AI doppelgänger experiment – Part 1: The training
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AI doppelgänger experiment – Part 1: The training
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Re: AI doppelgänger experiment – Part 1: The training
#2[deleted]
Re: AI doppelgänger experiment – Part 1: The training
#3No, two artists are the same.
As an artist, if I’m not constantly pushing the boundaries of how I’m expressing myself via media then I’m just telling the audience the same thing over and over. Im not actually changing as an artist, I’m simply producing the thing regularly that is expected of me.
This is 99% of professional art you find your style and then you do that over and over for money so that you can survive in a way that you like.
If you did this with a Thomas Kincaid, it would be trivially easy because Thomas Kincaid has built his entire portfolio around a very specific type of art that does a very, very specific type of thing.
Similar for Kahinde Wiley
On the flipside you’re not going to be able to reproduce something from Duchamp or Picasso - their styles changed because they as individuals in the world changed, and they had to change their approach in demonstrating how they interact with the world.
I totally can understand the perspective from professional artists who have developed a style and capability to produce something that they feel comfortable with and live on that
we could sit here and debate about the aim of Art or otherwise, but the reality is, if the core of what you do is reproducible because you have focused on commoditizing your medium or expression type (such that it is so recognizable immediately by any human - eg Kincaid) Then you should not be surprised if your limited vocabulary is fairly easy to replace
The art masters cannot be replaced, you cannot predict what they’re going to do next because they change the rules entirely. This is how we know a great artist from a mediocre artist.
Re: AI doppelgänger experiment – Part 1: The training
#4Related: "Invasive Diffusion: How one unwilling illustrator found herself turned into an AI model" [0].
It's astonishingly simple to train both LoRAs and Embeddings nowadays -- if you combine it with tech like ControlNet, you can more or less have direct control over the illustration as well (see this example I converted to Hollie Megert's style with barely any effort [1] using the model from [0]) -- but FWIW I was playing with the WhatsApp AI stickers recently and human-made illustrations still have a "je ne sais quoi" that sets them apart, vaguely reminiscent of "realistic" animation vs. "squash and stretch". I would not be worried as an artist*, but I would be worried if I am making assets for corporations in Corporate Memphis [2].
[0] https://waxy.org/2022/11/invasive-diffusion-how-one-unwillin...
[1] https://i.imgur.com/ZwtKug5.jpeg
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_Memphis
* In fact, I think I'd be excited, it can be a great tool, and people who lack artistic sensibility might find it almost as hard to use as to make art themselves. However, I do think there needs to be some kind of protection from having your 'style' commoditized without consent, using unauthorized images of your own art.
Re: AI doppelgänger experiment – Part 1: The training
#5No, two artists are the same. As an artist, if I’m not constantly pushing the boundaries of how I’m expressing myself via media then I’m just telling the audience the same thing over and over. Im not actually changing as an artist, I’m simply producing the thing regularly that is expected of me. This is 99% of professional art you find your style and then you do that over and over for money so that you can survive in…
> The art masters cannot be replaced, you cannot predict what they’re going to do next because they change the rules entirely. This is how we know a great artist from a mediocre artist.
I agree that in principle the best working artists are those who know how to create, modulate and discard artistic languages over time -- creating and abandoning rules for sequences of work -- but AI systems can clearly be unethically trained to mimic art in those styles, and there are many living artists (or estates of recently departed artists, supporting their families) whose incomes are defined by some periods of their lives where they worked a particular set of rules in a way that became definitive.
So it's not enough to say that great artists won't be affected because they change the rules all the time. Most of them will still be ruined by this, because as soon as there's enough work in the new style it can be stolen.
Re: AI doppelgänger experiment – Part 1: The training
#6No, two artists are the same. As an artist, if I’m not constantly pushing the boundaries of how I’m expressing myself via media then I’m just telling the audience the same thing over and over. Im not actually changing as an artist, I’m simply producing the thing regularly that is expected of me. This is 99% of professional art you find your style and then you do that over and over for money so that you can survive in…
At a certain point, art sells because of the artist not the art. Picasso's sell because they are Picasso's. An artist starts by creating a style that separates them from the pack but eventually turn into a brand that sells because they artwork is from that artist. For people that successfully are able to turn into a brand, great, but I feel new artist are going to be heavily kneecapped by AI.
Re: AI doppelgänger experiment – Part 1: The training
#7The challenge I see is that (in the US at least), "style" is not copyrightable in the arts. IMHO this is a good thing because artists learn and copy from one another, and if it were copyrightable that would lead to no end of lawsuits between media companies.
So my concern is trying to apply copyright to training AI models can easily slippery slope into more draconian copyright rules for human artists.
Re: AI doppelgänger experiment – Part 1: The training
#8No, two artists are the same. As an artist, if I’m not constantly pushing the boundaries of how I’m expressing myself via media then I’m just telling the audience the same thing over and over. Im not actually changing as an artist, I’m simply producing the thing regularly that is expected of me. This is 99% of professional art you find your style and then you do that over and over for money so that you can survive in…
> The art masters cannot be replaced, you cannot predict what they’re going to do next because they change the rules entirely. This is how we know a great artist from a mediocre artist. I agree that in principle the best working artists are those who know how to create, modulate and discard artistic languages over time -- creating and abandoning rules for sequences of work -- but AI systems can clearly be unethically…
> because as soon as there's enough work in the new style it can be stolen.
This is where the oft-cited comparison to previous advances like the camera breaks down - AI has an ongoing parasitic relationship with the mediums it is displacing. The camera doesn't need a thousand photorealistic paintings of a new subject to be made before it can capture that subject going forward. AI is an unprecedented situation, as far as I can tell, where a new artistic medium greatly de-values prior ones while also being reliant on those other mediums continuing to be used at scale in order to avoid stagnating.
Re: AI doppelgänger experiment – Part 1: The training
#9No, two artists are the same. As an artist, if I’m not constantly pushing the boundaries of how I’m expressing myself via media then I’m just telling the audience the same thing over and over. Im not actually changing as an artist, I’m simply producing the thing regularly that is expected of me. This is 99% of professional art you find your style and then you do that over and over for money so that you can survive in…
You are presenting opinion as objective fact for a subjective medium, which is surprising to hear from an artist.
This argument, and this article, are not about the "great masters" but about amateur and professional artists who find their efforts easily reproduced and outproduced by AI. These people are not protected by "This is a REAL Picasso" and some of them could lose their financial security because of it.
The article indicates that style can be copied in as few as 20 to 30 images. Could you imagine being an artist who is attempting to gain notoriety, publishing low quality pngs of 20 of their works for their Etsy store, and then someone trains a LoRa on that and profits off of your images? Hundreds of hours of time in an attempt to start your art career, to have it duplicated in seconds by computer. You have no time to grow as an artist, because your required contribution to the data set has already been made.
Re: AI doppelgänger experiment – Part 1: The training
#10Related: "Invasive Diffusion: How one unwilling illustrator found herself turned into an AI model" [0]. It's astonishingly simple to train both LoRAs and Embeddings nowadays -- if you combine it with tech like ControlNet, you can more or less have direct control over the illustration as well (see this example I converted to Hollie Megert's style with barely any effort [1] using the model from [0]) -- but FWIW I was p…
That last part is the issue. Once the material is released publicly there is zero way to prevent it from being used for training. I like the idea of these things but they're predicated on theft and exploitation.