I asked over there about how to spot "AI" images, now I need some pictures to practice this on, and IDK where to find pictures that are definitely "AI"-generated
I asked over there about how to spot "AI" images, now I need some pictures to practice this on, and IDK where to find pictures that are definitely "AI"-generated
Me using photoshop/gimp/krita is removing the local paint man's ability to sell paint and we should oppose photoshop/gimp/krita because it exploits the people who work on it with low wages and... you know its just all ridiculous, AI shit isnt going to replace artists except in the most evil shit you can imagine like fucking billboard ads or in the most mundane shit like someone generating quick art for a throwaway dnd character. This same hand-wringing was done about digital manipulation software, I'm old enough to remember that outrage too and its the same shit.
Theres all these stories of companies trying to get rid of artists and just telling some random person to generate art for them and it always blows up in their faces, and I frankly see almost no chance of it getting better.
I'll take a human being getting a paycheque to make the billboard garbage over even uglier slop made by a spreadsheet any day. Or god forbid an extra 5 bucks ends up in the hands of a real person for that throwaway character art. Just because these things blow up in the techbros faces doesn't mean they're stopping trying- they are doubling down and they will do everything they can to wipe out entire markets of art with the ugliest shit you've ever seen. None of this addresses that LLMs are trained with stolen information, either, making them inherently immoral to anyone who cares about labour.
It feels bourgeois to me anyways to be so deeply concerned about the purity of art as many on here do. One of the biggest early Soviet artists, Alexandr Labas, was pressured out of art and into architecture and began designing theaters. Dmitry Nalbandyan was conscripted and later made to make propaganda. In fact, all Soviet art was for the purpose of propaganda and perpetuating socialist ideals, whereas modern art is of course, by definition, slop and consumerism.
To me, art and these other fields that are being so cruelly attacked by AI, are just bullshit jobs in the first place. Everyone is all worked up about this, but think about how this sort of discussion looks to someone who does hard labor? Do we not all agree that the first world is filled with labor aristocrats? Then why are we so vehemently defending them? Let alone the artists that continue to accrue money passively that these AIs were trained on.
labor aristocracy is a matter of how much you get paid, not whether you work up a sweat. Most artists already do not make a living off of art.
also, part of what makes something a bullshit job is that it provides no value to society, but doesn't human expression enrich people's lives? Don't people have cultural needs on top of material and social needs? I don't think all of modern art can be dismissed as mere slop and consumerism, it's not all artists begrudgingly fulfilling commissions for big-titted Elsa or whatever. I still see people expressing themselves and their experiences and getting paid for it.
Maybe AI won't threaten that, maybe the people who use AI were never going to pay for art anyway, but if entertain the notion, if AI did hurt artists' incomes, I think it would be a bad thing worth caring about, even if artists aren't doing heavy physical labor and they're not perpetuating socialist ideals.
The average artist isnt going to have AIs trained on their stuff. Its only cream of the crop stuff (greg rutkowski, who is rich, or van gogh or something) or styling from big companies that gets trained on. These people all benefit from passive income, they can get fucked
I think the AIs scrape everything, but you raise a good point that only big names are mentioned in prompts, so big names are the only ones AI users specifically mimic (as far as I know).
But is direct mimicry the only way AI hurts artists? Or will regular, non-rich artists suffer in other ways? Will they land fewer commissions as cheap or free AI images become increasingly indistinguishable from real stuff? Will they have a harder time attracting a following as convincing AI starts to dilute the airwaves? Will AI users start to pass off generative AI as their own work, out-competing artists who have to spend hours of labor on each piece?
further ramblings
Is there also a cultural effect?
Will we start to lose organic evolution of stylistic trends as more and more artists use AI in their workflows, and the stylistic choices artists see each other making are increasingly not human choices? Will that artificiality erode the dialogue between stylistic trends and broader cultural trends, because AI has no sense of the collective mood of society from one moment to the next, and a text prompt can only convey so much?
It's hard to say how much I'm overreacting, because we're still in the early years.
I also think many artists are worrying, "Will this devalue me in society? Will my years of practice no longer be respected or valued to the same degree amid a flood of increasingly polished AI images that can be generated in seconds?" You might say, "so what, you learned how to do crosshatching." But is it only technique that gets devalued? Or is it the entire journey of self-exploration and cultural exploration that goes into developing an artistic style? I think, in part, the online backlash against generative AI is a backlash against the cultural direction it is seen to represent. People see the soullessness of the crowd that accumulates in generative AI spaces, and in NFT spaces, and they wonder if that's where we're headed.