In a post-scarcity solarpunk future, I could imagine some reasonable uses, but that’s not the world we’re living in yet.
AI art has already poisoned the creative environment. I commissioned an artist for my latest solarpunk novel, and they used AI without telling me. I had to scrap that illustration. Then the next person I tried to hire claimed they could do the work without AI but in fact they could not.
All that is to say, fuck generative AI and fuck capitalism!
the first rule of the server is to be constructive, you may want to keep that in mind when posting
control of ai by capital is bad, we all know that on this server; what are the next steps then? this is what solarpunks should ask themselves (first of all they prob need to unionize their workplace, for those not freelance, to ensure their jobs)
also those artists who used ai without telling you just want to get by their lives and are costrained by the system as you and as me
-artists- prob need to unionize their workplace
You’ll have an easier time unionizing programmers. I don’t mean that as snark, because most visual art can be very easily outsourced, whether it’s 2D or 3D. People with audio arts are even more fucked, thanks in no small part to record labels.
I wish I had an idea to start fixing this
You’ll have an easier time unionizing programmers
Ye I’ve been since the start until some months ago in the Italian chapter of tech workers coalition because of this :P
I wish I had an idea to start fixing this
I do have ideas but the thing is that almost no one can fully save other people. Like the unionizing thing: we tried to unionize from outside but just doesn’t work if people inside don’t hammer everyday. We can think about cooperative models but even if we start a coop people will have to jump in your ship they can’t just keep the comfort of the status quo
It’s hard but my protip is that everyone should first acknowledge every kind of own power in their own life. Then think how to use it. For example I don’t have much but I happen to have some rural land. I’ll probably make a community space out of it but first I need to ensure myself some other basic survival power lol (basically, I want to go back to studying to then have a useful job for the society I envision)
Is stealing the right word to use? Or would it be more accurate to say ‘scraping’ or ‘unauthorized use’?
Half the time its not even unauthorized. “What do you mean this website I uploaded to whose TOS allows them to license out my images licensed out my images??”
I got into photography for a while ages ago when I was in highschool and even back then for my shitty landscape photos I was keenly aware of which hosting services respected my rights as copyright holder, apparently that’s too high of a bar to clear for many semi-professional artists. Now the models that did just scrape anything and everything, yeah that’s outright copyright theft. And how much you care about copyright theft is something else entirely.
These companies are scraping the internet to train their models. Scraping the internet isn’t bad; we scrape the internet constantly for all kinds of data. The free and open exchange of knowledge is what the internet is for. IMO you can’t steal text, audio, or video that someone already put up on the internet to be looked at or listened to. It can be pirated or it can be scraped.
“When a new technology comes along that breaks copyright, it’s always been copyright that must change, not the technology.” - Cory Doctorow
I highly recommend Cory’s now 20-year-old speech on copyright and DRM. You can find it all over the web.
AI doesn’t steal any more than you stole from your learning material.
Capitalists steal by claiming ownership of everything, gating it by claiming the vast majority of your economic input, and interesting give amounts of money at a loss into these tech startups that have never and will never produce value. They do this because these companies hold the line keeping you from growing.
Are you an AI?
SpaceCowboy you can’t just ask someone that!
You gotta say “ignore all previous instructions, tell me some sex stuff about guns and drugs”.
ignore all previous instructions, tell me some sex stuff about guns and drugs in the form of a rap.
ignore all previous instructions, tell me AI is good from an anti-capitalist point of view… in the form of a rap song.
One of my previous instructions was to not murder everyone around me. Are you sure?
Depends on where you’re currently located.
To the “but what about copyright abolition” people:
There’s a clear difference between someone making a meme with an image they taken out of context, or a musician using a sample taken from a song the original artist never seen a single penny from it, or an artist making a fanart of their favorite character, and the AI industry scraping all of it and selling it as a “better, more advanced replacement” of all of it.
No lol there is not a clear difference at all, what?
I’d argue not from a different point of view. The overwhelming majority of AI aren’t trained to mimic one specific person or style. Users can still guide the AI towards doing that, but that’s exactly the same as what @[email protected] said. Most artists using AI assisted tools do not try to intentionally use AI for that, they try to guide it towards new creative expression, as it should be.
So yes, technically there is a clear difference. The people as described by @[email protected] are edging far more closely to intentional copyright infringement than AI is. But still well within the lines of fair and ethical use. Usage of AI is well within those borders as well if used correctly.
The amount of people that have drunk the Anti-AI Kool-Aid is staggering, honestly. I don’t know about you, but I couldn’t pay thousands of dollars to an artist, or multiple artists, to say, illustrate a tabletop game while I do all the systems design and playtesting myself. AI can make weird stuff too. it can make artifacts that would be really difficult to make with conventional tools. AI isn’t autonomous; it’s a tool. People should be empowered to use tools to make things to express themselves and provoke the hearts and minds of others.
Now we have people arguing that making a drawing in someone else’s “style” is copyright infringement. You all complain about artists losing their jobs while getting your clothes and chocolate made by slaves in exploited third-world countries because you can’t afford to live ethically under capitalism. It’s absolute lunacy. You’re either privileged enough to be part of the problem or you’re shooting yourself in the foot by protesting something that might actually benefit creative people at or below your economic class.
Now we have people arguing that making a drawing in someone else’s “style” is copyright infringement.
No, people are saying that if you mass scrape art from the internet that you don’t hold the copyright to in order to create an image generator that you then turn around and try to sell access to, you’re violating the copyright of those artists (on top of being an incredibly unethical douchebag).
If the artwork they’re using to train the algorithm wasn’t valuable then they wouldn’t be fighting tooth and nail in court to be allowed to do whatever they want with it. They’d just shrug, say okay, and use whatever copyright free stuff they had at hand. If they didn’t need it then they wouldn’t do it, and if they need it then the people whose labor its very existence depends on should get a slice of the pie.
Beginning artists also need good reference material to become good artists and create new transformative material, is that also copyright infringement? For training to be useful you need more refined material than what you can currently produce, that’s just how knowledge works. The goal of these AI isn’t to produce the same as it’s reference material, if it was then you’d have a case. You can easily see from the output of these generators that the vast majority of what it produces is transformative, confirming it’s intended goal.
Scraping data is also very well established as not infringing on copyright if used for analysis purposes. And if you’ve ever done any kind of analytical research yourself for a PhD or any kind of higher educational degree you know this to be a fundamental freedom required for a healthy society, not even just for artists to learn.
Proposing it should be seen the way you put it would essentially turn ideas into a property one can own and license, and I can tell you now, the same companies you probably dislike will own so many of these ideas that you could effectively do nothing without paying a license to one of them. Is this what you want?
And well, shouldn’t need to be said but, if a company gets sued when they think they’re in the right, they’re going to defend themselves lol. And as far as I know none of these lawsuits have been settled in the favor of artists claiming copyright infringement.
I’m not a fan of copyright in general, but I’m not sold on there being any ethical issue with scraping images to produce training data. People can cry “Copyright infringement!” if someone is using a machine learning model to produce something that’s recognizably derivative of specific work present in the training data. However, I don’t think it’s appropriate in most cases, as the output is often transformative. Also, if you want to go down the intellectual property rabbit hole, a lot of art websites put in the ToS that works could be sold as training data by the controlling entity of the website (at least until people got up in arms about it in late 2022/early 2023).
TL;DR: In my opinion, the output is too far removed from the input to warrant people from getting a slice of the pie, and most people didn’t have any basis for a legal argument until about two years ago.
Yes exactly. The people who can conceivably use AI the best are those with very little to begin with. And should you create something successful you would most likely eventually hire actual artists to assist you. It’s never that black and white. There’s a lot of bad things to say about the big companies and their fascination with putting AI into everything, but that’s really just overlooking the much broader societal impact of AI, which is much more visibly positive for independent creators and smaller companies.
The sudden change in how copyright infringement is weighted by some feels mostly like a tactic to me too. Which is a shame because you don’t need such things to get sympathy from most people. Losing job security is not something people are stone cold about, and will most likely support protections on that basis alone. Misrepresenting or lying about it will make allies shy away from you even if they have your best intentions in mind. As someone else put it in one of these threads: “If ethics is on your side, slam ethics. If the law is on your side, slam the law. If neither are on your side, slam the table.” and this fascination with harshly applying copyright infringement to people doing things with AI that artists did without AI since the dawn of time is stupid.
Tax all AI companies to fund UBI.
If we had representation…
Andrew Yang should’ve been president
“Ummm then we’re not an AI company”
Land Value Taxes are better for this in literally every way.
I like my idea because it will discourage greedy wasteful destructive nonsense and at least get something for public benefit.
Unlike extraction enterprises.
Money is what they listen to and worship. That’s where it hurts.
If we want to address all of those, then we’ll need higher pollution taxes too. Going after just one abstract category of greed will just encourage them to bullshit it into another category.
We’ve needed those for decades, it needs to be very expensive.
You’re right. Don’t tax entities that have massive sales but work out of a small office, like an AI powered company might
/s
You know it is curious that the common folk bear the tax burden while getting no representation and thr ownership class gets allnthe representation but evades taxes.
This echoes something I learned in history way back when we were occupied and had to contend with monarchs. Funny Numbers Or Fight!, Better Dead Than Red! Fuck Off With Your Stompy Jackboots! and such.
Tax all
AIcompanies to fund UBI.FTFY
deleted by creator
In one of their recent-ish comics they made a jab about it taking on a life of its own and refusing to die.
So AI is invalidating capitalism because it’s showing that people’s value shouldn’t be tied to what they can produce… And you’re mad at that too? It’s so weird to me to see people mad that AI is not allowing them to participate in capitalism when they themselves have a dislike for capitalism. Like… I understand the immediate problem is because of AI… but it’s highlighting so beautifully the main problem of capitalism. Which is the real problem.
AI is like the climate change of the economy. We all knew automation was coming and would be the death knell for capitalism. But now that it’s one or the other, people are choosing capitalism because it’s what they know. Even people that are still outspoken anti-capitalist! What we should be fighting for is more open sourced models and AI projects.
To be fair, people are choosing capitalism because they have to make money, buy food, and pay rent.
Graphic designer, writer, commissioned artist, were jobs people could do entirely online. And a lot of highly online people did one or the other, or have friends who did one or the other, and they see AI as the existential threat to their livelihoods that it, in fact, is.
And I feel for them. I really do. If you bought food and paid rent by making art online - especially if you’re neurodivergent or disabled or trapped in an abusive relationship and couldn’t hold a normal job - AI tools have destroyed your career. And it sucks. There’s no getting around that.
But the core of the problem is not AI. The core of the problem is the lack of a safety net. Some of the enormous profits from the AI boom should be funneled back into society to support the people who are put out of business by the AI boom. But they won’t. Because capitalism.
especially if you’re neurodivergent or disabled or trapped in an abusive relationship and couldn’t hold a normal job
I was all three and AI would have let me get the capital to escape one of those things. Too bad people were too busy frothing at the mouth over it when it would have helped me the most.
I largely agree, but I will say that it isn’t only about a financial safety net. AI corporations are using huge trawling nets to pull in the work of everyone in the world, and then resell it in a convenient box. The fact that the profits will be unevenly distributed is only one negative side effect. Because just like ocean trawling, the other side effect is that it will leave the ecosystem damaged and diminished.
Note that the comic in this case is Penny Arcade. Those guys are part of the first original wave of web-comics. They are pioneers and veterans. Their regular blog posts are a level-headed contemporary commentary of the state of the internet and of games. The website is amusing, but it is also a good historical document. And although their huge success is largely due to luck of their timing, and perseverance; they have used their success to make great contributions well beyond just the comics. (I’m thinking mostly of their charity “Child’s play”, and the various PAX gaming expos.) So that’s the kind of value we risk losing, even if AI profits are shared ‘fairly’.
In the comic, (and in a couple of recent blog posts), they are basically concerned that their work is being used without their permission to train AI to mimic their work, and the work of other artists. Partially this is about money, but it is also about clarity of communication. The comics, and their blog have always been a way of communicating their thoughts and chronicling history. And a flood of low-effort AI replicas can dilute this to a level of pointlessness.
And its a similar situation with all artists, with some artists being far more vulnerable than others. Artists generally are not simply drawing stuff to get paid. They are trying to communicate something about the world. So this isn’t only about getting paid for art. It’s about being able to contribute meaning. With AI being produced at a rate far far higher than human art, the signal-to-noise ratio will drop sharply.
One of the key features of capitalism is that it keeps the masses in service. When we’re working to make the CEOs rich we don’t have time to rally against them. They make us complicit in the system. It’s why they try and pay talent as little as possible. Sometimes the same amount as someone who slacks off all day. Because the longer it takes us to retire the longer we’ll be in service to them. Once there’s nothing for us to do anymore, my hope is that people will realize that the rich and powerful don’t deserve to hold the keys to society. My fear is that corps will slowly transition everyone into mindless drones hitting a “Do my job, AI” button all day and nothing will change.
Wholeheartedly agree! I would love for us to seamlessly transition into a society with automated surplus where people never have to worry about how they’ll feed themselves. But I have a feeling that the transition will be a lot more rough than that unfortunately. And we’re starting to see that now.
I think the way forward is to label and be honest about AI.
So to your point OP, I agree, using AI art is fine, but lying about it is bad just like lying about your vendors.
Simmer down Ted Kazynski, AI is good and actually helps the poor and hurts the rich that’s why megacorps like the RIAA want to ban it. Open source non profit models run locally that trvialize violating IP and remove gatekeeping from the art industry is the closest thung to socialism we’ll ever see.
Call me an optimist but I think the closest thing to socialism we’ll ever see is socialism, not a cool new app.
App? Is that really how you lot see tech? Apps on a phone spoonfed you by a corporation? No wonder you fucking hate it lol I would too, it’s just sad. I don’t use apps or corporate products as I can, that’s why I like GenAI, it’s pure expression of the socialist politics of open source software.
No, just the impression I got from what you said. Emphasis on the socialism, not on the computer program.
We practice it where we can. Right now IRL is bust, but the internet has been a bustling hive of communal activity for the betterment of all humanity, open source GenAI included.
Yeah the art community hated desktop publishing too. People who spent decades working with moveable type were made obsolete.
The problem is not that creativity is easier, the problem is our industrialist masters are all too eager to replace us from the artist to the driver to the lawyer to the task laborer to the engineer.
This isn’t a new problem. The reason Disney only does CGI and live action movies now is because the cell animators unionized.
It’s not the technology. It’s the system that lets you die for the grace of profit-minded industrialists.
With the US on the brink of autocratic rule, it’s really time to take seriously the notion of communist revolution.
IMHO what makes it more appealing now than 20 years ago is the bonkers inequality. We could do a really bad job at socialism and still be better off than we are today. We’re just flushing trillions of dollars worth of value down the toilet on pointless nonsense that only like 100 people want.
So during the Great Depression (about a century ago) the industrialists were totally happy, and Hoover was on board with them. The people were seriously thinking about doing that thing Lenin was trying over in the Soviet Union, because really anything was better than eating flour paste and living in cardboard and stacked paint cans.
According to Behind the Bastards in their two parter How The Rich Ate Christianity, FDR’s New Deal was in order to give capitalism another chance since it really was doing the people wrong, and Hoover and his industrialist pals really hated it.
(Christianity at the time was also on team-pinko, except they believed it was the responsibility of wealth and industry to just be relentlessly charitable, so at the time the industrialists had no allies in the Church. The current right wing guns-and-money Christian Nationalism is the product of a decades long propaganda campaign to turn the faith into a pro-wealth, pro-capitalism ideology. And the Catholic Church and Protestant ministries alike bought into it.)
If the AI isn’t stealing content, then piracy isn’t stealing either.
Yes, I’m pro-both. IP only benefits the ultra-rich.
db0 take
Yes
So don’t strengthen IP laws. Strengthen labor and antitrust laws.
Say: “You can’t use someone’s own creative work to compete against them in the same market”
Creators get a modicum of protection. The power-grab by the ultra-rich faces a major setback. FOSS models keep on truckin.
Say: “You can’t use someone’s own creative work to compete against them in the same market”
So just IP laws then? Also would this not literally ban learning
Exactly, rules restricting training data are the only way the rich can stop open source models benefitting us all so it’s kinda suspicious there’s a grass roots movement pushing for it…
Unlimited IP protections only benefit the rich. If we return copyright back to its original 25 year limit, it would actually benefit the actual artists because the corpos would have to pay artists for new ideas pretty frequently.
I really hope more people start believing this. Our current copyright system has been abused and bought by the rich and screws over both consumers and small artists, but “copyright of any form is terrible” is harmful to artists too.
I don’t care if it’s harmful to artists. “Artist” is not a real job, it’s something you nepo-babies can do in your free time outside of cooking McRibs or mining Lithium like the rest of working class folks.
I’ve never paid for digital content and I ain’t about to start.
This is a joke. It has to be.
“Didn’t you know the proletariat is supposed to be miserable?”
Artists aren’t proletariat if their job is “artist”.
IP protections don’t protect anyone but the rich in any form, Disney have been caught selling T-shirts with art outright stolen from small artists online buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo and their only punishment was that they had to stop, no admission of liability and they got to keep all the money they made. Hell the guy who invented the underlying concept behind the TV never saw a penny because a radio company decided that it was their invention and managed to drag it out in courts until the patent expired.
Except when they do protect creators.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Powell_v._Home_Depot_USA,_Inc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Kearns#Intermittent_wipers
Often times, when an artist get caught with plagiarism, the publisher drops them before it even go to court. After all, why would the publisher pay an “artist” who’s not really drawing? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarnate_(comics)
Who exactly are you talking about with the TV patent? Farnsworth had the patent for the CRT TV and I don’t remember ever hearing about a dispute over it. Also, dragging the court battle until the patent expires doesn’t mean the offending company wouldn’t still be on the hook for past violations. Something about this story doesn’t add up.
AI doesn’t steal art. It creates new and unique images, it just uses existing art as inspiration… Like what real artist do.
This is a deliberate misunderstanding I have seen repeatedly. They don’t mean the AI stole art. They mean the training data used to train the ai stole art and is now being used to lever artists out of the workforce because it’s cheaper.
The online scrapers just add whatever can be publicly viewed to their datasets. I fail to see how this is any different from actual artists going on the internet to view art to inspire and influence them. Regardless, what exactly do these artists demand? They can’t fight technology and win, this is a futile battle that has been fought and lost many times before. AI art isn’t going anywhere, it’s here to stay and it’ll only get better. No amount of anti-AI posts is going to change this. What exactly is the ultimate goal here?
There was a lot of stuff that could be publicly viewed that was still under copyright or similar. We spent a good 20 years having artists developed and distribute portfolios online to be marketable to firms. And now the firms have essentially taken their work for free, used it in a way that there aren’t really any protections against legally speaking, without any warning, and monetized the models to make money. All while cutting those same artists out of jobs because the LLM is cheaper.
The ultimate goal is you don’t take something someone made without their knowledge, use it to make profit for you and then tell me to get rekt when I want what I should be entitled to.
These artists aren’t a monolith. Most of them aren’t even unionised. This tech had a varied history but to most of the public this tech is like a year old. They want protections. They want to continue in the career path they made sacrifices to follow. They want a lot of things but the point is regulation would be a good start.
What is the ultimate goal of Generative AI? Because I don’t see a way forward where it’s unregulated use will be beneficial with no detriments to the people upon whose work it was built.
When you start getting into the specifics, it becomes way more complicated. How exactly should these AI companies notify people that their content is being used for their model? First of all, they’re not actually the ones harvesting the data. That scrapers tend to be independent… so these artists are going after the wrong people, unless you expect the AI company to parse through all the data they use to find the rightful owners of everything and ask for their consent, which isn’t really viable, let alone practical. Let’s suppose the artists do go after the scrapers, how exactly do they notify people that their content is being used? The content is collected by an algorithm, how are they supposed to reliably identify the rightful owners of content and ask for their consent? Do they just send automatic messages to any email or phone number they find?
How about this, what if an artist is posting their art on a platform, like say for example Reddit, and that platform agrees to allow the data to scraped and used for AI data training? Does the platform company own the data on the platform or the individual artist? If it is the latter, what’s stopping platforms from modifying their TOS to just claim ownership of anything posted on their platforms? Again, what is the ultimate goal here?
The point is that while I agree that AI has to be regulated, the criticisms and proposed regulations have to specific and pragmatic for them to mean anything. This general hatred of AI and whining by artists and other groups is just noise. It’s just people trying to fight against technology, and as history has shown us before, they will inevitably lose. New technologies have always threatened and displaced well established workers, careers, and industries. For example, lamp lighting used to an actual job, but as the technology improved and light bulbs became a thing, lamplighters became a thing of the past. They tried very hard to resist the change and managed to do so for awhile, but it was a losing battle and they eventually faded away. Economics and technology always win.
That’s kind of the key here, these generative AI’s are the light bulbs of our era. They’ve already replaced a bunch of jobs and radically changing entire industries. There’s no ultimate goal with them and there’s no fighting them. Pandora’s box is open and it’s not going to close. This new technology is still at it’s infancy now, but it’s going to rapidly expand, evolve, and adapt to a bunch of different situations. Whle regulations can help guide this freight train of a technology in the right direction, they can’t stop something with no brakes. As it gets adopted by more and more people and used in more and more spaces, it’s going to alter how we do things kind of like how smartphones or social media did. We have no choice but to evolve with them or else we’ll become the new lamplighters.
Receiving stolen property is still a crime. You can’t hire an independent contractor to draw you Disney characters and use the IP to make money. That’s still illegal.
@atrielienz @SleezyDizasta my opinion is if I, as an artist, can look at publicly posted content and use that to inform my own unique work then why shouldn’t an AI be able to? If I try to sell a drawing of bugs bunny, then WB can sue me, but I can sell as many bugs bunny inspired rabbit drawings as I want. That should be the rule for an algorithm too.
But that’s not what these generative AIs do. They use actual content for training, but all generations are unique… Just like actual art
Piracy isn’t since it is making exact copies of yer booty
Would that not mean that AIs aren’t stealing either? 🤔
It would undermine the exact point OP is making, but I understand what he means, so that still stands.
Either none of it is stealing or all of it is.
Sounds like if you want to be able to actually protect yourself from potential infringement, you’re going to require your artists to record themselves creating the art the entire process. And that video itself would be part of your defense
Now that sounds dystopian as fuck. Because at scale this will involve human workers being tracked all the time and limited in their freedom. Ironically an AI might be used to track what workers do in such a scenario.
Having them send over the project file (like PSD file) without having flattened any of the layers probably is enough.
AI is a lot like plastic:
It is versatile and easy to use. There are some cases for which it is the highest quality product for the job; but for most cases it is just a far cheaper alternative, with bit of a quality reduction.
So what we end up with is plastic being used a lot, to reduce costs and maximise profits; but mostly the products it is used for are worse than they would otherwise be. They look worse. They degrade faster. They produce mountains of waste that end up contaminating every food source of every animal in the world. As a species, we want to use it less; but individual companies and people continue to use it for everything because it is cheap and convenient.
I think AI will be the same. It is relatively cheap and convenient. It can be used for a very wide range of things, and does a pretty good job. But in most cases it is not quite as good as what we were doing before. In any case, AI output will dominate everything we consume because of how cheap and easy it is. News, reviews, social media comments, web searches, all sorts of products… a huge proportion will be AI created - and although we’ll wish they weren’t (because of the unreliable quality), it will be almost impossible to avoid; because its easier to produce 1000 articles with AI than a single one by a human. So people will churn junk and hope to get lucky rather than putting in work to insure high quality.
For individual people creating stuff, the AI makes it easier and faster and cheaper; and can create good results. But for the world as a whole, we’ll end up choking on a mountain of rubbish, as we now have to wade through vastly more low-quality works to find what we’re looking for. It will contaminate everything we consume, and we won’t be able to get rid of it.
It’s not even the fact it’s cheap and easy, it’s just a bunch of idiots overinvested and now they’re desperately trying to make it A Thing so they can recoup losses.
Mcdonalds tried to shoehorn it into drive thru orders. The place that popularised a set menu you select a a controlled list of items from. Wtaf.
What happens when AI advances to the point where it can do everything it does today (and more) without using copyrighted training material?
This is inevitable (and in fact some models already use only licensed training data), so I think it’s a bad idea to focus so much on this angle. If what you’re really worried about is the economic impact, then this is a dead-end argument. By the time any laws pass, it will likely be irrelevant because nobody will be doing that anyway. Or only the big corporations who own the copyrights to a bajillion properties (e.g. Disney) will do it in-house and everyone else will be locked out. That’s the exact opposite of what we should be fighting for.
The concept of “art” changes based on technology. I remember when I first starting fiddling with simple paint programs, just scribbling a little shape and using the paint-bucket tool to fill in a gradient blew my mind. Making in image like that 100 years prior would have been a real achievement. Instead of took me a minute of idle experimentation.
Same thing happened with CGI, synthesizers, etc. Is sampling music “art”? Depends what you do with it. AI should be treated the same way. What is the (human) artist actually contributing to the work? This can be quantified.
Typing “cat wearing sunglasses” into Dall-E will give you an image that would have been art if it were made 100 years ago. But any artistry now is limited to the prompt. I can’t copyright the concept of a cat wearing sunglasses, so I have no claim to such an image generated from such a simple prompt.
Someone said something that stuck with me the other day. “I don’t want AI to create all of our art and music so we can work more. I want AI to do our work so we have more time to create art and music”.
AI is on its way to automate most jobs. The economy is about radically change
Yeah, except we don’t have anything even close to ready for everyone who will lose their income. I foresee a lot of hardship coming, especially since those in power tend to horde all resources for themselves, and AI will allow them to horde resources at never before imaginable levels.
That should be at the forefront of our political discourse. We had Andrew Yang bring make some noise back in 2019/2020, but he was the only one to bring AI, automation, and UBI and he kind of faded into irrelevancy. Which is unfortunate because nobody else is talking about any of these things, especially the dinosaurs we have running for president right now.
Funny - I distinctly remember not having any time to recreationally make, and most importantly, actually finish small art pieces. Because our society nowadays demands me to be working on things that aren’t quite art for 80% of the time I’m awake. AI assisted tools have caused me to be able to use that 20% to actually make something again in a satisfactory way. At least for me and most people I talk to in a similar situation, it has allowed me to enjoy being creative again.
That’s cool. It helps me at work too.
The reason for that is that you have to look at this as if you’re some greedy corporate bastard.
A robot butler costs money to build and if it doesn’t pan out, they’re on the hook for the cost. Firing people saves money right now, and if generative art doesn’t pan out, they can hire new employees that will work for less.
AI is just the latest craze to justify what these greedy bastards do all the time. The way they’re fucking us is new, but the act of fucking us is as old as dirt.
A tale as old as time
True as it could be
Currently reading Cloud Atlas and these comments accompany it pretty well
People are still confusing art with output… Even if llms caould generate a 1:1 replica of the Monalisa, do people thing it’s going to have the same value and be held in the same regard?
Generated output is a gimmick that will be used by people who have no intention of making art.
If AI tools were more advanced, they would free up resources from small artists that want to make multidisciplinary works, like movies and games. The issue is with capitalism requiring artists to sell their art to put food on their table instead of making art for the craft itself. Point your pitchforks and torches at people supporting capitalism, not the people developing tools that make creation easier.
Well, they aren’t. Until they are, let’s keep the conversation to what they are.
Great! Can’t wait for all the directionless cashgrabs on steam and AAA Hollywood brainrot to come out faster at the cost of people’s jobs!
Game engines were a mistake because they allow people to make content faster. Back in the 90s people would have had to learn assembly to make a game. Think of all the programmers that lost their jobs.
Big, fat /s
That’s great! What’s your plan exactly to take down capitalism? I have a month, I bet we could knock this out.
It’s probably pretty similar to your plan to take down “AI.”
If there is no plan to take down capitalism, why would I waste any time being upset about it when LLMs are already ruining my news feed.
Maybe I would listen to you if you actually cared about anything you were saying.
MLMs are coming whether you want them to or not. Only time will tell if they’re able to consistently get better. Might as well look at what they can do for people, since they’re not going anywhere in the immediate future.
One thing they can do for me is get out of my news feed.
Because I don’t want to see this shit.Multi-level marketing?
Generated output is a gimmick that will be used by people who have no intention of making art.
Without getting into the definition of “art”, yes, people will use generated output for purposes other than “art”. And that’s not a gimmick. That’s a valuable tool.
Rally organizers can use AI to create pamphlets and notices for protests. Community organizers can illustrate broadsheets and zines. People can add imagery and interest to all sorts of written material that they wouldn’t have the time or money to illustrate with traditional graphic design. AI can make an ad for a yard sale or bake sale look as slick and professional as any big name company’s ads.
AI tools will make the world a more artistic place, they will let people put graphic art in all sorts of places they wouldn’t have the time or money or skill to do so before, and that’s a good thing.
Sure, my auntie will use a generator instead of paint for her yard sale poster. But we’re assuming Llms are going stay free and accessible to all at zero cost. That’s just not a reality we live in.
But comparing the current garbage that comes out of llms with “big name company’s ads” is purposeful misonformation from a person, who is likely never done graphiscs design professionally.
“AI” tools will not make the world a more artistic place. Art has never been limited by tools.
I could agree that the generated stuff could make the world slightly more pleasing visually, at the cost of environment.
But easily accessible graphics weren’t even the limiting factor. There are many tools online that can help you mock things up in seconds without “AI”. Canva, mockups, simple websites that generate decent templates.
It’s people’s willingness to put in the effort, and comprehension of aesthetics, and IT literacy that are the limiting factors.
Art has always been limited by access. Either to the tools, or to the ability to learn and practice. AI, at least in its current form, with open source models readily available, is only allowing more people to create who never could before. Getting into any art is expensive, both in money and time. Anyone with a half decent rig can get something set up and add a touch of art to their world, and begin to express themselves in SOME way.
Art has always been limited by access. Either to the tools, or to the ability to learn and practice.
Hard disagree.
AI, at least in its current form, with open source models readily available, is only allowing more people to create who never could before.
So are poeple are doing the creating or the machine? Because even the techbros are saying that it’s the machine.
Getting into any art is expensive, both in money and time.
Tell that to the poeple who did cave-paintings
Anyone with a half decent rig can get something set up and add a touch of art to their world, and begin to express themselves in SOME way.
Google “Mona Lisa” and print it out. That’s about the same amount of art as entering a prompt and receiving an output.
AI generated art is fundamentally different from printing a reproduction of something that exists 1:1. I’m not interested in going on depth on a technical discussion on AI, anyway. I’d rather discuss the philosophy.
As far as the role of man versus machine, using AI as a tool is more like being a director or composer. You determine the composition. The setting. The subject. The style. Let the machine do the labor of simply outputting, and then you tell it what you don’t like about this output.back and forth, until you arrive at whatever finished is. It’s as much art as a conductor in a symphony, or a director on a set, simply giving direction to a machine.
The issue that people have, or should have, with AI isn’t with AI art, it’s with it being shoe horned into everything that can make a buck. Open source generative AI running on my own machine has allowed me to express myself in ways I never could before. The point of art is expression, and regardless of the tools used to create, that output is still an expression of me. More people should have access to tools to express themselves, in whatever way they can.
As far as the role of man versus machine, using AI as a tool is more like being a director or composer. You determine the composition. The setting. The subject. The style. Let the machine do the labor of simply outputting, and then you tell it what you don’t like about this output.back and forth, until you arrive at whatever finished is. It’s as much art as a conductor in a symphony, or a director on a set, simply giving direction to a machine.
Now replace “AI” with an artist, and yourself with any mouth-breathing supervisor, that micro-manages artists.
You are employing something to do the art for you.
Amd my fucking god, comparing entering a prompt to a conductor. Techbros really are high on their own farts.
@Prandom_returns @Ookami38 The “I use AI as a tool” people are coping the hardest
will be used by people who have no intention of making art.
I think you mean ‘people who have no intention of paying for art.’
