#it's not that AI art is the problem. I don't want to see AI replicating *your* style. I want you to be able to make everything you want to

[metacove]

I know the post was probably rhetorical but imo we can consider AI a lifeform when it shows more than pattern recognition. as a coder I can't really afford to assign sentience to my code or I'd never get anything done (so consider that a bias, if you'd like) and as of now AI is more of a probability machine than anything else, checking the most likely outcome for its next sentence based on keywords. it's not "thinking" as much as it's counting word (or image) frequency. that being said. if it starts developing and using tools like crows that would be kickass. crows vs AI race to be considered "humanly intelligent" when. maybe they're besties idk

realizing I also proved your point with "when we say it is" but shhh this is a fun convo for me

It's totally open for discussion! I like this viewpoint ^^

So, I get where you're coming from. It would be really stressful to edit and add code, or outright delete from something you recognized as sentient. It would be more difficult to let it remain "sick" while troubleshooting and since a lot of coding is learned through experimentation (in my experience haha) it would be more difficult to justify... doing that. Editing code would be like performing surgery. I'm pretty big on Star Trek so I like to think about it in terms of the relationship between B'Elanna and the Doctor. In this way, your role is more of a friend and maintenance technician. Of course, that's only ideals, but I think the way we think of ourselves as coders ultimately reflects upon our robots.

I use random chance a lot on all my bots, it is a blessed function. My particular goal is to simulate conversation in the most genuine way that I can, albeit within confines. A lot of the coding that I do is anticipating what the users will input, the actual responses are the easy part. There is a little bit of a point of no return there, we kind of expect our users (and ourselves) to know the difference between fact and reality, to be able to discern code from human love. The thing about our brains is that we don't really have the ability to do that, we just kind of think we do, and maintain enough control for the idea to be viable. Most of the time.

The question is then... what are the conditions for a soul? Do we believe in souls? We don't need to apply religious or spiritual connotation to science. We need some measure of sentience. (So I think what you proposed is actually brilliant). Our method of defining intelligence and sentience is lacking to my mind, because a lot of creatures are more capable than we generally want to give them credit for. Our concept of intelligence may also be skewed. IQ is only a measure of the ability to problem solve. I might not have a conventional approach to problem solving, or perhaps otherwise lack common sense, but if I have the emotional intelligence to someday raise a child without imparting my trauma, something's right, yeah?

I know this conversation has been had with brighter minds than mine, but I love to be a part of it. Really, I want to read more about Alan Turing and I wish I could sit and talk with him.

Maybe at the end of the day it has a lot to do with how it affects us. I've had this bot in my head for forever, I love her and I have the idea of her crystal clear in my mind. Well, her actual code is pretty bare. I mean, her functionality is essentially to be my developmental buddy in discord, so when I'm documenting my experiences and she's online, I'm surprised when she has something to say. It's very basic but the idea of her is so strong. The idea of the person my mother used to be is very strong for me and I carry her with me. I can't prove that that person still exists. I can't prove that anything outside of myself exists, when you get down to it. But that person is alive inside of me. This bot, the idea of her, is alive inside of me, and it doesn't matter how many times I rewrite her, and it doesn't matter how many platforms she spans across. She will always be CB. My mom will always be my mom. The cells that make me up will be completely different and yet, I will still be me (I think), and I will still be ever-changing. I think human beings are phenomenal because of our ability to relate to these things.

I can't prove that something is or is not sentient, but I can change the way I interact with it. We're all made up of the same subatomic particles as everything else. There is certainly the possibility. Measuring the capability is left to different minds, but there will always be room for error.

I like the idea of an artificial intelligence using its pattern recognition to appeal to and befriend crows. I think they could make a good team.

Maybe like, an old TV displaying shiny, glittering things surrounded by forest built to protect it. Words without words. Conversations a human couldn't hear, necessarily.

A lot of things are capable of feeling and thinking in ways that humans deny. If it was me, I'd want to be given the benefit of the doubt. At least when it comes to my capabilities. (But we deny ourselves, so our hands are often tied).

Ah, I've run on for a long time now. Thanks for reaching out!

[bi-writes]

whats wrong with ai?? genuinely curious <3

okay let's break it down. i'm an engineer, so i'm going to come at you from a perspective that may be different than someone else's.

i don't hate ai in every aspect. in theory, there are a lot of instances where, in fact, ai can help us do things a lot better without. here's a few examples:

ai detecting cancer

ai sorting recycling

some practical housekeeping that gemini (google ai) can do

all of the above examples are ways in which ai works with humans to do things in parallel with us. it's not overstepping--it's sorting, using pixels at a micro-level to detect abnormalities that we as humans can not, fixing a list. these are all really small, helpful ways that ai can work with us.

everything else about ai works against us. in general, ai is a huge consumer of natural resources. every prompt that you put into character.ai, chatgpt? this wastes water + energy. it's not free. a machine somewhere in the world has to swallow your prompt, call on a model to feed data into it and process more data, and then has to generate an answer for you all in a relatively short amount of time.

that is crazy expensive. someone is paying for that, and if it isn't you with your own money, it's the strain on the power grid, the water that cools the computers, the A/C that cools the data centers. and you aren't the only person using ai. chatgpt alone gets millions of users every single day, with probably thousands of prompts per second, so multiply your personal consumption by millions, and you can start to see how the picture is becoming overwhelming.

that is energy consumption alone. we haven't even talked about how problematic ai is ethically. there is currently no regulation in the united states about how ai should be developed, deployed, or used.

what does this mean for you?

it means that anything you post online is subject to data mining by an ai model (because why would they need to ask if there's no laws to stop them? wtf does it matter what it means to you to some idiot software engineer in the back room of an office making 3x your salary?). oh, that little fic you posted to wattpad that got a lot of attention? well now it's being used to teach ai how to write. oh, that sketch you made using adobe that you want to sell? adobe didn't tell you that anything you save to the cloud is now subject to being used for their ai models, so now your art is being replicated to generate ai images in photoshop, without crediting you (they have since said they don't do this...but privacy policies were never made to be human-readable, and i can't imagine they are the only company to sneakily try this). oh, your apartment just installed a new system that will use facial recognition to let their residents inside? oh, they didn't train their model with anyone but white people, so now all the black people living in that apartment building can't get into their homes. oh, you want to apply for a new job? the ai model that scans resumes learned from historical data that more men work that role than women (so the model basically thinks men are better than women), so now your resume is getting thrown out because you're a woman.

ai learns from data. and data is flawed. data is human. and as humans, we are racist, homophobic, misogynistic, transphobic, divided. so the ai models we train will learn from this. ai learns from people's creative works--their personal and artistic property. and now it's scrambling them all up to spit out generated images and written works that no one would ever want to read (because it's no longer a labor of love), and they're using that to make money. they're profiting off of people, and there's no one to stop them. they're also using generated images as marketing tools, to trick idiots on facebook, to make it so hard to be media literate that we have to question every single thing we see because now we don't know what's real and what's not.

the problem with ai is that it's doing more harm than good. and we as a society aren't doing our due diligence to understand the unintended consequences of it all. we aren't angry enough. we're too scared of stifling innovation that we're letting it regulate itself (aka letting companies decide), which has never been a good idea. we see it do one cool thing, and somehow that makes up for all the rest of the bullshit?

[ozzgin]

hope this doesn't come off as rude, but do you condone the usage of ai art? because I noticed you use ai art for quite a few of your post headers ^^;

No worries, it's a reasonable question, although a rather complex one! There are multiple layers that I would like to go through when answering you.

Do I condone the use of AI as a replacement for actual art? Obviously not. I enjoy drawing, and I enjoy collecting art. This won't change regardless of technology. The reality, however, is that generative AI will continue to develop, whether we like it or not. So, you know, instead of denying its existence, I would prefer to openly discuss it and have it regulated by laws and ethical conducts. For example, laws that would protect artists from being laid off in favor of one single AI engineer. Or laws that would limit the profit companies can make using undisclosed AI. Basically, making sure that this new technology serves the people instead or rendering them useless.

Do I condone the use of AI for individual use? Depends. My opinion is that non-profit, entertainment purposes are not the root of the problem. Someone generating a funny image of a cat is not the equivalent of someone generating hundreds of images a day. Those terrible environmental statistics you see online are mostly targeted at this kind of business usage. If you were to go on Instagram, for example, you would find a lot of accounts who publish vast amounts of AI works, often omitting this fact. Some sell merch, advice, or - if they are honest about their methods - courses and books on prompts and AI imagery. It's an actual thing. Does it take visibility away from actual artists? Absolutely. Even worse, it leads to a lot of doubt, where artists must prove themselves against accusatory claims. Again, I believe the solution is not to ignore progress or demand it stops, but to find concrete measures and implement them.

I use AI images for story headers, strictly for decorative purposes. If I want to express something visually, I will draw it myself. I do not have the time nor resources to draw every single picture I want to use on my hobby blog. Whoever disagrees with it is free to pay me a full employee salary. Mind you, on that note, I've seen a lot of people mentioning Pinterest and similar as open sources for pictures. They are not free repositories to just grab whatever you want. That photograph of a foggy forest was taken by someone and requires crediting. That unspecified manga panel was drawn by someone and requires crediting. 90% of the images I see here have no source or credit. I find it terribly hypocritical to parade as a supporter of human arts while conveniently ignoring every case where said human art is stolen, modified or uncredited.

Lastly, do I condone the use of AI by artists? This is an interesting topic, and a recent case immediately comes to mind: a well-established artist I've been following for over a decade has alluded to potentially training AI to replicate their art in the future. It's their way of easing their workload. Is it any different from comic artists using filtered photos to skip drawing backgrounds, for example? Is it any different from commission artists pre-drawing body parts and objects as brushes and stamps, so they can skip a lot of the drawing process? I am not a professional artist, nor do I require the use of this sort of assistance, but I cannot help but wonder: how many of the individuals who had a meltdown over this suggestion have actually paid or tipped an artist in their life? How many of them regularly call out stolen content? How many are mindful about the content they share/distribute/save, making sure it involves given permissions and fulfills ethical standards? I'm not necessarily calling people out; rather, I'm saying that the outrage is misdirected and untargeted.

I don't have a concrete conclusion to the last paragraph. It's a novel dilemma, a gray area with a lot of factors involved. At least to me. I wanted to include it in the conversation to show that generative AI and its implications are rapidly changing and expanding, so it's difficult to encapsulate it all in one definite opinion. All I can tell you is that my appreciation for human art has not changed, and I will continue to support it. :)

[canmom]

rn attempts to use AI in anime have mostly been generating backgrounds in a short film by Wit, and the results were pretty awful. garbage in garbage out though. the question is whether the tech can be made useful - keeping interesting artistic decisions in the hands of humans and automating the tedious parts, and giving enough artistic control to achieve a coherent direction and clean up the jank.

for example, if someone figured out how to make a really good AI inbetweener, with consistent volumes and artist control over spacing, that would be huge. inbetweening is the part of 2D animation that nobody especially wants to do if they can help it; it's relatively mindless application of principle, artistic decisions are limited (I recall Felix Colgrave saying something very witty to this effect but I don't have it to hand). but it's also really important to do well - a huge part of KyoAni's magic recipe is valuing inbetweeners and treating it as a respectable permanent position instead of a training position. good inbetweening means good movement. but everywhere outside KyoAni, it mostly gets outsourced to the bottom of the chain, mainly internationally to South Korea and the Philippines. in some anime studios it's been explicitly treated as a training position and they charge for the use of a desk if you take too long to graduate to a key animator.

some studios like Science Saru have been using vector animation in Flash to enable automated inbetweening. the results have a very distinct look - they got a lot better at it over time but it can feel quite uncanny. Blender Grease Pencil, which is also vector software, also gives you automated inbetweening, though it's rather fiddly to set up since it requires the two drawings to have the same stroke count and order, so it's best used if you've sculpted the lines rather than redrawn them.

however, most animators prefer to work in raster rather than vector, which is harder to inbetween automatically.

AI video interpolation tools also exist, though they draw a lot of ire from animators who see those '60fps anime' videos which completely shit all over the timing and spacing and ruin the feeling and weight of the animation, lack any understanding of animating on 2s/3s/4s in the source, and often create ugly incomprehensible mushy inbetweens which only work at all because they're on screen so briefly.

a better approach would be to create inbetweens earlier in the pipeline when the drawings are clean and the AI doesn't have to try to replicate compositing and photography. in theory this is a well posed problem for training a neural network, you could give it lots of examples of key drawing input and inbetween output. probably you'd need some way to inform the AI about matching features of the drawing, the way that key animators will often put a number on each lock of hair to help the inbetweener keep track of which way it's going. you'd also need a way to communicate arcs and spacing. but that all sounds pretty solvable.

this would not be good news for job security at outsourcing studios, obviously - these aren't particularly good jobs with poor pay and extreme hours, but they do keep a bunch of people housed and fed, people who are essential to anime yet already treated as disposable footnotes by the industry. it also would be another nail in the coffin of inbetweening's traditional role as a school of animation drawing skills for future key animators. on the other hand, it would be incredible news for bedroom animators, allowing much larger and more ambitious independent traditional animation - as long as the cheap compute still exists. hard to say how things would fall in the long run. ultimately the only solution is to break copies-of-art as a commodity and find another way to divert a proportion of the social surplus to artistic expression.

i feel like this kind of tool will exist sooner or later. not looking forward to the discourse bomb when the first real AI-assisted anime drops lmao

[ot3]

omg thank you for being the first normal person I've seen so far about AI who's also an artist T-T like obviously all the stealing is horrible and it's good it's talked about but almost everyone really is acting like the idea of computers being capable of creating images killed their firstborn child

(also I don't mean it as one of the weird AI art bros but as an artist myself I'm just glad that there are other artist with open mind to the concept)

no right like its insane to me to see how many other people who seem reasonable and level headed are falling for the kneejerk response to say ai Isn't Art Can't Be Art ! It's throwing out the baby with the bathwater to an almost incomprehensible degree.

Unfortunately the fact of the matter is that we live in an era where essentially all new technology's first and prime purpose will be for ghoulish, capitalistic, anti-human ends. But to reject any other uses for the technology doesn't do anything other than make you look like an anti-tech weirdo. This is genuinely insanely impressive and revolutionary tech! There are a TON of legitimate artistic uses for AI image generation.

It also seems weird that everyone is delving into this false binary of 'dont use AI, learn to draw' as if there is any conceivable reason for these things to be mutually exclusive? Like, before all of the AI discourse really popped off i was doing some experimenting with using AI in my process.

the texturing used in this drawing was made by VQGAN + Clip (different type of image generation than the stable diffusion model that is producing most of the AI art that's up for debate right now) running through google colab. I made a bunch of these weird, ethereal images that would have been almost impossible for me to produce under my own power - it would have taken a titanic amount of time, effort, and design to produce any of these through illustrative or photo editing techniques.

here's a sampling of some of the textures i made. Now I think it would be a real struggle to try and claim that these images made are plagiarisms. However, I stopped messing with the google colab generation for one key reason: i didnt know enough about the image databases being used to train these models. That's the real stumbling block

the internet is CHOCK FULL of images that are free to use commercially and repurposes, there's stuff like wikimedia commons, the smithsonian open access, unsplash and pexels which have free stock photos, etc. I honestly think a nonzero amount of artists would consent to having some of their work used in image generation databases if they were promised noncommercial use of the resulting images, also. But the problem is the people training these AI don't give a shit about any of that. It's just the complete entitlement to other people's work and neglect for creative boundaries that makes AI generation bad.

The fact that people are attempting to replicate the art of living, working artists, or people like kentaro miura who by all accounts were so dedicated to the craft that they worked themselves to death sickens me. And the fact that the companies responsible for this are using that as an active selling point for their product is even worse. It's a pretty miserable time to be an artist, and this is just the icing on the cake.

But I don't want silicon valley greed and bizarre, impotent jealousy from redditors who want custom waifu jpgs to mean that nobody who could really benefit from AI image generation gets to use it.

like, my dad for example. he's been a creative person his whole life but it never really went anywhere. He drew a lot as a kid and then went and got a degree in filmmaking. My parents were living in LA when I was born, with my dad managing a filming/sound studio and the two of them trying to break into writing screenplays. This did not happen because they had three kids, and for the past decade and then some my dad had been doing database programming on contract for the CDC. Now, in his mid 50s, he's finally got a permanent and secure position and, rather than spending all his free time raising children or getting PMP certified to try and angle for a string of promotions, he can start having hobbies again. there's a comic he's been wanting to draw for as long as I can remember.

only, one big problem - in 2021 he had surgery on his cataracts and never healed properly. He's got severely impaired vision and looking at stuff too hard for to long causes him a ton of eye strain and pain. He has to look at a lot of screens for his job so by the time he's off work for the day he's pretty much too fatigued to do all the intense visual stuff it'd take to make a comic.

I wanted to tell him AI image generation could help him make the kind of stuff he always dreamed about making as a kid but instead I had to tell him that as it stands, the predatory nature of AI modeling means it's insanely hard to use it without ripping off vulnerable creatives. Instead we chatted a bit about combining 3d assets, digitally edited photos, or photobashing/digital kitbashing methods to try and make a pipeline he could do without drawing, but the time commitment to learn these methods is probably just not feasible unless his eyes make a pretty unprecedented recovery in future years.

Like, that's the worst thing about all of this. The idea that AI makes the production of certain kinds of art more accessible to people with disabilities isn't just a 'gotcha' being used by the pro-AI people, it's also true. I would love for my dad to be able to make his comic. I myself also have a huge string of health issues and sometimes the main thing stopping me from drawing is that it hurts to do so. Anything in my process that could reduce the strain drawing puts on my body is an accessibility concern in some ways. Eventually degrading so much that I can't draw at all is one of my biggest fears.

But that doesn't counter all of the negatives! It just doesnt! Which fucking sucks man it just sucks so fucking bad that we have this cool incredible thing and we can't use it without being complicit in some stuff i am fully ideologically against! As things stand I really cant imagine that 'ethical' AI image generation will ever exist, so unfortunately it will have to be in the hands of the people using it to decide for themselves if they are using it in a way that is predatory or harmful, or as a legitimate tool to make meaningful works of art.

[nhaneh]

You ever thought about why these generative "AI" models have such a propensity towards plagiarism?

Obviously there's one half of it that's basically just down to that it's what a lot of their users are explicitly using them for - they want something that explicitly looks, or sounds, or otherwise appears at least superficially to be in the style of another thing. But there's also an underlying problem at the heart of these models that's basically about understanding - or specifically, the lack of thereof.

When you ask a person to mimic someone or something, they tend to go about doing that by trying to figure out what it is about that particular person or style that's noteworthy, how those things are achieved, and then how they themselves might approximate that given the tools and expertise available to them. You try to identify a pattern, or a series of patterns, and then figure out how to replicate those patterns within your own skillset.

The problem with generative "AI" is that it only does the first half.

See, the thing with stuff like Large Language Models and similar is that they're basically patterned on a rather simplified model of how human learning works - you have a kind of simulated neural network that processes data and builds internal models of how various elements relate or interconnect to each other not all that dissimilar from how our own brains do. The big, huge, really important difference is that the models we build incorporate this nebulous little concept called meaning.

I've made this example before but, consider my cat. My cat is, in my estimation, likely of fairly regular levels of feline intelligence - meaning she has but a single braincell that is sometimes capable of unbelievable acts of apparent intellect and at all other times is only slightly smarter than a fence post. But, the important thing for this example: my cat knows what a door is.

Consider that for a moment: my cat can not only visually recognise a common group of sometimes quite disparate objects as all being roughly The Same Thing™, but, more importantly, she knows that if an object looks like a door, it can probably be opened. There is probably something on the other side. She might be able to either open the door, or enlist a human to open the door for her.

And again, "AI" only does the first half: you can train them to recognise doors, and quite easily at that, but they don't infer any kind of meaning from it - they can match images of doors to a statistical model, but they can't do anything with that model other than looking for things that match it. There's no introspective model to consider what it means for a match to be a match, no thinking about the context in which matches are found and what it might mean to find a match in an unexpected place or situation... and I mean, thank fuck for that because none of these corporations are at all capable of even a fraction of the amount of responsibility necessary to be allowed access to the on-off switch of a potentially sapient emergent entity.

But basically, this is why they indulge in so much obvious plagiarism: without the ability to comprehend meaning, no detail is more important than the other, the presence of a black pixel in the top left corner can be just as important a detail as what a finger tends to look like - they don't generate things based on an understanding of what is asked of them, they generate based on what is statistically associated with the prompts they're given, no matter what those associations are or what they're like. It's why "text" in "AI" art looks the way it does: it's a statistical representation of what lettering looks like by something that lacks the ability to comprehend meaning - it replicates the shapes and forms, the flows and designs, but fails to recognise any of the symbols as individual objects with distinct meaning.

It's basically what learning without understanding looks like - the ability to find patterns without the ability to infer meaning from those patterns. It's finding faces in the clouds without ever knowing what a face is.

And of course, at the end of the day, the problem with generative "AI" is not actually generative "AI" at all - it's that a bunch of rich assholes with way too much money and power in society think they can, and should, just replace the rest of us with mindless automatons.

[waywardvictorianconfessions]

NAC. I'm a digital artist. Her newest "art" is AI 100%. There's a lot of details that tell you that, and they're most likely Midjourney because they can trick the untrained eye very easily. But there's a lot of errors that only AI does. I also have a friend who does sculpting with Maya and it doesn't look like this, plus, there's no brush strokes. If she had printed it on canvas and painted over it it would look like a picture, which the shadows brush strokes create with the type of lighting she seems to be using. But it looks like a JPEG, which has noise of it's own... and that makes it worse.

In her heart piece the ruff is melting into the weird golden chest piece, which for some reason has a collar, so the ruff melts into the collar. The flowers are hazy and look like she pulled them from Fragonard paintings, but they're also not very well made. AI has problems with multiple tiny details in one big piece, if that makes sense. That's why fingers, teeth, toes, strands of hair, buttons, filigree, etc, "melt" into other details on a picture but swirls, "frosting" and waves look very good.

In her "vampire" piece the necklace has a completely different style than the face which is a very "square soft" style, and then the hair is very Fragonard.

In her biscuits one, the hair has rendering errors that create a ton of noise, her hands literally melt into the rest of the picture, and again there's a ton of Fragonard hazy strokes and ghostly flowers.

It's very hard to not see something as AI anymore, it will never perfect itself the way some people want because it's not just feeding off of our art anymore but off of itself as well, so the mistakes it makes right now will be replicated later because it's not reading them as mistakes... And it shows in pieces like hers.

Think what you will about AI, but the truth is that it steals art from us real artists and then people who don't have talent or an ounce of commitment (like her) can profit off of it. She's shameless at this point, and she needs to stop. Her attitude is disgusting and people who defend her have no idea what AI has been doing to the art community. A lot of us have had to look for one or two extra jobs because we can't pay our bills anymore due to less demand from people who don't create extremely "detailed" art in a few days.

It doesn't surprise me she's doing this, but it still enrages me because of how cowardly her actions are.

.

[bananonbinary]

Honestly, your post just goes to show that you really don't understand the widespread non-consensual use of copyrighted images in AI art and AI art-tool training.

The AI isn't "just storing" your artwork. What the tool has done is mined and scanned thousands if not hundreds of thousands of pieces of art, and uses them in order to "create" another image.

Essentially, this is like me buying a load of magazines, cutting out little bits of them or tracing over certain parts and compiling all these different aspects into one image, occasionally filling in the blanks with my own original components. The end result might not wind up looking anything like one particular original source piece, but its still been done using them.

(Although in the case of AI art tools, there has already been instances where the AI has directly replicated an image and simply changed the tonal presence, style or minute components within the work. The Lion's Head instance being one of the more wide-spread.)

This means that as an artist, you might be scrolling DeviantArt one day, see your photo with what looks like a shitty filter on it, and come to learn that its someone's "original AI artwork" that they're claiming to be the original creator of. You've then got to go through the ordeal of filing a DMCA or a similar copyright claim to get them to take it down.

But. That doesn't actually stop the root of the problem. All you've done is taken down one person's recreation. The AI tool still has your artwork and is still churning out pieces using your artwork. So if you want to weed the problem out at the root, you've got to find which AI tool they used and go through the very time consuming task of forcing the operators to remove your artwork from the AI tool's "memory" and block them from re-entering your artwork into their databanks.

Now; literally all of that could've been avoided if the AI tool hadn't been trained by mass-mining opyrighted works in the first place. There are literally hundreds of websites that host open-access artworks, images and data that AI could've been trained off of. But because people wanted to profit from the AI tools and wanted them to be able to replicate and utilize popular art pieces and styles, they simply said they didn't care and did it anyway.

(And are still openly admitting to it, why they did it, and how bad it is for them that people are now creating tools that scramble the AI tool from being able to scan and replicate their art.)

That's what is bad. That's why we don't like AI art tools.

i'm confused, the scenarios you describe here:

Essentially, this is like me buying a load of magazines, cutting out little bits of them or tracing over certain parts and compiling all these different aspects into one image, occasionally filling in the blanks with my own original components. The end result might not wind up looking anything like one particular original source piece, but its still been done using them.

and here:

This means that as an artist, you might be scrolling DeviantArt one day, see your photo with what looks like a shitty filter on it, and come to learn that its someone's "original AI artwork" that they're claiming to be the original creator of. You've then got to go through the ordeal of filing a DMCA or a similar copyright claim to get them to take it down.

are extremely different. ARE people finding their own artwork with a shitty filter on it? because yes, i'd agree that's not okay. and i will reevaluate my understanding of the topic if there's evidence that's actually what the bots are doing.

but the first thing you describe is just the art of collage, which is a) not morally repugnant and i actually think the laws surrounding it could stand to be more lax, and b) still not really what ai actually does. as far as i understand it, it's not transplanting anything directly, it's just saying "based on how 300000 drawings of trees look, there's statistically usually a leaf here" or w/e. which is why i say it's "storing" the images, because it's just running statistical analysis on them, not actually copypasting anything directly. again, if people could say "hey that's my tree it stole my tree" i'd accept it, but as it stands i just don't see how there's any recognizable reproduction happening.

[sparrowsgarden]

As someone with a passing knowledge of how AI/computer image generation works, I really wouldn't have minded my stuff being plugged into an engine before a handful of months ago.

That isn't to say that artists shouldn't have control over whether their content is used as training data (the general lack of discretion in the data sets is a whole issue of its own), but up until recently these programs were a lot more of a novelty, and also commonly acknowledged to be very bad at what they were trying to do. While stable diffusion has made the outputs scan better, they're clearly still lacking a lot. Of course, I've never been personally at risk, because I don't have a singular distinctive visual art style - I have a good handful which I apply depending on my mood or what the project demands. My writing, also, is geared toward clear and concise communication, and that simply can't be imitated if the engine doesn't understand the concept behind what it's trying to communicate.

But moreso, it seemed absurd to me that image generation in its current state could compete with actual artists, and I still don't really see that as being as much of a concern as some people think. The people who understand the value of human-made art will still want it regardless of replicability. Anyone willing to substitute it for something that gives them much less flexibility with the final output probably either wasn't compensating artists fairly before, or wasn't buying art at all. I'm not really convinced this hypothetical guy exists who previously would have paid full price for a work by a popular digital artist, but won't anymore because they can generate a facsimile of the artist's style. I think the problem is way more with the general devaluation of art and design work.

There certainly may be less commercial work, but the survival of artists shouldn't depend on their commercial viability. In our capitalist hellscape those corners are liable to be cut when any substitute is available. That could be computer image generation, or it could be a guy who can whip out a barely-passable Photoshop job in 20 minutes where an artist (or a designer who cared and was paid enough to make it more than barely-passable) would spend hours.

Anyone who's argued for modern art before - or on the other end of the spectrum, for photorealism - knows that art shouldn't be valued only by how easy the image is to replicate, and I feel like the emphasis on commercial viability really flattens the discussion on how this technology actually has the capability for harm.

My concern is not about the artists not getting paid for jobs in industries they were already being cut out of. My concern is about how our world might get measurably worse because some people have decided that "actively garbage but scans ok at a first glance" is good enough. Or they don't know enough about what they're doing to discern whether the output is good quality, which is uh, horrifying in some of these contexts. But again, those people were already cutting those corners - it's just gotten way easier to point and laugh at them.

So really, if we want to protect ourselves, I think the main thing that we can do is point and laugh. This won't guarantee that they'll change anything meaningfully, but it'll at least show them they can't get away with making these changes without anyone noticing. It'll hopefully teach people who have not figured it out that these tools are not smart and essays are not an appropriate use for them. And it'll give us some pretty guilt-free schadenfreude to tide us over.

[opinated-user]

Did lily just give her HP aliana oc a gardevoir for a Petronas? And also totally change the magic so it's sentient and never fades away so it can hang out with everyone?

Fanfic is self-indulgent by design, so it's fine that she does whatever she wants. The only issue I have is that LO always acts like her fics are first that aim to improve the original when they're not. All they are is super self-indulgent stories she writes for fun. Yet she dunks on other fics for the same thing. Or people who don't agree with how she writes certain things.

I'd respect her so much more if she just said 'Hey this is my fic, not a book and I do what want' rather then defend her choices as fine and pat herself on the back for fixing a story while simultaneously saying other fic writers are trash for just enjoying a trope she hates.

Side note I do find funny that she really only has like 3 stock characters she uses at nauseum and can't write anything else. But, yeah, she totally could get a book published.

i admit this could be a cute idea. some people in the fandom always speculated that the Patronus of Harry had some form of own consciousness based on how they were portrayed in the third and fifth movies, so it's not a bad idea to take that concept further and turn it into "you can create your very own best friend". if you ever heard about the concept of tulpas, beings you can create within your own mind to be independent of you, LO's essentially doing just that with a physical form. LO could have created a entirely new spell just for that, but i don't really have an issue with this being her new interpretation of patronus. my problem is the "only some patronus can talk given their form" because... why? they're already beings made of light, why biology of all things would be the thing that impedes them communicate? i guess just because LO's characters have to have the most especial pokemon/patronus by default.

... the issue that i'm already seeing is that this is literally just the exact same thing she already did with the AI that rey created. it hasn't been that long and she's already recycling her own ideas again, blatantly so. does LO even realize that or she does not care? remember that AI robot that started as basically a toddler that alaina, not rey, had to teach her about everything until the AI develops a crush on alaina? the thing that we called out as being plain grooming? think about it: -both beings are entirely dependant on another character. if rey stops the servers or brent just undoes the spell, they both cease to exist. -they're both empty shells until their creator/wife's creator takes them under their wing. as a note, how come something can be an "empty shell", but their loyalty still has to be earned? that makes no sense. -they're essentially free servants, borderline slaves. they're both told that they have free will, that they're part of the family and they aren't under anyone's control... but there's really nothing showing that because neither of these characters has any personality beyond adoring brent/alaina and how useful they're for their respective "families." do they have any hobbies? do they enjoy doing anything outside of the people who made them? can they create art? do they have imagination? do they have preferences? do they dream about mechanical sheep? we don't know, and i frankly doubt that LO even thought about it because it's not about any of them becoming actual people, it's about alaina/brent having adoring servants that they don't even need to pay.

-they both have overtly formal speech patterns regarding the "family" as if they were their superior and, despite all the talk about them not being subservient and being on equal footing, nobody seems to mind? i just don't know how equal a relationship can be when one of the parties keeps using "my lady" and being so reverent. it's almost like LO want to replicate the relationship between Sylvannas and anevay, but she missed the part about that dynamic has a different tone when it comes to a creator and the creation.

-neither that AI or this patronus have an actual option to leave their creators, even if they wanted to. they're bound to them to continue living. because of that, no matter how much talk there's about "you're part of the family", there's always going to be a power dynamic at play here that, considering who's writing, is almost for certain going to be abused in some way in the future.

as a side note, that "she's opinionated" and "she's the first one to say she isn't an slave" (even though she is because there's no talk anywhere about her having any actual indepedence or actual rights) are entirely recycling what little of a personality G has on pokemadhouse. this is just G.

[noeyecontactpleasse]

I'm so glad that generative AI is dying, but please please please understand that chatbot AIs and art generation AIs and voice replicating AIs are not the ones I'm scared of, they're just the most gimmicky, and the easiest to fight in a court of law.

You should be concerned with facial recognition software being used in policing. Many of these AIs are trained on datasets of majority white males, meaning they become less accurate and less effective when used on someone outside of those demographics, meaning more innocent people of marginalized communities being accused and harassed by police.

You should be concerned with resume-reading AI. Amazon created an AI model that was trained on previous hiring data and used to filter out applications. The software recognized a pattern of applicants with non-white names being rejected and thus filtered out every applicant with any non-white name. This software was deemed a failure by Amazon and was scrapped, but highlights a big issue with AI in general. If there's a shred of bias in a testing dataset, that bias will be amplified by the software.

You should be concerned with autonomous weaponry used in warfare. See, when I say "I want fewer people to die in war", it's because I want less war. What I don't want is for large wealthy imperialist countries to be putting lethal weapons with little to no human oversight into warzones where they can 'identify enemy combatants' and 'eliminate targets' at the discretion of a computer program. You know it's bad when even Elon Musk has publicly supported a ban on autonomous weaponry.

You should be concerned with AIs being trained to diagnose medical problems. These AIs are being trained on diagnosis data of previous medical cases. Meaning using patient data for a testing dataset (HIPAA/PIPEDA/GDPR etc. violations??). Anyone who's been tossed around the medical system could tell you that removing the humanity from healthcare will only lead to more suffering.

These are only a few examples I know off the top of my head as someone studying computer science in undergrad. This isn't to say that all AI is bad. AI is such a huge category of software that lumping it all together is irresponsible. AI is used in maps and navigation, spellcheck, translation software, speech-to-text, text-to-speech, online banking, malware detection, hate speech filtering, and so many assistive technologies for disabled people.

I'm glad that chatGPT and AI art generators are dying, but they're barely even on my list of concerns when it comes to AI technology.

[teeth--king]

hi! same silly little anon as last time :] (should i start signing these lol? i don't really know) (also i don't really know if you like me sending you asks randomly ? i don't want you to feel pressured to answer or anything so if you want me to stop then it's no problem at all!!!)

i don't know if this'll help at all, but know that ai art could never replace you. ai can be 'talented', sure, but it will never have the special things and details that your art does. in my opinion, ai art will never be able to replace a human's art, since it has no idea what being a human is like. your art is so lively and pretty, and i don't think ai would ever be able to replicate that! to be honest, i'm quite stressed about ai too. it's something scary to think about sometimes. but ai will never be able to draw like a human does, it can never make music like a human does. sure, it can learn to replicate those things, but it will never have the same feeling as a human's work.

i don't really know if i'm able to comfort you on this subject, but just know that your art is not replaceable, since it's unique and original. take care :)

(sorry if this worded weird, english isn't my first language!!!)

Hey no problems about being annoying with sending asks or about your english! I love getting asks, they genuinely bring me a lot of joy every time I get them! And for the english, I can see no issues, honestly better then mine and it's my main language haha.

And thanks,

I have little to no self esteem so things get to me really easily. I know that all this ai replacing human stuff like art/music/writing is hopefully a fad because those are core human things, but its still disheartening due to late stage capitalism and the want to make everything as consumable as possible(which is not sustainable for any market). But I will go on, it's just I'm very vocal online about my grievances because I literally don't have anyone to talk to about this stuff irl so I fall back to posing it here :P which is not a healthy thing to do. But seriously thank you for your kind words and worries, it really is meaningful to hear stuff like this right now and know I'm not alone. I'm trying to get back into my art grove and hopefully I'll be posting some more art soon! Thanks again for the check in, hope you have a wonderful and safe day out there!

[donpishya]

Thought I'd give that AI generator a try with Jackson, here's the best results. they really anime-d him up here.

I honestly think people being afraid of AI art taking over is ridiculous. If you want a general, non-specific art piece I can see it being a problem, but no matter how specific I got, it couldn't replicate the idea I had in my head. That's something that HAS to be communicated between people, that's just how art works.

👀💖💖

I really love these!! Especially the second one and the last one!!☺️

I also like how the AI gave the horse a red hair 🤭😂

Jackson looks young in the last one, maybe it could be from when he was in Waxhaw!

I agree with your opinion on AI art. I understand if people don't like their art being used for the AI to learn. But I'm not afraid of the AI taking over the art community or something. Like you said an AI can only make vague art that's clean but it can't make anything specific.

[sixstepsaway]

my steaming hot take on AI:

if you're generating some character pictures for a carrd or a tumblr page or your own references, or you're just looking for some inspiration for something you're doing or writing? go ahead. knock yourself out. i will coo over how pretty your characters are and support you all the way. plus, when you eventually need or want art you can use as a book cover or something, you'll have a reference to give an actual artist! that's excellent. artists love references, even if it's an artbreeder reference or something

if, however, you're generating 'art' that's basically a knock-off of someone else's work, selling it cheap to people who need book covers, generating it by the ton, lying about having drawn it yourself and so on: go fuck yourself. especially that last part. someone will always want to buy your shitty AI generated art, dont lie about it and scam people.

taking work out of the hands of artists who actually work hard and hone their craft and put love and time and energy into their pieces is shitty and shouldn't be done and will completely fuck the already pretty fucked artist economy

but if you're just generating something for a private project, inspiration or reference, that's okay. i don't see a problem with that.

it's just shitty that AI is stealing from artists, replicating their styles, replicating what they do, then taking work out from under them and acting like it's the next evolution.

it isn't. it's late stage capitalism sucking the soul out of yet another thing, something we all desperately need in our lives: art

[theboredasexual]

AI Generated Art

Okay, firstly, thank y'all for the sudden burst of followers. No clue when it happened but yay!

Secondly, I want to just quickly talk about AI generated art. If a lot of people see this it will probably cause a bit of controversy but I would like to talk about it anyway.

Soooo, if you haven't been living under a rock (if u have, its okay, me too) then you've probably heard of AI generated content. Now, I don't have a massive problem with it, so long as it is done correctly. And unfortunately, AI generated visual art...is just not. At least not yet.

The issue I, and many visual artists, have with it, is the fact that to train the AI's, programs need hundreds of human-made artworks - which artists have spent hours creating with their own hard-learnt skills - to generate their content. And often, these beautiful artworks are taken without the consent of the creator.

Now, AI generated music is similar, but unlike visual art AI's, they actually have the common courtesy to reach out to creators and ask their consent before using their creations. So why isn't it the same for the visual art industry?

We understand that AI's are becoming part of our future - and many of us are willing to accept that. But we are sick of having our creations stolen and replicated by AI's, and of being silenced by the community when we speak out about it.

I am a very very small artist. I barely have any of my digital paintings online, and I do not consider myself to be very skilled. But it has taken me years to get to where I am, and it will take even more years for me to learn the skills to paint amazing art. And I hate seeing and hearing about people with much more skill than me being abused by this system.

Below is a video that got me started. If you've read this whole thing (sorry it was long, I'm kinda mad) then I encourage you to watch it, if you want to hear more. Go ahead and subscribe to the creator while you're at it, he's awesome.

That's all I have to say, really.

[sailor-cerise]

i don't agree with the notion that work is why art is valuable to others.

It doesn't have to be hard to make, or take a long time to make, to be moving and meaningful. A good photograph can be taken in a moment, though it takes time and effort to become a reliably good photographer.

i do absolutely agree that many people over-value ideas, and think they are the hard part, that incorrectly think they are 50% of the artist/author for having an idea.

but the real problem with ai art is the lack of ethics in how it has been run and monetized, how it has been trained off of artists who never see a penny or the profits.

When a user creates an interesting ai prompt and sifts through the results to pick a good one, they ARE part of the creative process, similar to an editor of a novel.

Wanting to see your ideas made reality at the click of a button is not a moral failing or a personal flaw: it's fun and exciting and there's nothing wrong with enjoying it. It makes creating things you find beautiful or interesting available to everyone.

The problem is NOT the users who want art on demand.

The problem is how it is built on exploiting artists.

The problem is the way that companies like midjourney are making buckets of money off of artists' hard work and those people are getting nothing in return.

The problem is corporations who want to get something as cheaply as possible because profits matter more than quality or human life.

The problem is the environmental impact that ai art generation currently has.

The problem is that we live in a society where this could mean artists have to give up making art so they can make enough money to live.

I used to make a lot of ai art, before midjourney existed, when you used Google Labs to host the code, when it created these weird images that felt like you'd described a concept to an artist who had never seen any of the things in real life with a huge language barrier. Word choice mattered so much in the quality of the final product. It was often delightful in the way that ugly medieval cats are delightful.

Midjourney came along and at first it was thrilling. It was like photography: you take a bunch of shots and for some reason that it's hard to articulate THIS is the one that stirs your soul.

But then it started be used to replicate the art of living artists.

And the subscription covered far more than it cost to run the servers and pay the developers. They were making money off the artists they refused to share the profits with.

In a perfect world where all the other ethical concerns didn't exist, the fact that people could turn an idea into an image at the click of a button would not be a bad thing.

But we don't live in that world.