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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

#261

Post by mkaic »

mattkevan wrote: post #214

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 anyo…

This 1000%. I'm currently working on my own slightly more complex/customizable interface for Stable Diffusion because I firmly believe that the value lies not in simple prepackaged text-to-image, but in the wealth of information, structure, and hierarchy that is compressed into its 4GB latent space. SD encodes only 4GB of information, but that information is so highly structured and compressed that it represents a sizable chunk of all images on the internet. The true value Stable Diffusion brings to the table is the sheer level of semantic meaning encoded into the vector spaces it samples from to generate images. The fact that it's open-source means anyone can write meta-algorithms to walk through and explore that latent space, too, and as Stability and other companies start releasing better and better models, the latent spaces of those models will become less and less entangled and more and more meaningful and——

We're on an exponential curve and it's so exciting.

Re: Online art communities begin banning AI-generated images

#262

Post by comex »

paranoidrobot wrote: post #256
comex wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just typed in 'girl with a pearl earring vermeer' and got this: https://drop.qoid.us/vermeer.png And, for a slightly different scenario, here's what I got for 'pikachu': https://drop.qoid.us/pikachu.png But I think this sort of thing is the exception rather than the rule (similar to Copilot regurgitating the text of software licenses). Girl with a Pearl Earring is so famous that there are countless copies of it on…

> the exception rather than the rule [...] . Girl with a Pearl Earring is so famous that there are countless copies of it on the internet I think that's part of the point, though. Even if it's working like some kind of feature detection - "this is what 'nose' looks like [nose1,nose2,...,nose9999]" and "this is what 'girl with a pearl earring vermeer' looks like [vermeer1,vermeer2,...,]" Clearly it is storing copies o…

Not reliably, no. But at least for this size of model, its capacity to memorize seems to be limited to works that are so popular that 'everyone' knows what they look like. And it also seems to generate them only when asked. So in any situation where a human is reviewing the output, it doesn't seem like there's a big risk of plagiarizing something by accident. Larger models may differ.

Re: Online art communities begin banning AI-generated images

#263

Post by lifthrasiir »

paranoidrobot wrote: post #256
comex wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just typed in 'girl with a pearl earring vermeer' and got this: https://drop.qoid.us/vermeer.png And, for a slightly different scenario, here's what I got for 'pikachu': https://drop.qoid.us/pikachu.png But I think this sort of thing is the exception rather than the rule (similar to Copilot regurgitating the text of software licenses). Girl with a Pearl Earring is so famous that there are countless copies of it on…

> the exception rather than the rule [...] . Girl with a Pearl Earring is so famous that there are countless copies of it on the internet I think that's part of the point, though. Even if it's working like some kind of feature detection - "this is what 'nose' looks like [nose1,nose2,...,nose9999]" and "this is what 'girl with a pearl earring vermeer' looks like [vermeer1,vermeer2,...,]" Clearly it is storing copies o…

Technically speaking, there can be only so many such reproducible works in the model due to the information-theoretic constraint. But yes, I agree that this is a close enough reproduction of the Vermeer's work, and while this is indeed in public domain, you are right that other copyrighted works may be present in the model, in verbatim and extractable with a right but currently unknown prompt.

Re: Online art communities begin banning AI-generated images

#264

Post by halr9000 »

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #253
halr9000 wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 mag…

> But we adapt. The incentives to do so are, sometimes, life or death... > But I assert that it will always be a tiny percentage of the whole US/Uk life expectancy is falling, and more people are in precarious work than ever before. You can't just wish away these problens and pretend they don't exist

You are aware that disruption has been the human condition for 1000's of years, yes?

Why do you posit that life expectancy will continue to fall? Not sure it's rational to expect an extended reversal of the trends which have been on the increase prior to the past 2 years. Look at the charts and the analyses.

Precarious work? You may need to explain that one.

Re: Online art communities begin banning AI-generated images

#265

Post by GrazeMor »

I think the divide is that artists have worked at developing a skill to express themselves (art) while AI artists think they have achieved the same thing by turning a prompt into an image. The former is an act of expression, the latter is choosing something you like out of a magazine. Very different and one is art and the other is not. If you really want to say AI is art, maybe, but the person prompting it is definitely not the artist...maybe the curator.

Re: Online art communities begin banning AI-generated images

#266

Post by GrazeMor »

RoyBatty89 wrote: post #170

Like this isn't gonna cause a backlash against the half assed "Artists" that modern art is. If AI can do everything better than humans, these luddites either can evolve or face the same fate the horses and loomers did when the industrial revolution came.

Wouldn't it have been good for the horses?

Re: Online art communities begin banning AI-generated images

#267

Post by cthalupa »

adrian_b wrote: post #62
Kiro wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And how do you define artistic value? If you don't even know if an image is generated by an AI or not, what is lost?

If you just want a beautiful or intriguing image to look at, an AI-generated image may happen to satisfy that need very well. The same need can be satisfied with a photo of some natural things, e.g. living beings or minerals or places. In both cases there is no human to whom one could attribute any artistic merit for the content of the images. Whether an image is beautiful or not is not necessarily correlated with th…

>In both cases there is no human to whom one could attribute any artistic merit for the content of the images.

I'm not sure this is fair. How you create your prompt at the start is going to have widely varying results on all sorts of aspects that are choices made by human artists that impact the quality of the final piece. Then there are a variety of methods, including img2img, inpainting and outpainting, etc. In all of these the AI is doing most of the work, inasmuch as putting any pixel in any place, but it's not making all of the decisions.

And to be clear, I'm not some sort of AI maximalist - I have a large enough collection of human made artwork that a lot of it is stored in flat files because it wouldn't fit on my walls. I'm not planning on changing that any time soon, and will continue supporting artists I follow.

There's a massive flood of crap out there. But some people are consistently making things that look quite nice that aren't just "thing x in setting y, 8k, artstation, by wlop" - there is real thought put into composition, etc.

I don't know how much artistic talent this takes - I've spent a couple dozen hours playing with these tools over the past week or two, and I cannot reach the levels these people are - but it's more than none.

Re: Online art communities begin banning AI-generated images

#268

Post by gedy »

cercatrova wrote: post #218
tern wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes precisely. E.g. I enjoy Gustav Klimt paintings and thought it would be interesting if he had painted in Asia, and DALL-E helps makes that idea impressively "real": https://i.postimg.cc/nL2fMWPb/EB46-BE10-929-B-4358-BBCA-60-F...

Re: Online art communities begin banning AI-generated images

#269

Post by halr9000 »

mistrial9 wrote: post #248
halr9000 wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 mag…

I had to think twice about this reply .. I believe that from a psychological, character development point of view, what you say is reasonable.. adjust to change and apply new skills in new ways. However, there are different "lenses" through which one might examine large topics, and one lense might be that of personal challenge, adjustment and endeavor; but another lense is closer to The Economist Magazine, where fact…

> I had to think twice about this reply

Good :)

> The Economist Magazine, where factual snippets

I have nothing special for or against the mag, but I will point out that economists are famously known for disagreeing on huge things once you get beyond the law of supply and demand. Not every discipline of study has whole alternative schools of thought the way they do. Economists are closer to philosophists than most philosophists.

I really love economics! But I have no illusions at all that they serve up one and only one version of the truth like physicists. :D

> real, serious and long-standing economic changes

Ok, 100's of counterpoints: https://www.humanprogress.org/datasets/ (but check out the articles also, lots of great stuff on there.)

> starvation, war, and abundant death

Yeah, there's lots of that. Pre-panbdemic all the trends were in the right direction. This too shall pass.

Things aren't that abnormal in my area, and it's getting even better daily.

Re: Online art communities begin banning AI-generated images

#270

Post by cthalupa »

GrazeMor wrote: post #265

I think the divide is that artists have worked at developing a skill to express themselves (art) while AI artists think they have achieved the same thing by turning a prompt into an image. The former is an act of expression, the latter is choosing something you like out of a magazine. Very different and one is art and the other is not. If you really want to say AI is art, maybe, but the person prompting it is definit…

A hyper opinionated curator that is commissioning work based on very specific criteria, maybe.

I don't think that artist is the right word, but gallery owner or curator aren't quite right either. People are pumping out mountainloads of hot garbage with these things, but others are taking time to think about things like image composition, color and light rendering, etc. that are considered artistic skills. And that's not getting into the people that were already artists and have just added this to part of their workflow.

I do think overall the needle is closer to the curator side of the spectrum, but it's not all the way there, and I don't think it's fair to say that there is no expression in the process, at least for some.

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