AI Art Panic

by xena • 4 years ago

270 266 4 years ago

I'm of the position that art needs an artist.

txt2img prompt crafting is a bit of an art in its own right, as getting the model to spit out what you want isn’t always trivial.

I don't find the output images from a lot of "AI" art to be artistically interesting because an "AI" made them. The output might be novel, or even kind of surprising, but still just the output of code. Someone might say the code of an "AI" art machine could qualify as art. I often find the txt2img prompts artistic in a way that the output images lack, because they are representative of human imagination, often like surreal poetry, or like musique concrete, cutting and pasting segments around on a tape. This is not to deny that the output of "AI" art is impressive. It is, frankly. But as a matter of machine, computational, output rather than human artistic merit.

It comes down to a simple thing: if you showed me two images and you told me a human made one, and "AI" made the other, I will always find the former artistic in a way that I would never find the latter.

This is also not to touch on the licensing issues that arise from these tools. That's its own knot to untangle.

andybak2• 4 years ago

There's a spectrum of human agency in art. Where will you draw the line? Where does Warhol fit? Pollock? Bridget Riley, Vasarely or even Malevich?

Whatever line you draw will leave several canonical figures on the wrong side of it. Maybe that's OK and you'll draw your line in the sand. Just don't pretend it's a non-controversial consensus.

sethrin• 4 years ago

"Art is anything you can get away with." — Marshall McLuhan

hectorlorenzo5• 4 years ago

I agree. Also, it's not that stable diffusion spontaneously generates art: someone has thought of a prompt, written it down, iterated, and finally decided that a given image was good enough to publish. Is stable diffusion an "artist" or is it a tool?

I find "what is art" discussions impossible to resolve and untangle from prejudices and biases. The least problematic answer I've found comes from John Carey, paraphrasing: "art is whatever someone has decided it to be". In other words, if I decide something is art, then it is.

The problem shifts slightly to a more interesting way to pose this question: why some art has more value than some other art (or even "does some art has more value than some other art")? Equally difficult to resolve but more prone to highlight prejudices and biases mentioned above.

pcthrowaway• 4 years ago

Sure, and if your 4 year old son draws 2 sloppy stick figures representing him holding your hand, that's going to be valuable to you in a way a stranger's precocious 10-year-old child's drawing isn't (no matter how good it is).

But does that make it more artistic than something generated by AI which was coaxed out by a human applying their expertise?

RosanaAnaDana• 4 years ago

I'm of the position that art needs an artist.

Would you say the same of general intelligence? IE, general intelligence (artificial or otherwise) requires an agent?

harshreality• 4 years ago

Art Turing test: If you can't distinguish between human-made art and AI-made art, then there's nothing backing up your emotional bias.

It doesn't matter anymore that you emotionally value, or want to emotionally value, human-made art more than AI-made art, if you can't distinguish the two except based on other people's representations of how it was made.

Unless you watched a (non-augmented) human make a piece of art, you have no assurance that a human didn't touch up an AI generated art piece or simply curate a collection of fully AI-generated art.

ETA: I'm not trying to put down recognizable human-created art that's already been created, especially historically notable works. I'm not sure what all those replies are trying to get at. Of course there can continue to be an art-collecting market for human-made works made before the AI-art era.

citizenkeen• 4 years ago

I can’t tell if someone is selling me something made locally, or is just pawning something made in China as local, but I still try to support local because I believe the underlying knock on effects are greater.

The same holds for AI art.

rmckayfleming• 4 years ago

People appreciate art for the story. It’s why originals sell for more than prints.

_fizz_buzz_• 4 years ago

That is not how art works at all though. It's very difficult to distinguish a real van gogh from a fake van gogh. The real will still sell for millions and the fake will not.

jacksonlango• 4 years ago

If a copy of a Van Gogh is next to the original, and you can't which is the original, do they have equal artistic value?

If an artist who studied Van Gogh intensely made an original piece in Van Gogh's style, does it have equal artistic merit as one of Van Gogh's originals?

AI is just going to be another aspect of provenance, and if it's found out an art piece had AI used to make it, it won't be forgotten or ignored.

cyrialize• 4 years ago

For me personally, it's more about appreciating the act and capabilities possible by a human being.

I find it similar to watching chess. AI/Chess engines will always be better than humans, but it's exciting to watch a human play to see what they can do.

NikolaNovak• 4 years ago

I think OP understands there may not be a physical difference, but the provenance / "Colour of the Bits" is important to them; and that's a valid position to take (not the only valid position to take).

For example, a woolen blanket made by my mother is much, much dearer to me than an equivalent woolen blanket made in a factory.

I see it very likely that certified-provenance human-art may command high prices in the future; but also for physical part, it's pretty trivial and doesn't have to be so posh and fancy - anything from street art to art galleries and art collectives/workshops.

furyofantares• 4 years ago

I have a project that involves publishing an image I generate and publish to an audience everyday. It's not high value art, but the process does often involve me thinking of a concept I want to communicate to my audience and working with the AI to produce something that communicates that concept.

When I started doing this, I was uncomfortable thinking of myself as the author of the image in any way. I'm okay with it now. There's some skill I am expressing, even if not much, and I am connecting with an audience.

joebob42• 4 years ago

I don't think for "art as art" purposes where we take some painting and say it's worth a million dollars and put it in a museum ai can replace humans. But a lot of art is much more utilitarian: art in games, art in movies and tv, in picture books, etc. In those cases I care that it looks how it is meant to and costs as little as possible to make.

I feel like the majority of "art" we consume falls in the second category.

kens• 4 years ago

I'm of the position that art needs an artist.

As a historical note, this argument is over 50 years old. In 1965, an engineer at Bell Labs generated pseudo-random artworks inspired by famous artist Piet Mondrian. He found that a) people couldn't tell if the artwork was generated by Mondrian or the computer, and b) people generally liked the computer's art better.

https://www.historyofinformation.com/detail.php?entryid=4437

ShamelessC2• 4 years ago

Fascinating! Thanks.

hectorlorenzo5• 4 years ago

This argument could be made 150 years ago about photography. For the sake of an argument: can a selfie be a form of art?

To take a selfie, human intervention is minimal: someone decides they want to take a selfie; take dozens of them, pretty much at random; choose one they like; publish it.

Similarities with the stable diffusion process are striking. And yet, could you consider a selfie "artistic"? Are all selfies artistic? What if Annie Leibovitz or Marina Abramovic take a selfie?

What if Marina Abramovic generates a million images of a rabbit with stable diffusion and papers a whole warehouse with them? Is this art?

Edit: syntax.

bitwize2• 4 years ago

It's considered art for the purposes of e.g. copyright law. Recently there was a dispute about whether a selfie taken by a monkey belonged to the owner of the camera, or the monkey. (A judge opined that only humans can have copyrights, and PETA eventually settled out of court.)

https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/09/12/550417823...

But most selfies probably aren't high value art.

If Marina Abramovic were to take a bunch of selfies, or generate a bunch of AI images, and exhibit them, that might be considered high value art. A famous artist can literally tape a banana to a wall and it'd be considered high art:

https://www.vogue.com/article/the-120000-art-basel-banana-ex...

adrian17• 4 years ago

Stable Diffusion? Well, that’s free-ish. Problem is, you’ll probably want to run it locally, which requires a really, really beefy graphics card. I was struggling to run it on a Vega56 - a GPU that goes for ~$150 used now - so I went out and got a RTX3090 for about $1,000. If you’re already a gamer with a GPU with 8Gb+ of VRAM you’re probably good, but for most people this is a bit absurd.

Nit: 2 weeks ago there was an article about getting SD running on an iPhone. The app isn't very time- or battery-efficient, but it just barely works on my (previous-gen) device: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33539192

ben_w• 4 years ago

I get results in 2 minutes on my iPhone SE. At least, when it doesn't stop execution part way through. When that happens, I have to change the seed, but it happens often enough that it sometimes needs a second change of seed to actually complete.

Still, 2 minutes on my phone. I remember Bryce taking half an hour to render lower resolution images back in the late 90s.

orbital-decay3• 4 years ago

Running on an iPhone-grade hardware is what they refer to as "struggling". You need a lot of iterations in any workflow, be it style transfer or text-to-image, so you want as fast generation and as much CUDA cores as possible, and up to 24GB VRAM for higher resolutions. More importantly, most of the power of this stuff is not just in inference, but in finetuning the model on your custom data, which requires 12GB VRAM for SD 1.4 at the very least, and ultimately multiple server-grade GPUs. And even more importantly, you need full control over your own box, not an iPhone app - as it's still a very experimental field which is only going to be more complex and hard to master.

That said, you can just rent a GPU instead of buying it right away. It's not very expensive, and can be cheaper overall depending on your usage. It's also the only sane way to experiment with training as you need a lot of attempts.

This stuff can really devour any hardware you can possibly throw at it.

version_five• 4 years ago

you can just rent a GPU instead of buying it right away

I agree, this is an underrated option and I'm not sure why it doesn't get more attention. I've been using stable diffusion on a cloud machine, and, say $20 will get you very far - probably thousands of images generated and a few sessions of fine tuning. It's way more affordable that its apparent popularity would suggest

WhitneyLand• 4 years ago

It’s a good write up, worth a read if you’re want to understand how AI art is being used by artists and by newcomers.

stephc_int134• 4 years ago

This tech is currently barely usable for any real work outside of concepts, but it is easy to envision the development of new powerful tools built on top of refined iterations of the same models and algorithms, with finer controls and better integration.

Artists should rejoice, in my opinion, mastering this type of tool could dramatically increase their productivity, and thus their salaries.

andybak2• 4 years ago

I'm not sure it works like that. There's not an unlimited market for "things that look like original paintings". Demand won't scale with supply and "and thus their salaries" seems to ignore a couple of iron laws of economics.

However - I do wonder if this will increase the value of non-digital arts and crafts. They can't easily be substituted for - which is probably one of the key factors in establishing value in the art market.

snek_case2• 4 years ago

This tech is currently barely usable for any real work outside of concepts

I take it you haven't been keeping up. Stable Diffusion 2 and Midjourney are getting really, really impressive. Probably a 10x increase in quality over the original DALL-E already.

Take a look at Jodorowsky's Tron (Tron in the style of Jodorowsky's Dune): https://www.djfood.org/fantasy-jodorowsky-tron-visualisation...

chrstphrknwtn• 4 years ago

This is seriously impressive. I don't quite know what to think of it.

YurgenJurgensen• 4 years ago

That's still "barely useable for any real work outside of concepts". It makes for some impressive thumbnails, but it still has all the obvious signs of an AI-generated image. This is despite it being a situation that's heavily playing into the AI's strengths by using abstract or fantastical content where departures from reality and mistakes of scaling or logical arrangement of elements are less obvious. The lighting is also something that's really helping the AI there, as the highly unnatural lighting will cover up any illogical shadows or highlights. Everyone's hands are all mutilated, it has real trouble with text, symmetry, circles, multiple instances of the same object, and if the scene has more than one subject, everything starts to get all melty.

stephc_int134• 4 years ago

I have tried all the new toys and I am keeping track of this fascinating development.

I work in the video games "industry", we need concepts and mockups, but a much larger part of the production is assets, meshes, textures, materials, shaders...

We're seeing huge improvements, from photogrammetry to simplified production pipelines and more powerful light models.

ML based tools will also help to iterate faster, but the key point is control, human control.

orbital-decay3• 4 years ago

I'm keeping up with this pretty well, and it's very far away from being practical and controllable enough to get the actual job done. Txt2img is largely irrelevant for the real work, generation from text alone isn't going to work well beyond toy and novelty purposes.

krapp4• 4 years ago

Artists should rejoice, in my opinion, mastering this type of tool could dramatically increase their productivity, and thus their salaries.

Salaries do not increase with productivity. Rather, they tend to remain constant or even decrease as productivity rises, as technology makes that level of productivity easier to hire for, and thus less costly for the employer.

stephc_int134• 4 years ago

Do you think that people who are building houses are more or less productive now compared to before the invention of power tools?

How many office jobs have been replaced by computers?

Tossrock• 4 years ago

"you’re probably not going to be using any of the AI art tools to make a reference sheet for a character, nor be able to get it to generate images that consistently have the appearance of a custom character"

This was true maybe a month ago, but DreamBooth makes this possible

vegadw5• 4 years ago

OP here. This was a big struggle in writing this. Things changed so quickly that it's hard to keep up with what's possible.

drawingthesun• 4 years ago

Another recent development: Midjourney v4 has much better "image prompt" abilities allowing you to feed in various images of a character you have made to allow further scenes to maintain the characters likeness throughout.

I've read people making comics and generate many different scenes say v4 now allows consistent character design.

metalcrow2• 4 years ago

Can anyone with access to it test it out on the specific example in the post (fursona ref sheets), and show examples? If it is actually able to generate those with high accuracy that would seem to be a unbelievable improvement.

Filligree2• 4 years ago

Haven't tested it on that, but I did try it with an anime character who might be somewhat similar: Yoshida Yuuko, aka. Shamiko. Given that she's a very specific sort of demon girl, it was completely impossible to get anywhere close to her appearance with any pre-existing model.

I took ten high-quality pictures off Pixiv, spent five minutes cropping them, and ran Dreambooth overnight on a 3090 — this turned out to be enormous overkill, the final model was massively overtrained. Intermediate ones were fine.

The output is perfect; even higher quality than what the input model was already good at. This remains true even if I wander well outside the scope of the input pictures, e.g. different art styles, or Shamiko in a spacesuit wandering Mars, or...

https://usercontent.irccloud-cdn.com/file/w300/l9rBbcFo

Trust me when I say that 'magical girl shamiko' is not usually a thing. The technology works.

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/807260261747785759/10...

How about Shamiko on a highly improbable forest run? A completely different art style / "medium", in a completely different pose from any of the input images. Mind you, it's lower quality; that's mostly because I didn't do any cleanup or img2img work.

It's still not as good as the real thing. She's missing her tail in both of these pictures — though she had it in others — but even if I filtered for that, it's missing the expressivity it usually has. Shamiko's an emotional girl, and a lot of that shows in tail behaviour...

I doubt I need to tell you that there is no way to say "Jealous Shamiko, with tail curled protectively around Momo". Not yet, at any rate.

jalino23• 4 years ago

what a nice looking blog, the font are so easy to read, the dark theme so easy on the eyes and the images are colorful

vegadw5• 4 years ago

This just made my night. Thank you so much!

arcturus172• 4 years ago

I thought the same, love the style - kudos.

jonas-w• 4 years ago

This is exactly how i like the internet

wokwokwok3• 4 years ago

but the act of training a neural network on datasets like this has already been decided to be legal

Has it?

Look, you can argue about whether it’s morally right or not to use models that are fine tuned explicitly to copy the style of someone else, trained on their art without their consent, to make a model that can generate images very similar to the training images.

You can argue about technically of that’s copying, or if lossy compression is copying.

…but legal and moral are different things, and right now, as far as I’m aware:

- it’s only legal because there are no laws specifically making it illegal currently.

- there are active (eg. Copilot) cases challenging this to set a precedent.

- it’s sufficiently ambiguous having a model that anyone can type “a naked picture of a 12 year old” in and get exactly that as output, that stability has nerfed the most recent mode release they’ve done.

- there is a reasonably obvious similarity to other fields where a thing is itself not illegal or bad, but it can enable people to do illegal or bad things, and therefore access, ownership and usage of said things (eg. Hand guns) is heavily legislated.

I think “this has already been decided to be legal” is a blatantly false assumption.

jabits• 4 years ago

it’s only legal because there are no laws specifically making it illegal currently.

This is case with anything…anything not illegal is legal, at least in the US…

vorpalhex• 4 years ago

That is not quite correct. The question is undecided. It could be illegal and have been illegal this entire time.

wokwokwok3• 4 years ago

This is case with anything…anything not illegal is legal, at least in the US…

I think you're dancing around with words here. Let me be super specific:

There's no law specifically saying I can't use a jelly coated toasted to beat someone to death... but there are existing laws that cover 'beating someone to death'.

If you beat someone to death with a jelly coated toaster, you might argue for some obscure reason, your actions are not covered by the existing legal framework around beating people to death, but mostly likely you will not be protected by the claim you 'didn't know it was illegal' to do that.

...because the courts have not ruled that beating people to death with jelly coated toasters is legal.

ie.

a) There is no specific legal precedent or law around something but other laws related to it exist

and

b) Something has been determined to be legal by some precedent / law / whatever

Are not equivalent.

Regardless of what people want to believe, or have opinions one way or another, the assertion, made in the original article, that (b) was true, is not true.

Only (a) is true, and that is, legally, a much weaker statement.

majewsky• 4 years ago

Two disclaimers: 1. IANAL 2. I can only speak about German law.

I have investigated this a few months ago while researching a radio show segment on AI art. In German law, the relevant statutes appear to be section 23.1 and section 44b of the copyright code. The original text is at https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/urhg/__23.html https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/urhg/__44b.html and below is a Google Translate result that I have proof-read.

Section 23 (Adaptations and rearrangements): "(1) Adaptations or other rearrangements of a work, especially a melody, may only be published or used with the consent of the author. If the newly created work is at a sufficient distance from the work used, it does not constitute an adaptation or rearrangement within the meaning of sentence 1."

This amounts to the same as what TFA says about derivative works in general. If it's too close to the original, it may be infringing copyright. Gauging the boundary between "too close" and "not too close" is the bread and butter of copyright courts.

Section 44b (Text and data mining): "(1) Text and data mining is the automated analysis of one or more digital or digitized works in order to obtain information, in particular about patterns, trends and correlations. (2) Duplications of legally accessible works for text and data mining are permitted. The copies are to be deleted when they are no longer required for text and data mining. (3) Uses according to paragraph 2 sentence 1 are only permitted if the right holder has not reserved them. A reservation of use for works accessible online is only effective if it is in machine-readable form."

Again, IANAL, but in my opinion this covers neural networks. "Obtaining information about patterns, trends and correlations" is as close to a literal description of the purpose and function of artificial neural networks as you're going to get in legalese. Paragraph 2 just means that you have to delete your data-mined stash if you ever deem your model complete (but it should not be too hard to argue that ML training is always an ongoing process and thus the mined data will always be required). Regarding Paragraph 3, if I'm not mistaken, the "machine-readable form" part of paragraph 3 is very very very specifically aimed at robots.txt. That is, if you allow your art to appear in search results (which most artists want), then it's also fair game for data mining.

Once again, IANAL, and this is only German law. But I think it's very easy to make a case here that this existing code of law covers AI training as well, as long as measures are taken to ensure that source images cannot be reproduced with any sort of fidelity (and obviously that's a big "if").

unixhero2• 4 years ago

IANAL is the dumbest abbreviation to have come out of Internet forums.

I had to say it.

roenxi3• 4 years ago

Yeah, we'll see how the courts come down on this one. But If we follow exactly the same process as you describe using a human instead of a computer it seems like that would be fine. Artists copy each other all the time.

Also, this looks to me like a situation where generating art is suddenly so cheap and easy it doesn't matter what the courts decide. People can and will ignore the law, because it is trivial to generate new pictures and it is cost ineffective to enforce any restrictions. We're going to see this tech take off. Who knew that art would be the next thing software took out?

gonehome2• 4 years ago

This is basically my take - I'm mostly confused by the people up in arms about this (except that it likely makes their work more of a commodity, so I get that fear).

People look at art and make art in that style all the time, now a machine exists that can do that. Why is that unethical? Because they didn't consent for the machine to look at it/learn from it, but they did for humans? I don't think this argument will be able to hold the wave of change that's coming from this new capability. They'd be better off long term learning how to use it.

Nobody creates purely original things in a vacuum, machines won't either.

Retric5• 4 years ago

It’s really not that simple. If an artist picks 12 unusual colors to paint a sunset and you copy those exact same colors to also paint a sunset in his style then no that’s not ok.

People on HN have very strong options about this stuff without looking at any of the relevant case law.

tiahura• 4 years ago

IAAL. Regardless of how the Copilot case develops at the trial court level, anyone who thinks the Roberts' Supreme Court is ultimately going to kneecap this technology needs to reboot.

williamcotton3• 4 years ago

It’s not even getting out of the ninth district.

lost_tourist2• 4 years ago

YEah, I think people also need to give up on saying "well precedence says" with the current SCOTUS roster. They don't actually care about precedent when it doesn't jive with their agenda. It's hard to believe that the mightest lawyers in the land think precedent is unimportant but we've already seen it a few times and this SCOTUS is just getting started.

egypturnash2• 4 years ago

Yes. When artists say things like "this really feels like it should not be fair use" we are dismissed with "well it's legal!". Changing what "fair use" covers is a possibility.

Unfortunately art is a hard business to make a lot of money in and the vast majority of the people unhappy about this do not have the money to mount any kind of legal challenge to the corporations developing these databases, so we are basically fucked.

Which is in some ways nothing new, the average Internet user has no concept of creator's rights and will blissfully assume that if something's not behind a paywall, it's free for any use. It feels even shittier and worse when this is being done on an industrial scale by these AIs, though.

dmix• 4 years ago

Even if artists could sue this is assuming there is someone making enough money to sue.

Open source models will likely be dominant (this was how Stable Diffusion got popular, it's not clear their new neutered 'safe' model will be as popular or a successful business).

This is the new reality even if the bigco gets sued out of business. Artists need to accept that reality eventually. Just like all "panics".

Fortunately AI generators are not a direct replacement for artists, I've seen it used as part of the design process, but that still takes talent. Maybe it will get better but it's not a one-stop shop for business use-cases. More likely it will be AI+artist, not AI replacing artist.

marcosdumay• 4 years ago

AFAIK, from the discussion here, training the network has been established as fair use on the US. But that doesn't apply to use the network's results in any way.

VanTheBrand3• 4 years ago

As far as I know that hasn’t been established yet but is presumably what would be decided (especially in an academic environment). But yes the output is a totally different question.

rfrey• 4 years ago

Although not being explicitly illegal does make something legal, the phrasing "has been decided to be legal" suggests a debate, a conscious decision, and perhaps an overturned law. That is not the case as far as I know. It is legal (because that is the default), but no decision has been made.

gnopgnip• 4 years ago

There is a lot of case law on what a derivative work is. A model that outputs an identically image to the training doesn’t mean the trained model is infringing or a derivative work.

jagged-chisel• 4 years ago

... it’s only legal because there are no laws specifically making it illegal currently.

One might argue that any unlicensed use of copyrighted material is misuse (unless the courts have ruled it is fair use.)

Only the copyright holder may bring action against a potential misuse. Typically, individuals tend not to have deep enough pockets to hire the lawyers to bring the action. And during discovery it may be found that the model was trained on works-for-hire made by humans replicating the original style. Or appeals may continue on at more legal cost, without guarantee of recompense.

Most will decide it’s just not worth it. Until a company similar Getty buys up all the copyrighted material and, in addition to sensible suits, brings spurious legal action against individuals and turns the tables.

shadowgovt2• 4 years ago

In a lot of ways, whether it has or not is moot in the medium-term.

Court cases / legal clarification may outlaw Stable Diffusion or DALL-E for having been trained without the consent of the original artist on their copyrighted artworks. But if this technology proves valuable and viable, the likes of Disney, WPP, and Omnicom Group will pay a few dozen artists to create enough work to seed an engine that can generate 50 million wholly-owned lookalikes.

Copyright protection will ultimately shield the megacorps from competition by the common folk, not artists from competition by corporations.

lowbloodsugar• 4 years ago

it’s only legal because there are no laws specifically making it illegal currently.

No, it's only legal because nobody has litigated a case all the way to the Supreme Court. We all thought that APIs weren't copyrightable, and then, suddenly they were (or worse, were "assumed to be" but not explicitly ruled upon).

kmeisthax2• 4 years ago

In the EU, training a model on copyrighted data does not infringe copyright. This is explicit, codified law as of the latest EU Copyright Directive[0]. In the US, AI researchers are more or less hoping that Authors Guild v. Google forms controlling precedent against lawsuits against the AI companies. While this is not done-and-dusted case law, I can see the logic. The model is capable of, and is intended to be capable of, creating novel art.

In neither case is it legal to use outputs of an AI that infringe an already-existing copyrighted work. This means anyone using it to generate production-ready artwork is exposing themselves to potential legal liability if their AI winds up regurgitating training set data. This is what I worry about way more than just "are the model weights infringing copyright".

As for morality:

- Absolutely none of the current generative art systems are trained from scratch on ethically-sourced datasets. The AI companies just assume that because they need ungodly amounts of training set data, that they are morally entitled to get it, because they spend more time staring into the eyes of a basilisk[1] than worrying about the world they already live in.

- Multiple companies getting into generative art have gone above and beyond in giving human artists the middle finger. DeviantArt decided to blow all their good-will from defending against NFT nonsense by making their AI training program opt-out, which is NOT HOW CONSENT WORKS. Mimic[2] and Dreambooth are basically artistic impersonation tools that have specific moral implications beyond the general practice of AI art.

Whether or not this becomes actual law is... well, I'll put it to you this way. Stability AI's Dance Diffusion is actually trained on an ethically-sourced, public-domain dataset. Why? Because they're afraid of being sued by the RIAA. Despite the name, copyright maximalists are less about maximizing the rights of artists and more about building moats around large publishers. And generative art does not threaten[3] those publishers, so it will not be banned.

[0] Yes, the same one that mandated upload filters on video sites.

[1] Roko's Basilisk posits the idea of a superintelligent AI - one that can eat everyone's brains and emulate them perfectly - constructing a perfect hell for people who didn't build it as a way to threaten those people in the past to build it.

Longtermists can burn in computer-generated hell. Time discounts exist for a reason.

[2] https://illustmimic.com/en/

[3] Specifically: even in a world where AI completely outperforms humans on all artistic endeavors, publishers will just buy the AI companies.

tluyben22• 4 years ago

What I find weird is that humans do the same and no one mentions that; I have 2 professional (they have lived of it for decades) artist friends; one makes Giger art (paintbrush, exactly the same style but no copies, original but if you see it you are going to say Giger) and another one Vermeer, same thing. There is no discussion if that’s moral or legal, what’s the difference? The Giger one has bought a farm of GPUs a few months ago and is adding training to models for animations. He loves it.

Same with copilot; people copy shit from GitHub and SO all the time without mentioning copyrights and a lot of code people cough up is just ‘stolen’ from someone without remembering who/where it was; what’s the difference?

JKCalhoun2• 4 years ago

I'd say there's a good chance both of those artists are going to grow "beyond" the artist they are emulating (and by "beyond" here I don't mean better than but rather grow into something unique).

Lots of bands (nearly all?) learn their craft by playing covers. At some point the artists in the group start to find their voice.

I suspect AI never will.

spookie4• 4 years ago

Still waiting for the moment when somebody uses image/video AI for some real nasty incident in world politics.

PhasmaFelis2• 4 years ago

that stability has nerfed the most recent mode release they’ve done.

What does this mean?

nickthegreek• 4 years ago

Sd2 removed nsfw, artist names and celebs from training set. It’s a worse experience for the end user.

nbzso• 4 years ago

For most hobbies/professions, there are barriers to entry. For some it’s expensive equipment, for others it’s training and hard work to acquire a skill.

Barriers to entry? Training and hard work are barriers to entry? So the next time when you go to the dentist, tell him that you can fix your tooth with a text prompt.

arcturus172• 4 years ago

Training and hard work are barriers to entry?

Yes, assuming there is no substitute.

dmarchuk• 4 years ago

Stable Diffusion? Well, that’s free-ish. Problem is, you’ll probably want to run it locally, which requires a really, really beefy graphics card. I was struggling to run it on a Vega56 - a GPU that goes for ~$150 used now - so I went out and got a RTX3090 for about $1,000. If you’re already a gamer with a GPU with 8Gb+ of VRAM you’re probably good, but for most people this is a bit absurd.

I agree with the problem, on platforms like AWS you'll even need to send a manual request so they would let you use instances which can run SD. On the other hand there's already something like replicate.com, which allows you to run the SD like an API. I hope there will be more services like this.

https://replicate.com/blog/run-stable-diffusion-with-an-api

kepano4• 4 years ago

A couple of years ago I wrote the script for a graphic novel. I would have liked to illustrate it myself (I went to art school after all), but I was too busy running a startup at the time, so I pitched it as a collaboration to about 30 different artists that I thought could do a great job with it. I could not get a single person to bite.

In my pitch I proposed generous royalties and cash compensation to the artists. All of them essentially said that they weren't taking commissions. I'm sure this is in part due to the fact that I have never been involved in the graphic novel world, so they'd be taking a chance on someone new. Still, it seemed there was no amount I could pay to get someone to work with me.

Now I am reviving this graphic novel idea and still looking for someone I can pay to help me work on the project. However, the more synthography advances as a technology the more it seems like I should explore it as a path for this project. It would help me develop the book much faster than I can on my own. At minimum it could help me get the story board in place.

Maybe some day synthography can help artists scale up their output, in the same way Michelangelo developed a workshop of apprentices. I would be more than happy to pay an artist's AI apprentice if I can't work directly with the human.

88stacks2• 4 years ago

what exactly are you looking for in someone to help you?

kepano4• 4 years ago

It’s a sci-fi graphic novel. I have the story written and I’m looking for an artist to collaborate with.

synapticpaint• 4 years ago

Hi, I run http://synapticpaint.com/ and using AI image generation for graphic novels/comics is one of the directions I'm exploring. If you're interested in collaborating to make your graphic novel a reality (I'll provide the tooling in return for product feedback), please email me at the email address in my profile! (I poked around on your site but couldn't find an email address.) Thanks!

musingsole2• 4 years ago

I've had similar experiences trying to commission works. Turns out artists are difficult to work with almost by definition. And the few who actually act like they're providing a service you've agreed to pay money for are few and far between.

BlueTankEngine• 4 years ago

If you don't mind answering, I'm really curious how much cash you were offering up front and what the page count you were commissioning was. Been talking to some art consultancies recently and I'm curious to how your experience compared to mine.

kepano4• 4 years ago

$100k and 50% royalties

Palomides• 4 years ago

I think you're wildly underestimating the amount of effort and very specific skills that go into making comics, it's either a labor of immense love for the art form, or getting paid a large amount of money up front to work with an established writer, nobody is looking for an idea guy

kepano4• 4 years ago

I’m aware :)

threads2• 4 years ago

clicked for art found weird animal people

CharlesW4• 4 years ago

Furries are tragically underserved by human artists.

mc32• 4 years ago

It seems there are a few distinct things we have to consider:

How is art defined? How is it defined by artists and how is it defined by consumers. Some artists may want to define it such that it's made by people. Much fewer consumers would make that a requirement (aside from some art collectors). Consumers will care much less of how some art was generated and they will dictate demand.

justinator2• 4 years ago

Making GIFS No artist could reasonably do this. This is effectively a new art form.

So they're taking about "animation"?

This and image-to-image generation (more in a moment)

A reader will see there's more writing, you don't need the parenthetical.

CharlesW4• 4 years ago

So they're taking about "animation"?

I found this funny as well, but on reflection I think the author is talking about the specific effect of changing the seed but not the prompt. To me it highlights a weakness of AI imagery — no intent, no progression, no story.

justinator2• 4 years ago

no intent, no progression, no story.

Eh, yet. I can see where the prompt just gets extended to, "in a hilarious series events in the style of buster keaton" and all of a sudden your vampire-toothed anime furry in cyberpunk clothes is flying down the side of a building, being saved at the very end by a sunshade they flop into. But I don't know if I'm going to live long enough where AI makes new Buster Keaton shorts using commonplace elements around them in new and exciting ways. Like would AI know that you can hang from the hands of a clock, which move over the course of a day? to me that's some creativity that was years ahead of its time.

Now that I've attempted to predict the far-from-now future, I'm sure we'll see this in 6 months.

midnitewarrior• 4 years ago

I see human-curated, AI-generated images online, but none of it is art, as art is a form of human expression, and AI algorithms are not human.

nonima• 4 years ago

AI algorithms are human expression.

r0s• 4 years ago

I'm curious what market is supposed to be in danger of being disrupted?

Digital artists doing commissioned work in the style of some other more famous artist? Bespoke stock photographers?

It seems these jobs will simply use the new tools, and sell a more manual version when needed.

71a54xd2• 4 years ago

If artists can't adapt they'll just be left behind - not much value to be lost if they could be replaced with Stable Diffusion. Low hanging fruit, too bad their etsy store won't bring in $8k a year anymore

astrange4• 4 years ago

Artists provide different products from image generation models, especially artists making physical objects, so they probably won’t be replaced at all.

71a54xd2• 4 years ago

At best their work is used to launder money for the rich and elite.

88stacks2• 4 years ago

good guide, I've been working on stable diffusion a lot as well and ran into many of the same problems with extra body parts and have developed a few techniques that remove a lot of the extra body parts, but still refining it. He is also right about stable diffusion not being free as it is a PITA to get the GPUs running and software stack setup. I'm using the body cleanup techniques and other algorithms to improve output at https://88stacks.com which is a free stable diffusion custom model generator api. its running on my research cluster to train models. Please check it out and give me feedback :)

CharlesW4• 4 years ago

I can understand the author's feelings on this. It's fun, and it's exciting that with no knowledge of a domain the author can get interesting results. It can "feel like" creativity, even though literally anyone can get good results.

Similarly, AI-remixed¹ music is getting better and better. I want to know how the author will feel when their music² is used to build a model that allows anyone to create infinite music in their style and beyond, much of which will be enjoyed far more widely (because it will be free or royalty-free) than the source material ever will.

¹ It doesn't seem fair to call it "generated" or "created" when it'd be useless without an enormous corpus of source material powering the thing.

² https://vegadeftwing.bandcamp.com/

mojoe• 4 years ago

like the enormous corpus of source material powering every adult human brain?

vegadw5• 4 years ago

I'd be fine with it being used to train models. The music world is already extremely derivative and trendy. In western music anyway, we have 12 notes to go around and often only use a subset per song. Additionally, much of a song's structure is formulaic, even with music as experimental as my own. I've used AI tools for composition (though I've always had to modify their outputs), pretty much all musicians use samples, etc. If anything, I see the use of AI as a step towards having less reuse in music because of the ability for generes to bleed together.

CharlesW4• 4 years ago

I'd be fine with it being used to train models.

Right now, your music requires attribution and can't be used for commercial purposes.

Should visual artists have the same ability to choose the rights they reserve?

aperrien• 4 years ago

I'm impressed. this is the first critique I've seen that actually engages with the topic in a fair way. As of now, there's been just way too much noise to get to the detail of what exactly is wrong with AI art.

As for me, I just feel that it should be looked at the same way that photography is looked at; that it's a new medium all to itself. You wouldn't enter a photograph in an oil painting competition, so you shouldn't enter AI art into a drawing/sketch art competition either. It would also be useful if there was an acknowledgement that AI was used in some elements of the art, but like as not there will always need to be a human agent that makes corrections in what is created.

nemo44x• 4 years ago

Maybe visual art will respond to this like it did after the camera came out. Suddenly artists were free to interpret the world through their own lenses.

flandish• 4 years ago

I am an oil painter. AI art is, imho, art just the same. The more art the better.

JadoJodo2• 4 years ago

I have to say, I also find it fairly disturbing the waste of generating images over and over and over, hoping to find the right one.

toxicFork• 4 years ago

That's what a lot of artists do, too.

mdorazio• 4 years ago

Wait until you hear about this thing called Photography.

JadoJodo2• 4 years ago

I guess the difference that I see is that with photography I’m not generating a completely random image every time I push the shutter button. I think the corollary might be if I pointed my camera at some trees and pushed the shutter button resulting in my camera then picking a random picture that someone else has taken of trees anywhere in the world and I now have to hit the button many times to find the “right” one.

I understand that photography generates waste images. I just don’t feel like it’s the same.

nonbirithm• 4 years ago

Personally, I don't consider myself an artist and don't believe I have an understanding of what it means to be one, which will bias my thoughts on the subject. Still, I'm having some reservations about the ability to endlessly churn out AI-generated content.

In my view, in the past it was believed that to be an artist and produce the output you admire, you had to learn things. You had to be patient, and spend thousands of hours learning a skill. But I don't think it starts and ends with just 10,000 hours of brushstrokes. All that time and effort likely causes other neurological changes owing to the situations that being a traditional artist forced you into, like being exposed to other people and communicating with an audience.

The ability to generate art with prompts bypasses all that time and effort. Using Stable Diffusion, I have made incredible pictures (that I don't consider art), but at the end of the day I still feel like just another person chasing yet another rush of dopamine, the same as it's always been. It's an enabling device. I have never been able to summon the will to practice drawing or painting for enough time to see results, and that hasn't changed. The only difference is that I have the end results, which is mostly what I wanted in the first place, and it's pretty much all I'll ever get with this setup.

But it is often repeated that "focusing on the end results" when trying to learn a creative skill results in bad outcomes. It is a character flaw that someone has to overcome to get better. Now I feel that 70% of the road to "the end result" can be bypassed without the need to work towards that additional knowledge and virtue.

When artists speak of AI damaging the integrity of their profession, I think this is part of what they mean. For the first time in human history, it is now possible to be a better "artist" without growing into a better person, or developing a wider-scale notion of what existence or the world outside is. The folk assumption that growing up as an artist changes you in fundamental ways (by forcing you to study the craft and observe the world for what it is) has been violated.

The people who treat art as a profession or hobby to work at over thousands of hours, for example, will probably share a lot of significant interactions and bondmaking as their skill gradually improves over the years; not so with a person that can generate pseudo-masterpieces within minutes.

I'm going to guess that the long-term downsides of AI art are going to be baked into cultural norms instead of the limits of silicon. There has already been significant backlash from art circles when tech-oriented people outside of the scene train models in the style of people like Kim Jung Gi, who had just recently passed away. Many people's rules about "art" have gone unwritten for so long because this current situation was unthinkable only a decade ago. Regardless of intent, being seen as plagiarizing the style of someone who is no longer alive isn't a good look.

Still, what I always want to keep buried in my subconscious about how AI art is used and treated is that my insatiable interest in the subject is fueled by my lack of (ability/drive/bravery) to express myself through my own actions, whereas my embarrassment is spared by delegating to a machine to do the work for me and guess what the inner workings of my imagination look like. If this is something I need to overcome, it's only going to get harder for me to do so as the state of the field advances further.

The word that keeps coming to mind when I look over the things I generated is "intent". It doesn't feel like I "made" the things I did, but that I "found" them. There's not a lot of insight to be gleaned except the keywords that each subset of popular culture finds the most useful or interesting in regards to prompt engineering during a particular timeframe. My preoccupation when generating pictures is to find a result that looks nice, not something that carries intentional meaning or context that's greater than the sum of its parts.

vegadw5• 4 years ago

OP here. This is phrased beautifully and at least partially reflects my own views. I especially like how you said "It doesn't feel like I "made" the things I did, but that I "found" them".

This is a big part in why I enjoy vastly different kinds of music creation. When I work with a traditional DAW and build a track from scratch, I'm sculpting and crafting an artwork. When I work with modular synthesizers and generative compositional tools (AI or not) I feel like I'm navigating sonic landscapes to find interesting destinations.

AI art is the latter, and while it's fun, it's a different feeling during creation all together. In music, I can typically hear which the artist was doing in a given song. With Stable Diffusion and DallE, I don't know that I can as reliably. This is why the divide is so interesting to me. We have to radically different avenues, each with their own merits in how fulfilling they can be, to choose from which produce similar results.

I will admit, there is something to the reward of making something hand crafted that at least to the artist, adds value, even if that value isn't (typically) transferable to the end user.

williamcotton3• 4 years ago

Songwriters have been using rhyming dictionaries since the day they were first put on sale. It’s a similar kind of process of discovery. You still have agency and individual inspiration.

Like, this isn’t some kind of hack’s approach to art. Literally every working lyricist that I know uses a rhyming dictionary from time to time. Why? It’s fucking work! There are deadlines!

With regards to AI visual art… the best results I’ve seen have been from people with strong visual art skills. Aesthetic choices still matter a lot when you’re tweaking the prompt, model, hyperparameters, etc.

unixhero2• 4 years ago

Someone likes uhhh furries a lot.

lxe• 4 years ago

If diving into discussions of AI art, "The Ontology of the Photographic Image" by Andre Bazin is always a relevant read that can help you draw helpful parallels: https://archive.org/details/Bazin_Andre_The_Ontology_of_Phot...

boredemployee• 4 years ago

unless using rhetoric, we still dont know how to deal with copyright/piracy/digital art in 2022

Dove• 4 years ago

When I was in school studying computer science, as we learned about code reuse and libraries and whatnot, one student expressed a concern that all the software the world ever needed would be written, and we would be out of a job. The professor smiled at the concern, and said that it seemed to turn out in practice, no matter how many problems were solved in reusable ways, that there were always new things to do.

This development seems parallel to me: AI does not seem to be inventing, even in the limited sense of closely customizing for a purpose. It is remixing the well established. If machines can help with remixing and reapplying the old, that's all to the good. Humans still own the new.

williamcotton3• 4 years ago

  Real-time heads up display
  Keeps the danger away
  But only for the things that already ruined your day

cageface2• 4 years ago

One of the most important things that distinguishes great artists is that they have a distinctive, recognizable style. And it takes a lot of hard work to achieve this.

I think what makes me uneasy about these AI art generators is that they can trivially assimilate a new style like this and commoditize it. That's why so many of the most successful prompts are "X in the style of ${artist}".

musingsole2• 4 years ago

This just implies style will mutate as it has in chess.

cageface2• 4 years ago

Chess style and art style don’t seem similar enough to me for this analogy to work. Computers are strictly better than humans at chess in every respect.

cloudking4• 4 years ago

I think there should be a fair use license that allows creators to decide whether or not their original work can be used in AI training data sets. Just because you can scrape someone's work from the internet, shouldn't automatically give you permission to use it. Maybe this is something Creative Commons should consider. https://creativecommons.org/

gedy• 4 years ago

I struggle to see how this is different from another artist eyeing then aping their style. The choice would be to not show other humans the art basically.

cloudking4• 4 years ago

It's not about copying their style, the main difference is AI companies making revenue training their systems on other people's work, while the original artists are not being compensated for helping train their systems.

Invictus0• 4 years ago

Don't allow photos of the art?

baron8162• 4 years ago

I’m convinced AI art is going to be a boon for artists. People always assume that the demand for something will remain static as its production grows and the producers become more productive. But as the cost of something falls, people consume more of it. That’s a law in economics. This is no different.

What’s likely to happen is people are going to invent whole new media that will use this. Incredibly elaborate interactive and personalized experiences will be made possible by this. One person will be able to deliver a huge amount of value, and they will be rewarded accordingly.

Think back to the 1980s. Programmers were in very short supply, and the work they were doing was less accessible and more difficult than it was today. IDEs, version control, better languages and frameworks, easy access to tools to learn to code, Stack Overflow, etc. made programming much more accessible and engineers became much more productive. The number of programmers out there is orders of magnitudes greater than three decades ago. Yet real salaries have still grown tremendously. The value per capita has grown even faster than those salaries because they’re so productive.

The same thing is going to happen here. Artists will build unimaginably huge, complex projects (on the scale of Google/Facebook/Amazon), and the world will gobble them up.

jiggawatts• 4 years ago

A friend is a programmer, and he’s always wanted to make a computer game.

Suddenly, he’s got a cheap option for getting some basic art for a simple turn based game, card game or similar.

If a game of his takes off? He’ll have to hire artists to keep up with the increased workload.

AI will move barriers of entry lower, not higher.

baron8162• 4 years ago

Yes, creating art itself will have a lower barrier to entry, just like learning to code in Python has a lower barrier to entry than Assembly. But any software engineer will tell you that most of the challenges don’t come from writing lines of code, they come from building things that can scale at scales. Building a big thing in a big organization means having good communication and project management systems. Those things haven’t been taken over by AI (yet).

barbariangrunge• 4 years ago

The lower the barriers to entry, the more competition game developers face, often by teams willing to charge little or nothing. Look at the app stores on mobile: 0.01% of apps make back their development cost

Steam had almost 9000 new games added to it last year, and the average revenue of each fell by almost half a couple of years ago

yucky2• 4 years ago

     > But as the cost of something falls, people consume more of it. That’s a law in economics.

Which law is that? When the tulipmania crash happened, did people start consuming more tulip bulbs?

superfish• 4 years ago

In case you’re genuinely curious about the referenced law:

“conversely, as the price of a good decreases (↓), quantity demanded will increase (↑)”

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

mikojan• 4 years ago

The "law of diminishing marginal utility" asserts that marginal utility is always positive. More is always better.

In any case, it is a bizarre notion with perhaps limited applicability in the real world.

awithrow• 4 years ago

i'ts not a law, but there is also Jevon's Paradox in which the more efficient use of a resource causes overall increase in the amount of overall consumption of the resource

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

In this case you can think of Artists as the "resource" being used.

efsavage• 4 years ago

Yeah, people always underestimate/forget the ability of artists to use everything for art in novel ways, I see no reason AI is any exception. I'm sure it's already happening and I just haven't been exposed to it yet.

onepointsixC4• 4 years ago

I’m convinced AI art is going to be a boon for artists.

Have you talked to any artists? Because in my experience they universally hate AI generated art. Not just a little. I think I've seen more artists who were open to NFT's at this point than AI. Art sharing websites are getting filled to the brim with posts from new accounts sharing AI art which sometimes very directly takes clearly identifiable features and styles from other artists.

AI generated art is beckoning a possible dark age for visual arts. There are many lost arts already, if AI trivializes the costs and efforts why bother honing it. Then we find ourselves in a creative void as the only art generated will be based on art that of which has come before.

hodgesrm• 4 years ago

Have you looked at the resulting art works? There's an exhibit called "Unsupervised" currently running at the New York Museum of Modern Art [0]. I saw it last week--a fascinating of collage of shifting, waterlike images with delightful trompe l'oeil effects. If this is what AI-generated art can look like I'm all for it.

[0] https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/5535

lolinder2• 4 years ago

There are many lost arts already, if AI trivializes the costs and efforts why bother honing it.

Photography can capture reality far better than any artist could achieve even with a lifetime of practice, and today it can do so with nearly zero cost--take out your phone, hold down the camera button, snap a picture. These advances hardly put an end to drawing and painting as skills.

It turned out that there's value in art beyond verisimilitude, and if anything the advent of photography encouraged a resurgence of exploration into what art really is: a movement away from pure verisimilitude in search of feeling.

This is what I expect to happen with AI art today. Yes, the AI models can produce art that looks awesome and wonderful now, but it's frankly already starting to wear thin. Art exists to fulfill humanity's need to experience something new, and AI alone simply cannot keep up with the meta game.

There will need to be human artists guiding the AI to produce something valuable, and there will continue to be human artists working by hand to create the novel works that the AI could never have rendered.

KMnO4• 4 years ago

I am an (amateur, non professional) artist and I am a big supporter of AI generated art tools.

The main issue is that anyone can write a simple prompt and get 85% of the way to an image that previously required a decade of experience to create.

But that last 15% is where real artists differentiate themselves. It’s the last 15% that can’t be faked if you don’t have a sense of artistic direction and discretion.

I strongly disagree with “why bother honing it” as well. If anything, being able to get to the “honing” stage so quickly is what makes these tools so powerful. I’m sure if Gordon Ramsey had to butcher his own chicken, grind his own grain for flour, and churn his cream into butter, he wouldn’t spend as much time on the finishing and plating of a chicken sandwich.

janalsncm• 4 years ago

Disclaimer, I’m a layperson when it comes to art. I’ve taken one art history class so I could probably talk about various art styles, but I’m no expert.

In my experience of visiting art museums, some of the classical and renaissance art is incredible. There is clearly some profound idea behind the piece, and the skill is the vehicle of that idea. A huge amount of art, though, is simply commissioned portraits of some wealthy businessman or forgettable Duke. The purpose of these paintings is simply to represent reality. There is no idea behind it.

For the artists painting them, the camera must have been devastating. It meant that years of training in studying how to properly draw an eye and how to get the colors inside a shadow right were at risk of being entirely devalued. But the camera also laid bare the fact that art is more than just skill. I imagine a lot of artists who were coasting by on skill alone hated the camera.

We’re at that point now with digital art. The cost of skill in actually drawing a thing is now zero. Anyone can do it. The question is, do they have anything to say?

thomashop• 4 years ago

I have talked to and worked with a few artists, trying to capture their style using generative AI models.

With the limited subset of artists I have worked with (traditional modern / contemporary painters) they have been very inspired by the creative possibilites of these models and in one case see it as a great opportunity to scale their work to new types of media such as video.

It would have been practically impossible for one of the artists I am working with to draw each frame by hand but now she can generate music videos in her style by tweaking and working with Stable Diffusion and a set of reference images.

LoveMortuus• 4 years ago

AI generated art is beckoning a possible dark age for visual arts.

I don't think the invention of a camera displaced many artists, but I'm quite sure that they were just as angry, probably saying how it doesn't have a soul and such. But in the end it improved the life of humans to an unimaginable levels.

I think same if not more can be or will be achieved with AI generated art. And I don't think it's displace many artists jobs.

Again, the coming of AI art feels like the coming of camera must have felt.

ilkke• 4 years ago

Professional artist here, and I can tell you there are as many different opinions as there are people, including those who couldn't care less. But if you look at the hot take mic drop platforms, you will of course see either hype or outrage with little nuance.

It's happening very quickly and the outcomes are difficult to predict, but it's clear it's a big deal. We either fear the unknown or are excited by it. I feel most of the controversy is in fact the robots-will-make-our-life-comfortable / robots-will-take-our-jobs discussion. The real problem is elsewhere, not the tech itself.

Photography is if course a good comparison, but don't forget 3d CGI. I can place things exactly how I want them and have the computer do ALL the drawing for me? Outrageous! It certainly removed a lot of need for menial manual work (and even filming), but has also opened the opportunity for creating entirely new things that before would just not be practical, or enjoyable to make. And there's no doubt now that a lot of skill is required to make things look good. It can seem like it's easy to get great looking stuff with AI but it's not. What's easy is to churn out tons of samey derivative crap that will age very badly as soon as we get used to it, like with early 3d.

godelski4• 4 years ago

I'm curious how many people have actually tried these networks out. I've dropped a bunch of demos below so you can actually try them and I encourage everyone to do so before they form strong opinions here.

As someone that works in generative modeling I think it is important to note that we are hand selecting results and not showing the average ones. There's been such a hype machine that if we show our average results that we'll get killed in review (publishing in a hyped space unfortunately requires a lot of salesmanship). Not a thing I'm particularly happy about, but I think this is important to note because if you're just looking at the images on Twitter, Blogs, and other social media then you're seeing the top 1% results. Images that take quite a bit of time and effort to produce. Likely not as long as an actual artist to make them, but still a lot of skill is involved.

I do agree that I think it'll be a big boon for artists. I've even been using these to get better at drawing. The results are bad even with prompt engineering, but hey, my human mind can fill in the gaps and it is good for expanding creativity. We'll get better at these models for sure but I'm not quite convinced it'll kill a lot of art jobs. But maybe I don't know what those jobs are that are being killed. But then again, I've even seen artists do much better at these models than me even though I understand the code and math going on. There's also cool things like walking through the latent spaces, but you won't be able to do that with the hugging face code. But that is art that you won't be able to do elsewhere. It is entirely new.

https://huggingface.co/spaces/akhaliq/Ghibli-Diffusion

https://huggingface.co/lambdalabs/sd-image-variations-diffus...

https://huggingface.co/spaces/shi-labs/Versatile-Diffusion

https://huggingface.co/spaces/akhaliq/openjourney

https://huggingface.co/spaces/anzorq/finetuned_diffusion

https://huggingface.co/lambdalabs/sd-pokemon-diffusers

https://huggingface.co/spaces/hakurei/waifu-diffusion-demo

woolion4• 4 years ago

I tried Ghibli diffusion to get some decent cartoon styled results with SD, but it's really bad. Results were all hallucinations from the training data, no interesting new combinations, no novel prompts that would work. I stopped after a few dozens.

I'd still like to get some good cartoony results with SD, but it's clearly not possible yet.

woolion4• 4 years ago

But as the cost of something falls, people consume more of it. That’s a law in economics. This is no different.

I don't know such a law, but it's simply false. People have 2 finite budgets they can allocate to entertainment, time and money. In many ways money is not the limiting factor anymore since people have Steam lists with hundreds of unplayed games and the abundance of Free2Play. The main factor it not to have a saleable product, it is to manage to get in in front of enough eyes, with all marketplaces already being saturated and ads being useless unless you have a very high budget.

I'm a bit worried that it will devaluate indie productions even further because of an over-abundance of AI generated content, further elevating industry production that can afford really competent artists that you can't even start to replace.

delusional• 4 years ago

I'd draw some parallels to the rise of advertising as well. For most people, the culture industry as entered at "post-scarcity" phase, and the consumption of mass-art is now gated more by eyeballs and less by actual production. The only (reasonable) way to increase eyeballs is through advertisement, paying 3rd parties to force consumers to see (part of) your art.

sylware• 4 years ago

Yep. I have been gaming on native elf/linux (no msft grade proton plz) for a decade, and when we talked about time, it is a bit more complex: based on the type of game, it depends also on your state of mind (tired, motivated, etc). Games are "demanding", as it is not passively watching some content. I cannot play a game of dota2 if I am too tired (namely the adrenaline won't compensate enough), and you will need a break from it once in a while, if not burnt out for good.

Namely, it is more than time alone, it is "that right time" and there is much, much less of it.

pixelbath• 4 years ago

but he didn’t tell them that ahead of time

He actually did disclose this [1], at least to the art fair administration:

Olga Robak, a spokeswoman for the Colorado Department of Agriculture, which oversees the state fair, said Mr. Allen had adequately disclosed Midjourney’s involvement when submitting his piece; the category’s rules allow any “artistic practice that uses digital technology as part of the creative or presentation process.” The two category judges did not know that Midjourney was an A.I. program, she said, but both subsequently told her that they would have awarded Mr. Allen the top prize even if they had.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/02/technology/ai-artificial-...

toofy• 4 years ago

this reeks of something we see so often recently. implying there is a “panic” or a “hysteria” when there just isn’t.

are there occasionally people who say this is something which may upend art? of course. but is there a “panic”?

the people this type of clickbait immediately grabs are those who seem to enjoy explaining why “the panicky and the hysterical” are wrong wrong wrong.

but ultimately most of the time they seem to be attacking a ghost.

double_nan• 4 years ago

It’s interesting how fast we will see open positions for AI whisperers: ppl who are proficient with certain text2whatever “AIs” to produce things which are made by relatively low skill workers now days

Animats• 4 years ago

Wait until this hits music. It already has, but it's not very good.[1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M-5J5Nv0AC4

ponorin• 4 years ago

Text to speech is pretty much a solved question at this point, but nobody said it will replace voice actors, nor did it. It conquered TikTok, I'll give you that, but that's barely an accomplishment.

For me AI art is the same thing. It can give you serviceable material in a very fast time, but that's it. It's a Big Mac of the art industry. It's not gonna kill artists like how McDonald's didn't kill restaurants or even rival fast food chains or gourmet hamburger shops, because the only thing redeemable in AI art is you get variations of well-known styles (putting "trending on ArtStation" in the prompt to make it look good is a thing. let that sink in).

bitwize2• 4 years ago

Text to speech isn't really a solved problem yet. Within the next few years, it will be possible to prompt "Sonic the Hedgehog saying: 'I'm sure that'll work, just like the last thousand plans you had, Eggman' with heavy sarcasm" and get a read that's indistinguishable from Roger Craig Smith's. But we're not quite there yet. The models for GLaDOS are very, very close, enough to allow YouTubers to create their own skits -- but getting an AI to sound like an AI is, for obvious reasons, a relative doddle.

PAMANOCH• 4 years ago

The major problem is that the AI companies are redirecting the profit from artists to themselves. The creative industry will remain, but artists won't be able to receive even one penny, companies could just 1) grab their work with absolute zero payment, 2) fine-tune a new model 3) profit on the style. Artist as a job will cease to exist very soon as they are becoming free suppliers for AI companies. Like, Uber with remote drivers controlling cars, but all drivers work for free as they claim all cars are capable of "self-driving". How is this acceptable and legal is beyond my understanding.

throwaway2902• 4 years ago

That's the exact concern.

There is a way we can pit some corporations against the others to help with this though: Train models exclusively on content by megacorps like Disney, then claim it's fair use.

Those guys lobbied to get copyright extended for ages for own profit; for once they could help protect the ordinary artist.

ShamelessC2• 4 years ago

Similar to Moore's law, "transformer" deep neural nets have been found to following scaling laws[0]. This means the faster and more VRAM your GPU's have, the better a model you can train "for free".

Training models from scratch only works with massive (labeled) datasets covering a massive data distribution. With language models, the datasets being used are quickly approaching "all known written text" sizes. Training a model from scratch on Microsoft's internal code, with not only its precious intellectual property, but also its technical debt. Code at Microsoft is not going to get close to covering the broad range of styles that a coder could possibly use. The model will possibly diverge without enough data, as it needs to see a given "example usage" in multiple different contexts before it can learn it.

My current understanding is that deep NN's are quite good at modeling an underlying distribution of data without needing any priors hard-coded about that dataset. But! They need to see a whole lot more of it than an adult human would. Several orders of magnitude more. - and they need to see accurate labels about 75-80% of the time.

[0] https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/scaling-laws

sunjester• 4 years ago

AI generated art or not, I'd visit an art gallery with cool pictures.

panzerboiler• 4 years ago

Good art stems from an intimate context. AI regurgitated noise in not going to have that peculiarity for a long time, if ever.

411111111111111• 4 years ago

You're kinda missing the point with that statement as you're ignoring the financial aspect of it.

The reality is that most art creators are getting paid by marketing departments to create essentially stock art for various marketing initiatives.

it's likely not particularly enjoyable work, but is probably necessary for living for a lot of unknown artists. If that market is categorically removed from the equation, these artists will have serious issues going forward.

It's like the old argument of workers getting redundant by automation. Sure, some people will find new jobs in other deciplines, but not everyone.

Though to be fair, current models aren't there yet. They might get there eventually, and that's the fear if a lot of people.

visarga3• 4 years ago

We're the same. Noise to meaning.

In the brain, information is transmitted through the release of chemical neurotransmitters at the junction, or synapse, between neurons. This process is stochastic in nature, which is believed to be a key feature in how the brain operates.

rSi• 4 years ago

the 'fun" aspect of these "ai art" discussions is, that no artist are involved and that they show how little the techies know about art. replicating a style in a digital image is tiny fraction of what art can be. it's so boring having to listen to people talk about the future of something they clearly don't understand. let me give you a couple of points to understand what separates ai and human made images, and why art is something other than replicating and recombining what's already part of our cultural space. (sorry for my bad English, I'm not a native speaker)

1. the medium & technique: what technique is being used to put the artwork into this world? I beg you all, please go to a museum full of paintings (let's not forget that there are sculptures, installations, and so on) and take your time to look at them. you will find out that the digital representation of "the girl with the pearl earrings" is not even half the artwork. it's an oil painting and that has an incredible depth to it. see how the figure is put into the frame - who cares about a hypothetical room she is in - the important part is what is being shown and what is being kept from us. the light and the dark parts.. I could go on... please try to expose yourself to art in person and find out how much more than colour values a painting is! (brush strokes, depth of colour, size, varnish, etc)

2. originality: why have someone paint in the style of someone else? people who are not into art often don't understand that a style is always bound to a person and the time they surface. art after 1945 had many ways of reflecting and processing the horrors of the nazi regime, the holocaust, etc the invention of photography changed the art, but not because craftsman went out of business, but because the subject of the painting changed. before photography abstract art would not have been possible (although artists already changed their styles to less realistic) hyper realyism on the other hand evolved long after photography was invented....

3. history and provenance of the artwork and the artist:

I'm getting tired typing this all out on my phone :) I think i have to redo this in a more concise way with my computer or maybe pen and paper...

kybernetyk• 4 years ago

In the future artists, photographers and the likes will be creating art just to feed it into the AI. Provided some smart licensing scheme this should allow to make artists a living by creating content that is then devoured by the machine.

xg152• 4 years ago

I think especially tech people would do good to re-read the article, replace "artist" with "developer" and "artwork" with "program", "architecture" or "software stack" and see if the arguments that there is nothing to worry about still make sense to them.

If Copilot is any indication, we're really not far from some tool which can take a spec as a prompt and output an entire software system - front end, back end, DB layout, configuration - which sort of fulfills that spec.

mtrower2• 4 years ago

This just sounds like an evolution of the compiler to me.

OctopusLupid• 4 years ago

That would be great, honestly. An average person can finally write their own apps for themselves and their friends.

xg152• 4 years ago

I mean, it seems to be happening right now, so we will see how things go on from here...

PostOnce• 4 years ago

50s/70s/90s art are recognizably different

I have wondered if merely being behind the curve will be the Achilles heel of AI art -- nobody wants a bunch of old-looking crap, and if you're on the cutting edge, there isn't a large enough body of work to train the AI from, so it can never catch up; i.e., 2030 art might not look like 2020 art, and you may never have a current-enough labelled dataset to look "current"

I do hope AI art will make game and film production cheaper, but at the same time I suspect for commercial ads and a large part of graphic design, AI won't be that useful, since it is "imprecise" (can't fit the art in exactly such and such a position in a beautiful way -- or even, think of a dashed line with misaligned corner-dashes), or ads will look old and "wrong".

Just thinking out loud.

qayxc• 4 years ago

Even worse: imagine the whole internet being flooded with AI generated regurgitations of older art styles. The next generations of AI models would then use this as training data, creating a feedback-loop that gets us nowhere fast.

kilotaras• 4 years ago

Progress in the space is at breakneck speed. Check out this comparison of 5 months (!) of midjourney progress [0].

[0] https://twitter.com/lopp/status/1595846677591904257

art-is-human2• 4 years ago

Speaking as a full-time professional artist (painter) with fine art training in atelier environments, the fine art world finally has come together with a single purpose - to whole heartedly reject ai art, regardless of what you may hear from the "ai art wins art contest headlines". Looking strictly at my margins, engagements on reddit and instagram, major art platforms banning the sale and display of ai art, etc. one thing is perfectly clear: art is human.

First there was photography, then there was digital art, then there was nfts, now there is ai art - after each of these more and more people appreciate the inherent creativity of the non-deterministic nature of the human spirit.

Enjoy your cheap Beksinski imitations if you will, but it's better to go see his work in person in Poland. You will understand the meaning of art.

curl-up• 4 years ago

one thing is perfectly clear: art is human.

Genuine question: what would change your mind on this? Or is "human-made" part of your definition of the word "art", and as such there is nothing that would change your mind?

Additionally, do you have at least a vague idea where the line is between "human-made" and "machine-made", in the spectrum that spans "oil painting" - "photography" - "photoshop" - ... - "dall-e"? Maybe you're considering a completely different spectrum - I'd be very interested to hear your thoughts on that.

Please note, I'm not trying to argue "it's impossible to have a hard threshold so everything goes", I'm just trying to better understand where the art world is on these topics, as I'm mostly in the tech bubble otherwise.

art-is-human2• 4 years ago

My brother is a machine learning and bioinformatics researcher at a top university in the US and we often discuss the idea that human creativity itself at the upper echelon can be most interestingly defined to include a "non-systemetizable" quality. Thus, the result of a.i. art, being purely systematic, is an image whose style (artistic fundamentals of form, line, value, etc.) only ever lags just behind the artists whose work it was trained on. The a.i. flow itself requires new artists to create new styles or there's stagnation.

Most of us (art world) can look at an image (a.i. or otherwise) and immediately recall the artist(s) it was mostly influenced by. As a common example, this is why most dark surreal a.i. output feels like a botched Beksinski piece, however the tragic life of Beksinski informed his technical stylistic depth. Dall-E is a purely (practically speaking as compared to other forms) deterministic system. Even photography requires the human eye to compose, light, design, filter, granulate, texturize, etc.

Edit: Not sure if I exactly answered your question, but I think I've tried to explain how there's a direct connection between the human experience and novelty in style, A.i. undercuts it, but a conscious system cultivating new styles based on its experience would be the closest thing to change my mind.

hellfish• 4 years ago

This whole thing, the way it's being talked about... it's just very troubling

It's like the author (and others here) see the artist and art as separate entities, as if art is just regular labor that gets separated from a worker

What makes Kafka good? Not just the words on the page, or the prose behind the words on the page, but the person who wrote it and his own unique life experiences. Same for art

The fact that some people see art as just another product of labor and not something more personal is incredibly chilling and solipsistic

Not only this, but long term if we start to separate the creator from the creation, we no longer will control the terms of the creation. Imagine a hypothetical world where everyone forgets how to actually make art, and the AI art generators are rigged to try not to show any regime-critical art

Will AI replace art? I doubt it, but the way we're talking about it is chilling

JonathanMerklin• 4 years ago

I don't think that it's a strict binary of "art is not just another product of labor" and "artist and art are separate entities". Surely you've heard some variation of the turn of phrase "separating the art from the artist" over the last handful of years, even before this most recent boom in "AI art."

I'm writing this at 5am in a weird anxiety-induced sleep-procrastination HN session so I'm having trouble pinpointing and articulating the je ne sais quoi, but maybe some examples will meander gradually towards it: I've read many novels that I thought were good and knew nothing of the authors but the name (isn't this part of the point of a nom de plume?) and I've read novels I thought were middling, sometimes by the very same names. I know nothing about the artists of street murals I occasionally walk by, and I know nothing about the artists of non-mural graffiti tags along walls and overpasses on the very same roads, and I know nothing about the artists of phallic scrawls on the walls of the bathroom stalls I use along the way, but there's a pretty clear ordering of their artistic merits based on some ethereal non-quantitative aesthetic quality despite all being ostensibly "art". I'm not an art buff, but when I first encountered the works of Caravaggio, I found them to be a master class in form and light that resonated with me on some level, and I still thought that after eventually reading about his brawls and exile due to the murder/manslaughter of Tommasoni. Sometimes it'll take more than a year between discovering a musician or band that I enjoy, listening through their oeuvre, and finally reading their Wikipedia article (or Soundcloud/Twitter bio, for the sufficiently obscure). For some, it never happens. In the hoi polloi art form of standup comedy, I can still laugh hard at Louis C.K. or John Mulaney or Bill Cosby despite knowing stories about their lives off of the stage that paint them in a bad light, and I can laugh just as hard at the tight 5 or crowdwork or even the recorded album of someone I've never heard of, if the material and delivery have that non-quantitative quality of, well, being funny.

I don't find my art consumption habits or perspective troubling or chilling. I'm willing to celebrate what humanity is capable of without celebrating a specific subset of humans, or even knowing what subset of humans are worth celebrating.

It's like how I try hard to write clean yet robust code at work, but am not bothered that even when I hit the mark, it will only be appreciated by those within my corporate walls, and fade when I or the organization am gone. You can run the "git blame", sure, but "it's just code" - today's "big wins" are tomorrow's "legacy garbage". Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. But hey, I've struggled with lifelong chronic solipsism, so maybe this perspective is chilling to you nevertheless. I'm a real human, there's a "me" in here. I don't like to think that what makes me smile - and why/how - is any more a canary for our march towards oblivion than anyone else's smile-inducers.

daedlanth• 4 years ago

AI art is nothing more than a tool. I wonder how many billions of hours it will take it just to catch up to me. Hint: I don't make cheap posters.

namkt• 4 years ago

I'd really like that one where you give it a ref sheet and out comes a 3D model, or at least a baseline to tinker with in, e.g., Blender. I think NVIDIA was doing text-to-3d recently, but it did so from a single image and I'm not sure as to the accuracy of the model.

amoopa• 4 years ago

So much potential in this category and yet so much hate. Yea, elements need to be sorted out around IP and similar, but the potential this offers over time for artists is massive.

pxoe• 4 years ago

AI art itself is not the problem, it's the abuse of image copyrights. Companies continually dodge the question, redirect the conversation to "but is it art", make excuses like 'the scale is too big to control for image licenses' (but not too big to take advantage of that data), when in reality, no effort has been made to acknowledge that images have owners, licenses, copyrights, and no effort has been made into creating a system that would take those licenses into account and process data accordingly.

If these advancements are a result of systematic ignoring and abuse of image copyrights, is it ethical to continue to use them?

That said, as much as it is 'image copyright abuse' problem, it's still directly connected to AI art, so denouncing all AI art is justified. I don't see these issues being resolved any time soon. This massive scale exploitation will go on, as it continues to exist in legal gray area and not get enough legal attention and pushback (when a system abuses billions of works, and individual artists might be small and disparate, it may be hard for pushback to accumulate, or even happen at all), and then it might just get a green light to continue functioning the way it does. Sure, some 'more ethical' systems might pop up, but that won't change the bigger picture.

kvetching• 4 years ago

Regarding the text being gibberish with these models. Looking at Parti / Imagen papers. Once the training reaches a certain point, words start making sense.

AI Art Panic

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