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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

#211

Post by misterprime »

JacobThreeThree wrote: post #177
klez wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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?

I'm still trying to figure out a proper input to get a picture of this scene:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffal...

Re: Online art communities begin banning AI-generated images

#212

Post by catach »

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…

> claiming that AI is generating something completely new is a bit naive IMHO.

I don't see how AI art is less new than the vast majority of human art. Both can create unique compositions that are still deeply rooted in patterns and principles thousands of years old.

> Humans mix a much more broader and deeper experience pool to create things without prompts.

AI does not have understanding, but it's stealing the underlying patterns that are the end result of that human experience.

Re: Online art communities begin banning AI-generated images

#214

Post by mattkevan »

These tools are only weeks or months old. At the moment they’re a novelty.

‘A picture of a dog riding a skateboard by James Gurney | Trending on Artstation’ is clever and astonishing, yes, but we’ve nowhere near scraped the surface of what they can do or how they can be used as part of the creative process.

It’s going to take time and a good few rounds of development and pushback, but eventually we’ll wonder how anyone did anything without it.

Current trends in AI art are pretty boring, but once we properly get the hang of it it’s going to be fascinating.

Reminds me a lot of the early days of Photoshop - adding a filter was cool and novel so most people added a filter and called it a day. But over time people have figured out how to do all kinds of creative things with it.

As an artist, AI tools are like having a paintbrush that’s possessed by a drunk genie and that’s very exciting.

Re: Online art communities begin banning AI-generated images

#215

Post by quitit »

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 of the discussions today sound similar to the ones I read about during the advent of earlier creative leaps – which I think merely serves to highlight the importance of this advancement. However, I do still remember plenty of the discussions around DTP and the computerisation of various creative industries. The themes are similar, while some benefits are lost and many are gained - some people are fixated on what is lost, while forgetting that we're growing the field rather than forcing others to abandon the craft. It is, after all, just another tool.

Which brings me to a topic which seems to never go out of fashion: Purism/Conservatism.

Like most discussions that are centred in conservatism/purism, there's always a thread of hypocrisy, because this type of person will use themselves as the golden benchmark to what is acceptable.

To use an example: a purist painter of earlier times might shun the modern purist painter for the simple act of purchasing pre-made paints. They might bemoan that they didn't make their own pigments and mix up their own paints.

So while this online art community might ban AI work, it merely an action that excludes themselves. AI opens the door to many who otherwise wouldn't have the capability of producing beautiful pieces, just as digital painting did, and the number of those people will be larger than current # of digital painters. They should have just made a subcategory on their website for AI and used it to bring new relevance to their platform.

Re: Online art communities begin banning AI-generated images

#216

Post by JohnFen »

Animats wrote: post #127
lifthrasiir wrote: post #77

Earlier 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…

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 art because it turns the art into just a pretty picture. It's no longer about another person communicating something significant and human to me. It removes its purpose for existing.

In that view, I totally understand why some art communities would ban AI-generated art. I don't see a problem with it. I'm sure other communities will not ban such art. That's fine, too.

But I know which community I would be more interested in paying attention to.

Re: Online art communities begin banning AI-generated images

#217

Post by paranoidrobot »

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…

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 HuggingFace online demo) and it output direct copies of Vermeer's works with minimal modifications.

Re: Online art communities begin banning AI-generated images

#218

Post by cercatrova »

tern wrote: post #182
gedy wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I've been doing just this, then brushing over the canvas print with thick varnish, it's quite convincing.

And then what is the story behind the work? Well: an artist made someone with DALL-E, printed it, and then printed over it to make it convincing. Now, compare with: "this is an original master work of a historically revered artist," just to take _an_ example. Alternatively, "my friend made this by painstakingly carving into a 200 year old block of hardwood taken from the Black Forest after the death of their father."…

The point is it looks nice enough for gedy to hang up on the walls. I presume they don't care about fooling anyone, and likely would readily tell those who ask that it's an AI image. Sometimes people value the aesthetic over the provenance or story behind a piece of art.

Re: Online art communities begin banning AI-generated images

#219

Post by JohnFen »

JacobThreeThree wrote: post #177
klez wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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.

Re: Online art communities begin banning AI-generated images

#220

Post by pcthrowaway »

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…

> So this would mean that the "art content" for humans is not only the pictorial content of the image, but also the "transmission of a message", and in particular, the quality of the initiator and the receiver of the message

Sounds like you've taken a semiotics class.

If art is about transmission of a message, wouldn't the message be the prompt supplied to the AI by the human?

In that case, perhaps the art is only as profound as the prompt?

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