I don’t like supporting the thing that steals artists work and then makes a worse version of it. The thing they said “wow this is actually really great” already existed and was stolen to generate the worse one, and now the person who actually created the value gets no credit.
The biggest issue with this (imo) is it pushes artists out for more ai image generation, but ai image generation will only get worse as it’s trained on a greater percent of ai images, so we essentially lose the source of good images for short term ai images.
Except for all the artists that are out of work for years and lost all their audience in the meantime, sure. And as we’ve seen with just about everything (Twitter, reddit, youtube), once people are used to something, it being terrible isn’t enough of a reason to move.
Aren’t artists famously intermittently out of work and need a “day job”? Besides, if you lose your audience to AI… means that its work is “better” than yours, doesn’t it? Whoever was prompting had better ideas.
The cat is out of the bag, you adapt or become irrelevant, applies the same to artists as for travel agents, switchboard operators, milkmen, coal miners…
Yes they are. And no the AI art doesn’t need to be better, it just needs to be cheaper and good enough. This isn’t adapting to an improvement, it’s adapting to easier access to worse or similar quality. The bigger problem is it’s like if an auto manufacturer had machines that were trained on the other machines, and got consistently worse the fewer human workers there were. It might be better in the short term for everyone but the artists, but in the long term it’s worse for everyone.
Aplliances, flights, clothes, etc. Time and time again we choose the cheaper option as long as it’s “good enough”, I don’t see why artists should get an exception.
If you trace someone’s art or copy their style and were paid to do it yes that is generally frowned upon. And if someone posts their work that IS mainly just other styles combined, you encourage them because they are capable of making something new as they improve, possibly a style no one has seen or a unique take on an existing style. The ai will always be generating in the confines of its training data, and getting WORSE as it is trained on more ai art, not better.
The ai will always be generating in the confines of its training data
…and a human artist will be generating within the confines of their total experiences, even ones they aren’t consciously considering. Nothing is totally ex nihilo.
Not just their experiences, the mind can create things it has never experienced. Within the confines of what their mind can create, sure. It’s just that one is knowably confined, one is unknowably confined, and COULD go outside of what we currently have.
All artists copy, iterate or regurgitate existing work. What does pay have to do with anything? It’s clearly not a deciding factor for anti ai critics; the original post doesn’t mention payment at all.
they are capable of making something new as they improve, possibly a style no one has seen or a unique take on an existing style
This just isn’t how humans create. There’s also nothing stopping a human artist from taking inspiration from AI output (“wow, the combination of X subject in Y style is interesting. How can I improve it”), is there no value in that? Is that line of creativity forever tainted?
always be generating in the confines of its training data, and getting WORSE as it is trained
Categorically false for art. Ai output quality does get worse when you inbreed it on facts or data based in the real world. The only thing it’s really truly good at is hallucinating, which is a fine way of making art because the quality is entirely subjective.
A model with 60B parameters has something like ~60B^16 possible outputs. Just because humans currently lack the creativity to do anything interesting with it doesn’t mean the tool is slop.
There are real, ethical reasons to dislike our current AI usage. But saying all AI content is bad ipso facto is just reactionary nonsense.
I was using tracing as a metaphor for stealing their art without permission and using it as a weight in training data, and I said paid to do it as in these companies get massive returns off stealing the ai art. Even locally generated, the scraping was still content stolen without permission.
All artists copy, iterate or regurgitate existing work. What does pay have to do with anything? It’s clearly not a deciding factor for anti ai critics; the original post doesn’t mention payment at all.
I mean not wrong but not fully correct either. AI is generating specifically from the dataset it has. I would say the way AI neurons work is similar to humans, but the AIs data is literally just images and words. That is like 30% of what a human will experience, and they are limited to specifically what their dataset contains. It is incapable of generating outside that dataset. A human is also incapable of generating outside their dataset, but a human is not restricted in their dataset to experiences and things that have already happened, and the experiences are not reflected in just words and images. AI images also tend to average their dataset, so the images end up more generic on average.
Categorically false for art. Ai output quality does get worse when you inbreed it on facts or data based in the real world. The only thing it’s really truly good at is hallucinating, which is a fine way of making art because the quality is entirely subjective.
I absolutely agree with things like using it for inspiration or helping create an open source project, but I’m weighing the cost benefit for art and it seems like the long-term is negative for artists and consumers both, even if I might not care in the short term.
paid to do it as in these companies get massive returns
Ai companies are famously revenue negative. Their value is entirely speculative and it’s doubtful they’ll get any real returns due to the plain physical economics of training and running these models. Money currently being made is pocket change by grifters (eg: Ai YouTube videos, low effort articles), and that will dry up as water finds its level because it’s just so easy to do.
Looking at it from another perspective, the training of Ai and open sourcing of the initial models might be the greatest intellectual property transfer to the public in ~200 years. The strangle hold of Disney (and all litigious artist estates) on works that should be in the public domain has been strongly undermined.
not restricted in their dataset to experiences and things that have already happened, and the experiences are not reflected in just words and images
Not sure what exactly you mean here. I can imagine a purple polka-dot parrot only because I have experienced those words in the context of color and pattern and animal. I can’t imagine an ibcid kcajjd kpal outside of maybe vaguely attaching the concept of nonsense words to Dr Seuss. And I suppose an experience could be reflected in, say, a tantric massage but I’m not judging Gen Ai content on its ability to rub my genitals.
Everything I’ve read has said the opposite
Losing semantic coherence is exactly what I mean by hallucination. Even as you lose the ability to use input to derive a sane output, the resulting image could still be aesthetically pleasing or interesting. It could also be garbage, but the same problem happens with artists on hallucinogens.
And I agree, Ai is “bad” because of what terrible people think they can do with it and by extension the economic and environmental damage done by trying to apply it everywhere. But I think people losing sleep over individual pieces of Ai content and artistic purity are a bit silly.
They’ll enjoy the assembly line thoughtless content put out by Disney and Warner Bros for profit and not for any meaningful discussion or art, but the moment someone does the same with a calculator they’ll lose their minds and say art is dead.
Maybe we can just go back to enjoying things and stop pretending to protect artists while constantly accusing artists of using AI.
Remember when Wacom and Photoshop wasn’t see as a form of art and only traditional art was valid? Or when artists mocked photography?
Or when people about 3 years ago were anti-copyright and have completely done a 180 on it. Still don’t get how they can be anti copyright but then instantly say “but this is my exception, this is for me, not for the public. I’ll gladly take the public however.”
Lemmy has a profound ability to retroactively decide something they once liked sucks. Not in the same way as learning something negative about the context, the artist, or the process and regretting that something they liked could come from a negative source. No, I mean they retroactively decide that the thing they liked is actually awful and they never liked it; because Lemmy is full of emotional children who collapse into hysterics the moment they see the letters A and I together, with most not even able to fully articulate why they feel the way they do, other than “AI bad!”
It’s like if you gave a meat lover a vegan hot dog without telling them; and at first they like it and say how good it is. But then when you tell them it’s not meat they immediately spit it out and start gagging and crying and saying how disgusting it is, as if moments ago they weren’t just saying how much they liked it.
The two big ones tend to either be the environmental impact of data centers or simple worker protectionism (aka believing that commissioned art should be immune to automation, literally the same position the Luddites had about industrial automation in textile mills).
Yes I can enjoy eating a hotdog but if I find out you stole that hot dog from a 13 year old, now I’m too upset that you stole from someone to enjoy it anymore. It’s not that they “don’t like it” anymore, they just hate that it’s ai generated more than they like the image.
Yes, as I said, you can regret the circumstances that led to it. You can even dislike continuing to consume it. What we are talking about is you going “Mmm… Delicious!” Then spitting it out and going “Blegh, disgusting! Who could ever enjoy something that tastes like THAT!”
If someone gives me art from their kid I will inherently overlook the flaws because I am happy to see them drawing. If I learn it’s from a billion dollar studio, it will drastically change how I view it. If someone asked me to objectively say how good the drawing is I would say it’s terrible. But I’m thinking about the artist so I don’t notice the flaws. If a billion dollar studio made the art I would say “I don’t know how anyone could ever enjoy this” while actively enjoying the 5 year old’s identical art. Just replace the 5 year old with “actual artists” and it’s the same situation. My enjoyment is partially from the person behind it improving and seeing feedback.
I would never say there is no “good” ai art, but I would also say 99.999% of AI art feels very generic. If I see a regular artist draw “good” art that is generic, I will say good job because they drew good art even if I find it generic. If there’s no artist… well it’s just generic “good” art so why would I not just look at an actual artists work for diverse “good” art, while not supporting the energy/water leech that is ai images?
while not supporting the energy/water leech that is ai images?
Not as much of one as you think, these days. If you have something resembling a gaming PC from within the last 5 years or so you can probably run AI image generation locally, with how large a model and how complicated a workflow depending on your specs. Less stressful for the hardware than running a current AAA game even, depending on the model (possibly demanding more GPU RAM though).
Not false but I would say most people are not doing that, and you’ll be using models that are not as advanced and don’t have as large a dataset as the big companies. If someone wants to generate them locally and enjoys them then more power to them (though still arguable they’re using ill-begotten data)
The quality of the art isn’t in question here. what is, is what got it there. So yeah, if I see an picture and like it, but then find out it’s made by a talentless little hack that typed a sentence into a text prompt-
… It instantly sucks ass.
You see, it’s this reason that drives us to put our children’s shitty pictures on the fridge. It’s not because it’s art show adjacent work. It’s becase of the effort and time spent learning to make it what it is. Effort is something we call an “added value”. As is experience and training. These things are all subconsciously included in how we appreciate a thing- how we attribute a value it.
-and all of these things are ONLY acquired by a human being.
So no, it’s not “lemmy retroactively deciding something liked once sucked”
It’s learning that something they once liked, took zero effort to make, and wasn’t even created by a human being, but instead- a sweaty little wannabe “artist” behind a keyboard.
I like the metaphor where you deny someone’s dietary/moral choices, essentially made them party to a grave sin in their eyes, rob them of their ability to consent, and then laugh at them when they’re upset about it. It’s really fucking telling.
I… swore it was the other way round. Either way, their metaphor isn’t the same as the actual situation because most who don’t like AI hate it on a moral ground (wasteful, egregious) rather than on a pure aesthetic one.
If you like it, who cares?
Yeah, who cares about environmental damage when you got a neat image! /s
If people actually cared about environmental damage, then image generation would be among the least of their worries.
Having a artist sit for hours at a workstation consumes more energy than an Nvidia H200 for 5 seconds.
I don’t like supporting the thing that steals artists work and then makes a worse version of it. The thing they said “wow this is actually really great” already existed and was stolen to generate the worse one, and now the person who actually created the value gets no credit.
The biggest issue with this (imo) is it pushes artists out for more ai image generation, but ai image generation will only get worse as it’s trained on a greater percent of ai images, so we essentially lose the source of good images for short term ai images.
If it gets worse we won’t use it, will we? Self solving problem, if true.
Except for all the artists that are out of work for years and lost all their audience in the meantime, sure. And as we’ve seen with just about everything (Twitter, reddit, youtube), once people are used to something, it being terrible isn’t enough of a reason to move.
Aren’t artists famously intermittently out of work and need a “day job”? Besides, if you lose your audience to AI… means that its work is “better” than yours, doesn’t it? Whoever was prompting had better ideas.
The cat is out of the bag, you adapt or become irrelevant, applies the same to artists as for travel agents, switchboard operators, milkmen, coal miners…
Yes they are. And no the AI art doesn’t need to be better, it just needs to be cheaper and good enough. This isn’t adapting to an improvement, it’s adapting to easier access to worse or similar quality. The bigger problem is it’s like if an auto manufacturer had machines that were trained on the other machines, and got consistently worse the fewer human workers there were. It might be better in the short term for everyone but the artists, but in the long term it’s worse for everyone.
It’s literally that in many industries and people are fine with that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_to_the_bottom
Aplliances, flights, clothes, etc. Time and time again we choose the cheaper option as long as it’s “good enough”, I don’t see why artists should get an exception.
“steals artists work and makes a worse version of it”
You’re literally describing virtually every human artist.
If you trace someone’s art or copy their style and were paid to do it yes that is generally frowned upon. And if someone posts their work that IS mainly just other styles combined, you encourage them because they are capable of making something new as they improve, possibly a style no one has seen or a unique take on an existing style. The ai will always be generating in the confines of its training data, and getting WORSE as it is trained on more ai art, not better.
…and a human artist will be generating within the confines of their total experiences, even ones they aren’t consciously considering. Nothing is totally ex nihilo.
Not just their experiences, the mind can create things it has never experienced. Within the confines of what their mind can create, sure. It’s just that one is knowably confined, one is unknowably confined, and COULD go outside of what we currently have.
Not how AI works
All artists copy, iterate or regurgitate existing work. What does pay have to do with anything? It’s clearly not a deciding factor for anti ai critics; the original post doesn’t mention payment at all.
This just isn’t how humans create. There’s also nothing stopping a human artist from taking inspiration from AI output (“wow, the combination of X subject in Y style is interesting. How can I improve it”), is there no value in that? Is that line of creativity forever tainted?
Categorically false for art. Ai output quality does get worse when you inbreed it on facts or data based in the real world. The only thing it’s really truly good at is hallucinating, which is a fine way of making art because the quality is entirely subjective.
A model with 60B parameters has something like ~60B^16 possible outputs. Just because humans currently lack the creativity to do anything interesting with it doesn’t mean the tool is slop.
There are real, ethical reasons to dislike our current AI usage. But saying all AI content is bad ipso facto is just reactionary nonsense.
I was using tracing as a metaphor for stealing their art without permission and using it as a weight in training data, and I said paid to do it as in these companies get massive returns off stealing the ai art. Even locally generated, the scraping was still content stolen without permission.
I mean not wrong but not fully correct either. AI is generating specifically from the dataset it has. I would say the way AI neurons work is similar to humans, but the AIs data is literally just images and words. That is like 30% of what a human will experience, and they are limited to specifically what their dataset contains. It is incapable of generating outside that dataset. A human is also incapable of generating outside their dataset, but a human is not restricted in their dataset to experiences and things that have already happened, and the experiences are not reflected in just words and images. AI images also tend to average their dataset, so the images end up more generic on average.
Do you have a source for that? Everything I’ve read has said the opposite, such as https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.12202
I absolutely agree with things like using it for inspiration or helping create an open source project, but I’m weighing the cost benefit for art and it seems like the long-term is negative for artists and consumers both, even if I might not care in the short term.
Ai companies are famously revenue negative. Their value is entirely speculative and it’s doubtful they’ll get any real returns due to the plain physical economics of training and running these models. Money currently being made is pocket change by grifters (eg: Ai YouTube videos, low effort articles), and that will dry up as water finds its level because it’s just so easy to do.
Looking at it from another perspective, the training of Ai and open sourcing of the initial models might be the greatest intellectual property transfer to the public in ~200 years. The strangle hold of Disney (and all litigious artist estates) on works that should be in the public domain has been strongly undermined.
Visual processing alone takes up about half of our brain. Between that and language you’ve covered most of it, I doubt Ai quality would be much improved by giving it taste or smell.
Not sure what exactly you mean here. I can imagine a purple polka-dot parrot only because I have experienced those words in the context of color and pattern and animal. I can’t imagine an ibcid kcajjd kpal outside of maybe vaguely attaching the concept of nonsense words to Dr Seuss. And I suppose an experience could be reflected in, say, a tantric massage but I’m not judging Gen Ai content on its ability to rub my genitals.
Losing semantic coherence is exactly what I mean by hallucination. Even as you lose the ability to use input to derive a sane output, the resulting image could still be aesthetically pleasing or interesting. It could also be garbage, but the same problem happens with artists on hallucinogens.
And I agree, Ai is “bad” because of what terrible people think they can do with it and by extension the economic and environmental damage done by trying to apply it everywhere. But I think people losing sleep over individual pieces of Ai content and artistic purity are a bit silly.
They’ll enjoy the assembly line thoughtless content put out by Disney and Warner Bros for profit and not for any meaningful discussion or art, but the moment someone does the same with a calculator they’ll lose their minds and say art is dead.
Maybe we can just go back to enjoying things and stop pretending to protect artists while constantly accusing artists of using AI.
Remember when Wacom and Photoshop wasn’t see as a form of art and only traditional art was valid? Or when artists mocked photography?
Or when people about 3 years ago were anti-copyright and have completely done a 180 on it. Still don’t get how they can be anti copyright but then instantly say “but this is my exception, this is for me, not for the public. I’ll gladly take the public however.”
Lemmy has a profound ability to retroactively decide something they once liked sucks. Not in the same way as learning something negative about the context, the artist, or the process and regretting that something they liked could come from a negative source. No, I mean they retroactively decide that the thing they liked is actually awful and they never liked it; because Lemmy is full of emotional children who collapse into hysterics the moment they see the letters A and I together, with most not even able to fully articulate why they feel the way they do, other than “AI bad!”
It’s like if you gave a meat lover a vegan hot dog without telling them; and at first they like it and say how good it is. But then when you tell them it’s not meat they immediately spit it out and start gagging and crying and saying how disgusting it is, as if moments ago they weren’t just saying how much they liked it.
If you think people who hate AI haven’t articulated many reasons why, you must not be listening.
The two big ones tend to either be the environmental impact of data centers or simple worker protectionism (aka believing that commissioned art should be immune to automation, literally the same position the Luddites had about industrial automation in textile mills).
Yes I can enjoy eating a hotdog but if I find out you stole that hot dog from a 13 year old, now I’m too upset that you stole from someone to enjoy it anymore. It’s not that they “don’t like it” anymore, they just hate that it’s ai generated more than they like the image.
Yes, as I said, you can regret the circumstances that led to it. You can even dislike continuing to consume it. What we are talking about is you going “Mmm… Delicious!” Then spitting it out and going “Blegh, disgusting! Who could ever enjoy something that tastes like THAT!”
If someone gives me art from their kid I will inherently overlook the flaws because I am happy to see them drawing. If I learn it’s from a billion dollar studio, it will drastically change how I view it. If someone asked me to objectively say how good the drawing is I would say it’s terrible. But I’m thinking about the artist so I don’t notice the flaws. If a billion dollar studio made the art I would say “I don’t know how anyone could ever enjoy this” while actively enjoying the 5 year old’s identical art. Just replace the 5 year old with “actual artists” and it’s the same situation. My enjoyment is partially from the person behind it improving and seeing feedback.
I would never say there is no “good” ai art, but I would also say 99.999% of AI art feels very generic. If I see a regular artist draw “good” art that is generic, I will say good job because they drew good art even if I find it generic. If there’s no artist… well it’s just generic “good” art so why would I not just look at an actual artists work for diverse “good” art, while not supporting the energy/water leech that is ai images?
Not as much of one as you think, these days. If you have something resembling a gaming PC from within the last 5 years or so you can probably run AI image generation locally, with how large a model and how complicated a workflow depending on your specs. Less stressful for the hardware than running a current AAA game even, depending on the model (possibly demanding more GPU RAM though).
Not false but I would say most people are not doing that, and you’ll be using models that are not as advanced and don’t have as large a dataset as the big companies. If someone wants to generate them locally and enjoys them then more power to them (though still arguable they’re using ill-begotten data)
The quality of the art isn’t in question here. what is, is what got it there. So yeah, if I see an picture and like it, but then find out it’s made by a talentless little hack that typed a sentence into a text prompt-
… It instantly sucks ass.
You see, it’s this reason that drives us to put our children’s shitty pictures on the fridge. It’s not because it’s art show adjacent work. It’s becase of the effort and time spent learning to make it what it is. Effort is something we call an “added value”. As is experience and training. These things are all subconsciously included in how we appreciate a thing- how we attribute a value it.
-and all of these things are ONLY acquired by a human being.
So no, it’s not “lemmy retroactively deciding something liked once sucked”
It’s learning that something they once liked, took zero effort to make, and wasn’t even created by a human being, but instead- a sweaty little wannabe “artist” behind a keyboard.
There is NO defense for AI making slop art.
I like the metaphor where you deny someone’s dietary/moral choices, essentially made them party to a grave sin in their eyes, rob them of their ability to consent, and then laugh at them when they’re upset about it. It’s really fucking telling.
I think you inverted the scenario. Otherwise you’re suggesting there’s some way that eating a veggie dog is a grave sin
I… swore it was the other way round. Either way, their metaphor isn’t the same as the actual situation because most who don’t like AI hate it on a moral ground (wasteful, egregious) rather than on a pure aesthetic one.
See? Just like I said: emotional children.
They literally glossed over your point and the other dude, and then claim humans are perfect art making creatures.
Spoken just like someone who would actually argue that a computer can crate the human equivalent of art.