Artist banned from art subreddit because their work looked AI-generated | Hacker News Reader

Artist banned from art subreddit because their work looked AI-generated

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31 pointsisaacfrond23 comments

The biggest story here isn't about art or AI. The most interesting part of this story is that moderation on Reddit is so horrifyingly and provably awful.

If an art sub-reddit, with limited commercial or political manipulation value is moderated so badly, you have to wonder what happens on subreddits that might actually be able to influence politics or commerce and that smart people with resources are trying to wield to their own benefit.

I suspect (I may be wrong) that most of the moderators on the bigger subreddits have patrons in one way or another.

There is considerable economic value in being able to control the eyeballs that visit the large subreddits, so it's expected that mods will want to monetise their power somehow.

r/HailCorporate sometimes goes overboard with their paranoia, but they also have clear evidence of how much reddit is gamed by users such as u/gallowboob

IIRC GallowBoob was known to work for a company that advertised things on Reddit, and was still allowed to become a moderator of a large number of subreddits. He then used that power to remove competing posts and ensure his own reached the front page. Absolute insanity.

In my experience Reddit mods are in general jaded intolerant assholes. I’m sure this is because the Redditors they deal with are in general jaded intolerant assholes.

And in many cases below 18 years as nobody seriously have to do moderator tasks.

This is something I don't see brought up in this discussion often.

I was an active reddit moderator from the ages of 13 to 17... Once I got a job I didn't have time to waste on it anymore. I wouldn't be surprised if a majority of moderators on reddit are minors.

Maybe, but users everywhere are like that and moderators elsewhere aren't the first handful of people that latched onto a keyword 15 years ago.

The weirdest thing about reddit is that you have this anonymous group of all powerful moderators who seem to spend their time overriding the site's most known feature: karma.

I'm not arguing in favor of groupthink, but it seems like the upvote/downvote system is almost never used to guide the direction a community goes in because people seem to have a proprietary-like interest in keeping it the "same" before it got "popular."

The bigger story is that we're entering a world it is becomeing harder to know the difference between what is real and what isn't, and that foments distrust.

That's pretty much always been the case (at least since the mid-20th century). The difference is that now people are aware that most of what appears authentic, whether art or information, is carefully manufactured to appear so.

It seems other redditors are presenting some evidence for it potentially being AI-generated:

https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/107eent/the...

Reading further, it's probably not AI art, but the sketches at least did lift some artwork from somewhere else:

https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/107eent/the...

Which is absolutely fine? What's wrong with using random art as a placeholder to give a client a sense of what it might look like?

The final image had no plagerism.

I like this comment, "More likely it's a proof that's not AI art - it usually doesn't reuse that much verbatim."

Unless I am mistaken, that reddit poster is accusing the artist of plagiarizing, but the evidence is only from some preproduction reference images and spotlighting elements that are not in the actual final work.

This piece is a commissioned book cover so it would be expected that he slapped together a 'demo' for the author to approve before making the final work.

To be clear, I wasn't trying to accuse the artist of anything, I just updated my post as I read more of the thread and got more information.

> "I don't believe you", the mod answered. "Even if you did 'paint' it yourself, it's so obviously an AI-prompted design that it doesn't matter. If you really are a 'serious' artist, then you need to find a different style, because A) no one is going to believe you when you say it's not AI, and B) the AI can do better in seconds what might take you hours. Sorry, it's the way of the world."

Using DALL-E 2[1] as the turning point, we've gone from AI art isn't a thing to "it's the way of the world" in 278 days. I'm left stunned by how quickly the artistic community has been transformed. As an active participant, I've found myself taking on projects that a year ago, I wouldn't have started, and pushing my creative limits.

But let's draw a line in the sand - willingly participating in a new artistic ecosystem is qualitatively different than being told[forced] by others to participate in a craft until this time had no concern over whether or not computers could produce art.

1. April 6, 2022: OpenAI presents DALL-E 2 - https://tokenizedhq.com/dall-e-2-release-date/

That's rich. First a job-robbing AI is trained on your work. Then you are banned because your work (which predates the AI!) looks to much AI generated.

I can't get from the article whether the artist was reinstated or not.

Not. With ridiculous rationalization: “we fucked up, but if we admit it, the trolls win”.

It's actually quite an interesting happening, as banal as a self-righteous Reddit mod might be.

I recall in the very beginning of Stable Diffusion being released, the first few models used to have an odd behaviour where mentioning the artist "Greg Rutkoswski" in the prompt would ameliorate the quality of painterly or sketched styles.

So much that it kinda became a meme, and the artist himself became quite vocative about his issues with AI generated artwork - but not because he inherently opposed it, his issue was that pictures associated with prompts mentioning him started to displace his actual artworks in search engines and public perception.

I find this case here to be a great example of the issues arising from the "AI art debate".

Models will soon become good enough to emulate recognisable styles in such quality and higher resolutions that the giveaway errors and artifacts created by the diffusion process will start to fade, which might very well and ironically impact better known digital artists and subject them to the general rejection of purists and legally cautious companies, when the lines start to blur.

On the other hand though, it looks strange. That sharp sleeve angle, Two (not one) eyes of sauron randomly in the sky?

Can we at least agree that it looks very unconventional?

For what it's worth, I agree that it looks strange. However, the fact that he offered to send the PSD and progress pics but was still banned makes the mods look incredibly bad.

>Two (not one) eyes of sauron randomly in the sky?

It's a book cover for a novel series called 'beneath the dragoneye moons'. Said moons feature prominently in the story and several of the previous covers in the series.

https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/36299/beneath-the-dragoney...

Dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34275644

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