be supplied by a minority of fans.
Can entertainment media survive only with AI and Formulak and Templated franchises? I do not think that because they have a more emotional purpose than a functional purpose. Yes, it can flood the market with similar visible copies, but soon it will become contradictory.
Unlike products, entertainment is not just a practical value, and this is a place where AI can never replace human communication.