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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

#221

Post by quitit »

bayindirh wrote: post #201
causality0 wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Certainly, but those human artists were also trained on a data set their whole lives. Raise a baby with no training data set and they might produce a handprint on a wall or a rectangle of facepaint. There's a reason indigenous tribesmen don't spontaneously invent hyperrealism.

However, there's a major misconception about training of humans and AI. Image generating AIs are trained with massive amounts of images and text, however image generating humans train with much broader spectrum of experience. Also, feeding a model tons of images created by humans (directly or by proxy) and claiming that AI is generating something completely new is a bit naive IMHO. Humans mix a much more broader and…

Further to your point, comparing humans to AI is not just misunderstanding AI, but also looks past how humans create and choose the styles which this AI is now reproducing through a statical approach. Without the human guidance the AI would be bland, AI is limited to the walls of whatever it has been exposed to - humans are not.

The AI emulates. Humans create. - The significance here is not trivial.

Re: Online art communities begin banning AI-generated images

#222

Post by JohnFen »

largepeepee wrote: post #180
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…

Art is whatever the rich and influential patron who pays for it decides. They can afford to pay off the press, change the narrative and overpay the artist. Be it the de Medici in the Renaissance or CIA and state department backing abstract expressionism.

I disagree. You're describing a very small subset of the world of art.

Re: Online art communities begin banning AI-generated images

#223

Post by JohnFen »

npteljes wrote: post #114
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 dunno. Fast food haven't killed restaurants, and restaurants haven't killed home cooking. Fast food is a huge problem, but many go to restaurants and many still cook at home. We're in no endgame at all. If it worked this way, artists from poorer economies would have drowned out all other art. But for some reason, it just doesn't work that way.

> Fast food haven't killed restaurants, and restaurants haven't killed home cooking.

True, but fast food has seriously damaged and reduced both real restaurants and home cooking.

Re: Online art communities begin banning AI-generated images

#224

Post by forgetfreeman »

andybak wrote: post #159
mistrial9 wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

thousands of small companies sustain and employ humans, reliably now as sign makers? I live in a metropolitan area, sign makers were reliably found and nearby in my living memory. There are very few now, mainly as corporate franchises with catalog contents. How is the value of scarcity you refer to, being circulated in terms of reliable income and stability for humans living now? How plural are the products in modern…

You're entirely right. I was talking about cultural value. Things are really going to suck for working artists who can't adjust. That's not cool and I should have acknowledged it.

This assumes adjustment is even possible. Prior history suggests "adjust" is a euphemism for pivoting to unfulfilling lower wage work. If that seems like hyperbole to you I highly recommend taking some time out to research the before/after effects of globalization on rural factory towns in North America or the impact of high intensity corporate agriculture on family farms. If you want the tl;dr, just look up a graph of farmer suicides over time.

Re: Online art communities begin banning AI-generated images

#225

Post by practice9 »

JohnFen wrote: post #216
Animats wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another discovery that something thought to be uniquely human really isn't that hard.

It depends on what you mean by "art". There's different sorts of art for different purposes (commercial, fine, etc.), and for many of these sorts of art having an AI make it would be acceptable. But when I think "art" without a qualifier, I think "fine art". And the purpose of fine art, for me, is human communication of ephemeral things that aren't possible to communicate in language. I don't want AI generated fine a…

> It's no longer about another person communicating something significant and human to me.

There is a person thinking about the prompt, typing in the prompt, painstakingly selecting the image that matches what they imagined in their head.

It just less elitist, as now even a child can create a complex, meaningful and beautiful images by leveraging the essence of human art (compressed into a single ML model).

I, for one, never had the time & chance to learn painting. Even if I did it as a hobby, it would take me up to a decade to become proficient at it.

And now I can ask AI to paint what I dreamt about last night (!!!), or create an impressionist painting almost exactly like I see it (or even better).

Fun factor is also there: I can see how an anime character could look in real life, or put a movie character in a new context , or just generate cute corgis wearing funny hats and driving cars

Re: Online art communities begin banning AI-generated images

#226

Post by coldcode »

onion2k wrote: post #47
coldcode wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My normal artwork (digital) is 9000x9000 pixels up to about 14400x14400. Good luck getting any of them to make something bigger than 1024x1024. Sure, you can use Gigapixel to upres things, but in the end it's basically impossible to make a decent artwork using ML at the moment. I only use Dall-E for offbeat ideas for geometric abstractions, so far Stable Diffusion sucks for that purpose. Of course when you upload at…

I believe most of these models only use 1k images so they really can't make anything bigger yet. Maybe someday but not today. This is the sort of thing that changes incredibly quickly. I'd guess that a big chunk of the source data will be in 8K within a year or two.

Problem is the computing power necessary to implement those bigger models increases by some large value as well. An 81MP images is 81 times bigger than a 1MP image. Not sure exactly how the generation is implemented, but I am sure it probably becomes unaffordable if its linear.

Re: Online art communities begin banning AI-generated images

#227

Post by jupp0r »

kodah wrote: post #178
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…

Anecdotally I dated an artist for a short time who upon entering my home proceeded to ask me how much I paid for my art and why I would pay for something as awful as what I have. My art was made by a friend of mine who works in a union factory in Texas. Art is his real joy and I was able to snag some pieces from when we were in college together. It's easy to write off that the pieces are just sentimental and therefor…

I was reading this and waiting for the point where you say that his pieces sell for 10s of millions of dollars now :)

Re: Online art communities begin banning AI-generated images

#228

Post by stemlord »

klez wrote: post #174
JacobThreeThree wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>were considered 'not artists' by a lot of people at the time. You make a good point that the trend of automating art is not a recent one. At some point I think a line in the sand must be drawn where the human artist is no longer the primary conceptualizer. Writing a text prompt is a fair place for that line to be drawn in my opinion.

> Writing a text prompt is a fair place for that line to be drawn in my opinion. I read an article[0] on the subject the other day. At some point it said that some art tools are inherently easy to use. Part of the difference between an amateur and an actual artist is in the mastery of such tool. Think of a phone camera for example. It's extremely easy to take more than decent pictures with it. But it takes a good pho…

I like this train of thought. I wonder if "text in prompt" is far too simplistic of an interface as an input to a black box to consider skill level with?

My inclination is to say the interface needs more breadth of options beyond single-line string input, and the outcome needs to have some level of predictability to enable the artist a significant enough level of understanding of how each aspect of their input alters the output.

I mean, the input parameters should be complex enough to let artist intentionally develop a unique style/idea, rather than style being dictated inside the black box.

Re: Online art communities begin banning AI-generated images

#229

Post by nwienert »

lifthrasiir wrote: post #77
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…

> Many clearly think it's a photocopier. As if StableDiffusion is hiding copies of all these works inside. In my latest series of tweets [1] I tried to argue that this is not the case in a less technical way, not sure if I was successful though. For anyone not fluent in Korean, my argument was as follows: Stable Diffusion was trained with a data set composed of about 2.32 billion text-image pairs. The model itself by…

Not a good argument, because this type of AI is basically exactly a compression algorithm - it’s the most efficient way we know to compress 2 billion image/text pairs down such that it can recreate the average of all the inputs retaining as much layered knowledge as it can.

It’s a very very fancy compression algorithm, but it still is one.

Re: Online art communities begin banning AI-generated images

#230

Post by practice9 »

quitit wrote: post #221
bayindirh wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

However, there's a major misconception about training of humans and AI. Image generating AIs are trained with massive amounts of images and text, however image generating humans train with much broader spectrum of experience. Also, feeding a model tons of images created by humans (directly or by proxy) and claiming that AI is generating something completely new is a bit naive IMHO. Humans mix a much more broader and…

Further to your point, comparing humans to AI is not just misunderstanding AI, but also looks past how humans create and choose the styles which this AI is now reproducing through a statical approach. Without the human guidance the AI would be bland, AI is limited to the walls of whatever it has been exposed to - humans are not. The AI emulates. Humans create. - The significance here is not trivial.

Humans emulate as well, and produce bland art as well.

I've seen lots of human-made art (especially on Artstation) that failed to elicit any emotional response in me.

The reason people are having this discussion is a fear of AI creating aesthetically pleasing and deep emotionally through statistical approach.

And the deeper fear that AI can potentially "hack" our senses by providing us with exactly what we want to see, read or hear (statistically).

i.e. if some subset of art is pushing our biological buttons more than all other art, and the effect is generalizable over human population, what would that say about us?

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