Artist banned, told to “find a different style”- AI-made art

"Power" moderators, that is people who moderate a large number of subreddits, are untenable. It is not possible to effectively or fairly moderate dozens of communities, even if you were to spend all your waking moments doing so. This is, in part, why it's so common for popular submissions to be locked or deleted because "y'all can't behave".

The people that do so are largely doing it for their own self-gain (e.g., self-promotion) or because it makes them feel important. I had a very low stress job for a few years and ended up as a moderator for over a dozen large subreddits, including a few defaults. Socializing with Reddit's prominent moderators was enlightening.

Reddit is a worse echo chamber than Twitter ever was.

I gave up on it when I got banned from certain subreddits for posting quotes from congressional testimony. If you post anything that deviates in the slightest from the moderator's viewpoint, you get banned.

The end result is an echo chamber that's getting tighter and smaller, excluding any diversity of opinion. It's no way to run a business.

Fun fact: there's a popular car sub that will ban you for mentioning dealer markups in a disparaging way. That's right: if you say that Joe's Toyota tried to upcharge you $15k for a Camry, you'll be banned for life!

Reddit mods are ineffective or harmful a lot of the time, but so is Reddit itself in how it incentivizes thankless moderation and oversized and noisy communities for the purpose of ads and their upcoming IPO. Most non-niche subreddits could be replaced by ChatGPT at this point.

For real. From the headline I thought this was going to be a "ban" from an art department or marketplace or something of actual value, which would actually be news. Being banned from a subreddit for an arbitrary/idiotic reason is just reddit as usual.

HN is really lucky to have dang. Although he is a payed mod, so it's not 100% comparable.

Reddit mods fully convinced me that most of what we read on the internet is written by insane people. And I include most Reddit mods in that.

See previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18881827

The amount of great discussions I've seen shut down because a moderator removed the post on some stupid minor infraction is infuriating.

It is still surprising - at least for me, I've been using Reddit for years but mostly niche subs, nothing popular - how such a petty power warps people's minds. I dread to think what a real power does then.

But in this case, the mods can't win. If they let AI art take over, HN will be condemning them for putting artists out of business. If they refuse to allow AI art, HN condemns them anyway.

I wonder if the simple solution is to prevent mod accounts from interacting on the subreddits they moderate.

That's not news and applies to pretty much any moderators, especially the non-paid kind.

proof: I was a mod of a small hobby subreddit for a while, and I'm an idiot.

Came here to say this.

Reddit has definitely started a massive push in an authoritarian direction.

I actually was permanently banned from reddit last night for saying "I didn't know shooting a guy in the nuts would kill him" for spreading hatred/violence in a video game subreddit. It kind of caught me off guard.

The beauty of reddit is that you can create your own subreddit with your own mods and have the discourse that you want. You're not held to just sticking with the subreddits that are given to you.

Looking at one of the mods there, they've only had an account for 3 months. 0 comments, 1 post karma.

I was a moderator for r/robots for awhile. I even spent a few hundred dollars hiring an artist to create a theme.

I begged them to help me pin down what the subreddit was about since the submissions were all over the place, and some people seemed to think it was for a certain type of robot content and others a different type. Most ignored the question.

I tried to share articles and videos of actual leading edge robots that I though t were awesome. Generally these were ignored, along with most such things. Occasionally a video of a real robot would randomly become popular for some reason. The worst most repeated robot sketches would often receive many votes. Anything even remotely erotic went straight to the top.

They seemed to like art quite a bit, but often the voting was the opposite of what it should have been. Like artwork that was clearly derivative or low quality was top billing for the day, and amazing work was ignored.

Then there was someone who really wanted to use it for some channel that was obviously kind of a stealth marketing system. I repeatedly warned everyone about it and tried to discourage it, but the only feedback from anyone was that they liked the content and I was overreacting.

Due to the incredibly poor judgement of the people voting in the sub, I got fed up and left.

What do you think would be a better model? I have a hard time imagining one.

It doesn't seem all that different to me than whoever is first to claim a company name, a domain name, or when we go back further in time, land.

It's not absurd, it's reddit's killer feature and the primary reason that reddit is as big as it is.

If someone founds a company they get to own it. Why shouldn't someone get to own a community they found?

Nah, it's pretty amazing getting those people to work for free.

The weirder thing is that redditors make it possible to own categories.

The name of the subreddit shouldn't matter much at all. For each category there are several subreddits but people don't actively move to the subreddits with the best moderators.

For aggregators as a whole, it's the same. Places like https://tildes.net/ don't have many visitors even though Reddit's flaws should incentivize significant amounts of users to try other aggregators.

> It's the same with banning ChatGPT from StackOverflow: Who cares and who notices?

People were posting low-quality rambling bullshit, sometimes completely off-base, without even bothering with the most basic of smell-tests. People occasionally post low-quality rambling bullshit too, or things that are off-base, but with ChatGPT you can post 100 answers in an hour.

It's a matter of scale. The ban wasn't pre-emptive, it was reactive in response to a real observed problem with people lazily Ctrl+C/Ctrl+V spamming poor quality nonsense from ChatGPT.

While technically not allowed, you can still use ChatGPT on Stack Overflow: just make sure it's correct, copy-edit things a bit to remove some of the waffling and repetition that ChatGPT tends to generate, and no one will even notice.

I'm less involved in the art community, but I would imagine that most communities are at least in part about people who create things for the joy of creating things, and then share that in the community for the joy of sharing. I don't have anything against AI art, but if lots of people start lazily spamming that kind of stuff then you've kind of lost your community. It's not so much about what is or isn't art, it's about having a community.

That said, this mod is clearly being an ass about it.

Well, the temporary ban at SO is entirely justified. They already saw the influx of massive amounts of new answers, generated by ChatGPT, that are essentially spam and make everybody worse off. Even if 90% of the answers are perfectly correct, that leaves the 10% that are wrong, sometimes in subtle ways. And because the submitter of those answers is only parroting what ChatGPT wrote, they probably won't be available for further discourse, or to amend the answer they submitted.

The biggest problem with ChatGPT is that when it's wrong, it's confidently wrong and cannot quantify its uncertainty in any way (maybe it's too human-like in that respect...) Furthermore, the whole idea of a reputation economy collapses if reputation becomes "too cheap to meter".

If the goal of a community is to share work, critique each others efforts, and enjoy a hobby together, then someone coming along and pretending that they're doing it while they're not is obviously going to annoy people who are genuine.

I see AI-generated art as being similar to taking performance enhancing drugs in sport or using something that's against the rules in motorsports. Outsiders don't really care because they just see someone performing at the same level of the others by using clever tech, but if you're part of the group then you will care much more.

Well in this case, it's the artists who care. Ie the person at risk being "replaced". Yes, ML is not there yet to actually replace artists, but we all see the writing on the wall.

I'm a software dev attempting to learn art. I recently joined Mastodon related to this purpose and it's quite the hot topic there. Many, many artists pissed about how their work is being used to train corporate profits as well as potentially undermining their living/passion/etc. I've actually seen some cool art in protest of "AI"... usually involving malformed hands which the artist community have gravitated towards being the representation of current AI capabilities.

I think it matters how it is created, personally. Not because the author of an individual piece of art is important to me, but rather because once AI moves into a problem space and can effectively and accurately "solve" that problem space the displacement of humans will be surreal. How it affects people is the important thing to me. I'll be interested to see how we manage to recognize this reality as AI improves.

Seriously? Shouldn’t the SO example be very obvious?

If you submit an answer yourself and it’s wrong, if someone begins the process of critiquing it or editing it, they can engage in a dialogue with you in order to make this happen. You can explain how you came up with your answer, and they can help you debug your thinking. Seeing this process unfold over a couple comments is often one of the most enlightening things on SO.

How is this supposed to happen if you submit a ChatGPT answer which you have just accepted on blind faith and maybe don’t even understand?

It matters to me because, to me, art is a reflection of emotional processes specific to human beings. There is meaning conveyed by the difficulty of technique, refined over hundreds of hours at great opportunity cost. It says to me that the human being has sacrificed a lot to produce this piece, and so I should give it my attention. For human-made work, complexity is something like proof of work which is itself proof of conviction. None of this applies to generated work. While I am impressed at the analogous sacrifices of the human inventors of AI, the work produced by the AI itself has not yet surpassed the level of significance of a party trick, even though I would be impressed if a human had produced the work .

> An answer on SO is either helpful or not. Who cares how it was written?

"Who cares if the diagnosis is done by a medical expert or someone pulling out random drugs they tried before? As long as I feel better immediately after taking them, who cares how they were prescribed?"

The case on SO is clearly different, as ChatGPT might answer incorrectly or answer with something containing subtle bugs. There's also a good chance that you won't be immediately able to spot those bugs, as, if you were sufficiently knowledgeable in the topic yourself, you would have most likely not asked that question.

The case for art is a bit different, as there is no technically correct way to do it, but there is still a value to the way it is created. Would you think the first picture drawn by your child is worth the same as any other bad painting? Would you agree that a perfect copy of the Mona Lisa has equal value to the actual object? If no, it should be pretty easy to see why a painting generated by an AI is different from one created by a human.

It shouldn't matter how it's created. But some artists are pissed off that AI can generate art that people like, so they want to ban it.

I don't think the average person cares at all.

We should at least have transparency in the origin of the work. I care about the human experience, not the AI experience.

I'm not too surprised, /r/art has been famous for completely arbitrary rules for years by now.

/r/art mods are swivel-eyed loons

I've been keeping up with Stable Diffusion and all the tools around that for months now and it wasn't until a few weeks ago that I learned that you can just tell it to draw things accurately if you want to avoid weirdness.

For example, if I include "anatomically correct fingers" it significantly decreases the number of images with wildly creative ideas for how human fingers should be drawn.

Negative prompting works too. "deformed fingers" or "inaccurately drawn anatomy" can go a long way.

This person knows what they are talking about. Although I have been pretty successful in obtaining realistic hands by prompting photographs and including make of a camera, lens and film [1][2]. Somehow this seems to narrow down the model to mostly produce realistic output. Still, some variants will occasionally feature Chernobyl-levels of fingers.

[1] https://cdn.midjourney.com/6f52a6e9-b3f2-4830-81b1-84c8f8ca4...

[2] https://cdn.midjourney.com/361e143f-5121-4bff-ada9-069c2e400...

This is why I believe we’ll soon see a huge increase in the popularity of ‘physical’ art. Theatre, sculpture, dance… in a world overflowing with computer made images and sounds, things which can only be human-made will be all the more special.

Which is why, despite my distaste for DALL-E and its ilk, I’m not at all moved by the anguish over it rendering artists obsolete.

Stuff like this never had any artistic value in the first place, so it makes perfect sense to me that a bot would create it rather than a person.

While we're at it we should publicly flog anyone who's ever done any art in the style of anyone else before them, because they also stole ideas from the public.

This is a common misconception. AI is not copying anything. It is studying the images in a similar way that humans do. Entire size of the stable diffusion model is around 6gb, with pruning it goes down to 3gb. Training set is in terabytes. So it is common sense that no copying is done.

I think artists need to be fair about AI, is there any artist that created their style without ever studying other artists? That is high improbable because humans need to observe to create art. There is even a saying that "Good Artists Copy; Great Artists Steal".

Once again, artists trying to stake a claim of personal ownership of a section of human expression standing in the way of technological and cultural progress.

Lots of people in here making arguments about the fact that the way these image models learn is roughly analogous to how people learn, the fact that these relatively tiny models simply don't have enough bits to grok anything except the most popular (and therefore recurrent in the training data) images, etc.

What about the fact that these models aren't just randomly spitting out and taking credit for random images? This seems the most salient point to me — if I used a paintbrush to create a copyright-violating clone of some notable artwork or IP and tried to pass it off as my own, I'd be breaking the law. We wouldn't try to ban paint and canvas and the human arm because it has the potential to create something that infringes on copyright, we'd enforce the actual act.

If these models make this kind of infringement easy, then they are bad products and their users will run the risk of going to court. The whole thing seems like a non-issue.

It is curious how different the sentiment is in this thread compared to the other thread currently on the front page regarding GitHub Copilot. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34274326

"A good artist copy, a better artist steal". AI is influenced by artists work like artists are influenced by artists.

Nothing is being stolen, get a grip.

Nothing is being copied. If you understand how AI models work you'd realize that's impossible considering the model is a few GB. How could every piece of artwork be in there? It's not a database lookup.

The problem with Reddit, SO, and pretty much any system with moderators is that a heavy-handed moderator can claim that he's "doing something", while a lenient moderator who only deletes genuinely egregious content looks like he's "not doing anything".

The same is true of other institutions, such as congresses and parliaments. Note that politicians run on the basis of what new laws they've gotten passed far more often than what laws they've blocked.

There's something to be said for the idea of a branch of government whose function is limited to repealing laws.

Or like InDesign replaced people who set type with hot lead.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_metal_typesetting#/media/F...

> AI can produce greater art than the artist alone..

Citation needed.

> natural world has a lot of repeated elements and hand painting each one detracts from time that could be spent on more expressive aspects of the work.

Can't agree. Using these repeated elements artist can add additional level of impression for a viewer. While AI probably will use random distribution in this situation.

Fundamental misunderstanding of what art is.

Supply and demand.

Seems like a normal let's encrypt cert to me.

The artist in question offered to show the raw Photoshop files and the progression of work done on the piece to prove it was not AI generated, but the mod did not take him up on that offer, and simply banned him.

Wait until AI can generate such a video in 1min?

Because the art is actually good and better than most hobbyists in terms of technical skill in digital art.

I looked at the image and it feels like art in the terms that you put it.

What now. Is my inner experience of art not valid? How do we reconcile this?

> True art is something that can’t be replicated by AI. You will have no doubt once you see it.

Ignoring your assertion about what art is, I have to ask: what happens when you can't tell the difference?

Only at first glance. It doesn’t have any dodgy area or incongruence like you pretty much always find in AI pictures.

Thats truly interesting thing to learn on such site as HN.

So what. I guess the artist in question hasn't even been playing with AI art or even seen that much, so they don't have that context. And why do we need to look at AI art to know what is right for ourselves to paint?

I have a passing familiarity with the webfiction "Beneath dragon eye moons", that this artwork was designed for. All of the things you are complaining about makes sense in the context of that writing.

You've got a point, but I feel like I've seen more egregious examples of what you're describing. The Sauron eyes are unnecessary, but without that, it could be an interesting "Muse in the Warzone" piece. The character doesn't really look Asian to me though, or drawn in an anime style, but the expression could stand to be more subtle. We're all critics.

> Technicality isn't enough nowadays

When was it ever like that for artists? Most complex music to perform doesn't mean it's the "best", neither is it like that for art.

As an example from visual art, abstract art is sometimes very simple, yet have a profound impact on people, and it was never about being "technical", "complex" or "hard to reproduce".

What is creative? How many artworks like this with something like sauron's eye flying in the coulds have you seen, is that too unorginal?

I don't think it's possible to judge these questions you present at a glance anyway.

Just like how AI is forcing coders to make better design decision and focus on the bigger picture since eventually it will be able to write any program. The implementation will be up to us.