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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

#91

Post by wizofaus »

status200 wrote: post #53

I think the tweet author is missing the meat and focusing on the gravy - they themselves indicate that the AI just replicates existing styles, so it will only ever produce existing art styles with the signature AI blurry weirdness on the details. A main hallmark of breakthrough artists is inventing new styles and making them their own, a feat that AI has yet to perform very well (unless you include the aforementioned…

Has anyone ever tried asking DALL-E to come up with something in a style that's unlike any other?

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

#92

Post by thejohnconway »

Speaking as a professional digital artist, I am not very concerned by this. Images created by AI without comparable human experience (and therefore meaning), is not the same as art, although it can of course look like it. People who are more than casual appreciators of images follow and admire artists, and their translation of human meaning into an artwork.

I can see this eating into the commercial artwork market, which is bad news for the artists that rely on that for income, but it's not an existential threat to the meaning of art.

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

#93

Post by thejohnconway »

xor99 wrote: post #47

Digital art is not permanently interesting. My sympathies go out to people who feel like they will lose some of their business. However, a group of developers has shown what was always true about digital art: its computational art even if you draw it because it is encoded digitally. In other words, it was always going to be reproducible and remixable. The problem with being shocked by Dall-E, in my view, is that it s…

> Digital art is not permanently interesting.

I'm not sure what you mean by this. Reproducibility has virtually nothing to do with interest in my opinion. I was an admirer of plenty of artists before I'd ever seen their work in person. Perhaps I am missing the point.

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

#94

Post by wizofaus »

karamanolev wrote: post #80
dcow wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you describe sounds ideal for the software industry.

Automated trucking, rail and ocean transportation sound ideal for the cargo industry, except for the millions of truck drivers. You put those people out of a job and you have a societal problem that needs to be solved. I'm not against progress in any way, but it comes with problems in need of a solution

Technology is supposed to put us out of jobs! But I'd argue it's been doing a pretty terrible job of it in the last few decades - we're all still working as much as we ever have been. Personally I'd love to have a tool that meant I only needed to spend half as long working to be just as productive. But it requires more than just technology to make that result feasible for the wider population.

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

#96

Post by shagie »

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.

Every time I've been to an art museum (and this is a handful, not just SFMOMA), there has been a person or two in a room with some, well, art hanging on the wall. They had notebook of the appropriate paper medium and art supplies and were copying the existing work.

This is not something new. https://www.realistartresource.com/the-tradition-of-copying

Copying of existing works is part of how an art student learns. That this one happens to be a math model at its core is an interesting philosophical problem. The other people's work to serve as your training set is exactly what art students do - and the works they copied and the works that they have yet to produce are not royalty encumbered.

Nor should a mathematical model. It happens that the developers working on this problem have gotten it so that it can do its learning and creation many times faster than an art student in a gallery... but it still can't get hands and faces right.

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

#97

Post by PaulsWallet »

luckylion wrote: post #77
PaulsWallet wrote: post #8

There is a response to this tweet where someone says "stop gatekeeping art" which while I understand the gist of what they mean, seems like a weird thing to say to console someone who is concerned they are about to be automated out of a job.

I guess the context is "as an art seller, I am concerned", not so much "as an artist". Which is understandable, of course, as much as anyone would be concerned if their job is in jeopardy. But framing it as a matter of art does sound like gatekeeping. It'd be "that cannot be art, because x" when all they mean to say is "please don't stop paying me for this".

I don't believe they are framing it as if it is not art. The problem they are raising and that it is an AI trained on other peoples' art down to copying their signature making it appear as if it were a genuine piece from that artist and of course yes, they are concerned that they are watching their career die in real time because of it.

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

#98

Post by vanadium1st »

I am a working digital artist, my personal feed is filled with takes like this. I understand the crisis that artists go through currently and I understand their emotions. I've personally made peace with it already, but it will take time for everyone and there will be a lot of concern, rage and bargaining in the process.

All of us artists woke up in the world where the thing we were learning to produce all of our lives became 100x cheaper. I've been kinda waiting for this to happen for truck drivers or translators and was honestly surprised that it got to the artists first. But, there's nothing to do now.

There will be a lot of takes trying different ways to deny this reality. Like if we agree that this thing is immoral or anti-cultural it will go away and our potential customers will forget about it. I think that it's a waste of time The industry is not completely gone, but it will go though a massive transformation. The basic hierarchy of artists will probably stay the same - people who were good in the pre-ai era will still be good working with the ai. If you've learned your basic skills right - they will still work.

I've personally already changed my workflow to use ai art for the sketches, ideas and references. And then polish them to commercial level using my old experience and skills. It's funny how this thing is so new, but I've gotten so used to it that it's already hard for me to come back to my old set of tools. And I do recommend all other artists to do the same and to try to find their place in the new reality - it really seems like there's no other way.

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

#99

Post by v64 »

Kiro wrote: post #85
bambax wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. That is absolutely not what the OP is complaining about. They're not saying that because AI is good, they won't find work. They are complaining that in training AI for art generation, builders took works from living artists, without consent from them, and that in so doing allowed generator…

Not only is your rant about Google misplaced considering Dall-E is OpenAI, not Google, but the thread is also not complaining about Dall-E. It's about Stable Diffusion ( https://stability.ai/blog/stable-diffusion-announcement ) which is explicitly trained on working artists. That's why it tries to reproduce the logo.

Dall-E has also been trained on watermarked art. Here [1] [2] are some examples from images I've generated exhibiting that.

[1] https://ibb.co/Q86zDSw

[2] https://ibb.co/njvLMQ2

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

#100

Post by tomatotomato37 »

As a hobbyist artist my main concern is less the automation will replace artist as much as that 99% of that automation will come from the 3 companies with deep enough coffers to train and run the most complex AIs, and 2 of those companies will be FAANGs. Ultimately it will be a future where instead of paying an artist X amount for decent art with the artist getting a ~7% margin, it will be paying 90% of X to a monopolistic tech company for almost decent art with the company's CEO getting a 70% margin
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