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As an artist I am concerned about AI image generation

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Re: As an artist I am concerned about AI image generation

#21

Post by phi-y »

MontyCarloHall wrote: post #13

Transfer learning to emulate artistic style [0] has been around for the better part of a decade and has had zero impact on artists’ livelihoods. People consume art because they enjoy admiring the human talent that creates it, celebrating that some individuals are capable of extraordinary feats the vast majority of people are incapable of. It’s the same reason people watch sports—they enjoy admiring the top echelon of…

The danger of tools like this is eliminating those margins. This type of automation will eliminate junior graphic designer roles and add new requirements for the experienced graphic designers. Both of these affect the job market by making it harder to get started and stay. There will always be the high end and boutique jobs. The picassos and rembrandts will continue to find work.

The starving artist who sells out to create ads or create content for commercial entities will find those opportunities dried up

A single agency using this tool effectively could "in theory" produce 500 times the artistic output from a single artist. Vastly shrinking the market for a decent paying career.

Re: As an artist I am concerned about AI image generation

#22

Post by marc_io »

kimi wrote: post #15
MontyCarloHall wrote: post #13

Transfer learning to emulate artistic style [0] has been around for the better part of a decade and has had zero impact on artists’ livelihoods. People consume art because they enjoy admiring the human talent that creates it, celebrating that some individuals are capable of extraordinary feats the vast majority of people are incapable of. It’s the same reason people watch sports—they enjoy admiring the top echelon of…

> Very few people would watch Olympic Games performed by realistic androids. Why not? a cyclist is a "realistic android" to a runner. It would just be different, more like F1.

> Why not? a cyclist is a "realistic android" to a runner. It would just be different, more like F1.

But the human element is the main thing. This is the crucial part. Take us out of the picture and there's nothing very meaningful left for other humans to see.

Re: As an artist I am concerned about AI image generation

#23

Post by teakettle42 »

cercatrova wrote: post #5
antiterra wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It also apparently copies the artist’s logo. In a way, the “it just does what humans do but faster” argument is starting to follow the “a number can’t be illegal” trajectory.

Either way I support AI art and AI in other fields. Just because artists are mad it's gonna take their jobs does not seem like a legitimate reason to halt human progress. It's just inevitable the way things are going.

Stealing people’s work to serve as your training set is not human progress.

Sounds like the AI model should be paying royalties to every affected artist for the right to sample their work.

Re: As an artist I am concerned about AI image generation

#24

Post by cercatrova »

teakettle42 wrote: post #23
cercatrova wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Either way I support AI art and AI in other fields. Just because artists are mad it's gonna take their jobs does not seem like a legitimate reason to halt human progress. It's just inevitable the way things are going.

Stealing people’s work to serve as your training set is not human progress. Sounds like the AI model should be paying royalties to every affected artist for the right to sample their work.

The art that was trained on was all Creative Commons apparently, so perhaps artists should understand licenses first before giving their work a permissive license.

Re: As an artist I am concerned about AI image generation

#25

Post by WarOnPrivacy »

acadapter wrote: post #11

Mail couriers had to teach themselves to drive after many years of using horses. Artists will have to learn how to stimulate AI models in effective ways and perform suitable post-processing.

I think a more 1:1 comparison would be self-driving delivery vehicles - which we haven't figured out yet.

and

I imagine a primary motivation for investing in art-generating AI is cost savings.

disclaimer: By default, I tend to be less sympathetic to artists here. It's due to their communities' collective silence about decades of ever-ratcheting (and typically purchased) copyright laws.

Re: As an artist I am concerned about AI image generation

#26

Post by [deleted] »

ayngg wrote: post #9

A lot of art created now, especially for film/ media, already goes through a similar process that AI just automates and accelerates. Several big concept artists I have met have lamented on the fact that many artists in the industry basically churn compositions out through mashing references they gather on google images or asset stores, not to mention just straight photobashing, which has made a lot of the concepts pr…

[deleted]

Re: As an artist I am concerned about AI image generation

#28

Post by adamhi »

I won't pretend that this isn't a troubling development for digital artists, maybe even existentially so. I hope not.

One thing that makes me a little hopeful is that every image I've generated with DALL-E 2, even the best ones, would require non-trivial work to make them "good".

There's always something wrong, and you can't tell the model "the hat should be tilted about 5 about degrees", or "the hands should not look like ghoulish pretzels, thanks".

There's also this fundamental limitation that the model can give you a thing that fits some criteria, but it has no concept of the relationships between elements in a composition, or why things are the way they are. It's never exactly right.

It's like the model gets you the first 90%, and then you need a trained painter to get the second 90%.

But yeah, it will certainly devalue the craft, don't get me wrong. And anyone who is callously making comparisons to buggy whip manufacturers should consider how it would (excuse me, will) feel when AI code generators pivot to being more than a copilot, and suddenly the development team at your office is a lot smaller than it used to be, and maybe you aren't on it anymore.

If you spend a lifetime mastering some skill, and then it's just not valued anymore, it sucks, and you get pretty mad about it.

Re: As an artist I am concerned about AI image generation

#29

Post by h2odragon »

I'm watching an artist play with DALL-E for the past few days; it's proving to be a useful tool for inspiring concepts and leading her to her own visualizations and execution of things that she had not gotten to "gel" previously.

I can recall a little bit of the fuss at the beginning of digital art, "is that even real art?" I don't think this fuss has as much to stand on. It's a tool for making art; whether it's really art or not is a judgement only the individual viewer can make.

Re: As an artist I am concerned about AI image generation

#30

Post by teakettle42 »

cercatrova wrote: post #24
teakettle42 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stealing people’s work to serve as your training set is not human progress. Sounds like the AI model should be paying royalties to every affected artist for the right to sample their work.

The art that was trained on was all Creative Commons apparently, so perhaps artists should understand licenses first before giving their work a permissive license.

All CC licenses, other than the “CC0 public domain dedication”, require attribution, but CC themselves have taken what I’d consider to be an ass-backwards position on the matter:

> At CC, we believe that, as a matter of copyright law, the use of works to train AI should be considered non-infringing by default, assuming that access to the copyright works was lawful at the point of input.

https://creativecommons.org/2021/03/04/should-cc-licensed-co...

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