It's a miserable situation in general. Like... the tool itself is amazing. If the dataset was made out of our collective library of public domain paintings and photographs I still think that would be strong enough to make a powerful image generating dataset. Why scraping deviantart? Why grabbing from artstation?
At the moment, I think it can be used as a tool to make some really cool images, I've used it to make some awesome stuff that I'm actually proud of, but it's hard to do it and feel good about anything considering how it was made and what it will be used for.
Like I don't think you're a bad person for using it to generate brushstrokes. I don't think Mr DM making a bunch of generated images for his homebrew campaign is doing something wrong. I don't think Jane DisneyAdult is a bad person for making images of Captain America as a medieval knight either, like whatever, have fun.
But then you get to artists using the AI to generate image backgrounds for their otherwise original images. Or someone compositing a bunch of generations together and selling airdrop shirt prints of it. Like that's still some level of transformative, but when does it become directly exploitational? Should you disclose it if you've used the AI as a pose reference or for a blended texture in a 3D model?
If the dataset was made out of our collective library of public domain paintings and photographs I still think that would be strong enough to make a powerful image generating dataset. Why scraping deviantart? Why grabbing from artstation?
I dunno, to me I think thats kinda weird. Am I infringing on someone's rights by remembering someones painting and trying to paint something similar? Collages and minor edits are even protected forms of expression. I could go grab some official nintendo art, make it Mario but with Boobs™️ and that is my art.
Like that’s still some level of transformative, but when does it become directly exploitational? Should you disclose it if you’ve used the AI as a pose reference or for a blended texture in a 3D model?
People do generally list the medium for arts when placed on exhibits. People already just open up pose references in blender, screenshot it, and paint over it so their proportions are right.
There is real concern over NSFW art like this guy is doing. Its pretty reprehensible, just like painting nudes of random people you know or photoshopping their face on another nude body is reprehensible
I just dont like a lot of framing to this. I find what it does very useful and I've been in a depressed rut over losing my ability to do art as a hobby for like 5 years. It still hurts a lot for me to do it but its manageable now, not an incredibly painful process that would take me years to do 1 piece. In a way a lot of the discussion to me feels like a personal attack on my disability.
Am I infringing on someone’s rights by remembering someones painting and trying to paint something similar?
No, because you're a person.
This isn't a person. It's a math problem. A mechanism. It's not meaningfully different from taking a picture, applying a filter to it, and selling it as your own creative work. But in typical "Do not create the Torment Nexus" fashion bazinga techbros have found a way to steal the creative output of all of humanity and produce a dead, sterile facsimile. The potential consequences are horrific. Imagine a world without artists, because all "art" can be sufficiently produced by these machines. No more creativity. No more innovation. Nothing new. Nothing unexpected. Just endless, endless churning of the same parts in to pseudo-random configurations. Long strings of numbers masquerading as creativity.
No more creativity. No more innovation. Nothing new. Nothing unexpected. Just endless, endless churning of the same parts in to pseudo-random configurations. Long strings of numbers masquerading as creativity.
You have a better point with what you said in another comment about the economic side of it, that once it reaches a commercial level it'll massively reduce the demand for particular forms of skilled labor in a way that will hurt a lot of people. Because that's true, and the tech is extremely dangerous for that reason.
The idea that creativity is contained exclusively in the specific technical abilities that will be commercially devalued by the tech is not a good point, however. The threat of AI art is entirely economic (except for the danger of advanced photo/video-editing/mimicking AIs, which are an entirely different sort of threat), because it will still rely on human initiative and guidance. So far as creativity and art goes it doesn't make a difference whether the creative process is the brain working out how to make the hands create a mimicry of an image that it contains inside itself using a brush or stylus, or if the process is the brain working out how describe what it sees to a machine in order to create that mimicry and then applying other technical skills to shape that to more closely match what it wants. I can only assume that as it gets more advanced the ways of providing it inputs will also get more advanced (integrating posing 3d dummies to provide another data point for it to work from, for example), to the point that making it output things that aren't just random slop and hoping it's somewhat close to what one wants becomes a technical skill of its own.
I don't even see it as a threat of losing those technical skills, because there are mountains of texts trying to teach people to translate images in their head into images on paper, outlining training exercises and describing different methods. Although I'm also not as convinced AI will obviate the technical abilities involved in art to the point that it stops being a thing, although it will probably siphon off a huge chunk of would-be illustrators who'll never learn to draw and instead learn how to manipulate the AI and edit its results to get what they want instead.
Saying the human mind and an algorithm designed to emulate art are equivalent is whats actually anti-materialist here. A soul does not have to be real in order for human beings to be materially different from code on a silicon wafer and the fact that this needs pointed out is sad.
Your understanding of materialism is flawed if you think an organ as immensely complex as the human brain is not "special".
Thought does not exist independent from matter. That is a very basic principle of materialism...
As far as the machine does it, it literally learns how to make things by picking out the image from noise patterns based on the chance that picking out specific bits will make it match the prompt... It learns this by practicing on a dataset that has had noise patterns put on it. That's pretty much the machine equivalent to doing a master study on a piece of art.
This isn’t a person. It’s a math problem. A mechanism.
The human body is nothing but a biological mechanism that we control. Ultimately, the program requires input to do anything. Left to its own devices, it will not spit out art much the same way as a pencil won't draw anything byself, nor will the arm that holds it do anything without being told to, and much the se for a camera. I don't get how one form of input can be separated from another as valid through anything but arbitrary distinction.
The human body is not just a mechanism to house our brain, it literally is us. Even if we ignore the flawed premise that "we" solely exist within our brain (and not the culmination of all our organs working in tandem to create a whole individual), our nerves extend into literally every part of our body anyway. Your brain is connected to the rest of you in a way that cannot be replicated by an algorithm.
Yeah of course it's not as simple as the brain piloting a meat costume. A lot goes into human consciousness but for the purposes of rendering art, we do that in a literal mechanical fashion. We control ourselves and move our body in a specific way that creates an outcome. Does it really matter whether that's moving our arm to draw, or typing out text?
Your brain is connected to the rest of you in a way that cannot be replicated by an algorithm.
The point I'm trying to make here isn't that there is literally no difference between our bodies and a computer, but that the difference ultimately doesn't matter when considering what we're using them for. The only thing that's changing is the degree of abstraction from the human, which again I don't see how we can arrive at a meaningful limit or distinction between what is and is not acceptable in a non-arbitrary fashion.
Does it really matter whether that’s moving our arm to draw, or typing out text?
Yes. The act of creating art is as much a part of the art itself as the finished product. Just as the art is affected by the medium you make it with, the way in which it is created affects the end product. Yes, inputting words into the tool is a form of creativity but its materially not the same as directly drawing/painting/writing a piece yourself
I dunno, to me I think thats kinda weird. Am I infringing on someone’s rights by remembering someones painting and trying to paint something similar? Collages and minor edits are even protected forms of expression. I could go grab some official nintendo art, make it Mario but with Boobs™️ and that is my art.
I'm mostly just talking about the nature of transformative works and profiting from them. Like if you went to deviantart and painted over someone's picture in a way that obvious that you did/not transformative enough and posted it on deviantart without their permission, that's generally considered bad form, and on some art sites it's even outright against the rules. Then you take it one step forward and you try to sell it off of redbubble. That's not Nintendo you're trying to extract profit from, it's kawaiimewmew93 from deviantart.
But you could still take kawaiimewmew93's image and paint over it but you change it so much that even the artist themself wouldn't recognize the picture. That's a transformative work, that's generally considered fair.
When you look at Stable Diffusion. you can see countless kawaiimewmew93s in the dataset. Their images have all been used and broken down into mathematical equations via algorithms that "learn" by recreating their images over and over out of noise fields. The only reason you can't pick out the individual artists (most of the time) is because they're drowned out by even MORE artists turned into math equations.
I think in a world without capitalism that would still be considered bad form, to some extent, just because of the lack of crediting. In this world, people using all this unpaid labor that the datasets are built off of is what makes things so complicated and unfair.
And I do think you can use these for transformative works in a way that IS fair, hence my examples.
The datasets used in Ai generators are all taken from uncredited artists and photographers, many of which want their images removed from the datasets. Some datasets are even specifically trained on ~30-50 images from a single artist specifically to generate images that look like they were produced by that specific artist.
Using a tool that cannot function without those datasets in order to profit from unpaid and uncredited labor is exploitational to me.
I listed a bunch of varying examples because they're all transformative in some way but still uses that exploitational tool. I'm not saying they're all exploitational, just that because of the nature of the tool that it feels difficult for me to discern where a line can be drawn.
You shouldn't care about ip when its a multi-trillion dollar media conglomerate hoarding a thousand characters and stories.
But when a person who makes art for a living can have the products of their labor and skill taken by a machine and churned out into millions of mass produced images, it can ruin their lively hood.
Ai doesnt trawl disney films to make its art, it collects data from art sites where individual artists post their personal work.
This isn't about IP. This is stealing someone's soul and distilling it in to a machine so you can steal not just a single piece of work, but all of their skill and artistry and potential, forever. This is a crime the likes of which has not previously existed.
No. They have your skill and artistry and potential. And they can exploit them as much as they want, in whatever way they want, for eternity, for free.
Why would anyone hire you? Why would anyone pay you for your labor? They don't need you anymore. They've stolen all the things that made you special. You're redundant now. They've found a way to reduce labor costs to 0, permanently.
We all knew that eventually the techbros would use automation to replace labor entirely, then massacre everyone they didn't need until all that is left in the world is machines and the tiny handful of hyper-capitalists who control them. This is just one more step towards that future.
meh. we should all be in favor of eroding IP laws anyway I find it really hard to care about this one except for the specific cases of corporations using these tools instead of paying workers.
for my unskilled self and that disabled commenter these are great and fuck your copyright.
Cool. Hold on to that thought when disabled artists start dying because a techbro with a math problem stole their entire creative output and destroyed their only source of income in the process.
work-a-day artists are oppressed proles just like the rest of us and their jobs getting usurped and destroyed by capital has little to do with the specific "muh IP rights" people are doing when this topic comes up, and I guess I don't care what kind of labor these folks are doing, they're getting exploited the whether they're doing art as a profession or any uncreative labor.
Marx failed to consider the ability to rob workers of their future labor and creative potential by basically creating a digital clone of them and making it work for 10,000 years.
It's a miserable situation in general. Like... the tool itself is amazing. If the dataset was made out of our collective library of public domain paintings and photographs I still think that would be strong enough to make a powerful image generating dataset. Why scraping deviantart? Why grabbing from artstation?
At the moment, I think it can be used as a tool to make some really cool images, I've used it to make some awesome stuff that I'm actually proud of, but it's hard to do it and feel good about anything considering how it was made and what it will be used for.
Like I don't think you're a bad person for using it to generate brushstrokes. I don't think Mr DM making a bunch of generated images for his homebrew campaign is doing something wrong. I don't think Jane DisneyAdult is a bad person for making images of Captain America as a medieval knight either, like whatever, have fun.
But then you get to artists using the AI to generate image backgrounds for their otherwise original images. Or someone compositing a bunch of generations together and selling airdrop shirt prints of it. Like that's still some level of transformative, but when does it become directly exploitational? Should you disclose it if you've used the AI as a pose reference or for a blended texture in a 3D model?
I dunno, it just sucks all around.
I dunno, to me I think thats kinda weird. Am I infringing on someone's rights by remembering someones painting and trying to paint something similar? Collages and minor edits are even protected forms of expression. I could go grab some official nintendo art, make it Mario but with Boobs™️ and that is my art.
People do generally list the medium for arts when placed on exhibits. People already just open up pose references in blender, screenshot it, and paint over it so their proportions are right.
There is real concern over NSFW art like this guy is doing. Its pretty reprehensible, just like painting nudes of random people you know or photoshopping their face on another nude body is reprehensible
I just dont like a lot of framing to this. I find what it does very useful and I've been in a depressed rut over losing my ability to do art as a hobby for like 5 years. It still hurts a lot for me to do it but its manageable now, not an incredibly painful process that would take me years to do 1 piece. In a way a lot of the discussion to me feels like a personal attack on my disability.
No, because you're a person.
This isn't a person. It's a math problem. A mechanism. It's not meaningfully different from taking a picture, applying a filter to it, and selling it as your own creative work. But in typical "Do not create the Torment Nexus" fashion bazinga techbros have found a way to steal the creative output of all of humanity and produce a dead, sterile facsimile. The potential consequences are horrific. Imagine a world without artists, because all "art" can be sufficiently produced by these machines. No more creativity. No more innovation. Nothing new. Nothing unexpected. Just endless, endless churning of the same parts in to pseudo-random configurations. Long strings of numbers masquerading as creativity.
Don't have to the machine will do that for me :fidel-cool:
You have a better point with what you said in another comment about the economic side of it, that once it reaches a commercial level it'll massively reduce the demand for particular forms of skilled labor in a way that will hurt a lot of people. Because that's true, and the tech is extremely dangerous for that reason.
The idea that creativity is contained exclusively in the specific technical abilities that will be commercially devalued by the tech is not a good point, however. The threat of AI art is entirely economic (except for the danger of advanced photo/video-editing/mimicking AIs, which are an entirely different sort of threat), because it will still rely on human initiative and guidance. So far as creativity and art goes it doesn't make a difference whether the creative process is the brain working out how to make the hands create a mimicry of an image that it contains inside itself using a brush or stylus, or if the process is the brain working out how describe what it sees to a machine in order to create that mimicry and then applying other technical skills to shape that to more closely match what it wants. I can only assume that as it gets more advanced the ways of providing it inputs will also get more advanced (integrating posing 3d dummies to provide another data point for it to work from, for example), to the point that making it output things that aren't just random slop and hoping it's somewhat close to what one wants becomes a technical skill of its own.
I don't even see it as a threat of losing those technical skills, because there are mountains of texts trying to teach people to translate images in their head into images on paper, outlining training exercises and describing different methods. Although I'm also not as convinced AI will obviate the technical abilities involved in art to the point that it stops being a thing, although it will probably siphon off a huge chunk of would-be illustrators who'll never learn to draw and instead learn how to manipulate the AI and edit its results to get what they want instead.
deleted by creator
Saying the human mind and an algorithm designed to emulate art are equivalent is whats actually anti-materialist here. A soul does not have to be real in order for human beings to be materially different from code on a silicon wafer and the fact that this needs pointed out is sad.
Your understanding of materialism is flawed if you think an organ as immensely complex as the human brain is not "special".
Thought does not exist independent from matter. That is a very basic principle of materialism...
As far as the machine does it, it literally learns how to make things by picking out the image from noise patterns based on the chance that picking out specific bits will make it match the prompt... It learns this by practicing on a dataset that has had noise patterns put on it. That's pretty much the machine equivalent to doing a master study on a piece of art.
No it does not
🤓
:jesse-wtf:
The human body is nothing but a biological mechanism that we control. Ultimately, the program requires input to do anything. Left to its own devices, it will not spit out art much the same way as a pencil won't draw anything byself, nor will the arm that holds it do anything without being told to, and much the se for a camera. I don't get how one form of input can be separated from another as valid through anything but arbitrary distinction.
The human body is not just a mechanism to house our brain, it literally is us. Even if we ignore the flawed premise that "we" solely exist within our brain (and not the culmination of all our organs working in tandem to create a whole individual), our nerves extend into literally every part of our body anyway. Your brain is connected to the rest of you in a way that cannot be replicated by an algorithm.
Yeah of course it's not as simple as the brain piloting a meat costume. A lot goes into human consciousness but for the purposes of rendering art, we do that in a literal mechanical fashion. We control ourselves and move our body in a specific way that creates an outcome. Does it really matter whether that's moving our arm to draw, or typing out text?
The point I'm trying to make here isn't that there is literally no difference between our bodies and a computer, but that the difference ultimately doesn't matter when considering what we're using them for. The only thing that's changing is the degree of abstraction from the human, which again I don't see how we can arrive at a meaningful limit or distinction between what is and is not acceptable in a non-arbitrary fashion.
Yes. The act of creating art is as much a part of the art itself as the finished product. Just as the art is affected by the medium you make it with, the way in which it is created affects the end product. Yes, inputting words into the tool is a form of creativity but its materially not the same as directly drawing/painting/writing a piece yourself
I'm mostly just talking about the nature of transformative works and profiting from them. Like if you went to deviantart and painted over someone's picture in a way that obvious that you did/not transformative enough and posted it on deviantart without their permission, that's generally considered bad form, and on some art sites it's even outright against the rules. Then you take it one step forward and you try to sell it off of redbubble. That's not Nintendo you're trying to extract profit from, it's kawaiimewmew93 from deviantart.
But you could still take kawaiimewmew93's image and paint over it but you change it so much that even the artist themself wouldn't recognize the picture. That's a transformative work, that's generally considered fair.
When you look at Stable Diffusion. you can see countless kawaiimewmew93s in the dataset. Their images have all been used and broken down into mathematical equations via algorithms that "learn" by recreating their images over and over out of noise fields. The only reason you can't pick out the individual artists (most of the time) is because they're drowned out by even MORE artists turned into math equations.
I think in a world without capitalism that would still be considered bad form, to some extent, just because of the lack of crediting. In this world, people using all this unpaid labor that the datasets are built off of is what makes things so complicated and unfair. And I do think you can use these for transformative works in a way that IS fair, hence my examples.
deleted by creator
The datasets used in Ai generators are all taken from uncredited artists and photographers, many of which want their images removed from the datasets. Some datasets are even specifically trained on ~30-50 images from a single artist specifically to generate images that look like they were produced by that specific artist.
Using a tool that cannot function without those datasets in order to profit from unpaid and uncredited labor is exploitational to me.
I listed a bunch of varying examples because they're all transformative in some way but still uses that exploitational tool. I'm not saying they're all exploitational, just that because of the nature of the tool that it feels difficult for me to discern where a line can be drawn.
deleted by creator
You shouldn't care about ip when its a multi-trillion dollar media conglomerate hoarding a thousand characters and stories.
But when a person who makes art for a living can have the products of their labor and skill taken by a machine and churned out into millions of mass produced images, it can ruin their lively hood.
Ai doesnt trawl disney films to make its art, it collects data from art sites where individual artists post their personal work.
This isn't about IP. This is stealing someone's soul and distilling it in to a machine so you can steal not just a single piece of work, but all of their skill and artistry and potential, forever. This is a crime the likes of which has not previously existed.
deleted by creator
No. They have your skill and artistry and potential. And they can exploit them as much as they want, in whatever way they want, for eternity, for free.
Why would anyone hire you? Why would anyone pay you for your labor? They don't need you anymore. They've stolen all the things that made you special. You're redundant now. They've found a way to reduce labor costs to 0, permanently.
We all knew that eventually the techbros would use automation to replace labor entirely, then massacre everyone they didn't need until all that is left in the world is machines and the tiny handful of hyper-capitalists who control them. This is just one more step towards that future.
deleted by creator
All of the problems with AI are problems with capital. Capital controls all the AI. AI is now the means of production and we don't own it.
If artists didn't need to create to survive this wouldn't be a problem. But they do, so it is.
deleted by creator
Sum
Of
Unpaid
Labor
lol
The curtains are not, in fact, blue. "Soul" is a metaphor.
deleted by creator
Shut the fuck up about sexual violence you piece of shit
I will edit it to remove the term. It was a poor choice of words on my part. Thank you for calling me out.
Thanks
:jesse-wtf: absolutely deranged
meh. we should all be in favor of eroding IP laws anyway I find it really hard to care about this one except for the specific cases of corporations using these tools instead of paying workers.
for my unskilled self and that disabled commenter these are great and fuck your copyright.
Cool. Hold on to that thought when disabled artists start dying because a techbro with a math problem stole their entire creative output and destroyed their only source of income in the process.
work-a-day artists are oppressed proles just like the rest of us and their jobs getting usurped and destroyed by capital has little to do with the specific "muh IP rights" people are doing when this topic comes up, and I guess I don't care what kind of labor these folks are doing, they're getting exploited the whether they're doing art as a profession or any uncreative labor.
deleted by creator
Marx failed to consider the ability to rob workers of their future labor and creative potential by basically creating a digital clone of them and making it work for 10,000 years.
:agony-deep: