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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

#81

Post by fizx »

zackmorris wrote: post #66
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…

People were saying this stuff when Deep Blue beat Kasparov. Chess is perhaps thriving more than ever.

Re: Online art communities begin banning AI-generated images

#82

Post by pavel_lishin »

Aside from the debates about "artistic merit" and the ethics of using AI trained on existing artists' work, one of the key things is that this new technology allows anyone to flood a place with images.

There are some scifi-themed subreddits that I visit that allow posting art, and at this point it feels like 50% of all submissions are Midjourney/Dall-E generated art. Fine, it looks ok, but there's such a low barrier to creating and posting these, it's beginning to drown out other valuable content. The article even speaks about this:

> In July, one AI furry porn generator was uploading one image every 40 seconds

Re: Online art communities begin banning AI-generated images

#83

Post by pavel_lishin »

helloworld11 wrote: post #61

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 ap…

I don't know if I agree. One of the big sources of income for online artists is commissions of D&D characters and such; AI-generated art is now getting good enough that people can get a "good-enough" version of what they want for free, instead of paying an artist $50 or $100 for a piece of art.

I've commissioned art for my D&D character before, and I'll almost certainly do so again - but if I'm playing a one-shot online and want a quick image to share with the group, AI-generated art is a fast and free way of getting that!

Re: Online art communities begin banning AI-generated images

#84

Post by zackmorris »

aortega wrote: post #73
zackmorris wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>I'll always remember 2022 as the year that creativity died. It's like saying that computers killed artists. AI is just a tool, it still need a human in control and guiding it, can't generate anything on his own (yet). If anything, this can help creativity.

If a computer is a bicycle for the mind, then an AI is a mind for the mind.

Admittedly, my acquired lack of creativity after a lifetime of struggle is the very thing preventing me from seeing beyond this horizon. Too old to begin the training and all that! Ironically, I find the not-knowing to be somewhat comforting.

Re: Online art communities begin banning AI-generated images

#85

Post by greenhearth »

I've used AI to create stuff like music album covers and posters. It's cool and fun to mess around with, but I think it still takes a real person with an aesthetically trained eye to be fully effective. It does basically what I would do anyway, which would be to composite different images in Photoshop and then apply effects, etc. But you still need to edit for composition and text, and most of the time the images have to be fine tuned, or not at all what I wanted. I can easily see AI taking over most image compositing.

Re: Online art communities begin banning AI-generated images

#86

Post by abeppu »

I think we should also be aware of the technological reasons for separating AI-produced and human-produced images: New effects/risks can occur when the ML system is naively trained against its own outputs. It's not hard to imagine multiple companies trying to periodically scrape and build new image datasets and retrain the newest models against the updated dataset. But if stablediffusion vN is mostly trained against stablediffusion v(N-1) images, then it's possible for the sequence to not actually improve even though more data and computation are being thrown at it.

Re: Online art communities begin banning AI-generated images

#87

Post by HKH2 »

helloworld11 wrote: post #61

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 ap…

> 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.

I don't think it would be that hard to get a machine to physically paint in layers. Sure, the velocity, pressure, texture etc. of a brush would take time to model, but you could start with spray paint.

Re: Online art communities begin banning AI-generated images

#88

Post by stolenmerch »

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…

Same here. Software dev with an MFA in Studio Art. Generative Art was a topic 20 years ago in school and my feeling it was politely tolerated as conceptual, but not aesthetic. The difference now is that the models and algorithms and amount of data actually produce decent results. GPT-3 writing as opposed to the markov chain experimental writing decades ago is profound. Image creation even more so.

I see exactly this backlash in most art schools until eveything is so mingled a new generation just doesn't care.

Re: Online art communities begin banning AI-generated images

#89

Post by cardanome »

zackmorris wrote: post #66
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…

As a hobbyist game developer, 2022 is the year my creativity can finally fully unleashed.

Prototyping games is getting so much better, this will really help indies game studies quite a bit.

Will those AI generated assets replace hand crafted ones? Heck no!

Have you ever tried doing AI art?

What gets posted on social media are the few successful experiments. Most AI generated stuff is absolute crap. Getting anything useful out of it requires lot's of trial an error and magical incantations.

Now yes, you can quickly make generic background #20233 with it or simply something weird that would fit into some bad dream. If you need something specific and coherent though? Yeah, this will be very hard.

Here is how to make concept art with stable-diffusion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rS2kNvbIL5Q

Look how many iteration that requires. How it requires finding the proper real word assets for img2img techniques. How is still requires some serious Photoshop skill to put everything together.

AI helps us build more higher level tools for creating art but the idea that it is anywhere close to creating art itself is silly. We have not made any progress in creating general artificial intelligence at all.

The main progress we see is that AI-tech is that it is becoming available for the masses, which is awesome.

Re: Online art communities begin banning AI-generated images

#90

Post by jedberg »

egypturnash wrote: post #76
jedberg wrote: post #64

It seems like the actual problem they're trying to solve is volume, so why not just rate limit submissions? They just need to look at their median submission rate prior to a few weeks ago and then make that the submission rate limit.

The problem being solved by these decisions is that AI art is a visible threat to the livelihoods of the people the site is designed to support and uplift. Art sites have already had rate limits for years. These communities are explicitly saying "no" to this disruptive technology . If you want to go make a new gallery site for showing off your prompt engineering that's your own lookout, have fun trying to build a com…

> The problem being solved by these decisions is that AI art is a visible threat to the livelihoods of the people the site is designed to support and uplift.

That's not a solvable problem. Art will be made by computers, it's inevitable. Eventually it will get good enough to be indistinguishable from human made art. It's already good enough that a human can use the AI to get 90% of the way there and then finish it themselves.

> Art sites have already had rate limits for years.

Clearly not good enough if every one of them is saying some variation on "our site is getting flooded with AI art"

> These communities are explicitly saying "no" to this disruptive technology. If you want to go make a new gallery site for showing off your prompt engineering that's your own lookout, have fun trying to build a community and figure out how to keep the site funded. But you can't come spam our existing communities of people who've dedicated decades to their craft with the messy, incoherent results of the whole six months you've spent learning to be a "prompt engineer".

I agree, people shouldn't be spamming crap directly from the AI. But good luck keeping out the people who tweak the AI generated art to make it look pretty good. A smart site would embrace this kind of art, perhaps make a new category for it. But trying to ban it from the community is a lost cause.

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