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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

#121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/20…

>backwards position It's not backwards. It's the same as if a human artist studied it. Backwards would be thinking that any creative work you make is a derivative work of many creative works that you've seen in the past which you aren't copying from.

> It's the same as if a human artist studied it.

It’s not a human artist, and it can only regurgitate mash-ups of work stolen from others.

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

#122
post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right of course! I don't know what I was thinking. Dall-e is MS. I will edit.

Still wrong. DALL-E is Open AI

Yes, that's what the edited comment says. Dall-e is OpenAI; OpenAI has strong links with MS.

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

#123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, many of us will turn into cowards when automation starts to touch our work, but that would not prove this sentiment incorrect - only that we're cowards.

Dude. What the hell kind of anti-life philosophy are you subscribing to that calls "being unhappy about people trying to automate an entire field of human behavior" being a "coward". Geez.

Because automation is generally good, but making an exemption for specific cases of automation that personally inconvenience you is rooted is cowardice/selfishness. Similar to NIMBYism.

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

#124
post #62
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Not only that, but your average person is not able to asses the quality of an image. Just like the average person could not discern your code (or it’s quality)

Why would that be a problem? They can either pay an expert (if they want someone to assess the "quality", whatever that may be) or just be happy with their pretty picture.

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

#125

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.

What do you think the artists "trained on"? Didn't they ever see anyone else's art? Don't you think it influenced their art? If it's a 1:1 copy, I agree. If it's a "that looks vaguely like the style that xyz likes to use", I disagree. And I assume you'd run into plenty of situations where multiple people would discover that it's their unique style that is being imitated. Kind of like that story about a hipster threat…

Your entire point hinges on a false assumption; “training” a human artist (or programmer) is the same as training an AI model.

It is not.

The AI model can only regurgitate stolen mash-ups of other people’s work.

Everything it produces is trivially derivative of the work it has consumed.

Where it succeeds, it succeeds because it successfully correlated stolen human-written descriptions to stolen human-produced images.

Where it fails, it does so because it cannot understand what it’s regurgitating, and it regurgitates the wrong stolen images for the given prompt.

AI models are incapable of producing anything but purely derivative stolen works, and the (often unwillingly) contributors to their training dataset should be entitled to copyright protections that extend to the derivative works.

That’s true whether we’re discussing dall-e or GitHub copilot.

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

#126
post #28

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 loo…

MidJourney is a lot better at making very convincing and usable output in one shot.

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

#127
post #96

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.

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. Tha…

> The other people's work to serve as your training set is exactly what art students do

“Training” an art student and training an AI model are vastly different, and your equating the two is, frankly, nonsensical and absurd.

An art student isn’t a trivial weighted model capable only of mapping stolen text prompts to stolen image representations of them.

> 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

It hasn’t learned anything.

It correlates stolen textual descriptions with stolen images, and then regurgitates mash-ups of the same.

This type of AI model cannot produce anything other than purely derivative work stolen from others.

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

#128
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…

I think you're wrong. Pretty much all human creations can be encoded digitally to a high enough fidelity that the discretization process no longer is distinguishable. And 3D printers for paintings exist, that can replicate brush strokes and other techniques, and they will only get better over time. So there's very little left in the human arsenal as the AI generation and AI painting techniques both improve. https://y…

Your link shows you can 3D print a "Rembrandt" if you hire a team of people to spend 18 months working on custom algorithms for it, and I doubt any art experts were as likely to actually be fooled by it as they were by a van Meergeren forgery.

Not sure the people selling paintings knocked out in an afternoon to tourists who visited their studio and chose to buy an original instead of the visually indistinguishable print for a fraction of the price have much to worry about...

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

#129
post #28

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 loo…

Have you seen Stable Diffusion, the AI in question in the tweet? The images are astoundingly good, much better than DALL-E 2 even. https://twitter.com/StableDiffusion/

Also woth checking out the submissions on the subreddit, https://old.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/

Some of them really are outstandingly good. Beyond what I expected, and I have had access to Dalle2.

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

#130
post #110
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…

This is frankly what humans have always done, learning and taking inspiration from other artists. Now we have made a machine that can do the same thing. In the case of exact reproductions, we have copyright and IP laws.

It feels like a big stretch to consider an algorithm to be 'inspired'. Where are the bits that correspond to 'inspiration'? Seems like that would answer a lot of big questions in philosophy.
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