If anything, an AI artwork booth should be manned by the engineers that built and trained the image model and well as scraped the training data. Then they can meet all the people they non-consensually took artwork from :P
Some years ago, around the time I became aware that AI art is a thing, the artist scene around Finnish cons had already decided to ban it. And the reason was obvious, as the same people are also very eager to police others who might be selling pirated products.
They don't care legal constructs such as intellectual property. They don't really care about economic constructs such as copyright. What they care about are authors' moral rights. If the model was trained without obtaining a permission from the authors of every work in the training data, they think using the model to create art is immoral.
Art is not created in isolation. It is a result of the artist's exposure (aka training), both intentional and incidental. If an artist wants an AI model to get permission before training on their work, then the artist should get permission from all the artists they were exposed to that shaped their artistic expression.
It's training and copying all the way down.
Oh and this happens in a very underhanded way. Courts, governments and companies (including OpenAI and others) demand copyright is respected by humans. They impose great penalties when humans cheat, and then this happens:
https://torrentfreak.com/nvidia-contacted-annas-archive-to-s...
https://torrentfreak.com/authors-accuse-openai-of-using-pira...
https://torrentfreak.com/meta-torrented-over-81-tb-of-data-t...
If these companies were forced to abide by the rules courts impose on humans, they would have to buy billions worth of books. But of course, "that's not how copyright works". Of course, these companies ARE using copyright to avoid reciprocating:
https://openai.com/policies/row-terms-of-use/
So this is yet another "rules for thee, not for me" situation involving companies worth billions of dollars. A situation that's really hurting people's livelihoods ...
I have an almost unshakable conviction that LLM-type AI systems should become a repository of all human knowledge. When LLMs give you an answer, you should be able to ask, what are the sources behind your answer? People won't do this, but curious, wanting-to-learn people will. Which leads to one of the important questions. How do you keep people curious?
> About $750 to $30,000 per copyrighted work
> Can go up to $150,000 per work if it’s considered willful
... it was definitely willful. And these are amounts that would bankrupt even OpenAI. But I guess only you and me will have to pay these sorts of amounts, not big companies ...
or
(so is J.K. Rowling)
"aka training" is doing A LOT of work here
(Not to take away from human artist's unhappiness - it's completely understandable).
This is a good change in society towards protectionist IP, which was long due for fixing, but was never done.
Honestly, they aren't even that logical. Most of the anti-ai rhetoric is anti any usage, even that which is fully licensed.
I'd suggest people learn about Andy Warhol's factory where they mass produced "art." Art is obsessed with "thing-ness," that is, being able to hold and own the artistic object. It's why people without record players buy vinyl that they listen to on spotify. And the way I see it, the main problem with AI art is that (1) it's all digital, and (2) there hasn't been an artist willing to develop a model themselves in order to create unique pieces that exist in the real world.
Don't get me wrong, I think the visual arts are going through a shift that will rival the advent of the photograph, but we are at the birth of this new period. I think it's fair to say that we are in the "this is bad" period before new art movements using the technology start to emerge (e.g. photography), as well as art movements that move away from the medium (e.g. modern art). Art has always been in conflict between being about the idea and being about the skill to bring that idea to life.
https://guyhepner.com/news/318-andy-warhol-inside-the-factor...
https://www.thecollector.com/how-photography-transformed-art...
Ditto for Picasso, and many artists even going back to the Renaissance when great painters and sculptors sometimes had apprentices finish or duplicate paintings/sculptures for them.
But this isn't that. AI is something else entirely.
I don't recommend using the Warhol argument. It's become a trope used by AI-über-alles people who have little knowledge of and often zero experience in the arts.
The reason why artists are mad about AI is the same reason artists were mad about the photograph… they were selling a product like craftsmen, but calling themselves artists. Yes, there is a crisis for getting paid to be someone else’s creative, but there is no crisis in creativity. In fact, there has never been more freedom than now.
Duchamp's R Mutt is an abstract commentary.
The actual vehicle of this commentary, the upside down urinal, is wholly arbitrary.
I don't claim others misunderstand art. I'm saying that art as a product that can be sold for income, where people want to own it, is tied to thingness.
>The actual vehicle of this commentary, the upside down urinal, is wholly arbitrary.
Yes. I agree. I'm generally confused by what you're trying to say here. I also know there are a many copies of Fountain... which again, demonstrates the concept of thingness in art I'm trying to talk about.
You typically can't hang a performance art piece in a gallery all day. You certainly can't sell a print to people at home. The fact that they care about the original instead of holding equal value to the print is exactly what I'm talking about. Digital creations don't have the same thingness, because you'd literally need to do something like get the original RAM that rendered the piece to identify it as "the original."
Defining "concerns about AI" broadly as "is it art?" while obstinately denying the possibility for real concerns about imagegen tech: theft of intellectual property by the wealthy, environmental, economic, expressive, and on and on.
> I don't claim others misunderstand art.
> gp: I'd suggest people learn about ...
Is a passive aggressive way to say "you misunderstand this due to your ignorance".
> I also know there are a many copies of Fountain... which again, demonstrates the concept of thingness
> gp: Fucking Duchamp’s readymades should make any concern about AI worthless.
If anything this "demonstrates the thingness in consumerism".
My point was you are ex post facto conflating your opinion of the items in the gift shop with the named artist's own expression.
Critique, yes. Celebrate, wat?
I tend to categorize Warhol as an artist that if you hate their work you should love it because the point is to coerce you to hating it to lead you to the realization that the arc of factory mass production bends toward lowering quality.
I highly doubt Warhol used his chosen soup brand because he felt it was the pinnacle of soup and represented how even mass produced quantities can have excellence in quality.
More likely he was saying this piece is to art as this brand's product is to soup.
Digital artwork being presenting at an oil painting conference would cause similar confusion and outrage for the same reasons.
This time around the response as been aggressively adversarial. Not only do they disapprove of the new thing but anyone who express a contrary opinion is considered a target.
This too will pass. Soon everything is going to be rendered at 60hz in real time, and demands that everything needs to be rendered by hand will be as absurd as claiming every frame of a 3D game needs to be hand rendered in Photoshop.
I can vouch for myself and others - that we are there to just buy cool shit and not ‘connect’ with the artist.
“Why would you want to see a booth showing artworks that weren't even created by the person in front of you but by an AI?”
Um, because they are cool?
Who is "we"? Art, to me, is about pouring your heart and soul into something in a way that AI can trivially emulate, which makes it dangerous when placed next to art that actually has a lived experience attached to it.
I can slap a prompt into AI and get some graphic design slop that to the untrained eye looks "close enough" to the vendor next to them that actually made the art themselves. This is dangerous and spits in the face of people who pour themselves into their work.
At best, put the AI art generators into their own little special corner. But don't put one-shotted AI art next to actual crafted human created art right next to one another and say that they're equal. The brush strokes are imaginary. That's a grift.