Delighted to see it. Fuck AI art.
The typical argument against this is that human artists and ML models learn the same way, but the problem is that there's a fundamental difference: humans produce art by abstracting the concepts (think directional lighting, the kinematics of skeletal creatures, color theory, or physics of cloth) from the pieces they've studied and combining that with what they've learned from observing the world around them and by producing original art. This is why a human artist can produce competent art after studying only a handful of art pieces and gain most of their skill through practice.
By contrast, ML models do not learn by producing and have no way to directly observe the world. They don't abstract concepts, they "learn" by memorizing huge numbers of pre-existing images, and they produce images by patching together tiny bits and pieces of of those memorized images.
Where the human artist can function on little to no input, an ML model cannot, and so it's only fair that human artists have the choice to not have their works included in training datasets because if there is no feedstock of art there is no AI generated imagery.
Jerks are going to find dumb, lazy, malicious ways to abuse good tools, like they always do, though diffusion does have an conspicuously low effort barrier.
Another HN user summarized my thoughts on this better than I possibly could: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37978805
And that's was some actual AI artists do too. Its massively turbocharging stuff thats they can do in an illustrator or photo editor, but just takes forever. The tooling around diffusion is a deep rabbit hole, and requires some skill to use.
There's an important distinction between that kind of artist and the "AI users" flooding the internet. They are more akin to dank meme makers using Photoshop.
Being forced into an "average" grade sounds okay, but rather, I think, what is happening is that a new baseline for minimum meaningful art was created, and at the same time, new definition for value of art is being established as errors from that baseline. And I'm not sure those are good things.
I'm not saying that we will soon have a state-of-the-art image generation model that relies on self training, supervised learning or adversarial learning rather than a scraped data set, but I think it's a highly likely outcome within the next few years. Anyone making the argument that AI art is just copying might be in for a rude awakening. If that comes to pass, will you eagerly embrace AI art?
My experience with ESRGAN is that it really does not like to train on its own output. It amplifies all sorts of wierd artifacts you can barely see I'd you go back and squint at the finetuning dataset. And there was a paper suggesting newer generative models are similar.
Sometimes you just need some textures to make your game's level look pretty.
Whether you call that art or not is in the eye of the beholder. Compare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Applied_arts
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This is good peak of inflated expectations material [1]. LLMs will wholly transform some industries. Others will be virtually unchanged.
You know, technological progress. We don't stop it when it affects accountants, delivery drivers, programmers, etc. Art should be no different.
I think their point might be that we need to figure out how we live in a future with AI in it. Trying to deny AI with tools like this is not going to work.
I have a clog you can throw into a loom if it'll make you feel better, but there's no stopping AI art.
To quote an artist that I know, "artists already steal. They're the masters at it."
Stealing inspiration and style is how artists learn. It just takes time. They're angry that the time investment is going to zero. And also that their examples are what are being used, despite the fact that other human artists are doing that already.
I'm not sure we should defend any difficulty or complexity. Even that of our own careers.
We'd still be churning our own butter if we were afraid of automation. And what time would that leave us with?