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Comment by slowhadoken | Hacker News Reader

“A.I. art” is neither A.I. nor art. After you make a neural network the first thing that occurs to you is that it’s useless without tons of data. In this instance our data is art made my people. Using assets without permission or a licensing agreement is theft. To make things worse corporations are charging for this theft. Basically “A.I. art” is another way to say “theft as a service (TaaS).”

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Copyright infringement is not theft because you are not depriving the rightful owner of something. AI art is not copyright infringement because the results are transformative (really transformative), so you would have to explain how AI art directly became theft. Also, neural networks are not "useless", there is virtually an infinite number of permutations that can be achieved with generative models.

The algorithm has no agency so it's not making art, art is made by humans. It's data theft. The art is data. You could also think of it in terms of counterfeiting too.

Art is made by a human using the tool to create the image, such as a photographer using a machine called a "camera", a digital artist using a computer, or a traditional artist using a paintbrush, also you seem to have completely ignored the part where I state how absurd it is to call it "theft."

A human who pushes a button on a counterfeiting machine isn't a machinist, economist, or artist.

Déjà vu, this has also been said for photographers and digital artists.

You're making a false comparison. People who prompt an "A.I. art" algorithm aren't doing anything, the algorithm is and what the algorithm is doing is scraping data, i.e., art (made by humans). A camera or brush, whether analogue or digital, is still being manipulated by the human. If a guy puts a comic book in a xerox machine it doesn't make him Jack Kirby.

The comparison is valid, and to think otherwise is delusional, and you will realize sooner or later that generative models are manipulated by a human being like you manipulate a camera or a paintbrush. What you actually want to say, though not explicitly, is that with AI art you can get good results with little effort compared to, say, using only CSP or Krita, and that somehow this would make the result less "art" (or even not art at all), but it has been a long time since "hard work" was a requirement for making art.

Also no, a xerox machine does not create transformative works ahah

Yeah so sorry but you’re not Rembrandt, bud. Have fun though.

Are you Rembrandt? Anyway thank you, I will.

>After you make a neural network the first thing that occurs to you is that it’s useless without tons of data.

What about self-learning chess engines? All they take as input are the rules of chess. And the output (the games they play) can sometimes be described as peaces of art. My point is that it should be possible for AI to create art without tons of (input) data. Even if it is not what we experience at the moment.

Chess is a very large but finite system. It's also a game largely based on memorization. Both things are handled extremely by computers. I consider terms like "self-learning" to be disingenuous or at best an exaggeration. At the moment it is not possible for a machine to make art because it has no consciousness. By definition art can only be made by a human mostly because we have agency.

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