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Online art communities begin banning AI-generated images

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Re: Online art communities begin banning AI-generated images

#61

Post by helloworld11 »

For artists who continue to paint, or use other physical means of expression through base materials and sell them as physical works, this entire AI art surge remains largely irrelevant in a practical sense. A buyer or patron who wants real, physical art will still need and want real, physical art, and I don't see an AI imitating much of that easily any time soon.

The people or organizations to which AI-churned art appeals to most desire commercial visual churn. They are the same people who would in any case have least cared about art in its more creative, communicative forms. And there's nothing creative or imaginative about the results of machine-generated visuals. They're the very opposite in fact, visuals created literally mindlessly.

If anything, I can see AI art giving a new breath of life and interest to real man-made art, much like industrial food production gave organic "local-grown" food producers a chance to brand themselves with a distinct, desirable identity.

Re: Online art communities begin banning AI-generated images

#62

Post by adrian_b »

Kiro wrote: post #18
imranq wrote: post #13

I agree that images only through AI should be removed from art sites. The issue with AI art is that the only human contribution in those pieces is the creation of the prompt and the curation of the final image. Without sensory and experiential inputs of its own, AI can only interpolate between real images and styles. So an AI generated image doesn't add much artistic value since its not expressing any new deep truth…

And how do you define artistic value? If you don't even know if an image is generated by an AI or not, what is lost?

If you just want a beautiful or intriguing image to look at, an AI-generated image may happen to satisfy that need very well.

The same need can be satisfied with a photo of some natural things, e.g. living beings or minerals or places.

In both cases there is no human to whom one could attribute any artistic merit for the content of the images.

Whether an image is beautiful or not is not necessarily correlated with the involvement of a human in its creation, but its origin should nevertheless always be made clear.

Re: Online art communities begin banning AI-generated images

#63

Post by 7952 »

oulipo wrote: post #52

It's interesting to think about it, what differentiate art from a human or a machine. It can't be the content itself, because now machine output is close to a human output (modulo the small details). So what make those communities attracted to art made by humans, rather than art made by machines? It must be the "act of community" itself, which cannot be made by a machine (it is useless to be "in community" with a con…

People consume art for different reasons. It can be like a spiritual experience, or an investment, or something to brighten up your life. It can have a story attached to it or be inspirational. My guess is that different people will have different reactions to machine made art. And most of the art community will carry on perfectly happily as if nothing has changed.

Re: Online art communities begin banning AI-generated images

#65

Post by eat_veggies »

firasd wrote: post #35

I think the communities involved here like digital artists, furries etc got a lot of attention hating on NFTs last year, so they are doubling down with the anti-art-generator movement. But I don't think this one will be so successful. Like sure, maybe art community sites could require you to tag prompt-generated art just as a way to label things, but in terms of widespread usage the cat is out of the bag. Whenever I…

Sure, AI generated art is probably out of the bag, but to lump it in with NFTs and such is an interesting rhetorical move, since the only thing that really links them is their new-ness. That Blade Runner quote can be used to shut down any critique of an emerging technology precisely because it fetishizes new-ness for its own sake, and assigns it an agency of its own, inevitable like the tide. It becomes a cause that generates effects in our lives, and the only question is how we react. This robs us of our own agency as social/political/historical actors who can kill/change/improve/use/abuse technologies and decide how to incorporate them in our lives.

People invoked the same language about things like television, and I find Raymond Williams's critique helpful:

> If the effect of the medium is the same, whoever controls or uses it, and whatever apparent content he may try to insert, then we can forget ordinary political and cultural argument and let the technology run itself. It is hardly surprising that this conclusion has been welcomed by the 'media-men' of the existing institutions. It gives the gloss of avant-garde theory to the crudest versions of their existing interests and practices, and assigns all their critics to pre-electronic irrelevance (1974, 128)

Re: Online art communities begin banning AI-generated images

#66

Post by zackmorris »

gdubs wrote: post #29

I have a degree in Studio Arts in addition to being a software developer (and recently I've started making a lot of creative work with AI). Back when I was in school, there was already plenty of debate about 'what is "Art"'? It's always been hotly contested. Most of my teachers felt that 'technique' was not Art. Others were more purists – life painters, etc – and felt that, no, technique is art. Duchamp poked the art…

I'll always remember 2022 as the year that creativity died.

That sounds a bit negative I guess, but techniques like stable diffusion will be applied to other problem domains, so all other art forms like music and creative writing will be automated within the next 5-10 years. And if computers can do that, they can do anything. Because that's how our brains work. Our neurons are microscopic filters magnifying patterns in the long tail of quantum randomness where source consciousness probably resides. Although science will only have recipes for creating consciousness, it will never be able to explain meaning, because it has nothing to say about it. That's the domain of personal experience, faith, the study of magic, etc.

The big question for me is: if a liberal arts degree is worth even less than it is today, what will people do for work? We're looking at not just the death of creativity, but the death of all human contribution. This was predicted decades ago (see Asimov, Kurzweil, etc), but we're not prepared for what's coming. I just don't see us switching to UBI before we're subjugated beneath the yoke of corporate AI that gradually changes out human workers for machines. We're in the endgame now.

I still hold out some small hope that kids today will run with this and do creative stuff we can't even imagine. Or will we just merge with AI when the Singularity arrives around 2040? Who knows.

Re: Online art communities begin banning AI-generated images

#67

Post by Akronymus »

firasd wrote: post #35

I think the communities involved here like digital artists, furries etc got a lot of attention hating on NFTs last year, so they are doubling down with the anti-art-generator movement. But I don't think this one will be so successful. Like sure, maybe art community sites could require you to tag prompt-generated art just as a way to label things, but in terms of widespread usage the cat is out of the bag. Whenever I…

One of the biggest furry art archives has always banned art without much, if any, actual input from the human who created the artpiece. For example, game screenshots are banned almost universally, picture generated art is as well (something like picrew) 3d models aren't, assuming there is posing and such and so on.

It seems a perfectly fine continuation to the existing rules to ban ai generated art.

Re: Online art communities begin banning AI-generated images

#69

Post by throw101010 »

matkoniecz wrote: post #21

> generator was uploading one image every 40 seconds before it was banned > not have the Art Portal flooded with computer-generated art That was the real problem.

Then why do they pretend to ban a specific art type?

I could have generated variations of a human created digital piece in less time than these AI (currently) since the creation of this platform but they didn't seem to feel threatened by this up until now... so there is clearly an other problem.

Re: Online art communities begin banning AI-generated images

#70

Post by mherdeg »

gdubs wrote: post #29

I have a degree in Studio Arts in addition to being a software developer (and recently I've started making a lot of creative work with AI). Back when I was in school, there was already plenty of debate about 'what is "Art"'? It's always been hotly contested. Most of my teachers felt that 'technique' was not Art. Others were more purists – life painters, etc – and felt that, no, technique is art. Duchamp poked the art…

As a non-artist whose compensation is, so far, unaffected by ML-generated images, I'm more interested in the effects the technology has on people.

Over the past 150 years it became possible to compute cube roots in milliseconds, instead of minutes. Slide rules became obsolete, and the things we learn to do do arithmetic changed.

Over the past 20 years, the way we look up arbitrary facts changed. We learned to construct Web search engine queries and we learned to evaluate the quality of results. Other library skills are still relevant, but certain kinds of rote memorization become obsolete.

Now people are rapidly learning a new "prompt language" which uses English words but combines them in a way which is for now something like computer programming (given an input string, compile it to an output image). Will "prompt languages" for text / image / video generation systems turn into a full-fledged, non-English language that you can learn?

What will be the social effects of people learning and using this language to communicate?

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