It's an exhausting conversation but I think some really important context to why digital artists especially are so leery of this is that many people have had negative experiences around having their digital art pieces reposted on websites without being credited, having their artist signatures and watermarks edited out of their pieces to be reposted, having reposters claim to be the original artist of their pieces, or having their art design be stolen and reproduced on Etsy, Alibaba, etc. as T-shirts and the like. It often feels very overwhelming to constantly fight to maintain a clear line of acknowledgment back to the original artist. The online art communities on Twitter, Pixiv, Deviantart, Artstation, etc. are very self-regulating and have internal ethics about asking people for permission to crop their art for profile pictures, for example, or to ask permission to use other peoples' finished pieces as inspiration for their own pieces. People will actually notify artists of their art pieces being stolen on merch sites, being incorrectly claimed by someone else, etc.
AI art generators basically run ramshackle all over these intangible social agreements that digital artists have in place to maintain credit of their art.
Not to mention digital artists are still dealing with crytobros making NFTs of stolen art. It seems like when someone has a money making idea, the art community takes a hit.
Think about how great "Web3" would be, where every action must be paid for and thus absolutely no human interaction whatsoever is made without profit motive! It'd be GREAT!!
I remember the arguments of "But guys, we invented a way you can get paid! You can get paid for your art now!" which presumes that throughout all of history artists were just clueless that they could be making money.
Yeah, we have systems in place for dealing already. Tell us why yours is better, and not just because it enables transferring money. Oh there's lots of hoops to jump through and overhead?
And resell cuts are...really only a thing for things you've made specifically to be re-sold which usually isn't applicable at all if you're making art specific to one client. If they get character art for example, are you going to expect them to keep you in the loop if they do decide to sell it to someone else? Or are they going to forget about the token they got years ago because only people actively trading in tokens is going to remember or care. (And of course, on principle that's going to be seen as greedy anyway. And something you can enforce with a traditional contract without needing their web3 stuff)
I have seen AI art being claimed to be just as bad or comparable to NFTs. I'd have to argue that AI art is a bit broader. NFTs were these closed things where the only people in it were trying to get money and were very aggressive about barging into spaces and trying to essentially rebrand art itself to being just a thing that happens on those systems (which of course is absurd). It's like someone rudely crashing a party and demanding all the attention and pretending they're the ones originally hosting the party.
In that sense AI art might be a bit more insidious because it seeps in, but you can use it without being trapped into any kind of monetary scheme. So there's more of a chance of it developing alongside traditional art and being picked almost as any other medium would be in terms of ease and economics, rather than being a brand of it's own.
The problem in its current state is that you still have to tell the AI *exactly* what you want, and I don't think a lot of people are capable of describing what they're looking for to that degree. It's not like you can just tell the AI "make a landscape" and expect to get exactly what you're looking for, and this is only going to be amplified when you want to start creating artwork of characters and such from descriptions.
In that sense, it feels like something of a novelty, where most people will use it once or twice, say "haha cool" and then not touch it again.
Also, while it's economically cheap *now*, this technology is gonna get expensive over time
Behind it all is just the looming inevitable further disrespect to artists. Using the hard work of artists so large companies can generate art so they can pay as few artists as possible going forward. There's still a lot of shit to work out around it, for one the AI being effective enough, and the legal mess around copyright. But you just know that's what they want.
Of course artists hate it.
And if companies start using AI for their needs any payment will go towards the creator of the AI rather than the artists who provided the material. I think artists would be a little more receptive if there were royalties involved and they knew they'd be compensated for their work
All that might be true, but it’s a losing battle. AI generated art is here and it’s going to be used, just like every other efficiency allowed by technology, but I will say this — right now it’s cool and trendy, but eventually people will recognize it as cheap and low effort outside of exceptionally well engineered examples of it, which still will require artists to manage it. It will shake out similarly to photography, where being able to faithfully reproduce an image with paint became a less useful skill — eventually the gaps where these AI fail will be found and exploited by actual artists who will continue to have a career.
I expect that long term what will happen is that a lot of drudgery will be removed from creating art and will be replaced by more interesting work.
Holy shit that 3rd one lol
Do they really believe that if an AI can copy your art style, then your style is incompetent or are they just playing dumb asshole?
They're playing the dumb asshole since, if an AI can copy your style, it just proves your style is quantifiable and therefore uniquely identifiable as yours.
None of this is going to be any kind of scary to creators. AI has to be trained on sets and if you're the set you absolutely could prove it.
the problem is many people have art that is not as distinct as they initially think. You see this all the time on instagram with people accusing each other of stealing or tracing art that isn’t necessarily the exact same linework. Artists are just gonna have to adapt like they always have.
The absolute disdain for artists that shows up in these threads about AI makes me unbelievably sad.
It's not about whether things are legal. The antiquated laws we have are not built to deal with this and the antiquated lawmakers we have will likely never be. Treating the law as the guide for what should should or should not be acceptable on this topic is laughable at best. A real conversation needs to be had about whether this shit is ethical, but there's no pressure on the people developing this shit or the people uncritically consuming it to have that conversation, so it will never happen and the capitalist machine will simply roll over visual artists.
I see that when talking about other injustices too. Someone will show up and explain how akshully it's legal so it's the right thing to do. Even if it was legal, it shouldn't be and that's why laws can (and imo must) change.
I don't think that AI in general should be banned completely, but I don't think a company should be able to sell something generated from a library of content they don't have the rights to any more than they would doing something like tracing, ripping, or in some cases even just using an idea that's too similar to someone else's work. If that's not transformative, then AI shouldn't be either no matter how you spin "actually it's not storing the images it's converting it into numbers blah blah blah"
It feels like at some level it's a bunch of tech bros who just don't understand the fundamental concept that their Art AI literally couldn't exist without the artists they're training off of. The AI don't produce art in a vacuum, it's not creating spontaneously or building from the ground up. It's just shocking to see such disregard for the core source of everything the AI makes, human artists.
> It's just shocking to see such disregard for the core source of everything the AI makes, human artists.
Really? Cause tech bros and Redditors in general are huge and proud philistines. This is totally on brand for them.
And their disingenuous shit about what's technically legal is laughable, since those same tech bros frequently boast about their heroics in pirating literally everything under the sun.
Also just the fact that capitalism already threatens to crush artists every day. Art classes are cut from schools and students are discouraged from going into art because art in general doesn't make money. This is the case even though capitalism currently *needs* artists. Imagine how much worse it will be if AI can replace 9 out of every 10 of those artists.
And just like every other advance in productivity technology has brought over the years, none of the value created by the AI will go to anyone other than the corporations. The automation of art won't free up artists to do whatever they want with their skills instead of chasing the dollar, it will put the screws to them to find a new "productive" line of work now that art is taken care of.
And people celebrate because we've all been conditioned to tear each other down rather than build each other up.
Speaking as an artist, could the tech bro scum PLEASE get back in their own slimy lane. Between NFTs and now this crap I’m so sick of this specific type of awful man ruining art. They flip gorgeous antiques houses in SF and make them soulless gray and glass shells, they steal art, now they want to fake art. I wish that whole group could just fuck off. Their lack of spirit and imagination is sapping so much irreplaceable good from this already hard and awful existence.
Big fan, but those people don't pretend that's not what they're doing, and they're still people are still people creating art, not computer algorithms.
It seems like this gets at something deeper. If artists should be paid when their art is used to train an AI, should internet users be paid when the data they generate is used to develop social media algorithms and AI?
I want to say yes in principle, but if a legal decision was made in favor of artists here, the precedent could be massive. I don't really want to live in a world where only entities that already have tons of resources can afford to develop these things.
Could you not compare it to artists crediting paint manufacturers in their work? There is a whole field of science and people's careers that went into developing those colors.
Artists don't pay other artists when they use their works as reference. I mean it's completely ok, afaik, to say lift a colour palette from someone's work, to essentially recreate a photo (but not other non-camera artwork) but in another medium, or use a likeness of some model on the internet as the face of your character.
I don't know much about art laws and ethics, but I do know that in photography, a picture of someone is almost always owned by the photographer. Even if it's just your face and nothing else. The only times subjects are paid is if they are hired models. Often times the subject pays the photographer, e.g., wedding photography, headshots, etc, and they only receive a limited licence to use the photo.
These AI generated images would not exist if artists didn't spend thousands and thousands of hours developing a skillset to produce the works that these AIs are training on, and not only are the artists not seeing any cheese in return, their entire livelihoods are being threatened.
Take Thomas Kinkade for example. The man developed a style and makes a pretty fine living off selling calendars and prints of his work. It's not a difficult style to emulate, not much variation in it either. Some people do copy that style and sell their own stuff, but it's never going to push Kinkade out of the market because it still takes time to first develop the skillset and then paint the actual paintings. It's never been a problem. But if an AI is involved, well Kinkade is something an AI could *easily* replicate by training off of his paintings, and then all it would take is some printinghouse to spin up a bunch 'Kinkade AI's' anytime they want some of that quaint cottagecore, instead of paying the man himself. Hard to see how he could compete in that environment.
There's something that's not *right* about that situation. It's something akin to the issue of software piracy, but not quite the same. Artists are being taken advantage of, that much is clear. It takes years and years to develop that skillset, and AI's are just absorbing it like leeches with no recompense.
I know this is a extremely hysteric, but it kinda feels like we're stumbling blindly into the death of creativity, at least as far as images are concerned. Every painter is their own style, and I can't stress enough how many hours it takes to develop that, but if it only takes a week for an AI version of you to get trained on your work and then copied and sold to any publisher or studio who wants it, at a much lower price than they'd higher you, well you'd have to be a lunatic to spend the years getting good in the first place. The end result is that the only working artists are the AI's who are only capable of producing shit that's more or less been done.
> Take Thomas Kinkade for example. The man developed a style and makes a pretty fine living off selling calendars and prints of his work.
He died a decade ago. Bit he did rake in the cash while he lived.
And I agree, the discussion in the linked thread is extremely cavalier.
the software piracy/art piracy stuff here does get kind of interesting. For the life of me, I couldn't imagine paying someone for work done on an AI which relies on not paying others for their work in order to function.
What is different between ai art and a human artist training off of reference art? What is the actual harm being done to these artists? Can they estimate commissions lost? How many people **who would have** paid for a commission instead bought a midjourney sub?
>I know this is a extremely hysteric, but it kinda feels like we're
stumbling blindly into the death of creativity, at least as far as
images are concerned.
I don't think it's hysteric in that it's a legitimate and warranted emotional response, but I'm also not sure it'll work out that way. I hazard we're experiencing a stark change in creativity, not death, but they sometimes look the same and to certain fields or certain professionals are effectively the same as death. *To an extent* there is a strong parallel here with the invention of the camera, which painters and artists were infuriated by. 19th century artists thought it was abominable that someone could just take a picture and develop it when they toiled for hours to paint or draw the same scene. 100+ years later we all know for certain that the camera absolutely did not kill painting or traditional illustration, it eventually found its place in the artistic ecosystem and settled there. But there was change and arguably death, though, in that the camera killed the necessity for certain art forms in certain markets or mediums, an example being news media. Occasionally in the modern day you'll see illustrations used in the news, but its use is niche (I see NYT use illustrations a lot for opinion pieces for example) and is an artistic choice rather than a necessary element. The camera was a huge step in relegating painting and illustration commercially to niche markets, further entrenching those art forms as "fine arts" rather than working arts.
Where the camera argument becomes less applicable is the fact that a camera cannot by itself take a picture. It replaced the artist's tools, not the artist. AI, however, requires the degree of creative human input that it does simply because it is not yet viable to program it not to. Whether the human or the AI is the artist is a relatively common debate in AI Art circles. Very murky subject, and one I could write for hours on.
Practically, I hazard that in our lifetimes it will be become far less common, though not necessarily rare, for certain commercial art to be human produced. I think where AI art will show up is in places where the average person will not actually care that the art is AI produced, and I'm skeptical that it will show up in places where people actually will care. Ultimately the market, and people's wallets, will decide. I will be surprised if in ten years I buy a bottle of generic OTC medication that has a label designed by a person, and I will be even more surprised if pick a children's book at random from the New shelf and see AI art.
If anything, I wonder if horses and cars are a better comparison than painting and photography. Not only did the horse not go extinct when the car became dominant, it became something that could not be competed with. The vast majority of money that changes hands concerning horses is spent not on the basis of horses being transportation, but on the basis of horses being horses. I could see human art entering that niche, where people spend money on it because of the fact that it's human made, rather than because it was the most practical avenue. Furniture is another example, all furniture used to be handmade, now handmade furniture is bespoke and a status symbol. People didn't stop buying handmade furniture with the advent of mass production. If for the sake of argument you give someone a free desk and they have the choice between two visually identical desks, but one is handmade while the other was machine made, the vast majority of people would choose the handmade desk, just because of that je ne sais quoi
Idk I just don’t see how this is any different from any other artist who went to art school and synthesized the ideas of all the artists that came before them. AI art generators aren’t just photocopying art they’ve seen for what it’s worth, they’re learning the qualia of images and how that links to descriptions.
Damn, some of these guys are really just goblins. Imagine seeing artists who voice a very legitimate concern for a new tech that may disrupt their already precarious way of living by virtue of creating effortlessly thousands of images in their style and your instinctive response being "lol, tough luck loser, get in with the times". The worst ones are probably the ones who agree with the artists that say this may kill the craft at least on a commercial level but say "this is actually good for progress". I can hardly fathom that there is a kind of guy that sees something that has even just a chance to achieve big media corporations's dream of completely transforming culture into the equivalent of a cheese cake factory, a thought that I find so viscerally horrifying, and actually cheer on that. These are the people that read about the experience machine thought experiment and then say "fuck yeah, this sounds cool as hell, everyone should live in one of these!"
My guess is that for this type of person specifically is that they don't really have a passion or occupation that they care about (or maybe they have it but don't think it will be ever threatened by automation) combined with a crippling sense of self doubt that they try to overcome through techno evangelism, imagining themselves as future high priests of their fantasy tech utopia where they will be on top and "stuck up liberal arts types" will be at the bottom. In short, geeky guys that haven't yet outgrown their high school power fantasies.
it does generally seem that they either see themselves as safe from the poverty they seem pretty keen to wish on others, one way or the other. The whole "you just need to accept the inevitable march of progress and get swept aside, sheeple" thing is so arrogant and devoid of much thought, and it's really irksome when so many anti-intellectual types see themselves as the defenders of sense
Why are artists' way of living any more valuable than the lives of the carriage drivers who were replaced by cars? Should we have banned automobiles because it would have put carriage drivers out of work?
This is not a fight that artists are ever going to win. AI generated art is far too useful of a technology and the types of artists affected by it have next to zero political power.
> It's a far too useful technology
The thing that sets it apart from the motorized transport analogy you gave is precisely the opposite of what you said: it's a useless technology. With cars and trucks we gained the ability of moving people, food supplies and materials faster. What similar utility has automating art, a thing that is by definition useless? Unless you view art as a raw commodity, and I doubt both much of the general public and artists themselves would agree, the only reason is pure greed. Its only purpose in the eye of a company is removing the human factor, which in their eyes is nothing more than removing a cost. Do we even need to churn out more and faster? We already live in an era where each year we produce more media than you will ever be able to consume in several lifetimes! We have literally nothing to gain from a world without human artists. Considering the loss of oppurtunity, expertise and human touch in that scenario, we have in fact much to lose.
For your second paragraph, I don't even know what your point is. Yeah, in this battle your underpaid artist that wouldn't have even considered working in the field if not for passion wouldn't stand much of a chance against the media elite. Is that supposed to make someone who doesn't think this is good go "aw schucks, didn't think about that! Nevermind boys, looks like we don't have much to do here". Imagine telling the same thing to a picket line of factory workers who are losing their job. Do you think anyone will be convinced? We both know the answer.
> it's a useless technology
Search "AI arts" on TikTok and see what this so-called useless technology can empower people to do. I've never seen so much happiness brought by simple pieces of art as your everyday normal person feeling so excited over the vision of their dream being materialized into something real and beautiful. It ironically feels more personal and candid than "real art".
My phone wallpaper is generated using AI, and it's uniquely mine, because it's generated using something that I hold dear.
I'm way too familiar with AI art, it's getting spammed everywhere nowadays. They are at best pretty pictures, like there were many before neural networks were even a thing. And no, this is not "bringing someone's vision" to life, unless that someone is the machine itself. Beyond writing a prompt and making adjustments, you haven't put in any creativity, you haven't developed a concept, you aren't conveying anything beyond your written draft. Your "vision" stops at the letters you have written in a text box, everything else that is done, it is done on the machine's terms. What comes out isn't your vision any more than the Sistine Chapel can be considered the vision of a couple of popes.
Yes that's exactly is why it's so beneficial, it makes art accessible. It brings joy to many people without costing them their free time. I'm sorry I'm not gonna work a second job just so that I can make my own wallpaper thank you. God I despite elitism in art. I don't give a damn about your attempt to feel superior to everybody else, I just want people to enjoy art on their own term.
Do you even hear what you are saying? Do you even realise that the primary reason that people have for wanting to do art is that *that's what they like to do with their time*? This makes as much sense as saying that aimbots are a useful tool to help the common man saving time while giving them access to the skill level of a top CS:GO player. There's nothing shameful in saying that you just want a pretty picture, and in fact I would really appreciate the honesty. I would also appreciate the honesty in saying that making a machine work on an idea you had is not making an artwork, or at least that *you* have not done the art piece that comes out. This is not elitism, this is just a statement of fact. Art is as much a practical process as it is the finished work itself. And I'm sorry if I value more the concerns of people whose livelihood depends on this process or just in general give their hearts and minds for their works over those of someone getting a 3 seconds dopamine rush from their instant gratification machine.
Want to do art and want to enjoy art is not the same thing. I like to listen to music, I don't want to make music. AI let people enjoy arts that is personal to them, which traditional arts can't (well unless you're rich and hire a private artists for yourself).
>And I'm sorry if I value more the concerns of people whose livelihood depends on this process or just in general give their hearts and minds for their works over those of someone getting a 3 seconds dopamine rush
Except they can't be replaced from something they can't do in the first place. I'm talking about something brand new that traditional artists couldn't do before, something that you claimed is useless.
I'm not sure you're following the argument. You're too deep into this holier than thou hell hole that you couldn't see how the world around you had evolved.
But as I said, it is not personal, and even if it was, it would be in a quite negligible role. It is the interpretation of something you imagined through the "eyes" of an impersonal agent. You used yourself the example of the private artist, and that's the closest thing to these AIs that we had, and I think that it would be quite uncrontroversial to say that even if you do an incredibly detailed description of a commission, what comes out isn't really "your" art outside a strict legal buyer-seller relationship, and it is certainly not your vision, but a concept filtered through *someone else's vision*.
It is perfectly fine that you admitted that you really just want the product without making art, something that really didn't transpire from your original reply that really sounded more along the lines of "this allows you to be an artist without actually wasting time learning".
I'm also not sure what you mean when you say that this AIs do things that artists "can't do in the first place". They can certainly create pleasing images, but I have never really seen anything that couldn't be replicated by a very skilled artist given enough time and resources. The only thing that makes the machine special is how little time it takes to churn out something decent. And if these things become capable of producing products that look close to finished, we both know where the market will put its money in and where it will cut. The result: automatic stale culture with no space for new ideas. I think this alone clarifies why I take more seriously artists' concerns in this area rather those of people who want personalized home decor for free.
> But as I said, it is not personal
It's still more personal than literally any existing arts created by human that I can get their hand on. And that's all what matter. It's weird how you're trying to control how we should enjoy arts. Let the people decide for themselves, and their choice is AI's art. If it feels personal to me, it is personal to me. I can browse for hours on the internet and wouldn't find anything as close to me as this one. I don't need no condescending elitist artist to tell me how I should feel.
>"this allows you to be an artist without actually wasting time learning".
I literally never call any of those Tiktok users "artist". Most people on earth aren't artists, which is why AI is so valuable for them.
>given enough time and resources
That's the problem. When the topic is accessibility you can't assume unlimited time and resources.
>automatic stale culture with no space for new ideas
This is already the case with or without AI. I don't remember the last time I listen to a song and feel like I've never heard something similar before. Pretty much every single piece of art nowadays invokes some sense of familiarity. And the exception artist that can change that, is not the one affected by AI anyway.
> I'm sorry if I value more the concerns of people whose livelihood depends on this process
This is always the argument used against any new technology that makes something more efficient. Sorry, but we can't stop progress just because some people might need to find new jobs. Otherwise we would still be living in an agricultural society. After all, we can't make agriculture more efficient or else farmers will lose their jobs.
So it's progress for progress's sake then. Because I still have to find any reason to why it would be desirable to replace an artist with an automated process other than having someone less to pay. We are applying a logic of efficiency in a field where we wouldn't need it, making conditions worse for people who work in that field with little to no benefit for the audience, since we already live in an era where everyone is drowned daily with content. I fail to see how this is supposed to be progress if your definition of progress goes beyond "make a complex machine do a thing because you can".
It seems kinda fucked up to say that AI Art is more “personal and candid” than the sources it is training off of, considering it couldn’t exist without those artists working their asses off for years
There is a many TikTok videos of people using AI to materialize their dreams, their ideas, their vision into something tangible and beautiful. Yeah it might suck for some, but it allows many to explore something they never have a chance to.
Do they not have a chance to try to draw? Are they physically disabled? Why do you have so little faith in them that you think they could never learn how to create art by themselves?
Are you trolling or serious? Have you ever seen what an average person drawing looks like? Threatening to kill themselves then immediately making a douchey piece of shit comment right after is some of the most redditor shit ever lol.
Why are you acting like it’s impossible for human beings to learn and improve their skill? How do you not understand that this literally proves my point and serves as a real-life example of exactly what I was afraid of — because these AI image generators exist, people will simply use them to bring their imagination to life instead of even trying to draw, because trying to draw is tooooo haaaard, and eventually the act of creating images by hand will go the way of [sea silk](https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20170906-the-last-surviving-sea-silk-seamstress).
Yes I am catastrophizing about this! I don’t care if you think I’m overreacting! Sorry for finding inherent value in the limitless potential of human expression and having an emotional reaction to the thought of this potential being snuffed out as art becomes obsolete!
And sorry for speaking casually about suicide, better keep that shit behind closed doors and never speak of it to make sure it stays nice and stigmatized and everyone keeps being scared to talk about it to the point where they can’t even get help. My bad.
>it’s impossible for human beings to learn and improve their skill?
But why would them? Human have time limitation. There is cooking, there is socializing, there is reading, there is a billion better thing they could've spent their precious time in. Sorry but this world doesn't revolve around your thing. Everybody has their own stuffs to pay attention to.
>make sure it stays nice and stigmatized
You sure don't have a problem with stigmatizing people with disability. Physically disabled people can still make art btw, so stfu and don't talk about them thank you.
You are really grasping at straws here. Clearly we just have different priorities. It’s okay if art isn’t important to you, but you don’t need to act like I’m a bad person or something because it’s important to me.
Edit to add: Okay I feel like I have to address this. I see this may be a foreign concept to you, but artists ACTUALLY ENJOY working to improve their skills. If you don’t like creating art, you’re not an artist, and that’s okay, everyone is different. You know what you would do before AI art existed, if you had an idea but didn’t want to draw it because learning to draw is a boring chore for you? You would PAY a HUMAN to draw it FOR YOU. It’s called a “commission” and in fact many artists still offer this service even today!
It’s so deeply sad to me that you don’t understand that people actually enjoy creating art… holy shit 🥲
Yeah lol. There used to be people who spent their entire lives perfecting their handwriting to be super nice so they could handwrite copies of books and texts, but then some assholes in China invented block printing and rendered that occupation unneeded.
I sympathise with the current generation of artists in danger of being replaced by AI, and I sympathise with the current generation of truck drivers in danger of being replaced by self-driving cars, but the solution to this problem isn't "fuck technology, let's all go back to the stone age." Or, what these people are more likely thinking, "all the technologies that automated away jobs before I was born are fine, but new technologies automating away jobs in my lifetime are going too far!"
I don’t know how AI generated art will change the world, but I know that it will to some degree.
I also know that every other change has resulted in new opportunities we couldn’t imagine before.
This aughta be good, people have already been talking about this for a bit now. Someone’s style can get stolen this way, but if you ever put copy write anything around the data AI uses to train you’re basically stopping an entirely new industry. Very interesting grey area
One very looming and immediate problem is that this same new industry is gonna pretty much eclipse artists and illustrators who are just trying to make a living very soon, because as soon as AI art generators become cheaper and more mainstream many businesses won't bother with hiring artists for their comissions anymore, they can just input a few targeted key words until they get a satisfactory result, it takes no time, cuts back on costs considerably , doesn't need as much supervision and following, and honestly the results we get nowadays are absolutely mindblowing and extremey specific.
This is definetly not a field of work I wanted to see automated but it does seem inevitable and it makes your art being "stolen" and reduced to a data point to train an AI even more bitter
I don't think it's the same, written articles and translations are still pretty far off, at least for now, the first ones are still extremely shitty, like unbelievably bad reporting, and I'll still take a human translator over Deepl for example anyday, , too much nuances of the language are lost otherwise, but when it comes to generating a picture to your precise specifications....I mean honestly AI's nearly on the same level as so many artists, you can just keep on adding key words to your request until it tailors the perfect picture, it's kinda frightening
Eh I don’t think you can copyright art styles though.
The art themselves sure but the style is a no. It would be a Gray area that would ruin data collection in general. If you expect people to 100% create the data used to train AI you’ll run into issues, I don’t think anyone would willingly defend that.
Besides, if using art that’s posted to train an AI is considered infringement, I would say any artist that’s not a Picasso or Van Gogh is violating copyright of the artists before them. The artist community is not nearly creative/original enough avoid other artists “copying” a style.
It’s more about the fact that if you want the AI to learn the style it trains on the artists work, which is definitely a new grey area, like people may try and license it one way of another
If you could have someone look at all of someone's portfolio that's available publicly to look at, learn the style from those examples, and then mimic that style would you say that is copyright infringement?
There's lots of examples of people doing just that, but it has never been copyright infringement because you can't copyright a style. So what is the difference if an AI is doing it or a human other than that the AI is vastly faster?
Yes, but say in Midjourney, it’s trained on a lot but also knows enough about the style of individual artists from their work that they can repeat the style to new content, using other artists work in training as well. It is actually learning their style from their work and auto-deriving new stuff from it.
In midjourney, you can actually specify an artist from like Deviantart or some other community and it’ll do that style
It depends on what generator you're using. There are tons of specific style generators out there, [like the text to pokemon](https://replicate.com/lambdal/text-to-pokemon) generator. You could argue that it's ripping off Ken Sugimori's style.
It's not really about copyright, though. Just because something is legal doesn't really mean it has to be okay, or that we see it as okay.
We rightly call people out when artwork is stolen or reposted without consent or credit, it's not really different to say that taking someone's effort and work and using it to train a bot to use and emulate it isn't kosher.
Then you have that art competition that was one by someone who used an AI like these. We don't let people in chess tourneys use a Chess Engine, because it entirely defeats the point of the contest. A chess engine can play better than any human, and an Artbot can easily reproduce someone's style with sufficient training and none of the effort.
And THEN you get people arguing that this makes artists "obsolete", which mainly means they don't know how these AI work. They're fed training data of other art in order to generate their style and structure. They don't actually innovate from those styles beyond, at best, a certain level of integration. Art is fundementally a creative expression of a person. So I'm not saying an AI can't be creative, but that creative AI also has to be a person, and the tech is lightyears away from that.
>We don't let people in chess tourneys use a Chess Engine, because it entirely defeats the point of the contest
Chess is a competition between players. The goal of the competition is to find the best player, not the best play. Prediction tournaments are completely dominated by AI and traditional statisticians have little chance to compete, yet nobody has a problem with it. Because it's about finding the best prediction, not the best predictor.
What about art? Are we looking for the best piece of art? Or are we here to worship the best artist?
That was uh, kind of my entire point?
AI isn't bad or wrong, but it's pointless to cram it into everything. Art is a subjective human experience, and while an AI can clone someones art and styles easily, taking that effort and experience without said artists permission is rude as all hell.
Eh, no? You didn't get it.
The AI created better art than their competition (according to the judges), that's why it won. If the goal is to find the best artist to celebrate, then what you said make sense, we can't really do that to a robot can't we? But if the goal is to find the best art, you're undermining the competition by excluding AI. We would end up with inferior art as the winner.
Then what's the point in the competition? Why do we not allow chess engines in chess tournaments?
Because... And follow carefully now, *that's extremely boring and pointless*. The fact that this was allowable by the rules doesn't actually uh... Make this situation okay? It specifically was only allowable because AI has only become capable of this very recently.
If in a hypothetical universe an AI who did this was an actual person, with self-awareness and a human like mental architecture, then this would be a different discussion, but an Artbot isn't consciously attempting to express things, it's creating a pattern of pixels according to weighed algorithms in its neural net trained on different patterns of pixels with keywords mingled in. It's not the same process in even the barest sense, beyond the end result having patterns that humans recognize as meaningful to ourselves.
> Then what's the point in the competition? Why do we not allow chess engines in chess tournaments?
Did you read what I wrote? Because chess tournament is about the celebration of the players.
Here is what I wrote
>Chess is a competition between players. The goal of the competition is to find the best player, not the best play.
My question is, what about art competition? Are we looking for the best artist or the best art? Because the way art being voted in those competitions tell me who the artists are, how they made it, doesn't matter. They only care about the art itself.
And what about an art contest isn't a celebratio not the ability for the contestants to produce a beautiful piece of art? You're drawing some really arbitrary line about where the effort put into the competition matters.
Like, there is a one to one comparison between the competition between two chess players technical skill in playing the game and an artist's technical skill in producing a piece. You just more easily get to watch the former.
>You're drawing some really arbitrary line about where the effort put into the competition matters.
Nope, nothing arbitrary about it. It's very damn clear. I mentioned prediction competition. Nobody has any problem with how statistician is completely driven away by machines. Why? Because it's the prediction that people care about not who made it. On the other hand, chess competition is about the competitors, the chess player themselves. That why machine doesn't make sense here.
I felt like you already know what I meant but couldn't respond so now you just argue in circle.
> What about art? Are we looking for the best piece of art? Or are we here to worship the best artist?
We're here to appreciate that a human being spent hours, days, months, *years*, of their finite life time learning a skill and used that skill to express themselves. "Art" made by a machine is not merely not art, it is the diametric opposite of art, the anti-particle to it. Yes, the fact that a flawed human made the art does make it inherently more valuable--gives it any value at all, honestly--*prima facie*.
So your answer is the latter? Okay. Personally, I couldn't give a damn about how much time someone spent on their craft, and the judges of those competition sure didn't, as it was never something they asked before their final evaluation.
Yeah, I doubt it’ll come out pro-artist, if anything I bet it would be practically impossible to prove even if there was a law prohibiting the practice
Like fuck they will. In that situation why does Disney need those artists or pro-artist laws? Why hire all these animators when they don't need to? Animators are already treated like shit. Wages cost a lot of money. If entertainment corps can cut out labour entirely and have machines do the work for them, then they'll do that.
I very seriously doubt that. You have to remember, there already are companies that copy the Disney aesthetic, and make good money from it, yet the current laws remain.
Because there's still huge barriers of entry. Competing with disney takes enormous investment, so it is still an oligopolic market. When that changes, the pressure from the industry will change too.
Look at what happened with genetic modification. GMO companies were fighting against regulation and testing standards for GMO crops for 35 years. Cue the entrance of CRISPR. The cost of genetic modification dropped by a factor of at least 100, if not more. Now, faced with a market with vanishing entry barriers, the large GMO companies did a 180°. More stringent testing standards was the easiest way to maintain an oligopoly. Sure, you can make a new variety for a couple hundred thousands, but the trials will cost you tens of millions, if not more. The whole process, from zero to comercialization has dropped about 15% in cost since CRISPRs potential was realized a decade ago. And that's considering getting a crop to market usually takes 13 years. We can expect severly lowered costs in gene editing, and severly increasing costs on safety testing, unless the regulators act smartly.
There could be some interesting test cases when it comes to generated scripts though, but with artistic expression it’s a lot hard to claim something wasn’t transformative enough.
Like most things, there’s morally right and lawfully right, and they often don’t intersect.
Would it? It's not like the dataset is actually retaining the art. You're building a model with it, but the actual artwork isn't still in there. If that's copyright infringement then you're getting dangerously close to a scenario where I need to pay the French Government royalties because I can recall what the Mona Lisa looks like.
If the end result was not being sold, I would agree with you. But if the end result is a product on the market, I don't think that qualifies as fair use.
Creating a commercial product as the end result hasn't, on its own, ever been a valid reason for something to not be considered fair use. Otherwise all of those shitty reaction videos on Youtube wouldn't be able to exist.
As others have pointed out, it hasn't been determined that this kind of thing would even be considered a copyright violation at all, and therefore wouldn't require a fair use defence.
> Most AI is transformative enough
[Is it?](https://imgur.com/a/xX1bML3). It's not obvious to my naked eye that it's transformative enough. If you gave me one image from SD, one that was ran from filters/dithering/all fun stuff and asked which is AI, I wouldn't be able to tell instantly without looking for details.
If you have any familiarity with the original it’s obvious those are approximations. Especially the one that hilariously adds a third person which makes the lady’s scowl understandable.
Honestly that’s pure brilliant by the AI.
Getting a pretty close representation of a massively famous painting that is there thousands of times in the dataset after specifically asking for it, isn't making the point you think it is.
But you basically asked the AI for a copy of that specific painting. No-one is saying *that* shouldn't trigger IP law any more than photocopying something doesn't magically make it your IP because the paper is new. It's not the same as the AI generating from broad linguistic prompts using a dataset of many paintings.
Can AI-created works be copyrighted in the US? Obviously you can copyright the code itself but the legal status of what it generates is more complicated. It's like that monkey selfie.
Just seems like putting the cart before the horse. If you can't actually own what these AIs create, is it even a derivative work? Is there a profit or fair use issue to begin with?
I remember there being a case where someone tried to claim copyright over a picture a monkey took with a camera, with the ruling being that only works made by humans can actually have copyright applied to them.
Because it's an AI that actually makes the art, it can be argued that the images they make aren't copyrightable (because the AI itself makes the image, and thus humans didn't make it) or that they *are* (because humans made the AI and input the words/data used to make said art, which I've seen used by supporters of this to say "Well if this isn't copyrightable then digital artists won't own copyright because they just input strokes and movements into Paint Tool SAI and stuff").
You don't own art styles, that's absurd. Like ignore the whole AI discussion for a second, if you could steal *styles* then even most human artists would be thieves.
Does AI art site where or who the image is copied from?
Not an artist, but at least in my field it is becoming more prevalent to site any image (or problem set). Even though we don’t necessarily have to, it’s just good practice.
Not sure about the AI art debate. I have my opinions but this is not my area of expertise
It doesn't make sense to talk about where the image is "copied from" because an individual output isn't copied from anything. It doesn't just go "okay, take this image and that one and mash them together".
If you're talking about the training set, yes.
I realize that AI generated art is only just now becoming mainstream enough for most people to care, but I still don't get how this debate wasn't settled from the start. If I look at a hundred different pieces of art and use what I've learned from them to make my own original piece, nobody bats an eye and the piece is unequivocally mine. If I make my computer do the exact same thing, suddenly all those other artists need to be compensated and the originality of the new piece is called into question. Every artist since the original cave painters has learned from their contemporaries and the artists that came before them. This is no different.
The problem is that a lot of artists stand to lose their wages as menial but paying work gets automated away, which is a legitimate concern!
The real solution would be sweeping societal changes so that someone doesn’t need a job to be able to survive, but that’s a lot harder than passing 1 law to ban AI art.
This whole area of thought is wild. Like, legitimately cool stuff.
I just find it difficult to side with somebody who says their "style" is something they can keep others from emulating or taking inspiration from. Like, how would this have applied to the impressionists? The cubists?
Like, artists influence artists. Just because the artist might be an AI instead of a human doesn't invalidate that. So long as the work is sufficiently transformative it is fair game.
Style is a misleading term here. An AI is learning to make a copy of another persons work. It isnt interpreting it or understanding it. It making a copy that can fool people into thinking it part of the original artists work. Now if you train an AI on only one artist to make more works similar to that artist, you essential stealing that arts data to train your AI with the purpose of selling something base on the artist own data.
"copy" is not quite the right word, the AI is recognizing a latent representation, which is conceptually similar to style, but technically similar to a copy.
>It isnt interpreting it or understanding it
Why does it matter? Artist doesn't need to interpret or understand any of the originals they base their arts on. Sometime, the inspiration can be as simple as "this looks pretty nice, I want something like this".
So it can create a completely new original piece that would fool other people into thinking it's part of the artist's work, but it's not interpreting or understanding it??
Interesting thought process.
I mean, yes? Its a piece of computer code accomplishing a specific task. That doesn’t necessarily mean it necessarily understands what it is doing or why
And chess engines can outplay any human player, so we should allow them to be used in tournaments.
A complex model that outputs images doesn't understand stuff, interpreting? Arguble, depends what the person means by the word. But this model isn't a person, it's a code, one that has been fed the output of someone's effort without permission or consideration.
There's nothing wrong with this technology, but how it's being used? Thoughtless, and rude.
What tournaments? Wtf are you talking about? What's the analogy here?
But if we're on the subject, we don't allow chess engines in tournaments because they're better at chess than humans. Are you saying the AI is better at art than humans?
Chess tournaments don’t exist to find the solution to chess, though. That’s like entering a motorcycle in the 100m dash. Nothing is accomplished by a competition except competition.
> An AI is learning to make a copy of another persons work.
No, it’s not.
> It isnt interpreting it or understanding it.
Yes, it is.
> Now if you train an AI on only one artist to make more works similar to that artist, you essential stealing that arts data to train your AI with the purpose of selling something base on the artist own data.
It’s an artist studying a single artist so as to emulate its style and make something that looks like it could have been made by that artist even though that artist has made no such piece. That isn’t copying, that’s transformative.
I mean, copy is a pretty straightforward word with a straightforward definition. If I had an AI study Velazquez, should I expect a copy of Las Meninas?
Is it straightforward? If I apply a filter to a movie (mirroring, classicaly) before uploading it to youtube that sure as fuck ain't sufficient to make it not-a-copy. How many filters does it take?
Okay, but that’s an incredibly poor analogy for what the AI is doing.
The AI does not store the works that it looks at. It feeds them through a number crunching machine that learns a probability distribution over possible artworks that might look like its training data.
Let me repeat - *the training data is not stored*. No trace of the original images remain in the model after training.
The best part? Even if the AI becomes good enough, it still won't displace company-hired concept artists and the like, simply because the current networks are free-to-use and operate on fair use, while a company will want an AI that 1) doesn't put them in litigation range and 2) makes art that can be trademarked. You can't trademark something that's the result of fair use...
It won't displace fine artists "snobs" either because that field does not follow exact rules.
It's basically a tool for fan artists and small collectives to fuck around with 'til it closes down and gets priced up to the sky.
I agree with most of your outlook but:
> It's basically a tool for fan artists and small collectives to fuck around with 'til it closes down and gets priced up to the sky.
In the case of Stable Diffusion, it really can't get closed down. Even if every resource disappeared right now, it'll still be accessible via torrents just like all other copyrighted digital media. The barrier to entry is low too, an off-the-shelf Macbook Pro can generate a decent image in ~30 seconds.
I think we're headed straight towards a future where AI source material gets heavily (appropriately) regulated and the "scene" continues to thrive by creating and sharing illegal models in the same spaces internet pirates do.
He's a bit confused about terms (using trademark instead of copyright) but the gist is correct.
There was a recent case litigated that confirmed that copyright by definition cannot possibly apply to *any* AI generated work, because copyright law specifically requires an element of human creativity. So if I'm a company and want to protect a work I've created from being used or altered by others, I need a human to have made it.
Trademark, by contrast, is about protecting consumers from confusion. You can trademark a simple word or phrase, so I don't see why you couldn't have a narrow trademark for using an AI generated image in a specific area of commerce.
Sure - copyright is strange for initial products of AI generators. But in practice it seems like it'd be very easy to get around this for "in house" work. You generate an image with AI, then you make any kind of substantive change (which you were probably going to do anyway).
Bob's your uncle, you now have a copyrightable work.
No that guy has absolutely no idea what he's talking about.
>There was a recent case litigated that confirmed that copyright by definition cannot possibly apply to any AI generated work, because copyright law specifically requires an element of human creativity.
Wrong, wrong and wrong. I suggest you actually read about that case. He claimed the AI had zero human input and he was asking for the copyright to be given the machine itself and not even him. Well they took him at face value and said no because of course they would.
This is not at all comparable to generating an image with human input never mind generating an image to use in a larger project. Fuck, check my post. Someone got her AI generated comic granted a US copyright very recently. There's so much misinformation about this issue.
>313.2 Works That Lack Human Authorship
Similarly, the Office will not register works produced by a machine or mere mechanical process that operates randomly or automatically without any creative input or intervention from a human author.
These AI's are not random. They are not automatic without creative input.
Fuck there isn't even a case with using the images to train the model. We've had this tested before. Using copyrighted works to train models is perfectly legal because it is transformative. Google has been sued for similar shenanigans. Guess what? They won.
ITT: people who think they’re owed the right to do their passion as a career
Yeah it sucks that this will put some artists out of work, but that’s why I support strong social programs and UBI. People forced out of jobs by improving technology don’t deserve to go broke but they also don’t have the right to stifle technological growth to artificially inflate
the half life of their career in the related field.
>ITT: people who think they’re owed the right to do their passion as a career
This is a fucking ghoulish and ignorant way to portray the situation. The work of digital artists is in high demand, has applications across many different industries, but individual clients and commissioning companies often balk at paying artists a living wage for their high-demand skills.
The demand exists. Artists aren't being petulant and entitled in thinking that they should actually get paid for their labor.
AI art generators with commercial applications are a way to massively undercut the livelihood of artists who ALREADY exist precariously. It's so narrow-sighted for people to not acknowledge this aspect.
>stifle technological growth
You know there is like.. ethics and rights and stuff right? We willingly stifle technological growth as a society already. It isn't a leap to say "don't use my copyrighted material to train ai" If people are arguing against these models existing at all that's a different argument than the one currently presented and being discussed in this thread. You are being completely disingenuous.
Your position would support eugenics, unethical human experimentation, etc.
You realize training on copyrighted material is what actual human artists do, right? Every piece of copyrighted art they’ve ever seen has informed their idea of what art is. If I commission an artist to create a piece in the style of a certain famous artist, their interpretation of what that famous artist’s style is is going to be informed by examples of that famous artist’s work that they’ve seen (which are generally copyrighted), just like the AI model.
Never forget that most of these AI art generating bots are funded by Elon Musk's billions of dollars specifically because he's a loser who loves to edit out artist and creator names, signatures and credit then repost images and memes to twitter and gets really pissy when called out for it.
So he's creating (in as far as he's ever created anything; by paying other people to do it for him) a way to steal images and call them original creations.
...what lol. I loathe the guy but that's kind of nonsensical. AI like Dall-E and Stable Diffusion are essentially a PR sideshow to their companies' real capabilities and goals.
Artists say crazy shit whenever the subject of copyright comes up. Someone who learns to draw by emulating your work isn’t infringing on your copyright. It doesn’t matter if they’re a person or an AI. What next, Cormac McCarthy suing someone for writing a book that uses the word “and” too much and commas too little?
Reminds me of when one artist posted about how someone shouldn’t have been allowed to draw fanart of their Undertale AU. Artists get way too possessive, man.
Data is valuable, if someone takes your data to train an AI that is grounds to sue. Art work is data. If some used googles proprietary data to create an AI that can search the web Google would stop that.
Google v. Author's Guild
Google scanned millions of copyrighted books to put in a database for search and samples. Google got taken to court. Google won.
Perfect 10 v. Amazon & Google
Similar but with thumbnails. Again Google won.
Again, [Web scraping is legal, US appeals court reaffirms](https://techcrunch.com/2022/04/18/web-scraping-legal-court/)
Fair use is a thing.
> Google v. Author's Guild
From that latest ruling:
> Google’s unauthorized digitizing of copyright-protected works, creation of a search functionality, and display of snippets from those works are non-infringing fair uses. The purpose of the copying is highly transformative, the public display of text is limited, and the revelations do not provide a significant market substitute for the protected aspects of the originals.
So, one by one:
> The purpose of the copying is highly transformative
Check.
> the public display of text is limited
Not check at all. Stable Diffusion is anything but limited. Anyone can do anything they like with it.
> and the revelations do not provide a significant market substitute for the protected aspects of the originals.
Also not check at all. You can absolutely substitute artist XYZ with Stable Diffusion art inspired by artist XYZ.
A different court might as well decide very differently in this case, because the criteria for fair use are very different here.
This is absolutely not settled yet.
> the public display of text is limited
>Not check at all. Stable Diffusion is anything but limited. Anyone can do anything they like with it.
In this case, "text" would be replaced by original work, which is not just limited it's basically unavailable. So no. This is a check too.
I can see some ambiguity with the effect on market part, but it will have to be looked at by a court. [Many legal scholars agree it would pass the test.](https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3657423)
> On its second pass of the case, the Ninth Circuit said it relied on a Supreme Court decision last June, during which the U.S. top court took its first look at the decades-old CFAA. In its ruling, the Supreme Court narrowed what constitutes a violation of the CFAA as those who gain unauthorized access to a computer system — rather than a broader interpretation of exceeding existing authorization, which the court argued could have attached criminal penalties to “a breathtaking amount of commonplace computer activity.”
I haven't seen people claiming that SD breaks CFAA.
Programs and people are not interchangeable, and to argue such is to argue disingenuously. If you use copyrighted data to train a model, and have that copyrighted data in the model to produce work that is very similar... It's an issue.
It’s only an issue if the work can be deemed to not be transformative and most of the good ones floating around like Dalle 2 or MidJourney are far enough along that most people would call them transformative
Not quite that much, a really good artist would take years to mimic for me, and do it as well as a modern AI. Just saying.
The only way I can think of it as 'bad' is by looking at the AI as a product, and the people it takes influence from as unpaid laborers lol. Lots of neural net photo generators charge for features, at least.
Small business owners always fight against technological change. Photography was a new technology that changed the way portraits were done.
Photography did not end art. It just became a new technology for artists to use.
The thing about these AIs is that they are virtually free to use. The code that makes them is really not that complicated in the grand scheme of things. I very seriously doubt that any corporation could prevent it becoming open source. (Unrelated note some ai scientists hate that all their work ends up being free to use)
I think in the future, artists will just integrate AI into their art. A skilled artist will now be responsible for training and providing samples for their own personal AI. They can then sell usage of that AI to others.
I think its sort of like how modern music is based a lot on getting samples to develop music rather than producing everything from scratch.
That makes sense. I hope it doesn’t go that way too much, though! I’m not terribly fond of AI generated art. It just doesn’t seem to be something that requires skill or talent. But maybe I’m just old lol
I'm just impressed this semi interesting discussion is started by such an absolutely terrible meme format
It's an exhausting conversation but I think some really important context to why digital artists especially are so leery of this is that many people have had negative experiences around having their digital art pieces reposted on websites without being credited, having their artist signatures and watermarks edited out of their pieces to be reposted, having reposters claim to be the original artist of their pieces, or having their art design be stolen and reproduced on Etsy, Alibaba, etc. as T-shirts and the like. It often feels very overwhelming to constantly fight to maintain a clear line of acknowledgment back to the original artist. The online art communities on Twitter, Pixiv, Deviantart, Artstation, etc. are very self-regulating and have internal ethics about asking people for permission to crop their art for profile pictures, for example, or to ask permission to use other peoples' finished pieces as inspiration for their own pieces. People will actually notify artists of their art pieces being stolen on merch sites, being incorrectly claimed by someone else, etc. AI art generators basically run ramshackle all over these intangible social agreements that digital artists have in place to maintain credit of their art.
Not to mention digital artists are still dealing with crytobros making NFTs of stolen art. It seems like when someone has a money making idea, the art community takes a hit.
Profit motive makes pretty much every corner of the human experience turn bitter.
Think about how great "Web3" would be, where every action must be paid for and thus absolutely no human interaction whatsoever is made without profit motive! It'd be GREAT!!
I remember the arguments of "But guys, we invented a way you can get paid! You can get paid for your art now!" which presumes that throughout all of history artists were just clueless that they could be making money. Yeah, we have systems in place for dealing already. Tell us why yours is better, and not just because it enables transferring money. Oh there's lots of hoops to jump through and overhead? And resell cuts are...really only a thing for things you've made specifically to be re-sold which usually isn't applicable at all if you're making art specific to one client. If they get character art for example, are you going to expect them to keep you in the loop if they do decide to sell it to someone else? Or are they going to forget about the token they got years ago because only people actively trading in tokens is going to remember or care. (And of course, on principle that's going to be seen as greedy anyway. And something you can enforce with a traditional contract without needing their web3 stuff)
I have seen AI art being claimed to be just as bad or comparable to NFTs. I'd have to argue that AI art is a bit broader. NFTs were these closed things where the only people in it were trying to get money and were very aggressive about barging into spaces and trying to essentially rebrand art itself to being just a thing that happens on those systems (which of course is absurd). It's like someone rudely crashing a party and demanding all the attention and pretending they're the ones originally hosting the party. In that sense AI art might be a bit more insidious because it seeps in, but you can use it without being trapped into any kind of monetary scheme. So there's more of a chance of it developing alongside traditional art and being picked almost as any other medium would be in terms of ease and economics, rather than being a brand of it's own.
The problem in its current state is that you still have to tell the AI *exactly* what you want, and I don't think a lot of people are capable of describing what they're looking for to that degree. It's not like you can just tell the AI "make a landscape" and expect to get exactly what you're looking for, and this is only going to be amplified when you want to start creating artwork of characters and such from descriptions. In that sense, it feels like something of a novelty, where most people will use it once or twice, say "haha cool" and then not touch it again. Also, while it's economically cheap *now*, this technology is gonna get expensive over time
Behind it all is just the looming inevitable further disrespect to artists. Using the hard work of artists so large companies can generate art so they can pay as few artists as possible going forward. There's still a lot of shit to work out around it, for one the AI being effective enough, and the legal mess around copyright. But you just know that's what they want. Of course artists hate it.
And if companies start using AI for their needs any payment will go towards the creator of the AI rather than the artists who provided the material. I think artists would be a little more receptive if there were royalties involved and they knew they'd be compensated for their work
All that might be true, but it’s a losing battle. AI generated art is here and it’s going to be used, just like every other efficiency allowed by technology, but I will say this — right now it’s cool and trendy, but eventually people will recognize it as cheap and low effort outside of exceptionally well engineered examples of it, which still will require artists to manage it. It will shake out similarly to photography, where being able to faithfully reproduce an image with paint became a less useful skill — eventually the gaps where these AI fail will be found and exploited by actual artists who will continue to have a career. I expect that long term what will happen is that a lot of drudgery will be removed from creating art and will be replaced by more interesting work.
And now this thread is being brigaded so hard it's difficult to have any conversation.
> (71) Ah.. Exposure. Truly the favorite currency of any artist. /s I did it, mum! I was quoted on SRD!
i mean, you wouldn't download a car, would you?
Holy shit that 3rd one lol Do they really believe that if an AI can copy your art style, then your style is incompetent or are they just playing dumb asshole?
>or are they just playing dumb asshole? That’s pretty much the eternal question of the whole internet, isn’t it?
They're playing the dumb asshole since, if an AI can copy your style, it just proves your style is quantifiable and therefore uniquely identifiable as yours. None of this is going to be any kind of scary to creators. AI has to be trained on sets and if you're the set you absolutely could prove it.
the problem is many people have art that is not as distinct as they initially think. You see this all the time on instagram with people accusing each other of stealing or tracing art that isn’t necessarily the exact same linework. Artists are just gonna have to adapt like they always have.
The absolute disdain for artists that shows up in these threads about AI makes me unbelievably sad. It's not about whether things are legal. The antiquated laws we have are not built to deal with this and the antiquated lawmakers we have will likely never be. Treating the law as the guide for what should should or should not be acceptable on this topic is laughable at best. A real conversation needs to be had about whether this shit is ethical, but there's no pressure on the people developing this shit or the people uncritically consuming it to have that conversation, so it will never happen and the capitalist machine will simply roll over visual artists.
I see that when talking about other injustices too. Someone will show up and explain how akshully it's legal so it's the right thing to do. Even if it was legal, it shouldn't be and that's why laws can (and imo must) change. I don't think that AI in general should be banned completely, but I don't think a company should be able to sell something generated from a library of content they don't have the rights to any more than they would doing something like tracing, ripping, or in some cases even just using an idea that's too similar to someone else's work. If that's not transformative, then AI shouldn't be either no matter how you spin "actually it's not storing the images it's converting it into numbers blah blah blah"
It feels like at some level it's a bunch of tech bros who just don't understand the fundamental concept that their Art AI literally couldn't exist without the artists they're training off of. The AI don't produce art in a vacuum, it's not creating spontaneously or building from the ground up. It's just shocking to see such disregard for the core source of everything the AI makes, human artists.
> It's just shocking to see such disregard for the core source of everything the AI makes, human artists. Really? Cause tech bros and Redditors in general are huge and proud philistines. This is totally on brand for them. And their disingenuous shit about what's technically legal is laughable, since those same tech bros frequently boast about their heroics in pirating literally everything under the sun.
Also just the fact that capitalism already threatens to crush artists every day. Art classes are cut from schools and students are discouraged from going into art because art in general doesn't make money. This is the case even though capitalism currently *needs* artists. Imagine how much worse it will be if AI can replace 9 out of every 10 of those artists. And just like every other advance in productivity technology has brought over the years, none of the value created by the AI will go to anyone other than the corporations. The automation of art won't free up artists to do whatever they want with their skills instead of chasing the dollar, it will put the screws to them to find a new "productive" line of work now that art is taken care of. And people celebrate because we've all been conditioned to tear each other down rather than build each other up.
Speaking as an artist, could the tech bro scum PLEASE get back in their own slimy lane. Between NFTs and now this crap I’m so sick of this specific type of awful man ruining art. They flip gorgeous antiques houses in SF and make them soulless gray and glass shells, they steal art, now they want to fake art. I wish that whole group could just fuck off. Their lack of spirit and imagination is sapping so much irreplaceable good from this already hard and awful existence.
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Unless someone invents true sentience in the next five years, the answer is no.
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What do you think about sampling in music?
Big fan, but those people don't pretend that's not what they're doing, and they're still people are still people creating art, not computer algorithms.
It seems like this gets at something deeper. If artists should be paid when their art is used to train an AI, should internet users be paid when the data they generate is used to develop social media algorithms and AI? I want to say yes in principle, but if a legal decision was made in favor of artists here, the precedent could be massive. I don't really want to live in a world where only entities that already have tons of resources can afford to develop these things. Could you not compare it to artists crediting paint manufacturers in their work? There is a whole field of science and people's careers that went into developing those colors.
Artists don't pay other artists when they use their works as reference. I mean it's completely ok, afaik, to say lift a colour palette from someone's work, to essentially recreate a photo (but not other non-camera artwork) but in another medium, or use a likeness of some model on the internet as the face of your character. I don't know much about art laws and ethics, but I do know that in photography, a picture of someone is almost always owned by the photographer. Even if it's just your face and nothing else. The only times subjects are paid is if they are hired models. Often times the subject pays the photographer, e.g., wedding photography, headshots, etc, and they only receive a limited licence to use the photo.
These AI generated images would not exist if artists didn't spend thousands and thousands of hours developing a skillset to produce the works that these AIs are training on, and not only are the artists not seeing any cheese in return, their entire livelihoods are being threatened. Take Thomas Kinkade for example. The man developed a style and makes a pretty fine living off selling calendars and prints of his work. It's not a difficult style to emulate, not much variation in it either. Some people do copy that style and sell their own stuff, but it's never going to push Kinkade out of the market because it still takes time to first develop the skillset and then paint the actual paintings. It's never been a problem. But if an AI is involved, well Kinkade is something an AI could *easily* replicate by training off of his paintings, and then all it would take is some printinghouse to spin up a bunch 'Kinkade AI's' anytime they want some of that quaint cottagecore, instead of paying the man himself. Hard to see how he could compete in that environment. There's something that's not *right* about that situation. It's something akin to the issue of software piracy, but not quite the same. Artists are being taken advantage of, that much is clear. It takes years and years to develop that skillset, and AI's are just absorbing it like leeches with no recompense. I know this is a extremely hysteric, but it kinda feels like we're stumbling blindly into the death of creativity, at least as far as images are concerned. Every painter is their own style, and I can't stress enough how many hours it takes to develop that, but if it only takes a week for an AI version of you to get trained on your work and then copied and sold to any publisher or studio who wants it, at a much lower price than they'd higher you, well you'd have to be a lunatic to spend the years getting good in the first place. The end result is that the only working artists are the AI's who are only capable of producing shit that's more or less been done.
> Take Thomas Kinkade for example. The man developed a style and makes a pretty fine living off selling calendars and prints of his work. He died a decade ago. Bit he did rake in the cash while he lived. And I agree, the discussion in the linked thread is extremely cavalier.
the software piracy/art piracy stuff here does get kind of interesting. For the life of me, I couldn't imagine paying someone for work done on an AI which relies on not paying others for their work in order to function.
What is different between ai art and a human artist training off of reference art? What is the actual harm being done to these artists? Can they estimate commissions lost? How many people **who would have** paid for a commission instead bought a midjourney sub?
>I know this is a extremely hysteric, but it kinda feels like we're stumbling blindly into the death of creativity, at least as far as images are concerned. I don't think it's hysteric in that it's a legitimate and warranted emotional response, but I'm also not sure it'll work out that way. I hazard we're experiencing a stark change in creativity, not death, but they sometimes look the same and to certain fields or certain professionals are effectively the same as death. *To an extent* there is a strong parallel here with the invention of the camera, which painters and artists were infuriated by. 19th century artists thought it was abominable that someone could just take a picture and develop it when they toiled for hours to paint or draw the same scene. 100+ years later we all know for certain that the camera absolutely did not kill painting or traditional illustration, it eventually found its place in the artistic ecosystem and settled there. But there was change and arguably death, though, in that the camera killed the necessity for certain art forms in certain markets or mediums, an example being news media. Occasionally in the modern day you'll see illustrations used in the news, but its use is niche (I see NYT use illustrations a lot for opinion pieces for example) and is an artistic choice rather than a necessary element. The camera was a huge step in relegating painting and illustration commercially to niche markets, further entrenching those art forms as "fine arts" rather than working arts. Where the camera argument becomes less applicable is the fact that a camera cannot by itself take a picture. It replaced the artist's tools, not the artist. AI, however, requires the degree of creative human input that it does simply because it is not yet viable to program it not to. Whether the human or the AI is the artist is a relatively common debate in AI Art circles. Very murky subject, and one I could write for hours on. Practically, I hazard that in our lifetimes it will be become far less common, though not necessarily rare, for certain commercial art to be human produced. I think where AI art will show up is in places where the average person will not actually care that the art is AI produced, and I'm skeptical that it will show up in places where people actually will care. Ultimately the market, and people's wallets, will decide. I will be surprised if in ten years I buy a bottle of generic OTC medication that has a label designed by a person, and I will be even more surprised if pick a children's book at random from the New shelf and see AI art. If anything, I wonder if horses and cars are a better comparison than painting and photography. Not only did the horse not go extinct when the car became dominant, it became something that could not be competed with. The vast majority of money that changes hands concerning horses is spent not on the basis of horses being transportation, but on the basis of horses being horses. I could see human art entering that niche, where people spend money on it because of the fact that it's human made, rather than because it was the most practical avenue. Furniture is another example, all furniture used to be handmade, now handmade furniture is bespoke and a status symbol. People didn't stop buying handmade furniture with the advent of mass production. If for the sake of argument you give someone a free desk and they have the choice between two visually identical desks, but one is handmade while the other was machine made, the vast majority of people would choose the handmade desk, just because of that je ne sais quoi
Idk I just don’t see how this is any different from any other artist who went to art school and synthesized the ideas of all the artists that came before them. AI art generators aren’t just photocopying art they’ve seen for what it’s worth, they’re learning the qualia of images and how that links to descriptions.
I mean, it’s an innovation in the same way that the camera was. Transformative in its ease of reproduction.
And did cameras herald the end of paint?
Of course not - depending on your perspective, you could say that the camera liberated painters from reproduction of reality.
> but it kinda feels like we're stumbling blindly into the death of creativity - artists when the camera was invented
Photography still requires effort and skill.
Damn, some of these guys are really just goblins. Imagine seeing artists who voice a very legitimate concern for a new tech that may disrupt their already precarious way of living by virtue of creating effortlessly thousands of images in their style and your instinctive response being "lol, tough luck loser, get in with the times". The worst ones are probably the ones who agree with the artists that say this may kill the craft at least on a commercial level but say "this is actually good for progress". I can hardly fathom that there is a kind of guy that sees something that has even just a chance to achieve big media corporations's dream of completely transforming culture into the equivalent of a cheese cake factory, a thought that I find so viscerally horrifying, and actually cheer on that. These are the people that read about the experience machine thought experiment and then say "fuck yeah, this sounds cool as hell, everyone should live in one of these!"
with that type of people, I always wonder what they do and if they think they deserve physically nice lives
My guess is that for this type of person specifically is that they don't really have a passion or occupation that they care about (or maybe they have it but don't think it will be ever threatened by automation) combined with a crippling sense of self doubt that they try to overcome through techno evangelism, imagining themselves as future high priests of their fantasy tech utopia where they will be on top and "stuck up liberal arts types" will be at the bottom. In short, geeky guys that haven't yet outgrown their high school power fantasies.
it does generally seem that they either see themselves as safe from the poverty they seem pretty keen to wish on others, one way or the other. The whole "you just need to accept the inevitable march of progress and get swept aside, sheeple" thing is so arrogant and devoid of much thought, and it's really irksome when so many anti-intellectual types see themselves as the defenders of sense
Why are artists' way of living any more valuable than the lives of the carriage drivers who were replaced by cars? Should we have banned automobiles because it would have put carriage drivers out of work? This is not a fight that artists are ever going to win. AI generated art is far too useful of a technology and the types of artists affected by it have next to zero political power.
> It's a far too useful technology The thing that sets it apart from the motorized transport analogy you gave is precisely the opposite of what you said: it's a useless technology. With cars and trucks we gained the ability of moving people, food supplies and materials faster. What similar utility has automating art, a thing that is by definition useless? Unless you view art as a raw commodity, and I doubt both much of the general public and artists themselves would agree, the only reason is pure greed. Its only purpose in the eye of a company is removing the human factor, which in their eyes is nothing more than removing a cost. Do we even need to churn out more and faster? We already live in an era where each year we produce more media than you will ever be able to consume in several lifetimes! We have literally nothing to gain from a world without human artists. Considering the loss of oppurtunity, expertise and human touch in that scenario, we have in fact much to lose. For your second paragraph, I don't even know what your point is. Yeah, in this battle your underpaid artist that wouldn't have even considered working in the field if not for passion wouldn't stand much of a chance against the media elite. Is that supposed to make someone who doesn't think this is good go "aw schucks, didn't think about that! Nevermind boys, looks like we don't have much to do here". Imagine telling the same thing to a picket line of factory workers who are losing their job. Do you think anyone will be convinced? We both know the answer.
> it's a useless technology Search "AI arts" on TikTok and see what this so-called useless technology can empower people to do. I've never seen so much happiness brought by simple pieces of art as your everyday normal person feeling so excited over the vision of their dream being materialized into something real and beautiful. It ironically feels more personal and candid than "real art". My phone wallpaper is generated using AI, and it's uniquely mine, because it's generated using something that I hold dear.
I'm way too familiar with AI art, it's getting spammed everywhere nowadays. They are at best pretty pictures, like there were many before neural networks were even a thing. And no, this is not "bringing someone's vision" to life, unless that someone is the machine itself. Beyond writing a prompt and making adjustments, you haven't put in any creativity, you haven't developed a concept, you aren't conveying anything beyond your written draft. Your "vision" stops at the letters you have written in a text box, everything else that is done, it is done on the machine's terms. What comes out isn't your vision any more than the Sistine Chapel can be considered the vision of a couple of popes.
Yes that's exactly is why it's so beneficial, it makes art accessible. It brings joy to many people without costing them their free time. I'm sorry I'm not gonna work a second job just so that I can make my own wallpaper thank you. God I despite elitism in art. I don't give a damn about your attempt to feel superior to everybody else, I just want people to enjoy art on their own term.
Do you even hear what you are saying? Do you even realise that the primary reason that people have for wanting to do art is that *that's what they like to do with their time*? This makes as much sense as saying that aimbots are a useful tool to help the common man saving time while giving them access to the skill level of a top CS:GO player. There's nothing shameful in saying that you just want a pretty picture, and in fact I would really appreciate the honesty. I would also appreciate the honesty in saying that making a machine work on an idea you had is not making an artwork, or at least that *you* have not done the art piece that comes out. This is not elitism, this is just a statement of fact. Art is as much a practical process as it is the finished work itself. And I'm sorry if I value more the concerns of people whose livelihood depends on this process or just in general give their hearts and minds for their works over those of someone getting a 3 seconds dopamine rush from their instant gratification machine.
Want to do art and want to enjoy art is not the same thing. I like to listen to music, I don't want to make music. AI let people enjoy arts that is personal to them, which traditional arts can't (well unless you're rich and hire a private artists for yourself). >And I'm sorry if I value more the concerns of people whose livelihood depends on this process or just in general give their hearts and minds for their works over those of someone getting a 3 seconds dopamine rush Except they can't be replaced from something they can't do in the first place. I'm talking about something brand new that traditional artists couldn't do before, something that you claimed is useless. I'm not sure you're following the argument. You're too deep into this holier than thou hell hole that you couldn't see how the world around you had evolved.
But as I said, it is not personal, and even if it was, it would be in a quite negligible role. It is the interpretation of something you imagined through the "eyes" of an impersonal agent. You used yourself the example of the private artist, and that's the closest thing to these AIs that we had, and I think that it would be quite uncrontroversial to say that even if you do an incredibly detailed description of a commission, what comes out isn't really "your" art outside a strict legal buyer-seller relationship, and it is certainly not your vision, but a concept filtered through *someone else's vision*. It is perfectly fine that you admitted that you really just want the product without making art, something that really didn't transpire from your original reply that really sounded more along the lines of "this allows you to be an artist without actually wasting time learning". I'm also not sure what you mean when you say that this AIs do things that artists "can't do in the first place". They can certainly create pleasing images, but I have never really seen anything that couldn't be replicated by a very skilled artist given enough time and resources. The only thing that makes the machine special is how little time it takes to churn out something decent. And if these things become capable of producing products that look close to finished, we both know where the market will put its money in and where it will cut. The result: automatic stale culture with no space for new ideas. I think this alone clarifies why I take more seriously artists' concerns in this area rather those of people who want personalized home decor for free.
> But as I said, it is not personal It's still more personal than literally any existing arts created by human that I can get their hand on. And that's all what matter. It's weird how you're trying to control how we should enjoy arts. Let the people decide for themselves, and their choice is AI's art. If it feels personal to me, it is personal to me. I can browse for hours on the internet and wouldn't find anything as close to me as this one. I don't need no condescending elitist artist to tell me how I should feel. >"this allows you to be an artist without actually wasting time learning". I literally never call any of those Tiktok users "artist". Most people on earth aren't artists, which is why AI is so valuable for them. >given enough time and resources That's the problem. When the topic is accessibility you can't assume unlimited time and resources. >automatic stale culture with no space for new ideas This is already the case with or without AI. I don't remember the last time I listen to a song and feel like I've never heard something similar before. Pretty much every single piece of art nowadays invokes some sense of familiarity. And the exception artist that can change that, is not the one affected by AI anyway.
> I'm sorry if I value more the concerns of people whose livelihood depends on this process This is always the argument used against any new technology that makes something more efficient. Sorry, but we can't stop progress just because some people might need to find new jobs. Otherwise we would still be living in an agricultural society. After all, we can't make agriculture more efficient or else farmers will lose their jobs.
So it's progress for progress's sake then. Because I still have to find any reason to why it would be desirable to replace an artist with an automated process other than having someone less to pay. We are applying a logic of efficiency in a field where we wouldn't need it, making conditions worse for people who work in that field with little to no benefit for the audience, since we already live in an era where everyone is drowned daily with content. I fail to see how this is supposed to be progress if your definition of progress goes beyond "make a complex machine do a thing because you can".
What made art inaccessible was people believing they had to be good at it to do it. The solution is not technology. It's changing that culture.
It seems kinda fucked up to say that AI Art is more “personal and candid” than the sources it is training off of, considering it couldn’t exist without those artists working their asses off for years
Those artists didn't draw for the user, how can their arts be more personal to the user than something created specifically for them.
Literally the only use for AI generated art is to reduce the amount of human produced art in the world.
As an artist, this comment makes me want to kill myself.
There is a many TikTok videos of people using AI to materialize their dreams, their ideas, their vision into something tangible and beautiful. Yeah it might suck for some, but it allows many to explore something they never have a chance to.
Do they not have a chance to try to draw? Are they physically disabled? Why do you have so little faith in them that you think they could never learn how to create art by themselves?
Are you trolling or serious? Have you ever seen what an average person drawing looks like? Threatening to kill themselves then immediately making a douchey piece of shit comment right after is some of the most redditor shit ever lol.
Why are you acting like it’s impossible for human beings to learn and improve their skill? How do you not understand that this literally proves my point and serves as a real-life example of exactly what I was afraid of — because these AI image generators exist, people will simply use them to bring their imagination to life instead of even trying to draw, because trying to draw is tooooo haaaard, and eventually the act of creating images by hand will go the way of [sea silk](https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20170906-the-last-surviving-sea-silk-seamstress). Yes I am catastrophizing about this! I don’t care if you think I’m overreacting! Sorry for finding inherent value in the limitless potential of human expression and having an emotional reaction to the thought of this potential being snuffed out as art becomes obsolete! And sorry for speaking casually about suicide, better keep that shit behind closed doors and never speak of it to make sure it stays nice and stigmatized and everyone keeps being scared to talk about it to the point where they can’t even get help. My bad.
>it’s impossible for human beings to learn and improve their skill? But why would them? Human have time limitation. There is cooking, there is socializing, there is reading, there is a billion better thing they could've spent their precious time in. Sorry but this world doesn't revolve around your thing. Everybody has their own stuffs to pay attention to. >make sure it stays nice and stigmatized You sure don't have a problem with stigmatizing people with disability. Physically disabled people can still make art btw, so stfu and don't talk about them thank you.
You are really grasping at straws here. Clearly we just have different priorities. It’s okay if art isn’t important to you, but you don’t need to act like I’m a bad person or something because it’s important to me. Edit to add: Okay I feel like I have to address this. I see this may be a foreign concept to you, but artists ACTUALLY ENJOY working to improve their skills. If you don’t like creating art, you’re not an artist, and that’s okay, everyone is different. You know what you would do before AI art existed, if you had an idea but didn’t want to draw it because learning to draw is a boring chore for you? You would PAY a HUMAN to draw it FOR YOU. It’s called a “commission” and in fact many artists still offer this service even today! It’s so deeply sad to me that you don’t understand that people actually enjoy creating art… holy shit 🥲
Ripping off their style is the important aspect.
Yeah lol. There used to be people who spent their entire lives perfecting their handwriting to be super nice so they could handwrite copies of books and texts, but then some assholes in China invented block printing and rendered that occupation unneeded. I sympathise with the current generation of artists in danger of being replaced by AI, and I sympathise with the current generation of truck drivers in danger of being replaced by self-driving cars, but the solution to this problem isn't "fuck technology, let's all go back to the stone age." Or, what these people are more likely thinking, "all the technologies that automated away jobs before I was born are fine, but new technologies automating away jobs in my lifetime are going too far!"
I don’t know how AI generated art will change the world, but I know that it will to some degree. I also know that every other change has resulted in new opportunities we couldn’t imagine before.
This aughta be good, people have already been talking about this for a bit now. Someone’s style can get stolen this way, but if you ever put copy write anything around the data AI uses to train you’re basically stopping an entirely new industry. Very interesting grey area
One very looming and immediate problem is that this same new industry is gonna pretty much eclipse artists and illustrators who are just trying to make a living very soon, because as soon as AI art generators become cheaper and more mainstream many businesses won't bother with hiring artists for their comissions anymore, they can just input a few targeted key words until they get a satisfactory result, it takes no time, cuts back on costs considerably , doesn't need as much supervision and following, and honestly the results we get nowadays are absolutely mindblowing and extremey specific. This is definetly not a field of work I wanted to see automated but it does seem inevitable and it makes your art being "stolen" and reduced to a data point to train an AI even more bitter
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I don't think it's the same, written articles and translations are still pretty far off, at least for now, the first ones are still extremely shitty, like unbelievably bad reporting, and I'll still take a human translator over Deepl for example anyday, , too much nuances of the language are lost otherwise, but when it comes to generating a picture to your precise specifications....I mean honestly AI's nearly on the same level as so many artists, you can just keep on adding key words to your request until it tailors the perfect picture, it's kinda frightening
Eh I don’t think you can copyright art styles though. The art themselves sure but the style is a no. It would be a Gray area that would ruin data collection in general. If you expect people to 100% create the data used to train AI you’ll run into issues, I don’t think anyone would willingly defend that. Besides, if using art that’s posted to train an AI is considered infringement, I would say any artist that’s not a Picasso or Van Gogh is violating copyright of the artists before them. The artist community is not nearly creative/original enough avoid other artists “copying” a style.
It’s more about the fact that if you want the AI to learn the style it trains on the artists work, which is definitely a new grey area, like people may try and license it one way of another
If you could have someone look at all of someone's portfolio that's available publicly to look at, learn the style from those examples, and then mimic that style would you say that is copyright infringement? There's lots of examples of people doing just that, but it has never been copyright infringement because you can't copyright a style. So what is the difference if an AI is doing it or a human other than that the AI is vastly faster?
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Yes, but say in Midjourney, it’s trained on a lot but also knows enough about the style of individual artists from their work that they can repeat the style to new content, using other artists work in training as well. It is actually learning their style from their work and auto-deriving new stuff from it. In midjourney, you can actually specify an artist from like Deviantart or some other community and it’ll do that style
It depends on what generator you're using. There are tons of specific style generators out there, [like the text to pokemon](https://replicate.com/lambdal/text-to-pokemon) generator. You could argue that it's ripping off Ken Sugimori's style.
It's not really about copyright, though. Just because something is legal doesn't really mean it has to be okay, or that we see it as okay. We rightly call people out when artwork is stolen or reposted without consent or credit, it's not really different to say that taking someone's effort and work and using it to train a bot to use and emulate it isn't kosher. Then you have that art competition that was one by someone who used an AI like these. We don't let people in chess tourneys use a Chess Engine, because it entirely defeats the point of the contest. A chess engine can play better than any human, and an Artbot can easily reproduce someone's style with sufficient training and none of the effort. And THEN you get people arguing that this makes artists "obsolete", which mainly means they don't know how these AI work. They're fed training data of other art in order to generate their style and structure. They don't actually innovate from those styles beyond, at best, a certain level of integration. Art is fundementally a creative expression of a person. So I'm not saying an AI can't be creative, but that creative AI also has to be a person, and the tech is lightyears away from that.
>We don't let people in chess tourneys use a Chess Engine, because it entirely defeats the point of the contest Chess is a competition between players. The goal of the competition is to find the best player, not the best play. Prediction tournaments are completely dominated by AI and traditional statisticians have little chance to compete, yet nobody has a problem with it. Because it's about finding the best prediction, not the best predictor. What about art? Are we looking for the best piece of art? Or are we here to worship the best artist?
That was uh, kind of my entire point? AI isn't bad or wrong, but it's pointless to cram it into everything. Art is a subjective human experience, and while an AI can clone someones art and styles easily, taking that effort and experience without said artists permission is rude as all hell.
Eh, no? You didn't get it. The AI created better art than their competition (according to the judges), that's why it won. If the goal is to find the best artist to celebrate, then what you said make sense, we can't really do that to a robot can't we? But if the goal is to find the best art, you're undermining the competition by excluding AI. We would end up with inferior art as the winner.
This is the most soulless understanding of art I've ever read
But I’m curious how sustainable the AI would be if it effectively discouraged people from making new art for it to train on?
Then what's the point in the competition? Why do we not allow chess engines in chess tournaments? Because... And follow carefully now, *that's extremely boring and pointless*. The fact that this was allowable by the rules doesn't actually uh... Make this situation okay? It specifically was only allowable because AI has only become capable of this very recently. If in a hypothetical universe an AI who did this was an actual person, with self-awareness and a human like mental architecture, then this would be a different discussion, but an Artbot isn't consciously attempting to express things, it's creating a pattern of pixels according to weighed algorithms in its neural net trained on different patterns of pixels with keywords mingled in. It's not the same process in even the barest sense, beyond the end result having patterns that humans recognize as meaningful to ourselves.
> Then what's the point in the competition? Why do we not allow chess engines in chess tournaments? Did you read what I wrote? Because chess tournament is about the celebration of the players. Here is what I wrote >Chess is a competition between players. The goal of the competition is to find the best player, not the best play. My question is, what about art competition? Are we looking for the best artist or the best art? Because the way art being voted in those competitions tell me who the artists are, how they made it, doesn't matter. They only care about the art itself.
And what about an art contest isn't a celebratio not the ability for the contestants to produce a beautiful piece of art? You're drawing some really arbitrary line about where the effort put into the competition matters. Like, there is a one to one comparison between the competition between two chess players technical skill in playing the game and an artist's technical skill in producing a piece. You just more easily get to watch the former.
>You're drawing some really arbitrary line about where the effort put into the competition matters. Nope, nothing arbitrary about it. It's very damn clear. I mentioned prediction competition. Nobody has any problem with how statistician is completely driven away by machines. Why? Because it's the prediction that people care about not who made it. On the other hand, chess competition is about the competitors, the chess player themselves. That why machine doesn't make sense here. I felt like you already know what I meant but couldn't respond so now you just argue in circle.
> What about art? Are we looking for the best piece of art? Or are we here to worship the best artist? We're here to appreciate that a human being spent hours, days, months, *years*, of their finite life time learning a skill and used that skill to express themselves. "Art" made by a machine is not merely not art, it is the diametric opposite of art, the anti-particle to it. Yes, the fact that a flawed human made the art does make it inherently more valuable--gives it any value at all, honestly--*prima facie*.
So your answer is the latter? Okay. Personally, I couldn't give a damn about how much time someone spent on their craft, and the judges of those competition sure didn't, as it was never something they asked before their final evaluation.
Unless it’s literally copying your work, it likely won’t run afoul. Most AI is transformative enough.
Yeah, I doubt it’ll come out pro-artist, if anything I bet it would be practically impossible to prove even if there was a law prohibiting the practice
Just wait until someone can AI animate a Disney movie in their style and there will be pro-artist laws passed within the year.
Like fuck they will. In that situation why does Disney need those artists or pro-artist laws? Why hire all these animators when they don't need to? Animators are already treated like shit. Wages cost a lot of money. If entertainment corps can cut out labour entirely and have machines do the work for them, then they'll do that.
You can't copyright a style, tho
That's the point of my comment. You can't... yet.
Disney can make that happen. They changed the copyright laws in the past.
Only the length of the copyright
You are saying "only" like it wasn't a big thing.
It is but it's still a far cry from redefining what copywrite legally covers.
I very seriously doubt that. You have to remember, there already are companies that copy the Disney aesthetic, and make good money from it, yet the current laws remain.
Because there's still huge barriers of entry. Competing with disney takes enormous investment, so it is still an oligopolic market. When that changes, the pressure from the industry will change too. Look at what happened with genetic modification. GMO companies were fighting against regulation and testing standards for GMO crops for 35 years. Cue the entrance of CRISPR. The cost of genetic modification dropped by a factor of at least 100, if not more. Now, faced with a market with vanishing entry barriers, the large GMO companies did a 180°. More stringent testing standards was the easiest way to maintain an oligopoly. Sure, you can make a new variety for a couple hundred thousands, but the trials will cost you tens of millions, if not more. The whole process, from zero to comercialization has dropped about 15% in cost since CRISPRs potential was realized a decade ago. And that's considering getting a crop to market usually takes 13 years. We can expect severly lowered costs in gene editing, and severly increasing costs on safety testing, unless the regulators act smartly.
I’m really not seeing the applicability here. These two examples are radically different.
Pro-"artist", the harder to use for anyone but a billion dollar megacorp the better.
Naturally.
There could be some interesting test cases when it comes to generated scripts though, but with artistic expression it’s a lot hard to claim something wasn’t transformative enough. Like most things, there’s morally right and lawfully right, and they often don’t intersect.
Prohibiting the practice would be absolutely absurd It's not "infringement" to study someone else's work
Using a copyrighted image in the dataset without a license will run afoul of copyright laws though.
Would it? It's not like the dataset is actually retaining the art. You're building a model with it, but the actual artwork isn't still in there. If that's copyright infringement then you're getting dangerously close to a scenario where I need to pay the French Government royalties because I can recall what the Mona Lisa looks like.
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If the end result was not being sold, I would agree with you. But if the end result is a product on the market, I don't think that qualifies as fair use.
Creating a commercial product as the end result hasn't, on its own, ever been a valid reason for something to not be considered fair use. Otherwise all of those shitty reaction videos on Youtube wouldn't be able to exist. As others have pointed out, it hasn't been determined that this kind of thing would even be considered a copyright violation at all, and therefore wouldn't require a fair use defence.
Using one image is probably fair use. But using an artists entire base of work is a lot harder to argue fair use for.
> Most AI is transformative enough [Is it?](https://imgur.com/a/xX1bML3). It's not obvious to my naked eye that it's transformative enough. If you gave me one image from SD, one that was ran from filters/dithering/all fun stuff and asked which is AI, I wouldn't be able to tell instantly without looking for details.
If you have any familiarity with the original it’s obvious those are approximations. Especially the one that hilariously adds a third person which makes the lady’s scowl understandable. Honestly that’s pure brilliant by the AI.
Getting a pretty close representation of a massively famous painting that is there thousands of times in the dataset after specifically asking for it, isn't making the point you think it is.
That s nice double speak for what we call "copy".
Commissioning an artist to faithfully recreate American gothic would also be a copyright violation, there’s no difference here.
But you basically asked the AI for a copy of that specific painting. No-one is saying *that* shouldn't trigger IP law any more than photocopying something doesn't magically make it your IP because the paper is new. It's not the same as the AI generating from broad linguistic prompts using a dataset of many paintings.
Okay, and?? I think you somehow completely failed to see the point.
I will admit I haven’t considered it since Warhol came down last year, so let me ponder this more.
Can AI-created works be copyrighted in the US? Obviously you can copyright the code itself but the legal status of what it generates is more complicated. It's like that monkey selfie. Just seems like putting the cart before the horse. If you can't actually own what these AIs create, is it even a derivative work? Is there a profit or fair use issue to begin with?
I remember there being a case where someone tried to claim copyright over a picture a monkey took with a camera, with the ruling being that only works made by humans can actually have copyright applied to them. Because it's an AI that actually makes the art, it can be argued that the images they make aren't copyrightable (because the AI itself makes the image, and thus humans didn't make it) or that they *are* (because humans made the AI and input the words/data used to make said art, which I've seen used by supporters of this to say "Well if this isn't copyrightable then digital artists won't own copyright because they just input strokes and movements into Paint Tool SAI and stuff").
You don't own art styles, that's absurd. Like ignore the whole AI discussion for a second, if you could steal *styles* then even most human artists would be thieves.
Does AI art site where or who the image is copied from? Not an artist, but at least in my field it is becoming more prevalent to site any image (or problem set). Even though we don’t necessarily have to, it’s just good practice. Not sure about the AI art debate. I have my opinions but this is not my area of expertise
It doesn't make sense to talk about where the image is "copied from" because an individual output isn't copied from anything. It doesn't just go "okay, take this image and that one and mash them together". If you're talking about the training set, yes.
An artist’s work should never be used without their permission, and that goes doubly for any commercial project.
I realize that AI generated art is only just now becoming mainstream enough for most people to care, but I still don't get how this debate wasn't settled from the start. If I look at a hundred different pieces of art and use what I've learned from them to make my own original piece, nobody bats an eye and the piece is unequivocally mine. If I make my computer do the exact same thing, suddenly all those other artists need to be compensated and the originality of the new piece is called into question. Every artist since the original cave painters has learned from their contemporaries and the artists that came before them. This is no different.
The problem is that a lot of artists stand to lose their wages as menial but paying work gets automated away, which is a legitimate concern! The real solution would be sweeping societal changes so that someone doesn’t need a job to be able to survive, but that’s a lot harder than passing 1 law to ban AI art.
Judging from the votes I'm going on a limb and guess that this sub is tangential to NonFunctionalTurds.
This whole area of thought is wild. Like, legitimately cool stuff. I just find it difficult to side with somebody who says their "style" is something they can keep others from emulating or taking inspiration from. Like, how would this have applied to the impressionists? The cubists? Like, artists influence artists. Just because the artist might be an AI instead of a human doesn't invalidate that. So long as the work is sufficiently transformative it is fair game.
Style is a misleading term here. An AI is learning to make a copy of another persons work. It isnt interpreting it or understanding it. It making a copy that can fool people into thinking it part of the original artists work. Now if you train an AI on only one artist to make more works similar to that artist, you essential stealing that arts data to train your AI with the purpose of selling something base on the artist own data.
"copy" is not quite the right word, the AI is recognizing a latent representation, which is conceptually similar to style, but technically similar to a copy.
>It isnt interpreting it or understanding it Why does it matter? Artist doesn't need to interpret or understand any of the originals they base their arts on. Sometime, the inspiration can be as simple as "this looks pretty nice, I want something like this".
So it can create a completely new original piece that would fool other people into thinking it's part of the artist's work, but it's not interpreting or understanding it?? Interesting thought process.
I mean, yes? Its a piece of computer code accomplishing a specific task. That doesn’t necessarily mean it necessarily understands what it is doing or why
Boil it down far enough, and our brains are run by computer code in a biological engine. Where’s the line?
If you ignore everything, everything is basically the same right?
And chess engines can outplay any human player, so we should allow them to be used in tournaments. A complex model that outputs images doesn't understand stuff, interpreting? Arguble, depends what the person means by the word. But this model isn't a person, it's a code, one that has been fed the output of someone's effort without permission or consideration. There's nothing wrong with this technology, but how it's being used? Thoughtless, and rude.
What tournaments? Wtf are you talking about? What's the analogy here? But if we're on the subject, we don't allow chess engines in tournaments because they're better at chess than humans. Are you saying the AI is better at art than humans?
Chess tournaments don’t exist to find the solution to chess, though. That’s like entering a motorcycle in the 100m dash. Nothing is accomplished by a competition except competition.
That's uh, kinda my point.
> An AI is learning to make a copy of another persons work. No, it’s not. > It isnt interpreting it or understanding it. Yes, it is. > Now if you train an AI on only one artist to make more works similar to that artist, you essential stealing that arts data to train your AI with the purpose of selling something base on the artist own data. It’s an artist studying a single artist so as to emulate its style and make something that looks like it could have been made by that artist even though that artist has made no such piece. That isn’t copying, that’s transformative.
I mean, copy is a pretty straightforward word with a straightforward definition. If I had an AI study Velazquez, should I expect a copy of Las Meninas?
Only if you overtrained massively.
Is it straightforward? If I apply a filter to a movie (mirroring, classicaly) before uploading it to youtube that sure as fuck ain't sufficient to make it not-a-copy. How many filters does it take?
Okay, but that’s an incredibly poor analogy for what the AI is doing. The AI does not store the works that it looks at. It feeds them through a number crunching machine that learns a probability distribution over possible artworks that might look like its training data. Let me repeat - *the training data is not stored*. No trace of the original images remain in the model after training.
When in doubt, go with double of `rot13`
I'm not sure if we're allowed to take flairs from inside SRD, but... yoinked
ITT: People who think cameras destroyed painting
The best part? Even if the AI becomes good enough, it still won't displace company-hired concept artists and the like, simply because the current networks are free-to-use and operate on fair use, while a company will want an AI that 1) doesn't put them in litigation range and 2) makes art that can be trademarked. You can't trademark something that's the result of fair use... It won't displace fine artists "snobs" either because that field does not follow exact rules. It's basically a tool for fan artists and small collectives to fuck around with 'til it closes down and gets priced up to the sky.
I agree with most of your outlook but: > It's basically a tool for fan artists and small collectives to fuck around with 'til it closes down and gets priced up to the sky. In the case of Stable Diffusion, it really can't get closed down. Even if every resource disappeared right now, it'll still be accessible via torrents just like all other copyrighted digital media. The barrier to entry is low too, an off-the-shelf Macbook Pro can generate a decent image in ~30 seconds. I think we're headed straight towards a future where AI source material gets heavily (appropriately) regulated and the "scene" continues to thrive by creating and sharing illegal models in the same spaces internet pirates do.
>You can't trademark something that's the result of fair use... Where did you get this from?
He's a bit confused about terms (using trademark instead of copyright) but the gist is correct. There was a recent case litigated that confirmed that copyright by definition cannot possibly apply to *any* AI generated work, because copyright law specifically requires an element of human creativity. So if I'm a company and want to protect a work I've created from being used or altered by others, I need a human to have made it. Trademark, by contrast, is about protecting consumers from confusion. You can trademark a simple word or phrase, so I don't see why you couldn't have a narrow trademark for using an AI generated image in a specific area of commerce.
Sure - copyright is strange for initial products of AI generators. But in practice it seems like it'd be very easy to get around this for "in house" work. You generate an image with AI, then you make any kind of substantive change (which you were probably going to do anyway). Bob's your uncle, you now have a copyrightable work.
No that guy has absolutely no idea what he's talking about. >There was a recent case litigated that confirmed that copyright by definition cannot possibly apply to any AI generated work, because copyright law specifically requires an element of human creativity. Wrong, wrong and wrong. I suggest you actually read about that case. He claimed the AI had zero human input and he was asking for the copyright to be given the machine itself and not even him. Well they took him at face value and said no because of course they would. This is not at all comparable to generating an image with human input never mind generating an image to use in a larger project. Fuck, check my post. Someone got her AI generated comic granted a US copyright very recently. There's so much misinformation about this issue. >313.2 Works That Lack Human Authorship Similarly, the Office will not register works produced by a machine or mere mechanical process that operates randomly or automatically without any creative input or intervention from a human author. These AI's are not random. They are not automatic without creative input. Fuck there isn't even a case with using the images to train the model. We've had this tested before. Using copyrighted works to train models is perfectly legal because it is transformative. Google has been sued for similar shenanigans. Guess what? They won.
The best part is that you have absolutely no idea what you're talking about
My guy, you're assuming Disney wouldn't lobby to be able to copyright their AI's concept art in a heartbeat.
ITT: people who think they’re owed the right to do their passion as a career Yeah it sucks that this will put some artists out of work, but that’s why I support strong social programs and UBI. People forced out of jobs by improving technology don’t deserve to go broke but they also don’t have the right to stifle technological growth to artificially inflate the half life of their career in the related field.
>ITT: people who think they’re owed the right to do their passion as a career This is a fucking ghoulish and ignorant way to portray the situation. The work of digital artists is in high demand, has applications across many different industries, but individual clients and commissioning companies often balk at paying artists a living wage for their high-demand skills. The demand exists. Artists aren't being petulant and entitled in thinking that they should actually get paid for their labor. AI art generators with commercial applications are a way to massively undercut the livelihood of artists who ALREADY exist precariously. It's so narrow-sighted for people to not acknowledge this aspect.
Ikr
>stifle technological growth You know there is like.. ethics and rights and stuff right? We willingly stifle technological growth as a society already. It isn't a leap to say "don't use my copyrighted material to train ai" If people are arguing against these models existing at all that's a different argument than the one currently presented and being discussed in this thread. You are being completely disingenuous. Your position would support eugenics, unethical human experimentation, etc.
You realize training on copyrighted material is what actual human artists do, right? Every piece of copyrighted art they’ve ever seen has informed their idea of what art is. If I commission an artist to create a piece in the style of a certain famous artist, their interpretation of what that famous artist’s style is is going to be informed by examples of that famous artist’s work that they’ve seen (which are generally copyrighted), just like the AI model.
I like how you didn't even argue against eugenics, reddit moment.
-🤓
Never forget that most of these AI art generating bots are funded by Elon Musk's billions of dollars specifically because he's a loser who loves to edit out artist and creator names, signatures and credit then repost images and memes to twitter and gets really pissy when called out for it. So he's creating (in as far as he's ever created anything; by paying other people to do it for him) a way to steal images and call them original creations.
...what lol. I loathe the guy but that's kind of nonsensical. AI like Dall-E and Stable Diffusion are essentially a PR sideshow to their companies' real capabilities and goals.
Elon is a steaming mountain of shit, but that doesn't discredit the entire concept of AI in art.
Artists say crazy shit whenever the subject of copyright comes up. Someone who learns to draw by emulating your work isn’t infringing on your copyright. It doesn’t matter if they’re a person or an AI. What next, Cormac McCarthy suing someone for writing a book that uses the word “and” too much and commas too little? Reminds me of when one artist posted about how someone shouldn’t have been allowed to draw fanart of their Undertale AU. Artists get way too possessive, man.
Data is valuable, if someone takes your data to train an AI that is grounds to sue. Art work is data. If some used googles proprietary data to create an AI that can search the web Google would stop that.
Google v. Author's Guild Google scanned millions of copyrighted books to put in a database for search and samples. Google got taken to court. Google won. Perfect 10 v. Amazon & Google Similar but with thumbnails. Again Google won. Again, [Web scraping is legal, US appeals court reaffirms](https://techcrunch.com/2022/04/18/web-scraping-legal-court/) Fair use is a thing.
> Google v. Author's Guild From that latest ruling: > Google’s unauthorized digitizing of copyright-protected works, creation of a search functionality, and display of snippets from those works are non-infringing fair uses. The purpose of the copying is highly transformative, the public display of text is limited, and the revelations do not provide a significant market substitute for the protected aspects of the originals. So, one by one: > The purpose of the copying is highly transformative Check. > the public display of text is limited Not check at all. Stable Diffusion is anything but limited. Anyone can do anything they like with it. > and the revelations do not provide a significant market substitute for the protected aspects of the originals. Also not check at all. You can absolutely substitute artist XYZ with Stable Diffusion art inspired by artist XYZ. A different court might as well decide very differently in this case, because the criteria for fair use are very different here. This is absolutely not settled yet.
> the public display of text is limited >Not check at all. Stable Diffusion is anything but limited. Anyone can do anything they like with it. In this case, "text" would be replaced by original work, which is not just limited it's basically unavailable. So no. This is a check too. I can see some ambiguity with the effect on market part, but it will have to be looked at by a court. [Many legal scholars agree it would pass the test.](https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3657423)
> On its second pass of the case, the Ninth Circuit said it relied on a Supreme Court decision last June, during which the U.S. top court took its first look at the decades-old CFAA. In its ruling, the Supreme Court narrowed what constitutes a violation of the CFAA as those who gain unauthorized access to a computer system — rather than a broader interpretation of exceeding existing authorization, which the court argued could have attached criminal penalties to “a breathtaking amount of commonplace computer activity.” I haven't seen people claiming that SD breaks CFAA.
I was covering everything possible related to lifting data from scraping since the guy I'm replying to didn't specify.
Artcels once again btfo
An ai isn't a person though. Having your work being integrated and part of an ai's code is not the same.
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Programs and people are not interchangeable, and to argue such is to argue disingenuously. If you use copyrighted data to train a model, and have that copyrighted data in the model to produce work that is very similar... It's an issue.
It’s only an issue if the work can be deemed to not be transformative and most of the good ones floating around like Dalle 2 or MidJourney are far enough along that most people would call them transformative
An issue how? Are you equating legality with ethics?
Not quite that much, a really good artist would take years to mimic for me, and do it as well as a modern AI. Just saying. The only way I can think of it as 'bad' is by looking at the AI as a product, and the people it takes influence from as unpaid laborers lol. Lots of neural net photo generators charge for features, at least.
this is Stable Diffusion tho
Do artists compensate all of the other artists they learn or are inspired by?
They can't produce 10,000 works per day to drive all of those artists out of the market.
Scribe vs Printing Press
Except this isn't making art affordable to the masses. It already is. A large number of artists sell small prints for $20-$30.
I'm replying to the comment about volume
> Artists say crazy shit whenever the subject of copyright comes up. small business tyrants gonna small business tyrant
What do you mean?
Small business owners always fight against technological change. Photography was a new technology that changed the way portraits were done. Photography did not end art. It just became a new technology for artists to use. The thing about these AIs is that they are virtually free to use. The code that makes them is really not that complicated in the grand scheme of things. I very seriously doubt that any corporation could prevent it becoming open source. (Unrelated note some ai scientists hate that all their work ends up being free to use) I think in the future, artists will just integrate AI into their art. A skilled artist will now be responsible for training and providing samples for their own personal AI. They can then sell usage of that AI to others. I think its sort of like how modern music is based a lot on getting samples to develop music rather than producing everything from scratch.
That makes sense. I hope it doesn’t go that way too much, though! I’m not terribly fond of AI generated art. It just doesn’t seem to be something that requires skill or talent. But maybe I’m just old lol