Disco Diffusion AI Art Prompt: "a beautiful painting of a pirate ship on a vivid sunlit ocean by Ivan Aivazovsky, J. M. W. Turner and Lisa Frank, naval, regency, trending on artstation, gay color scheme"

happy pride!

more gay boats here

more info about AI neural network art here

A city made out of stars in the Aurora Borealis - Midjourney

I told DALL-E to generate “Kaname Madoka playing piano” and it gave me its pitch for “why future Madoka installments should hire an AI to animate all the labyrinth scenes.”

Пускай праздничный день Светлой Пасхи дарует Вам великолепное здоровье. Радостных дней, спокойных ночей, непоколебимой веры и поддержки близких. С Великой Пасхой!

U-193-x-022 (redraw)

Sky Edwards

2020

Ballpoint on paper

420 x 594 mm

Midjourney gazed into my soul having just one sentence from me

Восхищаюсь*

One of the perennial problems with deep learning models like DALL-E is that if you train them too well, eventually they start precisely reproducing material from their training data set that just happens to match whatever criteria they’re given.

Given that these models are a. trained on random images scraped in bulk from the Internet, largely without human curation, and b. being touted as a potential substitute for human artists in certain commercial applications, I’m just waiting for the inevitable lawsuit where one of these models spits out an exact copy of some reasonably well-known piece of art, that copy is used in a commercial publication whose author is unaware of what the model has done, and some poor judge has to rule on whether an AI can commit plagiarism.

On the one hand, people who take a hardline stance on “AI art is not art” are clearly saying something naïve and indefensible (as though any process cannot be used to make art? as though artistry cannot still be involved in the set-up of the parameters and the choice of data set and the framing of the result? as though “AI” means any one thing? you’re going to have a real hard time with process music, poetry cut-up methods, &c.).

But all of this (as well as takes that what's really needed is a crackdown on IP) are a distraction from a vital issue—namely that this is technology used to create and sort enormous databases of images, and the uses to which this technology is put in a police state are obvious: it's used in service of surveillance, incarceration, criminalisation, and the furthering of violence against criminalised people.

Of course we've long known that datasets are not "neutral" and that racist data will provide racist outcomes, and we've long known that the problem goes beyond the datasets (even carefully vetting datasets does not necessarily control for social factors). With regards to "predictive policing," this suggests that criminalisation of supposed leftist "radicals" and racialised people (and the concepts creating these two groups overlap significantly; [link 1], [link 2]) is not a problem, but intentional—a process is built so that it always finds people "suspicious" or "guilty," but because it is based on an "algorithm" or "machine learning" or so-called "AI" (processes that people tend to understand murkily, if at all), they can be presented as innocent and neutral. These are things that have been brought up repeatedly with regards to "automatic" processes and things that trawl the web to produce large datasets in the recent past (e.g. facial recognition technology), so their almost complete absence from the discourse wrt "AI art" confuses me.

Abeba Birhane's thread here, summarizing this paper (h/t @thingsthatmakeyouacey) explains how the LAION-400M dataset was sourced/created, how it is filtered, and how images are retrieved from it (for this reason it's a good beginner explanation of what large-scale datasets and large neural networks are 'doing'). She goes into how racist, misogynistic, and sexually violent content is returned (and racist mis-categorisations are made) as a result of every one of those processes. She also brings up issues of privacy, how individuals' data is stored in datasets (even after the individual deletes it from where it was originally posted), and how it may be stored associated with metadata which the poster did not intend to make public. This paper (h/t thingsthatmakeyouacey [link]) looks at the ImageNet-ILSVRC-2012 dataset to discuss "the landscape of harm and threats both the society at large and individuals face due to uncritical and ill-considered dataset curation practices" including the inclusion of non-consensual pornography in the dataset.

Of course (again) this is nothing that hasn't already been happening with large social media websites or with "big data" (Birhane notes that "On the one hand LAION-400M has opened a door that allows us to get a glimpse into the world of large scale datasets; these kinds of datasets remain hidden inside BigTech corps"). And there's no un-creating the technology behind this—resistance will have to be directed towards demolishing the police / carceral / imperial state as a whole. But all criticism of "AI" art can't be dismissed as always revolving around an anti-intellectual lack of knowledge of art history or else a reactionary desire to strengthen IP law (as though that would ever benefit small creators at the expense of large corporations...).

Disco Diffusion Prompt: a beautiful painting of a ghostly Royal Navy sailing ship on a tumultuous stormy sea by Ivan Aivazovsky, J. M. W. Turner and Lisa Frank, naval, regency, trending on artstation, gay color scheme

more ai neural network art here

The Milky Way reflected in a lake - Midjourney

the death of cassandra jones

U-193-x-017 Sky Darcy Edwards 2020 Ballpoint on paper 290x200mm Catalogue #35, The End Was Nigh, Strange Festival 2022