If artists suddenly started loving AI tomorrow, this pledge would be out the window. It's just business and marketing - nothing more, nothing less.
It’s a good rule of thumb that the profit motive will make everything worse, but it’s not like it happens 100% of the time with no exceptions (unless publicly traded)
But the people who use a tool like this aren't doing "slop" in the fist place, any more than they're importing the first stock art matching a keyword and calling it a day.
The stuff that gets the flak — I've seen some on posters in the U-bahn here, with a man exiting an airport luggage scanner while a robot scans his belly to reveal he's pregnant with a cat — are done by people with IMO no artistic standards to understand why editing is needed.
The prompt here sounds like something a generative AI tool would struggle to make look poster-worthy, while also being something I'd expect flesh-and-blood artists in marketing to come up with, draw, and think it's a good idea.
This is to say, I can tell (bad) AI art from human art by a type of technical mistakes made, but not by absurdity of the depicted concept.
I mean, it’s an app some people use to work with everyday and make money with and it only costs 15€.
A vacuous conditional, because AI goes fundamentally against the basic ethic of most artistis.
Image generating AI is a tool and like every tool you can be really creative with or just make crap. It's not inherently immoral or dishonest.
I know this because they've all reached out to me at one point or another and asked about tools/hardware/services/etc, and I've done my best to point them in the right direction. One that I'm particularly proud of bought himself a 3090 and is running his own models and doing inpainting stuff to great effect.
That's why I was clear about "my" friends, which necessarily limits the scope of what I'm saying.
This post:
>I don't know a single artist that's doing commercial work that isn't using AI to speed up their delivery times. They're all using AI tooling because it's useful. I know this because they've all reached out to me at one point or another and asked about tools/hardware/services/etc, and I've done my best to point them in the right direction. One that I'm particularly proud of bought himself a 3090 and is running his own models and doing inpainting stuff to great effect.
Does not include the phrase “my friends”. The first sentence could be interpreted as a broad statement as well.
It’s just a tool, adapt or get left behind. I wonder if this is how painters felt when photography became accessible to the massess.
Not really. Sociologically, I think it's a bad thing to want so desperately to remove stuff. That desperation was already borne from previous technologies, so it's just technology making things worse by apparently solving a previous problem that was already created by technology that ushered in a spirit paving the way for AI.
"Creatives" so strongly against AI art I suspect are not creative at all. They are the same class of people who are so uncreative that the entire internet looks almost exactly the same, even though you could basically do anything.
We don't call the person on the Ikea furniture assembly line "creative".
With that said, I am bored to tears with the output of generative AI art on its own. It is like taking a 4 bar beat sample generator for music and looping the output 100 times creates a pretty boring song. Someone actual creative though can see that the beat sample generator can be used for the base material for something interesting musically.
Of course the creative fraud is going to be afraid of something new and happy if things stay uncreative and the same.
100%
People just notice the shittiest ones where some marketdrone uses Dall-E to create the most stereotypical shit and puts it on a massive billboard or poster with zero thought for anything.
With local models + local learning, you can create stuff that looks like the company's IP and use it as a jumping off point or for inspiration.
I am a professional photographer and writer. I am 100% AI-free: I don't use any generative AI for my writing, photography, or graphic design (I do some of that as well). I absolutely hate AI and want no part of it.
This is literally the same line from record companies and Hollywood during the 80s and 90s, and they were rightfully mocked then. It is baffling how so many people are just repeating it now.
I am still more than willing to have a civil debate around the argument itself.
Why is it stealing to analyze images? I would be more convinced if AI used a fixed database during generation, or if it was considered a standard, acceptable practice to reproduce training data as "new" generations.
> I would be more convinced if AI used a fixed database during generation
Wow, I didn’t know that model weights, an elaborately compressed form of their training data, rewrote themselves every time they were invoked. Or that it’s only theft if I stole data from a fixed database to build my own service.
If objective facts are "my own narrative", then no rational discussion can occur.
https://arxiv.org/html/2309.10668v2
Maybe apply for a job there too, since you’re obviously so far ahead of everyone in understanding this problem space.
You can use whatever weasel words you want, but bits go in and fewer derivative bits come out in both cases.
The purpose of video codecs is to reproduce the original video. If you do that, it's copyright infringement.
AI models should not reproduce the original images. The output will not be something that already exists.
Purpose and intent matters.
Though I also think there’s an argument to be made that images need to be properly licensed to even be “analyzed” in this way, because it’s ultimately an unauthorized copy even if it involves picking the image apart and obfuscation. They were published with the intent of being viewed by the public, not for being reproduced in any shape or form.
Like your respondant, I find the artists more sympathetic despite finding the argument itself bad.
That said, the intellectually dishonest arguments irk me to no end and I'm simply tired of them. The artists upset over AI are more sympathetic than the RIAA (It's really quite hard not to be), but this stuff really wears at my sympathy.
And, unfortunately, it's impossible to actually tackle any issues unless without moving past the bad arguments.
I, too, get annoyed by People Who Are Wrong On The Internet; I'm trying to become more stoic, as I don't want to end up like my father.
I don't know if this will pass, or if the pro/anti AI split is going to be as permanent as the economic left/right split, or the libertarian/authoratarian split.
So yeah, if we're going by the (idealized version of) intent of copyright, it stands strongly on the side of AI.
EDIT:
And before someone complains that SOTA models are trained and owned by private parties -- copyright is "promoting the progress of useful arts and sciences" by literally giving private parties a monopoly to make money off art as an incentive.
The difference with AI is that AI takes a 100% bit for bit copy and uses it, rather than humans who just use their impression to be inspired.
> By the way, if anyone here is in advertising or marketing... kill yourself. [audience laughs and claps] ... there's no rationalization for what you do and you are Satan's little helpers, okay? Kill yourself, seriously. You're the ruiner of all things good, seriously. ...
> I know all the marketing people are going, "he's doing a joke..." there's no joke here whatsoever. ... I know what all the marketing people are thinking right now too, "Oh, you know what Bill's doing, he's going for that anti-marketing dollar. That's a good market, he's very smart." [audience laughs] Oh man, I am not doing that, you fucking evil scumbags.
> "Ooh, you know what Bill's doing now, he's going for the righteous indignation dollar. That's a big dollar. A lot of people are feeling that indignation. We've done research. Huge market. He's doing a good thing." Goddammit, I'm not doing that, you scumbags. Quit putting a goddamn dollar sign on every fucking thing on this planet!
> "Ooh, the anger dollar. Huge. Huge in times of recession. Giant market. Bill's very bright to do that." God, I'm just caught in a fucking web.
I wish their redo and undo shortcuts were used everywhere