this post was submitted on 01 Sep 2023
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I’ve tried to explain this to a lot of people on here and they just don’t seem to get it. Art fundamentally relies on human experience for meaning. AI does not replicate that.
Seems like people on this platform are very engineering focused, and many aren’t artists themselves and see it as a pure commodity instead of a reflection of the artist.
artist here. nobody is thinking about AI as a tool being used.. by artists.
the pareidolia aspect of diffusion specifically does a great job of mimicking the way artists conceptualize an image. it's not 1 to 1, but to say the models are stealing from the data they were trained on is definitely as silly as claiming an artist was stealing every time they admired or incorporated aspects of other people's art into their own.
i'm also all for opensource and publicly available models. if independent artists lose that tool, they will be competing with large corps who can buy all the data they need, and hold exclusive proprietary models while independent artists get nothing.
ultimately this tech is leading to a holo-deck style of creation, where you can define you vision through direction and language rather than through hands that you've already destroyed practicing linework for decades. or through hunting down the right place for a photograph. or having a beach not wash your sandcastle away with the tide.
there are many aspects to art and creation. A.I. is one more avenue, and it's a good one. as long as we don't make it impossible to use without subscribing to the landlords of art tools.
I absolutely approve of AI tools as a way for artists to empower themselves. Because there is human input.
The "best" AI art I've seen is the type posted by people who were already drawing before, and are using it as a tool to realise their vision. But that's the crux of the issue, in these pieces a human conceived the them, the tools used to realize them, don't matter.
But a lot of people are presenting AI as a something that replaces the whole person of an artist. Not a new brush for them to wield in creatively intelligent ways.
Why does that "fix it" for you? Earlier you stated that AI cannot create anything new by its very nature. Why does the status of the output change if an artist uses it? Why is it art when an artist does it, but not if a non-artist does it?
I'm not talking about "artists" who fiddle with prompts until they got something pretty and then treat the result as a finished piece.
I'm talking about people generate a nose, a hand, a set of abs, a piece of clothing, a texture for a set of clothing, and then combine these with their "traditional" digital art skills.
They are using the AI like a brush, not a printer.
And why is only that "art"? Why is it not art when I use in-painting to generate individual parts of the image? Where is the magical border where it turns from not-art to art?
The magical border is whether it originated in a human mind. What tools were used to get it out and into world don't matter.
A lot of AI content out there right now, isn't the result of that process. The AI generated something the artist liked, rather than the artist bending the AI into realising what they could already see in their mind.
So if I enter a prompt and click "generate" it clearly originated in my mind, and it's art.
No.
Interesting that you don't explain why, as it satisfies your earlier statement.
I often see the sentiment that AI art is only valid when it is created by people who were already drawing before. It's a pernicious notion I don't agree with at all. I think this is the birth of a new and exciting form of expression that can and should be explored by anyone, regardless of any experience or skill level.
Generative art allows more people to communicate with others in ways they couldn't before, and to inspire and be inspired by others. The stuff people post online isn't just a matter of pressing a button and getting a random result. It requires creativity, curiosity, experimentation, and refinement. It also requires learning how to use new skills they may not have had to effectively use new tools that are rapidly evolving and improving to express themselves. Generative art is not a passive process, but an active one, where human artists get a chance to create something unique and meaningful.
I believe that generative art, warts and all, is a vital new form of art that is shaking things up, challenging preconceptions, and getting people angry - just like art should. And if you see someone post some malformed monstrosity somewhere, cut them some slack, they're just learning.
It's so wierd to see artistic expression reduced to an engineering problem.
Yeah, you can generate images and sounds, but claiming that's art is like claiming a thousand monkeys could write the works of Shakespeare. Yes, its possible, but what enables it is randomness. Not creativity.
And in that process, you created a lot more of something else, aside from the works of Shakespeare.
No bodies, no social circles. No joy. No suffering.
This is where art comes from. AI can make 'something new' out of inputs. The same way a toaster can make toast when you feed it bread. But neither the toaster nor the AI create art.
Because neither one can connect with or communicate what it's like to be a human being. And neither is being shaped socially by other human beings.
I don't need to know the background of a piece of art to know it's art. I've seen AI generated pieces that touch me, and I've seen "real art" that I do not consider art. How can this be if you're right?
The obvious answer is that art isn't defined by who created it or how it was created, but instead it's defined by the interpretation of whoever views it. An artist using generative AI to make something great is no less art than if they used a brush and canvas, and a non-artist doing the same doesn't suddenly make it "not art".
My point was within the context of the argument saying that it's okay for copyrighted art to be fed to an ai without the artists permission because ai learns like people do and is essentially doing what people do to each other.
But AI don't participate in culture and they're not embodied entities. So they don't have the relational capacity to get art, as I understand it. And therefore they don't learn art in the same way people do, because they're not touched by art the way people are.
It's fine for ai to be used to make art. But to feed ai copyrighted art so the style can be mimicked, automated, and profited from.. that feels a lot more like theft to me then if I went to the art museum and tried to ape a Picasso.
AI don't participate in culture, but the people who make them do, and fair use protects their right to reverse engineering, indexing, and other forms of analysis that create new knowledge about works or bodies of works. These models consist only of original analysis of the training data in comparison with one another, which were selected by their creators based on their learned experiences and preferences.
These are tools made by humans for humans to use, we are in control of the input and the output. Every time you see generative AI output, it's because someone out there made the decision to share. Restricting these models is restricting the rights of the people that use and train them. Mega-corporations will have their own models, no matter the price. What we say and do here will only affect our ability to catch up and stay competitive.
I recommend reading this article by Kit Walsh, a senior staff attorney at the EFF if you haven't already. The EFF is a digital rights group who most recently won a historic case: border guards now need a warrant to search your phone. I'd like to hear your thoughts.
Alright, the article convinced me of the legal argument.
Morally and ethically I think my main issue is knowing that for profit corporations will be putting many of my flesh and blood favorite artists out of work without any sort of compensation.
Really we just need UBI. I think the issue is less about plagiarism and more about livelihood for most people worried about it.
Capitalism trained us to see anything we do as a way to amass wealth. As more things approach post-scarcity, it's going to drive more people to enforce artificial scarcity to keep prices up, like jewelers do with diamonds.
It's not all downsides. There are plenty of free and open source generative models that anyone can use. Ordinary people have new ways to express themselves creatively, learn new things, and entertain themselves, and improve their lives. We're already connecting with each other in ways we couldn’t before, and inspiring one another to get out and start creating.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=q1TjszE0vDc
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source, check me out at GitHub.
I'll read the links.
Personally, I don't have an issue with people copyrighting things they use an AI to make. I'll let you know if my opinion changes on fair use of already copyrighted work being used to make (commercial) AI.