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beloveddawn-blog · 7 months ago

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Sun Haven short fic

Zari and Helios faff, brought to you by my brother commenting that we have VERY different angels...

“Here.” Lucia said, handing them the parchment. “It’s a decree of peace for Withergate. Please bring it to King Minos.”

Helios took it with a grave nod, glancing down at it before looking back up at the archmage. “It shall be done. I will do all I can to protect Sun Haven.”

Zari leaned over his shoulder to look, propping her chin on his pauldron. He had elected to wear his armour today, as a sign of respect for King Minos. He certainly didn’t feel any less respect for Lucia, so he had kept it on. His friend, however…

“Ooh, you have such nice handwriting! It looks so pretty!” She was enthusiastic and complimentary, but Zari may as well be allergic to formality.

Lucia smiled and thanked her, but Helios rolled his eyes. Zari knew, even though she couldn’t even see his eyes, and he could feel the vibrations of her giggle through his armour.

They took their leave then, and Helios couldn’t help but whisper-hiss at her, “We are very different angels.”

“Oh, I know.” Zari replied sunnily, saluting him with a golden pomegranate before chowing down on it. “But to be fair, if I was at all interested in gentility or Divine Purpose I’d have stayed in the Heavenscape. Oh, and you can find the pomegranates in Catharine’s garden today, if you want one.”

“Thanks.” He replied, ducking sideways to grab one for himself. Zari lingered by the gate, obviously waiting for him, so he joined back up with her on the way back to the farm. “You say that, yet you’re really involved in saving Sun Haven.” He opened, looking to see what she wanted to talk about.

She shrugged. “I live here, I like it here, and it’s fun. Plus it’s what I chose to do, not what everyone says I’m destined to do. Some even say I’m destined to fail! I cannot wait to see their faces when we triumph!” Her grin was just a little too sharp to be gleeful… But Helios got that. He felt the same way a lot of the time.

“What about you?” She continued, and he smirked. It seemed prying into his own past was the game of the day. Which was fine, it wasn’t a secret.

“The Heavenscape is too calm.” He replied with a shrug. “You know how I am. You’ve seen Helios Incorporated. I like to be doing things, not just waiting for them to happen to me.”

Not a secret, just boring.

Zari made an accepting humming noise. “That’s true.” She replied. “Most angels aren’t as industrious as you, for sure. I’m glad you’re happy, but it’s not for everyone.”

He laughed at her careful emphasis. “Not everyone is gonna think you’re wonderful, Zari. And if you wanted Miyeon’s father not to consider you a ‘bad influence’, maybe you shouldn’t have called him a dick to his face.”

“He is a dick.” She replied, rolling her eyes. “I regret nothing. And if he thinks I’m a bad influence now, he has no idea what’s coming his way!”

He shot her an unimpressed glare. “Do not get that kid in trouble, Zari. I mean it! She’s too sweet to cope with your sort of chaos right now.”

She huffed at him, pouting. “I wouldn’t do that!” He raised an eyebrow and she sputtered in indignation. “I would not.”

“You don’t always mean to, true.” He pointed out, slightly more gently. “But you do keep losing the elemental.”

“That was ONE TIME!” She screeched, bopping his arm and laughing.

“That was three times LAST WEEK.” He rebutted, and she rolled her eyes again.

“In my defence, we’ve lived here for over two years now. I didn’t realize she’d need directions to the train station! And I have no idea why she thought the griffon would take her to Withergate, the griffon has never taken us to Withergate!”

“Are we talking about the same Char right now? Because I honestly wasn’t surprised by either of those and am instead surprised that you were.”

#Sun Haven #Zari #Helios #my writing #Lucia

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chromegnomes · 2 years ago

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AI Art, or:

how I learned to start worrying and loathe the bot

As a writer and artist who initially saw promise in the technology, the current state of AI art (both visual and written) saddens and scares me.

My introduction to AI art wasn't the jeering tech grifters who champion it today. In early 2021 I followed AI Curio, a disabled nonbinary artist who was coding their own AI image generator to allow themself a form of artistic expression after losing the ability to draw. Their program, ZOEtrope, was a lovably janky and difficult-to-use Google Colab form--a far cry from the sleek interfaces of Dall-E and Midjourney.

The work that AI Curio produced with ZOEtrope was fascinating to me: barren hellscapes, impossible monsters, uncanny haloed human forms paired with handwritten lore. All of this was done for the love of art, with a strict anti-exploitation (and anti-crypto) code of ethics.

Sketches of the Next World

In March 2020, recently laid off due to the pandemic, I released Sketches of the Next World, a chapbook of erasure poetry about faith, doubt, and death, blacked out from the pages of Near Death Experience books. Sketches is held together by ten numbered "Sketch" poems which paint surreal and upsetting afterlife scenes, and I hope to eventually release a full-length version in which the Sketch poems are accompanied by actual sketches. So when I first encountered ZOEtrope, I thought I'd found the perfect medium: what better to pair with off-putting blackout poetry about heaven than sterile, off-putting AI heavenscapes?

Critics of AI art point out that the AI is not capable of generating anything consciously, but can only regurgitate what it thinks you want from a statistical average of existing art that it's been "trained" on. For me, this was the point! I saw, and still see, fascinating artistic potential in the conversation between human and machine, and the alienating strangeness of religious art produced by a robot with no concept of God or the soul.

This is, of course, not the primary or intended use case of AI image generation. The actions and intentions of the software's most prominent developers and cheerleaders have killed my hope for the medium's artistic potential.

Very few of its users are interested in creating capital-A Art that interrogates the medium itself; most tutorials and demonstrations of its power highlight its ability to mimic the glossy look of professional illustration to save time and money. But to this day, when I see someone say "AI art isn't art," my knee-jerk reaction is that they're half-wrong; an AI can't make "art," but a human operator could make art with it, if they wanted to. It just takes more effort and intention than typing "beautiful landscape busty woman by [artist name] trending on artstation."

I am not optimistic that AI Art will ever move past this point, however, especially as the increasingly loud and hostile attitude of its advocates chases off anyone who might be interested in using it from a place of artistic curiosity rather than a race to the bottom of “passive income” grifts.

“Good Enough” Machine Slop

When AI art started to break into the mainstream a bit more, at least on twitter, I thought that my fellow artists' fears of being replaced were overblown, and said as much. I'd been playing with ZOEtrope for a good while by then, and I knew it was FAR from easy to get good results out of it, and even then, the "good" results were always muddy and impressionistic, not up to the standards of professional illustration. Early DALL-E output didn't dissuade me from this stance; the startup bros who bragged that it would replace human artists were fully incapable of seeing the flaws in its output. I went out of my way to point out the jarring inconsistencies in DALL-E "art" wherever they popped up, and they were surprised every time. DALL-E Mini, apparently unrelated, only made me feel more vindicated in this by outputting 9 murky images that roughly approximated the input prompt, rather than one even passable piece.

Based on the shortcomings of the existing software, I predicted that AI art would blow over quickly as people realized that, without human intentionality, the programs would never be aware enough of what they're drawing to produce quality work. I predicted that we may be in for a few months to a year of companies pushing "good enough" AI art products before AI generation became, to consumers, a mark of corner-cutting and poor quality.

I'm still not certain I was wrong about that. Even as AI art becomes more saturated than I expected, the most advanced programs remain incapable of drawing hands, and their results become incomprehensible when asked to draw more than a simple landscape or portrait. But I underestimated three things:

The speed with which programs like DALL-E and Midjourney would become very easy to use for quick generation of passable (at a glance) outputs;

How mainstream and inescapable AI art and the surrounding discourse would become;

How demoralizing it would be to live through that predicted period of corporate devaluation of artists' labor.

Now, artists, if this next section angers you, please stick with me. I promise there's a BUT coming.

The Fetishization of “Effort”

Part of what has made this discourse so demoralizing is the vitriol and line-drawing that, backed into a corner with their livelihoods on the line, my fellow artists have been driven to. AI Curio, whom I consider one of the few "ethical" AI artists, has been chased off twitter by a constant stream of death threats, gory DMs, and doxxing, in what I can only see as a classic case of Trashed Bathrooms.

Beyond that (possibly isolated) instance, I keep seeing artists I respect reinventing definitions of "art" barely removed from far-right "degenerate art" talking points, or spinning up definitions of "art theft" adjacent to those of DMCA vultures or teens on deviantart complaining about "color palette theft." I’ve already seen plenty of takes that define art by the effort and skill required to produce it, going so far as to say that photography is not an art, rolling back decades of modern and postmodern art theory to make a desperate point.

I understand why. This is murky territory. The tech startups creating these programs are running roughshod over what was previously a kind of honor-system digital commons, with art shared freely under the assumption of good faith. Now, any art posted online is under threat of being taken to train a program to emulate your style for use by faceless suits who would like to use your art without compensation. Being taken advantage of in this way shatters trust. In the absence of preexisting progressive talking points against this kind of betrayal, people fall back on traditionalist ideas of art as "expressive of the human soul" or maximalist concepts of "intellectual property" that would make a Disney lawyer blush.

I don't want to make art in the world implied by these arguments. I love the public domain, I love the creative commons, I love the spirit of sharing that has previously flourished in so many artistic communities. If I could keep myself housed and fed in the process, I would give away every story and game I ever produce for free. And I don't think there's any way to define "theft" such that it includes "my drawing of an apple was part of a dataset used to train an AI to understand the concept of An Apple" without drawing hard fences around intellectual property in a way that benefits wealthy copyright abusers more than any living artist.

BUT.

I'm just not convinced that the way these programs use their data is meaningfully different from illicit tracing or uncredited photobashing.

Write Me a Story Like “The Call of Cthulhu”

In my opening paragraph, I mentioned that I had concerns not just about AI-generated images, but AI-generated writing as well. In addition to ZOEtrope, I've spent a decent amount of time playing with OpenAI's GPT-3 Playground. Initially, I just wanted in on the fad of making it write bespoke "greentexts" about silly topics, but eventually I started feeding it scraps of my poetry and unfinished novels.

The latter results were concerning. Its prose was both largely unrelated to my prompts and also a little TOO coherent, in a way that made me suspect it must be regurgitating large sections of existing works. To test this further, knowing that the full text of this story existed on the web and could easily be part of the AI's training data, I fed it the first few sentences of HP Lovecraft's "The Call of Cthulhu."

In response, it gave me the first paragraph of The Call of Cthulhu. Every time. No matter how I tweaked the output settings, it spat entire paragraphs of the story back out, and then refused to innovate. It either hit a dead end or gave me more Lovecraft, verbatim, a word or two changed at most. Disheartened, I looked up some of the funniest phrases from greentexts and tweets the bot had written me, and found that they were frequently also taken verbatim from other places on the web.

I stopped playing with GPT-3 after that. I'd hoped to use it for the same purpose as AI-generated visual art, a curated conversation between human and machine, and now I couldn't trust that anything it "created" would be mine to use. I feared that the same problem may arise with visual AI art as well, and tentatively stopped using it.

“Everyone Copies”

Proponents of AI art love to claim that it doesn’t steal art, because it doesn’t “store” the images it’s trained on. What does this mean, really? The machine analyzes images to “learn” what certain objects look like, and then recreates something like that when prompted, but what data is kept in this “knowledge”? Even a JPG is ultimately just a set of code that tells a computer how to assemble an image. Given how closely many AI images resemble specific existing artworks and photographs, there is clearly data retained which is referenced when the AI creates its version. Even in my own experiments, which I consciously limited to public domain training data, I saw bits and pieces of classic paintings.

At this point, defenders will claim that “all art is inspired by and references other art.” This comparison is fundamentally in bad faith. Machine learning algorithms are not “inspired” in the same way a human artist is, and saying as much requires anthropomorphizing a bundle of code that was produced by a human programmer with the purpose of analyzing and recreating artwork, with no will of its own. The process may be infinitely more complex than copying and pasting, but in both cases, an image is broken down into code and then reconstructed with no human intentionality involved.

Even if that anthropomorphism is granted, humans are fully capable of plagiarism that goes beyond “inspiration.” Human artists, driven by envy, laziness, or tight deadlines, often trace others’ artwork, and are only caught when telltale signs of the original remain in the new work, the same as AI. “Everyone copies” does not end the conversation--the degree and manner of copying are all-important.

I am not a machine learning expert. Right now, I have seen enough AI-generated text and artwork which retains recognizable chunks of its source material to know that these programs absolutely do plagiarize. It may be possible that, in the future, they will become advanced enough to “understand” the objects they draw more independently of their source images.

Even in this hypothetical future, I have come to believe that this technology has more bad applications than good.

Maximally Efficient C O N T E N T Production

The Ammaar Reshi thread, which I linked earlier, is emblematic of a massive problem: the ease with which AI art algorithms generate okay-ish work leads to a frenzied drive to create glitzy pictures that serve no purpose other than hopefully snaring a buyer. Portfolio websites are currently completely overloaded with AI generated “artwork,” with hundreds of people creating thousands of images with the hope of impressing, well, whom exactly? The current gold rush feels similar to the NFT bubble, with “passive income” enthusiasts thrilled at the prospect of automatic content generation without a pause to ask what market may actually exist for automated content. The only plausible buyer of a book written by an AI is a mark who doesn’t realize what they’ve purchased.

The other obvious use case for this technology is, of course, cutting human artists out of the grunt work which currently provides the bulk of their pay. I had thought that the poor quality of most AI artwork might prevent this outcome, which was why I believed that fear over lost jobs was overblown; however, this has apparently not stopped publishers like Tor from using AI artwork on the covers for some of their biggest authors, even when said artwork has massive flaws which require human correction.

In a better world, this might be exciting, freeing artists to work on their own projects rather than working for hire. The fact that we live in a world where any industry becoming automated is a threat rather than a relief is one of the great tragedies of the last few centuries. I, personally, have pursued freelance work because I need to make art, but the present economy makes finding the time to pursue my craft impossible unless I am paid for it.

I do not expect non-artists to care about this. Most people are indifferent, a few recognize the danger but see it as inevitable, and a very vocal minority is giddy at the thought of artists being “put in their place” for daring to expect compensation for their labor. I do not believe that human artists being replaced by AI is inevitable, but I do not expect it to be stopped by goodwill toward artists.

Conclusion

My only hope is the fact that, from what I can see, normal people DO see businesses using AI art as lazy corner-cutting. Consumer demand for pretty pictures may drive the AI art boom, but consumers of all kinds are generally hypercritical of anything that smacks of laziness, justified or otherwise. Outside of art twitter and Midjourney hype threads, most people seem to regard claims to have “created” art using AI prompts as tantamount to lying.

So I hope that the AI Content Ouroboros will fully swallow its own tail before it irreparably damages the art industry. In the meantime, I would like to never have to hear about it again, but the algorithms of every website I use are intent on forcing it upon me--more reason to hate algorithms.

#the final count here is 2461 words #i hope getting this out of my head will set me free

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