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.
If you think art is dominated by furry porn you spend too much time on the internet
I disagree. It's the other way around - AI art is a way for rich fucks to steal artists' work for "training" and then lay them all off. Art is already democratized without it - paper and pencils cost fuck all, and I know a ton of artists who make fantastic digital art with just their phone. Your anger is basically indistinguishable from being a treat defender - you want the thing cheap and easy without regard for other people.
:downbear:
How is this different from something like the printing press? Legitimately asking, because I don't see how AI art is particularly different from other technologically derived means of automation. Yeah, under capitalism it will probably be abused, but what new technology isn't?
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.
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
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:
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
The only real form of art is to smear shit on a cave wall :anprim-pat:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Duplicating books wasn't really an art - unless you count stuff like gothic lettering - it was just work that needed to be done, more comparable to artisan labor like furniture making. The books that resulted weren't worse or shallower or lesser for being made by a machine, they were still the exact same words that a human wrote. More importantly, they weren't stealing anything from hand duplicators when they were making their printing press. AI art is based on stealing art that artists made and using it to basically create a frankenartist that can draw whatever they want for free, instead of hiring an actual artist. It's exploitative.
I mean I would count the lettering - calligraphy is a thing, isn't it? There's also the matter of illuminations and other marginalia that wouldn't be replicated via the printing press.
A key point for me is that the AI can't draw "whatever they want". It can follow a prompt, but it's never going to perfectly recreate the idea someone has in their head. Sometimes it's hard to even get something remotely similar to your prompt, much less something that matches up with your vision. That makes art aiming to express something specific or make a point hard to do unless you do post processing.
Also, it's not stealing. The AI aims to make something similar to whatever you've provided it with for inspiration. Sure, you could tell it explicitly to modify a work of art - but at that point what's the difference between that and and doing it yourself? The fact that a robot's taking care of it? Why does the level of individual effort put into it matter?
People don't really buy books for calligraphy, so I'm kind of going to ignore that one.
While it's true that current AI are rather inflexible, this is likely only a temporary situation. Much like how the GPT algorithms went from almost entirely incoherent garbage to being able to write original jokes on occasion, AI art will soon evolve to be able to create things to a high degree of specificity and accuracy.
Calling the training data "inspiration" is being a little generous, I would say, given that the end result is entirely based off taking lots of little details from that art. Copying from many sources is still copying. Whereas real life artists use lots of different factors, like their emotions, their perception of the world, how they feel, and the things they see in real life that aren't artistic works (such as natural beauty, for example), to add their original flavor to an art piece, AI artists base their drawings exclusively on the drawings of others. My opinion is that training with an art piece should be something that requires the rights-holders' consent.
Calling the training data “inspiration” is being a little generous, I would say
100% this. The machine cannot be inspired. It can merely take its inputs (which were given to it without permission) and mash together combinations.
AI artists base their drawings exclusively on the drawings of others
At least with the one I've used you need to provide it with a prompt, so I don't think that's quite true. I suppose you can debate whether a prompt is valid artistic input, but that's splitting hairs in a way that could start to exclude things like photography, which I don't imagine would get much traction
still the exact same words that a human wrote
:michael-laugh: :michael-laugh: :michael-laugh: ah thank god i can stroll into a shop and get the same King Lear as it was printed in 1608 and my copy will be exactly the same as anyone else's!
It isn't different from any other form of technological progress, people are assigning mystical properties to what art is.
With new technologies, the human still creates the art themselves. With digital art, it's still humans making the art. With AI, humans aren't making any of the art at all.
Depends on how you define making or creating - the AI does nothing without a prompt input
I decided that this was better as a separate comment instead of a reply. It's still in the thread.
People with disabilities can now use this to do art when it was robbed from them, I think thats pretty important. Also pretty absurd for this site to be against automation stuff, when, you know, thats an important part to progressing socialism. I'm sure everyone else freaked the fuck out when photoshop was made but its industry standard now.
Enjoy your good ole reaction to technological progress, I'm sure a real socialist™️ is a luddite that believes the cotton gin and mechanized agriculture is bad for society, think about all those poor serfs and slaves with nothing to do but starve!
The most important thing for socialists to do is ensure that this technology is democratized and not behind paywalls. It should all be public.
Automation often comes at a considerable social expense. Industrialization has been an incredibly violent social transformation in every instance it occurred, even when implemented under the auspices of socialist states. On the other end of it, we got an abundance of consumer goods, previously inconceivable technological and scientific breakthroughs, but this didn't come through anything resembling a smooth crescendo of enlightenment or progress.
Tools on their own are just tools. Whether it is a steam powered loom or a machine learning algorithm, the function doesn't matter. What matters (as you just edited in 😉) is who controls it and what it is being used for. At the present moment, these tools are overwhelmingly dominated by the Silicon Valley giants. The algorithms themselves may be open source, but the raw computational power and massive datasets needed to put them into practical use lie in private hands. This technology strengthens firms like Google, Facebook, Amazon and the state tremendously, while only reaching the level of a novelty for average people with limited computational resources. For this reason, we should be incredibly cautious.
But caution does not mean ignorance. This technology will continue to be developed whether we like it or not. Think about guns. Guns are among the worst things ever invented in human history, but world peace will not be brought about by burying our heads in the sand and wishing they went away. We need to develop an intimate understanding of this technology so we can be prepared both to combat it, and to employ it in the struggle for liberation.
I legitimately don't think this will cause all artists to be phased out at this point. Right now it is rare that it generates anything remarkable without digital alterations and a ton of input by the user, which in itself would be an art process. Stable Diffusion was posted here by someone at some point and I think thats the tech to be keeping an eye on, its open source and free, DALLE is all about the capitalists trying to control the tech for profit. Sort of like how Microsoft coopted a lot of open source tech and capitalized on it. I think the more realistic thing is it will make collaging easier as well as speeding up the workflow of current professional artists, which may actually allow them to make more money.
I doubt it'll end up killing anyone, as most of the historical instances of violence from technological advancement are associated with medicine and food supply chains.
Socialism is when automated art
Socialism is when automated
Read Das Kapital
Henry Ford didn't do any of the automation of the factories, he was just a stooge that took credit for what the workers did and organized :back-to-me:
Typing a prompt into an AI isn't doing art. People were always able to give prompts to artists.
I really don't care about what is or isn't art. If people see value in it, it literally doesn't matter what you think. Plus, its rare that anyone gets anything interesting out of a single prompt. Go type in 'hands' in any generator and take a look at the eldritch shit that it spews.
Some people might not be old enough to remember this but when photoshop first came out all the artists were up in arms and were saying digital art wasn't art. Its a reactionary statement, and now its the most common form of art.
Art doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Is it stealing from Da Vinci to draw a portrait after having previously viewed the Mona Lisa?
A machine cannot be inspired, it can merely lift what is provided. A machine will add nothing new to the art, it will simply mash together other inputs. You're describing two completely different things.
Does human inspiration not involve mashing together inputs from their own experience?
Yes, but human artists add something else of their own, where AI artists are incapable of doing so because they have no experiences.
What does this mean materially? Can you look at art and discern whether experiences have been added?
It's not about whether you can tell from a finished product whether an AI or a human made it - that's not really the core point. The point is that the only thing the AI can draw from is other people's art - making it essentially a big plagiarism machine. Humans, on the other hand, can make art without reference - somebody had to invent it, after all. Not to mention human artists capable of creating and refining entire styles - the work of HR Geiger, for example, which had a very unique style that wasn't really prevalent before. Humans can create, whereas these AI can only derive.
What happens when a novel art style emerges from the use of AI art? We've already seen new, emergent forms of body horror. I just really don't see what's so special about human experience in the equation. Am I not bringing my own human element to the creation with my prompting?
No the point is that you're stealing other peoples' art to make the model. Your prompt on its own is just that - a prompt. The AI cannot fulfill that prompt unless it's able to steal from a bunch of pre-existing artworks, which is what I take issue with.
And there's not an artist alive who hasn't stolen from another artist in honing their craft.
That isn't necessarily relevant. If you found someone who had never seen any kind of drawing or painting in their life, showed them how to use a pencil, and told them to draw a castle, you would get a sensible result. This is because humans are capable of making art without solely copying others. You can't do that with an AI - if you gave them no images to train with, you'd just get random noise. This is evidence that humans can add something original to art while AI cannot.
And what about a blind human? Why does the human get to train on visual representations of castles while the AI doesn't?
Moreover, that human has probably never seen a castle in person. In all likelihood, they have seen other people's photographs and drawings of castles, none of which they have paid for.
Then why don’t I get back an exact copy if I type “portrait of Mona Lisa” into dalle?
There's an official word for it: it's called a Master Copy (see def 3)
I’m not talking about someone creating an exact copy. What I’m saying is that anyone who creates art after consuming someone else’s has already been influenced
How is AI "democratization of art creation"?
Everyone has always been able to make art, that's not something that's suddenly changed with this new technology
if you use some leftist sounding words, then people can't mock your ridiculous takes
:think-about-it:
Everyone has always been able to make art, that’s not something that’s suddenly changed with this new technology
Not everybody has the talent to make art that's worth looking at
I don't get this, 'AI art shouldn't exist because people should have to work harder to create things' is what you're saying?
more like AI art is implicitly less interesting because it doesn't have human skill, it doesn't have inspiration, and it doesn't have meaning
it's literally a machine taking an input (stolen art) and giving an output based on some words
this isn't democratizing art, it's making idea guys think they're artists
less interesting because it doesn’t have human skill, it doesn’t have inspiration, and it doesn’t have meaning
Thank you, exactly what I was talking about in the OP.
I'm sorry, but I have trouble interpreting it as anything other than a 'pull yourself by your bootstrap'. Is that really the main argument against AI, that it facilitates labour?
I'm not trying to be unfaithful, I just don't get what else your comment is supposed to mean, I'm sorry...
I think it's more that they think you should value the process of creating art, of which you will gain little to no understanding from typing into the DALL-E hole, but you will when you engage in your classical field of choice. imo the main argument against it is that, as a tool of automation under capital, it is built using the work of the proletariat but used to concentrate power & wealth by the bougeoisie. really not too different from the automatic loom or w/e, not ontologically evil but currently being turned against those who made it possible in the first place
Let me just magic all the time in the world plus talent because "work hard" literally does not work for everyone just because I think it'd be kinda funny to see an image of Gandalf boxing with Shrek and don't wanna pay someone out of the money I don't have to see it
okay so AI art bad because literally every single human being is a nascent artist with the talent to make its pursuit worthwhile and has all the time in the world to devote to improvement, got it
no, it's bad because it takes other people's art without permission and constructs something new from it with zero inspiration
software developer that knows "machine learning" is just a name for something that takes input and lumps it together with other input
don't talk to me or my pale mechanical son :data-outdoor-cat:
I make shitty art, that doesn't mean I feel entitled to someone using it in like some D&D campaign with players going :awooga: "wow looks so good!" and I'm not naive enough to think that "just keep practicing" definitively equates to the development of skill for every single person on the planet
nobody thinks this. you’re basically just making up people to argue with.
dawg,
Not everybody has the talent to make art that’s worth looking at
then you work at it, it’s a skill like any other
literally comments above this
Then I don't understand why you feel art is only worth creating or viewing unless it fits conventional, subjective ideas
I don't know how to play guitar but there's entire genres of music that people listen to that don't fit the mold of what is "good"
because depending on the context of the art, i.e. whether it's some sort of therapeutic self expression (the art I do), or someone trying to make something aesthetically appealing to another person, it literally does matter how it looks
Everyone has always been able to make art, that’s not something that’s suddenly changed with this new technology
everyone can technically put ink on paper and say they did an art, but now with AI art someone with no technical skill, training, or ability (whether artistic ability or the literal physical ability to make art, i.e. someone with Parkinson's) can direct the computer to make something that actually looks pretty decent, which might not matter to you but if someone wants to have some art to go with a book they're writing or an album cover or their Dungeons and Dragons campaign or whatever they're now able to do so (without shelling out what might be an unfeasible amount of money to pay an Actual Artist)
I think, though, that what you have is a separate more abstract conversation about what "art" is and what makes it "worth looking at" that I don't think necessarily correlates with this discussion about AI.
Like, there are many people in the world physically capable of holding a paintbrush; and you probably wouldn't consider every action perpetrated via paintbrush to be art. If my plain white picket fence is aesthetically pleasing and "worth looking at," and was painted with a brush, is that art? So what separates my fence from a child's hand-painting of their family? Everyone has some capacity to communicate abstracted ideas and emotions through some sort of expressive medium, be it physical or otherwise, and deciding whether or not it's "worth looking at" is a pretty subjective bar to be using.
While I don't agree that algorithmic image generation is "democratizing art" it certainly provides a possibility for an art medium that's more accessible depending on how it is integrated. It may take a long time for new technology like this to be integrated in what we would call a healthy way but the way I see it is this is a new medium we haven't adjusted to yet, and until we do it will be used to create content.
Yes. All this is, IMO, is another tool. I've mentioned it in a previous thread but Pixar made a stink about motion capture tech back in the aughts. Looking back, that's silly - of course mocap doesn't make art lesser. Neither does using photoshop, or digital animation, or cameras...
Precisely, see also the music scene in like the early 2000's when people were having strokes over music being made out of math equations.
What I am referring to isn't the viability of Musician as an occupation, but the merits of a proposed artistic medium (electronic music via mathematical equation.)
I don't necessarilly disagree with you, it's just a different conversation.
Making art is a process people do for their own personal enjoyment, it doesn't matter if it's worth looking at in the end
You can type words into a prompt and receive a visual representation that would otherwise have taken hundreds of hours just to develop the skill necessary. Seems pretty straightforward to me.
And as has been pointed out elsewhere: what about the physically disabled? Are they to be siloed into the realm of outsider art forever? If you have cerebral palsy and you have ideas in your head of which you want to see representations that visually resemble reality, I guess you're just fucked.
Yeah, when I check on people's profiles on artstation, Behance, CGSociety etc. all I see is furry porn.
There is nothing democratising about using machine learning to scrape people's portfolios on aforementioned sites and using their work without credit - which has happened with a couple of my pieces. Get the fuck out of here.
how dare people who's income is destroyed by tech bro dipshits and their toys be angry
yeah, we should be trying to figure out how to put that anger into making people more Based. not entirely sure if pissed off concept artists will wield much power compared to the industrial proletariat or the disaffected peasantry but it can't hurt
This technique for approximating generating and editing images was invented by two PhD students and then released for free. It just turns out that when you plug words into it, it can make arbitrary images.
So what you really mean is people whose income was damaged by scientific progress. If your argument is that scientific progress is bad and we should get mad at it because some people will not be able to make a living out of it, that's okay, but then you can't really be a leftist without endlessly contradicting yourself. That low-creativity, mostly technical commission work is being made obsolete is just a fact of life at this point. If you think highly-creative art is going to be made obsolete, then you must be saying that AI is on the way to true creativity, which if it's actually the case then the world is about to change fundamentally (but I don't think that's happening anytime soon). Either that, or "prompt engineering" is approximately as creative as art itself, and thus this is merely a technique to reduce the mechanical requirements of art and make it more accessible.
a medium dominated almost entirely by furries, porn, and furry porn
you couldn't be more wrong
I think he's just talking about deviant art, which will certainly crater now that people like OP can fap to their own half-assed AI furry porn rather than slap-dash, starving artist commissions.
people who actually get commissions usually aren't Like This (minus the bloc of straight dude humansonas) - there's already plenty of free slop out there for basically every conceivable demand if you don't care about individual artists' styles. usually, around any financially successful furry artist, theres a community who care more about that specific artist's work continuing to be produced more than they care about their specific desires being replicated, see any number of adoptables that go for £300+, or fundraising drives that make multiple thousands
Hexbear: "Piracy is cool because you can get a copy of a thing while still leaving the original intact!"
Hexbear: "AI art generators literally steal the souls of the artists' work. and leave them with nothing but scraps."
The difference is who gets hurt. It's the reason that Hexbear likes shoplifting but hates wage theft. The problem isn't "taking things that don't belong to you", it's about reinforcing capitalism and hierarchy vs breaking it. Piracy is an individual choice, AI data scraping is systemic abuse of artists for the purpose of replacing them.
Then yeah, that's the problem. But you're talking about the difference between a 1000 employee company replacing their artists with AI and some geek with a computer who wants to generate neat images for their project. AI generators are just a tool, also subject to an individual choice. Our problem is with the end, not the means.
The means are not free from controversy. Many artists did not consent and were not asked whether they wanted their images used for such a project. If the AI were created solely from images the operator owned the rights to or made themselves, or from artists who wanted to contribute to the AI, I would understand your point, but as it is now AI is rooted in systemic theft. It's not that piracy is universally good or even universally neutral, it's more that companies have pushed their luck trying to "prevent piracy" and "protect intellectual property" so hard that it basically fucks everyone else over and piracy has emerged as a kind of push-back. I'm personally not much of a piracy defender, I basically don't pirate any games that aren't console exclusive and from at least 2 generations before the current one, and on PC I buy anything that's still up for sale (I mostly buy indie stuff).
Pretty convinced that all the people against this are hardcore reactionaries. Ah yes, technological progress, that thing every leftist should be against! :anprim-pat:
Mechanized agriculture is putting so many serfs out of work, we must be against it! :kitty-cri-texas:
Yeah, this thread is frustrating. Like of course all technology developed under capitalism is abused and weaponized against the working class, if only there was some ideological movement fighting to abolish private ownership of the means of production... 🤔
Then you've got threads where people argue that art is subjective and there is no universal standard of judgement, but also AI art is intrinsically meaningless and lazy. You can always tell!!!!! If it's so worthless and empty then what threat does it pose to artists? (Also I swear I've heard that last rhetoric somewhere else, I can't quite put my finger on it... 🤔 )
And how about it stealing from artists? Is this website about to become pro copyright law? If I wake a painting in the style of Van Gogh or Picasso, is that plagiarism? How about copying the style of thousands of artists? If I'm painting an apple and take inspiration from every painting of an apple ever, is that even stealing art anymore, or an I just copying the shared concept of an apple?
I feel like the people carrying on about "experience" are just rehashing the "free will vs determinism" argument wrapped around art.
I mean who cares if the simulation is creating its own simulation?
You can always tell
Strong terf energy in those sorts of statements. :thinking-about-it: Its almost like its reactionary
Certainly has no parallels to trans people being purposefully misunderstood and sidelined for being 'mockeries and fabrications' of 'true women'.
YUP! Exactly. And I know it feels weird to compare real people to tech, but its such a reactionary tactic, both are extracted from some absurd puritanical values of what deserves to be """real""".
Yeah, obviously. I'm trans myself and it does peak my ear when I hear someone saying familiar things. If anything, it shows those people are susceptible to reactionary arguments. Its also telling that a lot of what people are saying relies strongly on mystic terms like 'inspiration' and 'real'. TERFs see cis women through a mystical lens as well.
no, we’re just artists who have seen how tech is weaponized against us a million times already. art isn’t something that has to be commodified for it to be valued so your analogy about mechanized ag doesn’t really work here.
The invention of the paint brush is incredible weaponization, the only way to make art is to throw poop at walls.
They're literally stating that the relationship between artists and capital is being fundamentally altered as a result of the introduction of automation which we've seen in countless sectors already where the benefits are not shared amongst the working class but are instead siphoned off by the rich. To state that paint brushes are somehow equivalent to the relationship of workers and capital and that we must throw shit at walls instead is incredibly bad faith.
Your industrial agriculture example also ignores this fact that the problem is not inherently the technology, but the fact that the wealthy are taking any benefit that is gained while workers are left to starve.
I've already stated that holding the tech in common is important elsewhere. There are in fact open source versions of this tech, and everyone should use it.
I agree that it sucks that corporate interests can take art and sandblast the soul out of it to mold into something to generate more profit for themselves. I think remix culture however is based and cool. I think there's a definite line you can draw between the two.
You didn't bring dozens of ideas to life. A computer found a bunch of other people who already had your idea and composed them together so you could steal them.
It's okay for internal concepting or creating reference images, but you're literally just having a computer take other people's art and mix it together. It's like copying someone's homework and changing some of the wording and claiming you did your homework.
AI art is quite literally worker exploitation (the original artists). If no one makes original art, the AI has nothing to steal from.
This is not how it works, it doesn't just mix images. It learns how to effectively distill images and text into a common representation and how to manipulate this representation to make more palatable images.
That means that you can explain stuff to it and can have enough understanding to know what it should look like.
Think of it like this - the program is only able to store around 40 bytes from every 512x512 image. If it was just copying it wouldn't be able to remember much. It has to find a way to distill an image into something that approaches meaning, and a find a way to go the other way, and find a way to get to this "meaning" from text. The big difference between this and humans is that we are far better at manipulation of "meaning". But this is copying to approximately the same extent as a painter taking a detailed comission copies their environment.
It’s okay for internal concepting or creating reference images
What other scenarios are you imagining?
Artists are getting ripped off. And has the tech gets better - it will continue to get worse. Over time the same process will happen to other art forms like music.
counterargument: weird furry porn has more Soul than both ai art and what most professional artists spent their days cranking out. actual genuine expression of feeling & self that the megacorp algos are allergic to. also if you're into ai art you should try collage some time, it's fun & will make something more genuinely interesting & personal, if less polished
I think it's more about harming working class artists, these people spend a lot of time studying and drawing. It's very unfair that now the industry is just going to remove them after always treating these artists like shit.
I think AI art is a cool gimmick, especially for people who can't draw, it's fun to create something weird or cute. But when you start replacing people with machines, you are dehumanizing the entire industry. It's awful to have people being laid off and getting replaced by machines, when they could build these machines to help the people who work in this industry instead.
I think it’s more about harming working class artists, these people spend a lot of time studying and drawing. It’s very unfair that now the industry is just going to remove them after always treating these artists like shit.
I think AI art is a cool gimmick, especially for people who can’t draw, it’s fun to create something weird or cute. But when you start replacing people with machines, you are dehumanizing the entire industry. It’s awful to have people being laid off and getting replaced by machines, when they could build these machines to help the people who work in this industry instead.
As we all know, the cotton gin was awful because it laid the serfs and slaves off and they spent their whole lives learning the craft of removing seeds from cotton only to be replaced. It would be better to keep them in their place!
You are a textbook reactionary as called out in Das Kapital. You should be worried about how to make this technology accessible to all and ensuring protections for technologically displaced workers, not about saying it should be destroyed or sidelined.
I'm strongly convinced the majority of this site does not understand scientific socialism or the history of scientific advancement at all.
People here are unironically using the liberal concept of intellectual property to castigate AI art. Like most things, X doesn't suck in general. X sucks under capitalism. Do people here seriously believe that AI art would just not exist in a socialist or communist society or that a principled communist party would push to ban AI art as counterrevolutionary and reactionary? Of course not, because that's a ridiculous thing to suggest.
Plus, there's a whole bunch of mystic woo to differentiate between two sets of pixels (because we're comparing AI art to human art produced with Photoshop, in other words digital visual art). "But AI art isn't produced by humans, so it's deficient somehow." And who created those AI algorithms in the first place? AI art is ultimately still steered by humans by virtue of those AI algorithms and programs being created by humans. Therefore, all AI art is human art. I made the thing that made that other thing, therefore I made that other thing. To deny this would be to say that if I dropped a paintbrush onto a blank canvas, I didn't create the painting, gravity or the paintbrush did.
The only difference is that there's a further degree of separation from the human and the art, but you could say the same thing about Photoshop. The human is just moving their mouse and stylus a lot. It's up to the OS and Photoshop to interpret those mouse/stylus movements as something meaningful. The OS/Photoshop exists as a middle person between the human and the art just as the AI algorithms exists as a middle person between the human and the art. The main difference is that the amount of labor-time is now much less at the cost of producing more derivative art. Like all technologies, there's a tradeoff between choosing one technology over another. It's not like AI art is uniquely derivative from other (human) derivative art like tracing, and I would argue that AI art is at least greater than or equal to tracing as far as creativity is concerned.
And as a final note: you've made a great connection in another post about how these mystical woo style of rhetoric are used by terf reactionaries. So much "womanhood is mystical" followed by "here's why transwomen are actually men." People need to stop thinking in these weird unrigorous terms.
