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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

#151

Post by superchroma »

orangecat wrote: post #51
superchroma wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whilst automation in textiles, agriculture, etc. brought measurable benefits to society, this will have few as it stands. I can think of a dozen things that are worth automating before this. This leaves me suspecting that projects like DALL-E are gunning for Shutterstock's $500 million annual profit and that's it.

This leaves me suspecting that projects like DALL-E are gunning for Shutterstock's $500 million annual profit and that's it. Do you think AlphaGo was motivated by a burning desire to discover better board game strategies?

Elsewhere in this thread, people celebrate AI for some reasons. I'm not so impressed by the tech when the goal is just profit without some sort of ethical upside.

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

#152

Post by slowmovintarget »

ThisIsMyAltFace wrote: post #113
WASDx wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No. This argument comes up over and over and over again and it is wrong. These models are not learning or being inspired in the same sense humans are. The laws tgat apply to humans should not be applied to them.

Exactly. The relevant law is with regard to the use of artwork on the part of the people who feed the index. Artists should have a say on whether their work gets included in a training set, if their works are not public domain.

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

#153

Post by shagie »

teakettle42 wrote: post #127
shagie wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 got…

Ok... though I question the use of the word "stolen".

If I was to dabble in sci-fi art and made something that fit in the art style of Steward Cowley ( https://archive.org/details/terrantradeauthorityhandbookstar... ) do I need to credit the art?

When it comes to playing around in blender - my designs are obviously derivative of others - do I need to credit those artists? Even the ones that I don't remember more than a "I saw this print at a comic art show once..."

How original does my own work have to be before it isn't a mashup of stolen images that I half remember?

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

#154

Post by teakettle42 »

shagie wrote: post #153
teakettle42 wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 got…

Ok... though I question the use of the word "stolen". If I was to dabble in sci-fi art and made something that fit in the art style of Steward Cowley ( https://archive.org/details/terrantradeauthorityhandbookstar... ) do I need to credit the art? When it comes to playing around in blender - my designs are obviously derivative of others - do I need to credit those artists? Even the ones that I don't remember more than…

> If I was to dabble in sci-fi art and made something that fit in the art style of Steward Cowley … do I need to credit the art?

Probably, yes.

> When it comes to playing around in blender - my designs are obviously derivative of others - do I need to credit those artists?

Again, probably, but nobody is likely to care if you’re not actually selling your work.

> Even the ones that I don't remember more than a "I saw this print at a comic art show once..."

Then that’s not the prompt you should be starting with if your goal is to produce an original work.

> How original does my own work have to be before it isn't a mashup of stolen images that I half remember?

How original does it have to be before it’s not plagiarism?

Now, remove your ability for individual creativity, such that you cannot come up with an original idea. All you can do is plagiarize.

That’s the difference, here. This isn’t an AI trained to have creative thought, a genuine understanding of what it’s making, and original ideas. It’s an AI trained to regurgitate mashups of plagiarized works based on weighted correlation between the prompt and the (also plagiarized) descriptions of the works it’s regurgitating.

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

#155

Post by antisthenes »

p1esk wrote: post #136
vanadium1st wrote: post #98

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 live…

Do you think the AI will become better than the best human artist? In the foreseeable future?

I think the bigger point is that while it might not be better, it could be "good enough" and 1000x faster/cheaper at the same time.

Instead of hiring 100 artists, you could have this 1 model generating images, and then 10 artists touching up AI's results to take them from 90% to 99% on quality.

It facilitates more capital consolidation.

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

#156

Post by _nalply »

vanadium1st wrote: post #146
p1esk wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think the AI will become better than the best human artist? In the foreseeable future?

I believe that it already did, honestly. The output and range of Dalle-2 and Stable Diffusion is unmatched by any human artist. I am not only talking about quantity and range - the best illustrations generated by Stable Diffusion are honestly unbelievable and could totally get on the front pages on artstation on their own. The digital paintings, the 3d renders, landscapes, portraits, concept arts, character designs -…

I feel that the illustrations are still at least somewhat in the uncanny valley. I don't think that the quality is already there. What you see is only a subset. Many creations are really bad, creepy and unbalanced.

I think this will change up to the extent that the majority of people won't care.

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

#157

Post by p1esk »

antisthenes wrote: post #155
p1esk wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think the AI will become better than the best human artist? In the foreseeable future?

I think the bigger point is that while it might not be better, it could be "good enough" and 1000x faster/cheaper at the same time. Instead of hiring 100 artists, you could have this 1 model generating images, and then 10 artists touching up AI's results to take them from 90% to 99% on quality. It facilitates more capital consolidation.

I personally couldn’t care less about 99% quality. I want to see genius level work - of the same impact as Monet, Matisse, Picasso, Dali - something unlike anything else in the dataset.

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

#158

Post by luckylion »

teakettle42 wrote: post #125
luckylion wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

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

We all stand on the shoulders of giants. If you're very dismissive, I think it's easy to say the same about most artists. They're not genre-redefining, they carve out their niche that works (read: sells) for them.

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

#159

Post by [deleted] »

cercatrova wrote: post #33
adamhi wrote: 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/

[deleted]

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

#160

Post by MacsHeadroom »

egypturnash wrote: post #60
orangecat wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, and we should really do something about those abominations like Excel and Python that let ordinary people create programs without hiring us to do it the right way.

There is a big difference between "this is a tool that makes some things easier" and "this is definitely endangering the skill I spent a lifetime learning". You will know it when you see it.

There is no big difference. The steam engine put 90% of the world out of agricultural work. That is a big difference. Now you can buy strawberries all year round and drink coconut water in Alaska.

Nobody will care where their art comes from any more than you care about how your food's field was plowed; and all their lives will be better for it.

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