The End of Art: An Argument Against Image AIs

[Basman]

@Leo Gura Its reductive to equate AI and humans as the same, especially in this context. There's a difference between an artist and companies breaching copyright for profit while competing with the artist who's work they depend on. Even if AI arguably gets "inspirered", the scale of production of art programs in the context of using "stolen art" is worth discussing and not dismissing out of hand.

I want to stress however that depending on how you use it, the use of AI art becomes more or less ethical. The closer you are to using what the AI generates whole sale as the finished product, generally you'll be more in the gray of things. Though it can depend on the context and for what purpose it is being used.

Just to be clear, I'm not mad that AI exists and that it can paint. I'm mad at how it is being utilized.

On a side note, I have noticed that the people who most staunchly defend AI, the way that it is being used right now, tend to have little to no experience with art and are largely male. They come of as not appreciating what art does for the people who make it. At least to me.

 

[Leo Gura]

Any artist who makes art competes with other artists whose work he was inspired by, immitated, and stored in his brain.

You are not magically producing art out of thin air. You have a database in your brain of art. More than that, if you are a serious artist you got folders and files full of 1000s of samples of art which you constantly reference.

The key point is that the work should not be too derivative. As long as the AI art is deeply original, it is totally fair. Where you guys have a valid point is if the AI art is very similar to some existing work. Then that would be unfair.

We could make a simple AI that compares two pieces of art and calculates a percentage of similarity. If the percentage is larger than 50%, then it is unfair and could simply be deleted by the AI before it is even shown to the user. I think a system like this would be a nice balance. We could argue over what that percentage should be.

Edited April 2, 2023 by Leo Gura

[Basman]

I don't agree that AI should be afforded the same priviliges as humans relative to creativity.

Your counter-ai suggestion isn't bad and perhaps should be implemented regardless of the future legality of AI art, I think a much better solution would be to make it an opt-in system, where artists have to opt-in for their art to be used and possibly get compensated for it. That would resolve this whole controversy by the root. 

[Leo Gura]

Even if there was an opt-in system, or a system trained on royalty free images, I don't think this would make you artists feel any less threatened or upset because within a few years that system would grow so good that it would still produce art as good as todays AI and you would still feel threatened.

Edited April 2, 2023 by Leo Gura

[MarkKol]

That blog art is mind-bendingly good damn

[Basman]

Quote

Even if there was an opt-in system, or a system trained on royalty free images, I don't think this would make you artists feel any less threatened or upset because within a few years that system would grow so good that it would still produce art as good as todays AI and you would still feel threatened.

That's not really what it is about. Sure, the sense of threat wouldn't go away but that doesn't make it OK to exploit artist's work.

The fear of replacement is something a lot of people will have to come to terms with in the coming years. Not just artists.

Edited April 3, 2023 by Basman

[Leo Gura]

37 minutes ago, Basman said:

doesn't make it OK to exploit artist's work.

This idea of "exploit" is very much relative and something of your own imagining. Just because you call it an exploit does not make it so.

Edited April 3, 2023 by Leo Gura

[something_else]

1 hour ago, Basman said:

The fear of replacement is something a lot of people will have to come to terms with in the coming years. Not just artists.

People have been fearing it for centuries. Artists are crying now like they're the first group of people to ever face the existential crisis of having their job automated, lol

Edited April 3, 2023 by something_else

[BuddhistLover]

@Leo Gura True story man, "exploit" is a relative term. Just because someone says something like that doesn't make it a true statement. Artists who make art compete against other artists in the same domain. Much like a baseball player competes against other baseball players, or an engineer competes against other engineers. The world of art is very much so a competitive field. The music industry is an example of a highly competitive field of art. People in the music industry sue eachother all the time, this shows that art is very competitive, and that "exploit" is a relative term. 

[QandC]

Why does my AI art suck so badly? I'm trying to type in cool stuff like "Alien sitting on a cloud meditating" and all I get is a half alien half cloud looking thing that doesn't make any sense

Update: I tried another application and got a way better result: 

 

Edited April 3, 2023 by QandC

[Basman]

9 hours ago, Leo Gura said:

This idea of "exploit" is very much relative and something of your own imagining. Just because you call it an exploit does not make it so.

I mean, I guess we disagree then. Don't know what else to tell you.

 

9 hours ago, something_else said:

People have been fearing it for centuries. Artists are crying now like they're the first group of people to ever face the existential crisis of having their job automated, lol

Besides the industrial and modern age, where have people faced automation to a major degree in history? I thought that people where farmers/hunter gatherers the majority of time.

[something_else]

13 hours ago, Basman said:

Besides the industrial and modern age, where have people faced automation to a major degree in history? I thought that people where farmers/hunter gatherers the majority of time.

Automated production lines have been a thing since the early 1900s and as they have gotten more advanced many, many factory workers have lost their jobs.

[Scholar]

On 2.4.2023 at 11:42 AM, Leo Gura said:

Any artist who makes art competes with other artists whose work he was inspired by, immitated, and stored in his brain.

You are not magically producing art out of thin air. You have a database in your brain of art. More than that, if you are a serious artist you got folders and files full of 1000s of samples of art which you constantly reference.

The key point is that the work should not be too derivative. As long as the AI art is deeply original, it is totally fair. Where you guys have a valid point is if the AI art is very similar to some existing work. Then that would be unfair.

We could make a simple AI that compares two pieces of art and calculates a percentage of similarity. If the percentage is larger than 50%, then it is unfair and could simply be deleted by the AI before it is even shown to the user. I think a system like this would be a nice balance. We could argue over what that percentage should be.

 This is clearly not a good faith discussion. The issue here is that, with human artists getting inspired by each other, everyone profits because of the inherent limitations of humans beings. It is fair use because it does not fundamentally undermine the market value of the artists from whom work is derived.

If I learn from another artist, I cannot undermine that artist. Depending on the artstyle, I cannot even perfectly imitate another artist. It would be impossible because of the idiosyncraties of my mind and body. And even if I somehow could, I would not be capable of undermining their value because I still have to invest time to create any individual piece of art.

In good faith, mankind's creative process is a collective form of sublimation in which everyone benefits from reaching higher and higher insights into the nature of existence and unveiling further and deeper truths about humanity and God. That is the purpose and function of art, in it's most spiritual essence.

 

There are two issues here:

Firstly, AI is not limited by human constraints. It is capable of perfectly imitating other work because it is actually a mechanical imitation machine that is designed to extract and reproduce statistical patterns. It cannot actually do anything but imitation, whereas artists are capable of sublimation and adding genuinely new information through the engagement of individuated consciousness. If you think AI is capable of this you just fundamentally misunderstand the technology.

AI is also not limited by time as individual human beings are. Whereas, if a human learns to imitate another artist they still have to spent time and effort to create individual pieces of work, the AI does not require any time to produce such work. It can within minutes create more work than the artist has created in their entire life, completely undermining the value of their work.

So, to summarize: AI is capable of perfect imitation, AI is incapable of sublimation and the generation-speed of AI is disproportionate to the original artist.

 

Secondly, data usage without compensation monopolizes the value at the hands of data-miners, while leaving data-creators empty handed. An easy example demonstrating this is the following: Say I spent 20 years to learn to draw and to develop a genuinely unique style. My economic value is basically derived from my skill, meaning the fact that I can create pieces of data at that level of sophistication with my unique style. Whereas I had to invest 20 years of very hard work which probably required me to make incredible sacrifices in my life to arrive not just at the skill, but at the unique style I have developed, anyone can come along and extract all of that value from me by simply feeding the AI my images and then selling access to that AI.

Now, you seem to think that as long as the images generated are not too derivative, that is completely fine. But that doesn't make a lot of sense, because the products are not the images. The product is the AI. The megacorporations are not making money with the data-output, they are making money by giving you access to the capacity to create any type of data the AI has learned. They are not selling images, they are selling an AI that can do the same as every artist whose images it was trained on. I reiterate, in that world data itself has been render valueless, because the only value it could possible have is for data-miners who use that data to create products that are capable of regenerating that type of data. And because in your world, nobody needs to be asked for permission nor be compensated for their data, you just have created a world in which there is no incentive to generate novel data. Why would I spent 20 years of work, making incredible sacrifice to my life, relationships and body, so that some person can come along, extract everything that is valuable about what I have achieved in those 20 years and then sell access to that to anyone they please. This is completely insane, utterly absurd. The fact that this is not obvious to you is just terrifying.

Whether or not, in the end, the AI will combine the style of 2 artists, 3 artists or even 100s of artists so that the outputs don't look too derivative is irrelevant to the dynamic described above. No reasonable human being could call any of this fair or good faith. Just because the end result doesn't look like the same original image doesn't mean the AI's "skill" is an extraction of the artists it learned to imitate and interpolate.

This is the end of the collective process of sublimation, or at least an incredible disruption to it.

 

And there is no solution to this, because StabilityAI decided to make their AI open source. Everyone and their mother can train the AI on whatever images they want. The damage is irreversible, and it is unlikely that data-creators will ever get compensated for any of this.

Why do you think both Google and Microsoft recently fired their teams of AI ethicists? I mean, how are people so utterly blind, I expect more of you Leo, even if by now I should have learned not to.

 

There is a lot more problems beyond just the blatant ethical violations that I could get into, like noise to signal ratio problems and so forth, but who am I kidding, you are not equipped or interested to have good faith conversations about these topics.

 

The article you posted about pausing AI development is a complete Red Herring by the way, we are not even remotely close to AGI, none of what we are observing is even showing signs of intelligence.

Edited April 6, 2023 by Scholar

[Scholar]

On 3.4.2023 at 0:56 PM, something_else said:

People have been fearing it for centuries. Artists are crying now like they're the first group of people to ever face the existential crisis of having their job automated, lol

There are a few differences that make what is happening now unique, you can read my post above to get a basic grasps.

 

Automation in the past did not use the intellectual property of individuals to generate the product that eventually replaces those individuals, without compensation or permission to use their intellectual property.

You can't just say it is fair use, because with fair use we take into consideration:

Quote

 

Effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work:

Here, courts review whether, and to what extent, the unlicensed use harms the existing or future market for the copyright owner’s original work. In assessing this factor, courts consider whether the use is hurting the current market for the original work (for example, by displacing sales of the original) and/or whether the use could cause substantial harm if it were to become widespread.

 

https://www.copyright.gov/fair-use/

 

Another difference is that automation in the past also tended to target jobs that were in some manner undesirable, unfullfilling and monotonous. This was not always the case, much to the detriment of the humans who would have otherwise been given a chance to live a life of purpose and mastery. But today, we are reaching a point at which we will have to make conscious and rational choices about how we implement and continue to employ these technologies. It is no longer sustainable to just allow free market forces to do whatever they want, because we are reaching a point at which technology is so rapidly developing that it could destabilize the foundation of the market system and/or could cause significant, unnecessary harm to the collective.

If we are not careful about this, the only job left for you to do will be scraping shit off walls, because nobody will care to invest into technology to automate away the most miserable low paying jobs that will be left. I'm sure you will be doing that with the same self-indulgent grin that is plastered on your face right now. Welcome to the future.

 

 

Either way, your dismissive and unempathetic attitude already alludes to your character and bias in this, so I don't expect to get a good faith response from you. Don't expect me to waste my time on your nonsense if you continue chose to behave like this.

 

 

 

[Scholar]

A simpler example to showcase the damage of AI is journalism.

Currently employed AI technologies used by Google and Bing are capable of searching the internet for certain information by extracting that information from news sites. By doing that, they make it obsolete for users to visit those sites, therefore undermining their economic viability.

Yet, you could argue all of that is fair. That's what journalists do too, don't they? However, this kind of myopic, self-serving thinking is obviously flawed. By undermining the data-producers, we are undermining the very technology which is built upon it.

With image generation that is less obvious, but the same dynamic applies. The effects are simply not as immediately obvious.

[Danioover9000]

@Scholar

9 hours ago, Scholar said:

A simpler example to showcase the damage of AI is journalism.

Currently employed AI technologies used by Google and Bing are capable of searching the internet for certain information by extracting that information from news sites. By doing that, they make it obsolete for users to visit those sites, therefore undermining their economic viability.

Yet, you could argue all of that is fair. That's what journalists do too, don't they? However, this kind of myopic, self-serving thinking is obviously flawed. By undermining the data-producers, we are undermining the very technology which is built upon it.

With image generation that is less obvious, but the same dynamic applies. The effects are simply not as immediately obvious.

   Interesting. Out of context this reminds of the react community, and Twitch stream communities taking over content maker's videos for themselves:

 

[Scholar]

On 10.4.2023 at 11:20 AM, Danioover9000 said:

@Scholar

   Interesting. Out of context this reminds of the react community, and Twitch stream communities taking over content maker's videos for themselves:

 

Pretty much. How that is fair use is beyond me.

 

The biggest problem however is the cessation of the process of sublation. This is what will harm humanity immeasurably. AI will just make everything beautiful and appealling to the ultimate degree. But the problem is, when everything is beautiful and appealling to the ultimate degree, nothing is.

 

If everything is made of gold, gold completely looses it's value, and therefore meaning. And where does it end?

They will do the same with music, books, movies, games if they can.

 

It's kind of sad, because there are genuinely people who think this will give them the tools to somehow share their creativity. But nobody gives a damn. Why would I care about Leo's silly AI art? Anyone can create that shit in seconds, AI can probably automate itself to create infinite variations of that. And why would I care? I can go to midjourney myself and type in what I want to see. Nothing has changed.

Generating AI images is the same as just picking images from pinterest to signal your aesthetic appeal. That's what art is being reduced to. There is no necessary engagment in the essence of visual dualities, and achieving mastery of this field has been rendered obsolete. An entire aspect of human nature replaced and rendered meaningless.

 

Now you say all the AI stuff is impressive. But really, it stops being impressive once you use it for a day or two. For some it might take a week, a month, a year. Then it's the norm. And sure, now it can animate a little better. But then, that will get quickly normal too. And you just continue until you have removed all sources of human purpose and mastery.

Edited April 14, 2023 by Scholar

[Danioover9000]

@MarkKol

On 2023-04-12 at 6:45 AM, MarkKol said:

AI is becoming insanely good 

 

Reaction channels are trash, truly bin-worthy trash. Nobody's opinion deserves to be put on a pedestal, especially not of some low quality basement streamer. Personally, I don't need further convincing.

   I intuit that eventually, if this AI becomes AGI, and technological advancement doesn't slow down or strategically pause to let other human developments happen, and allow AI to disrupt jobs and careers, we'll all end up like React content makers making pseudo intellectual takes, pseudo philosophies, pseudo versions of @Leo Gura making these existential videos like there's no tomorrow, because all the more typical mundane to meaningful works out there are taken by AI and AGI.

   Also, dude, I know it's transformative and fair use, but please put a warning, what you posted was AI techno porno. We still have youngish users here man, don't want to get into trouble with animated tentacles okay? But nice animation but it's jarring because I'm mostly used to 80' and 90's anime style.

[MarkKol]

32 minutes ago, Danioover9000 said:

Also, dude, I know it's transformative and fair use, but please put a warning, what you posted was AI techno porno. We still have youngish users here man, don't want to get into trouble with animated tentacles okay? But nice animation but it's jarring because I'm mostly used to 80' and 90's anime style.

I can’t edit it now ?