Like all automation, it would be cool if it didn't mean workers were staring down the barrel of capitol's gun. I love the cool art machine learning models can generate. Would be even cooler if we lived in a world where this didn't threaten anybody and couldn't be used as a cudjol.
We can make a world where this is the case. Suck my guts (girl nuts) for more objectively correct takes you slop hogs.
It's not the same as other automations, though. That's where all these arguments towards AI art break down. AI art explicitly requires exploitation of mass amounts of artists to even WORK. These AI generators are getting better BECAUSE MORE ART IS BEING SHOVED INTO THEM WITHOUT PERMISSION.
Automation in art exists in digital tools already WITHOUT EXPLOITATION. Blending tools? Blurs? Smoothing? Color correction?
That's the automation. It does not require exploiting existing artists to work.
buddy I've got news for you about how every other process of industrialisation has happened under capital. Where do you think the cotton in the loom came from?
An automation being used to exploit people != an automation requiring exploitation to even work
plenty of public domain art out there! would make slightly weaker, less profitable, models but is still entirely viable as training data
Pretty sure a company could pay a license fee to access stock photos or any photos they wanted, to use alongside public domain photos.
All of these AI generators have a click wrap license forbidding commercial use. Any commercial version of this software will be using licensed works and the public domain..
This is a good point.
I'm not sure where I fall on this. Couldn't you make the same argument about an artist who looks at thousands of other artists' works in the process of learning to draw, developing a style, etc.? And the same with musicians- there are such extreme similarities between different pieces of music, especially within a genre. Are the later musicians exploiting the earlier ones?
I'm somewhat being devil's advocate there. It's a huge, very techbro-y, leap to assume that a human artist's brain is the right analogy for what these algorithms are doing. But on the other hand it also doesn't seem that obvious to me that it's not. Generally we accept that people can look at two pieces of art and decide whether one is flat-out copying the other or just inspired by it. Maybe that same test is right no matter whether the second piece was created by a human or machine?
I agree that humans take inspiration from each other all the time in regards to art and I think that is a great and healthy thing.
The primary difference (and the difference between this being art/notart imo) is that humans bring their own experiences into the art. These machines cannot do that. The only thing AI art does is pull in art work, add it to the pile of referenced things, and create pictures from that.
We all agree that when one human directly copies another's artwork without adding anything to it, they are a hack. These machines explicitely cannot add anything to the art than what is input. Humans all have unique experiences and beliefs to draw from. AI art does not have it.
That's how I see the whole situation, at least.
Except people also produce vapid and derivative art that's strictly aesthetic or utilitarian in its purpose. The art-generating AI even works in a similar fundamental way to how humans do, being a neural network that recombines observed patterns to synthesize something new-but-derivative.
Even the limits of its training data are more a matter of scale than of its nature: when it gets to a point where the neural network is twice as big and being fed movies along with their screenplays and mountains of novels in a way that start to create a further layer of context and understanding, then what differentiates the AI from a human raised on that same media? Is there an actual innate spark to humans or is it just that we're currently unique in our scale and sophistication? When the output of an AI is being guided, curated, and edited by a human how is that distinct from the creation of media now, apart from removing the need for specific technical skills?
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I care about artists
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