How exactly do you advance AI ethically? Considering how much of the data sets that these tools use was sourced, wouldnt you have to start from scratch?

a: i don't agree with the assertion that "using someone else's images to train an ai" is inherently unethical - ai art is demonstrably "less copy-paste-y" for lack of a better word than collage, and nobody would argue that collage is illegal or ethically shady. i mean some people might but i don't think they're correct.

b: several people have done this alraedy - see, mitsua diffusion, et al.

c: this whole argument is a red herring. it is not long-term relevant adobe firefly is already built exclusively off images they have legal rights to. the dataset question is irrelevant to ethical ai use, because companies already have huge vaults full of media they can train on and do so effectively.

you can cheer all you want that the artist-job-eating-machine made by adobe or disney is ethically sourced, thank god! but it'll still eat everyone's jobs. that's what you need to be caring about.

the solution here obviously is unionization, fighting for increased labor rights for people who stand to be affected by ai (as the writer's guild demonstrated! they did it exactly right!), and fighting for UBI so that we can eventually decouple the act of creation from the act of survival at a fundamental level (so i can stop getting these sorts of dms).

if you're interested in actually advancing ai as a field and not devils advocating me you can also participate in the FOSS (free-and-open-source) ecosystem so that adobe and disney and openai can't develop a monopoly on black-box proprietary technology, and we can have a future where anyone can create any images they want, on their computer, for free, anywhere, instead of behind a paywall they can't control.

fun fact related to that last bit: remember when getty images sued stable diffusion and everybody cheered? yeah anyway they're releasing their own ai generator now. crazy how literally no large company has your interests in mind.

cheers

you said you think gay sex cats is the new duchamp's fountain. i dont disagree and i kinda see what you mean already but please elaborate

it was a silly and tongue in cheek way to say that a lot of people are getting mad about it in a way that implies reactionary views on art, and that there's no way to say gay sex cats isn't art that wouldn't also imply that the fountain isn't art. a funny meme image is a funny meme image, but it is also funny to overthink and recontextualize them as art.

and the reaction makes the comparison even more apt. neural net generated artworks are anonymized mass produced images, vast majority having no artistic pretension or meaningful content such as a thomas kinkade painting. gay sex cats was made with no intent to be art, but the discourse it has with audience reaction and its appropriation in derivative works make it so. why is gay sex cats not art if people talking about it negatively allow it to be called art? is art only things you find beautiful and valuable? if so, what is value and beauty, and how do you draw the line? if gay sex cats was still ai generated but had more "aesthetic qualities" would it be art? if someone copies the original image by hand with all its ai generated faults where is the value generated? does the original still have no merit of its own, even after appropriation as a digital ready-made?

but the main reason as to why gay sex cats is comparable to the fountain still is because it made a lot of people with bad takes on art really really mad. and that the pissed off tags wouldn't look out of place as reaction to modern art in the 1920s. art is a flat circle

EDIT: well. putting an addendum because in retrospect more people took either or both the op and image in face value and much more self serious than ever intended. a lot of people understood the tone i was getting at, and i still stand by the questionings i added on, but still for clarification. the original comparison is not serious. it's self evidently ridiculous to compare a meme image to a historically significant artwork, the comparison was only drawn because they were both controversial to an audience, who reacted denying their status as respectively as an image and as art, and that it was funny that the negative reaction people had to the original image explicitly denied its status as art, even if the meme never had pretension to be art, so it was funny to draw a comparison and iterate on that.

i did think it was valid to bring in questionings about art and meaning because that's the reaction i saw most and wanted to make people think about the whys, and that also i do not think it's valid to base your dislike on ai art on either grounds of questioning its position and value as artwork, or even as a question of ip theft. regular degular handmade art can be soulless, repetitive, thoughtless, derivative, unethical, open and blatant theft, and much more, and that does not make it any less of an artwork. neural nets are tools that generate images by statistic correlation through human input.

the unambiguous issue with neural nets in art is its use as a tool by capital, to threaten already underpaid and overworked working artists and to keep their labor hostage under threat of total automation. in hindsight i regretted not adding the paragraph above as it was a way in which people could either misinterpret or assume things about me, but hindsight is hindsight and there's no way to predict how posts would blow up. so shrugs. i had written more posts in my blog that elaborated on that because asks would bot stop coming. and i think my takeaway is that people will reblog anything with a funny image without reading the words around it, or even closely looking at the image.

there's this scarcity model people have in their heads where the only way art can be good is if fewer people (deemed artists) do it, if its harder to do and you have to earn the right to do art. its genuinely a mindset with no relationship to reality. realistic potraits were really hard to do in the middle ages, but 80% of them were slop created for royal families. there's more creativity on itch.io since we got free no code frameworks like twine and the ability for people to host and share passion projects created in their free time with basically the whole planet cheaply.

My works got stolen last week and were used to make AI Art by a Reddit user who refused to tell anyone where they got the material from. (Upon being accused, they deleted the posts immediately)

Comparing AI (left) with my Art vs Artist (right)

Records show that the model was downloaded over 100 times afterwards. I have no idea how to track this. To see my illustration voice, that took my whole life to develop, plugged and automated into 0s and 1s is harrowing and a threat to my career, not to mention a slap in the face.

"AI art" isn't made by AI, it's built with theft, and it has serious creative limits

AI art is the subject en vogue right now, at least in the circles that I run. And it's a complex thing - the technology itself is really just an evolution of the same machine learning that shows you banner ads on websites or decides which YouTube videos to recommend, but because it's called "AI" - "artificial intelligence" people get suckered into all kinds of very bad arguments about the nature of creativity and what really counts as plagiarism.

The tl;dr is this: human minds do not run on binary code, and these machine learning models are not AI, they are machine learning models. They are built with untold gigabytes of training data, consisting of photos and artwork that was used without permission, and however you want to slice that, that is theft. Being machine learning, they inherit the biases and limitations of the data they're trained on, and that puts hard limits on how creative it is possible to be using these tools and introduces a massive trend towards homogenization and the lowest common denominator.

There's a much longer historical precedent for what these tools represent, though: AI art is a form of automation, and you can find a much longer discussion of what that means and what the consequences are...

Right here:

Art is already democratized, this is obvious, the vast majority of artists in this world are unskilled, and the vast majority of art in existence is amateur in nature. Unskilled people are making art already, this is just normal, I feel insane saying this out loud but I guess it needs to be said.

Image synthesis engines don't democratize artmaking, they just make unskilled art look superficially like mass-market slop. It is a bludgeoning of unskilled peer-focused communication into some distorted reflection of what Popular Art should look like. Please just look at the art your close friends make, the members of your community, whatever. It's good.

Best news I’ve heard in a long time!!! Read more about the lawsuit here.

Huge respect and gratitude to the team behind this, no matter what happens. But I do believe justice will prevail and we artists will win this fight!

Given my defenses of AI artists/dim view of the moral panic, I think overall people pushing back on this is a good thing.

Like, the sort of AI art I like is by small weirdos doing weirdo things not big megacorps using it to replace workers, and WotC and Hasbro are run by bastards who would probably salivate at the idea of replacing artists on MtG given they'd probably be the easiest ones to replace from a greedy-corporate-bastard view.

However, there's a souple of notes here I think we all should keep an eye on.

Namely, the fact that it was apparently from an artist using an AI tool that WotC didn't know about. Which, I think that's going to be a problem creators run into sooner or later with "AI bans"

Like, I get a lot of images for my photomanip stuff from Pixabay. And more and more I've been seeing a lot of AI art stuff as a part of it. How would those bans impact me if I; say; used them as an ingredient in a photomanip without knowing?

So, there's that. But there's also a disquieting possibility I've noticed.

Namely: Given the main fear about AI is that its ability to work quickly at volume might be used to push out traditional artists and their precision, what happens if corpos push for "the worst of both worlds"?

IE, what if; due to the expanded production speed of AI art; they mandate that creators work at speeds that can only be done if they use AI tools, but also end up forcing them to conceal and lie about it and leaving the artists to take the fall for using it rather than the corpos for pushing the culture of overwork that made it necessary?

TBH, I think that's why we need to focus less on the "stealing" argument being used as a way to talk about the destruction of the artistic ecosystem by mandated speed, and more the idea of the right of the artist to work at their own pace that might be able to do something about it.

But, IDK, that's just me, it's just something to watch out for.

there are a lot of well-meaning posts about AI art that get into this weird territory of delegitimizing modern or experimental art, just because the people saying them have some very specific conception of "true" or "real" art as born from the hands of a person starting on a completely blank workspace (like...is a collage "art"? what about cutting up existing film and dipping it in draino and then putting it back together with a copyrighted song distorted in the background...?)

so then you have actual artists challenging this idea of art "realness" because it skirts very close to or fully dismisses their work as legitimate, and then non-artists calling the artists anti-artist bootlickers...etc etc...but all of this is to say that arguments about what is "real" art have no answer and the actual problem here is that these technologies will be used (and have already been used) to lay off artists / designers / developers.

they are used to push out shoddy media and force more work onto understaffed teams, who have to babysit and correct glaringly obvious problems with AI models, characters, voices, backgrounds, scripts, dialogue, etc etc etc. and workers are not being paid in full as CREATORS but instead as "unskilled" "AI model supervisors" for a fraction of the cost and no proper credit for their experience, labor, and abilities

the problem is not and has never been "authenticity" in art, or about "consent" for someone's work to be cut up and used in another piece, or about "starting from scratch", it's the exploitation of entire fields of labor

how do you feel about AI art?

Dehumanization of art is absolutely bizarre for art is the most humane thing that exists.

What better way to vent about low-effort AI-generated artwork than with a low-effort shitpost?

real actual nonhostile question with a preamble: i think a lot of artists consider NN-generated images as an existential threat to their ability to use art as a tool to survive under capitalism, and it's frequently kind of disheartening to think about what this is going to do to artists who rely on commissions / freelance storyboarding / etc. i don't really care whether or not nn-generated images are "true art" because like, that's not really important or worth pursuing as a philosophical question, but i also don't understand how (under capitalism) the rise of it is anything except a bleak portent for the future of artists

thanks for asking! i feel like it's good addressing the idea of the existential threat, the fears and feelings that artists have as to being replaced are real, but personally i am cynical as to the extent that people make it out to be a threat. and also i wanna say my piece in defense of discussions about art and meaning.

the threat of automation, and implementation of technologies that make certain jobs obsolete is not something new at all in labor history and in art labor history. industrial printing, stock photography, art assets, cgi, digital art programs, etc, are all technologies that have cut down on the number of art jobs that weren't something you could cut corners and labor off at one point. so why do neural networks feel like more of a threat? one thing is that they do what the metaphorical "make an image" button that has been used countless times in arguments on digital art programs does, so if the fake button that was made up to win an argument on the validity of digital art exists, then what will become of digital art? so people panic.

but i think that we need to be realistic as to what neural net image generation does. no matter how insanely huge the data pool they pull from is, the medium is, in the simplest terms, limited as to the arrangement of pixels that are statistically likely to be together given certain keywords, and we only recognize the output as symbols because of pattern recognition. a neural net doesn't know about gestalt, visual appeal, continuity, form, composition, etc. there are whole areas of the art industry that ai art serves especially badly, like sequential arts, scientific illustration, drafting, graphic design, etc. and regardless, neural nets are tools. they need human oversight to work, and to deal with the products generated. and because of the medium's limitations and inherent jankiness, it's less work to hire a human professional to just do a full job than to try and wrangle a neural net.

as to the areas of the art industry that are at risk of losing job opportunities to ai like freelance illustration and concept art, they are seen as replaceable to an industry that already overworks, underpays, and treats them as disposable. with or without ai, artists work in precarized conditions without protections of organized labor, even moreso in case of freelancers. the fault is not of ai in itself, but in how it's yielded as a tool by capital to threaten workers. the current entertainment industry strikes are in part because of this, and if the new wga contract says anything, it's that a favorable outcome is possible. pressure capital to let go of the tools and question everyone who proposes increased copyright enforcement as the solution. intellectual property serves capital and not the working artist.

however, automation and ai implementation is not unique to the art industry. service jobs, manufacturing workers and many others are also at risk at losing out jobs to further automation due to capital's interest in maximizing profits at the cost of human lives, but you don't see as much online outrage because they are seen as unskilled and uncreative. the artist is seen as having a prestige position in society, if creativity is what makes us human, the artist symbolizes this belief - so if automation comes for the artist then people feel like all is lost. but art is an industry like any other and artists are not of more intrinsic value than any manual laborer. the prestige position of artist also makes artists act against class interest by cooperating with corporations and promoting ip law (which is a bad thing. take the shitshow of the music industry for example), and artists feel owed upward social mobility for the perceived merits of creativity and artistic genius.

as an artist and a marxist i say we need to exercise thinking about art, meaning and the role of the artist. the average prompt writer churning out big titty thomas kinkade paintings posting on twitter on how human made art will become obsolete doesnt know how to think about art. art isn't about making pretty pictures, but is about communication. the average fanartist underselling their work doesn't know that either. discussions on art and meaning may look circular and frustrating if you come in bad faith, but it's what exercises critical thinking and nuance.

[ID: screenshot of tags reblogged on my post

#art is intrinsically more valuable than menial work #so your point is moot #it's one thing to automate washing clothes or dangerous factory jobs and a whole other thing to automate human expression #what you're advocating for is the soul-sucking of art #for slop to replace creativity #and that is evil and soulless on the face of it

end ID]

you guys are beyond parody. artists are special workers the rest of proletariat should get ground down into dust by technology.

anti-AI hysteria is so funny because imagine thinking that "using external tools to help come up with ideas" is some kind of Hack Signifier. like imagine looking at someone using Oblique Strategies and going "you need a deck of cards to help you come up with ideas??? pathetic. you fucking hack fraud failure. MY amazing powerful brain is constantly generating amazing insights into the human spirit."

I didn't think if have to explain this, Human mediocrity is hundreds of times better then ANYTHING an AI could come up with.

love how ai art fans call real artists bourgeois. yeah im totally part of the upper ruling class that actively oppresses everyone below them because i said the fact you're automating the only job i can do with my disability, removing my only source of income, is a bad thing.