How will they know what is and isn't AI-generated? And when they cause a false-positive how are the "real" artists able to verify that their art is legit?
Online art communities begin banning AI-generated images
231–240 of 356 posts
Re: Online art communities begin banning AI-generated images
#232Aside 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…
>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.
Just subbing to the StableDiffusion sub has added a ton of art to my feed in Apollo. I agree the concern isn't that it's art, but that it's being produced so fast. I've seen dozens of showcase/portfolio worthy pieces generated in the past week. That manually created would probably take 40-160 hours (I'm not an artist so hence the huge range).
It's pretty comparable to handcrafting a letter vs. a spambot in terms of the volume jump.
Re: Online art communities begin banning AI-generated images
#233I 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 think art communities should have the ability to set parameters for what they accept. Whether it be something like "only African artists" or "only Holga cameras." If for this one, only generated by people, so be it. If someone wants to set up a community that only accepts AI-generated images, then that's okay too.
It's true. It's not like online communities are fighting for physical space. For attention maybe, but that's debatable.
The headlines like "AI art banned!!!" just generate more clicks as this thing is fresh new
Re: Online art communities begin banning AI-generated images
#234Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you used an AI to write a million DALL-E prompts for a million different outputs - are you an artist if you pick the nicest looking output and call it art?
In all honesty, that's how a lot of photographers work. They take a gazillion photos and pick the best ones.
But the human is at least taking the photos in this scenario.
Re: Online art communities begin banning AI-generated images
#235Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
There is an important distinction between lossy compression and lossless compression. My information-theoretic argument shows that models couldn't have been losslessly compressed, and the juice analogy implies (but does not show) that there is no obvious way to "decompress" the original data set. I intended that, if both arguments are true, those models can't be a photocopier because they don't contain copiable works at all.
Re: Online art communities begin banning AI-generated images
#236Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
It might not be storing all of the images, but it's clearly storing copies of some of the source images. A few weeks before OpenAI made DALL-E 2 open, I went through a series of prompts using well known artists as a basis. Vermeer was one of them. It generated some pretty amazing works that were 'inspired' but not direct copies of Vermeer's works. I started feeding the same prompts into StableDiffiusion (the HuggingF…
Do you have the exact prompt that essentially generated Vemeer's works? Omitted in the parent, but I also noted that while it is hard to reconcile the idea of human-directed transformative use with ML models, it might be actually easier to verify the models' plagarism---which is not equivalent to copyright infringement but can be a problem by its own---once you have a right prompt as they are decidable.
Re: Online art communities begin banning AI-generated images
#237> Lexica, a search engine that solely indexed images from Stable Diffusion’s beta tests in Discord, has over 10 million images in it. It would take a lifetime to explore everything in it, a corpus made by a relatively small group of beta testers in a few weeks.
There are many interesting points, but this is a key one I think. The sheer volume is astounding, like the media flooding of the last decade taken up exponentially.
Re: Online art communities begin banning AI-generated images
#238Perfect. A huge niche opportunity to focus on an art community dedicated to AI generated images.
> A huge niche opportunity
kind of an oxymoron. Why bother having an "art community" when one can just generate all the art at random themselves? That's the whole point of DALL-E and co, an endless stream of generated images... no need for a community for that.
Re: Online art communities begin banning AI-generated images
#239Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it will be interesting, but not result in total annihilation of the existing field. As a general counterexample, TV did not kill radio despite it having more dimensions for creativity. Radio changed, but it did not die, and was quite comfortable for many decades after. Coallescing on prompt languages is probably unlikely, if only because part of the thing that defines a language is that a community has rules,…
sign makers were put out of business en masse at a certain point, and there were quite a few, and it is high-skill, high-commitment work. Some kinds of print arts related to magazines for example, were next. There is a chapter in the Stanford AI Index (2021) that opens with "The rise of AI will inevitable raise questions of how much these technologies will impact business, labor and the economy in general .. " there…
> In the 1930s America there was mass unemployment
Sure, but these are temporary disruptions. Now it's true that the pace of change feels immensely faster than ever before, and I believe that's an observable fact. But we adapt. The incentives to do so are, sometimes, life or death. When faced with that kind of situation, some small % will sink into depression, perhaps never to climb out. I'm sure that some online magazine (which surely used to be known for its print version, but is no longer...) will write an extremely long piece full of anecdotes about the plight of the artist whose livelihood was destroyed by the evil AI.
But I assert that it will always be a tiny percentage of the whole, because the vast majority of people like to eat food and live in houses. Many of them will look at these new tools and make amazing new things. Many will go do other things. That's life, man.
Re: Online art communities begin banning AI-generated images
#240Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 se…
I think the point has been missed. AI is bound. Humans are not.
To better illustrate that difference: Just because anecdotally some human might produce crap doesn't mean that is the limit of all humans.