Setting aside the usual arguments on the anti- and pro-AI art debate and the nature of creativity itself, perhaps the negative reaction that the Redditor encountered is part of a sea change in opinion among many people that think corporate AI platforms are exploitive and extractive in nature because their datasets rely on copyrighted material without the original artists’ permission. And that’s without getting into AI’s negative drag on the environment.
Typically, I don’t find anything offensive about the images ai creates. What I do take issue with is the outlandish claims of artistic ownership because they strung some words together.
Agreed. Consider this absolutely batshit take from the reddit post linked in the article.
Your art looks pretty good, so most people wouldn’t be able to tell it’s AI unless you told them it’s AI.
Generally it’s always best to just lie and tell everyone you made it yourself, just to avoid all the toxic people that hate AI, because not having to read hateful comments from people like that is reason enough to lie. Don’t need to provide any evidence or go into details, just tell everyone you made it yourself and ignore anyone that question it.
“Your art”. I’m sure clicking the “regenerate” button on mid journey for 5 hours took lots of work. It’s hard not to feel real hate for these people.
you’re all hung up on ownership. IP is completely a result of capitalism. no one would care who used their images if we weren’t all struggling to survive in a post scarcity world. the problem isn’t AI, it’s the people that own this shit and insist that the world cling to these outdated ideas of ownership. I use AI in my art all the time. I’m an artist with 40 years of experience. I have no problem with it.
Quit bitching about AI and start dismantling capitalism (by any means necessary).
One of the saddest things I’ve seen on Lemmy is that while people here generally have sensible left wing opinions on things (the tankies aside), as soon as AI is brought up in any context most of the users seem to transform in to pearl clutching petite bourgeoisie.
What is bourgeoisie about being against AI art?
The bit where people all of a sudden become obsessed with owning intellectual property and generating passive income from it (royalties) and value people being able to monetise cultural artefacts rather than allow them to contribute to the common good.
The people “obsessed” with it are, by and large, independent and industry artists who are already struggling financially and most are definitely not making any money from royalties. They very often post their art in public spaces where they are free to view, or in Pateron for a few bucks a month. Certainly the outcry is against all of those public (but still copyrighted) works that were used to train models.
The people “obsessed” with it are, by and large, independent and industry artists
I’m not sure that’s true unless Lemmy has an incredibly strange community of whom a significant proportion are tech focused professional artists. But regardless the point I’m making is more about the mindset where people become vociferous defenders of an unjust system that benefits large corporations because they are fighting for the few scraps that they get out of it, rather than considering alternatives.
Everyone who has written a book: “HEY!”
Brief description = book
TIL
Imagine if anyone who commissioned a piece of artwork took sole credit for that art.
You’re a blast at parties, I’m sure
Sure, because as someone with social anxiety I can tell you all I ever dream of is going to parties.
Mood
All it takes to write a book is to string some words together?
Flagpole masonry tick Persepolis a reciprocity.
I’m an author!
See, now you’re getting it!
You are. A crappy one, but you’re an author. Try to do better.
Gatekeeping words like “artist” and “author” is very nasty. My 3 year old makes art. He’s bad at it but if I tell him he’s not an artist he’ll stop and who knows what could have happened. I choose to encourage him.
He also write like you did. And I encourage him to do better.
I don’t think saying “if you put random words together with no context, you’re not an author” is gatekeeping. It’s defining a term.
And I absolutely gatekeep the idea that anyone’s three-year-old is an artist or an author. Those are things that take skill.
My friend always said “if you can’t see it live with instruments it’s not music and they’re not musicians” and I disagreed with that for the same reason I disagree with you saying making art takes skills. I hope that makes sense. Making good art and popular art might take skill, but anyone can be an artist, anyone can be an author. “Anyone can cook.”
We can agree to disagree.
So a person who picks up a saxophone for the very first time is a musician? Really?
Sure, why not. Art teachers always defined art as the expression of an idea, and playing the saxophone for the first time is definitely that. Talent, time, skill and knowledge does not enter in this label as far as I’m concerned.
Now you’re not John Zorn but, hey, maybe you’ll be later with some perseverance and dedication. Edit: Or maybe you’ll become Duke Silver and you’ll be happy enough doing that. We need both in the world.
I disagree with the other poster, I’d say your child is an artist making maybe the purest form of art in the world, taking their life experience and putting it to paper. I’d dare to say that letting them type out a random prompt and getting a decent image out of their limited vocabulary would be much less impactful than the most crude stick figure drawing of the two of you together.
Funny, just this morning I woke up to someone commenting on one of my pieces of art that I’d posted on Reddit that if I hadn’t put in the comment how I did it, they’d have thought it was an AI generated picture.
It’s super-painful to be a technologist and an artist at the same time right now because there are way too many people in tech who have no understanding of what it means to create art. There’s people in the art community who don’t really get AI either, of course, but since they are trending towards probably the right opinion based on an incomplete understanding of what the things we see as AI actually are, it’s much easier to listen to them. If anything, the artists can labor under the misapprehension that the current crop of AI tools are doing more than they actually are.
In the golden age of analog photography, people would do a print and include the raw borders of the image. So you’d see sprocket holes if it’s 35mm film or a variety of rough boundaries for other film formats. And it was a known artistic convention that you were showing exactly what you shot, no cropping, no edits, etc. The early first version of Instagram decided that those film borders meant “art” so of course they added the fake film borders and it grated on my nerves because I think it was the edges from a roll of Velvia, which is a brilliant color slide film. And then someone would have the photo with the B&W filter because that also means “art” but you would never see a B&W Velvia shot unless you were working really hard on a thing. So this is far from the first time that a bunch of clueless people on the tech side of the fence did something silly out of ego and ignorance.
The picture I posted is the result of a bunch of work on fabbing, 3D printing, FastLED programming, photographic technique, providing an interesting concept to a person and an existing body of work such that said person would want to show up to some random eccentric’s place for a shoot, et al. And, well… captions on art exist for a reason, right? It adds layers to the work to know that the artist was half-mad when they painted it and maybe you can tell by the painting’s brushwork or just know your art history really well but maybe you can’t and so a caption helps create context for people not skilled in that particular art.
And, there’s not really “secrets” in art. Lots of curators and art critics will take great pains to explain why Jackson Pollock or Mark Rothko so if you are still wandering around saying “BUT IT LOOKS LIKE GIANT SQUARES” that’s intentional ignorance.
Now, I’ve been exploring my particular weird genre of art for a while now. Before AI, Photoshop was the thing. Much in the same way as I could have thrown a long enough prompt into a spicy-autocomplete image generator, I also could have probably photoshopped it. Then again, the tutorials for the Photoshop version of the technique all refer back to the actual photographic effect.
Describing something as it’s not has long been a violation of social norms that people who are stuck in a world of intentional ignorance, ego, and disrespect for the artistic process have engaged in. In the simultaneous heyday of Second Life and Flickr, people wanting to treat their Second Life as their primary life caused Flickr to create features so people could mediate this boundary. So, on one level, this isn’t entirely new and posting AI art in the painting reddit is no different from posting filtered Second Life to the portrait group on flickr. It’s simple rudeness of the sort that the unglamorous aspects of community moderation are there to solve for.
I have gotten quizzed about how I make my art, but I’ve never seen anybody go off and then create a replica of my art, they’ve always gone off and created something new and novel and interesting and you might not even realize that what got them there was tricks I shared with them it’s so different. Artists don’t see other art in the gallery and autocomplete art that looks like what they saw, they incorporate ideas into their own work with their own flair.
Thus, there’s more going on than just mere rudeness. I’ve been doing this for a long time now and the AI companies have a habit of misrepresenting exactly what content they have stolen to train their image models. So it’s entirely likely that the cool AI picture that someone thinks my art looks like is really just autocompleted using parts of my art. Except I can’t say “no” and if there was a market for people making art that looks roughly like mine, I’d offer paid workshops or something.
Well now I want to see some of your work. It sounds interesting as hell
Well, the photo in question is: https://www.flickr.com/photos/cyberspace/53570370332/
Which is funny cuz I’ve seen better ai art generated in 10 min on my laptop via CPU trained ai. Why is your photo you generated any more valid than the pic I generated? It isn’t. We both did the same thing. We used a machine to make art.
You’re really just pissed because mines better.
Also only llms are trained on web content and it is not stealing under any definition of the word. Their AI just looked at work presented online for free like any other not or user. None of that is illegal. Using the training data to recreate similar works is also not illegal as of right now.
Asking a computer to create an image is fundamentally different from constructing a scene and photographing it. One is using a machine, skill, talent and creativity to create art. The other is having a machine generate art for you.
Do you think art is maybe more about the process of creating and physically manifesting your thoughts and emotions? Like maybe art isn’t just about the end product but the joy of creation?
Maybe an unpopular opinion, but I like AI art. It can be fun and interesting, I play around with a couple engines myself. I occasionally use the imagery to kick-start my imagination or as inspiration for things I might be working on or thinking about. It’s useful to give your brain a “starting point.”
What I don’t like is people trying to pass off AI computer generated images as some form of accomplishment for themselves (excluding working out a good prompt or modifiers, that can be a bit of work) or trying to pass off the imagery as real in any way. Real IRL or like “I painted this.”
As far as the corporate models scraping content…yeah, they are definitely playing the usual game that it’s ok for them to fuck over the little guy but heaven help you if you’re a day late with a payment to them or torrent a movie.
Art is a key branch of human endeavour that can be described as “the study of choice”. That’s what so many people misunderstand in modern art, is that it’s often more focused on the choices themselves rather than trying to be a skillful representation or depiction of some kind. “That’s just a ___, my kid could do that.”
What is missing from every conversation about AI art is what contribution to “the study of choice” can be made here. There are a thousand variables in the choices made along the way, from which AI and training data was used, to the myriad of prompts used. I am certain that if you were thoughtfully making these choices along the way with a clear idea in mind, you’d be able to make incredibly impactful art that actually enriches us in the usual sense that good art can.
My complaint about AI here, if we will set the enormous scale of theft to one side, is simply that it is being used to create art that doesn’t mean anything, which is inimical to the pursuit of art itself.
I really like that description! The study of choice. I think that under that lens I’ll be able to appreciate art in a new way. Thanks.
Someone really smart said it to me a few months ago and it changed my world
Fair enough. AI art is often just a highly skilled visual meme generator used in a reactionary manner to whatever is happening at the time, whether it be denim-infused fediverse posts or mocking political figures.
Other than a few drop-down menus that aren’t any better than an iPhone photo filter app, yeah, all the choices have essentially been already made and recombined by the art generation software.
A lot of the more technical art generators seem to have a lot fewer fixed parameters. The failure to put in the effort to learn about them and make those choices is what I’d argue makes most AI art inherently worthless.
AI art is, by very definition, average.
It’s the best fit line. It’s the most common. The mean or the median.
The best art is exceptional.
Average AI art is average. Exceptional AI art is exceptional.
People who use AI as the tool it is, rather than just feeding it a single prompt and taking a few good results, can make art just like any other artist using a tool. Some of that art is exceptional. Most of it is average. Just like any other tool.
The best AI art is often the result of multiple passes with inpainting and refining, and touchups in other tools. But that takes time, effort, and skill. Just like any other tool.
I fully agree with you. However, there’s no point bringing it up here in this echo chamber of luddites. They’re deathly afraid of ai (for no real reason), and it really shows.
I’m not afraid of AI and I’m certainly not a luddite my friend. I used to lecture about technology in art on several university courses.
I’ve used algorithms to generate work that has been shown on an international stage, and used computers to run massive participatory art shows.
I currently work in publishing, and I can’t express how much AI has already impacted the landscape through generative text. It doesn’t compete with traditional authors, it just smothers them through sheer volume. It clogs up submission processes and it fills open calls… And nearly every one using generative methods thinks they should be called an “author” just because they put a few words into a prompt.
There really is a reason I hold this point if view and it is based on experience and education as well as being part of an industry that this is already having an impact on.
If you want me to take you seriously, I’m going to need some real discussion around the firm that goes beyond name calling and vague statements.
I honestly don’t give a fuck whether you take me seriously or not. As a luddite and technophobe, your opinion means less than nothing to me.
Doesn’t change the fact that you’re afraid of AI though. It is gonna change things, and just because you’re afraid of it isn’t going to stop it. I suggest you learn to adapt.
Bet you are into NFTs too, huh?
Not really. Were you?
lol imagine being scared of autocomplete. What a time to be alive.
“I feel like a lot of the anti-AI people just… want there to be less beautiful art in the world”
I certainly don’t want to speak for all “anti-AI people”, but personally …yeah.
Even before the generative AI boom, you could find an essentially limitless stream of artworks on the internet. If you exposed yourself to that for long enough, you’d eventually go numb to things just being beautiful for the sake of being beautiful.
Occasionally, you’d stumble over expressive art, which had a meaning beyond that, which conveyed an emotion, which was a labor of love and/or hatred.
Even before the generative AI boom, this expressive art was buried under heaps of profitable artworks, because artists were taking the second-best option for pursuing their passion.So, while I would’ve preferred less profitable artworks and more expressive art, I was always perfectly fine with it, because I knew it was humans doing the necessary.
Now with generative AI, it’s just yet another magnitude more artworks thrown on top, with even less meaning.
Where a missing finger might have been a powerful expression of the artist’s struggles, now it’s just an every-day-defect of the AI.It just buries the expressive art even further, obstructs any meaningfulness and makes me even number to beauty. I absolutely do not care for a greater quantity of art. I want greater quality, and not in terms of beauty.
AI image tools are useful for one thing and one thing only.
Putting Godzilla in the most ridiculous situations possible.
https://forums.mst3k.com/t/dall-e-fun-with-an-ai/24697/7734
Start at the bottom. It doesn’t start with Godzilla, but eventually we discovered the true meaning of AI image creation. Also because it’s getting close to 8000 posts at this point.
We really like putting Godzilla in ridiculous situations.
IMO I’d call “AI Artists” a type of Art Director, since they themselves don’t make the art but instead direct and dictate what exactly they want, and if the result is different they tweak their wording to direct the art into a different direction
Art Directing, whether for a human or a machine or otherwise, is still a skill itself and still has to be learned to get good results, but it’s distinctly different from making the art yourself so I wouldn’t call them “Artists” outright
People talk about A.I. art threatening artist jobs but everything I’ve seen created by A.I. tools is the most absolute dogshit art ever made, counting the stuff they found in Saddam Hussein’s mansions.
So, I would think the theft of IP for training models is the larger objection. No one thinks a Balder’s Gate 3 fan was gonna commission an artist to make a drawing for them. They’re pissed their work was used without permission.
The problem is artists often make their actual living doing basic boiler plate stuff that gets forgotten quickly.
In graphics it’s Company logos, advertising, basic graphics for businesses.
In writing it’s copy for websites, it’s short articles, it’s basic stuff.
Very few artists want to do these things, they want to create the original work that might not make money at all. That work potentially being a winning lottery ticket but most often being an act of expressing themselves that doesn’t turn into a payday.
Unfortunately AI is taking work away from artists. It can’t seem to make very good art yet but it can prevent artists who could make good art getting to the point of making it.
It’s starving out the top end of the creative market by limiting the easy work artists could previously rely on to pay the bills whilst working on the big ideas.
The problem is that most artists make money from commercial clients and most clients don’t want “good”.
The want “good enough” and “cheap”.
And that’s why it is taking artists jobs.
Have you just woken up from a year long coma? AI can create stunning pictures now.
stunning but uncreative af.
that still depends on the operator.
I mean, just like any other tool.
You should check out this article by Kit Walsh, a senior staff attorney at the EFF, and this one by Katherine Klosek, the director of information policy and federal relations at the Association of Research Libraries.
Using things “without permission” forms the bedrock on which artistic expression and free speech as a whole are built upon. I am glad to see that the law aligns with these principles and protects our ability to engage openly and without fear of reprisal, which is crucial for fostering a healthy society.
I find myself at odds with the polarized argumentation about AI. If you don’t like it, that’s understandable, but don’t make it so that if someone uses AI, they have to defend themselves from accusations of exploiting labor and the environment. Those accusations are often times incorrect or made without substantial evidence.
I’m open to that conversation, as long as we can keep it respectful and productive. Drop a reply if you want, it’s way better than unexplained downvoting.
I think AI art looks neat
That isn’t art. That’s just commodity.
People who are scared of ai art would also be scared of cameras in their inception.
Human art will prevail.
The anti AI movement is so interesting. Its what I imagine how people would have imagined other progress like the printing press
The analogy doesn’t work. The difference is that this “printing press” is stealing massive amounts of creative work and calling it its own, and using massive amounts of energy to do so.
Simply put, it requires an artistic sense to pick out the art from the junk that AI generates
Pretty sure that artists are pissed because they are gonna lose jobs and money. To which I say we’ll you chose that career path deal with it or go on another career. I hate the argument that AI is stealing art as it’s using existing art to generate other art, oh yeah ? Then what about you, how do you think you get inspired? Oh by looking at other art ? Hmm sounds an awful lot the same to me! Let me put it this way due to AI even I might loose my job in the future but you know what I do to combat that ? I try to learn how to use AI as that’s the skill that will be required in the future!
Your comparison of taking inspiration and literally generating something from someone elses image is the most braindead take on ai I’ve read. As a human you can’t replicate someone’s style to the extent that ai does. And if you are drawing from reference and trying to make something as close to the original as possible then it’s normal to give credit (with digital art at least).
Yeah, sure, you can’t replicate someone style to that extent. It not like people made fakes of famous paintings to sell them as originals just because the originals are expensive. Please tell me how humans can’t replicate someone’s style some more!!!
First of all, you can’t make a perfect copy. Second of all, faking paintings and advertising them as original just so happens to be illegal. Can you give me a reason why it should be acceptable when AI does it?
My point is humans do it, and not even AI can do a perfect copy as it is impossible due to how old those paintings are. I never said it should be legal for AI to do that but if you ask AI to do some painting you want but to do it the style that Rembrandt did his painting that’s not illegal that something that people do too and those kind of request are normal for painters so why should AI not be allowed to do it. ?
I feel ya. They complain a lot about something being better than them. Aren’t humans supposed to adapt and overcome or did we forget that skill a long while ago?
Adapt and overcome how? Using AI? By the nature of the matter, less artists will be needed using AI, some will not make it. So, what then? Dropping their artistic career to go carry boxes for Amazon? What a shitty path we are making for humanity if we need to drop careers of passion to do menial jobs.
No, make art for fun and not for money. 😒 Art is for fun and culture, not for profit
We can argue that when Disney ceases to be one of the biggest corporations in the world, and most people can live with part-time jobs, that leave them plenty of time to create art. AI is not going to make it so all art is made for fun rather than money, it’s just going to make it so media corporations get all of the money, without having to pay any to actual artists.
