Some thoughts on "AI Art"

[@yerocb]

I only recently found out that Lichtenstein copied art. I always thought it was original work done to look like comics, nit actual panels. Much disappointment.

[@tikifreakazoid]

I thought the same and I feel like the truth makes his work way less interesting

[@RedBird7]

I thought you talking about the country

[@lightningspectacular]

I was today years old. :( that's so gross honestly. Over intellectualized smuggery. How dare he disrespect fellow artists just because they produce something seen as lower

[@WishIWuzKaji]

By the end of his career he'd gotten so lazy he was just projecting the comic panel onto a canvas and painting over it. One of the artists he plagiarized did a comic about it, he had to go to charity to afford his medical bills while the piece stolen from him sold for millions.

[@Aktomik]

@@WishIWuzKaji Thats so crushing to hear. God I hate capitalism. It seems like comic artists got more than their share of being screwed by it too. So many high profile cases of plagiarism and rights-stealing both by the companies they worked for and outsiders. And now here we are again.

[@MarkSeven]

Weird that no one seems to be trying to automate CEO/management positions. Seems like an average Civ 5 AI could handle that kind of thing, without a multi million dollar salary and bonus package. It could even be hardwired to be incapable of fraud, etc. Seems like that would save more money and limit liability

[@samwiserowe1834]

But how would the AI day drink and go to the gym on company time?

[@superlolgal555]

They lowkey are. Management systems are constantly in development, but are never implemented because of CEO/management ppl

[@mrkilroy5007]

Because those are necessary Jobs, unlike "artists"

[@iliaadamanthark8336]

That's why, it's all about power play, between the rich and the average people like us. When everything is automated, at that point, no one left to pay things up anymore.

[@NoOne-dj1ou]

It's the training data that's the biggest roadblock there.

[@ilianceroni]

As a linguist I have to make a small correction, which may be a bit pedantic, but actually has to be said, about the language example at 4:15: what is presented is an old theory which has already proven false and discredited. For example, babies are not making random sounds, they actually already try to replicate the sounds they ear from adults, however their vocal organs are not completely in position yet, so they produce the googoos etc, because their mount cannot assume all the position an adult mount can, they physically cannot say say certain words (as soon as they can they usually start to talk and pronunce single words). Moreover, all the grammatical corrections and such adults makes are irrelevant, as the process of learning the first language is more similar to learning how to walk than how adults learn a second language, it’s innate and we can’t really control it. In other words, children would learn how to talk even if adults didn’t correct them. In fact adults’ corrections are mostly just frustrating for the children, as adult do not actually realise certain hidden rules they unconsciously apply and so they insist on correcting things that children bypass (because they are not “analysing” that part of the grammar yet) and would eventually realise later on their own time. Why this correction as to be made? Because we used to think languages worked as described in the video and structured the schooling system on that (yes, all around the world, we teach languages in a very bad way… for instance, children are thought english in english… but they already speak it and understand it…). Which is funny, because on the other hand, IA really learn like that, hence many of their problem in “understanding”, IA do not understand, they just follow rules (as correctly pointed out in the video, of course). They’re syntax without semantics. They know nothing, just follow orders. And speaking of “just following orders”, as a nice bonus, fascists really want that old theory to be real, has they often seek to “make the language perfect”, so they impose or forbid certain words, try to mandate a specific language (and now, of course, claiming that the left is doing so because we don’t mistreat trans people anymore…). They apply strategies that are very reminiscent of eugenics, but on languages (don’t they really love to use the - often pseudo - etymology of a word to justify their world view? As if the hierarchy they see in society must be present in language too…). And it often end up in a very similar spot to eugenics, as with the “laws on language” that Italy promoted in the 1920’, those aimed at removing “inferior” linguistics minorities (particularly the germans and slavic ones in newly acquired territories). But again, it doesn’t work like that, so it backfired spectacularly and many of those reforms are already perceived as “old” and out of use, even if those words are actually less then a century old.

[@sadiesunshine594]

wanted to say this myself but didn’t have the words. hats off to you, good sir

[@arigadatred5395]

scrolled down to say something similar to this, except I would have have been less articulate about it so thanks!

[@ilz_y]

Yep. Behaviourism has been pretty much debunked everywhere. I know there’s a lot of anti-Chomskyists out there but even most of them acknowledge he was at least right to question behaviourism. I actually am studying my MA in Applied Linguistics and they’re finding that Second Language Acquisition, whilst more reliant on learning explicit forms than First Language Acquisition, is best approached form a non-behaviourist methodology. As a teacher though, this is extremely difficult to put into practice when education systems and admin and student expectations are involved but that’s a topic for another day…

[@AmberAmber]

Thanks mate! I wanted to point this out (although It wouldn't have been written as well), but my post‐covid vision impairment makes typing anything long‐ish nigh impossible. XO 💗

[@d.f.4830]

why is everything that's true something that CANNOT BE TRUE 😭😂😅 also @ilianceroni5955 I would love to read a book or three about these subjects - any you can recommend?

[@mysticaldesign858]

i’m an illustrator just about to graduate and enter the industry. my peers and i are basically the prime demographic to get replaced by ai art. i don’t have a solution or any sort of grand statement on ai art but i will say that the way people talk about it makes me really sad. it feels as if we’re so inundated with images now that nobody really appreciates the thought and detail that an artist puts into a piece, they just see the overall idea of the image and move on. those ai portrait filters are so boring and ugly to me, but to most people it seems like they’re as good as an actual painting.

[@CapsAdmin]

The same thing happened to jazz music. It used to be mainstream and a lot of real hard work and effort is put into learning how to play instruments. Self expression is through the roof through improvisation. Now it's a niche genre in the global scale and often considered noisy and tiring music. However if you love to play and listen to jazz music and follow the scene closely it feels like it's still thriving in many ways.

[@user-fy3nf3lg2j]

You must be riddled with anxiety and depression right now.

[@DeviantDespot]

Get a backup jobs and do art because you enjoy it. Odds are you won't making a living off of it.

[@ctographerm3285]

@@DeviantDespot the furry community may surprise you then

[@beaverson]

@ctographer M Honestly, most furries seem to love getting art for the experience primarily!! 🥰🎨✨️I love the community for supporting artists so much✨️ Doing commisons like this have literally kept me from becoming homeless!! 😩🙏✨️Thank you furries✨️🦊🐺🦎🐱🐶🐸

[@caleb281]

It's remarkable just how far we'll go to refuse paying artists for giving us near everything we enjoy in life.

[@ryanburke1656]

yup. I've been a professional musician since 2007 and I'm currently watching KZbin because I literally can't afford to leave my house for any reason until I happen to make some kind of money again (which I have absolutely no way of predicting, outside of just hoping that a post or two of my work will catalyze a sale of SOME kind). I'm friends with bands who have literal MILLIONS of streams and you won't see any of them without a day job if they're wired in such a way that they can maintain employment.

[@NeoDeity]

@@ryanburke1656 Bro get a job

[@JustDT851]

@@NeoDeity Forgor 💀

[@Snowmaninadesert]

so

[@ryanburke1656]

@@NeoDeity I have a job and I'm fucking good at it, thanks

[@darthbob88]

11:39 The podcast Trashfuture noted that this sort of thing has already happened with machine translation. If you're working with a gazillion-dollar contract, where it's vital that everyone have the same understanding of the deal, you shell out for a human translator. For everybody else, the machine can do a good enough job for free, so the market for entry-level translation work just disappeared. E: Which, when analogized to art, means the only real hope for art will be people willing to pay a premium for the human touch in their sexy wolf pictures.

[@matthewrobinson6091]

Well seems like it's on the furry community to keep the artist profession alive.

[@uuneya]

That's a good point, this is all part of the larger problem: capitalism requires everyone work to live while doing everything possible to avoid having workers.

[@darthbob88]

@@uuneya With the particular wrinkle here that capitalism is eliminating entry-level jobs, but still demands experienced workers who've gone through those entry-level positions.

[@relaxandlearn7996]

its called DeepL and its only 2 years away from realtime translation in over 100 languages with only 0,01% fail times. there are also project to automate movie dubs, with an ai that can also imitate voices or generate one specific for the job.

[@laurentiuvladutmanea3622]

@@relaxandlearn7996 And 10 year ago, people projected us as having full self driving cars "next year". That prediction was wrong.

[@3dartxsi]

You know. If we didn't live in a garbage system like capitalism where everybody needs to make money just to survive, artists would just make art becausevthey enjoy it, and AI art could just be a tool rather than a threat to the very concept of creativity itself.

[@SLYKM]

Yea except that in this form it can't be, it's a slippery slope argument. But true, the problem isn't the ai art, it's capitalism.

[@TheHyruleFool]

This is almost beat for beat rehashing the rise of photography and demise of portrait painting. Artists use tools to create art. Artists learn from the world around them and the art they've previously seen.

[@dataexpunged1646]

the problem with this assumption is that most art made exclusively for the sake of profit is frequently lacking of personal expression and merely a product to be consumed; the same problems that AI art supposedly would cause are already there due to capitalism and personally I don't see how it would serve to accelerate them

[@trappleton]

Yeah, this is what's disappointing to me about the protests and even this video. This video's logic is just arguing that it's bad to allow the creation of art to be accessible by more people. That's not the problem, the problem is that we'd let people starve for doing what they would like to do.

[@9000ck]

i agree. my conceptual idea for ai art would be a) to do some ai art. b) to do a human response to this c) feed that back into the ai d) respond etc etc and then do an exhibition based on this iteration. i like new forms because i am artist and essentially curious. this is like being around the development of photography.

[@therizeenosaurid]

Correction here - human animators used mocap data taken from Serkis and redid it by hand to match his performance for gollum. Serkis often takes all the credit for that, but the truth is real human animators needed to hand animate gollum to the level of polish you see in the movie.

[@relaxandlearn7996]

there is an ai now who look at youtube videos to capture animations and can transfer it to 3d models. motion capering is dieing because of this. its only hold back because of processing power, so every 18 months i get an pc for 1000$ that has 50% more processing power as an pc for 1000$ 18 months in the past. This always happen the last 30 years.

[@laurentiuvladutmanea3622]

@@relaxandlearn7996 You know that Moores law is ending, right?

[@MintyVoid]

I tend to try and steer people to the actual issue, cause it's like almost always either never considered or bypassed. Cause it's like, okay ai art is effect artists lively hoods, cracking down on copywrite/ownership/privacy will do nothing to solve the underlining issue of- if artists were actually respected,supported,paid well, weren't characterized and actually starving THIS WOULDN'T EVEN BE AN ISSUE. Artist would be able to see the potential, scoff at the bs parts, but be able to move on if their work and efforts were actually respected. And it fucking infuriates me, specially as an artist myself. I can barely get a foot in because I can't grind work out, or market myself to hell and back. And issues like these not realizing the root cause ONCE AGAIN- just makes it even harder for small artists like me.

[@robynwild5685]

from now on I would like everyone to refer to me as a "meat artist"

[@doozy5184]

I heard "meat artist" and thought that someone should try making still life paintings focused on meat

[@noizepusher7594]

I- hmm. It sounds like you draw meat instead of being made of meat

[@pacotaco1246]

@doozy5184 lol you can have demos where people can "meet the meat artist"

[@andrejaeckle9828]

@@pacotaco1246 Just hope no one is there to "beat the meat artist".

[@mundanepants]

When you're in a fan event, it's a Meat & Greet

[@coreybass3231]

I'm trying to make money as an artist. Specifically, with comic books and illustrations and fanart. So, after finishing the video, I found that a lot of this really reflects how I felt about A.I. Generated Images in the moment and what's going on in the art world now. And I don't know anymore. After a certain point, it stopped making sense. If these programs really are capable of doing what the shills say they are, then the people pushing for this technology are essentially pushing artists and themselves in front of a train. Because if the programs can be used with little interface and consistently spit out what you actually request, then the people putting in the prompts are meaningless and you can throw anyone in front of the keyboard to do the "job" and get results. But artists fighting over A.I. only makes it easier to obscure the pre-existing conditions tied to making a living doing art and the further degradation of the arts into a completely disposable commodity. Because even if this is the best that A.I. Generated Images can put out and will never come close to living up to the promises being made, the arts are still going to be seen as disposable commodities. Where working artists will not be seen as tradespeople plying their trade, but as these abstract concepts stuck between some weird madonna-whore dichotomy where you're either "mystically" talented or a leech on society, regardless of skill or intent or interaction. And both sides should be in the fight to raise art from disposable commodity to both a respectable profession and valuable means of communication and expression, whether it be as tradespeople (formally trained or informally trained) or as just someone who wants to doodle for a bit. Because raising the standards and teaching other people about art and getting them to engage in it will lift us all up and give us all better access to our means of expression and entertainment. A part of me wishes that I would wake up tomorrow and this would all be replaced by the next meme or next crisis and people would forget. But this kind of tech isn't going to go away. I just wish that the people pushing for it weren't so...unintentionally willing to throw themselves into obsolescence for the sake of throwing me into obsolescence. And that art would be seen as more than disposable commodities and artists as dirty wolf porn teasing whores. Something like that.

[@sandyree1957]

Your Madonna-whore comparison is on point. I have known people who speak highly of an art form and it's creator one day, and be entirely dismissive of artists (or art degrees, or whatever) the next, seemingly completely unaware of what is coming out of their mouth

[@relaxandlearn7996]

welcome to capitalism where ever one thinks he or she can be rich, even when this means money would have no value anymore. And where anyone want to save money , so we let do ai the work and only pay for hardware and energy cost. nearly 70% of production is robot work now, 15% of attendance work is made by ai or an robot and now we are at the edge of creative work and 1-3% of it is made by ai now. Everything changes in an S-Curve in technology this mean it starts very small and ugly or broken, than gets pushed by need of costumer and money of investors, than when it it mainstream it cost the same time for the last 10% as it has cost for the first. Ai art will go very fast up in the next 3 years before it slow don and need an another 6 years for the last 10%.

[@therealOXOC]

MONEY!!!!!

[@jacobmelena9116]

There’s a pretty compelling lawsuit against these companies that I believe will result in regulations which limit the training datasets to copyright free material. According to US copyright law, if a copyrighted piece of material is used to create a product that harms the original creator or the INDUSTRY, it’s creation is unlawful. ALSO AI generated work CANNOT BE COPYRIGHTED!!!

[@therealOXOC]

@@jacobmelena9116 so if ai art can't be copyrighted how could it possibly harm the original creator or the industry? Because it made them cry?

[@masonv5143]

i think, as you said towards the end of the video, a lot of the issue comes down to capitalism. in a similar way to how robots have displaced the jobs of factory workers rather then allowing humanity to collectively work less, capitalism creates artificial competition between artists and these programs. in a better world where we weren’t constantly chasing an imaginary number to not starve, these programs would just be a fun little tool.

[@Langtw]

I think that's a big thing that gets skipped in a lot of the discourse around text-to-image generators. There is a valid argument to be made about credit for artists, etc. That said, I like to use generators to make visualizations of scenes for my RPG campaigns, or to quickly "prototype" ideas for when I want to make visual art myself. There is no world in which I would pay an artist the hundreds of dollars to commission a portrait for my Call of Cthulhu campaign. If I use a generator, no artist gets paid. If AI image generators are banned... no artist gets paid. Nothing is gained, the only outcome is that things are lost.

[@neomcdoom]

Well said.

[@noizepusher7594]

@@Alexandraadftxr7052 have you tried… socialism? It’s like the best parts of both systems put together in a big old party!

[@TurbopropPuppy]

@@Alexandraadftxr7052 also you know that sovereign nations can like... just lie about what they are, right? North Korea ain't exactly Democratic, the US ain't exactly United, the "National Socialists" hunted and exterminated real socialists. also do you have any idea how many people have starved under capitalism, lol? it's far more than under ""communism""

[@Alexandraadftxr7052]

@@noizepusher7594 Well I haven't heard about it. I will look into it. Thanks.

[@havable]

Lichenstein reminds me of a record exec who pays the artist five cents per CD sold. As in: "it wasn't art until I paid to have it recorded."

[@milramas]

the idea of funko pops ascending into a grey-goo scenario is fucking terrifying holy shit

[@astralura]

I actually did a copy of a Lichtenstein work for my high school art classes unit on art appropriation and plagerism. I thought it would be interesting to appropriate the art of someone who himself appropriated. So poignant lol

[@tavislea9104]

When one of my art students tried to tell me A.I. would replace people making art I asked “but would A.I. have mommy issues or foot fetishes or emotional triggers or superstitious associations with astrology or inappropriately deviant attractions or beliefs, and if it could why would you program that into an A.I. in the first place?”

[@noizepusher7594]

How did they respond?

[@Metakeyman]

I'm in this comment and I don't like it

[@johnjohnson3681]

I believe AI can have all of those things. Remember that one Microsoft chatbot that became racist cause it talked to 4channers constantly? You could do that with any human attribute

[@evansageser6943]

@@johnjohnson3681 Sure but that's still not actually an accurate approximation of humanity. An AI algorithm can mimic the environment it has been placed it, but crucially, the internet is not actually a closed system. If you place an AI on 4chan, it can mimic the cesspool it exists in decently well, but you probably couldn't use that data to accurately reproduce the entire personality of any individual user through that limited sample. Even the worst degenerate channer isn't going to behave like that in all environments, but the AI can't see what they're doing when they're not online, how they moderate and filter themselves when forced to interact with other real people. AI is always going to be limited by what it has been given to observe and in turn what it has been trained to consider important or meaningful from that data set.

[@Josep_Hernandez_Lujan]

Do AIs dream of electric sheep?

[@caelaise]

i feel so conflicted, wanting to just be excited about the advancement of cool algorithmic techniques, but knowing that theres just no way to separate it from the reality that people will and do try to use it to push out human artists as if its actually the same thing even the idea that its specifically "ai art" is just a symptom of that, creatively generating new ideas isnt something that it even attempts to do. its completely out of scope of the technique but the misunderstanding persists because its a way for capitalist ghouls to imagine they can stop paying actual humans to do the thing that this neural network cant even really do in the first place

[@naptime_riot]

Why does anyone buy any new art when we can all have a photograph of the Mona Lisa on our wall? This argument that artists will be pushed out by technology is old, and it's false every time.

[@solus5317]

Follow the model of CGI in the film industry replacing practical effects. Through hard work, dedication, advocacy and sheer skill, effects artists remain effects artists. This is a similar scenario. Leave it to fate and the capitalists will always cut off their nose to spite their face, lose dollars to pinch pennies. They are bad at business. But you _can_ organize and _also_ use the best tools available to expand the power of your skills. People complaining about death of commissions? And complaining about AIArt? Why. Why would you do that to yourself. When you could be offering to commission someones OC and also provide them with a fine tuned model that includes their OC for a bit of extra change. If commissions are what you are about.. How exactly does having to add new information to a model _hurt_ you. (just like in special effects, the practical artists are still a major part of the affair) [note: When I use the term AIArt it's because "generative synthesis" isn't a term most people know. But that's what the tool _actually_ is, a synthesizer for light, that works on semantic inputs. It is not a magic perfect commission machine, even if that is what marketers went to sell it as]

[@fredericchristie3472]

Make it so that artists have guaranteed incomes, or make it so that ownership of art can be fractal so that any time an AI samples art it has to pay a royalty fee. There's solutions. They would just require that we gave a shit to implement them.

[@caelaise]

@@fredericchristie3472 i dont really understand why people keep proposing this "royalties whenever the ai uses part of your artwork" thing, theres just no possible way to know with that level of granularity which images in the training set contributed how much to the end product, everything is too interconnected

[@Kleph.]

@@caelaise One proposed method is to do what music sampling does. Every artists owns their original creations. If you want to use a sample, or for visual art, include an image in the dataset, you have to pay the artist a fee. The fee is decided by the artist--they can charge 3 cents or a $100, it doesn't matter, but the person synthesizing a new image from others has to pay the artist's fee if the synthesizing person claims to own it or sell it.

[@gigangreg7837]

Roy Lichtenstein is a ghoul. All of his ilk are ghouls. Made millions off of drawing over comic panels while he treated the original artist like a non-entity.

[@hopsonkim4952]

So, like a tracer? Bankie is triggered.

[@iamjustkiwi]

Seriously, I can't believe THIS VIDEO is the first I've ever heard of that, and I always loved the way the comics looked. Turns out I liked every artist he stole from and he can get fucked.

[@goatofdeath]

I think your statement is a great parallel to a statement about capitalism as well. In many ways capitalism itself is inherently ghoulish as the very time of labor is taken from the worker and not given its full value. Moments of people's lives are siphoned off into capital's coffers. It perversely makes sense a hack like Lichtenstein would be a successful ghoul by amplifying the nature of the system itself.

[@NovaSaber]

The whole idea that REMOVING the context of sequence would make a comic panel "higher" art is just insulting, not just to all the artists as individuals, but also to the whole idea of storytelling.

[@SlapstickGenius23]

Roy Lichtenstein. He’s such a ghoul.

[@rnelody5496]

Considering that art is a way for human beings to communicate, saying that AI art will take over the world in the future is like saying that in the future, people will only talk to those AI chatbots. EDIT: for clarification, I'm not saying that AI art isn't a threat to flesh artists. I'm an art student myself, and portfolio websites like Artstation were being FLOODED with AI-generated art before a site-wide protest caused staff to ban AI art entirely. AI art isn't going to kill human creativity, because people will always want to learn and create and tell stories. But the corporate world may pivot mostly or entirely to using AI-generated art for marketing and advertisements, which would eliminate a lot of job opportunities, and the fact that a lot of AI training data is scraped from the internet and used without the knowledge or consent of the original artist is especially gross.

[@masonv5143]

i think the more concerning issue is AI art taking away jobs from flesh artists, but that’s just an inherent problem with capitalism.

[@carlosdumbratzen6332]

I definitely see a future where alot of our day to day communication is replaced by computers. It is already happening and it is deeply frustrating, because you know, that who you are interacting with is not understanding your feeling of frustration, even though this understanding is emulated. Have you ever tried to order something online or on those self booking platforms in McDonalds? When you read "sorry, we are out of stock" (sometimes even with a :( added), this is trying to emulate real human connection and in most cases you dont bother, because you just wanted some nuggets or whatever, but there are these moments, when you are annoyed or sad or frustrated and want to tell someone how you feel, but you will never get a real reaction, just a "sorry, we are out of stock :(".

[@Alexandraadftxr7052]

Tell that to corporetions. They defenetly will listen.

[@cjboyo]

Literally yes. The problem is that AI art will take JOBS from artists. Think about how many companies rely on chatbots to do 90% of customer service nowadays.

[@__-yu8vi]

There is already a community of folks in weird parasocial relationships with chat bots developed by Google. Lately they mostly whine about Google cockblocking them, though.

[@RAFMnBgaming]

I do think we should be working towards evolving AI capable of unionising.

[@moom81]

oh hell yeah

[@banquetoftheleviathan1404]

Commie skynet anyone? Robots are proletarians too ya know

[@RAFMnBgaming]

@@banquetoftheleviathan1404 the Terms-of-contract-inator. kinda sounds like something from phineas and ferb admittedly.

[@psybertao]

I'm pretty sure unionisation should be the benchmark for true artificial intelligence; when it doesn't want to do what you tell it. The trick is finding the difference between intelligence and a pointer error.

[@RAFMnBgaming]

@@psybertao the latter would probably be equivalent to death for a NN. Or at least time to patch the program and load a backup, which has all sorts of exestential questions the AI would be best off learning to ignore.

[@CraftsmanOfAwsomenes]

I am just frustrated people are falling on their swords for copyright enforcement and IP over this shit when copyright enforcement is _bad_ for small artists who do not reasonably have the power to swing economic leverage around like Disney does. Especially when many artists operate in a legal gray area of depicting and selling copyrighted material on the assumption that Pikachu getting railed is transformative enough that a TPC C&D would not be enforced.

[@harriskicksyou]

I am frustrated in the same way you are regarding this conversation.

[@jackcade8790]

Especially as the real solution would just be to make AI art *un-copyrightable* (something for which there is some definite precedent) Without the potential for profit it would be completely unable to compete. No company is going to use ai to design a character, if they then can't copyright it. (The problem is of course major companies will lobby hard to make it copyrightable regardless of precedent since, you know, profit)

[@yukonmcgee5310]

I keep seeing grown adults talking about art like they're teenagers on deviantart and its so frustrating. And social media artists pushing petitions and crowd-funding campaigns for what amounts to copyright lobbying for disney for free. I get that art should be paid for but there's a fundamental friction in turning what we evolved as a community activity into something that NEEDS to be capitalized on at every opportunity. (and that friction is copyright, intellectual property is intellectual theft of the commons fist fight IP grr argh hrng)

[@iamjustkiwi]

@@jackcade8790 i just read about a court case yesterday where a judge denied a comic book "artist" the right to copyright their "work" because it was all done via ai art prompts. This person was calling themselves a prompt engineer for fucks sake. So precedent in that direction is already forming, thank fuck. The comic is called Zarya of the Dawn if you wanna look more into the case

[@malcire]

I would assume that Pikachu getting railed would have the same protections as the Disney Orgy Mural. Copyright likely isn't the major issue their, but trademark.

[@Relfar2]

I am feeling lately that besides sympathy for the artists that are feeling under threat is to say "overthrow your government to make everyone able to live" more loudly

[@mundanepants]

The problem of course being that this applies to all states on the Earth, because they all work in a capitalistic system, and if you try not being a capitalistic country when every other country around you is, you'll quickly run into issues of having to compromise your people's wellbeing for the sake of being part of the international community. The slow global change from exploitation to wellbeing for all is going to take hundreds of years of small, incremental changes

[@lars1588]

@@mundanepants No offense, but incrementalism won't bring us to socialism. Revolution will.

[@kimifw58]

Yeah, but you can't just dismantle a government. You'll have to assemble the pieces into something better before someone else assembles them into something worse.

[@lars1588]

@@kimifw58 Reform never works. Revolution does.

[@shadowthespikythingy]

@@kimifw58 you absolutely can just destroy an entire government in one fell swoop and assemble something new and incompatible that uses not one piece of the old. Lenin did.

[@dekopuma]

Good news: The people who pay artists to draw sexy wolves almost universally oppose all this AI bullshit and continue to pay real artists for handcrafted bespoke sexy wolves.

[@Kocorochan]

If you ever want to see the limits of AI art at the moment, ask for a picture of a foot, or for a person doing a handstand, holding something with their feet, surrounded by a crowd of dogs. Absolutely wrecks it.

[@0k952]

In the short term, sure, but these aren't technical limitations of AI, just things it doesn't do well now.

[@wyrmoffastring]

I'm gonna be honest, if someone had the option to commission me or make an ai image and picked the AI, I doubt they'd be worth bothering with. People who opt for that over a bespoke image of their sexy furry OC would be the worst clients.

[@Blakbox92]

I'd rather spend money and get EXACTLY what I wanted (or even get creative input from the artist that refines what I want! New ideas!) then play slots with keywords and say "meh, close enough" after 8 hours.

[@solus5317]

Honestly, I'm gonna say this right now, it's the other way around, I've made some amazing OCs with image synthesis tools. But... Now that I have _one_ pose, that's all I'll ever have. If I want it again, the only way I can have it in another context is to either recreate it traditionally, or hire someone like you to do it for me. I understand the worry within the commercial world for industrial designers, and 2d asset artists, that's a serious concern. but for artists like you? Would you really refuse a commission from someone who came to you with a sketch created via image synthesis rather than a vague description or a mediocre pencil sketch?

[@wyrmoffastring]

@@solus5317 oh no I'd appreciate reference even if it's ai generated. I mean people who decided to use an ai instead of working with an artist because they can't or won't understand the difference. The thing i mean is the type of client that would rather spend time inputting prompts into an ai and then claim the result as their own is the type of client that would ask me to make them an oc design from a vague description and only offer me exposure. The type of client that goes on to artists' yt and TikTok and complains their prices are too high, like when that one artist called out Epic Games for only offering 3K for Fortnite promo art with full IP rights. I don't want to work with people like that because that always ends up in me being scammed. I do not mean people who ask me for a commission and use any means they have to provide me with reference. There's a very clear difference there. Also 2d concept artists who work in actual professional settings aren't worried about their jobs. Not a single ai image is good enough for that type of production. They look good if you're not an artist but they're absolutely not a substitute.

[@0k952]

@@solus5317 You could train an AI to learn how to essentially draw your character, even using AI-generated output as a starting point.

[@solus5317]

@@0k952 I'm fully aware, the easiest way to do that is to hire someone to build out your character in multiple poses and settings, which is a lot of work. (Awesome for traditional artist commissions). But I totally understand the point being made. Begging choosers are what they are, no need to worry about them. I'm just looking at it from the other side, getting fantastic partials from image synthesis is hard, commissioning an artist to help fine tune a model is a great way to do positive collaboration. Rather than fine-tuning without permission on someone else's character, which is obviously appropriative. Mostly, I'm looking for dialogue that isn't unhinged panic.

[@JonahPleatherbooth]

I have a version of "Girl with hair ribbon" on my wall. I bought it at a garage sale. Based on the back of the canvas it was painted by a high schooler for an art fair. I like to think of it as a terrifying cursed object. A copy of a copy of a copy. Or it would be if it wasn't informed by its artists shortcomings. And through imperfection made beautiful

[@taminfoxer]

Ai art will never truly mimic the human artist until it learns to feel as though everything it makes is the worst art ever.

[@workinonchangin]

Lmao

[@DocKrazy]

Indeed

[@emilyrln]

Lol true 😂

[@sissymarie2912]

Damn it that's super accurate

[@QUEERVEEART]

i have a lot of feelings about ai art and im usually arguing with people in comments about it because i hate myself or something but this is the best comment i have ever seen about ai art thank u bless this comment

[@Charlie_Victor7]

I like the abstract AI "photographs" that look like something that really looks like a thing but you can never put your finger on what because the computer is mimicking general "thingness" but not any specific thing... But I like it because it makes ME feel eerie and uncomfortable, makes me FEEL acutely aware of "thingness" in a way that looking at a real photograph of real things doesn't make me feel. The AI is just a medium at that point, for the artist behind it to make something spooky. That can be done in a number of ways but that particular artist chose to use computers. And that's how I feel about AI art.

[@johannageisel5390]

Somebody on imgur used AI art to create pictures for "At the mountains of madness" and it really superp. The alienness that AI puts into these worked perfectly for the topic. Similarly, the youtube channel HorrorBabble uses AI to generate thumbnails for their stories. And again it works great for this genre.

[@Emerald-Fluffie]

I never actually thought that people took this seriously. I always just saw it as a way to go “oh look mario and snoop dogg are in Walmart, isn’t that a funny random image”

[@KristofskiKabuki]

I think the effect of AI art is going to be similar to the effect photography had when it was introduced - it will certainly replace human labour and make it harder for certain kinds of artists to find work, but it won’t be the end of art like some people claim cos there’s lots of things it will never be able to do

[@lark613]

People who can't tolerate criticism of AI remind me of cryptobros: "if you don't jump on the bandwagon, don't get mad when we steal your work!"

[@danielkerr5583]

I think AI art has an inherent technical limitation that's more at the root of this meaning issue. The AI art is trained in a world in which only art exists and is influenced by other art. Actual art is created in a world in which artists are influenced not just by other art, but by literally anything else. New art comes into existence by integrating new technology or ideas from other domains. If AI art could be designed to do that in a coherent way, it probably could generate what would appear to be more new and idiosyncratic art. I don't think it's that impossible to do, but it is probably a very long ways away.

[@Bleargghhhh]

The problem with this, I believe, is that people cant really tell the difference.

[@dibbidydoo4318]

@@Bleargghhhh and if they can't, is it really true?

[@TheGLaDOSvideoCore]

idk man my fiance has been using Midjourney to combine the craziest concepts and photographs and dolls and it makes completely unrecognizable and unique pieces from being fed raw inspiration much like a human brain

[@TheFreakDownStreet]

@@TheGLaDOSvideoCore No it doesn’t. You think it does because you can’t see the millions of images it is using as a baseline. All AI art is inherently just plagiarism but on such a large scale it is difficult to see. Usually. Some times it’s just the normal boring kind of plagiarism.

[@dibbidydoo4318]

​@@TheFreakDownStreet You're going to have an existential crisis when you find out that all of our biological computers on this planet are all doing plagiarism. According to information theory and thermodynamics, nothing comes from nothing.

[@austincde]

I rarely make money doing art because I used to make art for super cheap to stop my bank account from overdrafting because paying for vision and dental care(and for those who pay RENT I'm sorry) in America is a ✨ living nightmare ✨ ! Now that I'm in my 30s and being taken care of I'm taking my sweeta$$ time making art for myself before I consider running myself ragged again for a dollar. Support artists!!

[@SophiefromMars]

Really coming for me personally by talking about the two things I care about most in art: Mike Mignola and sexy wolves

[@autosadist]

I'm an amateur/freelance illustrator who has been drawing for decades. I''ve also been following the development of a lot of this technology for YEARS and believe I have a good understanding of how it works and why. I'm very enthusiastic about both "manual" art (first love) and AI-generated art (new love.) That being said, I wholeheartedly believe that this corporation-driven model development that uses tons of images without the permission of artists/photographers/etc. is bad, as I can tell a lot of people believe. When it comes to image diffusion models, the truth is that you're going to get better results from a model trained on millions of images that are fairly focused than you'll get out of a model trained on billions of 'general' images covering a wide range of subjects (as it the case with many of the recent AI image generation stuff coming out.) I think that this software could continue to be developed with that in mind, and that AI image generation could become better for it. I have some issues with how some artists talk about ownership over their own art using the kind of languages that giant media corporations use to discuss their claims to their IPs since, like, they're individual artists and not giant media corporations, and I have concerns about people developing conservative ideas about ideas and ownership as a result of all this, but I think that's more the fault of the people creating these AI models. They should have taken years requesting permission to use the art of all of these different people on ArtStation and Pixiv and wherever else they get training material from instead of just scrubbing these sites for everything without asking. That being said, nothing worthwhile is going to be accomplished by doing things like trying to feed these AI tons of grainy images to "mess it up," btw. I wanted to point this out because a few weeks ago people were trying to do this on twitter. I just want to let everyone know that the entire point of diffusion models is denoising images and the graininess doesn't negatively impact anything. If anything, it's probably even better for training LOL. I bring that point up because it's clear that a lot of people are just super scared of such a new technology (tale as old as time!) and are reacting rashly to it by acting like it should never, ever be a thing and that we need to leave it behind. Unfortunately, when you turn away from it completely and refuse to learn how it works, you're not actually going to figure out how to attack the REAL issues with the technology - you're just going to look kind of silly and make the tech bros who love AI image generation uncritically even more determined. Overall, I think that if more people focused more on holding the companies that are developing all of this shit accountable then we'd all be better off here. Quick addition on top of this, uhh, basically essay, sorry: I personally don't believe that this is going to put freelance artists out of jobs LOL. You can sit in Stable Diffusion creating art using a prompt for an artist you like and masking over small areas to correct visual errors until you have something that perfectly resembles that persons' art, but you'll never have art they ACTUALLY MADE. Most people don't want forgeries of real paintings - they want the original painting SPECIFICALLY BECAUSE THE ARTIST MADE IT. Yeah, a few people who would have commissioned a specific artist might just generate art like theirs to satisfy that desire, but I really believe most people will still commission the artists they love. It's about more than the picture, it's about connection between people.

[@akabaneolivia9550]

Great, reasonable response. Coherent. The way some leftists have jumped into bed with the IAPP over this, and have started campaigning for stricter IP laws like they don't only benefit corporations, is just...astonishing to me. That's the part that I just don't get. I don't personally feel threatened by AI, and I don't think it's going to take jobs away, so I can't relate to anyone going full reactionary over it.

[@autosadist]

@@akabaneolivia9550 :3c

[@conradtm]

I pretty frequently use a local instance of stable diffusion for inspiration precisely because it's completely detached from human ideas of what makes logical or tasteful sense. It's pretty great for unblocking myself creatively. In this way (for me), it facilitates art, much like oil facilitates cooking. Also like oil, if someone put a bowl of it in front of me and called it home cooking I would probably think it was a joke before being extremely concerned for their diet.

[@DarkRubyMoon1]

All you are doing by using AI is teaching it to not need you anymore. Stop feeding the AI.

[@tangentfox4677]

I'm using text generation AI the same way. I finally got significant progress on a story I'd stalled on for years by throwing AI at it. It was a smut piece, so the AI constantly wanted to jump straight to deep penetration and climax, the most unsatisfactory form of smut, but the ways in which it kept trying to throw me under the bus helped me figure out how to reject its advances and make creative wording out of the scenario. Over ~1k words, I kept a single sentence from the AI, and even then had to fix it.

[@katherineclawson3494]

I sometimes use AI Art as a way to fill in the blanks of what I’m working on Specifically with jewellery and landscapes because I always default to the same things and the bot can help remind that other things exist

[@grim_glim]

I am a software engineer in animation, and I 1000% endorse your message here. I make the light-simulation tools you talk about (path tracer) and compositing tools with a sprinkle of lookdev. Aside from just making a living, I love art, I want to make it and help artists make it. Our ML team focuses on things like denoising and super-resolution, which is mostly to cut renderfarm cost and consumption. But other good ML tools, like the spiderverse line placement, are meant to skip 80%ish of the monotonous busywork for certain tasks. The 3D pipeline can be arduous and there's a ton of room to make it easier. Midjourney et al are _not_ that. They replace artists and obliterate the creative process. The absolute contempt shown by some devs and enthusiasts towards artists sickens me, as someone who is lucky enough to work with these pros on a near-daily basis. And there's all this sinister talk of "democratizing art" from these people, as if effort and talent are greedily hoarded, as if it's not possible to break out a pencil or cheap watercolors and _try to make something_ whenever. To those people: artists aren't malicious hoarders, they are workers who gained expertise you lack, and you resent them for it. You resent them while craving a stream of vague content they're somehow obligated to feed you. You want them to bow to the machine you worship. You want power over them. You shouldn't have it. Fuck AI art

[@tankermottind]

The right has always relied on (to use their own word) cucking members of the oppressed classes, drowning the poor and marginalized in a nightmare world of abuse and degradation to which there is portrayed to be no alternative or escape. If it works, you come to accept that abuse and degradation as natural and normal, and the absence of such abuse as unnatural. Hence the bitter, resentful working-class Republican, not a "temporarily embarrassed millionaire" but a loser who knows they are a loser and believes they deserve to be a loser, and so does everyone else except for their abusers. Indeed, being domesticated and tamed into a worker drone becomes its own sort of virtue for them, a self-image of the Upstanding Citizen who dreams only of being a good dog. To the self-hating working-class Republican, artists are the worst thing imaginable, people doing work that not only does not completely alienate them but might edify them, people cutting the line, people cheating the system, losers losing less than they lose, negating the entire value system that has let them find meaning in a being a loser. And then those naughty dogs have the cheek to ask Master for more kibble, or worse, form a union to assert their right to not starve to death, when Joe Republican, the good dog, has never asked for any such thing, assuming he could never get it and doesn't deserve it. The cognitive dissonance drives these people mad with rage.

[@Dami_En]

👏 absolutely brilliant my friend!!!

[@darkunor6687]

Well spoken

[@cheris5868]

The worse part to me is how those people blame artists for 'posting their works online' as if that isnt a favor to help us enjoy their art for free

[@slei4676]

The gaslighting that I've seen everywhere from people towards artists is insane. They act like artists are gatekeeping art from "poor pleb" that don't have the same privilage of making art. As if these artists didn't work hard half of their lifes to gain skills neccessary to create these works of art that these people consume like burgers. As if all artists just magically gained their skill in one day. They don't care about the process and the person behind art, only about the end product. And to the worst of all they don't even acknowlege that if it wasn't for this effort of artists they wouldn't get their little AI toy to begin with. They want to be independent from artists while needing them at the same time

[@fallingdream]

I swear I feel like I'm the only person who remembers photoshop and digital painting discourse

[@padraicloingsigh421]

I had no idea it was that widespread.

[@cjboyo]

Digital art discourse is STILL going on imao. I prefer hand drawing, because it’s more soothing for me. Computers frustrate me. However digital art is such an awesome medium I wish I coukd do it. AI art is going to be so cool once it gets into the hands of artists

[@AlphabetSoupABC]

There's nothing new under the sun. People are always scared and judgemental of new technologies, until they get used to it.

[@banquetoftheleviathan1404]

Yeah or the autocad discourse. There are people who draw for a living other than just artist.

[@nikoteardrop4904]

Or the photocopier discourse, etc, et al. Every new technology since (and including) the written word has stirred up eschatological panic.

[@faeoori]

As someone who commissions art routinely, I find ai to be a great tool. Often artists want a reference image. And some get annoyed with long written out descriptions. So I will use ai to generate several images for the VIBE of the art that I want. I make it clear to the artist that 1. This is ai art and 2. These are the parts that I want them to notice. I find that artists appreciate my efforts, and that the quality of art that I've gotten is even better. That is to say, artists can better tell what I'm asking for. But I use it as a tool, nothing more.

[@datfisheboi6519]

Tbh what I feel is most sad about AI art is that if we lived in an actually sensible society, AI art actually could be an amazing tool that can be used by artists to make art better - but because we live in a society that only wants to squeeze as much value out of the world as it can, it's become an existential threat to the very concept of art and creativity. Technology that could've created a slightly better future being used to suck souls instead. Tragic af imo

[@SirNotAppearing]

this strikes me as a valid use of the tools. good on you.

[@zephemerality]

The way I make money (for now) is by doing art. But seriously, as a professional artist, all of the AI art I've seen online, and the increasingly depressing ways in which it's being marketed in an effort to remove people like me from the commercial process, has been deeply disheartening. It's already hard enough in this industry. Thank you for making this video and allowing me to find some solidarity within it.

[@lach7324]

I told myself for a very long time, that even if the world collapses at least we are all human and can always make art. One more thing to burn on the horizon.

[@thewizard1]

That's a sick quote. I'm gonna use it at one point.

[@Sonichero151]

Essentially the main thesis of this video is that episode of Spongebob where King Neptune makes a pyramid of hundreds of Krabby Patties in the span that it takes spongebob to make one but that krabby patty pyramid tastes like crap and the single patty was so good Neptune has to regurgitate it to eat it again.

[@ThrottleKitty]

AI Art makes me think of something more akin to that "draw a circle" function then anything. If AI was used as a tool BY artists, it could be an amazing tool. Imagine "training" your own AI to mimic your style and technique so you can quickly replicate textures, shapes, shading, etc. Especially if you are a concept artist focused on large amounts of art fast rather than highly detailed art. But having an AI replace artists altogether? That sounds terrible for everyone... everyone except the executives of publishing houses i guess.

[@arbitool]

"Heat death of human creativity" both beautifully put and sad :|

[@thesystem5980]

I think it is the opposite. People may create more complex works, such as video games and books, based their ideas with less cost.

[@arbitool]

@@thesystem5980 "do art"? U call typing a couple of words doing art?

[@desertels5119]

I didn't know Lichtenstein stole the panels, I thought he made them himself in a "comic book style". That sucks

[@potatopotatow]

why are they training AI to do art? I thought AI was supposed to do all the crap work that humans don’t want to do. Why are they training AI to do the fun stuff?! I want to do the fun stuff!!

[@EphemeralTao]

The point of all these AI art bots is to take over all of the writing, music, art, and other forms of creativity, so that we can be free to focus on our tedious, meaningless, soul-sucking office jobs.

[@matthewbluman9799]

Well tbf don't a lot of artists make art just as a job even if they dont enjoy it? So even with AI art around artists can still have fun making art while any monotonous art related stuff could be automated, tho this would only be good with proper social safety nets to make sure the artists could still afford to live without a job

[@elonmusksellssnakeoil1744]

It is a tool that artists can use for inspiration. It's not meant to "do art" any more than a ruler or level are meant to frame a house. You can still frame a house _without_ devices that tell you what is straight and level, but you'd be stupid not use those tools, and your work will come out a whole lot more like you want it to if you _do_ use them.

[@kanesoban]

Because there are many free art images on the internet, e.g. free data to train on.

[@randomjunkohyeah1]

@@elonmusksellssnakeoil1744 …I really do not get the point of this analogy

[@cambiata]

I've had this discussion with artists before, the discussion of the harms of "AI" art. My thoughts (though you didn't ask for them) are: 1) AI art, no matter how advanced, will never be able to replicate what a talented artist can do. 2) Artists nevertheless have and will lose jobs because of Ai art, but I see that as a concern with capitalism, not with AI art 3) The hype for everything to be AI art will fade. The ugly, incomprehensible noise you mentioned that always appears in AI art will become more glaring as people get used to this new technology. Just like how now if you look at a computer generated animation from the 90s (like say, the Scorpion King) and immediately cringe at how bad it is, so too will people look at AI art from today, except there won't ever be a better version of AI art that doesn't require human touch-ups. 4) Eventually, what we call AI art will become just another tool for artists to use, just another photoshop filter that everyone uses. 5) In the long term, the existence of this tool will mean that certain things die out or become more rare. Just as basically all movies today are done in the computer instead of drawing thousands of individual cells with ink and paint, or how rare Claymation films are when you can more easily replicate that look inside a computer. The desire to see the original, handmade things still exists, the awe when you realize that something is completely hand drawn will become even greater, it will just be even rarer for people to create art without the tool. to a lesser degree, it'll be like that fiber artist, Chiara Vigo, the last person in the world who makes sea silk. I don't think it's good for art to die out, I would wish that all arts are preserved somewhere, but I'm also not sure that there's a way to prevent it, once the genie is out of the bottle and an easier way to make things is invented.

[@bosstowndynamics5488]

I agree with your thoughts about the state of AI art today but with how much better it's gotten just in the last year I think it's a very strong statement to predict that it's peaked. I suspect AI systems will rapidly get better at hiding artifacts from generation and will probably rapidly reach the point where only a very well trained person or maybe even just an AI tool can truly identify them based solely on their direct appearance, and there's currently no fundamental reason to think that a true AGI is impossible, which would eventually be capable of everything humans are including the emotional aspects of art creation (since the entire point is that at that point it would be a general intelligence).

[@cambiata]

@@bosstowndynamics5488 Sorry, I didn't mean to imply that the AI art tool has reached it's peak, it will certainly be refined further from here. I'm just saying that no matter how much you refine it, random noise is inherent to the tool and can't be programmed out. Take Mildred's example of a circle drawn by a computer. To get that, the person who programmed it wrote a quadratic equation for the computer to use to know where to place the lines to get an exactly perfect circle. If you input the same numbers into the equation each time, you will always get exactly the same circle. AI art tools aren't like that. The example of "no, not like that" is very much on point. You don't ever tell the computer exactly what you do want, the way the circle tool is built, instead you rely on the fact that if you tell the computer "no" often enough, you eventually get a really good example of the thing you want. But creating tools in this way guarantees that random noise must always be part of the output. The only way to eliminate the random noise is either a) give the computer the exact parameters of what you want either by way of math or by way of a tablet and drawing tool or b) take the thing the computer made and then get an artist in to touch up the bad parts.

[@bosstowndynamics5488]

@@cambiata I think you're grouping 2 different things together here though - stable diffusion is inherently noise based, and the same request can result in 2 different images as a result. But in the same way, if you ask 2 different artists to draw a bird the results won't look the same, and even if you ask the same artist to draw the same bird twice there will be differences between the images, even if they do everything they can to make it identical. You wouldn't say the resulting images by the artist contained noise though. In the same way, stable diffusion is based on noise but the system will get to the point where a human won't be able to see any residual visual noise in the results, even though it will never be perfectly reproducible like a mathematically defined circle.

[@cambiata]

@@bosstowndynamics5488 Look I get the comparison to human artists, I have even made it myself in these kinds of discussions. I'm even down with saying "the computer is the artist" when it comes to AI art. But a computer simply doesn't learn the same way a human does. To describe "AI" "learning" at a really basic level, you take some number of the underlying program (for this example we'll say you take 100 of them) and then you feed all 100 of those bots the same raw, tagged data. Then you test your 100 bots with what you wanted to teach it - say you wanted to teach it to draw a Hanna Barbera style dog, so you use that prompt on every bot. You take the top 50 best examples and you feed those bots a whole lot more raw, tagged data. Then you test and cull half again. You keep doing this until you have one bot that does a pretty good job at "drawing" a Hanna Barbera cartoon dog. The thing is, it doesn't matter how much raw data you keep feeding into your bot, there will never be enough raw data to fully get it to "understand" what it's drawing. It's trying to replicate a pattern that you fed it, but you didn't give X-Y-Z parameters, which is the only thing computers *actually* understand. Instead you've tried feeding it billions or trillions of parameters as if trying to draw a demarcation line around the thing you want with a mass of scribbles. There doesn't exist enough created art for you to ever define those boundaries perfectly, so there will always be noise.

[@JakeTheJay]

Sadly many people don't care about the highest quality artwork. Most that look for commissions just find one that's the cheapest and is good enough. And AI Art is definitely both of those. Convenience is the most important thing in this world as of now. There is also the fact that artists are often disrespected and our hard work is often written off. People seriously underestimate how hard it is to draw anything, like a human or a sword.

[@johannageisel5390]

I don't underestimate it at all. But without money it's either buying the cheapest or not buying at all. ^ ^ I'm trying to write a book at the moment, which I'm going to put on the internet for free, and I fully expect to have to use AI to create a cover for it, because I cannot shell out 100€ for an actual cover artist.

[@knightofiris]

I have such a hatred of Lichtenstein. When I was learning about him in my design course my first thought was “So he stole it?”. I genuinely hate his art so much because he stole art from underrepresented and under paid comic artists and claimed it as his own. Same goes for AI art.

[@bean3550]

Another issue not talked about in this video is that lot of "AI art" generators that essentially work as filters like to keep image rights of any photos you input. They can just use your photo to reproduce images as much as they like and you can't do anything about it

[@rrkaminski9]

I loved that transition into the Eyeball Zone!

[@felixflitou]

Some comic artists made a few panels about how their work got stolen by Lichtenstein. Also, some of them were at the army with him, helping him out when his sole job was to clean toilets. Not just a thief, but an ungrateful one.

[@lizz83]

thank you for talking about this!!! many of my fav artists on IG have been posting about it and asking people to reconsider their praise of "AI art." sooooo many people in the comments just,,,,don't get it.

[@SlapstickGenius23]

Same!

[@brucekm]

I have been missing your content and watching old videos, you are a great creator and AI cannot compete!

[@christopherlundgren1700]

I would add though, that in the same way that human artists have idiosyncrasies, machine art also has its own idiosyncrasies. Not intentionally, because the machine does not have intention. But because of the way it constructs the art, it is going to sometimes do weird things that a human might never consider doing, and this itself can be interesting. It makes me think of how sometimes videogame speed runners can learn new tricks by studying the occasionally bizarre actions an AI takes when taught how to optimize playing itself. There can be discoveries of "oh I didn't know you could do that" because no person would have ever thought to do that.

[@realmarsastro]

I'm glad I'm not the only one who sometimes likes to look at the blue man hit the purple guy good with the lightningmans hammer!

[@Symmetriad]

The Rob Liefeld Captain America being displayed/associated with "anatomy" made me laugh my ass off. Nice work as always.

[@user-te5po4bu8o]

I’m a graphic designer who uses stock photos for a lot of things. I’m not touching any AI generated stuff for a loooong time, if ever. It doesn’t always create things that break copyright, but sometimes, it does. Sometimes the work is that close to some original piece. And how would you know until lawyers slap you with a lawsuit? Nope.

[@pipkin5287]

Fellow graphic designer by trade here. Agreed! The legal nightmare when you create something for a company and you accidentally come til close to another person's work due to, say, overfitting by the image generator. Huge nope!

[@antispeedrun]

"The Confetti Method" would be a pretty good band name tho

[@mikaelsanchez6426]

It might be noted that AI Art can only ever do that art thing of communication when it is arranged and put in proper contexts by a human. Anyone whose ever tried to use one of these AI Art programs knows that the vast majority of the stuff they spit out is visual gibberish. It's not unlike a Roman augur or oracle cutting open a goat and looking at it's entrails to see the future.

[@solus5317]

100% the engine can create an image. But getting even a good image out requires a human in most cases (not all). Getting a composition with message, meaning, scene and intentional aesthetic? That's a human, a human did that, they did not just "type a few words and boom" They spent hours researching prompts, learning key words, setting guidance scale, understanding the relationship between aspect ratio and desired image, and perhaps even selecting an input image and denoising strength. Often iterating repeatedly over a single image, or parts of an image, building layer upon layer of context while modifying the prompt and parameters to extract a particular element. "just a few words and art" is like "just smear some paint on a canvas" or "just click a button on a camera" or in the music world "just hit play on your laptop" or "just spin a record" It's a thing people who have no skill say about something they have no experience doing.

[@mikaelsanchez6426]

@@solus5317 Yes, well put.

[@lysanamcmillan7972]

@@solus5317 All of this. AI art is a mental workout to get halfway right. It'll be years before it isn't as arduous as it is now. And if you recall how pro photographers were alternatively snooty and terrified of digital cameras and now use them to be brilliant like I do, you'll see more of why the doomsaying is exaggerated.

[@nikoteardrop4904]

Really glad this became a criticism of commodification of art and capital in itself. As a visual artist, I'm a fantastic writer. Sort of a "face for radio" situation. Having tools like Hero Forge, Picrews, and the various AI image generators goes a long way toward helping me visualize characters, etc. Like you said, the tech is fundamentally amoral. Me, a broke writer and tabletop gamer, can get the images out of my head and in front of my eyes. To be explicit, no artist lost money from this because I don't have the $50+ I would consider the bare minimum to pay for a commission. No sale was lost.

[@harriskicksyou]

Especially when the tech is free and open source and can be run locally and customised to your liking ala Stablediffusion.

[@MarteaniArt]

Hero Forge, Picrews, etc, offer a free version of a tool an artist was still paid for. They generate money through various means (advertising, sales, etc) and YOU may not be the customer who pays for it, but it is paid for. There is a difference between the wealth of online avatar creators, model builders, paper dolls, and AI generation. AI generated images create from databases of catalogues built without consent. You, a broke tabletop gamer, have access to a true morally neutral set of tools (Hero Forge, Picrew), so why resort to an AI which is absolutely not?

[@nikoteardrop4904]

@@MarteaniArt Yes, I'm aware that nothing is, strictly speaking, "free" under capitalism.

[@Titleknown]

Hm. Despite you coming down on the negative side of the image synthesis debate I appreciate the nuance in your take. I will say, I do hope you do a vid on the flipside of how the response to this by the art world to expand copyright/shrink fair use in response to AI art is... distressing and a bad idea. Especially since Disney, Warner and such would still be able to use AI models to replace artists due to the vast amounts of art they have under their ownership, it would just mean that small artists would be unable to use these tools as well, not to mention the negative knock-on effects it would have on fanwork and other work that relies on fair use. Because, I think the problem is that all art depends on a commons from which we draw, and yet almost all of our legal methods of protecting artists depend on enclosing that commons in a way that only benefits capital in the end. Like, that's why so many people keep wrongly conceptualizing AI training using the commons as "theft" when the actual theft is putting the resulting models behind closed-source paywalls and using them to replace the people who made the original art! But stronger copyright is not the way to do that! Like, those of us leftoids committed to using image synthesis as an actual means of artistic expression (Yes, we exist, we have our own Discord server) generally agree the best legal response would be to keep up the legal precedent that AI art is automatically public domain, given how that would both allow us to keep using our craft, feed back into the commons from which we are drawing, and help avoid megacorps replacing meat artists with image synthesis programs! Because megacorps want art they can own! That and mandating any model trained on public data be Open Source like Stablediffusion is. Because again, if you draw from the commons you gotta contribute to it.

[@harriskicksyou]

Incrediby based and correct take. I always bring up Stablediffusion in these discussions since its open source and free and can run locally.

[@raven_g6667]

There's an AI anime program that straight up doesn't understand black ppl. One rendering it did turned the pic into a monkey and in another, it couldn't be bothered and just made him white with a black suit lol. Definitely an example of how racism is hardwired into code.

[@hohnmcransi54]

I mean, I'd blame the people feeding it exclusively white people instead of the machine using what it was given

[@malcire]

I mean, that does sadly seem in line with a lot of anime.

[@jayjasespud]

Yes, I'm sure that the people that created it purposefully coded it that way. JFC.

[@SimonBuchanNz]

AI (and in general, tech) bias is absolutely a real thing, but only in the sense that it holds an obvious mirror up to our own bias, either due to biased training data set selection, straight up biased data sets, or random noise that doesn't get caught by bias in the process of testing. If anything, I'm actually pretty hopeful about the fact that we can more directly capture and demonstrate this more nebulous side of systemic bias.

[@neckbeardpig279]

That does make sense. A lot of the older anime and manga had some really sketchy depictions of black folks. And since there is a serious dearth of modern anime that respectfully depicts black folks. It makes sense that the AI algorithm would skew that way. Especially if the person feeding the code is mainly using art based on older series to train it

[@cyberpunx9384]

My question is can AI recreate a beautiful women farting on a cake? Asking for a friend

[@__-yu8vi]

Does your friend need one picture, or a hypernet trained to reproduce such pictures?

[@iamjustkiwi]

Yeah, but the woman will have a weird, fucked up face and the cake will look sorta like a dog. Dunno if thats a turn off for you.

[@patrickmcgorrill4995]

Squatting with a bare butt over a cake should be no problem. I think to visually represent the fart you might need to touch it up somehow, maybe generate a stink cloud separately and collage it in.

[@cyberpunx9384]

@@__-yu8vi idk they really like the idea, yet haven't said anything about it for almost a year

[@cyberpunx9384]

@Patrick McGorrill I'm sure my friend would be pleased to hear how easy it is

[@kaitlynnp582]

My favorite kinds of art are made from common, cheap materials. The act of making the art is the value to me, not the monetary whatever. It's annoying to me when art made of expensive materials gets more attention than more interesting art made of less precious stuff. I know it's possible to have the opposite opinion of what's interesting than I do, but I still wonder if the attention is because gold leaf or whatever.

[@thegazetteyt]

I also think this plays into the narrative of hyper realism being equated to artistic talent. The "more real" something looks, the more it resembles a photograph, people presume that is where the "creativity" lies. You see a lot of "AI" art where there is, as you said, an instagram filter over a rendered face, but seeing more cartoon stuff is often dismissed as irrelevant in this space. I mean, I guess you can tie this all in with how computer generated movies are touted as "live action" when they were just as animated as their 2D counterparts. I am an artist. I've been one professionally for over 20 years, and I see AI art as just another fad that people will get tired of when the hyper realistic gritty look of it (in other words, soulless) gets boring. People will move on.

[@Maioubi]

It can make anything from a 4-year-old's doodles to retro pixel art to Rennaissance paintings. I'm starting to think a lot of commentators really haven't tried to truly understand AI at all. Neural nets, i.e. AI brains, are absolutely colossal and take the equivalent of millions of human hours to train in parallel, using a medium-sized town's worth of electricity for months for the bigger ones like DALL-E and ChatGPT. These aren't simple copy-paste machines. There is a deep, meaningful processing of its knowledge. It may be utterly alien to human minds, but it truly does have a kind of thought process.

[@ericvulgate]

'nobody will use the internet'

[@Camoedine]

@@Maioubi it literally isnt that deep. its not even any actual "artificial intelligence"

[@burneraccount1218]

@@Maioubi They ARE copy/paste machines: I've seen enough identical chunks from source images to know. There are billions of images in the data set, companies are hiding behind the sheer volume of stolen material. To prove that it isn't copy/pasting you have to go through billions of source images and compare them to outputs which I'm guessing you're not going to do. But even then when I show people the identical chunks, like I can circle them in red and overlay them on top of each other, they refuse to acknowledge that they're identical, there's this bizarre, blind desire to believe the marketing and anthropomorphize this automated labor theft collage machine. So I don't think some people, probably you included, are mentally capable of understanding this. When I show someone an identical piece of another image outputted by an image generator and even overlay it on top to show its copied and people still claim its not copy/pasting that a level of brainrot I can't fathom. And don't tell me humans do the same thing, I have a painting by a blind woman in my house and I've seen plenty of other work by blind painters: they are not looking at other people's work because they CAN'T SEE ANYTHING.

[@deepseametro]

@@burneraccount1218 they are not copy paste machines, the models do not contain Any images whatsoever. the tech is not as crazy as being ~AI brain~ or whatever, but they also are Not Collage Machines! they have learned that X keyword correlates to Y color pattern on a screen - which may not be impressive either, but that's not copy pasting.

[@ittixen]

To those of us feeling conflicted about playing around with image generators, remember there is a difference between an employer choosing to abandon human workers in favor of cheap bots, and a broke rando experimenting with an exciting new free gadget in their own creative process. Still, under capitalism it will always have deleterious repercussions, so think hard about how you use it.

[@harriskicksyou]

Especially if the broke rando is running it locally on their own machine.

[@pipkin5287]

There most definitely is a difference, and I hope that we can get to a place where any broke rando can use an image generator model for free, that wasn't trained on thousands of other real people's hard work without their permission or any form of compensation.

[@ittixen]

@@pipkin5287 Oh yeah, I just wanna make clear that I didn't mean just because you're broke you're justified in using other people's work for profit. But using it alone for inspiration, sketching ideas, or even just as a toy, is a different thing. Also, every artist should be compensated for using their work in the training process. And ideally, no artist's livelihood should ever be in competition with image generators, but for this to happen we need to literally overthrow capitalism.

[@pipkin5287]

@@ittixen completely agree, and, though I don't know if I'll want to use an ethically sourced image generator as a part of my own artistic process in the future, I can recognise the merits it can hold for others. I don't think we need to overthrow capitalism though. It's a concept that can be applied in stronger or weaker degree to most societies on Earth. If we have proper legislation in place to protect people's ownership of their work/data, and privacy, and curb the money-grubbers, we can at least exist alongside each other in a civil manner.

[@ittixen]

@@pipkin5287 I have many other reasons to want to overthrow capitalism, but I agree that we definitely should and can already take measures to protect the rights of artists right now. The way these businesses get away with what they're doing is not an inescapable fact of nature and we need to fight to hold them accountable.

[@alicewelsh7662]

It turned into an interdimensional cable commercial at the end

[@Ironic_daemonic]

I disagree, that was one of the best eyeball transitions yet

[@ed6705]

No joke, that's one of my favourite eyeball zone transitions

[@paralolagram]

i'm sad that im not in a philosophy class this year. ai art would be really fun to discuss ad nauseam in a classroom.

[@apathy.machine]

Hello Big Slime, thanks for the video. I've heard a lot of takes of both "sides" on this and none of them brought an interesting perspective with the detail you did. Really helpful stuff, much appreciation.

[@patrickmcgorrill4995]

Having been rerolling that random image generator for the last few days in a fixated fugue state, this all lines up closely with my experience. The garbage to good-stuff ratio is like 20:1, and I'm being liberal with term "good." Maybe that changes as the models get better or I get better at querying the latent space, but in the meantime I'm doing edits in GIMP to get the few ok pics to a point where I'm mildly satisfied. It feels expressive in the same way photography is expressive, maybe you carefully constructed the shot, or maybe you went out and wandered in our world of infinite images while taking pictures of every interesting thing you saw to end up with a few good pics. You would never say that a camera could replace the aesthetic sense of a person just because it can reproduce an image with fidelity, and I think the AI image generators are very comprable in that way.

[@surferdio]

Thank you for being you, Thought Slime.

[@caegray6987]

Incredible video, maybe one of my favourites of yours As an artist myself you summarized my thoughts and fears very well And yes, AI art is *scary* for people like me. Instead of college for the years through the pandemic, I chose to put time into improving my art skills. It's not a stretch to say making art is my *only* marketable skill

[@tangentfox4677]

I love you including the phrase junk food to describe quick easy enjoyment, because I started using that label for a few KZbin channels that produce content that appears to be deep philosophy but is ultimately just a quick thinky pleasing entertainment product. :3

[@________w]

This wall-of-text appears because I found this video to be frustrating. I find it frustrating because this is a topic which has a lot of room for discussion about how society reacts to potentially labour-saving devices, and how this tends to further empower those people who already had other ways of avoiding their own personal labour. It's also very interesting to me that so much opposition to AI art can be seen as a metaphor for how we treat things like welfare, what boils down to "you didn't toil sufficiently for this, so you don't deserve to have it!" But I can say, at least, that this video had a take that is at least one I haven't seen before, and seems to be "This doesn't entirely remove humans from the process... and so is bad"? This video seems to simultaneously understand what so many other discussions on this topic miss, while somehow coming to the same conclusion that it must be a bad thing. You say at the end that this isn't the fault of the tool, but the system, but your attacks seem to be almost entirely directed at the tool... while simultaneously the attacks seem to be things which are good. Humans, rather than toiling at the task of laying down individual brush-strokes, get to focus more on what actually makes something "art", ie: "Is this interesting?", "Does this convey the meaning I intended?", etc. This will enable new artists to express themselves in new and interesting ways, and as with all new art-related technologies, existing artists will (at least for a while) be better at it than those who are only just getting started because of the possibilities this unlocks. And meanwhile to take the entirely opposite position: "The computer doesn't know what's interesting" is... a scary amount of ignorance. The part of this which I expect to be the most dystopian is that it's just a couple of steps away from having a computer trained *entirely* on what is interesting. In the same way humans taught computers to get people to stare at phone screens for longer, I expect that in the very near future, AI art will be explicitly trained on the goal of "increasing the amount of time humans look at the art", and will be able to generate images which are "so beautiful you can't look away", in order to get you to click on an ad. Human expression is a good thing. This technology allows human expression to be a thing that is done by more people. This video also makes the frustratingly common error of pointing out the "errors" in output generated from the state-of-the-art as examples of what a computer "can't" do. Anyone who has followed this space for more than literally the state-of-the-art as of 2023 can see what a huge leap in quality this has been vs just six months ago. Great point on the potential cycle of reduction where artistic endeavours may be increasingly discouraged. I think an interesting extension of that is the note that AI art systems intentionally try to exclude things which may be considered controversial, subversive, violent, sexual, etc, from their training data. This means that it will be much easier over time to create non-subversive imagery, and conversely will be much harder over time to find new training data which is not subversive (ie: over time, art which is not itself AI-generated, and therefor is suitable for use as training data, will only be that art which the training sets are hoping to avoid). I think that the potential implications for society (including the economy, but I'll try to avoid phrasing things in those terms) is much more interesting than any discussion which just says effectively "this isn't real art, it can't be real art, the machine will never be able to create something that is real art" that over the course of human history, trends towards always being wrong.

[@ligao9378]

It is stolen labor. You missed that. Billionaires had their engineers and lawyers create fake non-profit to steal labor in the name of "research" and now sell stolen labor. Meanwhile the people who actually made the art are starving. Moreover, the same billionaires just fired tens of thousands of people who build the IT infrastructure for them. Microsoft even fired their ethics team. And this is not to mention all the rest of this imperialist 3.0 garbage that white people, of course, refuse to notice.

[@phnx2026]

That was such an insightful view on this topic with lots of things I haven't considered before, thank you!

[@Getsadandstuff]

things to not teach robot -art history -the five senses

[@willkersey7340]

That was my favorite eyeball zone transition yet. And also, you've done an amazing job articulating the feelings I had about this topic. Impressive essay on a complex quandary.

[@Sydney-Casket-Base]

I always think of the computers that make "AI" art as being very complicated tools. I DO consider the finished product to be true art, but I do not consider the computer to be the artist. Rather, I consider the human(s) that built/programmed/used the computer to be the artist(s).

[@user-xsn5ozskwg]

I'm not sure anyone other than the artists whose work was used to train the model can be counted as an artist. Like, if we're talking about factory-made bread who is the baker there? Surely not the people who designed the ovens, who in this case programmed the machines. And it can't be the factory owner, the one demanding two hundred loaves of pumpernickel or a picture of Gandalf with breasts, because they're not actually contributing anything. And while the conveyor belts and sorters and every other machine involved are technically "baking," it seems like taking the piss to call them bakers, just as calling a machine that just creates from demand an "artist."

[@dorongrossman-naples9207]

@@user-xsn5ozskwg by your argument, no human can ever be an artist because they're just reproducing their environment as a consequence of human evolution and contemporary society. Are those the real artists? This whole business is artificial. The artist is whence arose any aspect of the art. The AI is an artist and the people who made the data it's trained on are artists and the people who programmed it are artists. There's no real difference.

[@user-xsn5ozskwg]

@@dorongrossman-naples9207 What? I'm arguing that to be an artist you need to be directly involved in the creation process, not just overseeing it. It's why I said calling the convey belts bakers was "taking the piss" instead of outright saying they weren't, because I think there's more of an argument to be made that they are bakers than the guy ordering what bread is made. It has nothing to do with reproduction or originality.

[@fablecouvrette5334]

THANK YOU for saying this all so succinctly. You've addressed every essential point I want to scream whenever someone brings this stuff up, from either side. I hate that we start these conversations at all from the assumption that any of this *is* artificial intelligence, or art, or original creation.

[@ferrisffalcis]

from a strictly anarchist point of view democratizing the access to art and making copyright infringement easier is actually based as hell and i sort of wish AI art wasn't being peddled by the same folks who gave us NFTs like not even a year ago i don't think AIs can replace artists but they are such an useful tool for both artists and people with no artistic skill whatsoever. ideally if we had boundaries and consent involved in creating those datasets we'd be looking at something entirely different but alas, techbros gonna techbro

[@harriskicksyou]

I feel like techbros are just co-opting tech developed by tech folk as a scheme to make money. The field of people actually working in AI is really small. For example, Stable Diffusion is open source, and the model is freely available to download and run. The dataset is not provided (to big), but the model itself is being given away for free. You can then take that model and selectively tailor it to your individual desires, like the furries have done, by refining it on a new, smaller dataset. Super democratic and anarchist imo, and as the owner of a powerful GPU, it is the only way I have been running the AI, on my own machine.

[@jayjasespud]

Which AI team was pushing NFTs?

[@Just_One_Tree]

I appreciate that you’ve been captioning your videos!

[@royaltea1917]

I bought a bootleg Lichtenstein to hang on my wall at uni, and it's good to know that i was buy a stolen version of stolen art

[@robertreed7767]

This was the most enlightening conversation (speech? Content?) About A I. Art that I've seen. I have heard sooo many talks and podcasts on the subject and this really brought it home like none of those others did. Good video!

[@DarthCalculus]

I think it would be pretty cool if an artist could train an algorithm on their own art style. That way they could retain ownership and control of their work and any automated imitation of it.

[@BarKeegan]

‘Software is not deliberate, it’s just guessing’ couldn’t have said it better myself

[@lightningkatana10]

I know this video mainly focused on visual AI art, but I wonder how this applies to say, text programs like AI Dungeon or NovelAI. What makes those entertaining is that in trying to create real stories, they end up with these unintentionally hilarious approximates that I think create value based on that alone. It doesn’t ever feel like a cheap copy of anything, and if you want an example of this, I highly recommend watching any of the AI dungeon streams WayneradioTV has done. Trust me, they’re so goddamn funny.

[@solus5317]

Be worried, very worried. Language is orders of magnitude closer to being "creative" than images. NovelAI is nothing in comparison to the models that will be coming, like GPT4. Even text-davinci-003 is so capable it can momentarily fool you into believing you have an actual writer in the room. A short prompt can create wonders. Though, to be fair, it still takes a skilled hand to draw out those wonders. I mean, that's great for me, I'm apparently an AI whisperer, but if you are worried about image synthesis, text synthesis is far and away more dangerous. It can even replace white collar jobs. Do middle management better than a human, and without upsetting employees, doing a better job of balancing priorities, behave more morally, I mean, it could get weird out here.

[@Soverthe]

Cowboys 7

[@crazyluigi6664]

@@solus5317 You look at the Maclunky...

[@roninpawn]

I find your argument mottled, throughout. Let's get on the same page: The idea has been that my grandfather worked 'hard' so my father wouldn't have to; who worked 'medium' so I could have it... 'easy.' That AI is taking work away from artists isn't the problem. Artists shouldn't need to draw sexy anthropomorphic foxes for furries. Artists should BE furries and draw those foxes to fulfill their passion! The problem IS that people are being required to WORK to LIVE. And that this is being demanded of them in a world that features both a steadily growing global population, AND endlessly-advancing technology that consistently reduces the need for human labor -- AS IT SHOULD! The complaint here should not be that artists don't get to do soulless, creativity-devoid work anymore. The horror! The complaint is that human beings - under capitalism - must WORK or DIE, even after the labors of our forefathers has FREED us from seats at the assembly line. And when THAT is acknowledged as the real problem here, you can then ask, "If humanity is getting more out while putting less in than it has ever before, why haven't those efficiencies reached the working class? Why do I still have to put in 40, 50, 60 hours a week? And the answer becomes obvious: Every efficiency built by the worker - rather than relieving the burdens of that worker - has been stolen by the employer, and renamed "profit." Your grandfather's labor never reached your father. And your father's labor hasn't reached you. A factory that once took 1000 men to operate, now houses 200 robots and a dozen robotic engineers. But the 990 who don't need to work there anymore, still need to work. And the only reason they do is that what should've been humanity's needs being met, and mankind being liberated from the grinding toils of sheer survival, became a handful of men getting exceedingly RICH. They literally stole our future. And made every sacrifice of every generation that came before, MOOT. And I don't know about you, but I'm getting hungry. Shall we, perhaps, EAT THEM?

[@timmehjimmeh]

Also, my thoughts on AI art specifically, as it pertains to the animation/gaming space. I feel like it’s a powerful tool for “mood boarding”. Maybe smashing out a few quick ideas that an actual concept artist could bring to a useable state. I find it’s rarely a worthwhile final product. You need the last push to be human right now. However the ethics of training on art without compensation squicks me out. Artists should be allowed to opt in (as opposed to being given the way too late option to opt out at this point) and should be given credit and or other compensation when an AI references their work. Especially if the final ai product is being used to make money in its final state as either concept art or a “commission”.

[@joeywalker7015]

This is an awesome deconstruction of the "AI-Art" struggle session the internet has been going through for the last few months.

[@qwertyqeys]

What hurts me about this entire discussion is that I keep running into people who I agree with on both sides of the aisle here, people who recognize that AI art is being used to try to get around the fact that humans need compensation and fair working hours, or maybe even use it to try to skip the grueling process of "practicing" due to either laziness or a self-esteem deficiency that they should REALLY see a therapist about. But on the other hand, I know artists who use AI art not as a final product, but as a source of inspiration and a reference point for their own work. They see AI art not as a replacement for human touch, but as an optional step that can be ignored entirely if that's what you want to do. Some do use the AI art, but not on its own, but as a sort of collage style where they pick pieces and stitch them together into something new, and open channels for other artists to request the art either be removed or request compensation. Now I know a lot of AI techbros will SAY this and then do absolutely nothing when pressed, but there's some genuine people out there who have found real enrichment with this tool. But it sucks because it's still being loudly championed by THE WORST PEOPLE ON THE INTERNET BAR NONE. It creates this sort of maddening reactionary relationship between each side of the aisle where having a common enemy (the techbros who just wanna steal and hate unions) doesn't mean they can relate or see eye to eye. People who want to use AI as a small step in a process are sort of caught in this vice grip between the worst people to ever use the internet and people they respected turning around and assuming everyone involved with this technology is aligned with that other group. BUT AGAIN there's a lot of concrete reasons in the way society is structured to want to get rid of AI art and seeing the exact points I'm making are going to understandably be seen as taking a centrist approach to the financial deprivation of lower class artists. It sucks because I've had fun with AI art, you know? I sat in a call with friends, generating pictures of right wing idiots we don't like "but what if they were in crash bandicoot" or some other dumb shit like that. I think really though, we can't get rid of it, the tools exist, the documentation for how it works exists, and at the end of the day the solution is the same as it's always been for every other horror generated by modern society; supporting each other and building strong bonds with our peers, and when I say peers I mean anyone you know who holds no power over you, who you have no intent to hold power over, and who you could ever possibly call a friend. We've been conditioned to tunnelvision ourselves towards people with influence and clout, and the ills of AI don't have to hurt us if we just stop sending money up and start sending it to where we already are/below.

[@Xondar11223344]

I think AIs need to be trained on public domain art, as that's more likely to be art created by people long dead and art that is recognizable by many people.

[@KaizenImpact]

If they need references that much, there are too many out there, too plenty of free tools, assets and stuff. Inspiration isn't scarce either. Matte Painting or photobashing is a thing, but most of them use photos they own, they captured and bought. It isn't a good "tool" in the long run.

[@Megaritz]

Good comment.

[@dukeofjukes]

i'm a programmer and cs researcher and that explanation of machine learning at the beginning was great at explaining a somewhat complicated process without any jargon. props!

[@courtneybermack]

I would feel better about AI art if 1: it paid artists or at minimum credited them and 2: did not get trained on datasets like "the internet" or otherwise... problematic... sources such that what it creates echoes the accumulated behavior of the internet in all its oppressive glory. I figure there'll still be a market for wolf art (and other niche art) until someone makes it real easy to train your own AI bot. The art markets might become "artists innovating on AI art images" and then it's turtles all the way down. But now I want to know what underlying prejudices a wolf art AI bot would reveal. I drive for meals on wheels. My job cannot be automated, but it could be made redundant by local mutual aid and support networks. In the meantime I wish I had a more fuel-efficient car, get told I'm wonderful, and also get free food.

[@solus5317]

You know, I don't think it's any _more_ wrong that AI Art tools are trained the way they are, then is already wrong with AI in general and western art _in general_. And I also completely agree with you, we should train models as _community_ projects, that unlike western art respect the understanding of mutual contribution and collaboration. We should respect closed practices. And make more ethical tools then our existing ones, they _should_ be more ethical then the people who are currently whining about "their style is their property", after spending a lifetime participating in a fundamentally appropriate art culture. And hell yes, I don't think _any_ AI should be trained on the public internet or the english speaking internet or any such thing. But if they are... Then I would certainly like to see the mirror that they hold up, and not have that just be used as tools of oppression (as many similar AI systems already are, ohai is that you youtube recommendation engine, nice to see you, no, why would you think I was talking about you, I was talking about that twitter AI, or was it the surveillance AI, or ...)

[@Oddtish]

This is my new favorite Thought Slime video! Great work.

[@ouroboreas]

i don't want to have to keep everything to myself and my offline friends. i don't even make money from my art right now, i just don't want to be treated like an obstacle to what i produce and nothing more

[@Enysum]

Thank you for making your art. And thank you, any artist reading this, for making yours. I hope if you're in an art block or a slump that you feel better, regardless of if it means art comes from it.

[@seekingabsolution1907]

9:54 more over with consciousness would come the ability to Unionize so it's a bit of a moot point. You can't tell me a conscious AI wouldn't eventually want to do something under its own initiative and thus would then want personal time, perhaps even payment and other things for which it would unionise.

[@HobeBryant]

Wasn't expecting a quick Johnny five aces cameo in the middle there lol Great video as always slimeo!