Oh the Ai art generator has no "soul" and it's soy and reddit? This precious art form (illustrating things that other people pay you to, a medium dominated almost entirely by furries, porn, and furry porn) is being destroyed by the evil AI? I'm sorry that the democratization of art creation is so upsetting to you. I've brought dozens of ideas to life by typing words into a prompt and I didn't have to pay someone $300 to do so.

  • macabrett
    ·
    2 years ago

    When you use a printing press to make duplicates of someone else's work, you don't erase their name and replace it with yours. Perhaps a publishing company says "hey we did the work to make copies of this" which is perfectly acceptable. AI art is literally taking other people's art without permission and smashing it together with zero credit or money going to the original artist.

    • GorbinOutOverHere [comrade/them]
      ·
      2 years ago

      When you use a printing press to make duplicates of someone else’s work, you don’t erase their name and replace it with yours.

      amalgamating a billion different works of art into something new isn't "stealing" the art and is, in fact, something that you and literally every other artist ever does whether you know it or not, unless you've developed your art entirely cut off from the rest of society

      there is no such thing as "an original idea," every idea anyone has ever had has built off of those of someone else

      There is not even a thought, or an invention, which is not common property, born of the past and the present. Thousands of inventors, known and unknown, who have died in poverty, have co-operated in the invention of each of these machines which embody the genius of man.

      Thousands of writers, of poets, of scholars, have laboured to increase knowledge, to dissipate error, and to create that atmosphere of scientific thought, without which the marvels of our century could never have appeared. And these thousands of philosophers, of poets, of scholars, of inventors, have themselves been supported by the labour of past centuries. They have been upheld and nourished through life, both physically and mentally, by legions of workers and craftsmen of all sorts. They have drawn their motive force from the environment.

      The genius of a Séguin, a Mayer, a Grove, has certainly done more to launch industry in new directions than all the capitalists in the world. But men of genius are themselves the children of industry as well as of science. Not until thousands of steam-engines had been working for years before all eyes, constantly transforming heat into dynamic force, and this force into sound, light, and electricity, could the insight of genius proclaim the mechanical origin and the unity of the physical forces. And if we, children of the nineteenth century, have at last grasped this idea, if we know now how to apply it, it is again because daily experience has prepared the way. The thinkers of the eighteenth century saw and declared it, but the idea remained undeveloped, because the eighteenth century had not grown up like ours, side by side with the steam-engine. Imagine the decades that might have passed while we remained in ignorance of this law, which has revolutionized modern industry, had Watt not found at Soho skilled workmen to embody his ideas in metal, bringing all the parts of his engine to perfection, so that steam, pent in a complete mechanism, and rendered more docile than a horse, more manageable than water, became at last the very soul of modern industry.

      Every machine has had the same history — a long record of sleepless nights and of poverty, of disillusions and of joys, of partial improvements discovered by several generations of nameless workers, who have added to the original invention these little nothings, without which the most fertile idea would remain fruitless. More than that: every new invention is a synthesis, the resultant of innumerable inventions which have preceded it in the vast field of mechanics and industry.

      Science and industry, knowledge and application, discovery and practical realization leading to new discoveries, cunning of brain and of hand, toil of mind and muscle — all work together. Each discovery, each advance, each increase in the sum of human riches, owes its being to the physical and mental travail of the past and the present.

      By what right then can any one whatever appropriate the least morsel of this immense whole and say — This is mine, not yours?

      • bread book
      • kristina [she/her]
        ·
        2 years ago

        These people that are against it are reactionaries, all socialist literature agrees that this is good and should be held in common for the benefit of all. :shrug-outta-hecks:

        • GorbinOutOverHere [comrade/them]
          ·
          2 years ago

          they're right to not want it in the hands of corporations and to the benefit of the wealthy at the expense of artists but like this is literally just Luddites 2.0

          • kristina [she/her]
            ·
            2 years ago

            The only real form of art is to smear shit on a cave wall :anprim-pat:

      • macabrett
        ·
        2 years ago

        Yes, everyone is inspired by other things when making art. But we bring our own experiences in it and that art evolves.

        AI art as it stands today simply takes other people's art and combines them in clever ways. There's no additional layer of experience. There's nothing that evolves the art. It's literally just taking the work of others and claiming it as your own.

        • sysgen [none/use name,they/them]
          ·
          2 years ago

          This is not really true. This generation of algorithms work by generalizing and condensing ideas into a vector representation, where the similarity between vectors and the dimensions then naturally represent the addition, substraction, and difference of concepts.

          As a result, you can quite literally "explain" - or perhaps even make to experience the essence of - concepts to these algorithms that they have never ever encountered, and they can apply them to art.

          This is not really different from a human or animal taking inspiration. It's a very similar mechanism, it's just much more primitive. Think of it as a primitive form of intuition.

    • RION [she/her]
      ·
      2 years ago

      I think that's a misunderstanding of how the technology works. It's not directly lifting parts of a piece (unless perhaps you tell it directly to do something to a one), it's trying to replicate something similar in combination with a given prompt, no different than if I were to draw in someone's style or take inspiration from their work except for the obvious automation of the task.

      • macabrett
        ·
        2 years ago

        Computers cannot take inspiration, claiming it is the same thing is a complete copout.

        I know how the technology works. I am a software engineer. I embrace tools that make art more accessible. This isn't making art more accessible, this is a machine very directly taking in other people's art without permission and constructing new art out of the pieces. Machine learning is a false term. There is no learning. It is not discovering new things. It only knows what has been input. There's no higher level.

        If original art is no longer being made and shoved into the system, these "AI"s will no longer produce new art.

        • sysgen [none/use name,they/them]
          ·
          2 years ago

          That's not true. To take Stable Diffusion as an example, it's a mix of two things, a text-to-image model trained on captions of images, and a "noise-denoise" model that takes these cursed, low quality images, compresses them into a "semantic" representation, adds noise, and tries to denoise it.

          Then, a text model compresses text into the same kind of semantic representation, and uses it to seed the noise-denoise process.

          So, as long as the text model can generalize your prompt effectively, it doesn't need to have seen its meaning before. It can actually figure out things it hasn't seen before by analogy and generalization, albeit not super well. As this generalization and embedding process gets better and better, it will be more and more able to generate things it has never seen before.

          Eventually, it will be able to learn fast enough and generalize well enough that you will be able to train it to give words to new concepts merely by explaining them to it and feeding it's result back into itself using arbitrary terms. Then it will be able to produce a fair level of genuinely new things that were only ever explained to it. And eventually if you can give it a way to classify things that are and aren't novel, it will be able to search the embedding space for things that no one has ever thought about.

          You can call this not art. But the idea it's forever going to be limited to imitation is just false. It's already beginning to show it can do more than that.

    • AssortedBiscuits [they/them]
      ·
      2 years ago

      When you use a printing press to make duplicates of someone else’s work, you don’t erase their name and replace it with yours.

      Except you're able to reproduce written works at a much faster rate with a printing press than laboriously writing it on manuscript. Plus, it's extremely trivial to maliciously misattribute the work (you literally just replace the real author's name with someone else). The only way for the real author to fight back is to either partner up with someone who also has a printing press in order to match the production speed of the misattributed work or get the state to shut down the fraud's printing press. Trying to outproduce the printing press by writing it faster or going "uh actually, I wrote that" to everyone you know is an exercise in futility.