I don’t think training a machine learning tool to paint something in the style of images scraped from the Internet is not fundamentally different than human artists learning to paint something in the style from another artists by looking at their pictures online.
What happens to the art community is just the same thing that happened to the weavers back in the late 1700s and early 1800s - their jobs are getting replaced with machines. Nothing new at all here. The real problem is that artists don’t see themselves as part of the Proletariat, forced to sell their labour on the marketplace. If we were living in a society not ruled by markets and private property, artists wouldn’t have to worry about AI image generators at all.
On this day, 21 January 1966, police in Forest Town, Johannesburg, raided a private home where over 300 gay and gender nonconforming white men (and almost certainly some trans women) were having a party. Nine people described as men were arrested for “masquerading as women”.
Conservatives in South Africa were outraged, and called for tighter laws to criminalise white, male and predominantly Afrikaner, sexuality. The incident triggered a national debate and many gay and gender nonconforming people did begin to speak out and argue, albeit anonymously, in favour of LGBT+ rights. While some stricter laws were passed, in some respects the new laws could be interpreted to decriminalise sexual acts between consenting adult men in private, although prosecutions for homosexuality did continue through the 1970s.
Same-sex relationships in the Black working class, which were widespread especially in places like mining communities, were largely ignored by the apartheid authorities who were more concerned with “corrupting” influences on white masculinity. https://www.facebook.com/workingclasshistory/photos/a.1819457841572691/2191632421021896/?type=3
