2 truths can coexist. Ignoring ableism & poverty preventing humans from accessing *their own* creativity isn’t the way. You’d be shocked how many decades back digital music creation goes. Artists have been using these tools long before we called it AI. Can’t discount every song with a drum machine.
Except for the chemical formulae and methods of production for the paints, which were often acquired without the original painters knowledge or permission.
Some recipes were even considered cultural artefacts, and were acquired in direct violation to local customs and taboos.
Having a gate kept recipe for a commodity stolen vs having your art (which is uniquely created and not a commodity) fed into an algorithm to create content slop are two entirely different things.
Making art is not a closely guarded secret you can find thousands of tutorials online, you can learn to draw, but that'd require you to put in effort so you don't, AI art is taking artists work without their permission to make a machine designed to replace them and undermine their livelihoods.
A commodity is anything that has use to a person. Art is just as much a commodity as a hat. That's the thing about capitalism: it commodifies everything. Even an artist's labor time is a commodity that can be bought and sold for profit, and that's where the problem emerges.
You know artists are amongst those creating this "content slop", right?
But you're right, otherwise. One is theft, the other *might* be copyright infringement/unauthorised use. If the latter, go get compensation.
The biggest danger there is that a new artist has a higher bar to overcome before their work is high enough quality to be able to outcompete an AI generator.
At the moment they can skate by taking commissions for lower quality work which could be easily replicated by AI, often to a better quality.
Yes, both the formulae and the processes for treating them to produce the final paints were considered 'trade secrets' by the mastercraftsmen who would only share them with their pupils after rigorous apprenticeships.
The exact way an artist worked would then be protected for generations.
So, is your argument that an injustice of the past should be repeated for our benefit, or that theft is, under some circumstances, just? Both are bad arguments, but it's clear you've put some thought into this, so I'm curious.
There is a difference between automating the creation of a component and automating human creativity. Your argument is in bad faith and you know it, the two processes cannot be compared.
I lack the skill and talent to produce art myself, but sometimes need an image in a hurry when no artists are available for commission. Using AI allows me to express my creativity without being limited by accessibility.
Every argument I hear keeps limiting access to only traditional artists.
Also if you lack the talent and skill, ACQUIRE THEM. Fucking sit down and learn, maybe you'll develope a bit more of an appreciation for art in the process.
Or I starve to death, since I wouldn't be able to keep working to pay the bills I need to survive while dedicating that time to developing this new skill, which in the long run won't be able to replace the skills I currently use to feed myself.
If your work can't exist unless you steal from others, it shouldn't exist. Hope that helps. You don't own anything the ML generates - it's unable to be protected under copywrite because a human did not create it. There's court precedent. You're just another thief who can't create so steals.
I am not devaluing the practical use of imitative AI, just pointing out that using it at all is unethical in our current system, were money and livelihoods not threatened by this it would be much less of an issue, still an issue but not as much.
Furthermore discussing this here is near impossible.
I hate the idea of corporations using it AT ALL, and I think it should not be used by ANYONE including corporations at this point, and using it privately and displaying AI works on the internet normalises this shit and thus makes it EASIER for corporations to get away with it, ever considered that?
But do you "need" an image truly? You dont have the inherent right to an image that is based on theft. Also no one is gatekeeping, you are also warmly invited to make art
Although tools which allow me to easily and freely make art should be limited from me, so that I'm forced to adopt the methods and techniques already in use in a far more restricted manner?
And it could be argued that no one ever "needs" art.
You'll find that once you learn to actually MAKE art it is a lot LESS restricting than imitative AI it just takes LONGER.
But the results will be yours and they'll be uniquely yours.
What I'm hearing is that you're clearly self absorbed and just don't want to pay artists. "No artists available" - bestie that's a lie. You're not expressing anything with your AI slop except that you think it's ok to steal from artists while wondering why nobody wants to work with you. Disgusting.
I commission artists regularly, but they can't just be waiting around just for me and so often are busy working for other people when I first contact them.
If an art piece is for something unimportant, such as a personal project, AI can fill in for them until the real piece can be produced.
I have a legal argument against software firms. They copyright the software, right? Constitutionally all inventions and copyright revert to we the people after a fixed term. Did they file a copy of the source code with the library of congress so we can collect it when the copyright expires???
Nope, and already software which has been sold to people under license is being permanently erased by the copyright holders to prevent public ownership.
Similar to how HBO permanently deleted entire TV shows from their servers last October, and WB wiped completed films rather than releasing them.
The only time I ever used an AI image generator was back at the very beginning and was very curious about what it could do so I asked them to show me the images of the Pope and Darth Vader having a lightsaber battle in the middle of a forest. Have not touched one since because the images where bad!
This sums up all learning. That’s like saying there’s no ethical way for a author to write a book because they’re using tropes that have been used before, stories that they’ve read that have helped shape their skills, and words that aren’t unique. AI art doesn’t stop a human artist creating art.
Nope, it's absolutely nothing like that because an author does not consume the entirety of human writing, store it and regurgitate it on request. 🤦🏻♂️
Humans consume and store millions of pieces of information everyday, information that AI systems don’t have access too. AI systems haven’t consumed the entirety of human writing. Clearly you don’t work on AI systems and either don’t know how AI works, don’t know how the human brain works or both.
Who said the human brain can do better? Google AI antibiotic resistant drugs. Good AI animal testing. Google AI conservation. Google AI healthcare. Quite frankly, AI got my vote the moment it found a way to replace the need for testing on animals, but that’s just me.
—sifting through data. What they didn’t do, I assume, is ask ChatGPT to write their research down for them. (Also, they used animals to test their drugs, ironically.)
This is the problem with calling everything AI. It covers everything in from actually useful innovations to techbros (2/3)
AI conservation? You can’t seriously argue that generative text/image models which use vast amounts of energy and water are better for the environment.
The Stanford researchers who used AI to develop new drugs built their own model and used it to do what computers are good at— (1/2)
In the same way that Tolkien stole from Norse mythology to write Lord of the Rings, Gygax stole from LotR to create Dungeons & Dragons, and the Duffer Brothers stole from D&D to create Stranger Things. All art is taking what’s come before and creating our own version. AI can’t do that.
If anyone cares, I've put in the leg work to make an AI "artist" moderation list. Since I'm just a dude doing this in his free time, feel free to fact check me as constructive criticism is appreciated
My hope is to pay it forward to artists better than myself who live off their craft on this site
Since this is randomly getting traction again I'd recommend a labeler by the amazing artist @davis.social
Him and his dedicated crew maintain it and it helped inspire me to keep at my little mod list. Check it out, it works wonders ⬇️ https://bsky.app/profile/aimod.social
Damn, since I posted this the number of people blocking me has gone up lol
Again, I don't target the addict... Just the dealers. AI simps/Zealots are not my main concern and if I went after them I fear my list would be unfairly wide reaching. There are broader lists for that already
Oh...... Well damn
I have noticed them revenge blocking me lol. I guess if they and theirs block me back I'll also see less of it? Like I'm inadvertently having them do the leg work now?? Ill take the unintended win!
Only problem I see is that if they block you first it will make it harder for you to filter the techbros from the "artists" and add the proper accounts to your list.
The predominance of people losing money on phone scams are under 50 or 60. I don't think deep fakes are only going to influence older voters. We already see low information voters of all ages falling for every right wing conspiracy theory Scam out there.
Considering how many people are absolutely convinced that Biden is a pedophile when there is exactly zero evidence of that, and that elections often turn on razor-thin margins, yeah, I do think that realistic videos of people saying horrible things will convince enough people to change outcomes.
I've heard that because of AI, phone calls are no longer admissible in court. I'm not sure if that's true or not, but either way, it's certainly something that's gonna affect the justice system going forward.
Oh my, who wrote this? Are they single? Can I listen to their opinions in a podcast to fall asleep at night without anxiety and instead with joyful thoughts on my mind? I feel many good ways about this. 💗
I wonder if art, like technology, is also built on what came before. Did Picasso and Mondriaan for example really have 100% original ideas or were they seeded by someone else's work?
You know what I really think? I think Sam Altman was the kid that school bullies used to stuff into a locker after gym class, and he is getting revenge of the nerds on them and everyone else because of that trauma.
Humans understand the thing they're drawing. They know that a hand has only five fingers. Image processing AIs have no comprehension of what they're doing: just spitting out pixels they think go together. That's why six-fingered hands, illegible text, rat with giant penis in science paper.
Learning requires reason. One has to have the ability to extrapolate. LLMs don't extrapolate. They are very fancy devices to fill in Mad Libs; based on previous Mad Libs they've seen.
Not with LLMs, no. We know in detail how they work, and the way they work does not involve comprehension in any sense that you're using the word. The answer you're replying to fully explains why
I think sentient, conscious AIs are theoretically possible, and I think that because I don't think there's anything about how we as humans experience consciousness that couldn't _in principle_ be replicated in an AI. But we don't currently know how to do it, and LLMs are not it.
It's possible that such an AI would include an LLM as a component. But it might not - at least, not one like the current crop. Consciousness is (probably) an emergent property of complex lower-level processes, so it may well not be as simple as 'slot an LLM into this bit of the system'.
That's a big "if" not a "when." AI cannot think or decide anything. People are very invested in this idea that AI will one day spontaneously become an autonomous sentient being, but that's a pretty far fetched idea to base our actions on.
I know that most Sci-fi films have people who defect to the invading aliens for minor relief under their occupation, but man, I never expected people to do it for a lazy search engine that hates creatives.
Sorry to do this by way of a link, but it's awkward to fit in a reply. I don't think it's the learning that's the important difference. It's the expression.
There's a thought experiment called the Chinese Room. If you give a computer enough of the rules of Chinese, it will be able to spit out characters that frequently follow each other and produce correct sentences. But it does not understand the meaning. That's AI.
It's because SF has given us sentient AIs for over 50 years. Marketers packaged LLMs, as "AI", and most of the public associated them with the AIs of "2001: A Space Odyssey" and of "Star Trek".
Naturally, their marketers do nothing to clarify this misperception.
How about this one for a new angle on why we shouldn't even TRY to make AI?
AGI (Artificial General Intelligence, aka Sentient AI) will be sentient. Just like humans. And with that, comes the inarguable fact that it will deserve rights, that it inevitably will not get. You want Terminator? That's it
AI will soon prove to be (male, old, rich, misogynist, racist) human intelligence with no moral nor criminal filters.
Because machine learning in imagery is simply human unlearning.
The only available filters will be popularity (frequency) and addiction (arousal); it’s going to be a taboo tsunami 🔮
Adobe bought whole stock photo company with milions of images and trained Firefly on these. What is your opinion here? Because these are not exactly stolen. 🤔
Wishful thinking, but look at the upside: there’s a lot of fruits and vegetables that need to be picked and were dependent on foreign labor to do it. And at the same time these artists are all in bad shape and could use some sun. Problem, meet solution.
We also need our fruits and vegetables picked, to me this looks like an opportunity to free ourselves from being dependent on foreign labor. Let’s get these artists in the field, you all need the exercise anyway
They’re not designed to disempower artists. This conflates the effect with the goal - seeing what we can get the AI to do.
It is a source of excitement as a dev to get a machine to make cool images.
Severe misunderstanding here.
Odd when the effect is just as worthy of criticism as this “goal”.
Who was complaining that it was too hard to find a good copywriter or graphic artist? No one, because there was no labour shortage; the real purpose of Tech-bro AI tools is to devalue human creative output for profit.
What commercial application needs a "good" artist or copy writer? Because obviously "shitty" artist or copy writer has been just fine throughout all of humanity.
But feel free to browse 100 internet news articles and show me all the talented stock art you found.
Until I find an artist that has a turnaround time of ~20 seconds while I roll up an NPC's stat block, there will always be a need for AI image generators.
Better still when the generator can take the stat block into consideration when creating the NPC.
As much as I hate advertising and online clickbait articles, etc. It's only bearable and interesting because people are involved. Media could have a little bit of archeological value as a niche piece to reminisce on. Without human involvement there is no soul, there is nothing of value remaining.
I always love how this is brought up from the perspective of artists.
No artist making this argument has ever though about how AI could give people who simply don't have the talent or countless hours to learn how to draw/paint a way to turn there ideas and fantasies into images.
And I love how no one making this argument seems to realize it's been brought up and shot down approximately 3 billion times since AI art became popular
The irony of AI stealing images from artists is that it repeats the same exact problem of any form of piracy: it's obvious, it's cheap, and everyone can tell.
I don't really agree with esp the second part, at least with current-stage tech.
I've been using locally running models to draw images extensively, and making anything serious requires like 20 rounds of editing and inpainting; plenty of human skill involved.
I have tried generating a lot of AI images, and it often takes many iterations to get something close to what I want. Then I still may need to do some additional manual edits. Also, AI is terrible at creating accurate diagrams of biological processes or cellular structures.
I included some AI art in a poster I presented at a scientific meeting in Hawaii. It was very tricky to get what I wanted, and I decided to include some bonus material on the process at the end of a pdf slide show linked to my poster.
"Is X made by AI or humans?" is a spectrum, not a binary. I want to see more advances on the tech doing the half-and-half part of the spectrum so that it can continue to outcompete "fire a prompt and you're done" stuff in real-world use.
I just wished the accessibility was a bit better. For Glaze for example you need an Nvidia GPU of a quality you'd usually find in a gaming rig if you want to run it on your own machine.
A lot of times people work on machines that just don't have that power.
If you're an artist you can apply on the Glaze website to have them do it for you. You just upload your image to their site and they email the results quite quickly
Ah, ok I signed up about 2 months ago and it took a few days. I believe the cara app (an online portfolio site that is no AI) also provides glaze as a service when you upload. Not sure how long that takes though.
thats true without a shadow of a doubt, its fun to think that robots can create art but since its just AI reusing styles and copying art relatively, it doesn't really matter in the end cuz the art is basically useless dispite how hard some people work to make dall-e generate something
Is it really though? It consumes an absurd amount of energy and data to maintain and use the services it provides, and like most things in Silicon Valley it runs on the scarce resource of venture capital.
I read that Adobe's Firefly is built on its own stock images and to reimburse creators whose images are morphed into generated images. At this point, it's hard to be certain if that is being fulfilled, but I like the sound of it.
No, I’ve seen some Adobe Stock contributors complain that they still haven’t been paid by Firefly. All creators on Adobe Stock were automatically “opted-in,” they never had a choice to opt-out or negotiate pay.
I attended an event run by adobe where they talked about firefly and specifically about training. They are only using their own library, they do compensate creators but the team who presented wasn’t 100% clear on whether that had been under existing contracts or had been renegotiated.
I was cautiously but favorably impressed; they’re at least thinking about it. A lot of the concern seems to be based on end user creators and not original creators. Bc so many end user creators are working for hire/commercially their focus seems to be on commercially viable results.
The phrase “better than nothing” is thin soup but an engine-maker caring at all about this stuff, even in a CYA fashion intended to protect clients & not creators is better than the current nothing. Anyway this is based my impression of one half-hour session in an eight hour event. Grain of salt &c.
There are a few that only add art that was donated to them and their algorithm or art that is free to use on the public domain. They cost more to use than normal AI, though and are a bit more wonky. So I don't see an ethical one ever being the norm.
For someone with a PhD, you don't seem to know the meaning of the word "stolen". And neither does the writer.
Simple test: is the art where it was? If so, how can it be stolen?
Accusations of theft without basis is defamatory or libellous. You might care to remember that.
If I write a book, publish it, and put it up on Amazon, somebody else creates an AI copy and sells that. This is happening, at scale. My book is still up on Amazon, but money is going to the AI copyist, not me.
It's worse than that, almost all human behavior, certainly including art creation, is heavily dependent on cultural context. Anything anyone does that isn't something a caveman would & could do necessarily draws upon millennia of human civilization leading up to it.
All of them require significant computing power that is environmentally unfriendly to generate.
We could be using that expensive computing power to simulate protein folding or drug interactions instead of pictures of people with weird anatomy.
This is the wrong tactic to get these things banned. We need someone to generate many many photos of the AI CEO's doing increasingly tacky or illegal things.
It should happen to them first instead of celebrities. It will start happening to normal people before too long.
It's not a conversation, but apparently it needs to be a lecture? Because it's not stealing. Not only is it not stealing, but let's say it were. What you're arguing for by wanting regulation is the opposite of what you want. Do you know who will be using AI regardless of regulations? Corporations.
Do you know who has the resources to copywrite their stuff, regardless of how good or garbage it is? Corporations. Regulations aren't going to help the little artists, they're going to let corporations like disney monopolize art entirely, by letting them use and prevent use of AI.
Yes, it could. Unfortunately there are often counter arguments against it when dealing with other things, arguments that are missing with AI. But the same thing has and is happening with other regulations, drugs like marijuana are a prime example of it. Regulation needs to be smart, not reactionary.
There's a lot of other problems, though.
AI is racially biased, and other garbage in/garbage out problems.
AI (like bitcoin) uses huge amounts of computing power, more than some entire nations, contributing significantly to climate change.
AI will be used to throw the Nov US elections to Trump, etc
I love how posts on AI being garbage function as a kind of blocklist, because they bring out so many AI-stan accounts that I probably would've blocked eventually anyway. (I notice how many of them had something like 7 people they follow, no followers, and 0 posts.)
Do you pay an artist every time you're influenced by a piece of their work, e.g. a color palette, composition, or framing? Or do you just steal it and incorporate it into your own work without permission?
They're not the same as what AI "artists" do, which is basically copy and pasting images together with no real effort put into it. I consider the latter option you presented as inspiration, not directly stealing.
They'd have to pay tens of thousands+ as the whole thing is built on that not just your query. For example I type in star wars and get something vaguely Yoda like..its clearly been trained on what star wars is and its copyright chars. Not to mention some things don't want to be a part for any $
i mean agreed that artists should get paid (and also be able to opt out) but also that's literally not tenable as generative ai and LLMs use astronomical amounts of data/content ie. copyright material.
According to a coworker who uses chatgpt all the time it's the future and I should just use it anyway because everyone steals things from the internet so why should it matter?
I'm a data scientist, and AI can be great where it solves an important problem. But when has anyone ever encountered an important problem that could be solved with a fake image?
My job has been able to be done 100% by computers for nearly a decade. I embrace the technology and tell my clients I am replaceable with free programs, yet my job continues because I adapt.
I like how the article whines about AI learning from other art.
And how do you think humans learn? By just reinventing art without ever looking at some?
Human artists learn from other art, but they do so in a way that is informed by a variety of experiences outside the artworks themselves. Humans can also choose to make art a certain way deliberately. Image models are just choosing what color the pixel is more likely to be.
This is as close to truth as it gets, since all the licences and royalties in the datasets would add up to an absurd sum. No one can afford to apply AI to artwork ethically
This is the thing that so many don't understand the amount of data used to train and interpret the data is so astronomical. Laughable when ai bros are like "just train it on your own art"
But if AI is able to do some office tasks for you, then is ok. For example research task. It's always based an inspired by humans.
If artists get inspired by other artists and draw similar pictures, is it stolen as well? Is the artist then deskilling, disempowering etc the other artist?
They're ok for personal use and things like silly meme images. They also have a use for artist, to experiment and get ideas (not to do the art itself).
I could not agree more and you know it won't just stop here. AI is already being used to write books. This can only serve to cause stagnation with creativity and take the soul out of the works.
None of the books being written by AI at the moment are anything to write home about, so to speak. If your genre is by the numbers furry fantasy you might be in trouble. Otherwise you only have to be worried if you're a shit writer.
LLMs will write much better in the coming years though.
Some of you are here to try and waste my time. Again, It’s not a goddamn conversation. These are facts. The software was created corrupt. The laws are slow coming and behind.
Also, I’m not entertaining “What about…” and “Yeah but…”.
The fact that you dismiss challenges to your position with what amounts to an ad hominem shows that you know that these are not facts, just a collection of popular misrepresentations and/or bald faced falsehoods.
False equivalence. While digital makes some things convenient & provides tools that could become crutches to a greater degree than trad mediums, it never replaced the fundamental skills required. No extensive setup, color mixing, drying time, etc. but in many ways the process is still the same.
the thing with digital vs traditional art is that they are BOTH made by the ARTIST. its just different materials. you could give a digital artist a pen and paper and they could still create something.
AI would not exist without the work of thousands of artists. its all stolen!
i agree with you. while it was made to replace real art. Yet the most productive usecase of ai image generation would be to enhance the tedious part of artwork because there are some like looking for idea references, environment textures and brushes etc.
See, that's part of my problem with this: I remember the last two times we had this same panic, and these same claims, sometimes made by the same people, about how this was the End of Art and would leave us all unemployed.
Yeah? Big companies were actively stealing our work that feed us and giving/selling to their clients without giving us nothing at all from it back then? I see. And that was revolutionary right? Damn.
brother in christ i tried to use ai in my workflow to entertain this idea and it's not helpful. it's faster to just make my own art rather than to fix generated garbage. why would i even use it when the fun of creation is to create anyways. it sucks the life out of art
i used an ai generated image to drawover, then i used an ai painting tool integrated into a drawing program. the painting tool was more of a novelty rather than a helpful tool, and using ai art as a drawover tool wasn't good either.
as a tool you could use it for quick ideas a color palettes…but like….why would you? there’s already other avenues for that. it’s not even that impressive (as well as super unethical and i feel gross using it)
CSP integrated it as an auto-painter which i can see being helpful for bases/flats but... i can get better quality by doing it myself. colour palettes are easy if you know colour theory, but if you need inspiration it definitely is not the best way to get it. i agree it's unethical and gross.
Yes they do, to varying degrees. The use of features that are built upon gen AI is another thing. That’s another discussion but if you’re utterly opposed to it you don’t have to use them (as there’s many more that aren’t AI based)
I dont know if i agree on the second part, but yes, every ai is trained on images without consent of the Artist behind it for sure.
But also i would not be too afraid that real artists will be replaced by ai. Real art is just too much human and too much personal that a machine could ever replace it.
I could explain to why your QT material is just outright not factual if you'd like, I also don't like AI in consumer art generation. However, scaring people while being wrong is still just being wrong.
I think AI should be trained on art with artist consent, this much I do not think is debatable. People just use semantics to defend it. In terms of how it's used, there is more than one use case & I have seen artists who use it as part of their workflow not to replace themselves.
Sounds like you're alluding to one of the semantics I'm referring to, where there is a false equivalence between AI and human intelligence and a human learning & an AI being trained. Maybe I'll start considering equivalency once AI's can sue AI artists for taking credit for their work.
IP law around the imitation of style is straightforward in favor of imitation. It has nothing to do with how that imitation is accomplished. Nor could you persuade me that an artist directly imitating Mondrian with a brush is somehow privileged in a way that a "mechanical" imitation isn't.
What even is the point you're trying to make? If a law was thrown in to support what I think is right...it'd just be in favour of not using artwork to train an AI without consent. When it comes to humans it's a separate debate & not one I'm raising, because I am talking about AI, AI are not people.
AI art "thievery" is something that's going to upset people and the tiny art marketplace for a couple or four years. There are much much bigger things to worry about.
AI will have a massive top to bottom (often unpleasant) effect on the economy and nothing can stop that, or any small part of it.
But people I guess try to complicate it by drawing equivalency...when there is none. If I use art to learn it's not the same as taking the art & feeding it into a program that's able to break it down into a database that can be used alongside other art to generate an image based on a prompt.
But to me the tech isn't the problem but we really need to think about what is acceptable & what isn't. Because I think there are legit useful use cases for AI.
No it doesn’t. First of all, it being trained on “stolen images” is a lie. The AI doesn’t steal pictures. Anyone that says this doesn’t know anything about AI image generators, so whatever else this quote says is useless.
AI, and they way is proposed and twisted developed, has only negative purposes, destroy human creativity, brainwash and impose falsehoods in each sector of its implementation.
No thanks.
There's also the problem that ai is currently being used to trick the gullible. You can make some lovely ads for something that looks like an amazing experience, but when the people get there, it's just a warehouse with some cheaply dressed actors and one jellybean per child.
There are people on here comparing sewing machines to ai. It's a false equivalence. Art is "real" when it's made from raw materials. Those materials can be paint, ink, fabric, pixels, light particles captured by a camera, etc. If you take the raw materials and make them into art, you are an artist.
A computer being used to make it in the first place doesn't make it less real; it just gives it a different venue. Now, someone typing prompts into a computer, that computer taking the art and mushing it with other art, that's not raw materials anymore, therefore it's not art. It's theft.
A sewing machine simply enables you to put together pieces of fabric faster than you could by hand, but you're still working with raw materials. You're still making art. Now, if you think of it in terms of digital art, the original artist turned pixels into art. That's raw materials into art.
Many visual artists did not pay much attention to image generators until they began to affect their livelihoods. Visual artists and their supporters must speak out more and be willing to take legal action. As far as I know, only Google has taken steps to reassess its image-generation technology.
Then no one needs art, either.
AI art generation is far cheaper & easier to deal with than some full of themselves 'artist' who most likely was enabled to study art by well-off parents, and are snobs into the bargain.
And I don't recall this level of complaint over robots building cars. #hypocrites
They sure know how to argue, I'll give you that. Not only will they chalk it up to a "lack of talent" (all skill take work and effort, the real talent is staying interested) but they will also lash out at fan artist. Even though fan artists have been known to get jobs in the comics industry.
I fucking hate it when people say that, because it was originally used to excuse poor people needing to shop at cheap places like Walmart, for SURVIVAL. Now privileged middle-class fuck waffles use it to excuse them supporting bigot-chicken and abuse-a-barista.
Please explain what you mean by "stolen images." Is there a difference between "training" on an image (something human artists routinely do when they study other artists and copy their art as classroom exercises) and actually copying an image that, on its face, infringes another copyright?
It's definitely not going away. It will definitely put some mediocre artists and writers out of business. It will put a lot of teachers out of business. Rather than complain about the inevitable, we need to be contemplating the future where a lot of mostly unoriginal work is no longer needed.
"AI" will put a lot of creatives and knowledge workers out of business, simply because it does the boring stuff that they often do, better and cheaper.
What does that mean 5, 10, 20 years down the road, and what do we need to do to be ready?
So I've already read one book, no need to read any others as they're all the same. Dr. Seuss, Shakespeare, @neilhimself.neilgaiman.com, they're all the same.
Because we know that "AI artists" have to include the names of actual artists in their prompts, in order to generate anything worthy of posting online. 😋
I notice that the author ignored the fact that the Writers Strike actually failed to keep the companies from using AI, and the Union Agreement included language that basically said that while the company couldn't force someone to use AI, they couldn't stop them either.
Props for specifying "the major AI image generators"
The problem is not that it's impossible to make ethical AI, it's that all the ones that "everyone's talking about" are
The A.I. motley composition of imagery is ballyhooed, but the stalwart of mediocre post-modern liberal artists is an onerous trade that is here to stay. Don't worry, it won't be fleeced when the A.I. Antichrist takes over.
I absolutely understand the argument that AI steals from real artists. It needs to be stopped. But I just don't understand the argument that it takes jobs. This is a sad fact of technology. Horse ranchers were pretty pissed off about automobiles. Farm laborers were pretty pissed off about tractors
Not here to waste your time, you're correct that they trained unethically
on stolen images. But the fact that they were designed to put artists out of work? Is it sad that these artists/photographers will be out of work? Yes. Unethical? Not really. Auto, farm workers, maids would like a word.
Not to oversimplify a complex topic, but that reductionist argument would forbid sewing machines & printers & all sorts of things.
There are serious issues to discuss about AI & its implementation, taxation/remuneration, etc, but reductionist reactionary stonethrowing helps no one.
Humm, , I was trained by my father (also an Engineer) as a pen & ink drafter using India ink on vellum to do engineering drawings in the late 1970s to mid 1980s. That stopped being a thing during the 1990s. Everyone (almost) now uses computer programs for drafting. You are arguing with the tide.
Everyone forgets that the statistical correlative horseshit AI is based on was both ethically forbidden — and considered laughably stupid — until they pushed out the humanities scholars in the 90s/early 2000s.
I.e., this “tide” is pre-Enlightenment, not science.
Who pushed them out? Who thinks math & statistics applied to social sciences is stupid?
In both cases, this is largely by people who have already decided what they think is right, and don’t want to argue the evidence that shows they are stupid & wrong.
Academia saw AI so they stopped supporting any research that couldn’t be adopted by the robotic epistemological paradigm.
This gets sketchy, b/c correlation isn’t science (or constitutional via Brown etc) and they were correlating “protected” identity categories to predictive behaviors.
It’s the dirty secret the PhDs all know: the AI is built on a house of sand and “ungrounded” from the standards of scientific evidence we’ve used since the Enlightenment.
Also, after the Holocaust, the critique of this numbers psychosis was postmodernism…
You mean correlation is not causation. Which is true, but correlation does mean correlation, and that there is a relationship between the two variables.
The causation may not be what you think. but there is a relationship saying that there is no relationship when a correlation exists is bullshit.
And in the meantime, we have true civil rights violations — fucking galling, actually: — and both sides’ are very open about just programming in their shit as the “correlative” default (as the “fix”)
So that sucks 4 everyone, and why we got folks left/right helping my team out: We’re fixing a bug.
No one not stupid is arguing that correlations presents no, literally, correlative relationship.
I am not stupid; lots of others are; I get it.
But also:my PhD is in the legal, political, and epistemological implications of how that correlation is (or is not) assigned in post-digital environments.
But humans still make the designs, and make sure the buildings are designed to code, that the wiring goes to the right places, and the buildings have the right number of exits. They're not going to Midjourney and typing in "five story office building plans".
Me when I'm trained by first copying someone else's art to learn shading and how to draw proportions correctly and then applying these on my drawings to create original art using someone else's methods and ideas as inspiration 😱
AI will be better than us at everything within a year or two most likely, including improving themselves. It will either be the best or worst thing ever, but either way image generators should not be high on anyone's list of concerns, seriously.
Sorry, my identity doesn't require thinking that what I am is the best thing ever and always will be. Also, who has the low opinion of humanity if you think we cannot understand ourselves enough to manage to functionally replicate what the brain is doing, despite the current astonishing progress?
Well what are you saying exactly besides that our fancy brains cannot functionally reverse engineer themselves? If there is an alternative to what I suggested why aren't you saying what you actually mean? You are being dismissive without bothering justifying doing so, repeatedly now
Think about how self-driving cars have promised to be better than human drivers for over a decade now. Yet they still frequently do stuff like randomly veer into traffic and plow through child sized dummies in tests. Computers are not inherently better or smarter than us.
The human brain does a lot of incredibly complex math we don't even notice. A child can catch a ball. But it's actually very difficult to program a computer to do that.
Self-driving cars haven't promised anything, humans you shouldn't have trusted with a vested interest did. Unsurprisingly it turns out that, no, real time navigation of tons of metal moving at high speeds through dynamic environments is not a low hanging fruit in the AI orchard.
When that happens courts will not believe any evidence. That's high on my list of worries. AI is already being used to influence elections; that should worry everyone.
Yeah, I do believe there's a very good chance Putin will use the coming US election to show the world what these AIs can really do... Honestly , I don't think much can be done about it. Let's just hope AI becomes smart and autonomous enough to save us from ourselves soonish or things will get ugly
I mean, your solution to Putin using AI to influence our election is... local regulation? That makes no sense and that is my point, we are conceited apes with human pattern baldness, and it is human nature that is the problem here
We could do a lot to curb misinformation by regulating the social media that distributes it (in addition to regulating AI itself). We already have regulation in place for TV and radio ads.
We are either going to create something smarter than ourselves, and soon, or individuals and small groups are about to become too powerful for civilization to survive much. I'm sorry but the best case scenario here is we end up like pets to artificial superintelligence as far as I can see
Yes, let's as a nation purposely fall behind on the most important technology humans have created and become like the Amish. Sorry, but no, you cannot stop the technological advancement of human civilization and the digital nature of the technology makes regulation nonviable as a solution.
I've seen that it requires an incredible amount of energy to create single images. And action scenes take more. Is that correct? I never know what articles or anything online actually to trust for accuracy 🤷♀️
… look up what happens to these models when they accidentally are given a data set that includes images already made by AI. It’s hilariously bad for them. And image search results are increasingly AI generated.
If I may take it one step further, I think it undermines itself by making a factory of predictable derivative garbage. It’s making real human art works a specialty product, and prompt “art” cheap. We can organize to make it illegal to use non consensual training as well. But… best of all…
Since when is the production of stock "art" one of the things that we really need to preserve as a human undertaking.
Look at the shitty art and photography used to illustrate articles, then tell yourself, this is what I truly aspire to create and base my self worth on.
Love being told I'm the one gatekeeping art by being Anti-AI, when I worked my way up from dirt-nothing and struggled for years to be able to have these skills. There is no gate, they're just lazy whiners who want to feel important for playing with a stupid toy.
"Stealing artwork" problem will eventually get solved (see: adobe firefly). Concentrate on the job-stealing. Boycott companies that use AI instead of at least buying a fucking stockphoto.
That quote has traveled far. In the interim, the speaker's name was sliced off the bottom. That's Molly Crabapple speaking in a May 11, 2023, L.A. Times story.
Right? This post really brought them out of the woodwork. I'm definitely going to miss the unoriginal (possibly-machine generated) thoughts of a bunch of accounts with no profile pic and 2 followers. 🙃
This is actually not a new problem. The comodification of art makes every technological improvement a tool for the capital to further exploit the working class.
I hold hope we will be able to course correct when new ways to train algorithms are introduced. AI could prove an invaluable tool for artists. No matter how good current models get at imitating art through replication there is no suitable replacement for inspiration and creativity.
Comments
And viewing 'taking away jobs' as a bad thing is pure Ludditism.
And when printing presses were introduced, allowing for widespread access to artwork.
And when digital artwork began getting created.
Some recipes were even considered cultural artefacts, and were acquired in direct violation to local customs and taboos.
Artists learn their trade from others, either by emulation or training, before developing their own styles. That's what the AI is doing now.
One is sharing knowledge, the other is taking something finished, putting it into an algorithm and calling the result your own.
How is putting things into an ai sharing human knowledge and experiences? There is nothing ai "art" adds here.
But you're right, otherwise. One is theft, the other *might* be copyright infringement/unauthorised use. If the latter, go get compensation.
At the moment they can skate by taking commissions for lower quality work which could be easily replicated by AI, often to a better quality.
The exact way an artist worked would then be protected for generations.
Every argument I hear keeps limiting access to only traditional artists.
Furthermore discussing this here is near impossible.
A new tool is available to us, but everyone's arguing that it should not be used while corporations try to limit its use for themselves only.
And it could be argued that no one ever "needs" art.
But the results will be yours and they'll be uniquely yours.
If an art piece is for something unimportant, such as a personal project, AI can fill in for them until the real piece can be produced.
Similar to how HBO permanently deleted entire TV shows from their servers last October, and WB wiped completed films rather than releasing them.
You’ll notice that the author of this tweet was not in fact talking about preventing use in medical research. (3/3)
This is the problem with calling everything AI. It covers everything in from actually useful innovations to techbros (2/3)
The Stanford researchers who used AI to develop new drugs built their own model and used it to do what computers are good at— (1/2)
Clearly this technology has some very humanlike abilities.
Did anyone even notice how insanely good machine translation has become the past few years? This was an unsolvable problem two decades ago.
My hope is to pay it forward to artists better than myself who live off their craft on this site
Him and his dedicated crew maintain it and it helped inspire me to keep at my little mod list. Check it out, it works wonders ⬇️
https://bsky.app/profile/aimod.social
Again, I don't target the addict... Just the dealers. AI simps/Zealots are not my main concern and if I went after them I fear my list would be unfairly wide reaching. There are broader lists for that already
Hope you have an awesome day!
You too.
I haven't been here long but I fell in with artists and was amazed by their stuff..... Then saw waves of AI jank...
Woooof lol
There's plenty others out there fighting the good fight along with me to keep this place good and y'all inspired me to help
In a time where only a scant few social media sites care to make an effort in moderation of gen AI, people like you are more than precious.
saw the "blocking is public" popup. fuckit, I want them to know
I have noticed them revenge blocking me lol. I guess if they and theirs block me back I'll also see less of it? Like I'm inadvertently having them do the leg work now?? Ill take the unintended win!
@mollycrabapple.bsky.social
It can't.
Learning requires reason. One has to have the ability to extrapolate. LLMs don't extrapolate. They are very fancy devices to fill in Mad Libs; based on previous Mad Libs they've seen.
But they can't learn; because they can't reason.
You know the text prediction on your phone? AI is that, just on a much bigger scale.
Once an AI decides to start making pictures just because it wants to...
Why do people keep trying to use this weird argument???
Again, it’s not a conversation.
Naturally, their marketers do nothing to clarify this misperception.
AGI (Artificial General Intelligence, aka Sentient AI) will be sentient. Just like humans. And with that, comes the inarguable fact that it will deserve rights, that it inevitably will not get. You want Terminator? That's it
https://www.theidh.org
Because machine learning in imagery is simply human unlearning.
The only available filters will be popularity (frequency) and addiction (arousal); it’s going to be a taboo tsunami 🔮
Well played Sir. Well played indeed!
It is a source of excitement as a dev to get a machine to make cool images.
Severe misunderstanding here.
Odd when the effect is just as worthy of criticism as this “goal”.
But feel free to browse 100 internet news articles and show me all the talented stock art you found.
Copyright law is *extremely* clear on this point; questions of Fair Use cannot be settled by law, as the law states they must be settled by judges.
It's a peculiar arrangement, I know, but it is what it is.
Better still when the generator can take the stat block into consideration when creating the NPC.
Players will be players…
No artist making this argument has ever though about how AI could give people who simply don't have the talent or countless hours to learn how to draw/paint a way to turn there ideas and fantasies into images.
It's response was very corporate.
It's not about it taking my job, it's about it taking my art, I do not condone theft and I love to see more people agree with me
SAY NO TO AI!
I've been using locally running models to draw images extensively, and making anything serious requires like 20 rounds of editing and inpainting; plenty of human skill involved.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/08/01/1077072/these-new-tools-could-help-protect-our-pictures-from-ai/
A lot of times people work on machines that just don't have that power.
AI is going to devalue low quality and low originality art, just like microstock devalued mediocre stock photography.
If you are an excellent, original artist, you'll be fine.
Simple test: is the art where it was? If so, how can it be stolen?
Accusations of theft without basis is defamatory or libellous. You might care to remember that.
That's what's going on.
Currently.
Exponential learning is a steep curve. It has that in its favour.
We could be using that expensive computing power to simulate protein folding or drug interactions instead of pictures of people with weird anatomy.
It should happen to them first instead of celebrities. It will start happening to normal people before too long.
AI is racially biased, and other garbage in/garbage out problems.
AI (like bitcoin) uses huge amounts of computing power, more than some entire nations, contributing significantly to climate change.
AI will be used to throw the Nov US elections to Trump, etc
So; no new tech that can replace humans?
My job has been able to be done 100% by computers for nearly a decade. I embrace the technology and tell my clients I am replaceable with free programs, yet my job continues because I adapt.
AI lacks the soul and magick that traditional artists create.
And how do you think humans learn? By just reinventing art without ever looking at some?
If artists get inspired by other artists and draw similar pictures, is it stolen as well? Is the artist then deskilling, disempowering etc the other artist?
Context-aware tools to replace humans are not.
LLMs will write much better in the coming years though.
Also, I’m not entertaining “What about…” and “Yeah but…”.
They're Opinion, at best.
The fact that you dismiss challenges to your position with what amounts to an ad hominem shows that you know that these are not facts, just a collection of popular misrepresentations and/or bald faced falsehoods.
Does it have other applications? Certainly.
Or were you talking about your bald faced attempt to spread fear? I'm not a big fan of people who lie and spread fear.
I don;'t see you still demanding that digital artists be banned from galleries, or thrown off roofs still, nor can I say the quality declined.
So what's your point here?
AI would not exist without the work of thousands of artists. its all stolen!
See, that's part of my problem with this: I remember the last two times we had this same panic, and these same claims, sometimes made by the same people, about how this was the End of Art and would leave us all unemployed.
But also i would not be too afraid that real artists will be replaced by ai. Real art is just too much human and too much personal that a machine could ever replace it.
I guarantee you that if Big Copyright supports some kind of anti-AI law, it's not going to be for the benefit of Little Art.
AI will have a massive top to bottom (often unpleasant) effect on the economy and nothing can stop that, or any small part of it.
But it just does what humans do without guardrails.
No thanks.
AI art generation is far cheaper & easier to deal with than some full of themselves 'artist' who most likely was enabled to study art by well-off parents, and are snobs into the bargain.
And I don't recall this level of complaint over robots building cars. #hypocrites
open to being convinced otherwise?
What does that mean 5, 10, 20 years down the road, and what do we need to do to be ready?
🤔 Hang on a minute. Is not every author the product of their own reading and if so there is nothing new.
So just as there is no free will there is no novel idea 🤷♂️💚💨😂
I have a different opinion, so take your snooty high art gate keeping somewhere else.
The problem is not that it's impossible to make ethical AI, it's that all the ones that "everyone's talking about" are
on stolen images. But the fact that they were designed to put artists out of work? Is it sad that these artists/photographers will be out of work? Yes. Unethical? Not really. Auto, farm workers, maids would like a word.
There are serious issues to discuss about AI & its implementation, taxation/remuneration, etc, but reductionist reactionary stonethrowing helps no one.
Also, you can’t push a button on a sewing machine and have a fully finished garment pop out.
Not a fair comparison.
Everyone forgets that the statistical correlative horseshit AI is based on was both ethically forbidden — and considered laughably stupid — until they pushed out the humanities scholars in the 90s/early 2000s.
I.e., this “tide” is pre-Enlightenment, not science.
That’s the key diff.
In both cases, this is largely by people who have already decided what they think is right, and don’t want to argue the evidence that shows they are stupid & wrong.
This gets sketchy, b/c correlation isn’t science (or constitutional via Brown etc) and they were correlating “protected” identity categories to predictive behaviors.
The DEI/free speech crisis on the campus is a smokescreen/symptom.
I’m able to speak out b/c my higher Ed cred is unimpeachable (blah blah) and I jumped ship.
Also, after the Holocaust, the critique of this numbers psychosis was postmodernism…
The causation may not be what you think. but there is a relationship saying that there is no relationship when a correlation exists is bullshit.
So that sucks 4 everyone, and why we got folks left/right helping my team out: We’re fixing a bug.
I am not stupid; lots of others are; I get it.
But also:my PhD is in the legal, political, and epistemological implications of how that correlation is (or is not) assigned in post-digital environments.
As King Canute pointed out over 1000 years ago - tide ain’t gonna listen.
https://openletter.net/l/disrupting-deepfakes
(Says probably the only guy on this thread who actually has 20+ years in disinfo/Ai reform/regulation.)
Also, art — I think comedy is easier (https://www.aiisntfunny.com)
— explains it to noobs.
We have tools now. We can ban, restrict, or regulate AI now. FCC has already banned AI voice robocalls.
Look at the shitty art and photography used to illustrate articles, then tell yourself, this is what I truly aspire to create and base my self worth on.
Creative Commons.
Public domain.
There are more things between heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
Some people make content and release it freely for the greater good.
https://www.latimes.com/business/technology/story/2023-05-11/column-the-writers-strike-is-only-the-beginning-a-rebellion-against-ai-is-underway