Online art communities begin banning AI-generated images

https://waxy.org/2022/09/online-art-communities-begin-banning-ai-generated-images/

by hardmaru • 4 years ago

303 344 4 years ago

waxy.org

DefineOutside2• 4 years ago

They should also ban creating digital art, as digital art takes less effort than paper.

matkoniecz4• 4 years ago

And art using paper rather than doing proper stone carvings.

KaoruAoiShiho2• 4 years ago

All those are segregated...

shishy• 4 years ago

I don't think that's really fair... I can see the argument for removing AI generated stuff in part because it doesn't require technical artistic skill (whereas digital art still does, in your ability to observe, draw with perspective, etc.)

polygamous_bat2• 4 years ago

But that can easily lead to a slippery slope since it requires more technical skill to make physical art than digital (for one, you can't "undo" anything in physical world.) Where do we draw the line?

Secondly, it will just become more and more subtle as art softwares will subtly repackage such AI tools into their art software packaging. I am willing to bet anything Adobe is already employed an army already to figure out how to do so. How would you tackle that?

tiborsaas• 4 years ago

So if I skillfully combine multiple AI generated images it's stops being art? What's the difference between someone only using that vs. someone taking parts form random images found in Google image search? The latter very common among digital artists.

nottorp3• 4 years ago

as digital art takes less effort than paper.

Hmm I've seen someone draw/paint on both paper and an iPad. It didn't look to me that she was much faster on digital. But then it was original art not copies of something.

DefineOutside2• 4 years ago

probably should have said photographs, as photographs are more similar to AI art than computer generated art is

cthalupa3• 4 years ago

To be clear: I fully think that digital art is art.

But it is a lot less effort in a lot of ways. If I'm painting in Photoshop or Krita, I have layers. I can adjust blending modes. I can move them up and down. I can easily ctrl+z a mistake. I can rotate my workspace quickly and easily in ways that would be difficult with physical media. I can easily find the color I want without having to purchase more paints and blend them, or colored pencils, or whatever. I can create brushes and variations on them to match my style. I can go on with dozens of other things.

I happen to think all of that is a good thing, and don't know that comparing digital art to AI generated art is a good analogy, but digital art 100% makes many things you do in art easier.

nurbl• 4 years ago

If you are a "digital art" community, clearly you have already accepted some digital tools.

I do think it makes logical sense to try and ban "AI" art if it is not what the community is interested in. It's likely not just about pretty images. They might value the mental process, the individual's style, progression, techniques, and yes, the effort. Someone coming in with generated images expecting to be treated the same is to me a bit like commissioning art from someone else, and then presenting that as your own. The images might be great, but it's not in the spirit of the community. There must be tons of "AI" focused communities for that.

I suppose they will eventually fail at resisting this, but that's another matter.

RcouF1uZ4gsC• 4 years ago

Left unchecked, it’s not hard to imagine AI art crowding out illustrations that took days or weeks for someone to make.

This reminds me of what someone from the 1800's would say:

"If left unchecked, it is not hard to imagine photography crowding out paintings that took days or weeks for someone to make."

Or several thousand years ago when the pottery wheel was invented.

Or when humans learned to cast metals instead of having to chisel stone.

Art is the expression of human creativity. Art transcends the medium. In addition, making art more accessible to more people is a good thing.

There are probably a lot of people who did not consider themselves artists, but with creative use of prompts and img-to-img can actually create stunning works. That is a good thing, not a bad thing.

diydsp• 4 years ago

"If left unchecked, it is not hard to imagine photography crowding out paintings that took days or weeks for someone to make."

Today photography and illustration are segregated. Which is what these artist communities are establishing.

SicSemperUranus• 4 years ago

It depends what the point is. You wouldn't let a motorcycle participate in a horse race. I think there's a place for AI art and it's fine if "manual art" remains the same. The difference can be arbitrary at times, but art often is.

bryanrasmussen• 4 years ago

This reminds me of what someone from the 8 years from now will say

if this is left unchecked I also will be out of a job like those useless artists all were.

Natsu2• 4 years ago

I don't think artists will be out of demand any more than fast food has made people stop eating out.

I do think it will cannibalize the lower end of art such that it becomes like working at a fast food joint, though.

biftek3• 4 years ago

There are probably a lot of people who did not consider themselves artists, but with creative use of prompts and img-to-img can actually create stunning works

That doesn't make anyone an artist just like filling in a coloring book doesn't. You're following rigid guidelines and given a very small amount of creative choice. I get it, it's a very powerful feeling watching a computer approximate a prompt to great effect but it's not artistry.

nonbirithm2• 4 years ago

"If left unchecked, it is not hard to imagine photography crowding out paintings that took days or weeks for someone to make."

The difference I see is that photographers don't try to pass off their works as bona fide paintings without telling anyone. Even if they did, it's usually easier to discern whether something is a painting or a photograph than with AI, because there's usually no need to aim for replicating the exact look of a photograph in a painting.

AI artists submit their work as digital art, and this distinction is far harder to make owing to the sheer sophistication of the former. The problem is that both use the medium of digital art, but the provenance is different, so there is still a desire to classify them differently. And as discussed, the huge output of these programs makes the need more urgent.

The interesting questions in this debate to me involve asking what happens when you take the humanity out of art creation, and how the underlying humans will react to that. Even photographers have to use their legs to go outside, train their eyes to find something interesting and press the shutter button with a fleshy finger, all while having the final output able to be visualized in the process. I'm not sure if "art" has ever been decoupled from humanity at this large of a scale in human history before, and that could signal a significant cultural shift if so.

The cultural implications of someone or something being associated with "AI" will outstrip any advancements in technology. Many artists are revered because of the culture surrounding them, not just the specific combination of paints they slathered on a canvas. It is that culture that I think will undergo turbulent changes as a result of the clashes between technologists and the larger art world.

If the culture decides that AI-generated art is plagiarism, then this debate will never end.

Also, asking "what prompt did you use" is probably going to become an insult with the implied intent of dehumanizing its target in the near future, when applied to certain art spheres.

Janicc• 4 years ago

It's going to be interesting to see how this is going to get enforced in the likely future in which AI art becomes in every way indistinguishable from human art.

Jevon232• 4 years ago

They can just focus on obvious cases: people that upload new images at an astounding rate, people who forget to remove the AI watermarks, and people who simply admit to using AI. No need to turn it into a witch hunt where you accuse everyone of using AI.

horsawlarway• 4 years ago

It will 100% turn into a constant witch hunt - I can absolutely promise it.

Want an easy reference? See First Person Shooter games.

Turns out that once the computer can mostly do the job, you will see:

1. Constant use of the computer for that job

2. Constant accusations of using the computer in places that restrict it.

See basically every online FPS community that exists. And that's with incredibly invasive software running on player machines explicitly to stop them from using the computer to play - and People both still do it (in HUGE numbers), and the communities constantly bitch about the "rampant cheating".

TheMaskedCoder2• 4 years ago

In the future we'll hire blade runners to find and destroy AI art

ortusdux• 4 years ago

Someone needs to make an AI art detector and name it Voight-Kampff. Ironically, it would be a great application for machine learning.

aero-glide2• 4 years ago

A lot of AI art is already indistinguishable. Mid Journey is especially artsy.

zeteo• 4 years ago

They're just tilting at windmills. It's already difficult enough to catch cheaters in chess, where there are, at most, a few dozen candidate moves in any position. This is a space with infinite candidate moves.

Best case scenario is that they catch a few people who have no idea how to create art otherwise. But, short of an exam-like proctoring system where art can only be created under complete supervision, I doubt there's anyone in the whole world who can reliably distinguish a creation that is 90% AI / 10% human from 100% human.

scarmig3• 4 years ago

I agree it will be hard or impossible to catch cheaters. But you get it backwards: AI generated art probably is more easily detectable. A chess game can be represented in a relatively small number of bytes, while artwork must represented with a much larger number. That means more opportunities to find an unintentional signal of provenance (e.g. artefacts that aren't readily noticeable to humans).

odessacubbage3• 4 years ago

until ai actually starts procedurally creating images with bespoke tools rather than blending pixels it will in fact be fairly easy to distinguish a made image from a generated one for the same reasons you can usually tell if someone painted over 3d or used a photo base. ai has a lot of dalle-isms and artifacts that i cannot see going away any time soon. on top of that you could simply require posted images to come with a process timelapse. heavypaint and a few other pieces of software already store those in the png data.

gonzo41• 4 years ago

Art takes effort. Training models and feeding them information takes effort. AI is not magic. Art is just getting another toolset.

YurgenJurgensen• 4 years ago

Building a motorbike from scratch by hand also takes effort, but we've universally agreed that that doesn't let you enter it into the Tour de France.

xani_5• 4 years ago

Sure you can, you will just have to push it

gspr• 4 years ago

How much effort? Do you discount for example accidental works of art?

biftek3• 4 years ago

Typing a prompt into DALLE does not take effort and it does not make you an artist. Don't kid yourself that the people generating art and submitting it to these sites are the same ones writing and training the AI.

filoleg2• 4 years ago

"Pressing a shutter button on your camera and tweaking a few parameters in settings does not take effort and it does not make one an artist."

I think we have established by now that photography is art, so your argument doesn't feel like it would stand the test of time much. Just like the photography one didn't.

advisedwang2• 4 years ago

They aren't banning AI art because because it doesn't take effort. They're banning it because once that work has been done, you can create a huge number of images which creates problems for the community.

tomatotomato37• 4 years ago

Yes, creating the actual ML model and curating it's input takes effort, a lot of it in fact. Taking someone else's ML model and shitting prompts into it does not

latchkey2• 4 years ago

Perfect. A huge niche opportunity to focus on an art community dedicated to AI generated images.

KaoruAoiShiho2• 4 years ago

There's one linked in the article, https://lexica.art/

throw_m2393393• 4 years ago

A huge niche opportunity

kind of an oxymoron. Why bother having an "art community" when one can just generate all the art at random themselves? That's the whole point of DALL-E and co, an endless stream of generated images... no need for a community for that.

latchkey2• 4 years ago

I think that is like saying digital cameras will never replace film.

Art is art.

Double_a_924• 4 years ago

It still takes some skill, patience and luck to get a pleasing result. If you try out DALL-E literally 99% of the images you get from naïvely trying some promts will be complete shite.

Kiro4• 4 years ago

Challenge accepted. How will they know?

Jevon232• 4 years ago

With the models that are available for public use today, there are still usually signs, particularly when it comes to drawings of humans.

Kiro4• 4 years ago

Sounds like a good opportunity for an "AI image detection"-as-a-Service.

coldcode2• 4 years ago

My normal artwork (digital) is 9000x9000 pixels up to about 14400x14400. Good luck getting any of them to make something bigger than 1024x1024. Sure, you can use Gigapixel to upres things, but in the end it's basically impossible to make a decent artwork using ML at the moment. I only use Dall-E for offbeat ideas for geometric abstractions, so far Stable Diffusion sucks for that purpose.

Of course when you upload at no one wants you to do the full resolution image; at 1024x1024 you might be able to fool people with something ML made.

I believe most of these models only use 1k images so they really can't make anything bigger yet. Maybe someday but not today.

onion2k2• 4 years ago

I believe most of these models only use 1k images so they really can't make anything bigger yet. Maybe someday but not today.

This is the sort of thing that changes incredibly quickly. I'd guess that a big chunk of the source data will be in 8K within a year or two.

Natsu2• 4 years ago

Have you seen the 'in-painting' technique yet? You can write prompts for each element of an image you want, erase the parts you don't like, position them on the canvas, and make SD fill in the blanks.

ryeguy_24• 4 years ago

They should also ban people that have seen more art than others as they may be inadvertently creating derivative artwork from their more thoroughly trained real neural network in their brain.

Purposely being facetious, but seriously, we will likely see more and more of these type of rules being applied to competitions or groups. It will be harder and harder to define the rules. At some point, it becomes moot. Did I draw it? Did my toddler? Was I on hallucinogens when I drew it? Did I use computer algorithms (filters) on any form of the digital art? If the intent is to preserve the "effort" that goes into art, fine, but that will be a really gray line. I guess it's all fine to have the rules, it's similar to the natural body building competition.

jxy• 4 years ago

How can they draw the line between AI and non-AI assisted art? What about a gaussian kernel filter? How about adding a saturation enhancer? How about putting a few of those together and let's play with the parameters a bit for fun?

advisedwang2• 4 years ago

Newgrounds: "not have the Art Portal flooded with computer-generated art"

DeviantArt: "complaining that their feeds are getting flooded"

Artstation: "the front pages are flooded with unmodified AI generated slop"

They're really worried about the volume that AI art scales. So they don't really have to chase down every image and decide if it's AI or not. They just need to stop users from throwing huge amounts of them, which is easy to detect.

nonbirithm2• 4 years ago

I contrast these reasons with the FurAffinity announcement from a week ago[0]:

AI art is a damn good learning tool, but it's taking everything it does from artists. It leeches on the time, effort, skill, energy an artist put into their work.
You can use tools like this to learn and try to come up with concepts to learn from. I have nothing wrong with that, but just adding it to an image gallery. The origin are questionable unlike, say, using a site specifically for royalty free images.
I stand with artists, not prompts.

[0] https://twitter.com/Dragoneer/status/1566900442650628096

imranq• 4 years ago

I agree that images only through AI should be removed from art sites.

The issue with AI art is that the only human contribution in those pieces is the creation of the prompt and the curation of the final image. Without sensory and experiential inputs of its own, AI can only interpolate between real images and styles. So an AI generated image doesn't add much artistic value since its not expressing any new deep truth or factual understanding of the real world.

Well isn't all art just a derivative of another piece? The issue with that statement is that art is fundamentally a communication from a human artist to a human viewer. At the level of AI prompt creation and curation, you act more like an art gallery owner rather than an artist, which doesn't communicate artistic values in the same way as does an original piece derived from the experiences, history, and skill of a human artist.

Dall-E 2, Stable Diffusion, should be used for inspiration and helping with minor elements of a piece, but someone passing off an AI generated image as part of their portfolio is disingenuous at best

Kiro4• 4 years ago

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

zasdffaa5• 4 years ago

People who are precious about art will keep defining it away from anything that upsets them.

adrian_b• 4 years ago

If you just want a beautiful or intriguing image to look at, an AI-generated image may happen to satisfy that need very well.

The same need can be satisfied with a photo of some natural things, e.g. living beings or minerals or places.

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

Whether an image is beautiful or not is not necessarily correlated with the involvement of a human in its creation, but its origin should nevertheless always be made clear.

zasdffaa5• 4 years ago

any new deep truth

What is a 'truth' in art. Also, what is a 'deep truth' specifically.

factual understanding of the real world

Can you name me a few factual understandings that art has brought.

sixstringtheory2• 4 years ago

"Truth" and "understanding" are both things that have changed throughout human history, they are not fixed. Art can be something that changes the way you understand the world, which would change your idea of what the truth is about reality.

I just rewatched Goodfellas the other day. No doubt that film brought a deeper understanding for many many people about mafia philosophy, history and events, and inspired more research (I went down a Wikipedia rabbit hole after watching it, myself). Dali's melting clocks might suggest a new way to conceive of time. I only dabble a little in science fiction, but my impression is that it has historically inspired plenty of scientific and engineering endeavors, including AI generated art (and I'm sure there are plenty of dystopians out there that may show how it could go wrong). Reading literature from everything between the ancients and contemporaries, I'm constantly finding things that parallel my current interpersonal challenges and give me new insights.

What is "truth" to you?

xani_5• 4 years ago

The issue with AI art is that the only human contribution in those pieces is the creation of the prompt and the curation of the final image. Without sensory and experiential inputs of its own, AI can only interpolate between real images and styles. So an AI generated image doesn't add much artistic value since its not expressing any new deep truth or factual understanding of the real world.

That kind of reasoning would throw entirety of Realism into "not art", because it is also not trying to express any artistic value. And there were arguments back then too

I guess whole debate about Realism could be just copy-pasted to discussion about AI arts...

Nursie• 4 years ago

I make all sorts of interesting stuff with DALL-E

I wouldn't have the temerity to claim it was art, or wholly my creation, though.

wccrawford2• 4 years ago

A lot of people do, though.

And even with more traditional art, a lot of people trace something and claim they made it themselves.

However, I do think it's art. Coming up with an idea and then a prompt to express that idea, and then curating the results... That's artistry. It's not traditional, of course.

And with img2img and in-painting, there's a lot more to creating a really good work than just a prompt and curation.

I have no problem calling this art. I'm still struggling with the ethics, though. I'm not sure how I really feel about it yet.

hericium• 4 years ago

The problem I see here is that ML-generated art may be based on real art.

While human painter may repeat style of fragments of work of other artist as homage, computer software does it more as plagiarism.

This isn't much different than issues surrounding Microsoft GitHub Copilot.

Kiro4• 4 years ago

And neither would constitute as plagiarism by the legal definition of it. Yes, it's a problem that they are trained on material without consent but what they produce is something totally new and not even close to plagiarism.

nottorp3• 4 years ago

what they produce is something totally new

It is? I may be cursed with a good memory but absolutely no "AI art" that my friends passed on to me looked original. In some cases it was painfully obvious what it's based on, in other cases it just felt like i've seen it before.

Legal it may be (although there will be conflicts about machine generated derivative works) but it's also boring.

People are just enthusiastic because it's "do it with a computer". If a young human artist came up with this stuff you'd tell them they're good technically but now they need to develop their own personality.

Nadya• 4 years ago

So is most real art. In fact - artists have even created a dedicated terms to this kind of plagiarism: "style study" or even "reference". You can look for this term on YouTube and find a nearly endless result of artists basing art off of the style of other artists. [0]

It is 100% legal for me to blatantly copy the artistic style of Ilya Kuvshinov. I could even sell such work as my own - because it would be. I'd be seen as a derivative or knock-off artist but it can be done. As far as I can tell the real issue is that the AI does it far better - and much faster - than people can. Creating heavily derivative works that, if nonfamiliar with Kuvshinov's work, could possibly be mistaken as being theirs.

That the AI has learned that artist signatures/watermarks are a "feature" of some artwork and so sometimes adds its own has only reinforced people's mistaken belief that it is stealing art when that simply isn't how neural networks like this work at all.

Speaking of - how many people doing style studies of Ilya's work reached out for permission first? I'd wager zero. Because that isn't a thing artists tend to reach out and ask for permission to do. So why should an AI be expected to ask permission first?

[0] Quite literally only to illustrate my point.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FrvZTeLP96E

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_DadJAu0Ogs

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/gc8DhwMZDKU

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7U4RSCK-Tn0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KPWOy7NxYho

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1nc--w5NfCM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a0K3F9al2Js

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K5l8y1HZ1zc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sDRS9im1q4s

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/4zBoHcIo4mc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h0cXa9WxFVQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HDhtkWRY9qk

ShamelessC3• 4 years ago

Interesting! I haven’t really seen this discussed elsewhere.

Double_a_924• 4 years ago

Isn't that how most art works in real life? Not every artist will create some completely new style. It's mostly combining bits of styles that you like.

ElCheapo• 4 years ago

It should simply be a new "hey guys, look at this cool prompt I came up with" category. Using AI for easy upvotes, unwarranted clout or spam should be banned.

matkoniecz4• 4 years ago

generator was uploading one image every 40 seconds before it was banned
not have the Art Portal flooded with computer-generated art

That was the real problem.

throw1010102• 4 years ago

Then why do they pretend to ban a specific art type?

I could have generated variations of a human created digital piece in less time than these AI (currently) since the creation of this platform but they didn't seem to feel threatened by this up until now... so there is clearly an other problem.

matkoniecz4• 4 years ago

I could have generated variations of a human created digital piece in less time than these AI

Seems dubious that you could achieve over 2000 upload each day, without stopping.

eezurr• 4 years ago

I was looking for this reply. Imagine if you needed to hire an artist but 9/10 listings are from alibaba express, full of fake reviews (other nonartist techies commenting on ai art)

Or maybe because this is where artists place their portfolios and theres no reason to make ot that much harder to find.

ibz• 4 years ago

Why would you want to hire an artist whose work is indistinguishable from AI when the AI can work faster and cheaper?

gdubs2• 4 years ago

I have a degree in Studio Arts in addition to being a software developer (and recently I've started making a lot of creative work with AI). Back when I was in school, there was already plenty of debate about 'what is "Art"'? It's always been hotly contested. Most of my teachers felt that 'technique' was not Art. Others were more purists – life painters, etc – and felt that, no, technique is art.

Duchamp poked the art establishment in the eye with his 'readymades' (urinals on the gallery wall, etc.) Warhol with his 'factory' making silkscreens.

The 'reverse Monet' (too lazy to link) that caused such an uproar when it was shared last week was ironic – apparently people aren't aware that the impressionists themselves were considered 'not artists' by a lot of people at the time.

The camera and photography made many painters sit up and say, 'hey, it can't just be about "image" anymore' – enter abstract expressionism, fauvism, cubism, etc. Work that shifted the focus from the image represented in the painting ('a window into a world') onto the surface of the canvas itself: Rothko, Albers, etc.

The thing is, people have wild misconceptions about what this technology does. Many clearly think it's a photocopier. As if StableDiffusion is hiding copies of all these works inside. When in fact what's been done is to take all of this online knowledge and create an incredible new tool with it. Like a music synthesizer times a million.

It's understandable why this technology makes people uncomfortable. There are legit fears about displacement, economic uncertainty, etc. But we are fundamentally tool makers – it's arguably intrinsically part of what makes us human (borrowing from Carl Sagan's "Dragons of Eden").

If I were back in the art department last century, I'm pretty sure we'd be really excitedly discussing how these new tools will enable entirely new forms of expression. And sure, there'd be the old guard saying it was awful, and 'not Art'.

This is a really interesting debate – I just wish it scratched deeper than the surface more often than it does, with a bit more historical context.

zasdffaa5• 4 years ago

This is the kind of comment about art that is measured, constructive, non-absolutist, and too rare on HN in posts about art (and urban dictionary has an entry for 'reverse monet' cos I wondered, but I'd skip that one if I were you).

gdubs2• 4 years ago

Ha! Oh dear. Here's the SFW link to what I was referencing:

https://twitter.com/matthen2/status/1566424523125276672?s=20...

(And thanks :)

zackmorris2• 4 years ago

I'll always remember 2022 as the year that creativity died.

That sounds a bit negative I guess, but techniques like stable diffusion will be applied to other problem domains, so all other art forms like music and creative writing will be automated within the next 5-10 years. And if computers can do that, they can do anything. Because that's how our brains work. Our neurons are microscopic filters magnifying patterns in the long tail of quantum randomness where source consciousness probably resides. Although science will only have recipes for creating consciousness, it will never be able to explain meaning, because it has nothing to say about it. That's the domain of personal experience, faith, the study of magic, etc.

The big question for me is: if a liberal arts degree is worth even less than it is today, what will people do for work? We're looking at not just the death of creativity, but the death of all human contribution. This was predicted decades ago (see Asimov, Kurzweil, etc), but we're not prepared for what's coming. I just don't see us switching to UBI before we're subjugated beneath the yoke of corporate AI that gradually changes out human workers for machines. We're in the endgame now.

I still hold out some small hope that kids today will run with this and do creative stuff we can't even imagine. Or will we just merge with AI when the Singularity arrives around 2040? Who knows.

aortega2• 4 years ago

I'll always remember 2022 as the year that creativity died.

It's like saying that computers killed artists. AI is just a tool, it still need a human in control and guiding it, can't generate anything on his own (yet). If anything, this can help creativity.

yunwal• 4 years ago

There's a few artists currently doing creative things with stable diffusion that aren't just "put in a prompt and let SD crap out an image". I think this music video from Holly Herndon shows the promise of this stuff. I do think ultimately once people have been exposed to enough AI art they're going to demand more creativity. Right now there's a lot of exploration going on and people need to get more familiar with AI tools before they start doing amazing things with them.

https://twitter.com/hollyherndon/status/1567694502382518274?...

fizx• 4 years ago

People were saying this stuff when Deep Blue beat Kasparov. Chess is perhaps thriving more than ever.

cardanome2• 4 years ago

As a hobbyist game developer, 2022 is the year my creativity can finally fully unleashed.

Prototyping games is getting so much better, this will really help indies game studies quite a bit.

Will those AI generated assets replace hand crafted ones? Heck no!

Have you ever tried doing AI art?

What gets posted on social media are the few successful experiments. Most AI generated stuff is absolute crap. Getting anything useful out of it requires lot's of trial an error and magical incantations.

Now yes, you can quickly make generic background #20233 with it or simply something weird that would fit into some bad dream. If you need something specific and coherent though? Yeah, this will be very hard.

Here is how to make concept art with stable-diffusion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rS2kNvbIL5Q

Look how many iteration that requires. How it requires finding the proper real word assets for img2img techniques. How is still requires some serious Photoshop skill to put everything together.

AI helps us build more higher level tools for creating art but the idea that it is anywhere close to creating art itself is silly. We have not made any progress in creating general artificial intelligence at all.

The main progress we see is that AI-tech is that it is becoming available for the masses, which is awesome.

PuppyTailWags• 4 years ago

I think things will categorically change about how we define art in the next little while. We may see an increase of parasocial-style livestream art drawing, so the illustrator isn't just an illustrator but specifically a personality attached (an exaggeration of the current artist-art relationship commonly known today). We may also determine AI-generated art is simply in another category, like photography, CGI, digital, and traditional portraits are all considered different categories. I can imagine human-generated novels and AI-generated novels are neatly separated, with associated scandals if a human attempts to pass an AI-generated novel as their own creation (scandals already currently exists for humans who eg. a romance writer recently got in trouble for lifting paragraphs from fanfic they didn't write into their original fiction).

There's nothing to say that creativity will die. We invented typewriters, but calligraphy is still an art whose pens and inks are beloved interests. We invented the digital screen and the paper machines, but handmade paper and hand-stitched book binding is still an artist's pursuit.

immigrantheart• 4 years ago

UBI doesn’t solve this

npteljes• 4 years ago

I dunno. Fast food haven't killed restaurants, and restaurants haven't killed home cooking. Fast food is a huge problem, but many go to restaurants and many still cook at home. We're in no endgame at all. If it worked this way, artists from poorer economies would have drowned out all other art. But for some reason, it just doesn't work that way.

haskellandchill• 4 years ago

Our neurons are microscopic filters magnifying patterns in the long tail of quantum randomness where source consciousness probably resides

gibberish

Although science will only have recipes for creating consciousness, it will never be able to explain meaning, because it has nothing to say about it. That's the domain of personal experience, faith, the study of magic, etc.

misguided conjecture

We're looking at not just the death of creativity, but the death of all human contribution

hilariously misinformed extrapolation

AI is nowhere closer to cracking the meaning problem. Until we have meaningful AI generated art there's no point for this baseless speculation.

itronitron• 4 years ago

I wouldn't worry too much about AI stamping out creativity, all the results I have seen just look like the type of art you see in hotel rooms and hallways. It's supremely ignorable stuff, possibly exactly because the models are built from billions of samples and by definition most of those samples will be average and below.

DontchaKnowit• 4 years ago

I will never understand you AI optimists. AI will never create remarkable or even widely popular music. Well, never say never. But 5 to 10 years? Not a snowballs chance in hell.

mherdeg• 4 years ago

As a non-artist whose compensation is, so far, unaffected by ML-generated images, I'm more interested in the effects the technology has on people.

Over the past 150 years it became possible to compute cube roots in milliseconds, instead of minutes. Slide rules became obsolete, and the things we learn to do do arithmetic changed.

Over the past 20 years, the way we look up arbitrary facts changed. We learned to construct Web search engine queries and we learned to evaluate the quality of results. Other library skills are still relevant, but certain kinds of rote memorization become obsolete.

Now people are rapidly learning a new "prompt language" which uses English words but combines them in a way which is for now something like computer programming (given an input string, compile it to an output image). Will "prompt languages" for text / image / video generation systems turn into a full-fledged, non-English language that you can learn?

What will be the social effects of people learning and using this language to communicate?

bigcheesegs• 4 years ago

I think the much more likely outcome is further research on making the prompts smarter and more human like.

bobthepanda2• 4 years ago

I think it will be interesting, but not result in total annihilation of the existing field. As a general counterexample, TV did not kill radio despite it having more dimensions for creativity. Radio changed, but it did not die, and was quite comfortable for many decades after.

Coallescing on prompt languages is probably unlikely, if only because part of the thing that defines a language is that a community has rules, both opaque and explicit, about what is acceptable in the language and what is not, and there's no effort to standardize inputs.

lifthrasiir7• 4 years ago

Many clearly think it's a photocopier. As if StableDiffusion is hiding copies of all these works inside.

In my latest series of tweets [1] I tried to argue that this is not the case in a less technical way, not sure if I was successful though. For anyone not fluent in Korean, my argument was as follows:

Stable Diffusion was trained with a data set composed of about 2.32 billion text-image pairs. The model itself by comparison weighs about 4 GB. If the model somehow stored those images (completely disregarding texts) in the compressed form, it would be less than 2 bytes (EDITED) per each image. Whoever downloaded an image from the internet can see this is absurd. In reality 4 GB of data is the juice extracted from the data set, and if you could actually recover an original image from it then the juice must have had a recognizable residue, which would be pretty undesirable.

[1] https://twitter.com/senokay/status/1565543214068600832

wccrawford2• 4 years ago

20 bytes? Wouldn't that be about 2 bytes per image?

minimaxir• 4 years ago

Textual inversion also takes an entire concept (including context, style, and 3D attributes) and fits it into 768 float32s / 4KB.

Animats• 4 years ago

Another discovery that something thought to be uniquely human really isn't that hard.

paranoidrobot4• 4 years ago

It might not be storing all of the images, but it's clearly storing copies of some of the source images.

A few weeks before OpenAI made DALL-E 2 open, I went through a series of prompts using well known artists as a basis. Vermeer was one of them. It generated some pretty amazing works that were 'inspired' but not direct copies of Vermeer's works.

I started feeding the same prompts into StableDiffiusion (the HuggingFace online demo) and it output direct copies of Vermeer's works with minimal modifications.

nwienert2• 4 years ago

Not a good argument, because this type of AI is basically exactly a compression algorithm - it’s the most efficient way we know to compress 2 billion image/text pairs down such that it can recreate the average of all the inputs retaining as much layered knowledge as it can.

It’s a very very fancy compression algorithm, but it still is one.

dtn• 4 years ago

The model size:training image ratio seems more like an implementation detail more than anything.

The fact that people are writing prompts with named artists, and phrases such as "Trending on Artstation"- yeah, I'm not sure if you can just handwave that away.

beezlewax• 4 years ago

I've used the words "stock photography" in an image and saw the shutterstock logo across the image in the output. Not sure how that happens but try it out.

saving_throw2• 4 years ago

It doesn't compress each image separately. Rather, it compresses its entire training set into one dense region of cartesian space. Each pixel of each training image is in there, scurnched up next to every other pixel of every other training image. It's like sardines in a can, except in thousands (?) of dimensions. You have no hope of calculating how much space it needs for that just by dividing the size of the model by the dimensions of images in pixels, like you did.

You can see that it has memorised all its training material very clearly in its ability to perform style transfer. You can ask it to geneate an image of Pikachu in the style of Vermeer. It can do that because it has memorised images of Pikachu and images by Vermeer in its weird compressed form and it can combine them by finding a point on a gradient between their representation in its memory.

If it didn't have memorised images of Pikachu, or images by Vermeer, how do you guess it could generate images of Pikachu or in the style of Vermeer? It's not magick.

stolenmerch• 4 years ago

Same here. Software dev with an MFA in Studio Art. Generative Art was a topic 20 years ago in school and my feeling it was politely tolerated as conceptual, but not aesthetic. The difference now is that the models and algorithms and amount of data actually produce decent results. GPT-3 writing as opposed to the markov chain experimental writing decades ago is profound. Image creation even more so.

I see exactly this backlash in most art schools until eveything is so mingled a new generation just doesn't care.

calibas• 4 years ago

Generative art produced "decent results" 20 years ago, it just took a skilled artist instead of typing the right prompt into Midjourney.

actually_a_dog• 4 years ago

I agree 100% with this. The only thing I would add is that a key property of art is that it must make the audience feel something. It seems very clear that AI-generated art is making people feel something, and I think that what it makes people feel will change over time, as these tools become more accepted in the art world.

I also think it's very interesting that these tools enable a near absence of technique. I tend to be one of those who doesn't value technique very much. For instance, I believe I've commented on this site before that while I certainly appreciate the time, effort, and technique that goes into photorealistic painting, I don't think it brings a whole lot to the table beyond what a photograph would. This is strictly a personal assessment, of course -- others are free to, and do disagree with me. I just feel as though photorealistic art leaves less room in it for the viewer than other forms. (Incidentally, I think this also applies to AI art, and may be a part of the reaction to it.)

blacksmith_tb• 4 years ago

I suppose the 'photocopier' argument is pretty similar to collage - sure, it's recombining existing things, but presumably they'd all agree Max Ernst wasn't just a machine?

mc32• 4 years ago

I think art communities should have the ability to set parameters for what they accept. Whether it be something like "only African artists" or "only Holga cameras." If for this one, only generated by people, so be it. If someone wants to set up a community that only accepts AI-generated images, then that's okay too.

practice93• 4 years ago

It's true. It's not like online communities are fighting for physical space. For attention maybe, but that's debatable.

The headlines like "AI art banned!!!" just generate more clicks as this thing is fresh new

JacobThreeThree4• 4 years ago

were considered 'not artists' by a lot of people at the time.

You make a good point that the trend of automating art is not a recent one.

At some point I think a line in the sand must be drawn where the human artist is no longer the primary conceptualizer.

Writing a text prompt is a fair place for that line to be drawn in my opinion.

klez• 4 years ago

Writing a text prompt is a fair place for that line to be drawn in my opinion.

I read an article[0] on the subject the other day. At some point it said that some art tools are inherently easy to use. Part of the difference between an amateur and an actual artist is in the mastery of such tool.

Think of a phone camera for example. It's extremely easy to take more than decent pictures with it. But it takes a good photographer to make art with it.

Bringing it back to the topic at hand it means that yes, describing what you want to see to this kind of software is easy on a basic level. But you get a picture that looks like any other. Instead, you need to speak the language of the software to obtain a better materialization of your vision, and that requires some sort of mastery of that tool. That would be the difference between an illustration made with stable diffusion and actual art.

[0] https://www.indiscreto.org/non-fa-tutto-il-computer-il-ritor... (in Italian, sorry)

kuroguro• 4 years ago

I like the more eastern idea that art is mastery of skill and art pieces are more of a byproduct we can observe.

Photoshopping or making an AI make art still takes skill, so it's still art - just in a different category. Putting a robot in a boxing match or an AI in a human car race wouldn't make much sense, but robot vs robot would.

vintermann2• 4 years ago

There is a word for that in the west as well, we just call it craftsmanship. The artist is the one we allow to decide what the purpose of the work is, even if they outsource all the work to apprentices, assistants, or for that matter computers.

superb-owl• 4 years ago

I totally agree [1]. Once all the panic dies down, I think you'll see these technologies enabling artists more than hurting them.

The displacement problem isn't quite there yet. While it's a good replacement for stock photo aggregators, it's not a great replacement for commissioning an actual artist. E.g. if you want a consistent look and feel for each of your images, you'll struggle. It's only the C-listers, who create heaps of bland stock photos in hopes of earning royalties, who have something to worry about.

As the technology improves, you'll see a whole new tranche of creators who are able to harness it to create amazing new things.

[1] https://superbowl.substack.com/p/the-future-of-art-is-artifi...

PaulDavisThe1st• 4 years ago

Once all the panic dies down, I think you'll see these technologies enabling artists more than hurting them.

This has happened in a different (non-AI, but "technology enables") way already with other forms of creativity. While it is true that more people become enabled, its not clear that this is overall a good thing. The benefits of more people empowered and enabled to engage in self-expression has to be traded off against the problems associated with discovery caused by their work becoming a part of the cultural milieu. People making art in private is almost certainly a good thing without limit; people making art and then making it public is not so clear - most of the work people create (even the best) is just not worth being public, but the self-limiting discrimination that this implies is in short supply in most of us. Yes, it's good you made it. No, it shouldn't be online or public, almost all the time.

asddubs2• 4 years ago

I think it'll displace a chunk of what artists do. Anything where there don't have to be super precise specifications for the end result, where there's some leeway and you just need something that goes into a general direction. Which is a non insignificant chunk, and maybe kind of unfortunately also the jobs where you can be more creative about what you're doing. Like if I'm making a magic-like card game and I need illustrations for my playing cards, I could use an AI for that. If I want a comic strip or an illustration of a specific object, it's probably a poor fit.

pjgalbraith• 4 years ago

Completely agree I've been experimenting with an Img2Img workflow for rendering drawings https://twitter.com/P_Galbraith/status/1564940095777431552?t...

kodah• 4 years ago

Anecdotally I dated an artist for a short time who upon entering my home proceeded to ask me how much I paid for my art and why I would pay for something as awful as what I have.

My art was made by a friend of mine who works in a union factory in Texas. Art is his real joy and I was able to snag some pieces from when we were in college together. It's easy to write off that the pieces are just sentimental and therefore subject to sentimental value, but really, his work is very abstract and each piece (if you can snag them in order) describes a time in his life.

I tried to explain to this person how art to me is the story not told or the story as I see it. More recently I had the opportunity to really appreciate his work when I was on an LSD trip, but that's a story for another time.

jupp0r• 4 years ago

I was reading this and waiting for the point where you say that his pieces sell for 10s of millions of dollars now :)

yieldcrv2• 4 years ago

In my experience, artists are completely divorced from economics, and the concept of the market, while striving to be a recipient of it - making the oppressive desperation their whole identity

For those formally educated, schools should really focus on the economics more instead of relying on magic

The reason to me is that people that buy contemporary art (stuff from living artists) are already going out of their way to do so, knowing that it is divorced from the concept of investment or stores of value. But for other living artists not to really understand the motives or empathize with the customers, going as far to criticize them for any number of reasons (daring to question the stated price, having a taste at all) really undermines the point of bothering with living artists at all.

largepeepee• 4 years ago

Art is whatever the rich and influential patron who pays for it decides.

They can afford to pay off the press, change the narrative and overpay the artist.

Be it the de Medici in the Renaissance or CIA and state department backing abstract expressionism.

JohnFen5• 4 years ago

I disagree. You're describing a very small subset of the world of art.

thih9• 4 years ago

The 'reverse Monet' (too lazy to link) that caused such an uproar when it was shared last week

I haven't found the HN discussion; I have found a 2017 paper [1] that had relevant examples [2].

[1] https://junyanz.github.io/CycleGAN/

[2] https://taesung.me/cyclegan/2017/03/25/monet-to-photo-summar...

phreack• 4 years ago

Others have chimed in already but I was inspired by this idea:

Like a music synthesizer times a million.

Even now, every once in a while I find people arguing that synths are not "real music". Also DJs, etc. generating songs using pre-made samples. I think it's a very apt comparison, where tools become more and more available and barrier of entry gets lower, I don't believe art will die but rather just change into new forms, and what's now revolutionary will become just a very commonplace tool in the future, just like synths, and "real" artists will keep on existing alongside.

quitit3• 4 years ago

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

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

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

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

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

xani_5• 4 years ago

Like most discussions that are centred in conservatism/purism, there's always a thread of hypocrisy, because this type of person will use themselves as the golden benchmark to what is acceptable.
To use an example: a purist painter of earlier times might shun the modern purist painter for the simple act of purchasing pre-made paints. They might bemoan that they didn't make their own pigments and mix up their own paints.

That I think is pretty much why this stupid discussion is still going - people considering their work (or just stuff they enjoy) "art" want other things to not be it to feel better.

yieldcrv2• 4 years ago

aside from showcasing, you have to factor in how the bottom is now out from MANY freelance artists who were already fairly lucky to have clients paying them $5/pop

for example, in the last two weeks, promotional flyers for parties in my area have been all AI generated, because Stable Diffusion is free and DALL-E 2 completely fumbled with their limited access and data credit system

its kind of game-over for the promo art trade, the transactions that were happening, are not happening

xani_5• 4 years ago

Back when I was in school, there was already plenty of debate about 'what is "Art"'? It's always been hotly contested. Most of my teachers felt that 'technique' was not Art. Others were more purists – life painters, etc – and felt that, no, technique is art.

Of course people practising it would say that it is an art.

And of course they would discount stuff that is beneath them as not art. "I'm creative, I don't just copy stuff I see!", just to feel better about themselves.

So someone might say code is not an art, it's same as any other engineering. But code can clearly create art pieces, whether directly (say a shader generating pretty picture) or indirectly (AI training and generating pictures based on that).

So, what, do we just say "art is any product that you can experience and have feelings about?". Nah, can't discriminate this and that based on that vague expression! We might even accidentally call blacksmith an artist if we go too far! /s

SMAAART• 4 years ago

"The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" was published in 1935, almost a century ago, and yet not much has changed.

cjohnson3182• 4 years ago

I paint a fair bit. Artists all know how hard it is to innovate, and how difficult it is to faithfully physically represent ideas, images, and emotions that they experience internally. People don't respect works created by algorithms because people feel algorithms (1) do not have a rich internal state, that is (2) challenging to express, (3) will one day die, and (4) never occur again.

There's analogues in music. We have algorithms that can write jazz standards with all the same essential characteristics of Blue in Green, or So What, but no one cares. People just want to hear Miles Davis and Bill Evans do it.

jcelerier• 4 years ago

We have algorithms that can write jazz standards with all the same essential characteristics of Blue in Green, or So What, but no one cares.

That's definitely not true. In the areas that make money with some semblance of reliability for the artists (low budget film / game scores esp. asset flippers, shitty TV shows, music for ads, etc), people are going to be more than happy with a magic "make music" button without having to pay for a composer. Like, if you thing that anything in this video is out of reach for today's AIs... https://youtu.be/QgU9H9dECt8

Sophistifunk• 4 years ago

Yes, it really is storing all those images inside it, as well as an evolved NN compression algorithm specific to that dataset.

totetsu2• 4 years ago

I enjoyed this work called 'art is' by poet George Quasha that consists of interviews with artist answering what 'art is'. hundreds of answers over decades and no two the same https://vimeo.com/323912060

TomSwirly• 4 years ago

Typing prompts into a program until you get an image you like does not make you an artist.

Duchamp was already one of the great painters in the world when he showed the readymades - and there's a lot of evidence that he made them, what a great joke if so.

marktangotango• 4 years ago

This is a really interesting debate – I just wish it scratched deeper than the surface more often than it does, with a bit more historical context.

I find this is true of a lot of topics, too bad there's not some way to shorten the time between shallow to more useful/informative debate. Your post above does that for this topic, thanks for that.

firasd2• 4 years ago

I think the communities involved here like digital artists, furries etc got a lot of attention hating on NFTs last year, so they are doubling down with the anti-art-generator movement. But I don't think this one will be so successful. Like sure, maybe art community sites could require you to tag prompt-generated art just as a way to label things, but in terms of widespread usage the cat is out of the bag.

Whenever I get on Twitter and see someone incoherently angry about people using Stable Diffusion I'm reminded of that quote from an Android in Blade Runner 2049: “You tiny thing. In the face of the fabulous new, your only thought is to kill it? For fear of great change? You can’t hold the tide with a broom.”

eat_veggies• 4 years ago

Sure, AI generated art is probably out of the bag, but to lump it in with NFTs and such is an interesting rhetorical move, since the only thing that really links them is their new-ness. That Blade Runner quote can be used to shut down any critique of an emerging technology precisely because it fetishizes new-ness for its own sake, and assigns it an agency of its own, inevitable like the tide. It becomes a cause that generates effects in our lives, and the only question is how we react. This robs us of our own agency as social/political/historical actors who can kill/change/improve/use/abuse technologies and decide how to incorporate them in our lives.

People invoked the same language about things like television, and I find Raymond Williams's critique helpful:

If the effect of the medium is the same, whoever controls or uses it, and whatever apparent content he may try to insert, then we can forget ordinary political and cultural argument and let the technology run itself. It is hardly surprising that this conclusion has been welcomed by the 'media-men' of the existing institutions. It gives the gloss of avant-garde theory to the crudest versions of their existing interests and practices, and assigns all their critics to pre-electronic irrelevance (1974, 128)

firasd2• 4 years ago

Well in this case the link between NFTs and AI art wasn't made by me, I'm just observing the overlap between the same online influencers/groups doing the same type of activism against two different phenomena.

Sure I think there's always a conversation to be had about how to incorporate tech. Like Reddit banning celeb deepfakes is probably the choice I would have made as well if I set policy on the site.

But what I'm noticing is over the top anger at usage per se. (Someone linked the 'reverse monet' tweet elsewhere in this discussion and the quote tweets there are unhinged.) That's what I'm saying can not be 'killed'--these breakthroughs in large language models

Bakary5• 4 years ago

NFTs and AI art feel pretty similar in that it was obvious from their very inception exactly how they will be abused: relentless opportunistic spam.

Akronymus2• 4 years ago

One of the biggest furry art archives has always banned art without much, if any, actual input from the human who created the artpiece. For example, game screenshots are banned almost universally, picture generated art is as well (something like picrew) 3d models aren't, assuming there is posing and such and so on.

It seems a perfectly fine continuation to the existing rules to ban ai generated art.

hadlock• 4 years ago

Also, Art AI can't click on ads, which is probably, ultimately their main concern. If you replace all the monetized users with AI that can't buy things, the economic incentive to keep the website running disappears.

henriquecm8• 4 years ago

Yesterday I saw a guy saying that Outpaint is nothing new, that photoshop was able to do it for years, I pointed it out that what photoshop does is extremely limited, and the results only look okay in small scale, the difference is night and day.

falcolas• 4 years ago

Individual art communities should be allowed to decide to only accept art created by a particular set of tools. Oil. Acrylic. Mixed Media. Watercolor. Chalk. Pencil. Digital. Photoshop. AI. And so forth.

It's a matter of curation in my mind, not discrimination, and not really outrage worthy.

AlecSchueler• 4 years ago

I didn't take the idea that this was shared as an outrage piece as much as a point of interest; it's a key point along this journey and worth noting with or without judgement.

polygamous_bat2• 4 years ago

This will become even more interesting as digital art softwares start including "AI brushes" and such that include subtle tweaks to the established process. AI generated art made in 40 seconds could be banned, but what would happen to the AI assisted works, churned out by an artist in 10 minutes instead of 10 hours?

scarmig3• 4 years ago

Perhaps possible to enforce now, but they're fighting a losing battle. AI art will ultimately be indistinguishable from human art except by being consistently better; they're relying on the good faith of contributors. And anything that relies on the good faith of 100% of humans is something doomed to failure.

oulipo• 4 years ago

It's interesting to think about it, what differentiate art from a human or a machine. It can't be the content itself, because now machine output is close to a human output (modulo the small details).

So what make those communities attracted to art made by humans, rather than art made by machines? It must be the "act of community" itself, which cannot be made by a machine (it is useless to be "in community" with a conscious-less machine).

So this would mean that the "art content" for humans is not only the pictorial content of the image, but also the "transmission of a message", and in particular, the quality of the initiator and the receiver of the message. In this case, humans would (and apparently seem to) differentiate in quality art that has been created by a conscious being and for a conscious being, to art that has been created by a machine.

7952• 4 years ago

People consume art for different reasons. It can be like a spiritual experience, or an investment, or something to brighten up your life. It can have a story attached to it or be inspirational. My guess is that different people will have different reactions to machine made art. And most of the art community will carry on perfectly happily as if nothing has changed.

ilaksh• 4 years ago

Has nothing to do with that. It's two things. Artists are threatened, and also right now a lot that is being submitted is low quality.

So if you are an artist you don't like seeing a bunch of AI junk on your home page just because a lot is junk but also, because one can assume that it will continue to improve so that that most of it really is competing with artists.

So that could put a lot of people out of work since it would make art-related business models much more competitive.

pcthrowaway• 4 years ago

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

Sounds like you've taken a semiotics class.

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

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

helloworld113• 4 years ago

For artists who continue to paint, or use other physical means of expression through base materials and sell them as physical works, this entire AI art surge remains largely irrelevant in a practical sense. A buyer or patron who wants real, physical art will still need and want real, physical art, and I don't see an AI imitating much of that easily any time soon.

The people or organizations to which AI-churned art appeals to most desire commercial visual churn. They are the same people who would in any case have least cared about art in its more creative, communicative forms. And there's nothing creative or imaginative about the results of machine-generated visuals. They're the very opposite in fact, visuals created literally mindlessly.

If anything, I can see AI art giving a new breath of life and interest to real man-made art, much like industrial food production gave organic "local-grown" food producers a chance to brand themselves with a distinct, desirable identity.

pavel_lishin4• 4 years ago

I don't know if I agree. One of the big sources of income for online artists is commissions of D&D characters and such; AI-generated art is now getting good enough that people can get a "good-enough" version of what they want for free, instead of paying an artist $50 or $100 for a piece of art.

I've commissioned art for my D&D character before, and I'll almost certainly do so again - but if I'm playing a one-shot online and want a quick image to share with the group, AI-generated art is a fast and free way of getting that!

bheadmaster• 4 years ago

People have been losing their jobs because of technology ever since the industrial revolution, each one of them enraged about it, and rightfully so. Society doesn't care about people who've put their whole lives into a skill that suddenly became worthless (or much less valuable then it was).

The solution is not to ban technology (you can't really ban technology, as it's not under total government control) - the solution is to enable anyone to pursue new skills without fear of homelessness and starvation. I.e. Universal Basic Income.

helloworld113• 4 years ago

The people or organizations to which AI-churned art appeals to most desire commercial visual churn. They are the same people who would in any case have least cared about art in its more creative, communicative forms.

I specifically addressed this in my original post. You're exactly the kind of person who would possibly like this AI technology, and apparently not someone who would have an appreciation for art in its artistic, emotionally appealing form. Your disagreement is based on a misunderstanding of definitions.

HKH22• 4 years ago

For artists who continue to paint, or use other physical means of expression through base materials and sell them as physical works, this entire AI art surge remains largely irrelevant in a practical sense. A buyer or patron who wants real, physical art will still need and want real, physical art, and I don't see an AI imitating much of that easily any time soon.

I don't think it would be that hard to get a machine to physically paint in layers. Sure, the velocity, pressure, texture etc. of a brush would take time to model, but you could start with spray paint.

a_shovel• 4 years ago

Importantly, a physical painting machine isn't gonna be something anyone with a beefy GPU can download for free. It would pretty much only be useful for factories in Mexico making "Henry Rogers"-style mass-produced paintings [0], which would be bad news for the impoverished workers currently making them, but not for most other painters.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rOjTc3F5UB4

dqpb2• 4 years ago

Dall-e can create beautiful images of oil paintings that can be printed to canvas, much like original oil paintings are printed to canvas.

gedy2• 4 years ago

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

helloworld113• 4 years ago

All of you commenting seem to miss the fundamental point that I made: People who appreciate art for art's human aspects will want HUMAN, emotionally derived art, not a printable piece of AI-generated pixel-vomit that can then be mounted and varnished. I have nothing against anyone doing this and I absolutely don't support banning any technology that lets people explore new frontiers of creativity, but I don't see even AI-connected devices that can physically paint things replacing artists as imaginative human creators of concepts and emotional ideas expressed for other humans. To go on about how an AI could eventually paint or sculpt and so forth from its own algorithms is to miss the point entirely about this specific type of creation and the extremely old human desire to enjoy it.

Perhaps to be expected from a site so frequented by many people who spend their working lives "optimizing" X or Y gimmick for major tech giants and viewing other humans largely as simple parts of a data gathering landscape.

JacobThreeThree4• 4 years ago

For artists who continue to paint, or use other physical means of expression through base materials and sell them as physical works, this entire AI art surge remains largely irrelevant in a practical sense. A buyer or patron who wants real, physical art will still need and want real, physical art, and I don't see an AI imitating much of that easily any time soon.

Giclée prints on canvas are already very popular with artists. Printing into physical medium is already trivial whether the art is produced by human or AI.

See as an example the Epson SureColor S80600 Printer:

https://epson.ca/For-Work/Printers/Large-Format/Epson-SureCo...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TECjOmrlogg

tern2• 4 years ago

For artists at high levels who print, the print is a part of the work and is often done with close to as much care as one puts into a painting—fine tuning colors, making small details perfect, printing on exotic materials, totally messing up the print in certain ways, painting over it, layering the print with other things, printing on fabric and hanging, stretching, modifying, or destroying the fabric etc etc.

Every aspect of making things available to humans becomes a medium, from writing code to literally just cleaning something to factory production to using "art materials."

Indeed a lot of mid-tier / long-tail work is also just straight up prints from the print shop, but OP is talking about the bespoke side of the spectrum. At the high end, fine art defines "bespoke."

https://www.contemporaryartdaily.com/

jedberg2• 4 years ago

It seems like the actual problem they're trying to solve is volume, so why not just rate limit submissions? They just need to look at their median submission rate prior to a few weeks ago and then make that the submission rate limit.

egypturnash3• 4 years ago

The problem being solved by these decisions is that AI art is a visible threat to the livelihoods of the people the site is designed to support and uplift. Art sites have already had rate limits for years.

These communities are explicitly saying "no" to this disruptive technology. If you want to go make a new gallery site for showing off your prompt engineering that's your own lookout, have fun trying to build a community and figure out how to keep the site funded. But you can't come spam our existing communities of people who've dedicated decades to their craft with the messy, incoherent results of the whole six months you've spent learning to be a "prompt engineer".

jedberg2• 4 years ago

The problem being solved by these decisions is that AI art is a visible threat to the livelihoods of the people the site is designed to support and uplift.

That's not a solvable problem. Art will be made by computers, it's inevitable. Eventually it will get good enough to be indistinguishable from human made art. It's already good enough that a human can use the AI to get 90% of the way there and then finish it themselves.

Art sites have already had rate limits for years.

Clearly not good enough if every one of them is saying some variation on "our site is getting flooded with AI art"

These communities are explicitly saying "no" to this disruptive technology. If you want to go make a new gallery site for showing off your prompt engineering that's your own lookout, have fun trying to build a community and figure out how to keep the site funded. But you can't come spam our existing communities of people who've dedicated decades to their craft with the messy, incoherent results of the whole six months you've spent learning to be a "prompt engineer".

I agree, people shouldn't be spamming crap directly from the AI. But good luck keeping out the people who tweak the AI generated art to make it look pretty good. A smart site would embrace this kind of art, perhaps make a new category for it. But trying to ban it from the community is a lost cause.

hackernewds• 4 years ago

"The candle makers protested the distribution of lightbulbs"

"The horse stables protested the building of parking lots"

"The taxi drivers protested the proliferation of Uber"

antonymy• 4 years ago

I'm waiting for the first case of a human artist being banned because their style was "too similar" to AI-generated art. I think that'll be the beginning of the end for the communities that do these kinds of bans.

pavel_lishin4• 4 years ago

Aside from the debates about "artistic merit" and the ethics of using AI trained on existing artists' work, one of the key things is that this new technology allows anyone to flood a place with images.

There are some scifi-themed subreddits that I visit that allow posting art, and at this point it feels like 50% of all submissions are Midjourney/Dall-E generated art. Fine, it looks ok, but there's such a low barrier to creating and posting these, it's beginning to drown out other valuable content. The article even speaks about this:

In July, one AI furry porn generator was uploading one image every 40 seconds

Axauv2• 4 years ago

This could be solved on basically all arti communities by simply putting in a post limit per day. Say an artist can only upload 5 images per day or something, why would someone need to upload more than that?

zimpenfish• 4 years ago

Say an artist can only upload 5 images per day or something, why would someone need to upload more than that?

There's been more than a few days when I've uploaded more than 5 images a day to flickr/Instagram (according to my backup, I uploaded 27 images to Instagram on 2007-02-04 during a day-long walk.)

asddubs2• 4 years ago

because they're migrating there from another platform

pavel_lishin4• 4 years ago

But now everyone's an artist.

jachee• 4 years ago

More like one image per X days. I don’t care how many different things you can type into an AI in a given period of time. I only want to see the best of the best of the best.

This is like when we discovered stereo recording, and mixers would put tracks at either 100% left or 100% right, just to show off the novelty of it.

Or when 3D movies became ubiquitous and every movie (even those shot completely without the third dimension as a consideration) got released in 3D.

Once the novelty wears off, I imagine things will be better.

For now, it’s just a deluge of low-effort, yet high (relative to traditionally produced art) apparent quality artworks.

Double_a_924• 4 years ago

Or just add tags, so people could filter out AI generated content if they don't like it?

NaturalPhallacy• 4 years ago

Aside from the debates about "artistic merit" and the ethics of using AI trained on existing artists' work, one of the key things is that this new technology allows anyone to flood a place with images.

Just subbing to the StableDiffusion sub has added a ton of art to my feed in Apollo. I agree the concern isn't that it's art, but that it's being produced so fast. I've seen dozens of showcase/portfolio worthy pieces generated in the past week. That manually created would probably take 40-160 hours (I'm not an artist so hence the huge range).

It's pretty comparable to handcrafting a letter vs. a spambot in terms of the volume jump.

int_19h2• 4 years ago

I think this will subside significantly once the novelty wears off, and examples of truly outstanding generated art become more prominent (establishing a consensus baseline for quality).

greenhearth• 4 years ago

I've used AI to create stuff like music album covers and posters. It's cool and fun to mess around with, but I think it still takes a real person with an aesthetically trained eye to be fully effective. It does basically what I would do anyway, which would be to composite different images in Photoshop and then apply effects, etc. But you still need to edit for composition and text, and most of the time the images have to be fine tuned, or not at all what I wanted. I can easily see AI taking over most image compositing.

abeppu• 4 years ago

I think we should also be aware of the technological reasons for separating AI-produced and human-produced images: New effects/risks can occur when the ML system is naively trained against its own outputs. It's not hard to imagine multiple companies trying to periodically scrape and build new image datasets and retrain the newest models against the updated dataset. But if stablediffusion vN is mostly trained against stablediffusion v(N-1) images, then it's possible for the sequence to not actually improve even though more data and computation are being thrown at it.

Axauv2• 4 years ago

When digital effects and CGI began to replace stop-motion monster effects in movies, the stop motion artists screamed that art made on a computer was not art, and that their industry would be lost.

Nowadays we know better, not only is digital art accepted everywhere on earth, it's almost expected, and as for the stop-motion folks, they're still in business! Movies still come out every year, some of them with huge budgets (like Coraline) that use stop-motion because it has a certain look and feel that is all its own. AI art will only get better, but so will the ways we use it, and the people who are actually ARTISTS will be the furthest ahead, and leading the way.

shagie• 4 years ago

Jurassic Park was right at the tipping between stop motion and CGI. Corridor Crew with John Berton Jr. ( https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0078237/ ) https://youtu.be/j8JgN_srwCc?t=921 discuss the change and how Phil Tippett ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil_Tippett ) who was the "master of dinosaur animation" changed the industry... And the first thing that they did was hire him as the animation director and other stop motion artists.

This wasn't a "they were out a job" - it was a they changed how they did what they did.

mabbo• 4 years ago

That should certainly help maintain a 'pure' source for further training examples.

mring33621• 4 years ago

I think the AI generated art, even at this early stage, is pretty good and have no problem with people submitting it to contests and/or selling it.

Also, as a sometime painter, I would view AI generated art as a great and fun source of inspiration. I'd pick some generated pieces that I like, combine parts from this and that and make it my own.

This stuff may open more doors than it closes, IMHO.

dqpb2• 4 years ago

AI-generated art was not allowed because it “lacked artistic merit.”

As a consumer, what I want is the art, not the merit. Over the last few weeks, I've been able to get images that I simply would have never gotten without Dall-e. Maybe it doesn't provide "merit", but it certainly provides a ton of value that I wouldn't have gotten otherwise.

leobg• 4 years ago

What are they using to tell AI generated art apart from human generated? AI? :P

parrellel• 4 years ago

How do you deal with the chatbot problem in visual media. It's still Eliza, but without the obviousness of text, how can you tell its just Eliza?

I wonder if their will be a similar evolution in art circles as in chat. What questions and answers about the composition will out the AI generated pieces as mechanical in nature, or if our ability to parse images is different enough from our ability to comprehend speech and text, that it will legitimately be impossible to suss out.

The big problem right now is just sheer volume. Just piles of auto-generated crap burying months of work. That definitely needs to stop, rate limiting or banning seems an appropriate way to deal with the misbehavior.

dmje• 4 years ago

I'm fascinated by this.

So "AI" art isn't ok. But presumably Photoshop as a tool to create artworks is ok? What about some of the filters and plugins available?

What about if you use AI as a tool to prepare art that you then make yourself? I was looking at SD and thinking this - I make linocuts and have been experimenting with using it to create layer ideas that I then cut by hand. Is this ok?

What about using AI purely as a prompt? I tried just "linocut in 3 colours of a seascape" and got a whole nice bunch of starting ideas. Is this ok?

Seems to be that there's a huge amount of nuance here that's pretty fascinating to watch / talk about.

2Slow• 4 years ago

Theres no skill in AI art involved and i think skill is part of art being art so..

Art is one of those raw human things

swayvil• 4 years ago

You can say that AI art is bad. But you can also say that normal people have bad taste. So the two meet in the middle and the normal art-consumer is satisfied with his junk.

It's like fast food and normal people. Everybody knows it's crap but they eat the stuff by the megaton.

The argument againt AI art is an argument against popular markets, basically.

drueter• 4 years ago

It's important to keep in mind that these art communities represent one very narrow kind of art, one that is more focused on illustration and graphical style, and most often not the kind of art that major art institutions work with. In the past 5 years, AI-generated art has been accepted and incorporated in the contemporary art world, with major works produced by luminaries such as Pierre Huyghe (of Ideal), Trevor Paglen (Bloom), and Hito Steyerl (Power Plants). For these artists, the graphical potency of the generated images is usually only one factor of the work, which also centers on how the artists use the technology, its origins, history, and broader uses, and what it might imply.

For this kind of artwork, the kind made by artists who feel threatened by AI, I’ve been thinking for a while that a computer could likely do it better. Intricate detail, repetition, sampling and recombination of popular styles, optimization for aesthetic popularity and mass appeal — these practices are all squarely in the domain of automation, data science, and marketing. We might call it the Netflix-ification of illustration art, but it’s quite different, because the tools for making are available to many. As an arts educator and artist, I welcome these new tools, as they allow easy experimentation for newcomers, but also as they reveal that art based primarily in deployment of technical skill and eye-popping graphics is missing something vital.

asah• 4 years ago

Just wait until the NFT sells for more!

jmbull• 4 years ago

This topic always reminds me of a great poem[1] by Rudyard Kipling, The Conundrum in the Workshops. Enjoy!

<snip>

When the flush of a newborn sun fell first on Eden's green and gold,

Our father Adam sat under the Tree and scratched with a stick in the mold;

And the first rude sketch that the world had seen was joy to his mighty heart,

Till the Devil whispered behind the leaves: "It's pretty, but is it Art?"

</snip>

[1] https://poets.org/poem/conundrum-workshops

jorl17• 4 years ago

I don't oppose AI-generated images in the slightest. I love them and I genuinely think they will be a very important part of our future. Effectively, it will take more effort to make a living as an artist, especially a mediocre one, because AI is now a decent mediocre artist. It's a stupendous artist for some prompts, too.

However, I can understand that if I can just spit out image after image, there must be a way to "limit" my submission of these images. In that sense, I "get" banning AI-generated images, as a way to stop spam.

bgro• 4 years ago

I'm in some Discord chats for various things, and they often have a channel where people can post their artwork. Often, people spend weeks or months on a piece of fan art that's related to the Discord topic, or they draw a picture of the "leaders" for fun.

Lately it's been just getting drowned out by people posting ridiculous AI art where they try to get absurd results. It was interesting and fun at first, but after seeing probably as low as 20 of these images I can tell they're all a similar sort of thing.

I feel bad for people posting their art getting drowned out by this, and these aren't even remotely art related groups.

odessacubbage3• 4 years ago

the vast majority of participants in any given field are, by definition, mediocre.

causi• 4 years ago

I don't understand the difference between telling photoshop to sharpen an image or remove red-eye and using AI to generate based on a prompt. Both of them are software modifying your canvas.

RoyBatty89• 4 years ago

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

GrazeMor2• 4 years ago

Wouldn't it have been good for the horses?

smrtinsert• 4 years ago

That's shortsighted. I'm sure they'll come around. There's already been some great demonstrations of artists using ai to enhance their visions instead of being just a simple output.

smm11• 4 years ago

I recall some time back the "photo of the year" with some esteemed organization looked like something you'd take at random. Just a few people doing various things. A snapshot, the sort you'd take back during the film era when you'd load film then click the shutter in case the first photo had a light leak.

A throwaway photo. And it won.

andrewdubinsky• 4 years ago

This is exactly the sort of behavior the robots will point to when they rise up.

sn0w_monkie• 4 years ago

I'm not surprised more and more art communities are banning AI images, 99% of them are dull and ugly. Definitely not something I would print out and hang on my wall. I tried playing around with these models, but I was too bored to bother futzing around with prompts to try and make something I liked.

But I have seen some cool things made using these models by creators who put more effort in than just writing a prompt to get back an image. I can definitely see how these tools can enhance human creativity but like most art the results are just bad.

At least with some human art even if it's not aesthetically pleasing you can appreciate the thinking or time and effort put into producing a piece of work. When you go to an art museum you can learn about history, politics, culture etc even if you don't appreciate how something might look.

Most AI art, however, is useless and ugly.

cma• 4 years ago

I would print out and hang on my wall

Printing things was at one point thought to devalue art and remove artist jobs.

enviclash• 4 years ago

Very interesting diffusion of a social norm, and probably easy to track?

_greim_• 4 years ago

AI art is striking at first glance, but devoid of meaning once you really try to engage with it. It's the meaning people want, but an image's visual impact has been a reasonably cheap heuristic for finding it. The viability of this heuristic is now dead or rapidly dying, and AI generated art is degenerating into yet another form of spam. Relatedly, feeds full of visually-striking images, once impressive, are taking on a "spammy" tinge. New, harder-to-fake signals will be found, and social media will reorganize around whatever those end up being.

betwixthewires2• 4 years ago

I'm personally very happy about it. To me, art is just pleasant, it's a matter of degree. Meaning is nice and all, but not necessary. And with this new way of generating art, people can have beautiful art, cheaply and as much as they want. No more cheap Target art everywhere. It's the replicator of art, nice, beautiful art is now post scarcity and I love it.

Double_a_924• 4 years ago

How does manual labour add meaning to a mentally creative process? It's not like the AI spits out random images, you have to very specifically tell it what you want in there. What's the difference between "telling" your hands vs. telling the AI?

t0bia_s• 4 years ago

I hope those "mouse wars" improve emptiness in digital art. Sure, AI can generate beautiful images. But art is beyond this.

What the heck is furry art anyway?

mikotodomo• 4 years ago

Sounds like they are just admitting AI generated art is legit.

mattkevan2• 4 years ago

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

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

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

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

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

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

mkaic2• 4 years ago

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

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

Bakary5• 4 years ago

Using any Photoshop tool still requires some work. AI is an order of magnitude more multifaceted and autonomous. What happens when we realize that AI art generators consistently and instantly bring forth better contributions than what we can make ourselves over a much larger period of time? The artist will look at their paintbrush and wonder what the point of holding it is when the drunk genie is doing much better on their own. There will still be artists, but there will be space only for the most exceptional of them.

Art software is similar to cruise control. AI art will in a few years become the equivalent of a fully perfected autonomous car that is safer than a human driver in all but the most contrived scenarios.

mattkevan2• 4 years ago

My phone camera can take much better pictures of things than I can draw. Doesn’t mean that my drawings have been invalidated.

Human art is going to adapt, similarly to how it adapted to photography. If a camera can make perfect reproductions of reality, AI is a camera of the imagination.

I wonder if there’s going to be a trend towards craft -tangible, clearly handmade things that an AI can’t do.

synicalx• 4 years ago

How will they know what is and isn't AI-generated? And when they cause a false-positive how are the "real" artists able to verify that their art is legit?

vitiral• 4 years ago

Lexica, a search engine that solely indexed images from Stable Diffusion’s beta tests in Discord, has over 10 million images in it. It would take a lifetime to explore everything in it, a corpus made by a relatively small group of beta testers in a few weeks.

There are many interesting points, but this is a key one I think. The sheer volume is astounding, like the media flooding of the last decade taken up exponentially.

pipeline_peak• 4 years ago

They’ll ban it long enough until it’s no longer possible to tell its AI generated.

GrazeMor2• 4 years ago

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

cthalupa3• 4 years ago

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

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

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

analog31• 4 years ago

I'm fascinated by the idea that AI-generated images will eventually be the primary data source for training the algorithms themselves. Kind of like a giant positive feedback loop. Eventually the "art" might not be about generating a single image from a prompt phrase, but influencing art through the generation of the most successful algorithms.

bergenty• 4 years ago

How can you even tell? Any human can just claim they made it.

_carbyau_• 4 years ago

With a flood of AI generated art on the internet... what will the next generation of AI be trained on?

Online art communities begin banning AI-generated images

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