Faking William Morris, Generative Forgery, and the Erosion of Art History

https://maggieappleton.com/generative-forgery

by ishqdehlvi • 2 years ago

111 47 2 years ago

yinser• 2 years ago

Etsy is a hell hole and this is just the latest head of the hydra

lopis• 2 years ago

I don't think there's a single mark place nowadays that isn't a complete shit show and a travesty of what they set out to be.

jameshart• 2 years ago

The inevitable lifecycle of any marketplace

- Individual sellers in this sector struggle to get seen among all the big corporate offerings. Let's make a marketplace to help them find and connect with customers!

- Wow! Now small businesses in this sector can make real money! <-- here is where the original business plan ends

- So much money that new people are trying to get into the sector now...

- That means there's money to be made selling the ability to enter the marketplace to those people

- Big businesses are happy to franchise their offerings out to people who want some of that sweet marketplace money

- Market economics of a never-ending supply of new rubes looking to get a piece of the action, and the dominance of the big suppliers, makes sure their resellers' margins are cut razor thin, and big business collects the bulk of the revenue

- Marketplace ends up full of get-rich-quick-scam victims undercutting and driving out of business the very small sellers the marketplace was set up to benefit

AI means you can skip the MLM scam component of the process and just destroy the marketplace with sock puppet bots.

cleandreams• 2 years ago

I use ebay a lot. I think it is fine.

The difference between ebay and others are several: much better search. It's set up to allow customers to target what they want. Better filters. It includes the capability to have a complex user defined search that emails any new items that meet the criteria to the customer. Layers of search: one set of results can be searched to provide another set. It's amazing how other sites don't do this.

The result is that ebay provides benefit to customers that in practice is not so easily gamed by big sellers. It gives you very, very, very niche results. E.g. arts and crafts pottery of a particular vintage and maker and color.

I've found replacement parts for kitchen implements that haven't been manufactured in 20 years.

serf• 2 years ago

Etsy as a platform for buying and selling is fine, its discoverability and search that hinders the customer experience.

I've bought lots of art commissions and actual hand-made knickknacks and toys from actual non-print-mill individuals.

The experience has always been fine for me -- but I was aware of the artist and what I wanted going into it rather than searching for 'something cool' only to be inundated with mass-production "I LOVE MY DAD" mugs.

Loughla• 2 years ago

Exactly. Etsy is still great if you explicitly know what you're looking for, in the case of bespoke jewelry or art, and/or if you explicitly know the artist.

As a discovery tool, it's worse than anywhere else.

surfingdino3• 2 years ago

I used to run a shop on Etsy. 20+ daily messages from scammers pretending to be buyers or Etsy support. Etsy ads bringing zero new customers, seller bans for no reason... it's a decent experience for buyer, but not fr he seller.

blacksqr• 2 years ago

Television destroyed high culture a lifetime ago, and every generation that's come of age since has persuaded themselves that they can recognize the lines between high and low culture, only to be shocked and dismayed when the illusory lines are obliterated by the latest wave of invasive technology.

pjc502• 2 years ago

The line between authentic and inauthentic is very different from high and low culture. It's one thing to argue about whether you like William Morris, it's another to just forge works and use his name to market them.

Theodores• 2 years ago

In all fairness you can have a lot of fun doing AI art in the style of William Morris. But can you sell it? Well, nobody has bought any of mine!

It requires a special type of individual to fake the greats and a special type of customer to buy the forgeries.

Creating a new 'art franchise' is an entirely different proposition, and I am sure that there will be plenty of new artists that are able to use their own name/brand/identity to succeed. It might also take time for people to get recognised.

wrp3• 2 years ago

everyone's art has gotten brighter, more colourful, more dramatic, more aesthetically pleasing, better composed, and more desireable.

She seems to be ignoring at least the last 500 years of European art. Bright colors, drama, structured composition...it's all there to different degrees in different periods.

I've looked into William Morris' art and design philosophy quite a lot and he definitely didn't use muted colors because shiny bright stuff wasn't available.

Those recreations of the Impressionists also misrepresent their approach. The lack of detail was essential to the "impressions" they were trying to elicit.

DrewADesign• 2 years ago

Eh. Most of those look like they were halfheartedly forged by Thomas Kinkade. I think it's a different level.

There really is a whole gooey schlocky kind of sheen to so much of that stuff that really zeros out any intentionality of the original works. I think the most egregious examples are more operator error than anything else, but it is what it is.

DeathArrow4• 2 years ago

Quite true. The style was deliberate and it wasn't due to lack of technology, skill and knowledge.

DeathArrow4• 2 years ago

Most of these impersonations, visually brutal, too colorful, too noisy, reaching to the edge of grotesque, scream kitsch. I doubt the original authors would have liked something like that.

gilleain3• 2 years ago

didn't use muted colors because shiny bright stuff wasn't available

I had (mistakenly it seems) thought the muted colors were partly due to those available for printing, but i suppose it makes sense that the Arts and Craft movement would not use bright colours?

Anyway, zooming in on the detail of vegetal regions of such fakes is clear evidence. It's hard enough to reproduce the small gaps between curled leaves in these images anyway.

wrp3• 2 years ago

I don't think Arts & Crafts philosophy was explicitly against bright colors, but they did emphasize tradition, or at least their romanticized idea of it. The latter 19th century saw introduction of many bright pigments and dyes (lots of them toxic), so they were available, but I think use of them was associated with modern industry.

William Morris in particular just favored the dark and muted. His stained glass windows are the darkest I know of, and his Kelmscott Press books have been criticized for their very dark pages.

thejohnconway• 2 years ago

I think the author of the article is being sarcastic.

wrp3• 2 years ago

Huh...I tried rereading TFA from that perspective...and I don't know. If you take the 2nd & 3rd paragraphs in isolation, it does look like sarcasm, but further down it seems she really thinks the AI stuff is better.

hprotagonist• 2 years ago

of all the people to rip off, huh?

othing should be made by man's labour which is not worth making, or which must be made by labour degrading to the makers.

jdietrich• 2 years ago

The real irony is the number of employees and customers that Morris killed. His wallpaper was hideously toxic.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/victorian-wallpape...

labster• 2 years ago

Look at any photograph or work of art. If you could duplicate exactly the first tiny dot of color, and then the next and the next, you would end with a perfect copy of the whole, indistinguishable from the original in every way, including the so-called "moral value" of the art itself. Nothing can transcend its smallest elements.

- CEO Nwabudike Morgan (Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri, unlocking the Nanoreplicator tech)

camillomiller• 2 years ago

Nice quote but it was clearly meant to demonstrate how out of touch a CEO unveiling such tech is from the actual nature of art and its value, which funnily enough is exactly what AI CEOs are doing right now. So much power and brain resources in the hands of the shallowest of individuals.

globalise83• 2 years ago

Eventually we'll have to move to a model where the only way one will be able to have confidence that something is real is to go to a physical building where a temporary curated collection of such objects is displayed, having been gathered from around the world by well-connected elite of connoisseurs. Even then, some of the objects may be such well-executed forgeries that even the experts are fooled. We might call such a place a 'gallery', as it to some extent attempts to replicate in the real world the act of scrolling through a library of images on a website.

jwmoz• 2 years ago

Even then they could be replicas

sandworm101• 2 years ago

> such well-executed forgeries that even the experts are fooled.

More than a couple forgeries have been manufactured by the very experts tasked with detecting them. Other experts are incentivized not to detect forgery, or at least not speak to the scale of forgery as it may erode confidence in the legitimate market.

DeathArrow4• 2 years ago

The cat is out of the bag. We can't mandate AI generated images be watermarked.

For now we have the information to distinguish between real and imitations. But what will happen in 200 years? Will people still know how the real Monet painted?

pjc502• 2 years ago

We can't mandate AI generated images be watermarked.

I'm not sure how well the information economy will work when everything is a forgery and every transaction a scam. It's bad for customers and bad for legitimate businesses.

DeathArrow4• 2 years ago

There are countless tutorials on how to get rich on Etsy using Stabble Diffusion.

With so much AI offers, what the market is lacking is some AI buyers.

numpad0• 2 years ago

"But I can't tell apart from the real stuff!" - the Seller

poulpy123• 2 years ago

It's the same that happened to google search: the cultural "market" is imploding into himself. It was somewhat manageable when creating crap necessited people, but now that AI can churn at speed never seen before, it's just a matter of time for creation to be devaluated. It's the first risk of AI before the other, and I'm wondering if it can be fixed and if it will be fixed.

Dalewyn3• 2 years ago

it's just a matter of time for creation to be devaluated

I think it's just value being properly reassessed to be more accurate.

Art has no intrinsic value, whatever value there might be are all external projections. If "AI" devalues art to what it should actually be, that is a good thing.

Incidentally, art has seen a slow but constant decline in perceived value over time. "AI" is merely accelerating it.

AlexandrB• 2 years ago

Nothing has intrinsic value. If society only values things that a computer can't do, we're all going to be plumbers and carpenters before too long.

surfingdino3• 2 years ago

AI is being actively promoted and used as a tool to maximise content creation output, to create, edit, re-edit, re-mix, translate as much content as possible and win the war for our attention. The emphasis is on speed of creation and low cost; accuracy, originality, or merit are not even on the long-range radar of the providers or the users of AI.

doctorhandshake2• 2 years ago

When did ‘aesthetic’ become a descriptive adjective

andybak• 2 years ago

I once ranted about this and someone posted a historical usage from way back

Doesn't mean I have to like it.

doctorhandshake2• 2 years ago

Somehow it does make me feel better that it’s not a recent development.

gwern• 2 years ago

I tried reverse image searching a few of the prints, only to find they were one-of-a-kind. I started googling “morris artwork” and found images that, while beautiful, seemed to lack the finesse and colour range of my new prints.

Yeah, that seems to be one of the MJ telltales, and preference-tuned model telltale in general: they use too wide a color range and want to jam in every possible color. It's possible there's a lowest-common-denominator human-rating bias towards using a lot of colors. That seems to be a big problem with RLHF and instruction-tuning as practiced, which you will notice as you delve into outputs more.

(I don't worry too much about the 'erosion of art history'. You know how many forgeries there are out there in art history? The only reason you don't think about this for, say, Rembrandt, is that the 95%+ of fakes or pious forgeries or restorations out there over the centuries have been winnowed out or destroyed or lost.)

surfingdino3• 2 years ago

Cases of compound forgery, compound fraud, and pastiche have been tried in courts before and will be tried again, because GenAI companies train models on works of others without proper licensing.

pcrh3• 2 years ago

Ironically, the complaint seems to be that the copies are not accurate enough, i.e. don't sufficiently resemble the styles of the original creators, and are too easily detected as forgeries.

gilleain3• 2 years ago

No the complaint is that these are fake 'new' works by artists. If someone wanted to sell an exact replica print of an existing work that is one thing.

pcrh3• 2 years ago

Yes, but they're evidently not in the same category as the originals, i.e. obvious fakes, and so are not "new", despite their claims to be so.

Faking William Morris, Generative Forgery, and the Erosion of Art History

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