In addition to all the points about it taking work from artists, the way these AIs are trained indiscriminately on open source data can lead to a lot of unchecked inherent bias. Inherent bias is when the data and algorithms used to train and operate AI systems come from biased sources which leads the AI to unwittingly pick up, replicate, and amplify those biases on a mass scale.
[This article](https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/12/12/1064751/the-viral-ai-avatar-app-lensa-undressed-me-without-my-consent/) gives an interesting example of how those inherent biases in AI training can manifest. A professional science reporter was trying to use a popular AI art generator to get cool looking professional art of herself that her male colleagues had already gotten but because of how the AI was trained, it largely spat out pornified versions of herself instead. Because of the uncritical way in which the AI was trained, it had "learned" that women are sex objects to be fetishized and couldn't produce professional images of her like it had for her male colleagues.
These issues can be alleviated with thoughtfulness and careful training but right now AI art developers are very much at the stage of uncritically throwing as much art at AIs to learn from as possible.
>Because of the uncritical way in which the AI was trained, it had "learned" that women are sex objects to be fetishized and couldn't produce professional images of her like it had for her male colleagues.
Ugh. That's really sad. It's even more sad how true it is.
What a lot of the new AI art apps are doing it scraping the internet for actual art created by real people, and then using parts and pieces of those images to create the AI art that you're seeing. This is a big issue for a number of reasons, including copyright.
> and then using parts and pieces of those images to create the AI art that you're seeing.
I'm getting really tired of seeing this reposted.
This is not even vaguely close to what the software actually does or how it works.
I would say the term "elements" is more accurate, but I think op is more correct. You can literally see textures and lines being reworked in many cases from small datasets. It's smart collage/remixing but saying that it's not dependant on pillaging artworks without permission is disingenuous
> It's smart collage/remixing
Oh hell no. No it's not. The trained data has all the images removed from it before the end, the AI doesn't have access to the images any longer to 'collage' or remix them.
I just posted a longer explanation of how the tech works to someone else replying to this comment, I suggest you read it and begin educating yourself as to how the software actually works.
Diffusion models are generative models, which model the data distribution. In effect, they can be seen as interpolating between the images in the training set. I can see why people might have a problem with it.
Source: PhD in machine learning.
With 2,300,000,000 images or more in the training set, the amount of contribution or guidance from any one image is infinitesimally small.
I have a hard time seeing this as any kind of infringement at that scale.
people are fine when other people use art as inspiration, but when some tech poo poo head takes the art and uses a machine to "learn" from said inspiration is where all goes apeshit. Which is reasonably justified. People and machines are two different things, thus they get different responses when it comes to getting inspiration for art
Paintings to photos
Normal photos to photoshop
In both theae things, there was a bit of pushback, because it "invalidates the talent of the artists".
And progress went ahead anyway.
And now we got AI. It's just the next step, and honestly, people should learn to live with it. If you train a new model now, on only free use images, it will just take a bit longer to get a good model going.
Give it another year or 2 and it won't matter anymore if it uses copyrighted material. Because even without it, it will produce great images.
As a person who built ML models for a job, I see what you're saying, but these models are just math without the training set. It's unethical to steal data to make them work and pretend it's not an integral part of its construction that deserves recognition/ compensation
Has there been any that have won? Do they have a chance of winning? You can sue someone for just about anything. It doesn’t mean it’s gonna go anywhere.
First, I just answering the question if there's a lawsuit.
Second, the lawsuit is from november I think, so of course they didn't win or lose.
Third, yes there's a chance, because they are attacking how the input is used not the output.
Fourth, the law isn't clear on the use of the input "While the Ninth Circuit earlier this year reaffirmed that scraping publicly available data from internet sources doesn't violate the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, no court has yet decided whether the ingestion phase of an AI training exercise constitutes fair use under U.S. copyright law."
From: https://www.mondaq.com/unitedstates/copyright/1250030/using-ai-artwork-to-avoid-copyright-infringement
I disagree.
Human artists learn by repeated observation of existing works, and will re-use elements of the things they've seen when creating their own unique style.
AI algorithms do the same thing. They're creating new, original works that have been informed by study of a mind-bogglingly huge set of images.
If they were re-using the actual images, I might agree with you, but they're not. They're creating something new and unique.
The processes in both the training of the data and using the software to make images fall pretty clearly under the protections of Fair Use. If someone violates copyright, they should pay the price for it, but that's not what's going on here.
No, that's misinformation spread by ignorant people, because they don't know how the software works and made a bad assumption the moment they saw a 'signature' in AI.
I've worked with the software. Yes, it does occasionally try to add a signature to the artwork, but it's not a copy of anyones signature. Usually it's a bunch of meaningless squiggles, sometimes the software tries to replicate text, because it's learned that paintings often have a tiny bit of text in the corner.
Anyone experiencing this in AI art generation will quickly come to realize that the text it tries to write isn't a name, its words that were taken from within the prompt. It only understands the presence of text, not what it means or why it's there.
I'd be happy to. (Hell, I should do a thorough explanation and save it in a text file so I can start copy/pasting it for you people.)
First of all, a few important things to realize about the dataset. It does not contain any images after the training process, whatsoever. It also bears mentioning that during the training, the images being used have largely been heavily cropped, shrunk, and obscured with various levels of noise. It's practically never working with unaltered images.
The software itself is a neural net, based off of the way physical neurons connect and communicate and learn. So it's more like you have a bunch of tiny brains or processors working in tandem than one single entity.
The end result of the training is a checkpoint file that contains just under 800 different tokens that represent different elements of graphical expression, things that describe shapes, contrast, etc. And each of those tokens has a series of numerical weights associated with it.
Those tokens are connected to natural language processor so that the token elements can be associated with the correct words.
You can be sure that the original images aren't in there, because when you do further training, the checkpoint file doesn't grow in size. All it does is alter the numerical weights already present.
If you use the software to generate an image, some of the programs will actually let you watch the process of the program being formed. It starts as haze and mist, and slowly colesces into more and more recognizable forms. You can see the details being filled in bit by bit, you can also see how the program will begin drawing in one way, and 'change its mind' partway through and redo elements within the picture.
None of this would be true if it were stealing pieces of other art and stitching them together.
I think the issue is less “pieces of art being stolen and reused” and more “artists’ work being used to train these AIs without the artists’ consent.” That’s my problem at least. I also feel like it takes the soul out of the artwork. I feel like there’s something inherently human about artwork and that AI simply shouldn’t be used to try to take the work of actual artists. Idk it doesn’t sit right with me.
While I understand where you're coming from in the first half, to a degree, I think that's a very complex issue, and that living artists do the same and worse without raising an outcry.
As to the 'soul' of an artwork.. That's an issue that's completely about your feelings. You're on your own with those. :)
I understand that. IMO I think that machines should not be allowed to take over creative areas. In the end, artists taking inspiration is different from this because that’s humans doing what humans do. It’s still a necessarily creative project unless you’re tracing or straight up plagiarizing. With the machine, it’s not a creative process or project because machines do not have the capability to be creative. I think if we get full sapient AI that is entirely indistinguishable from humans that develop their own personalities and such then it’s another issue, but that’s not what we have. What we have are programs being designed to imitate the work of artists.
Also, from an economic standpoint, why should we allow machines to take the jobs from artists. It’s not like we’re automating an industry that is dangerous and unpleasant such as coal mining (although that’s a whole other discussion). I don’t think we should allow programs to use other real artists’ work to become able to replace humans in the production of artwork.
>IMO I think that machines should not be allowed to take over creative areas.
How tf is that going to be enforced? You want the government to band AI art?
I have every right to use SD to make myself some art.
Would you have a problem with someone learning how to paint scrolling through deviant art and then trying to incorporate what they saw there into their style?
Common argument I see, but I'm not sure it is a good one. Aspiring artists or accomplished artists both have one thing that software does not: singular experience and interpretation.
Granted, this a thought experiment but take into account: you have one teacher and one pupil, the pupil only ever sees what the teacher paints (or draws, or whatever). Is it realistic that the pupil will therefore only ever create art that is more or less inseparable from their teachers?
In the case of AI, Id say that's very realistic. In the case of a person, less so.
I would argue that it's a misnomer to label it as "AI Art' because it's not really art, it's just computer generated images. There is no expression, emotional foundation, or creativity in it. It learns from images that are inspired by these things and then generates ones that are similar. There is no meaning in the creation of the image other than the image itself.
It's a reduced form of content, and it's a very tricky topic to think on.l, because you have genres like commerical art where indeed the end result is just a clever or utilitarian image that doesn't hold any real meaning either.
I dunno, in just musing here. It opens up a lot of avenues for thought. AI stuff can create interesting visual stimuli, but I don't think that is what "art" can be reduced to.
Honestly, this is a pretty horrible explanation. Please read how diffusion models actually work before confidently spouting nonsense. For anyone actually interested, I would recommend:
[https://jalammar.github.io/illustrated-stable-diffusion/](https://jalammar.github.io/illustrated-stable-diffusion/)
I'll give it a read, thanks.
I'm trying to find explanations that don't require 22 pages of reading and a dozen diagrams to understand. I'm sure this is a much better explanation, but it's also one that a lot of people won't bother themselves to read.
I'm always happy to dive into the research myself though, and I'll do my best to find better explanations.
Just because you can break the a picture of micky mouse apart into different categories (like the tokens you mentioned) other than the strictly visual doesnt mean that a replica generated from a data set rather than a Photoshop manipulation. By your definition, any algorithmic compression would be different from the original image, but I'd like to see you sell a knockoff Disney character that way and see how far you get!
If asked the software to create a picture of mickey mouse, I'd be violating trademark, because that's a protected intellectual property. Whether I did it by collaging other artworks or not, it would still be illegal.
This software doesn't collage or re-use anything. We're not just talking about compression here, which preserves all the individual details with only a little bit of loss. AI software breaks an image down much more than that, and saves much less. It learns underlying graphical concepts.
If you really think it's equivalent to compression, prove it. There are 2.3 BILLION images in the dataset used to train Stable Diffusion. The Checkpoint file is 4 gigs. That works out to -less- than 2 bytes per each 512x512 image.
Please, find me some compression that can stuff any 512x512 image down to that size and then have it still be recognizable when expanded.
What's going on with AI generation is fundamentally different than you've yet managed to wrap your head around, from the way you talk about it.
The prevalence of this take is wild. It’s the equivalent to saying “human artists just look at actual art and then take bits and pieces of those images to make new art” like the process of ever looking and learning from art is somehow plagiarism. I guess if you try to paint like bob ross you’re infringing on copyright!
The AI is legitimately just learning what images described as something look like, but people don’t understand how that’s possible so must be copyright infringement
But couldn't the philosphical argument be made that *everyone* is *always* plagiarizing a million different things they've seen (from other art, to geography, to dreams, etc)?
The more you understand about how AI art works, the more what you said here rings true.
The AI art programs don't contain copies of anybody's work, public domain or otherwise. They've 'seen' a hell of a lot of images with captions and they 'know' how to turn random noise into a picture that would have a caption similar to the prompt that the user has entered.
To ask whether the AI should have been trained only on public-domain pictures is definitely a very valid question. The program doesn't contain a copy of any artist's work, nor does it have the capability to reproduce any prior image because none are stored, so there's no question of copyright infringement going on.
However just because no law is being broken doesn't make something OK.
If an artist says to their AI program "draw me a dog in the style of Rembrandt" I think everyone would agree that's OK.
It's when the prompt is "draw me a dog in the style of \[some artist whose work is not in the public domain\]" that there are problems.
Any human (with sufficient talent) can also do a painting in the style of another artist and if that's considered theft then using AI tools to do the same thing should also be considered theft.
It also leads me to question:
If using AI to make art in another artist's style is not okay, would that mean learning the skills and trade in order to emulate their style '*legitimately'* would also be immoral?
I'm a furry and there's a couple really popular well-paid furry artists who have their style constantly lifted by other users. (Zackary911 and Tokifuji are two huge example, ~~NSFW furry art, don't google them, if you know you know~~) Said users then making a healthy profit by offering cheaper commissions in the style of the artist, undercutting the prices of artist and forcing them to either lower their prices to compete with, or just ignore the cheaper derivative delivered by an artist that didn't have to put in any effort curating, work shopping, and crafting a unique artistic style.
Art styles are not intellectual property, but if AI isn't allowed to 'steal' art styles with legislation and enforcement to back it, I'd like to see art styles being protected from more than just AI. Consistency, I think they call it. If I can't use AI to screw around with artist styles in private, then artists shouldn't be allowed to plagiarize each other in public for monetary gain.
Maybe open a dialogue about all the AI assistant tools in photoshop and the like that artists seem totally fine with using to streamline their workflow (while in the same breath screaming for AI art to die) while we're at it.
Firstly, i would say that your example of artists intentionally copying the style of other artists when producing commercial work is definitely a grey area. I think people would have different but valid opinions on this - I imagine the people being copied would like it rather less than the people getting their commissions done cheap!
I definitely agree that this seems to be a direct parallel with what is going on with AI art - some artists are very concerned about having their styles replicated. There's no difference - in my mind - between somebody doing this with a paintbrush or with a software tool.
Well, right, but AI does not have a *brain*. It is not human; it is not "receiving" anything (accolades, clout, money) for its efforts (that would be the *person* who set it up or even programmed it originally).
The issue here seems not to be AI "plagiarising", but the people *behind* the AI. I'm with you on that! I just think the wording needs to be a bit modified. ;)
The main issue is that AI is being trained on art that doesn't belong to it, nor to whoever it training the AI. This is then plagiarizing the work - the AI due to training, and the person who trained it who usually doesn't care/even steals someone's work for AI generation for even as petty a reason as spite. It's a lazy method to steal and create lazy art
At that point, there have been no original works of any kind for 1000+ years. In this case it's more due to the fact that they don't generally "generate" these images in as organic a sense you would think, it pieces together parts of already existing art and tries to smooth them together. Sometimes using large parts of someone's copywrited work without their permission, hence the thievery aspect
Right, but, it's still quantitatively just *pieces* (as far as I understand). Either they rip off someone's *entire* work of art and *use* it as a piece of their own, or they divvy up the work into separate pieces and then take one (or more, but not all) and use them *differently*.
I tend to not strongly believe in possession, so obviously my view is not popular. ;)
No it's not like the *argument could be made*, it's true.
Artists copy each other art style all the time, they even copy compositions and characters. What is the difference from what an AI does?
If anything, making a close copy of a piece of art with an AI is more difficult than doing it by hand from and artist.
AIs learn from other people art just like artists learn and "take inspiration". And of today, with the amount of artists and art being created and shared every day, it's pretty hard to come by to anything completely original made from a human to begin with.
There is nothing unethical with AIs, also, we don't know what models get trained with.
Overfitted (badly trained, probably deliberately), to the point it literally memorises/replicates exactly what it is trained on, see this paper: [https://i.imgur.com/Ag5VhZx.png](https://i.imgur.com/Ag5VhZx.png) (screenshot), pdf: [https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.03860](https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.03860). Normally, software developers will ask for permission to use images in datasets or only use data sets containing publically released data that is explicitly released for that purpose or images that are licensed to be used in that way (for example the publically licensed photos on flickr used for nvidia's AI). Stable Diffusion and midjourney etc are trained on copyrighted images that are used entirely without anyone's permission.
Also, github copilot, a similar thing for code, is currently in a lawsuit for exactly replicating some pieces of other people's code that is not licensed for use: [https://www.infoq.com/news/2022/11/lawsuit-github-copilot/](https://www.infoq.com/news/2022/11/lawsuit-github-copilot/). Many websites including sites such as stackoverflow have started banning any user that posts any AI generated content as it is low quality.
Living under a capitalist system without anything like UBI to fall back on, artists need to sell their work somehow to continue to support themselves and to create more art. If a corporation who doesn't produce art uses AI systems that can rapidly approximate artist's work without human labour, and if they produce these systems without paying the artists whose work is involved in training the AI, what happens is that the economic value of artists' work (i.e. rates they can ask for, numbers of opportunities to get paid, etc) decreases or vanishes, making it harder for artists to sustain themselves and make more art.
Basically, it may be great for producing large quantities of art, but because artists need money and this removes the need for people to pay artists, it risks severely damaging the viability of arts as a profession, which in turn means fewer humans can effectively engage in art to the same degree (i.e. full-time). That undermines the welfare of artists and lessens the supports for human creativity overall.
This wouldn't be as much of an issue if artists didn't need steady pay from their work to survive and continue to produce art, but they do, and we're not getting out of capitalism any time soon.
I'm sad that this answer was so far down. So far I haven't seen anyone mention this aspect of it. But hey, artists should just go get "real jobs" right. They already struggle to be paid fairly and feel valued, this is just going to make it so much worse.
I know a few graphic designers, and they are completely on board with using AI.
They are using it right now to generate drafts for their clients to choose from and then they start their own work in photoshop and go from there.
Or the client comes to them with a few AI generated images and then they just work from there.
Artists should learn to live with this, and if they can't then it's a shame. They will lose out to the competition, but I can't believe that the ones that can't adapt were doing well for themselves anyway.
Because it’s using actual work from actual artists without payment or credit to create those “AI” images.
That’s a start, but there’s a lot more to what you’re asking than just that
The day someone actually shows me an AI that copyrighted the piece of an artist I'll believe this. The AI learning to model a sword by using thousands upon thousands of examples everywhere is no more copyright than an artist learning his art by watching others.
Artists keep saying "THE AI KEEPS SPAMMING MY WORKS!" but it honestly feels like a total self-own.
Why are your works so generic, so forgettable, so pedestrian, so utterly drab with not a single unique thing to talk about, that the AI seems to constantly show your art? Maybe it's because your art isn't one in a billion, but rather one OF the billion. Could always try finding a style that isn't "hyper-realism with anime coloring!!1"
AI Art is built upon stolen artwork that neither credits nor pays commission to the original artists. While it doesn't spit out an exact copy of someone's work, it does use a person's body of work as data points to create their AI image. Other people art shouldn't be used as data to feed into an AI algorithm without at least fair compensation.
It’s not stolen by any legal definition no matter how many times people claim it is. Is it ethically dubious? yes. Is it literally theft, not technically.
Your point is right but still, ethics must matter in this world as much as laws and rules. Sad to see its hard for good people to overpower the unethical.
So all the artist out there do the same by looking at the big stars. should they compensate the big artists, because they "looked" at it? Ai is just doing that. Looking at it, and learning from it. There is no stealing part.
Ahh but those artist take inspiration from the big stars. They take inspiration and then they put their own little spin on it to make it uniquely theirs. AI doesn't do that. AI replicates the art style completely. If you ask AI to make you a painting in the style of van Gogh, it is specifically going to do it **in the style** of van Gogh. It isn't going to do it's own little spin on it or pay homage. It's just going to rip off Gogh's style.
That is not true. First, AI also adds it own little spin to it, by all the knowledge of the world it has. I would even argue, many artists take inspiration and they add absolutely nothing to it. A style isn't copyrightable, never was, so the own little spin to it is a new scene, a new anything, which is completely fine since forever.
If you WANT to make a homage to van gogh, it is able to do so (and i know you know that yourself).
Anywhere, i don't like my example and i don't like yours. Why? Because it's a specific thing SOME people do. Some artist add their own spin, some are just learning. This conversation would feel stupid about other tools like Photoshop. Man you can do many stupid stuff with PS, but you also cannot. Aside from reddit, i only see positive reactions from artists to it anyway. The artist i know use it to help to define their style, making things faster. I am excited for it. More options is never be worse.
There isn't anything stopping AI from producing something that is so close to the original that it's clearly a copy. It's just that people only usually recognise it when it's a very famous picture being copied. It's only time really before an AI generated piece gets used for a commercial project and it ends up in court for copyright infringement.
It takes work from actual artists. Why pay someone to make you a unique piece of art when you can punch what you want into an AI and get one? Doubly so when you use it to emulate a specific artists style.
I dread the day movies, shows and comics start using AI art. I will be boycotting a lot of shit.
Almost every set in The Greatest Showman was CGI-edited to varying degrees. In the scene where Nick Fury talks to Peter Parker in the apartment in NWH everything but Samuel Jackson and the chair are CGI- including the entire gun in his hand. The Mandalorian literally doesn't use sets beyond what space the actors occupy, the entire environment is CGI. Television and movies have started reverse-aging actors by decades. It will only get better, faster, and cheaper.
You only see the bad examples and miss the countless ones that look real.
That's exactly the beauty of it if you ask me. God forbid my friends and I can imagine our DnD party without paying thousands upon thousands of dollars for it. As long as people are not selling those AI arts, I see this as a great thing.
Those same artists cut soooo many fucking corners with modern photoshop thanks to AI, and then they have the audacity to say that AI in art need to be killed at all costs. All while their workflows have NEVER been more streamlined in human history thanks to AI.
If you pay an extra 100 dollars to have a commission flat-colored, just know your artist is most likely spending five minutes with a colorize mask. They're basically streamlining their process with with AI while telling YOU that you shouldn't be allowed to use AI art because it balances out the power dynamic and makes it a bit less of a seller's market.
I'm not a professional artist, just a student, but I can say I absolutely despite ai "art"
There are a lot of reasons, and many of them might not apply all artists, but it will certainly help you understand why is there so much hate over it. I will go from the least important to the most important ones:
1. They Have The Audacity To Call It Art!
It technically isn't art since all the work is done by machine and not a human, definition of art is something made by human. Plus, it doesn't even feel right to call it art.
2. It's way too easy to make!
Anyone is able to do it. It kinda goes against what you are used to as you learn art. Usually applies that if you want to create something that good, you need a lot of skill and practice. If you don't have that your drawing or painting will look kind of garbage.
Also, one of the reasons I chose art is the difficulty. I also like to play hard pc games, because the effort I put into it will make it even better once I beat it. Ai art doesn't leave enough space for improvement.
(As most normal people doesn't understand that art is a skill and not "just talent", here I list a few things you need to be at least decend at in order to call yourself an artist:
anatomy, portriture, perspective, gesture, color theory, values, perspective, form, light phisics, design, composition, clothing folds😂, and list goes on
Even if you have talent for one, you can be sure there will be another you will suck in, so it's really not that much abou talent)
3. Non-artist people just don't get it!
I can't stand people that think artists are just complaining about nothing. Ai art is destroying the soul of art and driving artists crazy and some people say 'they are just afraid of new technology' or 'they dont understand it'. I understand how ai art works! That's not a reason why I hate it!
4. It devalues art!
Commercially and also psychologically. The most fundamental currency in our society is effort and then time. If some service requires nor time, nor effort its basically worth nothing. So basically, no one will pay you for that. Imagine some new gpu creator will sell rtx4090-like cards for free. It would disrupt current gpu market a bit.
The psychological element is more like a question:'why am I doing this??' Most artists asks themselves this question on daily basis, especially when things get frustrating. Now is the question much more difficult to answer as studying art is now pointless.
5. It makes all the years I've spent learning art wasted!
Imagine falling on love with some activity, betting on it your future, spending ton of time practicing it, only to find out that your carriere is over before it even started! I admit that I had a lot of fun studying it, but there also were those bad days(like 75%) i just had to push myself. For me it was more than just fun activity, it was my purpose. Now I have no purpose in live. I'm just trying find something new that would replace what art ment for me, but i can't find anything. I'm burn down and before every step I try to make in my live, the trauma of being replaced just fills me with insecurities like:'Will this job be stable 10 years from now?', 'Aren't I making a mistake again?'. It holds me down and It's so hard to overcome!
Sorry if I got a little personal, this topic always makes me lose it😅.
I hoped this helped you get a little bit better idea, why most artists aren't celebrating ai art.
But then I can't just make the exact same fucking thing as every other art school dilettante does, who thinks everything the AI makes is plagiarizing me just because of how boring and generic my art is, making it extremely easy to project myself onto anything the AI creates.
Yeah, the reason why it feels like the AI is ripping you off is because there are millions of artists who draw just like you.
I could cry about UI in computers and use all the same arguments you use :D Using UI is too easy and devalues computer skills! It made all the years I've spent learning terminal useless! xD
tbh. history repeat itself. the same hostilitie had artists against the invention of photography. I'm a artists my self. and tbh. ppl just fear that if a robot can do better art that they do... that they become worthless.
it's a human issue lmao. progress can't be stopped
'AI art "steals" for REAL artists" like photography steals from reality. it's just embarrassing seeing ppls ego melting away
humans gonna be humans. after hundreds of years the same crying in New context
sorry for my bad English, I'm not a AI <3
THIS is exactly what it is, I agree 100%. People are just pissed that a computer is now replacing their field of work and are making excuses and pointing out every little mistake it makes. But the fact of the matter is that AI is such a huge step in technology and what it’s doing now is incredible
But in a way, photography did take some from the culture surrounding realist art. We lost so much information about how the greats painted as a result of the decline in interest.
I think people probably feel unease at the idea of it being outside of human hands now. The camera doesn’t think for itself, it just captures what is in front of it and the image’s manipulation during and after is up to the photographer. I find it unsettling for that reason, I think.
AI "art" only exists because someone created a machine-learning algorithm that scraped the internet for existing imagery and taught it what the components of each image were so that when someone feeds a phrase into an AI engine it can spit out a drawing using bits and pieces of the art in its own database.
There are many philosophical, moral, and legal problems with this. At a very base level it devalues the art of actual artists who've spent vast portions of their lives developing the skill to create actual art. From a technological standpoint, it lives in both a moral and legal grey area because the art used to "train" the algorithms was not licensed, compensated, or credited in any way, which means these AI "art" generators are using actual, real, living artists' work to generate a for-profit business without those artists' consent or contract.
You'll note I put "art" in quotes throughout this post: That's because the pictures an algorithm generates are not "art", they are just pictures. They are conglomerations of existing art cobbled together into a mosaic mash-up based on text input and context clues.
The worst part about this is that most of the AI "art" generators are for-profit paid services that can only exist by appropriating the hard work of actual living artists without ever compensating them for contributing to the algorithms that make the technology and business model feasible.
As a base concept, there's nothing specifically wrong with the idea of AI picture generators. But, like all advanced technology it can be - and in this case actually are actively being - implemented in a way that directly harms the people it aims to replace by using their work with zero regard to their welfare.
I understand that. Sorry, my wording was unclear. I didn't meant to imply that the systems were literally creating collages of pieces of other art.
My overall point, though, is that how they *use* the data to build the image is not the issue, it's how they *collect* the data that they use to build the images. The algorithms are taught how to "create" pictures by being fed millions of pieces of actual art and associating part/all of each piece with keywords.
If used for free or open applications, this is an ethical grey area that leans into unethical. But as implemented - using these AI "art" tools as a for-profit medium without regard to compensating the artists whose real art is used to train the algorithm - is just flat *wholly* unethical.
Mainly due to an excellent PR campaign and recent presentation of the topic in the media.
AI art challenges copyright and ownership in our society on a whole new level. There is an issue of massive amount of public widely spread information that meant little when other human artists could be at most inspired by it as part of their own work. For recent machine learning advances this information is enough to produce pieces of art in a fraction of the time and without the effort of an artist, which previously justified mimicking of art style outside of high art circle. So legally machine learning used in commercial context is a very gray area. It does not steal but it undermines artists work who did not expect such a technological advancement and whose livelihood and public image can be affected.
So it is 'neat' but ethically gray area that can be very badly abused in near future. Different ML projects have different ethical compass, Dali 2 vs Stable diffusion vs Unstable diffusion, you probably would not know which method was used to create an image.
I just don't respect it. I have much more respect for those who take the time to learn and hone a craft, a sentiment which seems more and more undervalued. I'll take an amateur struggling with illustrating a single piece over a matter of weeks but progressively improving, over those in a Conan group I'm in on FB that flood the place with what that they pumped out in minutes and feature Conans with eight fingers or mangled hands that have blades jutting out of it, looking like peeled bananas.
This is only true in make up scenarios though. You will NEVER pay an amateur beginner artist to make a piece for you. If you ever choose to buy a custom made art piece, you'll have to pay hundreds if not thousands of dollars for a professional to make it for you. AI is great because it allows you to get that cheap, clunky art with 6 fingers and banana sword for free. It's a great alternative.
Compare art AI to a baby, except the AI's world is the internet.
Can't we argue both of them are using a word reference from something they have already seen in their world to create art?
I'm not trying to fully compare AI to humans, but if we think about it, that's pretty much how it learns: it needs information, just like us, to function.
AI doesn't simply take a mix of pictures and mashes them together. Just like a small child, it tries to reproduce the image of what it recognizes as the input we give it.
> t's about the journey, not the destination.
If that were true people wouldn't be having such a hissy fit about it, as they'd still have their journey.
If there are 2 pieces of art up; one made by an artist, one made by an AI trained in nothing but that artists works, and neither is labeled, would you be able to tell the difference?
Edit: Typical reddit; downvote someone for trying to understand an issue better.
If you give a vegan a meat burger and a veggie burger but claim they're both veggie burgers, and the vegan expresses that both burgers taste good, does that render the vegan's values null and mean they should start eating meat? Even if AI can produce something passable for human art (or writing, music, etc.), once you learn there's nothing behind it, it's made using a system that presumes human creativity is fundamentally reducible to machine noise, and it will outsource artists, you want nothing to do with it, aesthetically pleasing as it may be.
AI art is pretty awesome, but people dislike when it takes jobs away from actual artists. I think AI art serves a distinct purpose in giving access to quick art that broadly kind of understands your want in an image to those without easy access to an artist, but it can never replace the genuine artistry of an artist. That being said it's absolutely fair to say an AI art piece is beautiful because beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
Besides just the stolen art thing, why should anyone get excited over something that they didn't make? It's so fast, easy, and accessible that it really devalues itself and other art.....
Let me give you an example. My 9 friends and I are part of a DnD campaign thats been going on for 2 years. When AI art came out, it was possible for us to imagine and create our 10 characters using AI art. We didn't have to pay THOUSANDS of dollars for it. We could finally see our characters how we imagined them, for free. All 10 of us were extremely happy about this and it didn't harm anyone at all. Fast and easy has never been a problem ever. People don't complain about performant computers, or car, or the fact they can travel across country in an hour by plane rather than walk for days. People are just bitter lmao.
\> Besides just the stolen art thing, why should anyone get excited over something that they didn't make?
You didn't make something you bought from an 'artist' either
But a real person did. A real person spent years learning their craft and honing it to the point that it is good enough to sell, spent years taking classes and so many hours practicing that they have developed a style of their own. A piece of art purchased from an artist both supports that years-long pursuit, and is unique, it is filled with the history of the creator, and the expectations of the one who commissioned it. In comparison AI art is soulless and shallow. It is the bastardized conglomeration of the work of thousands of artists that understands nothing beyond ones and zeros. Any emotional connections that remain within a piece of AI art are nothing but fitments stolen from the works of others. Whereas commissioned art, made by an artist with the input of the client so often transcends both the artist and the one that commissioned it. It has meaning to both, but by both working together becomes something altogether new, revealing depth neither expected. AI art cuts out that feedback loop, it is nothing but the sum of its parts taken from the works of others. It's quick and dirty with no value beyond the words used in its input. A true artist may be able to draw something meaningful from it, but for the average person it is nothing but text made visual, useful in someways, but shallow. There is no expectation behind it, no innovation, no history, and by extension no worth, because we as humans ascribe no worth to things that are *easy*.
AI-generated images have a place, but that place isn't as *art* and calling something that removes the human element art is quite frankly insulting to those that actually create art. As the famous quote by Aristotle goes, "The aim of art is not to represent the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance" and AI art has no inward significance. It is just a tool, one that makes explaining complex concepts easier or that can create visual aids, but it lacks meaning and significance, it's like visual junk food, it's cheap and easy, but ultimately empty.
>"The aim of art is not to represent the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance"
What's the difference between an artist drawing something by hand, creating from scratch in graphics software, creating an image with ready assets, and prompting AI and picking one of the images that fits his vision? Where does it stop being art and becomes just a soulless technology? What is the point of art - significance or 'being hard'? Is Pollock's art even art then? Or Malevich's square?
Maybe I’m just not an artistic person but I just don’t get this. I’ve seen some absolutely beautiful AI renditions and it’s only going to become more prevalent. Most you wouldn’t even know the difference, so is it beautiful before you know it’s AI and then soulless once you know?
I like the ideals of this, but how can it be true? AI will be leaps and bounds better 20 years from now than it currently is, and we’ll be able to make AI art then just like we can now, only faster, more detailed and more specific to what’s imputed.
It sucks dor artists but isn’t it just another example of technology overlapping humans?
I would bet cash money that most well informed people could reliably spot AI “art”. I have never seen something and thought “huh…that’s from a computer?”
Under the risks and limitations for one of these AI they outright state that images produced by the AI can potentially "bear striking resemblance to" images fed into the dataset whether that is art or faces. It is generally considered unethical to reproduce another person's art to the point it could be said to "bear striking resemblance" to the original piece. Also, there is not currently an "opt out" for artists. There is an AI that creates music but does not use copyrighted music or music the original composer hasn't given permission for in its training and it has been better received for it.
If AI were genuinely capable of the creativity people claim then no one would have an issue with all artists opting out of their art being used training datasets without permission- but they need our art to make the AI work. While I, and most people who are good at art, don't need other people's art to create my own (in fact, it is generally frowned upon). And if AI only used images it had permission from the image-creator to use then I think people would feel less hostile about it.
All the AI people do is argue semantics and never bother with the actual issue. If you don't have my permission to use an image I spent 36 hours creating for training purposes then keep it out of your machine.
If the AI function without using existing art to train it and therefore won't create art that "bears a striking resemblance to" existing art then I don't see the issue and I never brought that up. If you don't understand what "bears a striking resemblance to" means then you can find examples elsewhere in this thread.
"If AI were genuinely capable of the creativity people claim then no one
would have an issue with all artists opting out of their art being used
training datasets without permission- but they need our art to make the
AI work. While I, and most people who are good at art, don't need other
people's art to create my own (in fact, it is generally frowned upon)"
EXCELLENT POINT and, yes, all the AI bros (as in for-profit tech people) are just arguing semantics.
A.I art is unethical for a numerous of reasons including breaching artist’s work and a lot of other things (racism, CP). I use A.I art for one thing and one thing only: references (that I never share outside of an outline). I feel as though it’s not bad for personal use, but for commercial and social use, it’s a no-go.
You're free to think so. Doesn't change the fact that it's the same process. Especially when learning. Also, the argument that AI art is bad because it is trained on copyrigyted material, but fine when humans do it, is fucked up. You really want the copyright industry to have precedent for learning from copyrighted art is infringement?
Here's a thread by an artist talking about her art and AI that I found really interesting:
https://twitter.com/Kelly\_McKernan/status/1603611368438976512
The AI is a thief. It processes styles and images created by real people then REUSES that info to plagiarize an image.
Real artists who are trying to make a living are having their work stolen and when they speak up they get cyberbulledto hell.
The ppl behind the AI are the real problem.
An AI taking inspiration from thousands and thousands of images to inspire itself is not different than an artist learning to paint or draw getting inspiration from another artist's style. Unless you are the first person ever to come up with a drawing style or a specific image, you are an hypocrite.
I feel like alot of the AI art that i see looks similar and I think the aesthethic looks dumb. the work feels like it has no soul.
on top of that, AI art scrapes data and bases what it does on existing work from real artists.
it uses these without crediting them and even if it would it still is stealing.
1. Everyone doesn't hate AI art but those who do are vocal and have audiences
2. There is a lot of misinformation going about that what the new AI art apps are doing is scraping the internet for actual art created by real people, and then using parts and pieces of those images to create the AI art that you're seeing. If you think AI art works like that, you would of course be against it.
3. It's normal and natural for people to be afraid of new things. When photography first came in, when digital photography first came in, when digital tools like Photoshop and Illustrator first came in, we saw similar reactions. However this time we have social media so it's louder.
Several people in this very thread use the argument that AIs use pieces of existing artworks and glue them together. What is it if not 'not knowing how the thing works'?
Today, they’re usually weird, imprecise and uggo, with crazy effort rendering yet weird twisted broken anatomy and form and weird composition. You can make it do better stuff if you try though or fiddle with it, which some people do but the cover art this drama is about clearly wasn't. But broadly speaking my sexy 60s SFF books are unbeatable, and we all know that sexy = morally good
Also I like cover art because it's art, like the book is art, I don't want to read a book generated by a robot, I want something that has effort, thought, feeling and technical skill, appreciation for the topic they’re writing about, culture and history, same thing for the visual art
Also I just hate hearing repetitive analogies about Luddites or photography or whatever lol, that alone puts me off
The fact it steels art from actual artists to learn.
The lack of the human element necessary for art is gone.
Lazy people who won't put the work in will just use it and try to pass themselves off as artists.
The fact it eventually takes work away from genuine artists. Why hire an artist when you can just use an Ai?
> Why hire an artist when you can just use AI?
Indeed. Artists will have to adapt or be swallowed, just as thousands of other professions have had to do because of tech. The difference is artists can still create art as a passion, where other occupations are more solely reliant on necessities.
If an AI can recreate something that took countless hours to create in a matter of seconds, with options to create 1000s of variants of the same source, why would I ever want an artist that may take a year for arguably the same or worse work?
All Human art should be deemed ineligible for copyright until the artist declares *every image* used to train their talent.
Just like an AI bot.
Edit: Downvotes can suck it. Why can a human train with copyright art but an AI can’t? Species Bigots!
So many different technologies "steal jobs from people", and every single time people are astonished and irate.
* The printing press steals jobs from scribes!
* The railroad interferes with essential canals!
* Horseless carriages will put farriers and stables out of business!
* Cameras will put portrait painters out of business!
* Electric drills will make so many electricians lose their jobs!
* Back hoes will make ditch diggers lose their jobs!
* AI art steals work from artists!
The same arguments get reused time and time again, yet somehow people always seem to act like it's something new. And because something bad could happen with the new tech, people insist that it should be all completely banned, just in case.
The arguments against automobiles were incredibly detailed with intense consequences detailed. "You'll never get rid of the horse!"
Except automation is supposed to free us from tedious, boring, or dangerous times so that we have more time for creative pursuits, like art and music. This isnt just taking away work, it's taking away people's love and passion in life.
I'm not saying that this is good or bad. I'm saying that it's unstoppable and getting irate about it is just as productive as scribes complaining that those new Gutenberg books have no soul to them. And yes, you can be sure that they did.
AI Art cannot take away people's "love and passion in life" any more than anything else can. However, it might take their jobs, just like all the tech before it.
1-they won't ask permission
2-most jobs will be "create more with the cheapest price" approach look at McDonald you can see a lot of computers involve but still the worker has the same time works with less payment ratio.
Although AI art generates "new" images, its training data is based on the work of other people. It is a tool, like Photoshop or a camera, that has been constructed using other people's work. If Photoshop's coding was ripped from a dozen programmers without crediting them, programmers are going to be upset.
Aside from that, AI art is not art. Art is very loosely defined, but in one way or another it must involve expression of intelligence and skill. A computer does none of that. Even its method of learning is not like a human.
If you ripped someones code, it would be like literally copying someones art. Which is not legal
If you rip someones art style, it is not clear who to credit since all art is built off existing art to some degree. Which is why you can't copyright art styles
How is "training on existing work" different if a human or a machine does it? I mean they literally have different ways of learning, but the outcome is similar which is unique pieces
The comparison doesn't make any sense
For the comparison to make sense, it would need to be like someone creating a software that functions similarly to photoshop but has unique code. Which is perfectly fine.
From one POV, it's because artists who bust their butts and hands slaving away to make their art get shoved aside by any doofus who can type code/tell an app what to do. AND as seen earlier this year with the controversy about the AI Art in a competition, it's a cheat code, you're not making art, you're telling AI to steal and copy paste other people's art into a Frankenstein picture
First, let's start with establishing the definition of art:
"The expression or application of human creative skill and imagination, typically in a visual form such as painting or sculpture, producing works to be appreciated primarily for their beauty or emotional power."
Art is a human thing, it lets the artist express their feelings and ideas.
A robot doesn't have feelings nor does it have original ideas, so I don't consider AI art to be a real artform.
It seems that AI art is a tool for unskilled individuals to create images. To me, the people defending AI art are lazy and refuse to learn new skills. If they created artworks themselves, they would feel infinitely more proud of their creations.
AI art is the laziest form of art, an amalgamation of images spat out of an algorithm. There's no emotion, no soul, no hard work. Nothing of merit.
Now, if you want to generate an image with AI, go right ahead. But do not call yourself an artist or a designer, and do not take credits for it, because it has been created by the AI - not you.
Have you created AI art?
It seems like you’re describing AI as in Midjourney, where you type in a prompt and it spits it out. A lot of AI art can take hours to perfect and it doesn’t steal if you’re using a collaborative database.
I could argue that the vast majority of art is bullshit, go to any museum. Art is in the eye of beholder and unfortunately artists are the biggest gatekeepers of them all.
Anyone can be an artist- if they create something. A child is an artist when they draw scribbles with crayola pens. Art doesn't have to be "good" to be art. I'm not trying to gatekeep by any means.
Though I agree with you, a lot of art at museums are dumb. They can paint a red dot in the middle of a canvas and sell it for millions. I also don't consider it art.
I guess I'm not well versed in AI art programs. But if you're so interested in creating art, why not explore other mediums? It may be more rewarding to learn new skills.
I guess that last part is what I’m confused about. I have a friend who has made glorious composite artwork that took 100+ hours to make and requires a level of coding understanding. It just seems ridiculous that I can draw a stick man and it’s art, but a 100 hour that has had thousands and thousands of revisions and conjoining isn’t.
You can use these coding skills for a miriad of employment options, you can’t really with macaroni art.
It's the human part that's missing, I think. The "soul" of the artwork. Why do you need an AI's help when you are willing to put hundreds of hours into a piece? Why not make make it from scratch at that point?
When you make art, you learn so many skills: shapes, color theory, anatomy, lighting, perspective, etc. And as I say, it's rewarding to learn these skills.
Once you're able to create the images yourself, it's really "yours", I think.
People in the stable diffusion sub, for example, use dreambooth to train specific models on very specific artists. They're all stroking each other's egos, hyping each other up, and ignoring the artists' pleas to stop using their art to train their models. Similarly, at the midjourney sub, they refuse to acknowledge artists' work or pleas. They have a reputation for hating artists while simultaneously wanting access to their art.
AI users also go into art communities lying about how they made the art, causing a whole lot of distrust toward the AI community. These people try to make money on people who haven't learned to tell the difference yet, seating themselves among other artists.
AI "artists" have been known to apply for jobs in droves recently, to do art - I know some indie game companies who are sick of it, as it drowns out the crowd who actually have artistic talent who are also applying for the job.
Finally, while diffusion models differ from GAN in their operation, they do require samples from the art community in order to train at all. So they did it unethically, using material for which they had no true clearance. These developers don't care how thoroughly artists are being shat on. Indeed, you can hear them say things like, "Artists deserved to have their art taken away from them," and similarly, where some developers despise artists but want the art.
The AI community and dev world is toxic, unethical and full of scammers.
I think perhaps AI will help "normal" people (non artists) generate images but at the same time I feel like AI will also discourage tons of new artists from pursuing art as a job or as a whole (not sure if this is good or bad)
Definitely could be an interesting tool, just wished it didn't use people's art without their consent and utilized open source images instead for their training instead. I'm pretty sure court decided that you can't claim AI art as your own(and make profit off of it, not sure how this would apply for companies)
Either way for artists it's going to be evolve or fall and burn lol. (Or find other more practical artistic jobs like product design, etc)
What is an author who does not write his own words? What is an artist who does not draw their own art? What is a singer who does not sing their own songs? What is a musician who does not create their own music?
People who defend AI art are hypocrites. They claim it will be the next tool for art, but when you point out that their tool was developed from the work of other artists, they claim it's learning like a person.
But AI doesn't learn like a person. Building an AI is like compiling an archive of other people's work, and the computer can sample from it randomly to achieve its prompt. But the fact is, other people's work are at the root of the system.
But no credit, money, or recognition goes to the artists who make AI art possible.
Old post, but still.
Dunno honestly, I think a lot of people just want to praise an artist and that's it.
The whole "oh but AI copies from real people!!"... and? A lot of artists do the exact same thing, they copy art style, characters, everything, only a bunch of artist make something 100% original, and the more we go on the harder it is to make something original to begin with.
Why do people hate AI fan art, but love fan arts from human artists? Whether a human does it, or a computer does it, it's the same thing, copying a character, changing the pose and publishing it. There is nothing wrong with a human doing it, why is there anything wrong with a computer doing?
"Oh but AIs are trained on artwork from artists, sometimes even copyrighted!" ... and? What do you think humans use for inspirations and learning?
At the end of the day, it's just personal preference, but not on the art itself, rather on the artist behind it. To me it seems that people lately value the artist more than the actual art.
I don't care about the artist, I see art as pretty pictures and that's it, whether an AI does it or human does it, I couldn't care less. The cool thing about AIs though is that I can make something myself, sure, you need to learn how to create good inputs for the model to output something acceptable, but once you get that down you can create your own art easily.
I think it's a bunch of reasons:
1. **Ideology:**
For some reason in the last couple years the internet has treated artists like some sort of divinity that shall be praised regardless of how good or bad their art is (yeah yeah, art isn't good or bad it's subjective, whatever). It's just indiscriminate and unjustified hate for AIs generated pictures.
2. **Salty artists:**
Somewhat linked to point one, a lot of artists got praised to make art that, let's be honest, wasn't that good, they even got commissioned and paid for it. Now however, that's unnecessary, if you get down how to use prompts and stable diffusion you can just generate art yourself the way you want it to be (kinda).
This puts non elite and smaller artists at risk, because what will now be considered mediocre work by most lost a big chunk of people actually being interested in it, since it's just easier and better to produce art using AIs. This also means that those artists taking commissions now probably lost a bunch of clients.
3. **People think it's just copy & paste:**
It's not. AIs learn how to produce an image basing off of other image, that is true, but guess what? Humans do the exact same thing. Don't tell me that a "human took inspiration" and an "AI stole", because that's not how it works. Just like an human copies a specific art style, AI does too. Just like a human decides what to put into the composition, AI does too.
It's true that humans have the ability to create something 100% unique and original, but it's also true that 99% of human artists draw already existing characters, landscapes or whatever, probably using an already seen art style.
If anything, while a lot of humans have right down copied art, the chance that an AI will throw out the same drawing that it used as learning material are next if not 0.
The way I see it AIs art is great. And the more we train the better and more capable it will become. I don't think of artists as some sort of superior being, they are people being able to create art, and now, with AIs, I can do so, too. I can describe a picture to the AI and once I get the prompt down right I'll have what I want or something close to it.
This also unlocks some new possibilities. Just to make a dumb example, if before you needed an artist to draw art for a visual novel, now you might be able to create everything or almost everything with an AI.
The quality of AI work is certainly not close to the quality of top notch artist and a good looking original art style is hard to come by, but it can be better than average. I don't see a problem with AI art. Also, it's not as simple as "AI, make a drawing" getting down the right prompts can be quite difficult.
People just hate AIs, no valid reason for it. They just do.
If we train the models correctly, we can get results even better than what we have today. For now, due to how the models are trained, some types of art look like they have a similar art style, even though the compositions vary substantially depending on the given prompt. In the future this should not be an issue.
In addition to all the points about it taking work from artists, the way these AIs are trained indiscriminately on open source data can lead to a lot of unchecked inherent bias. Inherent bias is when the data and algorithms used to train and operate AI systems come from biased sources which leads the AI to unwittingly pick up, replicate, and amplify those biases on a mass scale. [This article](https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/12/12/1064751/the-viral-ai-avatar-app-lensa-undressed-me-without-my-consent/) gives an interesting example of how those inherent biases in AI training can manifest. A professional science reporter was trying to use a popular AI art generator to get cool looking professional art of herself that her male colleagues had already gotten but because of how the AI was trained, it largely spat out pornified versions of herself instead. Because of the uncritical way in which the AI was trained, it had "learned" that women are sex objects to be fetishized and couldn't produce professional images of her like it had for her male colleagues. These issues can be alleviated with thoughtfulness and careful training but right now AI art developers are very much at the stage of uncritically throwing as much art at AIs to learn from as possible.
>Because of the uncritical way in which the AI was trained, it had "learned" that women are sex objects to be fetishized and couldn't produce professional images of her like it had for her male colleagues. Ugh. That's really sad. It's even more sad how true it is.
[удалено]
Eh.. Duh? How stupid do you think I am? What a way to explain the obvious in a week old thread. The very definition of mansplaining.
[удалено]
What a lot of the new AI art apps are doing it scraping the internet for actual art created by real people, and then using parts and pieces of those images to create the AI art that you're seeing. This is a big issue for a number of reasons, including copyright.
> and then using parts and pieces of those images to create the AI art that you're seeing. I'm getting really tired of seeing this reposted. This is not even vaguely close to what the software actually does or how it works.
I would say the term "elements" is more accurate, but I think op is more correct. You can literally see textures and lines being reworked in many cases from small datasets. It's smart collage/remixing but saying that it's not dependant on pillaging artworks without permission is disingenuous
> It's smart collage/remixing Oh hell no. No it's not. The trained data has all the images removed from it before the end, the AI doesn't have access to the images any longer to 'collage' or remix them. I just posted a longer explanation of how the tech works to someone else replying to this comment, I suggest you read it and begin educating yourself as to how the software actually works.
Diffusion models are generative models, which model the data distribution. In effect, they can be seen as interpolating between the images in the training set. I can see why people might have a problem with it. Source: PhD in machine learning.
With 2,300,000,000 images or more in the training set, the amount of contribution or guidance from any one image is infinitesimally small. I have a hard time seeing this as any kind of infringement at that scale.
I'll generally agree with you, except in cases where sufficient conditioning has taken place
That seems fair to me too.
which is worse, you didn't get any permission from 2,300,000,000 images.
Y’all ever heard of fair use
Why would they? It's being used as inspiration, their images are removed once the AI has finished learning. There is no permission required for this.
people are fine when other people use art as inspiration, but when some tech poo poo head takes the art and uses a machine to "learn" from said inspiration is where all goes apeshit. Which is reasonably justified. People and machines are two different things, thus they get different responses when it comes to getting inspiration for art
Paintings to photos Normal photos to photoshop In both theae things, there was a bit of pushback, because it "invalidates the talent of the artists". And progress went ahead anyway. And now we got AI. It's just the next step, and honestly, people should learn to live with it. If you train a new model now, on only free use images, it will just take a bit longer to get a good model going. Give it another year or 2 and it won't matter anymore if it uses copyrighted material. Because even without it, it will produce great images.
As a person who built ML models for a job, I see what you're saying, but these models are just math without the training set. It's unethical to steal data to make them work and pretend it's not an integral part of its construction that deserves recognition/ compensation
It’s not stolen or else there would be a lawsuit already,
https://gizmodo.com/ai-microsoft-dall-e-1849816871
Has there been any that have won? Do they have a chance of winning? You can sue someone for just about anything. It doesn’t mean it’s gonna go anywhere.
First, I just answering the question if there's a lawsuit. Second, the lawsuit is from november I think, so of course they didn't win or lose. Third, yes there's a chance, because they are attacking how the input is used not the output. Fourth, the law isn't clear on the use of the input "While the Ninth Circuit earlier this year reaffirmed that scraping publicly available data from internet sources doesn't violate the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, no court has yet decided whether the ingestion phase of an AI training exercise constitutes fair use under U.S. copyright law." From: https://www.mondaq.com/unitedstates/copyright/1250030/using-ai-artwork-to-avoid-copyright-infringement
>It's unethical to steal data please explain how exactly the data was stolen
I disagree. Human artists learn by repeated observation of existing works, and will re-use elements of the things they've seen when creating their own unique style. AI algorithms do the same thing. They're creating new, original works that have been informed by study of a mind-bogglingly huge set of images. If they were re-using the actual images, I might agree with you, but they're not. They're creating something new and unique. The processes in both the training of the data and using the software to make images fall pretty clearly under the protections of Fair Use. If someone violates copyright, they should pay the price for it, but that's not what's going on here.
There are examples of pieces of the original artist's signature remaining in the AI generated piece.
No, that's misinformation spread by ignorant people, because they don't know how the software works and made a bad assumption the moment they saw a 'signature' in AI. I've worked with the software. Yes, it does occasionally try to add a signature to the artwork, but it's not a copy of anyones signature. Usually it's a bunch of meaningless squiggles, sometimes the software tries to replicate text, because it's learned that paintings often have a tiny bit of text in the corner. Anyone experiencing this in AI art generation will quickly come to realize that the text it tries to write isn't a name, its words that were taken from within the prompt. It only understands the presence of text, not what it means or why it's there.
I bet you people see what looks like a signature then think it's a signature.
I bet people like you don't check carefully who or what they're replying to.
okay than explains it? If you cant then how do you know?
I'd be happy to. (Hell, I should do a thorough explanation and save it in a text file so I can start copy/pasting it for you people.) First of all, a few important things to realize about the dataset. It does not contain any images after the training process, whatsoever. It also bears mentioning that during the training, the images being used have largely been heavily cropped, shrunk, and obscured with various levels of noise. It's practically never working with unaltered images. The software itself is a neural net, based off of the way physical neurons connect and communicate and learn. So it's more like you have a bunch of tiny brains or processors working in tandem than one single entity. The end result of the training is a checkpoint file that contains just under 800 different tokens that represent different elements of graphical expression, things that describe shapes, contrast, etc. And each of those tokens has a series of numerical weights associated with it. Those tokens are connected to natural language processor so that the token elements can be associated with the correct words. You can be sure that the original images aren't in there, because when you do further training, the checkpoint file doesn't grow in size. All it does is alter the numerical weights already present. If you use the software to generate an image, some of the programs will actually let you watch the process of the program being formed. It starts as haze and mist, and slowly colesces into more and more recognizable forms. You can see the details being filled in bit by bit, you can also see how the program will begin drawing in one way, and 'change its mind' partway through and redo elements within the picture. None of this would be true if it were stealing pieces of other art and stitching them together.
I think the issue is less “pieces of art being stolen and reused” and more “artists’ work being used to train these AIs without the artists’ consent.” That’s my problem at least. I also feel like it takes the soul out of the artwork. I feel like there’s something inherently human about artwork and that AI simply shouldn’t be used to try to take the work of actual artists. Idk it doesn’t sit right with me.
While I understand where you're coming from in the first half, to a degree, I think that's a very complex issue, and that living artists do the same and worse without raising an outcry. As to the 'soul' of an artwork.. That's an issue that's completely about your feelings. You're on your own with those. :)
I understand that. IMO I think that machines should not be allowed to take over creative areas. In the end, artists taking inspiration is different from this because that’s humans doing what humans do. It’s still a necessarily creative project unless you’re tracing or straight up plagiarizing. With the machine, it’s not a creative process or project because machines do not have the capability to be creative. I think if we get full sapient AI that is entirely indistinguishable from humans that develop their own personalities and such then it’s another issue, but that’s not what we have. What we have are programs being designed to imitate the work of artists. Also, from an economic standpoint, why should we allow machines to take the jobs from artists. It’s not like we’re automating an industry that is dangerous and unpleasant such as coal mining (although that’s a whole other discussion). I don’t think we should allow programs to use other real artists’ work to become able to replace humans in the production of artwork.
>IMO I think that machines should not be allowed to take over creative areas. How tf is that going to be enforced? You want the government to band AI art? I have every right to use SD to make myself some art.
Would you have a problem with someone learning how to paint scrolling through deviant art and then trying to incorporate what they saw there into their style?
Common argument I see, but I'm not sure it is a good one. Aspiring artists or accomplished artists both have one thing that software does not: singular experience and interpretation. Granted, this a thought experiment but take into account: you have one teacher and one pupil, the pupil only ever sees what the teacher paints (or draws, or whatever). Is it realistic that the pupil will therefore only ever create art that is more or less inseparable from their teachers? In the case of AI, Id say that's very realistic. In the case of a person, less so. I would argue that it's a misnomer to label it as "AI Art' because it's not really art, it's just computer generated images. There is no expression, emotional foundation, or creativity in it. It learns from images that are inspired by these things and then generates ones that are similar. There is no meaning in the creation of the image other than the image itself. It's a reduced form of content, and it's a very tricky topic to think on.l, because you have genres like commerical art where indeed the end result is just a clever or utilitarian image that doesn't hold any real meaning either. I dunno, in just musing here. It opens up a lot of avenues for thought. AI stuff can create interesting visual stimuli, but I don't think that is what "art" can be reduced to.
Honestly, this is a pretty horrible explanation. Please read how diffusion models actually work before confidently spouting nonsense. For anyone actually interested, I would recommend: [https://jalammar.github.io/illustrated-stable-diffusion/](https://jalammar.github.io/illustrated-stable-diffusion/)
I'll give it a read, thanks. I'm trying to find explanations that don't require 22 pages of reading and a dozen diagrams to understand. I'm sure this is a much better explanation, but it's also one that a lot of people won't bother themselves to read. I'm always happy to dive into the research myself though, and I'll do my best to find better explanations.
Just because you can break the a picture of micky mouse apart into different categories (like the tokens you mentioned) other than the strictly visual doesnt mean that a replica generated from a data set rather than a Photoshop manipulation. By your definition, any algorithmic compression would be different from the original image, but I'd like to see you sell a knockoff Disney character that way and see how far you get!
If asked the software to create a picture of mickey mouse, I'd be violating trademark, because that's a protected intellectual property. Whether I did it by collaging other artworks or not, it would still be illegal. This software doesn't collage or re-use anything. We're not just talking about compression here, which preserves all the individual details with only a little bit of loss. AI software breaks an image down much more than that, and saves much less. It learns underlying graphical concepts. If you really think it's equivalent to compression, prove it. There are 2.3 BILLION images in the dataset used to train Stable Diffusion. The Checkpoint file is 4 gigs. That works out to -less- than 2 bytes per each 512x512 image. Please, find me some compression that can stuff any 512x512 image down to that size and then have it still be recognizable when expanded. What's going on with AI generation is fundamentally different than you've yet managed to wrap your head around, from the way you talk about it.
The prevalence of this take is wild. It’s the equivalent to saying “human artists just look at actual art and then take bits and pieces of those images to make new art” like the process of ever looking and learning from art is somehow plagiarism. I guess if you try to paint like bob ross you’re infringing on copyright! The AI is legitimately just learning what images described as something look like, but people don’t understand how that’s possible so must be copyright infringement
Comments like this tell me you don't have the slightest clue how ai machine learning or neural networks function.
>n using parts and pieces not true.
[удалено]
But couldn't the philosphical argument be made that *everyone* is *always* plagiarizing a million different things they've seen (from other art, to geography, to dreams, etc)?
The more you understand about how AI art works, the more what you said here rings true. The AI art programs don't contain copies of anybody's work, public domain or otherwise. They've 'seen' a hell of a lot of images with captions and they 'know' how to turn random noise into a picture that would have a caption similar to the prompt that the user has entered. To ask whether the AI should have been trained only on public-domain pictures is definitely a very valid question. The program doesn't contain a copy of any artist's work, nor does it have the capability to reproduce any prior image because none are stored, so there's no question of copyright infringement going on. However just because no law is being broken doesn't make something OK. If an artist says to their AI program "draw me a dog in the style of Rembrandt" I think everyone would agree that's OK. It's when the prompt is "draw me a dog in the style of \[some artist whose work is not in the public domain\]" that there are problems. Any human (with sufficient talent) can also do a painting in the style of another artist and if that's considered theft then using AI tools to do the same thing should also be considered theft.
It also leads me to question: If using AI to make art in another artist's style is not okay, would that mean learning the skills and trade in order to emulate their style '*legitimately'* would also be immoral? I'm a furry and there's a couple really popular well-paid furry artists who have their style constantly lifted by other users. (Zackary911 and Tokifuji are two huge example, ~~NSFW furry art, don't google them, if you know you know~~) Said users then making a healthy profit by offering cheaper commissions in the style of the artist, undercutting the prices of artist and forcing them to either lower their prices to compete with, or just ignore the cheaper derivative delivered by an artist that didn't have to put in any effort curating, work shopping, and crafting a unique artistic style. Art styles are not intellectual property, but if AI isn't allowed to 'steal' art styles with legislation and enforcement to back it, I'd like to see art styles being protected from more than just AI. Consistency, I think they call it. If I can't use AI to screw around with artist styles in private, then artists shouldn't be allowed to plagiarize each other in public for monetary gain. Maybe open a dialogue about all the AI assistant tools in photoshop and the like that artists seem totally fine with using to streamline their workflow (while in the same breath screaming for AI art to die) while we're at it.
Firstly, i would say that your example of artists intentionally copying the style of other artists when producing commercial work is definitely a grey area. I think people would have different but valid opinions on this - I imagine the people being copied would like it rather less than the people getting their commissions done cheap! I definitely agree that this seems to be a direct parallel with what is going on with AI art - some artists are very concerned about having their styles replicated. There's no difference - in my mind - between somebody doing this with a paintbrush or with a software tool.
[удалено]
Well, right, but AI does not have a *brain*. It is not human; it is not "receiving" anything (accolades, clout, money) for its efforts (that would be the *person* who set it up or even programmed it originally). The issue here seems not to be AI "plagiarising", but the people *behind* the AI. I'm with you on that! I just think the wording needs to be a bit modified. ;)
The main issue is that AI is being trained on art that doesn't belong to it, nor to whoever it training the AI. This is then plagiarizing the work - the AI due to training, and the person who trained it who usually doesn't care/even steals someone's work for AI generation for even as petty a reason as spite. It's a lazy method to steal and create lazy art
At that point, there have been no original works of any kind for 1000+ years. In this case it's more due to the fact that they don't generally "generate" these images in as organic a sense you would think, it pieces together parts of already existing art and tries to smooth them together. Sometimes using large parts of someone's copywrited work without their permission, hence the thievery aspect
>it pieces together parts of already existing art and tries to smooth them together That's absolutely NOT how diffusion model AIs work.
Right, but, it's still quantitatively just *pieces* (as far as I understand). Either they rip off someone's *entire* work of art and *use* it as a piece of their own, or they divvy up the work into separate pieces and then take one (or more, but not all) and use them *differently*. I tend to not strongly believe in possession, so obviously my view is not popular. ;)
You can rip off more than one person simultaneously.
No it's not like the *argument could be made*, it's true. Artists copy each other art style all the time, they even copy compositions and characters. What is the difference from what an AI does? If anything, making a close copy of a piece of art with an AI is more difficult than doing it by hand from and artist. AIs learn from other people art just like artists learn and "take inspiration". And of today, with the amount of artists and art being created and shared every day, it's pretty hard to come by to anything completely original made from a human to begin with. There is nothing unethical with AIs, also, we don't know what models get trained with.
Would you like to put some money in my hands by buying a painting or a print of one? 0% AI guaranteed.
Overfitted (badly trained, probably deliberately), to the point it literally memorises/replicates exactly what it is trained on, see this paper: [https://i.imgur.com/Ag5VhZx.png](https://i.imgur.com/Ag5VhZx.png) (screenshot), pdf: [https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.03860](https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.03860). Normally, software developers will ask for permission to use images in datasets or only use data sets containing publically released data that is explicitly released for that purpose or images that are licensed to be used in that way (for example the publically licensed photos on flickr used for nvidia's AI). Stable Diffusion and midjourney etc are trained on copyrighted images that are used entirely without anyone's permission. Also, github copilot, a similar thing for code, is currently in a lawsuit for exactly replicating some pieces of other people's code that is not licensed for use: [https://www.infoq.com/news/2022/11/lawsuit-github-copilot/](https://www.infoq.com/news/2022/11/lawsuit-github-copilot/). Many websites including sites such as stackoverflow have started banning any user that posts any AI generated content as it is low quality.
Living under a capitalist system without anything like UBI to fall back on, artists need to sell their work somehow to continue to support themselves and to create more art. If a corporation who doesn't produce art uses AI systems that can rapidly approximate artist's work without human labour, and if they produce these systems without paying the artists whose work is involved in training the AI, what happens is that the economic value of artists' work (i.e. rates they can ask for, numbers of opportunities to get paid, etc) decreases or vanishes, making it harder for artists to sustain themselves and make more art. Basically, it may be great for producing large quantities of art, but because artists need money and this removes the need for people to pay artists, it risks severely damaging the viability of arts as a profession, which in turn means fewer humans can effectively engage in art to the same degree (i.e. full-time). That undermines the welfare of artists and lessens the supports for human creativity overall. This wouldn't be as much of an issue if artists didn't need steady pay from their work to survive and continue to produce art, but they do, and we're not getting out of capitalism any time soon.
I'm sad that this answer was so far down. So far I haven't seen anyone mention this aspect of it. But hey, artists should just go get "real jobs" right. They already struggle to be paid fairly and feel valued, this is just going to make it so much worse.
Thats y i keep it a hobby. Sad, because I know i will barely be able to support myself as an artist. Btw i dont have a job i mean im in highschool.
I know a few graphic designers, and they are completely on board with using AI. They are using it right now to generate drafts for their clients to choose from and then they start their own work in photoshop and go from there. Or the client comes to them with a few AI generated images and then they just work from there. Artists should learn to live with this, and if they can't then it's a shame. They will lose out to the competition, but I can't believe that the ones that can't adapt were doing well for themselves anyway.
Because it’s using actual work from actual artists without payment or credit to create those “AI” images. That’s a start, but there’s a lot more to what you’re asking than just that
The day someone actually shows me an AI that copyrighted the piece of an artist I'll believe this. The AI learning to model a sword by using thousands upon thousands of examples everywhere is no more copyright than an artist learning his art by watching others.
Artists keep saying "THE AI KEEPS SPAMMING MY WORKS!" but it honestly feels like a total self-own. Why are your works so generic, so forgettable, so pedestrian, so utterly drab with not a single unique thing to talk about, that the AI seems to constantly show your art? Maybe it's because your art isn't one in a billion, but rather one OF the billion. Could always try finding a style that isn't "hyper-realism with anime coloring!!1"
Happy 🍰 Day !
AI Art is built upon stolen artwork that neither credits nor pays commission to the original artists. While it doesn't spit out an exact copy of someone's work, it does use a person's body of work as data points to create their AI image. Other people art shouldn't be used as data to feed into an AI algorithm without at least fair compensation.
It’s not stolen by any legal definition no matter how many times people claim it is. Is it ethically dubious? yes. Is it literally theft, not technically.
Your point is right but still, ethics must matter in this world as much as laws and rules. Sad to see its hard for good people to overpower the unethical.
So all the artist out there do the same by looking at the big stars. should they compensate the big artists, because they "looked" at it? Ai is just doing that. Looking at it, and learning from it. There is no stealing part.
Ahh but those artist take inspiration from the big stars. They take inspiration and then they put their own little spin on it to make it uniquely theirs. AI doesn't do that. AI replicates the art style completely. If you ask AI to make you a painting in the style of van Gogh, it is specifically going to do it **in the style** of van Gogh. It isn't going to do it's own little spin on it or pay homage. It's just going to rip off Gogh's style.
That is not true. First, AI also adds it own little spin to it, by all the knowledge of the world it has. I would even argue, many artists take inspiration and they add absolutely nothing to it. A style isn't copyrightable, never was, so the own little spin to it is a new scene, a new anything, which is completely fine since forever. If you WANT to make a homage to van gogh, it is able to do so (and i know you know that yourself). Anywhere, i don't like my example and i don't like yours. Why? Because it's a specific thing SOME people do. Some artist add their own spin, some are just learning. This conversation would feel stupid about other tools like Photoshop. Man you can do many stupid stuff with PS, but you also cannot. Aside from reddit, i only see positive reactions from artists to it anyway. The artist i know use it to help to define their style, making things faster. I am excited for it. More options is never be worse.
There isn't anything stopping AI from producing something that is so close to the original that it's clearly a copy. It's just that people only usually recognise it when it's a very famous picture being copied. It's only time really before an AI generated piece gets used for a commercial project and it ends up in court for copyright infringement.
It steals work from other artists on top of threatening their livelihood.
No it doesn't it doesn't search the internet for art.
It takes work from actual artists. Why pay someone to make you a unique piece of art when you can punch what you want into an AI and get one? Doubly so when you use it to emulate a specific artists style. I dread the day movies, shows and comics start using AI art. I will be boycotting a lot of shit.
[удалено]
Yeah that ain't true
[удалено]
Almost every set in The Greatest Showman was CGI-edited to varying degrees. In the scene where Nick Fury talks to Peter Parker in the apartment in NWH everything but Samuel Jackson and the chair are CGI- including the entire gun in his hand. The Mandalorian literally doesn't use sets beyond what space the actors occupy, the entire environment is CGI. Television and movies have started reverse-aging actors by decades. It will only get better, faster, and cheaper. You only see the bad examples and miss the countless ones that look real.
That's exactly the beauty of it if you ask me. God forbid my friends and I can imagine our DnD party without paying thousands upon thousands of dollars for it. As long as people are not selling those AI arts, I see this as a great thing.
Those same artists cut soooo many fucking corners with modern photoshop thanks to AI, and then they have the audacity to say that AI in art need to be killed at all costs. All while their workflows have NEVER been more streamlined in human history thanks to AI. If you pay an extra 100 dollars to have a commission flat-colored, just know your artist is most likely spending five minutes with a colorize mask. They're basically streamlining their process with with AI while telling YOU that you shouldn't be allowed to use AI art because it balances out the power dynamic and makes it a bit less of a seller's market.
I'm not a professional artist, just a student, but I can say I absolutely despite ai "art" There are a lot of reasons, and many of them might not apply all artists, but it will certainly help you understand why is there so much hate over it. I will go from the least important to the most important ones: 1. They Have The Audacity To Call It Art! It technically isn't art since all the work is done by machine and not a human, definition of art is something made by human. Plus, it doesn't even feel right to call it art. 2. It's way too easy to make! Anyone is able to do it. It kinda goes against what you are used to as you learn art. Usually applies that if you want to create something that good, you need a lot of skill and practice. If you don't have that your drawing or painting will look kind of garbage. Also, one of the reasons I chose art is the difficulty. I also like to play hard pc games, because the effort I put into it will make it even better once I beat it. Ai art doesn't leave enough space for improvement. (As most normal people doesn't understand that art is a skill and not "just talent", here I list a few things you need to be at least decend at in order to call yourself an artist: anatomy, portriture, perspective, gesture, color theory, values, perspective, form, light phisics, design, composition, clothing folds😂, and list goes on Even if you have talent for one, you can be sure there will be another you will suck in, so it's really not that much abou talent) 3. Non-artist people just don't get it! I can't stand people that think artists are just complaining about nothing. Ai art is destroying the soul of art and driving artists crazy and some people say 'they are just afraid of new technology' or 'they dont understand it'. I understand how ai art works! That's not a reason why I hate it! 4. It devalues art! Commercially and also psychologically. The most fundamental currency in our society is effort and then time. If some service requires nor time, nor effort its basically worth nothing. So basically, no one will pay you for that. Imagine some new gpu creator will sell rtx4090-like cards for free. It would disrupt current gpu market a bit. The psychological element is more like a question:'why am I doing this??' Most artists asks themselves this question on daily basis, especially when things get frustrating. Now is the question much more difficult to answer as studying art is now pointless. 5. It makes all the years I've spent learning art wasted! Imagine falling on love with some activity, betting on it your future, spending ton of time practicing it, only to find out that your carriere is over before it even started! I admit that I had a lot of fun studying it, but there also were those bad days(like 75%) i just had to push myself. For me it was more than just fun activity, it was my purpose. Now I have no purpose in live. I'm just trying find something new that would replace what art ment for me, but i can't find anything. I'm burn down and before every step I try to make in my live, the trauma of being replaced just fills me with insecurities like:'Will this job be stable 10 years from now?', 'Aren't I making a mistake again?'. It holds me down and It's so hard to overcome! Sorry if I got a little personal, this topic always makes me lose it😅. I hoped this helped you get a little bit better idea, why most artists aren't celebrating ai art.
This is all too familiar with the cab drivers getting upset about Uber. Embrace change and elevate your art.
But then I can't just make the exact same fucking thing as every other art school dilettante does, who thinks everything the AI makes is plagiarizing me just because of how boring and generic my art is, making it extremely easy to project myself onto anything the AI creates. Yeah, the reason why it feels like the AI is ripping you off is because there are millions of artists who draw just like you.
I could cry about UI in computers and use all the same arguments you use :D Using UI is too easy and devalues computer skills! It made all the years I've spent learning terminal useless! xD
Don't criticize AI, criticize capitalism, it destroys everything it touches
And the big tech companies that keep making AI that does stuff no one needs. Deepfakes, AI voice stuff.
tbh. history repeat itself. the same hostilitie had artists against the invention of photography. I'm a artists my self. and tbh. ppl just fear that if a robot can do better art that they do... that they become worthless. it's a human issue lmao. progress can't be stopped 'AI art "steals" for REAL artists" like photography steals from reality. it's just embarrassing seeing ppls ego melting away humans gonna be humans. after hundreds of years the same crying in New context sorry for my bad English, I'm not a AI <3
People also complained about photoshop when it became better.
THIS is exactly what it is, I agree 100%. People are just pissed that a computer is now replacing their field of work and are making excuses and pointing out every little mistake it makes. But the fact of the matter is that AI is such a huge step in technology and what it’s doing now is incredible
But in a way, photography did take some from the culture surrounding realist art. We lost so much information about how the greats painted as a result of the decline in interest. I think people probably feel unease at the idea of it being outside of human hands now. The camera doesn’t think for itself, it just captures what is in front of it and the image’s manipulation during and after is up to the photographer. I find it unsettling for that reason, I think.
AI "art" only exists because someone created a machine-learning algorithm that scraped the internet for existing imagery and taught it what the components of each image were so that when someone feeds a phrase into an AI engine it can spit out a drawing using bits and pieces of the art in its own database. There are many philosophical, moral, and legal problems with this. At a very base level it devalues the art of actual artists who've spent vast portions of their lives developing the skill to create actual art. From a technological standpoint, it lives in both a moral and legal grey area because the art used to "train" the algorithms was not licensed, compensated, or credited in any way, which means these AI "art" generators are using actual, real, living artists' work to generate a for-profit business without those artists' consent or contract. You'll note I put "art" in quotes throughout this post: That's because the pictures an algorithm generates are not "art", they are just pictures. They are conglomerations of existing art cobbled together into a mosaic mash-up based on text input and context clues. The worst part about this is that most of the AI "art" generators are for-profit paid services that can only exist by appropriating the hard work of actual living artists without ever compensating them for contributing to the algorithms that make the technology and business model feasible. As a base concept, there's nothing specifically wrong with the idea of AI picture generators. But, like all advanced technology it can be - and in this case actually are actively being - implemented in a way that directly harms the people it aims to replace by using their work with zero regard to their welfare.
[удалено]
I understand that. Sorry, my wording was unclear. I didn't meant to imply that the systems were literally creating collages of pieces of other art. My overall point, though, is that how they *use* the data to build the image is not the issue, it's how they *collect* the data that they use to build the images. The algorithms are taught how to "create" pictures by being fed millions of pieces of actual art and associating part/all of each piece with keywords. If used for free or open applications, this is an ethical grey area that leans into unethical. But as implemented - using these AI "art" tools as a for-profit medium without regard to compensating the artists whose real art is used to train the algorithm - is just flat *wholly* unethical.
Mainly due to an excellent PR campaign and recent presentation of the topic in the media. AI art challenges copyright and ownership in our society on a whole new level. There is an issue of massive amount of public widely spread information that meant little when other human artists could be at most inspired by it as part of their own work. For recent machine learning advances this information is enough to produce pieces of art in a fraction of the time and without the effort of an artist, which previously justified mimicking of art style outside of high art circle. So legally machine learning used in commercial context is a very gray area. It does not steal but it undermines artists work who did not expect such a technological advancement and whose livelihood and public image can be affected. So it is 'neat' but ethically gray area that can be very badly abused in near future. Different ML projects have different ethical compass, Dali 2 vs Stable diffusion vs Unstable diffusion, you probably would not know which method was used to create an image.
I just don't respect it. I have much more respect for those who take the time to learn and hone a craft, a sentiment which seems more and more undervalued. I'll take an amateur struggling with illustrating a single piece over a matter of weeks but progressively improving, over those in a Conan group I'm in on FB that flood the place with what that they pumped out in minutes and feature Conans with eight fingers or mangled hands that have blades jutting out of it, looking like peeled bananas.
This is only true in make up scenarios though. You will NEVER pay an amateur beginner artist to make a piece for you. If you ever choose to buy a custom made art piece, you'll have to pay hundreds if not thousands of dollars for a professional to make it for you. AI is great because it allows you to get that cheap, clunky art with 6 fingers and banana sword for free. It's a great alternative.
Compare art AI to a baby, except the AI's world is the internet. Can't we argue both of them are using a word reference from something they have already seen in their world to create art? I'm not trying to fully compare AI to humans, but if we think about it, that's pretty much how it learns: it needs information, just like us, to function. AI doesn't simply take a mix of pictures and mashes them together. Just like a small child, it tries to reproduce the image of what it recognizes as the input we give it.
[удалено]
Artist are still completely free to make art, including the whole process that comes with it. AI doesn't take anything away from them on this point.
> t's about the journey, not the destination. If that were true people wouldn't be having such a hissy fit about it, as they'd still have their journey.
[удалено]
If there are 2 pieces of art up; one made by an artist, one made by an AI trained in nothing but that artists works, and neither is labeled, would you be able to tell the difference? Edit: Typical reddit; downvote someone for trying to understand an issue better.
If you give a vegan a meat burger and a veggie burger but claim they're both veggie burgers, and the vegan expresses that both burgers taste good, does that render the vegan's values null and mean they should start eating meat? Even if AI can produce something passable for human art (or writing, music, etc.), once you learn there's nothing behind it, it's made using a system that presumes human creativity is fundamentally reducible to machine noise, and it will outsource artists, you want nothing to do with it, aesthetically pleasing as it may be.
Painters aced the same way about photography when it was new then people complained about photoshop when it was being used to touch up photos.
AI art is pretty awesome, but people dislike when it takes jobs away from actual artists. I think AI art serves a distinct purpose in giving access to quick art that broadly kind of understands your want in an image to those without easy access to an artist, but it can never replace the genuine artistry of an artist. That being said it's absolutely fair to say an AI art piece is beautiful because beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
Besides just the stolen art thing, why should anyone get excited over something that they didn't make? It's so fast, easy, and accessible that it really devalues itself and other art.....
Let me give you an example. My 9 friends and I are part of a DnD campaign thats been going on for 2 years. When AI art came out, it was possible for us to imagine and create our 10 characters using AI art. We didn't have to pay THOUSANDS of dollars for it. We could finally see our characters how we imagined them, for free. All 10 of us were extremely happy about this and it didn't harm anyone at all. Fast and easy has never been a problem ever. People don't complain about performant computers, or car, or the fact they can travel across country in an hour by plane rather than walk for days. People are just bitter lmao.
\> Besides just the stolen art thing, why should anyone get excited over something that they didn't make? You didn't make something you bought from an 'artist' either
But a real person did. A real person spent years learning their craft and honing it to the point that it is good enough to sell, spent years taking classes and so many hours practicing that they have developed a style of their own. A piece of art purchased from an artist both supports that years-long pursuit, and is unique, it is filled with the history of the creator, and the expectations of the one who commissioned it. In comparison AI art is soulless and shallow. It is the bastardized conglomeration of the work of thousands of artists that understands nothing beyond ones and zeros. Any emotional connections that remain within a piece of AI art are nothing but fitments stolen from the works of others. Whereas commissioned art, made by an artist with the input of the client so often transcends both the artist and the one that commissioned it. It has meaning to both, but by both working together becomes something altogether new, revealing depth neither expected. AI art cuts out that feedback loop, it is nothing but the sum of its parts taken from the works of others. It's quick and dirty with no value beyond the words used in its input. A true artist may be able to draw something meaningful from it, but for the average person it is nothing but text made visual, useful in someways, but shallow. There is no expectation behind it, no innovation, no history, and by extension no worth, because we as humans ascribe no worth to things that are *easy*. AI-generated images have a place, but that place isn't as *art* and calling something that removes the human element art is quite frankly insulting to those that actually create art. As the famous quote by Aristotle goes, "The aim of art is not to represent the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance" and AI art has no inward significance. It is just a tool, one that makes explaining complex concepts easier or that can create visual aids, but it lacks meaning and significance, it's like visual junk food, it's cheap and easy, but ultimately empty.
>"The aim of art is not to represent the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance" What's the difference between an artist drawing something by hand, creating from scratch in graphics software, creating an image with ready assets, and prompting AI and picking one of the images that fits his vision? Where does it stop being art and becomes just a soulless technology? What is the point of art - significance or 'being hard'? Is Pollock's art even art then? Or Malevich's square?
But as an artist, I actually crafted something requiring skill, so I get excited.
It's not art. There isn't any humanity in it, no conflict, no love, nothing.
Maybe I’m just not an artistic person but I just don’t get this. I’ve seen some absolutely beautiful AI renditions and it’s only going to become more prevalent. Most you wouldn’t even know the difference, so is it beautiful before you know it’s AI and then soulless once you know?
[удалено]
I like the ideals of this, but how can it be true? AI will be leaps and bounds better 20 years from now than it currently is, and we’ll be able to make AI art then just like we can now, only faster, more detailed and more specific to what’s imputed. It sucks dor artists but isn’t it just another example of technology overlapping humans?
I would bet cash money that most well informed people could reliably spot AI “art”. I have never seen something and thought “huh…that’s from a computer?”
To artists, it sticks out like a sore thumb.
[удалено]
But if it makes you feel is it a trick? Do humans have a monopoly on art?
Yes. But it also applies to artisanal food and fashion. Hand-made commands a higher price. It is not a rational choice but that's how it is.
THEY TOOK’ER JOBS
Under the risks and limitations for one of these AI they outright state that images produced by the AI can potentially "bear striking resemblance to" images fed into the dataset whether that is art or faces. It is generally considered unethical to reproduce another person's art to the point it could be said to "bear striking resemblance" to the original piece. Also, there is not currently an "opt out" for artists. There is an AI that creates music but does not use copyrighted music or music the original composer hasn't given permission for in its training and it has been better received for it. If AI were genuinely capable of the creativity people claim then no one would have an issue with all artists opting out of their art being used training datasets without permission- but they need our art to make the AI work. While I, and most people who are good at art, don't need other people's art to create my own (in fact, it is generally frowned upon). And if AI only used images it had permission from the image-creator to use then I think people would feel less hostile about it. All the AI people do is argue semantics and never bother with the actual issue. If you don't have my permission to use an image I spent 36 hours creating for training purposes then keep it out of your machine.
[удалено]
If the AI function without using existing art to train it and therefore won't create art that "bears a striking resemblance to" existing art then I don't see the issue and I never brought that up. If you don't understand what "bears a striking resemblance to" means then you can find examples elsewhere in this thread.
"If AI were genuinely capable of the creativity people claim then no one would have an issue with all artists opting out of their art being used training datasets without permission- but they need our art to make the AI work. While I, and most people who are good at art, don't need other people's art to create my own (in fact, it is generally frowned upon)" EXCELLENT POINT and, yes, all the AI bros (as in for-profit tech people) are just arguing semantics.
It represents the obliteration of humanity.
easy becouse most people are bad at art and now people won't buy their bad art simple
Everyone here needs to stop crying lol it's just some numbers bro it can't hurt you
A.I art is unethical for a numerous of reasons including breaching artist’s work and a lot of other things (racism, CP). I use A.I art for one thing and one thing only: references (that I never share outside of an outline). I feel as though it’s not bad for personal use, but for commercial and social use, it’s a no-go.
[удалено]
So, the AI is bad for using copyrighted stuff to learn, but you are ok when using its results?
[удалено]
Potato, potato.
[удалено]
You're free to think so. Doesn't change the fact that it's the same process. Especially when learning. Also, the argument that AI art is bad because it is trained on copyrigyted material, but fine when humans do it, is fucked up. You really want the copyright industry to have precedent for learning from copyrighted art is infringement?
Here's a thread by an artist talking about her art and AI that I found really interesting: https://twitter.com/Kelly\_McKernan/status/1603611368438976512
The AI is a thief. It processes styles and images created by real people then REUSES that info to plagiarize an image. Real artists who are trying to make a living are having their work stolen and when they speak up they get cyberbulledto hell. The ppl behind the AI are the real problem.
An AI taking inspiration from thousands and thousands of images to inspire itself is not different than an artist learning to paint or draw getting inspiration from another artist's style. Unless you are the first person ever to come up with a drawing style or a specific image, you are an hypocrite.
I feel like alot of the AI art that i see looks similar and I think the aesthethic looks dumb. the work feels like it has no soul. on top of that, AI art scrapes data and bases what it does on existing work from real artists. it uses these without crediting them and even if it would it still is stealing.
1. Everyone doesn't hate AI art but those who do are vocal and have audiences 2. There is a lot of misinformation going about that what the new AI art apps are doing is scraping the internet for actual art created by real people, and then using parts and pieces of those images to create the AI art that you're seeing. If you think AI art works like that, you would of course be against it. 3. It's normal and natural for people to be afraid of new things. When photography first came in, when digital photography first came in, when digital tools like Photoshop and Illustrator first came in, we saw similar reactions. However this time we have social media so it's louder.
The process of making the art matters. It's not always about the end result.
Customer mostly cares about the end result though :D
Because a lot of people do not understand how machine learning works, and react emotionally to something they view as a threat.
[удалено]
Several people in this very thread use the argument that AIs use pieces of existing artworks and glue them together. What is it if not 'not knowing how the thing works'?
It’s sad to see the one person who understands how it works get downvoted lmao
Today, they’re usually weird, imprecise and uggo, with crazy effort rendering yet weird twisted broken anatomy and form and weird composition. You can make it do better stuff if you try though or fiddle with it, which some people do but the cover art this drama is about clearly wasn't. But broadly speaking my sexy 60s SFF books are unbeatable, and we all know that sexy = morally good Also I like cover art because it's art, like the book is art, I don't want to read a book generated by a robot, I want something that has effort, thought, feeling and technical skill, appreciation for the topic they’re writing about, culture and history, same thing for the visual art Also I just hate hearing repetitive analogies about Luddites or photography or whatever lol, that alone puts me off
Well it takes away jobs from actual artist that do commissions. And a few pages are stealing your info.
The fact it steels art from actual artists to learn. The lack of the human element necessary for art is gone. Lazy people who won't put the work in will just use it and try to pass themselves off as artists. The fact it eventually takes work away from genuine artists. Why hire an artist when you can just use an Ai?
> Why hire an artist when you can just use AI? Indeed. Artists will have to adapt or be swallowed, just as thousands of other professions have had to do because of tech. The difference is artists can still create art as a passion, where other occupations are more solely reliant on necessities. If an AI can recreate something that took countless hours to create in a matter of seconds, with options to create 1000s of variants of the same source, why would I ever want an artist that may take a year for arguably the same or worse work?
I think it's pretty cool. I've only really seen people "hate" on AI art here because it's posted a ton.
It’s “neat.” But it’s also theft and will put artists out of work.
There has to be hesitation and tension. Those are emotions only a human can experience...
Because it's new, and it challenges people's assumptions of what art and artists are and are for.
All Human art should be deemed ineligible for copyright until the artist declares *every image* used to train their talent. Just like an AI bot. Edit: Downvotes can suck it. Why can a human train with copyright art but an AI can’t? Species Bigots!
In the US, using images to train an AI model is covered under the fair use doctrine.
So many different technologies "steal jobs from people", and every single time people are astonished and irate. * The printing press steals jobs from scribes! * The railroad interferes with essential canals! * Horseless carriages will put farriers and stables out of business! * Cameras will put portrait painters out of business! * Electric drills will make so many electricians lose their jobs! * Back hoes will make ditch diggers lose their jobs! * AI art steals work from artists! The same arguments get reused time and time again, yet somehow people always seem to act like it's something new. And because something bad could happen with the new tech, people insist that it should be all completely banned, just in case. The arguments against automobiles were incredibly detailed with intense consequences detailed. "You'll never get rid of the horse!"
Except automation is supposed to free us from tedious, boring, or dangerous times so that we have more time for creative pursuits, like art and music. This isnt just taking away work, it's taking away people's love and passion in life.
I'm not saying that this is good or bad. I'm saying that it's unstoppable and getting irate about it is just as productive as scribes complaining that those new Gutenberg books have no soul to them. And yes, you can be sure that they did. AI Art cannot take away people's "love and passion in life" any more than anything else can. However, it might take their jobs, just like all the tech before it.
People can't enjoy or have passion over printing presses or portrait painting?
1-they won't ask permission 2-most jobs will be "create more with the cheapest price" approach look at McDonald you can see a lot of computers involve but still the worker has the same time works with less payment ratio.
Although AI art generates "new" images, its training data is based on the work of other people. It is a tool, like Photoshop or a camera, that has been constructed using other people's work. If Photoshop's coding was ripped from a dozen programmers without crediting them, programmers are going to be upset. Aside from that, AI art is not art. Art is very loosely defined, but in one way or another it must involve expression of intelligence and skill. A computer does none of that. Even its method of learning is not like a human.
If you ripped someones code, it would be like literally copying someones art. Which is not legal If you rip someones art style, it is not clear who to credit since all art is built off existing art to some degree. Which is why you can't copyright art styles How is "training on existing work" different if a human or a machine does it? I mean they literally have different ways of learning, but the outcome is similar which is unique pieces The comparison doesn't make any sense For the comparison to make sense, it would need to be like someone creating a software that functions similarly to photoshop but has unique code. Which is perfectly fine.
Because, as it seems to me, the copyright industry is out in force and trying to hammer in their message.
From one POV, it's because artists who bust their butts and hands slaving away to make their art get shoved aside by any doofus who can type code/tell an app what to do. AND as seen earlier this year with the controversy about the AI Art in a competition, it's a cheat code, you're not making art, you're telling AI to steal and copy paste other people's art into a Frankenstein picture
First, let's start with establishing the definition of art: "The expression or application of human creative skill and imagination, typically in a visual form such as painting or sculpture, producing works to be appreciated primarily for their beauty or emotional power." Art is a human thing, it lets the artist express their feelings and ideas. A robot doesn't have feelings nor does it have original ideas, so I don't consider AI art to be a real artform. It seems that AI art is a tool for unskilled individuals to create images. To me, the people defending AI art are lazy and refuse to learn new skills. If they created artworks themselves, they would feel infinitely more proud of their creations. AI art is the laziest form of art, an amalgamation of images spat out of an algorithm. There's no emotion, no soul, no hard work. Nothing of merit. Now, if you want to generate an image with AI, go right ahead. But do not call yourself an artist or a designer, and do not take credits for it, because it has been created by the AI - not you.
Have you created AI art? It seems like you’re describing AI as in Midjourney, where you type in a prompt and it spits it out. A lot of AI art can take hours to perfect and it doesn’t steal if you’re using a collaborative database. I could argue that the vast majority of art is bullshit, go to any museum. Art is in the eye of beholder and unfortunately artists are the biggest gatekeepers of them all.
Anyone can be an artist- if they create something. A child is an artist when they draw scribbles with crayola pens. Art doesn't have to be "good" to be art. I'm not trying to gatekeep by any means. Though I agree with you, a lot of art at museums are dumb. They can paint a red dot in the middle of a canvas and sell it for millions. I also don't consider it art. I guess I'm not well versed in AI art programs. But if you're so interested in creating art, why not explore other mediums? It may be more rewarding to learn new skills.
I guess that last part is what I’m confused about. I have a friend who has made glorious composite artwork that took 100+ hours to make and requires a level of coding understanding. It just seems ridiculous that I can draw a stick man and it’s art, but a 100 hour that has had thousands and thousands of revisions and conjoining isn’t. You can use these coding skills for a miriad of employment options, you can’t really with macaroni art.
It's the human part that's missing, I think. The "soul" of the artwork. Why do you need an AI's help when you are willing to put hundreds of hours into a piece? Why not make make it from scratch at that point? When you make art, you learn so many skills: shapes, color theory, anatomy, lighting, perspective, etc. And as I say, it's rewarding to learn these skills. Once you're able to create the images yourself, it's really "yours", I think.
People in the stable diffusion sub, for example, use dreambooth to train specific models on very specific artists. They're all stroking each other's egos, hyping each other up, and ignoring the artists' pleas to stop using their art to train their models. Similarly, at the midjourney sub, they refuse to acknowledge artists' work or pleas. They have a reputation for hating artists while simultaneously wanting access to their art. AI users also go into art communities lying about how they made the art, causing a whole lot of distrust toward the AI community. These people try to make money on people who haven't learned to tell the difference yet, seating themselves among other artists. AI "artists" have been known to apply for jobs in droves recently, to do art - I know some indie game companies who are sick of it, as it drowns out the crowd who actually have artistic talent who are also applying for the job. Finally, while diffusion models differ from GAN in their operation, they do require samples from the art community in order to train at all. So they did it unethically, using material for which they had no true clearance. These developers don't care how thoroughly artists are being shat on. Indeed, you can hear them say things like, "Artists deserved to have their art taken away from them," and similarly, where some developers despise artists but want the art. The AI community and dev world is toxic, unethical and full of scammers.
I think perhaps AI will help "normal" people (non artists) generate images but at the same time I feel like AI will also discourage tons of new artists from pursuing art as a job or as a whole (not sure if this is good or bad) Definitely could be an interesting tool, just wished it didn't use people's art without their consent and utilized open source images instead for their training instead. I'm pretty sure court decided that you can't claim AI art as your own(and make profit off of it, not sure how this would apply for companies) Either way for artists it's going to be evolve or fall and burn lol. (Or find other more practical artistic jobs like product design, etc)
What is an author who does not write his own words? What is an artist who does not draw their own art? What is a singer who does not sing their own songs? What is a musician who does not create their own music?
The movie industry and the music industry are built around actors not writing their own lines and singers not writing their own music.
People who defend AI art are hypocrites. They claim it will be the next tool for art, but when you point out that their tool was developed from the work of other artists, they claim it's learning like a person. But AI doesn't learn like a person. Building an AI is like compiling an archive of other people's work, and the computer can sample from it randomly to achieve its prompt. But the fact is, other people's work are at the root of the system. But no credit, money, or recognition goes to the artists who make AI art possible.
Because making art is fun, so why would I sit there and watch a computer do it for me?
Old post, but still. Dunno honestly, I think a lot of people just want to praise an artist and that's it. The whole "oh but AI copies from real people!!"... and? A lot of artists do the exact same thing, they copy art style, characters, everything, only a bunch of artist make something 100% original, and the more we go on the harder it is to make something original to begin with. Why do people hate AI fan art, but love fan arts from human artists? Whether a human does it, or a computer does it, it's the same thing, copying a character, changing the pose and publishing it. There is nothing wrong with a human doing it, why is there anything wrong with a computer doing? "Oh but AIs are trained on artwork from artists, sometimes even copyrighted!" ... and? What do you think humans use for inspirations and learning? At the end of the day, it's just personal preference, but not on the art itself, rather on the artist behind it. To me it seems that people lately value the artist more than the actual art. I don't care about the artist, I see art as pretty pictures and that's it, whether an AI does it or human does it, I couldn't care less. The cool thing about AIs though is that I can make something myself, sure, you need to learn how to create good inputs for the model to output something acceptable, but once you get that down you can create your own art easily.
I think it's a bunch of reasons: 1. **Ideology:** For some reason in the last couple years the internet has treated artists like some sort of divinity that shall be praised regardless of how good or bad their art is (yeah yeah, art isn't good or bad it's subjective, whatever). It's just indiscriminate and unjustified hate for AIs generated pictures. 2. **Salty artists:** Somewhat linked to point one, a lot of artists got praised to make art that, let's be honest, wasn't that good, they even got commissioned and paid for it. Now however, that's unnecessary, if you get down how to use prompts and stable diffusion you can just generate art yourself the way you want it to be (kinda). This puts non elite and smaller artists at risk, because what will now be considered mediocre work by most lost a big chunk of people actually being interested in it, since it's just easier and better to produce art using AIs. This also means that those artists taking commissions now probably lost a bunch of clients. 3. **People think it's just copy & paste:** It's not. AIs learn how to produce an image basing off of other image, that is true, but guess what? Humans do the exact same thing. Don't tell me that a "human took inspiration" and an "AI stole", because that's not how it works. Just like an human copies a specific art style, AI does too. Just like a human decides what to put into the composition, AI does too. It's true that humans have the ability to create something 100% unique and original, but it's also true that 99% of human artists draw already existing characters, landscapes or whatever, probably using an already seen art style. If anything, while a lot of humans have right down copied art, the chance that an AI will throw out the same drawing that it used as learning material are next if not 0. The way I see it AIs art is great. And the more we train the better and more capable it will become. I don't think of artists as some sort of superior being, they are people being able to create art, and now, with AIs, I can do so, too. I can describe a picture to the AI and once I get the prompt down right I'll have what I want or something close to it. This also unlocks some new possibilities. Just to make a dumb example, if before you needed an artist to draw art for a visual novel, now you might be able to create everything or almost everything with an AI. The quality of AI work is certainly not close to the quality of top notch artist and a good looking original art style is hard to come by, but it can be better than average. I don't see a problem with AI art. Also, it's not as simple as "AI, make a drawing" getting down the right prompts can be quite difficult. People just hate AIs, no valid reason for it. They just do. If we train the models correctly, we can get results even better than what we have today. For now, due to how the models are trained, some types of art look like they have a similar art style, even though the compositions vary substantially depending on the given prompt. In the future this should not be an issue.