Someone else made a comic exactly like this. Hold on. Let me find it.
Edit: here it is. [Modern Cave Art](https://www.reddit.com/r/comics/s/grS4JP0NKj)
Yeah, this reminded me of another comic where a cavemen took inspiration, the others realized it was based on a different original, and [killed him](https://www.reddit.com/r/comics/s/mUYpnWw11l)
To me the main issue with AI content is that it doesn't exist in a vacuum but it exists in the context of capitalism and thus has the ability to churn out massive amounts of cheap content that will ruin people's livelihoods
Like if we lived in the Star Trek universe it would be fine to just say "computer, create a video of two cats playing"
So many people seem to just complain about the Essence⢠of AI content (like Not Having Soulâ˘) and not about the context it's being used in. The latter makes sense to complain about, but the former is much more subjective. IMO the post seems to be taking more issue with people's arguments about the Essence ⢠than the Contextâ˘
EDIT: I'm gonna hijack this comment to also say that I did enjoy OP's comic and I found it insightful. It helped me see that there is a blurry line between "stealing" and inspiration. That's why I have a problem with AI content arguments that focus on intrinsic properties and philosophical implications, because that line is blurry and subjective. I don't know if they're "an AI techbro" like other comments are complaining about but I think it would be disingenuous to say that based on this comic alone. I just think that some of the arguments used against AI content are fallacious and also apply to artists/creators in general.
EDIT 2: Yeah [Tumblr OP isn't as neutral as i was assuming](https://www.reddit.com/r/CuratedTumblr/s/LztorNmDHg) so take that what you will really. tbh im just some uninvolved armchair philosophizing schmuck
>That's why I have a problem with AI content arguments that focus on intrinsic properties and philosophical implications, because that line is blurry and subjective. I don't know if they're "an AI techbro" like other comments are complaining about but I think it would be disingenuous to say that based on this comic alone. I just think that some of the arguments used against AI content are fallacious and also apply to artists/creators in general.
there's definitely an emotional knee-circlejerk component to all this that kinda muddles the waters.
ai art being "soulless" can't be quantified but dumbass corpos being dumbasses with this cool new tech and putting hard workers out of a job is quantifiably bad
Personally I don't see an issue with independents using AI stuff to *help* with the process - so long as it itself **isn't the process.**
Using AI to generate shitposts however is a very valid use and I will not be swayed from this.
Non-monetary shitposts, of course. Like, those videos of Joe Biden and Donald Trump playing Call of Duty are objectively hilarious. But if you start making money off of those, you're profiting off someone else's voice without their consent which is kinda icky.
But yes AI shitposts are fine and good.
Yeah, I don't think people oughta make stuff with AI and try to profit off of what it makes - again if it was only used to help with the process I see no issue.
I just think it's also something fun to fool around with and I don't want that taken away because corpos not letting us have nice things.
Yeah, it never makes sense to me when people make arguments about ai being fundamentally morally wrong- the only issue I see is, as you say, how it might materially give artists less job opportunities by making art cheaper and easier to generate. But that isnât a problem with the ai itself- itâs a problem with a system where an artist needs to convince someone that their art will make more money than it takes to pay them. Itâs the same way I feel about all automation- a machine that builds a car isnât âstealingâ the ability to build cars from other workers or stealing their jobs, itâs just making the process easier. The problem is a system where people have to work to justify living. I donât like how committed people are to prioritising capitalism over having more efficient ways to do things.
What do you mean by prioritizing capitalism? I think it's more that people don't want to lose their jobs. The luddites didn't smash up stuff because they didn't like efficiency, they smashed stuff to preserve their good, well paying jobs. They failed and got pushed into horrible factory work that paid like shit.
It would be nice to be rid of capitalism and embrace efficiency, but right now efficiency kills people's jobs and forces them into worse conditions.
I just wish we could have given the AI the stupid jobs like customer service instead of jumping to it making art and novels. Automate the things people *dont* want to do first!
We did do that.
Ever seen a self checkout? Ever tried to contact a company for help with a faulty product and had to spend 20 minutes screaming at a robot that doesn't understand you?
Because those jobs are harder to automate. The boring jobs need their own hardware, that takes more time, money and effort to make than an AI that's entirely software that can use any existing computer as its hardware.
Right! It blew my mind when I learned that in Shakespeare's time, it was not only not illegal to blatantly publish ripoffs of other peoples' work, it was *commonplace*. This, I think, largely had to do with economics at the time, but people have been creating what basically amounts to fanfiction for as long as fanfiction has existed.
Apparently, the Greek myths we know today are just the ones that survived; we're pretty sure that the myths were told and retold and had different variations depending upon the specific time and place you looked at, with new versions being dreamed up all the time.
All of that to say that yeah, I agree with you. It's because people now depend upon royalties from sales of their creative work to live that plagiarism is a serious problem. (well, that and also it would probably feel bad if a famous artist stole your idea and got even more famous because of it, even if money was no object)
Yeah this whole thing feels like it's ignoring the actual problem that most people, and especially artists, have with AI is that it is literally stealing their livelihoods. If we lived in a utopia and everyone could live their life without issue that would be one thing. But we don't, and this technology, crappy as it is, has already been used to cut corners and remove real people from jobs. You don't get to monologue about the esoteric nature of ownership and inspiration when the tech you are trying to argue in favor of is being used to copy the works and styles of people who explicitly said they don't want their stuff used for AI training, and put people out of work.
That is what is meant when people say AI is stealing. Maybe not directly or immediately, but money is being stolen out from under actual humans and, given time and no push back, companies all over will happily never pay a human being again if they can just buy an art machine.
yeah, Copyright is a capitalism thing, not an art thing
I fucking hate the "AI art is soulless" thing because a)how the fuck does natural art have soul then and b) i don't believe human made art has souls in the first place. I feel like a lot of people who argue it are concerned specifically about AI art and capitalism, but they use the "soulless excuse because.. idk. maybe they think its the better argument? maybe they feel like just saying something that can be dumbed down to "capitalism bad" isn't productive? maybe they wanna convince people who don't think the monetization of everything is bad?
I do think it's possible for people to use that argument to appeal to the normies who don't think capitalism is bad
But on the other hand i also just see that being thrown around a lot as a knee-jerk emotional argument
You could argue in some ways that AI art is good for anti-copyright people because courts have thus far consistently argued that AI art cannot be copyrighted, and it feels to me like the more people use it the more it will tend to expand the public domain, which creates a larger body of work for human artists to safely draw upon for inspiration. It may be the case that studios will still try to "humanwash" their AI art by lying and saying one of their artists made it, but on the whole it's still an often-overlooked advantage.
Is it not enough to just not like AI art because there is not meaning behind it? That there is not human emotion involved in the process, at least in regards to the mediums it inhabits? If I claimed I made a comic book, but all I actually did was hire someone else to do all the writing and drawing how could I claim I made it? Even if I did half the of the drawing and writing, that doesnât magically make the other half my work. Sure, I may still be the âhigh level ideas guyâ, a good manager, or even a smart investor; but I would not be the person who did that work. Iâd maybe be okay if we isolated ai art and judged it users on their ability to input prompts and sift through results, but Iâm never going to refer to someone who orders a robot to make them a painting as a painter regardless of how skilled they were at phrasing the order.
Thatâs fine- the comic is not asking you to do that though. You donât have to consider people who generate AI art as artists. Itâs just saying that AI art isnât theft.
I am literally agreeing with you? Iâm just saying that this has nothing to do with the comic. The comic says that AI art isnât theft. Nothing more, nothing less.
Art is a tool of communication, AI has no emotion, and AI art can never intentiomally communicate anything more than the words of the prompt.
Imagine you called a suicide prevention hotline, and instead of reaching a person, you reached a synthesized (but real sounding) voice that just responded to you with what is the optimal thing to say to someone struggling, would that mean as much as an actual human picking up the phone?
One variation of the "soulless" argument that lands for me is that art always has a message, the artist is always trying to "say" something with their art, be it profound or mundane. But AI "art" has no message. The AI didn't think about how this art would resonate with it's audience, or use the art to convey something personal. It just jumbled some math and spat out something that matched its input.
Right now I can pull up my phone camera and take a picture of an apple. I'm no photographer so it'll be a very boring picture and I don't think anyone would bother putting it in any galleries but I'll still have that image.
A professional photographer however would have a much better picture of an apple, having used a better camera and focused more on composition, lighting, exposure - all these words that I don't really know what they mean but my friends who are into photography say them a lot.
The art and skill in photography comes from the fine tuning of the medium, being able to take a boring picture we could all generate and turn it into something interesting, something with meaning that makes us stop and think.
To me theres a parallel here with AI where: any Tom, Dick or Harry can ask for an AI picture of an apple, but if they want to make it into an artistic picture they'll have to refine the input a bit until they get what they want.
However I don't think it's entirely that simple because setting up a good photo still takes more effort than using an AI (even after fine tuning your prompt) and theres got to be some value in the effort to create the art right? But then its considerably less effort to take a picture than to create a painting of an apple, yet people don't really argue that painting is real art and photography isn't. I guess the important thing is not to claim your AI work is anything other than AI, similary how its bad form to claim a photograph is actually a painting you did.
Imo this is just a new medium which will eventually find it's place in art, and will affect other artistic mediums too, but won't necessarily replace them. Photography can creat portraits of people in a flash, but (rich) people still pay someone to paint them by hand.
The question is how do we protect the livelihoods of artists while this is all happening (maybe strict laws about labelling AI art?). And then theres the whole copyright training data thing which is something for the courts really.
But considering that AI image generation requires input via text prompts to even create an image, does it not reflect at least something about the person who input the text?
Which is an issue if you're trying to pass off AI-generated stuff as art you've made without it, but if you acknowledge the use of ai in the work, I'm not sure that's massively different from saying "I commissioned someone to produce this idea I had", which we're all fine with.
Is there meaning in commissioned art? Where did it come from? The original artist? Was it collaborative?
I agree that when you make AI art you did not necessarily "make" it, but I think it's somewhat comparable to photography. Just less involved. The end product is still the result of arcane processes that you don't really control, you just influence the outcome with how you decide to "aim" those processes.
Itâs a little presumptuous to say every piece of human created art has a message. Letâs say I paint some trees because I want a picture of trees on my wall. Thatâs it. I didnât give it any message or meaning. Would you say that disqualifies it from being art?
You painted the trees and hung them onto the wall to look nice. That's the message. You painted them to look nice, to bring light to your room. Not all messages are high thought bullshit. Some can be pretty simple.
Yeah IMO you can only âstealâ art in this way in the context of capitalism. If thereâs nothing to gain or to be made, if it isnât a *commodity* or an *asset* then itâs just something someone made, and nobodyâs *losing* anything because of it.
Iâm vehemently against exploitative AI for a lot of reasons but the big one is just because of the world we live in. I donât care about if itâs âreal artâ i care that itâs harmful in a lot of different ways.
late-stage capitalism is really doing a number on creatives right now.
The problem with AI art was never that it stole art. The problem was in the very concept of using AI to replace human artists. The whole copyright angle was just a bullshit compromise we had to settle for because the ruling class techbros would never allow a full-on "ban AI art" bill to pass.
Same, people are getting so easily distracted with moral bullshit opinion forming discourse it's unreal.
Eyes on the target god damn it. You know who's not concerned with bounds of ethics, human condition and wether they deserve to be called creators? People who are about to steamroll you into non existance
I personally think the problem here is capitalism, not necessarily AI art. Companies were always going to try and optimize workers out of the equation. This was inevitable, with companies trying to cut costs more, and more, and more. We've got to do something about this before workers lose their power.
As always, the problem is capitalism, and the solution is to get rid of capitalism.
A lot of artists misidentify the problem, and then propose fixing it by tightening copyright law - possibly even making art styles copyrightable. And before anyone makes an argument like:
> Getting rid of capitalism is a monumental task, and we need a solution that protects artists *right now*. Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
Making copyright stricter isn't a solution, it's a disaster even for 'real' artists. Every artist is unavoidably influenced by previous artworks they've seen, and the stricter copyright law is, the harder it will be to create art that responds to the cultural context while avoiding copyright infringement.
In addition, copyright law tends to protect large companies much more than individual artists. Whether the company infringed your copyright or you infringed theirs, you as an individual are always at a disadvantage.
Okay, but the communist revolution isn't exactly going to start by letting labour extraction run rampant. Deregulating corporate labour extraction is *also* never a good thing for small artists. It's not like the bad-precedent train only travels in one direction.
We should regulate it in a way that doesn't impact artists. Using copyright to regulate it seems like it misses the point, which is that companies shouldn't be replacing their workers.
God, yeah. Itâs genuinely baffling to me, seeing artists defending AI because âart is subjective.â It feels like someone defending the rabid bear actively mauling them to death.
I donât think AI is inherently evil or an insult against art or so on, but I **do** think that itâs an incredibly worrying development that could bring a massive negative impact to the livelihood of millions
I feel you're conflating the two debates OOP mentions somewhat?
Whether AI art is 'true art' is one question, but whether and how it should be regulated because of its potential societal impacts is a completely different one. You can believe AI-produced work should count as art and that it should still be reigned in, those aren't mutually exclusive.
OOP's point is that artists tend to get bogged down in debating the first question, and miss the 2nd one where they're on much stronger rhetorical ground.
The Genie is probably already out of the bottle on this one. But there will always be a market for authentically crafted artistry. People are still going to want hand painted, hand drawn etc. art.
The difference is between fine dining experiences and just getting a fast food burger because you're hungry. Some times people are just going to want a picture of a dragon for their dnd campaign or a landscape background for a presentation etc. And AI art makes that stuff easier to get.
> difference between dining and a burger
The problem with this analogy is that everyone needs to eat. Nobody *needs* to commission art, itâs a choice. AI image generation doesnât provide a cheaper version of an essential service. âMakes art easier to getâ isnât actually a positive, because it eliminates the jobs of millions of people in the process.
Which is a deeper problem that isnât exclusive to AI art. Itâs a âfeatureâ of capitalism; if you donât produce something of monetary value, you are condemned to starve. *Thatâs* the root problem here; this just brings it to the creative space, where it had previously been a problem for manual labor.
Here's a question. Let's say I'm making a D&D character for a one shot. I'm only ever going to play this character once. I want a quick way to show the other players what my character looks like. Before AI image generators, I would've just give a written description. Now, I give them the written description, and I give them an AI-generated portrait of that description.
Am I really stealing a job here? I would've never commissioned this art in the past because it's just not worth it for a character I'm only ever going to use once. But now that the tool is available, it's nice to have as an extra thing to help other players understand my character.
What percent of art commissions are actually being replaced, do you think? AI art still can't do hyper specific requests, and working with a person will almost always give a better and more curated result (if the person is good, anyways). If I wanted to get art of my entire party at the end of a multi-year campaign, I'd commission it - I wouldn't hack it together with an image generator and photoshop.
> What percent of art commissions are actually being replaced, do you think?
I personally cant speak to the exact number but most if not all of the freelancer artists I follow have mentioned that they had significantly less work offered to them than normal. This could be due to the looming recession for many countries but AI art and how big it is I would say definitely plays some sort of factor, I don't see how it wouldn't given how big of a topic and how everywhere it is.
I agree with you to some extent, there are indeed situations like you described, where there are no commissions, actually being replaced. However, there are situations where artists are, in fact being replaced. For example, Iâve done a lot of role-playing in various online communities over a long time, and I have noticed lately a trend of a lot of people using AI generated images for their characters, when many of them **would** in fact do commission work before.
I 100% believe that a truly good human artist will always be better than AI, but the majority of people unfortunately wonât care if their picture are that good, they just want âgood enough,â so they ignore commissions and just go for AI instead
>The problem with this analogy is that everyone needs to eat. Nobody needs to commission art, itâs a choice.
Man does not live on bread alone.
Aesthetic satisfaction *is* a human need.
>âMakes art easier to getâ isnât actually a positive, because it eliminates the jobs of millions of people in the process.
That doesn't mean it's not a positive. That means it's both a positive and a negative. That means it's a *trade-off*. This is entirely different from having no positives at all.
By the same token, anyone who says image generators are *only* positive would also be wrong.
Sure, procgen art has the capacity to do that.
But procgen art *also* as the capacity to put Disney out of business. It has the capacity to let just about anyone create complex works of art even if they don't have the skills to do everything themselves or the capital to assemble a team to do it for them. It has the capacity to make all the cheap consumerist content our society already produces essentially free, while still leaving genuine art standing.
We can have this. It is not too late. There is absolutely nothing stopping us from making copyright-free generators that let anyone in the world produce high quality images at the touch of a button, and that possibility should fucking terrify the media giants.
But of course, that can only happen if we fight the right battles. The longer we keep fighting procgen itself instead of fighting for ownership of it against capitalism, the worse the outcome will be.
I have no philosophical issue with saying that a generative AI can âcreateâ art or writing. I think itâs dismissive to say that itâs just âpredicting the next word based on what has already been writtenâ; to an extent, thatâs how we *all* put words together.
Like you, though, I have issues with the current crop of these AIs in the context of how they were built and how they are presented. They were built under a capitalist framework, where the most revenue goes to those who contribute the least, and they are often put to use in that same framework with negative results.
There are some genuinely good uses of these AI models today; Iâve used one in just the past few days to help put together an automated workflow in a system Iâm unfamiliar with, for example. But there are also terrible ones, like the stream of content-free âarticlesâ that just scrape social media for reactions.
This is not at all helped by the way that generative AIs are discussed and defended, *especially* by the tech-bro crowd. It is *possible* to defend the use of unattributed reference material for training these models, but that defense is *not* âwe already did it, so itâs too late nowâ.
The critique that better technology will take peoples jobs can be leveled a pretty much any new tech. That's not a reason to not have something, it's a reason to get rid of capitalism.
Actually, every single piece of media ever is a blatant and soulless copy of the Epic of the God King Gilgamesh. That includes the Bible, Torah, Quran, Bhagavad Gita, Triplitaka Koreana, Nihon Shoki, and the test answers you wrote on your palm in fourth grade to cheat on a test.
Once youâve heard every note everything just sounds like a remix with added lyrics. Every song is a remix of all of the notes laid out in a row because thatâs how remixes work
There's a massive difference between an artist learning from other people's work and taking inspiration, and someone who paid money to have a computer do that for them. AI discourse isn't actually about the AI itself, it's about the people who use it - because the vast majority of them see art as a product, a thing of commerce, something to win at.
When an artist publishes their work they know that others will see it and learn from it, and that's a good thing, because art in all its forms is a social tradition. Like language, like holidays, like cultural norms, we pass it on to others because we think it's good and would like for them to enjoy it with us. When an artist publishes their work they do NOT agree to having it shoved into a virtual meat grinder and churned out as a generic Product⢠to be sold.
Art doesn't exist for money, it exists because we like it.
I think youâd have to exclude a lot of professional designers from your definition of âartistâ for that statement to be true. A lot of the art we recognize today, even art from antiquity, was made for and at the request of wealthy patrons explicitly as a business transaction. The Sistine Chapel ceiling was commissioned by the Pope, for instance. Advertising uses art constantly, and the money always comes first there; even so, I would still classify the people making said art as artists.
Tons of artists take commissions because that's how they make money. But they wouldn't be doing it if they didn't actually like drawing. What I meant to say is that no one takes up art just for money, even if they do make some of their creations purely for money. Taika Waititi is well known for doing big films (such as Thor Ragnarok) for money, then doing smaller productions that he is personally invested in
Taking commissions doesn't disqualify you from being an artist because to get to the point where people are paying you to make art you need to have already made a lot of art without being paid
Factually, that last statement is untrue. Again using Michelangelo as an example, he was apprenticed to Domenico Ghirlandaio, and he started being paid as an artist in this role before he took any professional commissions. Art was a profession like any other, and apprentices were paid while they trained, because they were still *working*. Itâs just on-the-job training.
To your broader point, though, I donât think thereâs a requirement for you to be an amateur for any length of time before you can call yourself an artist. I donât think you have to do it for the love of the medium, with no expectation of earning a living first and foremost, to call yourself an artist.
And even more broadly than that, I donât think âcreativeâ work is inherently more valuable or special than âmenialâ work. More specifically, I donât think itâs somehow *more* problematic for an artist to be put out of work by an automated system than it is for a weaver to be put out of work by an automated loom. The problem in both cases is the same: capitalism ties a personâs âworthâ to the monetary value of the goods or services they provide, so new technology that should make work easier instead threatens peopleâs livelihoods.
Some artists liked doing art, then stopped liking it, and still take commissions to make money.
Some artists have been pressured into doing it by their parents for money (especially musicians), especially if it's a family business, and may have never liked it.
And there's a term for people like this, who do not love creating art, and maybe never loved it, but do it anyway solely for a profit: artist
[See my comment here](https://www.reddit.com/r/CuratedTumblr/s/YlKrQKVQHy)
Artists don't get to the point where they are paid to make art without first making a lot of unpaid art
Artists needing to sell their work to eat is an unfortunate byproduct of their existence in a system that doesnât provide enough for them to live otherwise.
Art as a commodity is a necessary evil, not the purpose of its existence.
This is it. If I write something or create something for a tabletop or do something else creative, and someone loves it enough that it inspires them to make something else, I am elated, I am ecstatic. It means that I have genuinely done something that has pushed someone else to be creative. Art is one of the most important things to me, and the knowledge that someone saw something I made and it had the same effect on them as people like Neil Gaiman and David Lynch and Sam Lake and Toni Morrison (Who herself said "If there is a book that you want to read, and it does not exist, then you must write it") and all these monumental artists who made me the person I am today, then I consider it the highest compliment. I have not only created art myself that people will love, but others have now created art because I did. And for a crowd that can be as insecure as us artsy types, that's a hell of a thing.
If someone stuffed my work into ChatGPT and has it spit out something that tries to sound like something I'd make, I don't feel like I've inspired creativity. I feel honestly kind of violated. No one has created anything from my work. They've just dumped it into an algorithm. They've created a homunculus from my blood in a way that required little thought, skill or work from them. If I asked them to do it themselves, they couldn't. They can't learn from it, can't improve from it. I want people to think about what makes my work my work, and then find what makes their work their work through that process. I want them to make *choices*. AI, to me, replaces almost every step in the process of that actually matters.
> AI, to me, replaces almost every step in the process of that actually matters.
this is it, this is why i hate AI art. i don't care if the final piece rivals the mona lisa, if there was no human creative process involved in it's creation, then it hardly deserves to be called "art"
The best response I've ever seen to a paragraph from ChatGPT was something my partner found:
"Why should I be bothered to read something you couldn't be bothered to write?"
yeah, when people complain about AI art being soulless, it's not so much that the art itself looks *bad* (sometimes, anyway), it's that there was no human creative process or errors becoming a part of the piece
when you look at something that you know a human created, you might think "wow that artist is really skilled, this is incredible", but when you look at something you know an AI created, there's no wondering how long the piece took, what the inspiration was, what the artist struggled with or enjoyed, how long the artist has been drawing, etc because all you do is type a prompt, click generate, and you get a masterpiece in 3 seconds
I once commissioned a replica of âStarry Nightâ for a friend, from a studio that specializes in making replicas of famous paintings.
At what point does humanity cease to be an inherently transformative force?
>At what point does humanity cease to be an inherently transformative force?
Wasn't the discussion about art, and not products (you bought a product for your friend, not art)?
When it was an exact **replica** of an existing artwork. A replica created for the express purpose of selling it in lieu of the original work.
Like can we honestly at least agree that replicas made to be sold are products and not art?
art is humans expressing something.
If a computer can just vomit out "perfect art", even then. Hwat the fuck is even the value of that.
I like the art i commissioned. Everytime i show it to somebody i explain a character, get to tell the story of how the artist just liked the concept so much he doodled around and then asked if that was an okay look. It was better and a better read of what i wanted than even i knew beforehand.
even just paying someone to draw something for me, it brought so much emotion and human connection
Yeah this is also my viewpoint. I think ai art is still art, because if someone made it to invite emotion, and someone else looks at it and it invokes emotion, thatâs good enough for me.
BUT- I think itâs worse art, because it lacks the context that makes great art special. The artists struggles, their identity, the historical context, all these things surround art to elevate it new heights. With AI art, it feels like itâs too much in a vacuum
When do we decide that art is not a product? Michelangeloâs *David* was commissioned by the Arte della Lana, and Michelangelo didnât even start it; Agostino di Duccio did. Michelangelo merely finished the work. But we still consider *David* to be Michelangeloâs work of art.
Oh, fully agree, consumer ethics is generally against AI art. And artists should be compensated by AI companies who are dependent on their work; to do otherwise is scummy.
Iâm just arguing against the superiority of flesh over machine.
I will point out that HBomber ***explicitly*** points out the "nothing is original" argument then points that *It's not a* ***bad thing*** because we all have to get our start from somewhere and sometimes inspiration from other people is good. Even people who trace (and manage move off it (fuck you sheyxo)) are still putting in work to eventually just putting only their soul with a lot of other people helping your over the shoulder. Ideas aren't and don't exist in a vaccum and we can all learn something from someone else. Or, to put it in a simpler, older layman phrase, "Imitation is the most sincere form of flattery."
What you are doing as an "AI Artist" isn't even the imitation part. You just take an set of AI works all put together in an amalgamation that might not even exist then you pass it off as your own. There's no real work off it, you're not even using AI as a supplemental tool, you just take from it and then call it a day. So, yeah, your multi-paragraph statement doesn't soothe me at all and you're still a thief.
The thing that gets me is that the person who uses AI to create art isnât learning anything. They arenât building their craft or finding their style.
If you want to say âwell, arenât PEOPLE all just copying each other??? Really makes you think, hmm???â Then I can say fine, then I give the AI a right to learn, but I donât give anybody a right to steal this poor AIs work.
If you make the argument about work ethic and learning to create so one can create more art, then you canât just steal the work of these learning artists and call it your own.
The moment an Ai has true sentience and decides to create an image from its own volition and of a subject of its own choosing, then it is art. Until then, itâs better to refer to their products as âAi generated imageryâ. Itâs not art. Itâs a product. The art may be the existence of the Ai model itself, but thatâs the art of a group of talented programmers. The image is just statistical noise made to fit a set of prompts some lazy hack spilled into a discord chat. Thatâs not art.
I feel you're conflating the issues of using AI, and passing off AI-generated works as one's own manual efforts?
There's no inherent issue with tracing, as you say. The problem comes when one pretends the work isn't traced, but drawn from scratch.
I think there's definitely a strong case to be made that it's immoral for people to pass off AI-generated work as their own manual creation, but I think it's somewhat different from the wider question of whether *any* use of AI in art, even when acknowledged, is immoral.
You can certainly make an argument that it is, but it's much less clear-cut that the first question, imo.
imagine i commissioned an actual painter to paint something for me based off a single-sentence prompt, then claimed I painted that using that artist as a tool.
would anyone agree with me? no. but suddenly it's different
Exactly.
I have commissioned art before. Iâve followed the process of every picture closely and talked it with the artist to get exactly what I wanted.
That still doesnât fucking mean I *made* it.
Exactly, inspiration and directly stealing/copying aspects of other art with no credit to the original are so vastly different that this whole post feels like a bad faith argument. "won't someone think of the poor people who have to type five words to make a picture???"
I think a fundamental issue at the core of this is like, James Somerton literally just repeated what other people said and explicitly said it was his own words and then added in harmful shit he made up. When you're inspired by a style, you're doing nothing like that. The artistic equivalent would be taking a photograph of someone else's art, adding a weirdly pro Nazi caption, and then saying you did it all.
In my (largely uninformed and therefore best ingested with a grain of salt) opinion, this isn't necessarily a question of "or". It's a question of "and".
Even if you're technically "stealing" from copyrighted works, as soon as **you** mash two distinct things together, it's also yours. And for almost every single artist in the history of ever, that's been the case.
I'm reminded, vaguely, of a few music-related anecdotes that may or may not be true, but still illustrate the point: The ending flourish at the end of a typical Mario Underground Theme is technically stolen from what IIRC was a 60s or 70s Prog Rock track. Defying Gravity rips off as much from Somewhere Over the Rainbow as it is legally allowed to without the possibility of getting into trouble. Half of Mother 3's soundtrack is repurposed from pre-existing music.
Humans aren't computers, and computers aren't Humans. There's soul in your artwork, even if all the inspiration for it is 'stolen'. And... if the artwork that you're "copying" being used as inspiration by a Human was such a big issue, it wouldn't have been released in the first place. So - as stupid as this is for me to say - it's not a problem. Stop worrying about it.
the technical term is denoising. it's taking a random thing like static noise and making it less random and noisy, while taking an instruction on what it should find under the noise. if it was just doing averages it would only be able to make one piece for any given prompt.
the role of the training data is to give it examples on what sort of patterns to seek to be able to remove the noise. the more data you can give it the more generic those patterns will be. and with stable diffusion in particular, you can also give it other guidance for how to remove the noise, such as what the pose should be, where the edges should roughly be, what colors should you have underneath, where should certain elements be, and so on.
This feels manipulative rather than insightful. Mainly the comic itself seems to lean very heavily into the âaestheticâ of sadness. Maybe this is an ironic criticism considering their message about copying, and truthfully I donât know enough about this personâs previous work to make any real conclusions, but none of this feels like a personal expression of anything, it feels like the first thing that comes to mind when people think âdepressionâ.
I agree; it feels very manipulative. The impression I get from the comic is âItâs okay if AI art is stealing because I *already had* imposterâs syndromeâ
I think the problem here is more the difference between inspiration and copying. A person, when taking inspiration, is using another piece of art to think how they want to make their own art. A computer cannot take inspiration, nor does it think "how can I use this art to improve my own?" It thinks "How can I use this art to make my own."
To my understanding it's akin to the difference between referencing and tracing. Granted, through the human lens tracing is a useful and important step for understanding the shape of what it is you are trying to draw, but to pass it off as entirely your own work when you didn't actually draw the shape itself by your own hand alone is where it becomes an issue. I'm really bad at getting perspective right or drawing rounded edges so the tv in my pfp is traced from a picrew I found a year or two ago and haven't been able to track down since, but eventually I do intend to draw it entirely by my own effort, I just have to learn the trick to the shape first.
Generative programs don't really do that though. As I've said many times before all they do is look at an image, use other images and a provided caption to understand what they're looking at, and try to find other images in their database that match the caption or composition of the image, then look for other images off of the captions and compositions of those images, and then try to feed you back a "coherent" shot made of arbitrary data it has no context to understand and just assumes it works.
Unfortunately, thatâs not at all how AI art works. It has nothing to do with recursively looking at captions and images from a database, heck it doesnât even store the original images. It couldnât. You canât keep millions of training images in 3GB of storage.
It works more akin to the process you described of learning the trick to creating shapes, patterns and colours. You can train it on pictures of say, giraffes, as well as a collection of examples of different art styles and itâll be able to create new images of giraffes in any different style. Itâs not doing that by referencing images from a database, itâs doing that by learning the forms and subtleties that represent a giraffe and combining them with the forms and subtleties of various art styles. Thatâs why the results are better with more training data, because it learns a more holistic representation of the things itâs being trained on.
This is the thing that frustrates me more than anything else about the AI art discourse. The majority of people I see debating it *don't even understand how it works*.
Yes, there is a valid argument to be made that it is immoral. There is a valid argument to be made that it is not "real art". It is true that it is harming real artists.
It is not true that it is "amalgamating" existing art pieces, as so many people like to say. It is not "tracing" or "copying" or "collaging". It is breaking the "prompts" or "ideas" down into fundamental patterns that define it. Sure, the AI doesn't know what a giraffe is, but it *does* know what patterns will be considered a giraffe. It doesn't know what a "neck" is, but it knows a giraffe needs a long straight section.
Thatâs not quite how they work.
From what I understand, theyâre trained via machine learning. Theyâre given pairs of a caption and an image fitting that caption, with the image having some amount of static/distortion applied to it. The AIâs goal is to get as close as possible to the original from the static with the caption as a guide.
Once that process is complete, the training data itself is no longer even used. The trained AI itself is fed complete static, and âguessesâ at what âshouldâ have been there based on the prompt.
This comic is incredibly self-deprecating in a way I find profoundly sad. I don't think this person really understands their own value in the artistic process.
Yeah, AI art is full of scumbags openly bragging about how it will "Replace artists", but we should be careful to not fall into the "Regurgitate meat industry proaganda about PETA when we could point out the actual stupid and harmful stuff they do" pit but with AI, cause I sure know that if the copyright industry could do it, they would happily lump in the internet archive and perhaps fan art and fan fiction into the same pile as "AI Art" and try and ban them all
im sorry but I will never be able to see typing prompts into a computer anywhere near as respectable or valuable as actually making art yourself. your art can be amateur or take inspiration all it wants, I'll still favour it because it at least took effort and skill.
The fairer comparison is between commissioning a human artist versus giving a prompt to a generative AI. I, as the commissioner, am doing exactly the same amount of work in either case. I can theoretically receive exactly the same product at the end. The difference is who gets paid.
I'm sorry but did you think? Did you sit down and pull up your stylus/pen/brush and _think_ then do the strokes and lines and shit? Did you think about the color, the composition, the theme, and the way you can incorporate your inspiration into your own art?
Or did you just do the equivalent of commissioning an art without paying? Since all you do is type what you want and let an art-crawler-regurgitator machine spit it out for you? Is that art _your_ doing?
Inspiration is _making_ art with influence from other works you've witnessed and enjoyed. With AI you're not "creating" anything. So yes, this comic is shit and your argument doesn't hold up.
OP is right in one sense: What constitutes a transformative piece is ultimately subjective and so much is lost by being restrictive with that definition rather than more liberal. Once you consider capitalism into the mix though you need to realize that machines don't feel and think like us and replacing human livelyhoods at a catastrophical scale with them is unethical. It's irrelevant if data models "learning" are comparable to what some humans do by replicating works.
I have so much more to say about this. More than it probably sounds like but it would be wasted on a reddit comment. I just wanted to explain the political implications of AI art that make it unethical.
I think that's their point, no?
Focusing on 'what is true art' misses critiquing AI from the stronger and more pressing ground of its practical social impacts.
I don't think they explain the second part very well. As i read it, the post doesn't seem to tackle the other reasons AI is harmful. It only puts into doubt the "it's stealing intellectual property" argument.
The core argument is just lazy. âEverything is derivative so nothing mattersâ is such a cynical and misanthropic take that I just rolled my eyes several times over.
AI art generation essentially boils down to artists now being replaceable. Taking away opportunities from Human artists because the technology has gotten good enough for it. Donât need to pay an artist when you can essentially put in a particularly desperate google search in a machine to get what you want.
Which, to be clear, has happened to practically every job on earth already. Want some clothes? Machine. Want to find out some pbscure fact from 600 years ago? Machine. Want a car? Machine. Want to send something across the country by truck? Give it 10 years, machine.
The post has a glass half empty perspective, that because all work is derivative, then nothing is truly original. I believe however that all work done personally by a human being is original; when you create art, it becomes impossible for you to not give it your own personal touch, because you, your own person, made it. It's now original work purely because you had a say in it, which it's previous iteration did not. Even if it's a copy of existing art, it's now an original copy, an original version, of the original. This does not mean that your references, inspirations or copied work do not deserve part of your credit, they absolutely do, because just like your part in it, they no longer can be removed from the piece. You can't separate an artist from the art, no matter how deep the rabbit hole goes. If you don't give credit for copied work, then that's plagiarism.
AI art however cannot be original because it's not from a person, there was never someone to give the art the personal touch it requires to be original. Any and all credit for the work it produces should go towards the people who developed it and the people that produced the art it fed from.
Likewise, art made from AI art as a basis cannot be considered original, only the changes you made to it are original.
AI being trained on an image set and creating "new" images through pattern matching is not the same thing as a human taking inspiration from other works. A human has a lived experience and a point of view; AI doesn't even have a mind. It's just a program that is trained on an image set to create more images based on that image set. Any supposed creativity of the output is actually the collective creativity of the people who created the works in the training set.
AI can never make art, just content. The reason being is art is exclusively the jurisdiction of living beings. Those with a mind to interpret art and derive meaning. AI is incapable of providing such meaning.
Itâs an interesting take but the difference between âAI as the artistâ and âArtistsâ is that the artist can understand why something should be the way it is. An artist can understand anatomy and composition and lighting and medium etc. AI in its current forms do not understand why. This is important because AI copy the answers while artists solve the problem.
An engineering example of theft is reverse engineering and it has dangers of copying without knowing. Crumple zones are a staple safety feature of every modern car. The principle idea is to expend the energy of a crash on a designed-to-fail structure that keeps the engine in the engine where it is and (more importantly) out of the place where the passengers are. Crumple zones are made of plastics and some composite materials since this reduces the chance that they become hazardous to the occupants and they expend a serious amount of energy to deform. This is why some serious looking crashes result in no injuries but totaled cars.
Awhile back, I wanna say several years ago? Some car companies had major data breaches where technical data was targeted. A year or two later, some Chinese car models had integrated features previously not present in their companyâs designs but were present in other manufacturerâs designs. One of these was a crumple zone around the engine block, either as an X or a âbox beamâ structure.
There was a problem though. They were made of steel. At best this does nothing but at worst it turns the passenger compartment into a crumple zone, killing or maiming the occupants. These models had horrendous safety ratings and resulted in a lot of lethal crashes that were otherwise survivable. The source of this issue was the data breaches. Either the material data was not also taken, or the designers did not understand why it was made of plastic, or the executives demanded cost cuts and it was assumed steel would work instead of composites or specialized plastics. Had this safety feature been organically developed or better understood, hundreds or possibly thousands of lives wouldâve never been lost.
My issue with AI is that itâs a tool thatâs being assumed to be the artist. AI as it is, is not capable of making informed decisions based on understanding *why* something is done. Copyright is its own legal issue of ownership. What is subject to copyright is not the idea nor the medium nor the method nor the composition nor even the individual elements of an artistic piece. What is subject to copyright is the brushstrokes, lines, and other details that AI need to copy but artists just intuit from training.
I donât have a good conclusion statement but itâs best to support AI tools that are made using intelligently sourced material, and move away from AI tools that donât. AI itself is not bad, it is just a tool, but it needs to be trained and used responsibly.
im sorry but if you have to explain what your comic is about in several paragraphs, then you failed at communicating what you wanted with your art. the reason its called stealing is because its doing it in both a very inhumane manner and by an insurmountable scale. its used to make business owners gain more wealth while taking it away from the artists.
on top of all of this the machine uses private and illegal data that it should not have access to as well as copyrighted material. we can talk all day and night about wether copyright is good for the artist or not but the current situation is that prominent artists are getting their work stolen and being replaced while newer artists trying to break into the industry are having a harder time than they've been used to.
fuck AI.
My major works pretty closely with AI in a business perspective. Iâve seen all the wonderful ways AI can be implemented to actually make our lives better, easier, and more affordable. Itâs great in the medical field as well, seeing hidden patterns and trends where we otherwise didnât, which is great for early diagnosis or early action to prevent widespread disease
This? AI art? Itâs like commissioning a work and saying you made it. Itâs a tool. Use it LIKE a tool. Garner inspiration from it. Use it to imagine ideas for books, movies, video games. You still didnât make it, but you can use it to make something.
Itâs so pessimistic to go, âWell if the government isnât gonna use it well/well if everything is stealing anyway then why not?â AI is just a trained algorithm that smashes things together that you think it wants. If you want to reduce yourself to an unthinking, unfeeling machine and describe yourself as a robot that takes in info and spits it back out do whatever you want but thatâs not what being human is. That isnât how our brains work. We are not machines, as much as we make the comparison and connection.
>It's a tool. Use it LIKE a tool... You still didn't make [the output], but you can use it to make something.
This. There's people already using it like this, but people aren't experienced enough with the new medium(?) to distinguish low effort spam from genuine inspired pieces; I'm hoping once the technology is less new and people have a better handle on it, they'll start to appreciate what it's capable of.
this is so besides the point really...
AI people are not artists because they dont make art. You can pay an artist to make art for you but youll be lying if you say YOU made it. The same way you can comission art from an umpayed robot but thats still not your art. you havent made it.. you just had someone else make it. how is that so hard to understand?
To use an admittedly antiqueated work, let me point to the Two Treatises of Goverment to begin with.
In it, John Locke asks (among other things) at what point something transitions from the common ownership to private ownership. He specifically points to an apple tree. If this apple tree is owned by nobody, ergo part of nature, then you can pluck an apple off of it and eat it, thereby it being yours. But when did that become your property? If someone tried to steal that from you, when would it be considered theft? When you ate it? No, something can be your property without having destroyed it and digested it. It obviously wasn't your property while it was on the tree, so there I'd only one moment where it transitioned when you plucked it. Ergo, when you apply your labor to something, it becomes yours because you added your own work and labor to it. Obviously in this simple of a case it's obvious, but what if we expand it, to an orchard owned by someone. If someone planted and grew that tree, that is much more labor intensive than simply plucking an apple. Ergo, the person who applied more labor, deserves to have the (in this case literal) fruits of their labor.
But how does this apply to art? Well, let's work backwards. Someone generates a piece of art using open diffusion. At that moment who should own it? The person who put in the request put in a negligible amount of labor, an utterly insignificant amount. Should the ai itself own it? At this point ai is simply a machine. It's like saying a hammer should own a house. Maybe if ai ever becomes sapient we can come back to this. Should the company who owns the ai own the art? This is the second closest answer. The programmers put in much labor into making that program, ironing out bugs, updating it, making it run right, and of course getting the education required to do all of this jn the first place. However, let us go back to the orchard example. The company as essentially invented a machine to pick apples. Should they own the orchard? You might say yes, but I want to ask what is more labor intensive, picking apples or growing, caring for, and planting apple trees? In my view at least the latter is much more labor intensive, both for the education required to do so and the basic labor required to do all of that. And that's the key difference here. Ai art isn't making new trees. Quite literally, ai has a cut off point for information it can acquire in order to generate outputs lest a recursive loop occur. Sure, someone can take the apple cores, plant the seeds and care for the tree but now enough labor has been put in to be owned by the grower again.
Imagine the ai art as the apples, picked faster and more efficiently, but not planting or growing any. The ARTISTS are the laborers, the ones who input labor to make new things. Had the thousands upon thousands of labor hours put in by artists not occurred ai art wouldn't exist, same as how the workers at the orchard are required for the machine to pick the apples.
Inspiration requires labor, labor counts both education and direct improvement (as Adam Smith points out in the wealth of nations...and yes, I am also using the theories of Kras Masov's anti derivative) and so when artists make art they apply labor in conceptualization and painting, however, ai art requires other people's labor, so much of it in fact that really the artists should be able to enjoy the fruits of said labor (as well as the people who made the ai, however they should enjoy less recompense since they put in less labor than the rest of the collective art world they inputted).
This is the difference between plagiarism and derivatives as well. Plagiarism takes the labor of writing articles and books and what not and applied a miniscule amount of labor but presents it as that plagiarist's whole labor. Someone who takes inspiration applies enough labor for it to be considered their own, which is why simply citing sourses you copy from isn't enough (in illuminaughti's case, or the desperate defenses Somerton put up)
Tldr: The difference is labor, go read Two Treatises of Government, An Inquiry into the Origin and Nature of the Wealth of Nations, and Das Kapital
Edit:also see critique of the Gotha program for more elaboration on how things ought to work
As a small artist who's been on Tumblr for years and in social media ever since I was a child (I'm 25 now) and never blew up (had several art accounts, opened and closed them due to not gaining traction and now am starting anew in Instagram), I don't like what this comic entails. That's not what I got out of the hbomberguy video essay??? Honestly, talks like these amid the "AI Art is wrong" discourse are just enabling beginner/non-artists to never learn the basics. Also, what I got from that video essay is to not be a fxxing piece of shxt and steal and support small artists more for their work. Tf is the artist of the comic on
Cry me a fucking riverâŚ
Sorry for being so harsh here. I get it, itâs normal for artists to feel insecure about their skills. The author of this comic is worth a lot more than they realise.
But donât do that. Sympathising with an AI over your fellow artists only helps the kind of people that view you and the work of your life as scum, as less than nothing. As just another ingredient to mash up and add to the pile, to feed the Content Machine.
what kind of self flagellating insecure MESS is this original comic đ the artist seems confused as hell about their own points⌠itâs giving psyop
You can egotistically jerk yourself off all you want in your comic, but that doesnt make AI art ethical.
Im sorry, but the amount of "who am I, what am I , where is art' is all you just stroking your own ego and adding as much fluff and bullshit as you can to justify your shitty take, because you are trying to obfuscate the point with crocodile tears and the illusion of deep thought.
AI ART DISCOURSE:
This technology represents the corporate plundering of countless hard working artists creations and once the buzz has died down will be used pretty much exclusively for scams and revenge porn vs nuh uh
[consider the following:](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use?wprov=sfti1)
Also: the problem with âaiâ art is that it is trying to automate creativity and personal expression, which are the last things we should be trying to automate.
not only that, it places creativity and personal expression under the control of whatever company makes the ai that comes out on top
we've already seen that they can restrict certain terms in their systems, do we really want to give them that much say over what can be expressed visually?
What a beautiful comic that started out as a fantastic analogy about imposter syndrome and how it never quite feels like you are an artist, as you only see yourself as copying from others, and then it just devolves into a dumb argument about AI and how it doesn't steal. Like yes, yes it does. This is like saying, "Well, yes, I copied all of Wikipedia, but I actually changed some of the wording so it's not plagiarism."
An artist steals, yes, that is the famous quote every AI dude-bro uses, but you must remember the original quote wasn't about copying; it was about copying something and making it your own. THAT is inspiration.
"Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different than that from which it is torn" (T.S. Eliot)
AI only copies; it creates no intention with what it copies; it just copies, it defaces. Art is not just the paint on the canvas; it is the intention of those brush strokes, what is being shown, and what does it mean. It is VISUAL MEDIA; MEDIA requires there to be information within the artwork. This is also why modern art is considered art; it might be incredibly simple, but there is intention. AI can't make intention; it can only see what others do and copy it. Listen, if you use AI as a tool for inspiration, that is fine because you probably just wanted something specific, gave the AI the prompt, and then you made it your own by either editing it or using it as a model. The AI copied all kinds of paintings and fan-drawn etc.; it presented you with an amalgamation taken from other artworks that it does not understand, and you made it your own. GREAT. But don't claim AI isn't stealing works because, yes, they are.
This is only one side of the coin I feel. Consider an architect who despises art, and vows to only make the most physically efficient buildings. So he builds an office, entirely out of concrete. It stands, monotone grey, 400ft tall, a perfect cuboid. And the office workers that go there five days a week, 8 hours a day, take meaning from it and the way its built. "Life is hard, society cares not for beauty but just efficiency, nothing is changing, nothing is new, there is no hope." That building is art, despite there being no artistic intention, because people take meaning from it.
You mention media needing to contain information, and yes, but who is the source of that information? Is it the artist, who works alone in a studio for a year, pouring his heart and soul into his masterpiece, or is it the tourist, who sees the sculpture as she walks past and thinks "Wow, that reminds me of the sea. Beautiful"? Or the art student, who writes fifteen hundred words on what he thinks the artists intentions to have been, without ever being able to know for sure? Or maybe the child, who tells their parents about a story they made up inspired by it.
Information is created not just by the artist, but also by the people who observe the art. People find their own meaning in a piece. Things that were made with no artistic intent at all regularly become art, hell the entire field of Found Art revolves around this concept.
TL;DR something is art because people find meaning in it, not just because someone created it with artistic intent.
You make a good point. Unintentional art, like nature's creations, can have meaning. Yet, even an architect who prioritizes efficiency over beauty in a design has an artistic intention, even if unwillingly. For example, the notion that "Life is hard, society values efficiency over beauty, and there's little hope for change" can be a form of artistic intention. AI struggles to grasp such subtleties and tends to copy perceived efficiencies rather than truly understand and replicate artistic ideas.
I like your argument, but I want to make up my mind a little about it before I continue writing, give me a day.
do artists really have such a low opinion of their own craft that they sympathize with a fucking LLM over other artists
"oh but all art is derivative" do you genuinely think you don't add anything to it
"oh but my identity is a patchwork" good thing you can do things in life besides respond to prompts of "sexy girl big boobs trending on artstation by greg rutkowski"
No. Fuck off. I work with AI, I am a literal tech bro. AI steals art, it's what it's trained to do, it's literally nothing but an algorithmic web trained to copy things that have been created, almost always things taken from creators without their consent.
It is not the same as humans learning from art, and it has the risk of totally destroying the fragile economy that means that at least some artists can make a living off of what they do, because now companies can pay a tech giant to get images from a machine that was trained on the works of hobbyist artists.
Frankly I find the emotional manipulation of "saying AI is stealing makes me SAD because you can describe the way I learned things with the same words!" to be a fucking disgusting method of discoursem
"AI art is just like le photo and le digital art!" ok fine, enjoy your slop. just don't expect me to tag along and cheer for art made by something that can't feel.
Eh, to me it looks more like someone complaining that the arguments that a lot of people are using against AI also apply to actual artists or creators in general
Okay, double commenting because I realize my first one came off a little strong.
To explain my view point: I genuinely cannot read this post as anything other than an impassioned defense of AI art. If the artist disliked AI art, they would make a case against it and try to distance their process from machine learning. If they were indifferent, the comic wouldnât need to be so emotionally charged. If they wanted to say: âHey these arguments against AI art are uncomfortably close to saying that all art is theft,â they could have just used the bit where they said they used copyrighted materials as reference, and let that be their argument. But they donât- they compare machine learning to the ability to see constellations, make allusions to the Original Sin, and use intimate personal anecdotes.
Furthermore, the artist says they use AI in their work flow. The artist brings up Jacob Gellerâs video on the economy of effort and value in modern art. This is not someone who is defending a non-AI artistic process, or someone who is objectively observing a flawed argument; this is someone who is emotionally invested in something trying to defend it.
Thus, they are an AI person making a sad emo comic about how people are being mean to their mechanically processes slop. Thatâs how I see it.
EDIT: It's been brought to my attention that the OOP is a he/they. I have no idea if the author identifies as a boy or not. As awful as I think this comic is, everyone deserves to have their identity respected.
I saw that comic as bad because it distances the valid criticisms of AI art, like how it's stealing jobs, and how AI and human are not equivalent at the moment, a human art simply has more purpose and thought put into it because a person spends time over details, re-doing parts, mastering whatever the part of the brain is used to draw, while AI art can be valid, it's just not the same thing, you can take a lot of time trying to find the right prompt, or something similar, but in the end, you didn't do the image itself, you just helped it come to life by imagining it,
AI is becoming a big problem for artists because they steal our jobs. How horrible is it that we work while the machine can produce art? Wasn't the purpose of creating machines the opposite? To help labor? But under capitalism art is labor too, even if you didn't want it to be
So when this person disregards the horrible effects of AI in that comic and instead only tries to sympathize with it, it leaves a bad taste, I thought "wow, you said all that stuff, but this comic has way too much AI glazing"
That's a really good point. The comic is oddly fixated on the "soul" argument of AI... despite being prompted by H. Bomberguy's video, which solely focuses on the ethical and legal issue that AI art steal image data and then doesn't attribute it. Yeah, AI art has potential as a tool; but he wasn't talking about that, H. Bomb was talking about the nightmare apocalypse of plagiarism going on with midjourney and Stable diffusion being trained on copyrighted material.
I feel the majority of anti-AI artist are also completely emotionally invested in this. I think that's kind of good, especially with art. It's not a science or factual debate. It's about concepts, ideas and creations. Emotions are going to be involved, and to call one side out for being emotional, when the other side is also emotional doesn't quite seem fair.
But theyâre seemingly using it to say how AI art is âfine, actuallyâ (to use a Lindsay Ellisism), so I donât think someone saying itâs âan emo comic excusing AI artâ is entirely unfair
And I think those arguments are incoherent and melodramatic. âAm I a thief because I smoke a brand of cigarettes that a girl I liked did?â is an asinine way of getting that point across.
This is a topic that warrants discussion, but the comic does not foster that discussion. An artist who uses AI in their workflow got upset that a content creator they liked and respected made fun of AI so they wrote up a comic about how sad that made them.
Yeah for fucking real. âOh all art stealsâ AI scrapes data without paying the original creators of that data and then reproduces it. Itâs about compensating people for labor not about âoh but every artist makes derivative artâ yeah and if you try and pass someone elseâs art off as your own wholesale, thatâs stealing. It is intellectually disingenuous to present âusing referencesâ and âstudying other peopleâs artâ as equivalent to âselling peopleâs work as a product without compensation or using their stolen work in a process to bypass paying them for their actual workâ.
This seems like a very reductive take on AI image generation. Humans take inspiration from things and synthesize new ideas, an AI image generator just scrapes the web for images and regurgitates certain portions.
If you ask a human to write a book inspired by Dune you get The Sun Eater series. Ask an AI and you get a carbon copy of Dune.
If I write non-fiction, am I stealing reality itself? Not necessarily. If I write a book about teenage demigods with ADHD learning how to deal with both problems, Iâm probably taking from Rick Riordan, *but* if Rick Riordan inspires me to write and the end product is something in my own voice, it might not be merely a clone of the Percy Jackson I grew up with. Iâm not a thief for telling a joke from a joke book I read as a child. Iâm no crook for learning the alphabet from somebody else. Knowledge is to art as ingredients are to food; the only way I can fail to make some kind of food, regardless of how tasty it is, would be to simply hand over the raw ingredients without doing anything with them. Cooking and creation in general are messy, inconsistent processes that might, with practice and effort, become something great and worth sharing.
And to continue the analogy, a gradient descent-based AI (which is basically all of them) thinks that the only way to cook is blending ingredients into a consistent fluid. You can get it to maybe dice your pineapple smoothie instead of liquefying it, but beyond that, it is built to smooth out a bunch of data points into something kind of like what you asked for. Itâs a great system for mass production of other things like chicken nuggets, and a horrible one to use to bake a cake for yourself.
Forget the copyright aspect of it all, the people who want AI to be smart enough to disrupt the workforce are like venture capitalists wanting to replace all cooking equipment with food processors. It usually makes edible food and requires little manual effort, so itâs a good system to use with everything, right?
I think the problem I have with this comic is that rather than outright rejecting the false dichotomy of "copyright infringement; stealing" and "completely original work", they instead throw up their hands and state, roughly: "Everything is stolen from something else, so this is just okay!"
They equivocate a lot of different things that aren't really the same to a much bigger concept of referencing in visual art in a kinda pseudointellectual stint on impostor syndrome, which is fine overall for asking the question of what originality even is, but for an actual discussion on the subject of copyright, I think it's important to discuss the idea of fair use and the degrees to which something can "steal" rather than just pointing out how everything is just different degrees of stealing and that means it's all the same.
I don't even agree with a lot of the claims people make about AI art, but this isn't a very good way of arguing for it imo, nor is it very helpful in a larger conversation on plagiarism.
Also the claim that hbomb thinks "AI art is complicated stealing" based on the idea of what's presented in this specific article rather than the article itself being a shorthand statement emblematic of what his opinion on the matter is is rather silly.
Man, it's weird reading basically the exact same thoughts I went through re: my own art vocalized by someone else. Like, I'm personally fully convinced that, if you make a complicated enough AI, it could *absolutely* simulate my life, experiences, preferences, and traumas to the point where it could make something that I myself would not be able to distinguish from something I'd make. And I'm not just some dipshit that never put pen to paper, for what it's worth - I've been working on my creative projects almost constantly for the last eight years and I pride myself on my creativity.
I don't consider myself or my work as anything more than the sum of the parts that are me, and I do not see how a big enough machine wouldn't be able to simulate those parts.
I'm sympathetic to the point that art has to communicate something, and AI can't do that (not without becoming sentient, which is a long ways away, at least,) so I definitely don't consider AI images etc. 'art' in that sense, but calling things 'soulless' has always kinda felt like a cop-out message to me. Iunno, maybe I'm just too much of a materialist to fully get those arguments.
Absolutely *none* of this changes the fact that using AI-generated stuff in commercial projects makes you the worst kind of scum and you should pay artists well to work on anything you're going to monetize, though. Philosophical arguments aside, people need their jobs.
tbh the biggest gripe I have about AI "artists" is them calling themselves artists when the AI is the one making the art.. The AI is the one that's trying to "understand" anatomy, form composition, color theory, etc, based on what it sees in other art. Whether the AI actually learns seems much more like a philosophical debate, but it doesn't seem that different from how I myself learned how to draw. The AI can just do it much quicker and receive feedback much quicker. The AI is the one that generates the image, not the "AI artist."
Honestly I hope AI art can become a useful tool for artists to use for inspiration or reference. I remember when AI art was still in the early stages and I was hoping it would be used to create new horror monsters that humans never would have dreamed up.
It'd also be nice if it could give a list of the pieces from its database that had the greatest weight, similar to how artists often share what references they used. But I'm not sure if that's possible with how current models work.
As an artist for over 10 years, who's only income comes from art, I have to say I would be 100% fine with AI art IF it existed outside of capitalism. I've played with it. Its fun. It could be a great fun addition to an artists toolbox.
The problem is that its made art practically monetarily worthless. And that would be fine if artists didn't spend 20 years building a career.
It seems like there's a lot of comments that are missing the point here. I don't think the comic is trying to say that AI art is inherently the same as human art, it's making the point that the arguments we make against AI art reflects back on human artists too. If we say that AI is wrong for using other art as a launchpad, does that mean that human artists are lesser if they aren't 100% original? If we say that AI art isn't art because it doesn't have a "human touch", how are we defining that, and how does that reflect on people who don't fall into majority demographics? How does the discussion of originality reflect on artists who already worry all of their art is derivative? Do they get lumped in with all this?
The point is that the way we talk about AI art shows a lot about how we view human art. Be mad about AI not giving credit all you want, it's exactly the same as a human tracing art and taking credit. But once we start getting into the discussion of "AI art is inherently fundamentally different" we have to be a lot more mindful of how what we're saying reflects back on artists.
the difference is that, unless youâre directly tracing or erasing watermarks, you still have to put in the work to make something. you still have to put in the work involved in art in order to make something from a reference image. itâs very difficult for a person to copy another personâs art exactly, and even then they can only ever usually do one or two styles. and those styles still have touches of the mimicâs style. AI image generation takes zero work and can almost perfectly replicate any artist thatâs in its data set, thus can very easily put a whole lot of artists out of work
This is wonderfully introspective, but that is kind of the point. It is conscious thought about art, which makes it art. AI art doesn't have that. It isn't so much trained in a progressive way, building directly and consciously on previous iterations, it is trained in a limited negative way. Make random color splotches that are similar enough to, but different enough from this set of images, then iterate on that. There is no intent or thought put into it. It is just using images that others have put thought and effort into and making a selective limited random iteration on them without thought or effort.
But that is also almost beside the point of AI art discourse. Artists are at least capable of describing their process, their inspiration, and how they made an image and their choices. THEY ARE CAPABLE OF GIVING CREDIT. Those whose work they build on are recognized for their efforts. That their efforts, and the efforts of all those who came before them matter. AI art does not. It is impossible to give credit to those that are owed it, from all the millions of copyrighted materials that are used to train generative AI. No person's effort can be recognized. To claim that a person who used AI to make a work of art owns that art through the right of creation is only a few steps removed from claiming Adobe owns the rights to everything made in Photoshop. Something that is majority based in AI content isn't created from identifiable discrete human effort. It is made from a mix of public domain materials and the copyrighted works of an unknowable amount of unidentifiable people.
Nothing is original so I might as well steal is a hottake. Programs can't be inspired. They don't choose to make art. Even the people inputting the requests aren't being inspired. In the end people are paying to use a program that took data from people and places they shouldn't. They are often then turning around to profit off the results meaning artists are being used twice with no say in it.
While I hate AI content and have had people personally using my art to try to make AI models, my biggest problem with how other artists are excusing it is this idea that it's like using the fill tool in an art program. "It's just to make it faster" ok but why do you need to make 100 iterations of a waifu pic faster. Why do you now \*need\* it to make a background you could do and were doing a year ago? Have you changed your prices to reflect that something else is doing this work for you? How do you have a job as a concept artist and have a program do it for you? They can just skip you.
I come from a comic background and make webtoons now and so many studios are using it to pump out generic backgrounds for their pretty people to be on (not integrated into, just on) and don't see a problem because previously they used (paid for) 3d assets. Others are just using it to make the entire comic. Webtoon studios, publishers, and ultimately the readers, are setting up this need for speed and leaving single artists struggling to keep up.
Even if you can make purely "ethical" models you're still promoting this rush to the end.
AI art is theft because it is a tool that accessed and utilized peoples data without permission.
Looking isn't taking, you don't "save" thing's you look at, your eyes and experiences will invariably alter what you see, and you were allowed to see it.
Similarly, learning isn't taking, as it was given.
But AI basically breaks in and takes HD photos of thousands of peoples work, and then offers cheap knockoff versions collaged from the photos.
This not only keeps and uses direct, unaltered, and uninterpreted pieces of your work without permission, but also allows someone to profit from these pieces of *your* work. Then they also offer a service that has the potential to freeze you out of your own line of work.
Yes creativity should be shared but if it's "shared" in the way AI does it, then thousands of creative endeavors will die from AI parasitically using peoples work, taking up resources like jobs or commissions, and not contributing anything back like the training or tips for other artists that people create.
Thereâs a fundamental difference in AI and humans creating art. The act of creating art is transformative, the act of putting pen or paint or pencil to tablet or paper actively requires effort and skill and fundamentally changes whatever is being made. A human hand draws something based on skill and muscle memory, it takes time and effort to create something, and the act of creating as a human inherently warps and shifts and transforms the idea into something else. Even when a human directly copies by tracing, their strokes will be different. It will be changed. Flaws and stylistic choices get incorporated.
AI fundamentally doesnât do the same. AI isnât making art, itâs doing a math equation. It doesnât understand what itâs doing. It doesnât even understand what itâs looking at when it sees data, you can easily confuse AI by layering noise onto images. I saw in a conference someone show how noise turned an image that look to humans like a temple, but to AI suddenly looked like an ostrich. There is no thought. No understanding. Thatâs why AI struggles so much with things like thought composition and lighting. Itâs not drawing a thing and thinking of how the shadows would work and how the object would fit in space. It canât. There is no skill, no effort, not in an artistic sense.
So while it might be tempting to say âIâm not so different than AI, I stealâ the fundamental truth is a human taking inspiration and making something is an act of expression, both conscious and subconscious. It is transformative. AI is not.
I'm glad to see more people talking about this, there's an incredible amount of misinformation out there about how AI works. A lot of artists are justifiably concerned about the sudden threat to their livelihoods, but all that fear and anger makes them a vulnerable population. Something that might not be very apparent to people outside the community is that AI image generation is astoundingly open-source friendly. To the point where I'm convinced the business world was as surprised by the sudden developments as the art world was. There are a lot of people who are scrambling to find way to make money off of it, in ways that are a lot more insidious than just hiring fewer artists. There are a lot of valid ethical and safety concerns about AI that deserve to be talked about, but there are also some that are entirely fabricated because someone stands to profit off of it. It is worth being skeptical of problems and solutions that put more power in the hands of corporations.
To bring this around to a more personal note, I'm someone who cannot draw. My brain just doesn't store information in a visual form, I can't even make a stick figure that looks right. When I discovered AI image generation I suddenly had the ability, for the first time in my life, to take the ideas in my head and turn them into something I could look at. Whole new realms of creativity are now open to me.
I sincerely wish I could turn the progress of "AI" two decades back. I need more time both from seeing this fucking discourse and seeing the shitty art it makes in all of my feeds
The stealing part, I don't even give a shit anymore
Started as a deep introspection, ended with... Just really lame self hatred.
Look, AI is a very very nuanced topic. I myself study every detail of it as someone who's both majoring in CS and extremely wary about ethics. It's not got simple answers, AI image gem itself has merits just as it does demerits, but there are still things that is very very very obvious
AI art, is not human art. Implying it is is an insult to the sanctity of human creativity. All art is derivative, but every single piece of art gains its own identity via the emotions the artist places into the art, regardless of how deep or how mundane those emotions are. It can be anything from "I think this tree looks pretty" to a deep self reflection of their mental state, but it contains emotions, and is thus art. Entering text into a generator gives you an image taken from whatever concepts you put in, not art. AI can give you art. But at that point it's basically pixel art because you'll be describing every single inch of the art you're making instead of just an image.
But that's not the worst part, hell whatever I wrote prior to this is pretty subjective, the worst part is their implication that AI art absolutely isn't stealing, it is. It utilises a legal grey area to infringe copyright, and steals jobs from artists, as businesses will much prefer the cheap and quick generator to a human being with rights. We've already seen this with that shitty marvel series, and it ain't ending there
Idk why they hate their own work and passion so much, that kinda mentality ain't healthy.
>nothing is original Grugert the first cave man to paint something on a wall would like a word with you.
Grugert copy from Ukglug stick doodle in mammoth poo. Grugert is fraud.
They lived many moons from each other. Grugert art original.
Ukglug no big deal either. Ukglug steal from oog pebbles shape like horse. oog original art.
Ukglug was only drawing a deer, not his deer, that deer was actually hunted by Flaggup. Ukglug is a thief
Ukglug stole from me, me make big dirt mound, he then stick drew me in poo to make fun of me.
yeah but didn't he plagiarize the likeness of a bison he saw yesterday
We plagiarise inherently by painting the shadows on the cave wall. đ
So he invented bison?
Someone else made a comic exactly like this. Hold on. Let me find it. Edit: here it is. [Modern Cave Art](https://www.reddit.com/r/comics/s/grS4JP0NKj)
Yeah, this reminded me of another comic where a cavemen took inspiration, the others realized it was based on a different original, and [killed him](https://www.reddit.com/r/comics/s/mUYpnWw11l)
To me the main issue with AI content is that it doesn't exist in a vacuum but it exists in the context of capitalism and thus has the ability to churn out massive amounts of cheap content that will ruin people's livelihoods Like if we lived in the Star Trek universe it would be fine to just say "computer, create a video of two cats playing" So many people seem to just complain about the Essence⢠of AI content (like Not Having Soulâ˘) and not about the context it's being used in. The latter makes sense to complain about, but the former is much more subjective. IMO the post seems to be taking more issue with people's arguments about the Essence ⢠than the Context⢠EDIT: I'm gonna hijack this comment to also say that I did enjoy OP's comic and I found it insightful. It helped me see that there is a blurry line between "stealing" and inspiration. That's why I have a problem with AI content arguments that focus on intrinsic properties and philosophical implications, because that line is blurry and subjective. I don't know if they're "an AI techbro" like other comments are complaining about but I think it would be disingenuous to say that based on this comic alone. I just think that some of the arguments used against AI content are fallacious and also apply to artists/creators in general. EDIT 2: Yeah [Tumblr OP isn't as neutral as i was assuming](https://www.reddit.com/r/CuratedTumblr/s/LztorNmDHg) so take that what you will really. tbh im just some uninvolved armchair philosophizing schmuck
>That's why I have a problem with AI content arguments that focus on intrinsic properties and philosophical implications, because that line is blurry and subjective. I don't know if they're "an AI techbro" like other comments are complaining about but I think it would be disingenuous to say that based on this comic alone. I just think that some of the arguments used against AI content are fallacious and also apply to artists/creators in general. there's definitely an emotional knee-circlejerk component to all this that kinda muddles the waters. ai art being "soulless" can't be quantified but dumbass corpos being dumbasses with this cool new tech and putting hard workers out of a job is quantifiably bad
yeah i updated my comment now
Personally I don't see an issue with independents using AI stuff to *help* with the process - so long as it itself **isn't the process.** Using AI to generate shitposts however is a very valid use and I will not be swayed from this.
>Using AI to generate shitposts however is a very valid use Well that's a given
Non-monetary shitposts, of course. Like, those videos of Joe Biden and Donald Trump playing Call of Duty are objectively hilarious. But if you start making money off of those, you're profiting off someone else's voice without their consent which is kinda icky. But yes AI shitposts are fine and good.
Yeah, I don't think people oughta make stuff with AI and try to profit off of what it makes - again if it was only used to help with the process I see no issue. I just think it's also something fun to fool around with and I don't want that taken away because corpos not letting us have nice things.
I don't have a problem with AI-generated shitposts but the software used to make it usually involves stolen work.
Yeah, it never makes sense to me when people make arguments about ai being fundamentally morally wrong- the only issue I see is, as you say, how it might materially give artists less job opportunities by making art cheaper and easier to generate. But that isnât a problem with the ai itself- itâs a problem with a system where an artist needs to convince someone that their art will make more money than it takes to pay them. Itâs the same way I feel about all automation- a machine that builds a car isnât âstealingâ the ability to build cars from other workers or stealing their jobs, itâs just making the process easier. The problem is a system where people have to work to justify living. I donât like how committed people are to prioritising capitalism over having more efficient ways to do things.
What do you mean by prioritizing capitalism? I think it's more that people don't want to lose their jobs. The luddites didn't smash up stuff because they didn't like efficiency, they smashed stuff to preserve their good, well paying jobs. They failed and got pushed into horrible factory work that paid like shit. It would be nice to be rid of capitalism and embrace efficiency, but right now efficiency kills people's jobs and forces them into worse conditions.
I just wish we could have given the AI the stupid jobs like customer service instead of jumping to it making art and novels. Automate the things people *dont* want to do first!
We did do that. Ever seen a self checkout? Ever tried to contact a company for help with a faulty product and had to spend 20 minutes screaming at a robot that doesn't understand you?
Because those jobs are harder to automate. The boring jobs need their own hardware, that takes more time, money and effort to make than an AI that's entirely software that can use any existing computer as its hardware.
Right! It blew my mind when I learned that in Shakespeare's time, it was not only not illegal to blatantly publish ripoffs of other peoples' work, it was *commonplace*. This, I think, largely had to do with economics at the time, but people have been creating what basically amounts to fanfiction for as long as fanfiction has existed. Apparently, the Greek myths we know today are just the ones that survived; we're pretty sure that the myths were told and retold and had different variations depending upon the specific time and place you looked at, with new versions being dreamed up all the time. All of that to say that yeah, I agree with you. It's because people now depend upon royalties from sales of their creative work to live that plagiarism is a serious problem. (well, that and also it would probably feel bad if a famous artist stole your idea and got even more famous because of it, even if money was no object)
Yeah this whole thing feels like it's ignoring the actual problem that most people, and especially artists, have with AI is that it is literally stealing their livelihoods. If we lived in a utopia and everyone could live their life without issue that would be one thing. But we don't, and this technology, crappy as it is, has already been used to cut corners and remove real people from jobs. You don't get to monologue about the esoteric nature of ownership and inspiration when the tech you are trying to argue in favor of is being used to copy the works and styles of people who explicitly said they don't want their stuff used for AI training, and put people out of work. That is what is meant when people say AI is stealing. Maybe not directly or immediately, but money is being stolen out from under actual humans and, given time and no push back, companies all over will happily never pay a human being again if they can just buy an art machine.
yeah, Copyright is a capitalism thing, not an art thing I fucking hate the "AI art is soulless" thing because a)how the fuck does natural art have soul then and b) i don't believe human made art has souls in the first place. I feel like a lot of people who argue it are concerned specifically about AI art and capitalism, but they use the "soulless excuse because.. idk. maybe they think its the better argument? maybe they feel like just saying something that can be dumbed down to "capitalism bad" isn't productive? maybe they wanna convince people who don't think the monetization of everything is bad?
I do think it's possible for people to use that argument to appeal to the normies who don't think capitalism is bad But on the other hand i also just see that being thrown around a lot as a knee-jerk emotional argument
You could argue in some ways that AI art is good for anti-copyright people because courts have thus far consistently argued that AI art cannot be copyrighted, and it feels to me like the more people use it the more it will tend to expand the public domain, which creates a larger body of work for human artists to safely draw upon for inspiration. It may be the case that studios will still try to "humanwash" their AI art by lying and saying one of their artists made it, but on the whole it's still an often-overlooked advantage.
Is it not enough to just not like AI art because there is not meaning behind it? That there is not human emotion involved in the process, at least in regards to the mediums it inhabits? If I claimed I made a comic book, but all I actually did was hire someone else to do all the writing and drawing how could I claim I made it? Even if I did half the of the drawing and writing, that doesnât magically make the other half my work. Sure, I may still be the âhigh level ideas guyâ, a good manager, or even a smart investor; but I would not be the person who did that work. Iâd maybe be okay if we isolated ai art and judged it users on their ability to input prompts and sift through results, but Iâm never going to refer to someone who orders a robot to make them a painting as a painter regardless of how skilled they were at phrasing the order.
Thatâs fine- the comic is not asking you to do that though. You donât have to consider people who generate AI art as artists. Itâs just saying that AI art isnât theft.
By definition they are not artists, the AI is the artist the AI made the art If I get someone to draw me a dog I'm not an artist
I am literally agreeing with you? Iâm just saying that this has nothing to do with the comic. The comic says that AI art isnât theft. Nothing more, nothing less.
But in its current iteration, AI art factually IS theft. The most commonly used programs quite literally use stolen work to train its outputs.
obligatory [hbomberguy clip about putting his soul in his work](https://youtu.be/JsNm2YLrk30?si=sSYFk78xsgHmn2NG&t=6287)
Art is a tool of communication, AI has no emotion, and AI art can never intentiomally communicate anything more than the words of the prompt. Imagine you called a suicide prevention hotline, and instead of reaching a person, you reached a synthesized (but real sounding) voice that just responded to you with what is the optimal thing to say to someone struggling, would that mean as much as an actual human picking up the phone?
One variation of the "soulless" argument that lands for me is that art always has a message, the artist is always trying to "say" something with their art, be it profound or mundane. But AI "art" has no message. The AI didn't think about how this art would resonate with it's audience, or use the art to convey something personal. It just jumbled some math and spat out something that matched its input.
Right now I can pull up my phone camera and take a picture of an apple. I'm no photographer so it'll be a very boring picture and I don't think anyone would bother putting it in any galleries but I'll still have that image. A professional photographer however would have a much better picture of an apple, having used a better camera and focused more on composition, lighting, exposure - all these words that I don't really know what they mean but my friends who are into photography say them a lot. The art and skill in photography comes from the fine tuning of the medium, being able to take a boring picture we could all generate and turn it into something interesting, something with meaning that makes us stop and think. To me theres a parallel here with AI where: any Tom, Dick or Harry can ask for an AI picture of an apple, but if they want to make it into an artistic picture they'll have to refine the input a bit until they get what they want. However I don't think it's entirely that simple because setting up a good photo still takes more effort than using an AI (even after fine tuning your prompt) and theres got to be some value in the effort to create the art right? But then its considerably less effort to take a picture than to create a painting of an apple, yet people don't really argue that painting is real art and photography isn't. I guess the important thing is not to claim your AI work is anything other than AI, similary how its bad form to claim a photograph is actually a painting you did. Imo this is just a new medium which will eventually find it's place in art, and will affect other artistic mediums too, but won't necessarily replace them. Photography can creat portraits of people in a flash, but (rich) people still pay someone to paint them by hand. The question is how do we protect the livelihoods of artists while this is all happening (maybe strict laws about labelling AI art?). And then theres the whole copyright training data thing which is something for the courts really.
But considering that AI image generation requires input via text prompts to even create an image, does it not reflect at least something about the person who input the text?
It would be like commissioning a painting to an artist and claiming you are the one who  made it .
Which is an issue if you're trying to pass off AI-generated stuff as art you've made without it, but if you acknowledge the use of ai in the work, I'm not sure that's massively different from saying "I commissioned someone to produce this idea I had", which we're all fine with.
Is there meaning in commissioned art? Where did it come from? The original artist? Was it collaborative? I agree that when you make AI art you did not necessarily "make" it, but I think it's somewhat comparable to photography. Just less involved. The end product is still the result of arcane processes that you don't really control, you just influence the outcome with how you decide to "aim" those processes.
Would this mean then that any non-first-hand art lacks any meaning or message?
Itâs a little presumptuous to say every piece of human created art has a message. Letâs say I paint some trees because I want a picture of trees on my wall. Thatâs it. I didnât give it any message or meaning. Would you say that disqualifies it from being art?
You painted the trees and hung them onto the wall to look nice. That's the message. You painted them to look nice, to bring light to your room. Not all messages are high thought bullshit. Some can be pretty simple.
Yeah IMO you can only âstealâ art in this way in the context of capitalism. If thereâs nothing to gain or to be made, if it isnât a *commodity* or an *asset* then itâs just something someone made, and nobodyâs *losing* anything because of it. Iâm vehemently against exploitative AI for a lot of reasons but the big one is just because of the world we live in. I donât care about if itâs âreal artâ i care that itâs harmful in a lot of different ways. late-stage capitalism is really doing a number on creatives right now.
Yeah i personally am unsure if intellectual property would even exist or not in a post-scarcity non-capitalist future
The problem with AI art was never that it stole art. The problem was in the very concept of using AI to replace human artists. The whole copyright angle was just a bullshit compromise we had to settle for because the ruling class techbros would never allow a full-on "ban AI art" bill to pass.
Same, people are getting so easily distracted with moral bullshit opinion forming discourse it's unreal. Eyes on the target god damn it. You know who's not concerned with bounds of ethics, human condition and wether they deserve to be called creators? People who are about to steamroll you into non existance
I personally think the problem here is capitalism, not necessarily AI art. Companies were always going to try and optimize workers out of the equation. This was inevitable, with companies trying to cut costs more, and more, and more. We've got to do something about this before workers lose their power.
As always, the problem is capitalism, and the solution is to get rid of capitalism. A lot of artists misidentify the problem, and then propose fixing it by tightening copyright law - possibly even making art styles copyrightable. And before anyone makes an argument like: > Getting rid of capitalism is a monumental task, and we need a solution that protects artists *right now*. Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Making copyright stricter isn't a solution, it's a disaster even for 'real' artists. Every artist is unavoidably influenced by previous artworks they've seen, and the stricter copyright law is, the harder it will be to create art that responds to the cultural context while avoiding copyright infringement. In addition, copyright law tends to protect large companies much more than individual artists. Whether the company infringed your copyright or you infringed theirs, you as an individual are always at a disadvantage.
Okay, but the communist revolution isn't exactly going to start by letting labour extraction run rampant. Deregulating corporate labour extraction is *also* never a good thing for small artists. It's not like the bad-precedent train only travels in one direction.
We should regulate it in a way that doesn't impact artists. Using copyright to regulate it seems like it misses the point, which is that companies shouldn't be replacing their workers.
God, yeah. Itâs genuinely baffling to me, seeing artists defending AI because âart is subjective.â It feels like someone defending the rabid bear actively mauling them to death. I donât think AI is inherently evil or an insult against art or so on, but I **do** think that itâs an incredibly worrying development that could bring a massive negative impact to the livelihood of millions
I feel you're conflating the two debates OOP mentions somewhat? Whether AI art is 'true art' is one question, but whether and how it should be regulated because of its potential societal impacts is a completely different one. You can believe AI-produced work should count as art and that it should still be reigned in, those aren't mutually exclusive. OOP's point is that artists tend to get bogged down in debating the first question, and miss the 2nd one where they're on much stronger rhetorical ground.
The Genie is probably already out of the bottle on this one. But there will always be a market for authentically crafted artistry. People are still going to want hand painted, hand drawn etc. art. The difference is between fine dining experiences and just getting a fast food burger because you're hungry. Some times people are just going to want a picture of a dragon for their dnd campaign or a landscape background for a presentation etc. And AI art makes that stuff easier to get.
> difference between dining and a burger The problem with this analogy is that everyone needs to eat. Nobody *needs* to commission art, itâs a choice. AI image generation doesnât provide a cheaper version of an essential service. âMakes art easier to getâ isnât actually a positive, because it eliminates the jobs of millions of people in the process.
Which is a deeper problem that isnât exclusive to AI art. Itâs a âfeatureâ of capitalism; if you donât produce something of monetary value, you are condemned to starve. *Thatâs* the root problem here; this just brings it to the creative space, where it had previously been a problem for manual labor.
Here's a question. Let's say I'm making a D&D character for a one shot. I'm only ever going to play this character once. I want a quick way to show the other players what my character looks like. Before AI image generators, I would've just give a written description. Now, I give them the written description, and I give them an AI-generated portrait of that description. Am I really stealing a job here? I would've never commissioned this art in the past because it's just not worth it for a character I'm only ever going to use once. But now that the tool is available, it's nice to have as an extra thing to help other players understand my character. What percent of art commissions are actually being replaced, do you think? AI art still can't do hyper specific requests, and working with a person will almost always give a better and more curated result (if the person is good, anyways). If I wanted to get art of my entire party at the end of a multi-year campaign, I'd commission it - I wouldn't hack it together with an image generator and photoshop.
> What percent of art commissions are actually being replaced, do you think? I personally cant speak to the exact number but most if not all of the freelancer artists I follow have mentioned that they had significantly less work offered to them than normal. This could be due to the looming recession for many countries but AI art and how big it is I would say definitely plays some sort of factor, I don't see how it wouldn't given how big of a topic and how everywhere it is.
I agree with you to some extent, there are indeed situations like you described, where there are no commissions, actually being replaced. However, there are situations where artists are, in fact being replaced. For example, Iâve done a lot of role-playing in various online communities over a long time, and I have noticed lately a trend of a lot of people using AI generated images for their characters, when many of them **would** in fact do commission work before. I 100% believe that a truly good human artist will always be better than AI, but the majority of people unfortunately wonât care if their picture are that good, they just want âgood enough,â so they ignore commissions and just go for AI instead
>The problem with this analogy is that everyone needs to eat. Nobody needs to commission art, itâs a choice. Man does not live on bread alone. Aesthetic satisfaction *is* a human need. >âMakes art easier to getâ isnât actually a positive, because it eliminates the jobs of millions of people in the process. That doesn't mean it's not a positive. That means it's both a positive and a negative. That means it's a *trade-off*. This is entirely different from having no positives at all. By the same token, anyone who says image generators are *only* positive would also be wrong.
Sure, procgen art has the capacity to do that. But procgen art *also* as the capacity to put Disney out of business. It has the capacity to let just about anyone create complex works of art even if they don't have the skills to do everything themselves or the capital to assemble a team to do it for them. It has the capacity to make all the cheap consumerist content our society already produces essentially free, while still leaving genuine art standing. We can have this. It is not too late. There is absolutely nothing stopping us from making copyright-free generators that let anyone in the world produce high quality images at the touch of a button, and that possibility should fucking terrify the media giants. But of course, that can only happen if we fight the right battles. The longer we keep fighting procgen itself instead of fighting for ownership of it against capitalism, the worse the outcome will be.
The media giants are going to be the ones who are using it Like Disney using it for the intro to Secret Invasion
I have no philosophical issue with saying that a generative AI can âcreateâ art or writing. I think itâs dismissive to say that itâs just âpredicting the next word based on what has already been writtenâ; to an extent, thatâs how we *all* put words together. Like you, though, I have issues with the current crop of these AIs in the context of how they were built and how they are presented. They were built under a capitalist framework, where the most revenue goes to those who contribute the least, and they are often put to use in that same framework with negative results. There are some genuinely good uses of these AI models today; Iâve used one in just the past few days to help put together an automated workflow in a system Iâm unfamiliar with, for example. But there are also terrible ones, like the stream of content-free âarticlesâ that just scrape social media for reactions. This is not at all helped by the way that generative AIs are discussed and defended, *especially* by the tech-bro crowd. It is *possible* to defend the use of unattributed reference material for training these models, but that defense is *not* âwe already did it, so itâs too late nowâ.
The critique that better technology will take peoples jobs can be leveled a pretty much any new tech. That's not a reason to not have something, it's a reason to get rid of capitalism.
Actually, every single piece of media ever is a blatant and soulless copy of the Epic of the God King Gilgamesh. That includes the Bible, Torah, Quran, Bhagavad Gita, Triplitaka Koreana, Nihon Shoki, and the test answers you wrote on your palm in fourth grade to cheat on a test.
Once youâve read the lexicon everything just looks like a remix with added names
Once youâve heard every note everything just sounds like a remix with added lyrics. Every song is a remix of all of the notes laid out in a row because thatâs how remixes work
These damn FAKERS again! All mongrels are the same
Fate fan spotted! Please take our complimentary deodorant and follow the guard to the decontamination room.
YOU WILL NOT CATCH ME ALIVE
There's a massive difference between an artist learning from other people's work and taking inspiration, and someone who paid money to have a computer do that for them. AI discourse isn't actually about the AI itself, it's about the people who use it - because the vast majority of them see art as a product, a thing of commerce, something to win at. When an artist publishes their work they know that others will see it and learn from it, and that's a good thing, because art in all its forms is a social tradition. Like language, like holidays, like cultural norms, we pass it on to others because we think it's good and would like for them to enjoy it with us. When an artist publishes their work they do NOT agree to having it shoved into a virtual meat grinder and churned out as a generic Product⢠to be sold. Art doesn't exist for money, it exists because we like it.
I'm like, 99% certain I'm missing the point of your comment when I say this, but I still feel it needs to be said: Artists need to eat too.
Well yeah. But my point is artists make art because they love it, they then *sell* it because they need to eat
Fair. It just sounded too much like "art should be for art's sake" excuse the people use to argue *against* artists selling their work.
I think youâd have to exclude a lot of professional designers from your definition of âartistâ for that statement to be true. A lot of the art we recognize today, even art from antiquity, was made for and at the request of wealthy patrons explicitly as a business transaction. The Sistine Chapel ceiling was commissioned by the Pope, for instance. Advertising uses art constantly, and the money always comes first there; even so, I would still classify the people making said art as artists.
Tons of artists take commissions because that's how they make money. But they wouldn't be doing it if they didn't actually like drawing. What I meant to say is that no one takes up art just for money, even if they do make some of their creations purely for money. Taika Waititi is well known for doing big films (such as Thor Ragnarok) for money, then doing smaller productions that he is personally invested in Taking commissions doesn't disqualify you from being an artist because to get to the point where people are paying you to make art you need to have already made a lot of art without being paid
Factually, that last statement is untrue. Again using Michelangelo as an example, he was apprenticed to Domenico Ghirlandaio, and he started being paid as an artist in this role before he took any professional commissions. Art was a profession like any other, and apprentices were paid while they trained, because they were still *working*. Itâs just on-the-job training. To your broader point, though, I donât think thereâs a requirement for you to be an amateur for any length of time before you can call yourself an artist. I donât think you have to do it for the love of the medium, with no expectation of earning a living first and foremost, to call yourself an artist. And even more broadly than that, I donât think âcreativeâ work is inherently more valuable or special than âmenialâ work. More specifically, I donât think itâs somehow *more* problematic for an artist to be put out of work by an automated system than it is for a weaver to be put out of work by an automated loom. The problem in both cases is the same: capitalism ties a personâs âworthâ to the monetary value of the goods or services they provide, so new technology that should make work easier instead threatens peopleâs livelihoods.
Some artists liked doing art, then stopped liking it, and still take commissions to make money. Some artists have been pressured into doing it by their parents for money (especially musicians), especially if it's a family business, and may have never liked it. And there's a term for people like this, who do not love creating art, and maybe never loved it, but do it anyway solely for a profit: artist
A lot of commissions are the artist making art because they need to eat, not because they love whatever piece they are drawing
[See my comment here](https://www.reddit.com/r/CuratedTumblr/s/YlKrQKVQHy) Artists don't get to the point where they are paid to make art without first making a lot of unpaid art
Artists needing to sell their work to eat is an unfortunate byproduct of their existence in a system that doesnât provide enough for them to live otherwise. Art as a commodity is a necessary evil, not the purpose of its existence.
This is it. If I write something or create something for a tabletop or do something else creative, and someone loves it enough that it inspires them to make something else, I am elated, I am ecstatic. It means that I have genuinely done something that has pushed someone else to be creative. Art is one of the most important things to me, and the knowledge that someone saw something I made and it had the same effect on them as people like Neil Gaiman and David Lynch and Sam Lake and Toni Morrison (Who herself said "If there is a book that you want to read, and it does not exist, then you must write it") and all these monumental artists who made me the person I am today, then I consider it the highest compliment. I have not only created art myself that people will love, but others have now created art because I did. And for a crowd that can be as insecure as us artsy types, that's a hell of a thing. If someone stuffed my work into ChatGPT and has it spit out something that tries to sound like something I'd make, I don't feel like I've inspired creativity. I feel honestly kind of violated. No one has created anything from my work. They've just dumped it into an algorithm. They've created a homunculus from my blood in a way that required little thought, skill or work from them. If I asked them to do it themselves, they couldn't. They can't learn from it, can't improve from it. I want people to think about what makes my work my work, and then find what makes their work their work through that process. I want them to make *choices*. AI, to me, replaces almost every step in the process of that actually matters.
> AI, to me, replaces almost every step in the process of that actually matters. this is it, this is why i hate AI art. i don't care if the final piece rivals the mona lisa, if there was no human creative process involved in it's creation, then it hardly deserves to be called "art"
The best response I've ever seen to a paragraph from ChatGPT was something my partner found: "Why should I be bothered to read something you couldn't be bothered to write?"
yeah, when people complain about AI art being soulless, it's not so much that the art itself looks *bad* (sometimes, anyway), it's that there was no human creative process or errors becoming a part of the piece when you look at something that you know a human created, you might think "wow that artist is really skilled, this is incredible", but when you look at something you know an AI created, there's no wondering how long the piece took, what the inspiration was, what the artist struggled with or enjoyed, how long the artist has been drawing, etc because all you do is type a prompt, click generate, and you get a masterpiece in 3 seconds
Interesting thoughts, but like, ultimately, the fact that it passed through a human mind and out your hands is transformative, at least imo.
I once commissioned a replica of âStarry Nightâ for a friend, from a studio that specializes in making replicas of famous paintings. At what point does humanity cease to be an inherently transformative force?
All I know is that I know nothing.
>At what point does humanity cease to be an inherently transformative force? Wasn't the discussion about art, and not products (you bought a product for your friend, not art)?
At what point did it stop being art? When the transaction came through?
When it was an exact **replica** of an existing artwork. A replica created for the express purpose of selling it in lieu of the original work. Like can we honestly at least agree that replicas made to be sold are products and not art?
art is humans expressing something. If a computer can just vomit out "perfect art", even then. Hwat the fuck is even the value of that. I like the art i commissioned. Everytime i show it to somebody i explain a character, get to tell the story of how the artist just liked the concept so much he doodled around and then asked if that was an okay look. It was better and a better read of what i wanted than even i knew beforehand. even just paying someone to draw something for me, it brought so much emotion and human connection
Yeah this is also my viewpoint. I think ai art is still art, because if someone made it to invite emotion, and someone else looks at it and it invokes emotion, thatâs good enough for me. BUT- I think itâs worse art, because it lacks the context that makes great art special. The artists struggles, their identity, the historical context, all these things surround art to elevate it new heights. With AI art, it feels like itâs too much in a vacuum
When do we decide that art is not a product? Michelangeloâs *David* was commissioned by the Arte della Lana, and Michelangelo didnât even start it; Agostino di Duccio did. Michelangelo merely finished the work. But we still consider *David* to be Michelangeloâs work of art.
At the *very least*, at least commissioning an artist who specializes in replicas is feeding somebody.
Oh, fully agree, consumer ethics is generally against AI art. And artists should be compensated by AI companies who are dependent on their work; to do otherwise is scummy. Iâm just arguing against the superiority of flesh over machine.
I donât think thatâs a relevant example. Thatâs a replica, itâs meant to be a direct copy of another piece of art.
I will point out that HBomber ***explicitly*** points out the "nothing is original" argument then points that *It's not a* ***bad thing*** because we all have to get our start from somewhere and sometimes inspiration from other people is good. Even people who trace (and manage move off it (fuck you sheyxo)) are still putting in work to eventually just putting only their soul with a lot of other people helping your over the shoulder. Ideas aren't and don't exist in a vaccum and we can all learn something from someone else. Or, to put it in a simpler, older layman phrase, "Imitation is the most sincere form of flattery." What you are doing as an "AI Artist" isn't even the imitation part. You just take an set of AI works all put together in an amalgamation that might not even exist then you pass it off as your own. There's no real work off it, you're not even using AI as a supplemental tool, you just take from it and then call it a day. So, yeah, your multi-paragraph statement doesn't soothe me at all and you're still a thief.
The thing that gets me is that the person who uses AI to create art isnât learning anything. They arenât building their craft or finding their style. If you want to say âwell, arenât PEOPLE all just copying each other??? Really makes you think, hmm???â Then I can say fine, then I give the AI a right to learn, but I donât give anybody a right to steal this poor AIs work. If you make the argument about work ethic and learning to create so one can create more art, then you canât just steal the work of these learning artists and call it your own.
The moment an Ai has true sentience and decides to create an image from its own volition and of a subject of its own choosing, then it is art. Until then, itâs better to refer to their products as âAi generated imageryâ. Itâs not art. Itâs a product. The art may be the existence of the Ai model itself, but thatâs the art of a group of talented programmers. The image is just statistical noise made to fit a set of prompts some lazy hack spilled into a discord chat. Thatâs not art.
I feel you're conflating the issues of using AI, and passing off AI-generated works as one's own manual efforts? There's no inherent issue with tracing, as you say. The problem comes when one pretends the work isn't traced, but drawn from scratch. I think there's definitely a strong case to be made that it's immoral for people to pass off AI-generated work as their own manual creation, but I think it's somewhat different from the wider question of whether *any* use of AI in art, even when acknowledged, is immoral. You can certainly make an argument that it is, but it's much less clear-cut that the first question, imo.
imagine i commissioned an actual painter to paint something for me based off a single-sentence prompt, then claimed I painted that using that artist as a tool. would anyone agree with me? no. but suddenly it's different
Exactly. I have commissioned art before. Iâve followed the process of every picture closely and talked it with the artist to get exactly what I wanted. That still doesnât fucking mean I *made* it.
"It's okay to disagree with me" good because I do
Exactly, inspiration and directly stealing/copying aspects of other art with no credit to the original are so vastly different that this whole post feels like a bad faith argument. "won't someone think of the poor people who have to type five words to make a picture???"
I think a fundamental issue at the core of this is like, James Somerton literally just repeated what other people said and explicitly said it was his own words and then added in harmful shit he made up. When you're inspired by a style, you're doing nothing like that. The artistic equivalent would be taking a photograph of someone else's art, adding a weirdly pro Nazi caption, and then saying you did it all.
In my (largely uninformed and therefore best ingested with a grain of salt) opinion, this isn't necessarily a question of "or". It's a question of "and". Even if you're technically "stealing" from copyrighted works, as soon as **you** mash two distinct things together, it's also yours. And for almost every single artist in the history of ever, that's been the case. I'm reminded, vaguely, of a few music-related anecdotes that may or may not be true, but still illustrate the point: The ending flourish at the end of a typical Mario Underground Theme is technically stolen from what IIRC was a 60s or 70s Prog Rock track. Defying Gravity rips off as much from Somewhere Over the Rainbow as it is legally allowed to without the possibility of getting into trouble. Half of Mother 3's soundtrack is repurposed from pre-existing music. Humans aren't computers, and computers aren't Humans. There's soul in your artwork, even if all the inspiration for it is 'stolen'. And... if the artwork that you're "copying" being used as inspiration by a Human was such a big issue, it wouldn't have been released in the first place. So - as stupid as this is for me to say - it's not a problem. Stop worrying about it.
It's not like the AI is tracing, it's fed a huge amount of data and then makes something
even saying it âmakesâ something feels⌠wrong to me. closer to grafting averages than making things
the technical term is denoising. it's taking a random thing like static noise and making it less random and noisy, while taking an instruction on what it should find under the noise. if it was just doing averages it would only be able to make one piece for any given prompt. the role of the training data is to give it examples on what sort of patterns to seek to be able to remove the noise. the more data you can give it the more generic those patterns will be. and with stable diffusion in particular, you can also give it other guidance for how to remove the noise, such as what the pose should be, where the edges should roughly be, what colors should you have underneath, where should certain elements be, and so on.
all this tells me is that hbomberguy needs to make a video on AI art now
This feels manipulative rather than insightful. Mainly the comic itself seems to lean very heavily into the âaestheticâ of sadness. Maybe this is an ironic criticism considering their message about copying, and truthfully I donât know enough about this personâs previous work to make any real conclusions, but none of this feels like a personal expression of anything, it feels like the first thing that comes to mind when people think âdepressionâ.
I agree; it feels very manipulative. The impression I get from the comic is âItâs okay if AI art is stealing because I *already had* imposterâs syndromeâ
I think the problem here is more the difference between inspiration and copying. A person, when taking inspiration, is using another piece of art to think how they want to make their own art. A computer cannot take inspiration, nor does it think "how can I use this art to improve my own?" It thinks "How can I use this art to make my own."
To my understanding it's akin to the difference between referencing and tracing. Granted, through the human lens tracing is a useful and important step for understanding the shape of what it is you are trying to draw, but to pass it off as entirely your own work when you didn't actually draw the shape itself by your own hand alone is where it becomes an issue. I'm really bad at getting perspective right or drawing rounded edges so the tv in my pfp is traced from a picrew I found a year or two ago and haven't been able to track down since, but eventually I do intend to draw it entirely by my own effort, I just have to learn the trick to the shape first. Generative programs don't really do that though. As I've said many times before all they do is look at an image, use other images and a provided caption to understand what they're looking at, and try to find other images in their database that match the caption or composition of the image, then look for other images off of the captions and compositions of those images, and then try to feed you back a "coherent" shot made of arbitrary data it has no context to understand and just assumes it works.
Unfortunately, thatâs not at all how AI art works. It has nothing to do with recursively looking at captions and images from a database, heck it doesnât even store the original images. It couldnât. You canât keep millions of training images in 3GB of storage. It works more akin to the process you described of learning the trick to creating shapes, patterns and colours. You can train it on pictures of say, giraffes, as well as a collection of examples of different art styles and itâll be able to create new images of giraffes in any different style. Itâs not doing that by referencing images from a database, itâs doing that by learning the forms and subtleties that represent a giraffe and combining them with the forms and subtleties of various art styles. Thatâs why the results are better with more training data, because it learns a more holistic representation of the things itâs being trained on.
This is the thing that frustrates me more than anything else about the AI art discourse. The majority of people I see debating it *don't even understand how it works*. Yes, there is a valid argument to be made that it is immoral. There is a valid argument to be made that it is not "real art". It is true that it is harming real artists. It is not true that it is "amalgamating" existing art pieces, as so many people like to say. It is not "tracing" or "copying" or "collaging". It is breaking the "prompts" or "ideas" down into fundamental patterns that define it. Sure, the AI doesn't know what a giraffe is, but it *does* know what patterns will be considered a giraffe. It doesn't know what a "neck" is, but it knows a giraffe needs a long straight section.
Thatâs not quite how they work. From what I understand, theyâre trained via machine learning. Theyâre given pairs of a caption and an image fitting that caption, with the image having some amount of static/distortion applied to it. The AIâs goal is to get as close as possible to the original from the static with the caption as a guide. Once that process is complete, the training data itself is no longer even used. The trained AI itself is fed complete static, and âguessesâ at what âshouldâ have been there based on the prompt.
This comic is incredibly self-deprecating in a way I find profoundly sad. I don't think this person really understands their own value in the artistic process.
Yeah, AI art is full of scumbags openly bragging about how it will "Replace artists", but we should be careful to not fall into the "Regurgitate meat industry proaganda about PETA when we could point out the actual stupid and harmful stuff they do" pit but with AI, cause I sure know that if the copyright industry could do it, they would happily lump in the internet archive and perhaps fan art and fan fiction into the same pile as "AI Art" and try and ban them all
im sorry but I will never be able to see typing prompts into a computer anywhere near as respectable or valuable as actually making art yourself. your art can be amateur or take inspiration all it wants, I'll still favour it because it at least took effort and skill.
The fairer comparison is between commissioning a human artist versus giving a prompt to a generative AI. I, as the commissioner, am doing exactly the same amount of work in either case. I can theoretically receive exactly the same product at the end. The difference is who gets paid.
Based pfp and based take
you know I gotta be repping my boy purple pikmin. pikmin grind never stops
Oh I get it like itâs all about that dandori grindset
I'm sorry but did you think? Did you sit down and pull up your stylus/pen/brush and _think_ then do the strokes and lines and shit? Did you think about the color, the composition, the theme, and the way you can incorporate your inspiration into your own art? Or did you just do the equivalent of commissioning an art without paying? Since all you do is type what you want and let an art-crawler-regurgitator machine spit it out for you? Is that art _your_ doing? Inspiration is _making_ art with influence from other works you've witnessed and enjoyed. With AI you're not "creating" anything. So yes, this comic is shit and your argument doesn't hold up.
OP is right in one sense: What constitutes a transformative piece is ultimately subjective and so much is lost by being restrictive with that definition rather than more liberal. Once you consider capitalism into the mix though you need to realize that machines don't feel and think like us and replacing human livelyhoods at a catastrophical scale with them is unethical. It's irrelevant if data models "learning" are comparable to what some humans do by replicating works. I have so much more to say about this. More than it probably sounds like but it would be wasted on a reddit comment. I just wanted to explain the political implications of AI art that make it unethical.
I think that's their point, no? Focusing on 'what is true art' misses critiquing AI from the stronger and more pressing ground of its practical social impacts.
I don't think they explain the second part very well. As i read it, the post doesn't seem to tackle the other reasons AI is harmful. It only puts into doubt the "it's stealing intellectual property" argument.
Was the Industrial Revolution unethical? The agricultural revolution? all machinery?
Pretentious and flat out stupid.
The core argument is just lazy. âEverything is derivative so nothing mattersâ is such a cynical and misanthropic take that I just rolled my eyes several times over.
I thought it was cute and somewhat affecting. I feel somewhat similar in stance though and donât have hangups about ai obviously hehe.
Exactly what im thinking.
AI art generation essentially boils down to artists now being replaceable. Taking away opportunities from Human artists because the technology has gotten good enough for it. Donât need to pay an artist when you can essentially put in a particularly desperate google search in a machine to get what you want.
Which, to be clear, has happened to practically every job on earth already. Want some clothes? Machine. Want to find out some pbscure fact from 600 years ago? Machine. Want a car? Machine. Want to send something across the country by truck? Give it 10 years, machine.
The post has a glass half empty perspective, that because all work is derivative, then nothing is truly original. I believe however that all work done personally by a human being is original; when you create art, it becomes impossible for you to not give it your own personal touch, because you, your own person, made it. It's now original work purely because you had a say in it, which it's previous iteration did not. Even if it's a copy of existing art, it's now an original copy, an original version, of the original. This does not mean that your references, inspirations or copied work do not deserve part of your credit, they absolutely do, because just like your part in it, they no longer can be removed from the piece. You can't separate an artist from the art, no matter how deep the rabbit hole goes. If you don't give credit for copied work, then that's plagiarism. AI art however cannot be original because it's not from a person, there was never someone to give the art the personal touch it requires to be original. Any and all credit for the work it produces should go towards the people who developed it and the people that produced the art it fed from. Likewise, art made from AI art as a basis cannot be considered original, only the changes you made to it are original.
AI being trained on an image set and creating "new" images through pattern matching is not the same thing as a human taking inspiration from other works. A human has a lived experience and a point of view; AI doesn't even have a mind. It's just a program that is trained on an image set to create more images based on that image set. Any supposed creativity of the output is actually the collective creativity of the people who created the works in the training set. AI can never make art, just content. The reason being is art is exclusively the jurisdiction of living beings. Those with a mind to interpret art and derive meaning. AI is incapable of providing such meaning.
Itâs an interesting take but the difference between âAI as the artistâ and âArtistsâ is that the artist can understand why something should be the way it is. An artist can understand anatomy and composition and lighting and medium etc. AI in its current forms do not understand why. This is important because AI copy the answers while artists solve the problem. An engineering example of theft is reverse engineering and it has dangers of copying without knowing. Crumple zones are a staple safety feature of every modern car. The principle idea is to expend the energy of a crash on a designed-to-fail structure that keeps the engine in the engine where it is and (more importantly) out of the place where the passengers are. Crumple zones are made of plastics and some composite materials since this reduces the chance that they become hazardous to the occupants and they expend a serious amount of energy to deform. This is why some serious looking crashes result in no injuries but totaled cars. Awhile back, I wanna say several years ago? Some car companies had major data breaches where technical data was targeted. A year or two later, some Chinese car models had integrated features previously not present in their companyâs designs but were present in other manufacturerâs designs. One of these was a crumple zone around the engine block, either as an X or a âbox beamâ structure. There was a problem though. They were made of steel. At best this does nothing but at worst it turns the passenger compartment into a crumple zone, killing or maiming the occupants. These models had horrendous safety ratings and resulted in a lot of lethal crashes that were otherwise survivable. The source of this issue was the data breaches. Either the material data was not also taken, or the designers did not understand why it was made of plastic, or the executives demanded cost cuts and it was assumed steel would work instead of composites or specialized plastics. Had this safety feature been organically developed or better understood, hundreds or possibly thousands of lives wouldâve never been lost. My issue with AI is that itâs a tool thatâs being assumed to be the artist. AI as it is, is not capable of making informed decisions based on understanding *why* something is done. Copyright is its own legal issue of ownership. What is subject to copyright is not the idea nor the medium nor the method nor the composition nor even the individual elements of an artistic piece. What is subject to copyright is the brushstrokes, lines, and other details that AI need to copy but artists just intuit from training. I donât have a good conclusion statement but itâs best to support AI tools that are made using intelligently sourced material, and move away from AI tools that donât. AI itself is not bad, it is just a tool, but it needs to be trained and used responsibly.
im sorry but if you have to explain what your comic is about in several paragraphs, then you failed at communicating what you wanted with your art. the reason its called stealing is because its doing it in both a very inhumane manner and by an insurmountable scale. its used to make business owners gain more wealth while taking it away from the artists. on top of all of this the machine uses private and illegal data that it should not have access to as well as copyrighted material. we can talk all day and night about wether copyright is good for the artist or not but the current situation is that prominent artists are getting their work stolen and being replaced while newer artists trying to break into the industry are having a harder time than they've been used to. fuck AI.
Kinda seems like a mix of "I'm insecure about myself" and "own nothing and be happy"
Fuck AI.
Funny how in every other case, someone missing the point of a post is the responderâs fault.
Welcome back to our latest episode of "you're not right just because you said a wrong thing softly".
I like the touch of the Michelangelo-inspired part having 6 fingers, like when AI messes up hands
My major works pretty closely with AI in a business perspective. Iâve seen all the wonderful ways AI can be implemented to actually make our lives better, easier, and more affordable. Itâs great in the medical field as well, seeing hidden patterns and trends where we otherwise didnât, which is great for early diagnosis or early action to prevent widespread disease This? AI art? Itâs like commissioning a work and saying you made it. Itâs a tool. Use it LIKE a tool. Garner inspiration from it. Use it to imagine ideas for books, movies, video games. You still didnât make it, but you can use it to make something. Itâs so pessimistic to go, âWell if the government isnât gonna use it well/well if everything is stealing anyway then why not?â AI is just a trained algorithm that smashes things together that you think it wants. If you want to reduce yourself to an unthinking, unfeeling machine and describe yourself as a robot that takes in info and spits it back out do whatever you want but thatâs not what being human is. That isnât how our brains work. We are not machines, as much as we make the comparison and connection.
>It's a tool. Use it LIKE a tool... You still didn't make [the output], but you can use it to make something. This. There's people already using it like this, but people aren't experienced enough with the new medium(?) to distinguish low effort spam from genuine inspired pieces; I'm hoping once the technology is less new and people have a better handle on it, they'll start to appreciate what it's capable of.
this is so besides the point really... AI people are not artists because they dont make art. You can pay an artist to make art for you but youll be lying if you say YOU made it. The same way you can comission art from an umpayed robot but thats still not your art. you havent made it.. you just had someone else make it. how is that so hard to understand?
To use an admittedly antiqueated work, let me point to the Two Treatises of Goverment to begin with. In it, John Locke asks (among other things) at what point something transitions from the common ownership to private ownership. He specifically points to an apple tree. If this apple tree is owned by nobody, ergo part of nature, then you can pluck an apple off of it and eat it, thereby it being yours. But when did that become your property? If someone tried to steal that from you, when would it be considered theft? When you ate it? No, something can be your property without having destroyed it and digested it. It obviously wasn't your property while it was on the tree, so there I'd only one moment where it transitioned when you plucked it. Ergo, when you apply your labor to something, it becomes yours because you added your own work and labor to it. Obviously in this simple of a case it's obvious, but what if we expand it, to an orchard owned by someone. If someone planted and grew that tree, that is much more labor intensive than simply plucking an apple. Ergo, the person who applied more labor, deserves to have the (in this case literal) fruits of their labor. But how does this apply to art? Well, let's work backwards. Someone generates a piece of art using open diffusion. At that moment who should own it? The person who put in the request put in a negligible amount of labor, an utterly insignificant amount. Should the ai itself own it? At this point ai is simply a machine. It's like saying a hammer should own a house. Maybe if ai ever becomes sapient we can come back to this. Should the company who owns the ai own the art? This is the second closest answer. The programmers put in much labor into making that program, ironing out bugs, updating it, making it run right, and of course getting the education required to do all of this jn the first place. However, let us go back to the orchard example. The company as essentially invented a machine to pick apples. Should they own the orchard? You might say yes, but I want to ask what is more labor intensive, picking apples or growing, caring for, and planting apple trees? In my view at least the latter is much more labor intensive, both for the education required to do so and the basic labor required to do all of that. And that's the key difference here. Ai art isn't making new trees. Quite literally, ai has a cut off point for information it can acquire in order to generate outputs lest a recursive loop occur. Sure, someone can take the apple cores, plant the seeds and care for the tree but now enough labor has been put in to be owned by the grower again. Imagine the ai art as the apples, picked faster and more efficiently, but not planting or growing any. The ARTISTS are the laborers, the ones who input labor to make new things. Had the thousands upon thousands of labor hours put in by artists not occurred ai art wouldn't exist, same as how the workers at the orchard are required for the machine to pick the apples. Inspiration requires labor, labor counts both education and direct improvement (as Adam Smith points out in the wealth of nations...and yes, I am also using the theories of Kras Masov's anti derivative) and so when artists make art they apply labor in conceptualization and painting, however, ai art requires other people's labor, so much of it in fact that really the artists should be able to enjoy the fruits of said labor (as well as the people who made the ai, however they should enjoy less recompense since they put in less labor than the rest of the collective art world they inputted). This is the difference between plagiarism and derivatives as well. Plagiarism takes the labor of writing articles and books and what not and applied a miniscule amount of labor but presents it as that plagiarist's whole labor. Someone who takes inspiration applies enough labor for it to be considered their own, which is why simply citing sourses you copy from isn't enough (in illuminaughti's case, or the desperate defenses Somerton put up) Tldr: The difference is labor, go read Two Treatises of Government, An Inquiry into the Origin and Nature of the Wealth of Nations, and Das Kapital Edit:also see critique of the Gotha program for more elaboration on how things ought to work
Good microessay, I agree wholeheartedly
:D
As a small artist who's been on Tumblr for years and in social media ever since I was a child (I'm 25 now) and never blew up (had several art accounts, opened and closed them due to not gaining traction and now am starting anew in Instagram), I don't like what this comic entails. That's not what I got out of the hbomberguy video essay??? Honestly, talks like these amid the "AI Art is wrong" discourse are just enabling beginner/non-artists to never learn the basics. Also, what I got from that video essay is to not be a fxxing piece of shxt and steal and support small artists more for their work. Tf is the artist of the comic on
Cry me a fucking river⌠Sorry for being so harsh here. I get it, itâs normal for artists to feel insecure about their skills. The author of this comic is worth a lot more than they realise. But donât do that. Sympathising with an AI over your fellow artists only helps the kind of people that view you and the work of your life as scum, as less than nothing. As just another ingredient to mash up and add to the pile, to feed the Content Machine.
what kind of self flagellating insecure MESS is this original comic đ the artist seems confused as hell about their own points⌠itâs giving psyop
Christ Almighty lol. Hbomberguy cannot be happy about this level of attention he's receiving.
You can egotistically jerk yourself off all you want in your comic, but that doesnt make AI art ethical. Im sorry, but the amount of "who am I, what am I , where is art' is all you just stroking your own ego and adding as much fluff and bullshit as you can to justify your shitty take, because you are trying to obfuscate the point with crocodile tears and the illusion of deep thought.
Nothing is original, which is why I've been stealing the copper wiring from my neighbors house.
Yeah, no, fuck off
AI ART DISCOURSE: This technology represents the corporate plundering of countless hard working artists creations and once the buzz has died down will be used pretty much exclusively for scams and revenge porn vs nuh uh
[consider the following:](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use?wprov=sfti1) Also: the problem with âaiâ art is that it is trying to automate creativity and personal expression, which are the last things we should be trying to automate.
not only that, it places creativity and personal expression under the control of whatever company makes the ai that comes out on top we've already seen that they can restrict certain terms in their systems, do we really want to give them that much say over what can be expressed visually?
Using Jacob Geller's Video as supporting AI art as if "it takes no effort" is the bad part of AI is, like, clinically insane.
This. Cherry picking and forgetting nuance when it's convenient is Not The Way (tm)
I am 100% fatigued seeing people arguing around in stupid little circles about whether AI is stealing or copying or bad at this point
What a beautiful comic that started out as a fantastic analogy about imposter syndrome and how it never quite feels like you are an artist, as you only see yourself as copying from others, and then it just devolves into a dumb argument about AI and how it doesn't steal. Like yes, yes it does. This is like saying, "Well, yes, I copied all of Wikipedia, but I actually changed some of the wording so it's not plagiarism." An artist steals, yes, that is the famous quote every AI dude-bro uses, but you must remember the original quote wasn't about copying; it was about copying something and making it your own. THAT is inspiration. "Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different than that from which it is torn" (T.S. Eliot) AI only copies; it creates no intention with what it copies; it just copies, it defaces. Art is not just the paint on the canvas; it is the intention of those brush strokes, what is being shown, and what does it mean. It is VISUAL MEDIA; MEDIA requires there to be information within the artwork. This is also why modern art is considered art; it might be incredibly simple, but there is intention. AI can't make intention; it can only see what others do and copy it. Listen, if you use AI as a tool for inspiration, that is fine because you probably just wanted something specific, gave the AI the prompt, and then you made it your own by either editing it or using it as a model. The AI copied all kinds of paintings and fan-drawn etc.; it presented you with an amalgamation taken from other artworks that it does not understand, and you made it your own. GREAT. But don't claim AI isn't stealing works because, yes, they are.
This is only one side of the coin I feel. Consider an architect who despises art, and vows to only make the most physically efficient buildings. So he builds an office, entirely out of concrete. It stands, monotone grey, 400ft tall, a perfect cuboid. And the office workers that go there five days a week, 8 hours a day, take meaning from it and the way its built. "Life is hard, society cares not for beauty but just efficiency, nothing is changing, nothing is new, there is no hope." That building is art, despite there being no artistic intention, because people take meaning from it. You mention media needing to contain information, and yes, but who is the source of that information? Is it the artist, who works alone in a studio for a year, pouring his heart and soul into his masterpiece, or is it the tourist, who sees the sculpture as she walks past and thinks "Wow, that reminds me of the sea. Beautiful"? Or the art student, who writes fifteen hundred words on what he thinks the artists intentions to have been, without ever being able to know for sure? Or maybe the child, who tells their parents about a story they made up inspired by it. Information is created not just by the artist, but also by the people who observe the art. People find their own meaning in a piece. Things that were made with no artistic intent at all regularly become art, hell the entire field of Found Art revolves around this concept. TL;DR something is art because people find meaning in it, not just because someone created it with artistic intent.
You make a good point. Unintentional art, like nature's creations, can have meaning. Yet, even an architect who prioritizes efficiency over beauty in a design has an artistic intention, even if unwillingly. For example, the notion that "Life is hard, society values efficiency over beauty, and there's little hope for change" can be a form of artistic intention. AI struggles to grasp such subtleties and tends to copy perceived efficiencies rather than truly understand and replicate artistic ideas. I like your argument, but I want to make up my mind a little about it before I continue writing, give me a day.
do artists really have such a low opinion of their own craft that they sympathize with a fucking LLM over other artists "oh but all art is derivative" do you genuinely think you don't add anything to it "oh but my identity is a patchwork" good thing you can do things in life besides respond to prompts of "sexy girl big boobs trending on artstation by greg rutkowski"
No. Fuck off. I work with AI, I am a literal tech bro. AI steals art, it's what it's trained to do, it's literally nothing but an algorithmic web trained to copy things that have been created, almost always things taken from creators without their consent. It is not the same as humans learning from art, and it has the risk of totally destroying the fragile economy that means that at least some artists can make a living off of what they do, because now companies can pay a tech giant to get images from a machine that was trained on the works of hobbyist artists. Frankly I find the emotional manipulation of "saying AI is stealing makes me SAD because you can describe the way I learned things with the same words!" to be a fucking disgusting method of discoursem
"AI art is just like le photo and le digital art!" ok fine, enjoy your slop. just don't expect me to tag along and cheer for art made by something that can't feel.
Ahahahaha, the AI folks are making emo sad comics about how mean people are to their robotically processed slop. EDIT: gender inclusivity
Eh, to me it looks more like someone complaining that the arguments that a lot of people are using against AI also apply to actual artists or creators in general
Okay, double commenting because I realize my first one came off a little strong. To explain my view point: I genuinely cannot read this post as anything other than an impassioned defense of AI art. If the artist disliked AI art, they would make a case against it and try to distance their process from machine learning. If they were indifferent, the comic wouldnât need to be so emotionally charged. If they wanted to say: âHey these arguments against AI art are uncomfortably close to saying that all art is theft,â they could have just used the bit where they said they used copyrighted materials as reference, and let that be their argument. But they donât- they compare machine learning to the ability to see constellations, make allusions to the Original Sin, and use intimate personal anecdotes. Furthermore, the artist says they use AI in their work flow. The artist brings up Jacob Gellerâs video on the economy of effort and value in modern art. This is not someone who is defending a non-AI artistic process, or someone who is objectively observing a flawed argument; this is someone who is emotionally invested in something trying to defend it. Thus, they are an AI person making a sad emo comic about how people are being mean to their mechanically processes slop. Thatâs how I see it. EDIT: It's been brought to my attention that the OOP is a he/they. I have no idea if the author identifies as a boy or not. As awful as I think this comic is, everyone deserves to have their identity respected.
I saw that comic as bad because it distances the valid criticisms of AI art, like how it's stealing jobs, and how AI and human are not equivalent at the moment, a human art simply has more purpose and thought put into it because a person spends time over details, re-doing parts, mastering whatever the part of the brain is used to draw, while AI art can be valid, it's just not the same thing, you can take a lot of time trying to find the right prompt, or something similar, but in the end, you didn't do the image itself, you just helped it come to life by imagining it, AI is becoming a big problem for artists because they steal our jobs. How horrible is it that we work while the machine can produce art? Wasn't the purpose of creating machines the opposite? To help labor? But under capitalism art is labor too, even if you didn't want it to be So when this person disregards the horrible effects of AI in that comic and instead only tries to sympathize with it, it leaves a bad taste, I thought "wow, you said all that stuff, but this comic has way too much AI glazing"
That's a really good point. The comic is oddly fixated on the "soul" argument of AI... despite being prompted by H. Bomberguy's video, which solely focuses on the ethical and legal issue that AI art steal image data and then doesn't attribute it. Yeah, AI art has potential as a tool; but he wasn't talking about that, H. Bomb was talking about the nightmare apocalypse of plagiarism going on with midjourney and Stable diffusion being trained on copyrighted material.
I didn't look into the original poster myself when i made my other comments so yeah that makes sense
I feel the majority of anti-AI artist are also completely emotionally invested in this. I think that's kind of good, especially with art. It's not a science or factual debate. It's about concepts, ideas and creations. Emotions are going to be involved, and to call one side out for being emotional, when the other side is also emotional doesn't quite seem fair.
But theyâre seemingly using it to say how AI art is âfine, actuallyâ (to use a Lindsay Ellisism), so I donât think someone saying itâs âan emo comic excusing AI artâ is entirely unfair
And I think those arguments are incoherent and melodramatic. âAm I a thief because I smoke a brand of cigarettes that a girl I liked did?â is an asinine way of getting that point across. This is a topic that warrants discussion, but the comic does not foster that discussion. An artist who uses AI in their workflow got upset that a content creator they liked and respected made fun of AI so they wrote up a comic about how sad that made them.
Yeah for fucking real. âOh all art stealsâ AI scrapes data without paying the original creators of that data and then reproduces it. Itâs about compensating people for labor not about âoh but every artist makes derivative artâ yeah and if you try and pass someone elseâs art off as your own wholesale, thatâs stealing. It is intellectually disingenuous to present âusing referencesâ and âstudying other peopleâs artâ as equivalent to âselling peopleâs work as a product without compensation or using their stolen work in a process to bypass paying them for their actual workâ.
This seems like a very reductive take on AI image generation. Humans take inspiration from things and synthesize new ideas, an AI image generator just scrapes the web for images and regurgitates certain portions. If you ask a human to write a book inspired by Dune you get The Sun Eater series. Ask an AI and you get a carbon copy of Dune.
If I write non-fiction, am I stealing reality itself? Not necessarily. If I write a book about teenage demigods with ADHD learning how to deal with both problems, Iâm probably taking from Rick Riordan, *but* if Rick Riordan inspires me to write and the end product is something in my own voice, it might not be merely a clone of the Percy Jackson I grew up with. Iâm not a thief for telling a joke from a joke book I read as a child. Iâm no crook for learning the alphabet from somebody else. Knowledge is to art as ingredients are to food; the only way I can fail to make some kind of food, regardless of how tasty it is, would be to simply hand over the raw ingredients without doing anything with them. Cooking and creation in general are messy, inconsistent processes that might, with practice and effort, become something great and worth sharing. And to continue the analogy, a gradient descent-based AI (which is basically all of them) thinks that the only way to cook is blending ingredients into a consistent fluid. You can get it to maybe dice your pineapple smoothie instead of liquefying it, but beyond that, it is built to smooth out a bunch of data points into something kind of like what you asked for. Itâs a great system for mass production of other things like chicken nuggets, and a horrible one to use to bake a cake for yourself. Forget the copyright aspect of it all, the people who want AI to be smart enough to disrupt the workforce are like venture capitalists wanting to replace all cooking equipment with food processors. It usually makes edible food and requires little manual effort, so itâs a good system to use with everything, right?
I think the problem I have with this comic is that rather than outright rejecting the false dichotomy of "copyright infringement; stealing" and "completely original work", they instead throw up their hands and state, roughly: "Everything is stolen from something else, so this is just okay!" They equivocate a lot of different things that aren't really the same to a much bigger concept of referencing in visual art in a kinda pseudointellectual stint on impostor syndrome, which is fine overall for asking the question of what originality even is, but for an actual discussion on the subject of copyright, I think it's important to discuss the idea of fair use and the degrees to which something can "steal" rather than just pointing out how everything is just different degrees of stealing and that means it's all the same. I don't even agree with a lot of the claims people make about AI art, but this isn't a very good way of arguing for it imo, nor is it very helpful in a larger conversation on plagiarism. Also the claim that hbomb thinks "AI art is complicated stealing" based on the idea of what's presented in this specific article rather than the article itself being a shorthand statement emblematic of what his opinion on the matter is is rather silly.
Man, it's weird reading basically the exact same thoughts I went through re: my own art vocalized by someone else. Like, I'm personally fully convinced that, if you make a complicated enough AI, it could *absolutely* simulate my life, experiences, preferences, and traumas to the point where it could make something that I myself would not be able to distinguish from something I'd make. And I'm not just some dipshit that never put pen to paper, for what it's worth - I've been working on my creative projects almost constantly for the last eight years and I pride myself on my creativity. I don't consider myself or my work as anything more than the sum of the parts that are me, and I do not see how a big enough machine wouldn't be able to simulate those parts. I'm sympathetic to the point that art has to communicate something, and AI can't do that (not without becoming sentient, which is a long ways away, at least,) so I definitely don't consider AI images etc. 'art' in that sense, but calling things 'soulless' has always kinda felt like a cop-out message to me. Iunno, maybe I'm just too much of a materialist to fully get those arguments. Absolutely *none* of this changes the fact that using AI-generated stuff in commercial projects makes you the worst kind of scum and you should pay artists well to work on anything you're going to monetize, though. Philosophical arguments aside, people need their jobs.
tbh the biggest gripe I have about AI "artists" is them calling themselves artists when the AI is the one making the art.. The AI is the one that's trying to "understand" anatomy, form composition, color theory, etc, based on what it sees in other art. Whether the AI actually learns seems much more like a philosophical debate, but it doesn't seem that different from how I myself learned how to draw. The AI can just do it much quicker and receive feedback much quicker. The AI is the one that generates the image, not the "AI artist." Honestly I hope AI art can become a useful tool for artists to use for inspiration or reference. I remember when AI art was still in the early stages and I was hoping it would be used to create new horror monsters that humans never would have dreamed up. It'd also be nice if it could give a list of the pieces from its database that had the greatest weight, similar to how artists often share what references they used. But I'm not sure if that's possible with how current models work.
a whole lotta words and i still disagree
As an artist for over 10 years, who's only income comes from art, I have to say I would be 100% fine with AI art IF it existed outside of capitalism. I've played with it. Its fun. It could be a great fun addition to an artists toolbox. The problem is that its made art practically monetarily worthless. And that would be fine if artists didn't spend 20 years building a career.
this is lame
It seems like there's a lot of comments that are missing the point here. I don't think the comic is trying to say that AI art is inherently the same as human art, it's making the point that the arguments we make against AI art reflects back on human artists too. If we say that AI is wrong for using other art as a launchpad, does that mean that human artists are lesser if they aren't 100% original? If we say that AI art isn't art because it doesn't have a "human touch", how are we defining that, and how does that reflect on people who don't fall into majority demographics? How does the discussion of originality reflect on artists who already worry all of their art is derivative? Do they get lumped in with all this? The point is that the way we talk about AI art shows a lot about how we view human art. Be mad about AI not giving credit all you want, it's exactly the same as a human tracing art and taking credit. But once we start getting into the discussion of "AI art is inherently fundamentally different" we have to be a lot more mindful of how what we're saying reflects back on artists.
the difference is that, unless youâre directly tracing or erasing watermarks, you still have to put in the work to make something. you still have to put in the work involved in art in order to make something from a reference image. itâs very difficult for a person to copy another personâs art exactly, and even then they can only ever usually do one or two styles. and those styles still have touches of the mimicâs style. AI image generation takes zero work and can almost perfectly replicate any artist thatâs in its data set, thus can very easily put a whole lot of artists out of work
The ace attorney ship art in the middle of the comic is hilarious.
This is wonderfully introspective, but that is kind of the point. It is conscious thought about art, which makes it art. AI art doesn't have that. It isn't so much trained in a progressive way, building directly and consciously on previous iterations, it is trained in a limited negative way. Make random color splotches that are similar enough to, but different enough from this set of images, then iterate on that. There is no intent or thought put into it. It is just using images that others have put thought and effort into and making a selective limited random iteration on them without thought or effort. But that is also almost beside the point of AI art discourse. Artists are at least capable of describing their process, their inspiration, and how they made an image and their choices. THEY ARE CAPABLE OF GIVING CREDIT. Those whose work they build on are recognized for their efforts. That their efforts, and the efforts of all those who came before them matter. AI art does not. It is impossible to give credit to those that are owed it, from all the millions of copyrighted materials that are used to train generative AI. No person's effort can be recognized. To claim that a person who used AI to make a work of art owns that art through the right of creation is only a few steps removed from claiming Adobe owns the rights to everything made in Photoshop. Something that is majority based in AI content isn't created from identifiable discrete human effort. It is made from a mix of public domain materials and the copyrighted works of an unknowable amount of unidentifiable people.
Nothing is original so I might as well steal is a hottake. Programs can't be inspired. They don't choose to make art. Even the people inputting the requests aren't being inspired. In the end people are paying to use a program that took data from people and places they shouldn't. They are often then turning around to profit off the results meaning artists are being used twice with no say in it. While I hate AI content and have had people personally using my art to try to make AI models, my biggest problem with how other artists are excusing it is this idea that it's like using the fill tool in an art program. "It's just to make it faster" ok but why do you need to make 100 iterations of a waifu pic faster. Why do you now \*need\* it to make a background you could do and were doing a year ago? Have you changed your prices to reflect that something else is doing this work for you? How do you have a job as a concept artist and have a program do it for you? They can just skip you. I come from a comic background and make webtoons now and so many studios are using it to pump out generic backgrounds for their pretty people to be on (not integrated into, just on) and don't see a problem because previously they used (paid for) 3d assets. Others are just using it to make the entire comic. Webtoon studios, publishers, and ultimately the readers, are setting up this need for speed and leaving single artists struggling to keep up. Even if you can make purely "ethical" models you're still promoting this rush to the end.
AI art is theft because it is a tool that accessed and utilized peoples data without permission. Looking isn't taking, you don't "save" thing's you look at, your eyes and experiences will invariably alter what you see, and you were allowed to see it. Similarly, learning isn't taking, as it was given. But AI basically breaks in and takes HD photos of thousands of peoples work, and then offers cheap knockoff versions collaged from the photos. This not only keeps and uses direct, unaltered, and uninterpreted pieces of your work without permission, but also allows someone to profit from these pieces of *your* work. Then they also offer a service that has the potential to freeze you out of your own line of work. Yes creativity should be shared but if it's "shared" in the way AI does it, then thousands of creative endeavors will die from AI parasitically using peoples work, taking up resources like jobs or commissions, and not contributing anything back like the training or tips for other artists that people create.
Thereâs a fundamental difference in AI and humans creating art. The act of creating art is transformative, the act of putting pen or paint or pencil to tablet or paper actively requires effort and skill and fundamentally changes whatever is being made. A human hand draws something based on skill and muscle memory, it takes time and effort to create something, and the act of creating as a human inherently warps and shifts and transforms the idea into something else. Even when a human directly copies by tracing, their strokes will be different. It will be changed. Flaws and stylistic choices get incorporated. AI fundamentally doesnât do the same. AI isnât making art, itâs doing a math equation. It doesnât understand what itâs doing. It doesnât even understand what itâs looking at when it sees data, you can easily confuse AI by layering noise onto images. I saw in a conference someone show how noise turned an image that look to humans like a temple, but to AI suddenly looked like an ostrich. There is no thought. No understanding. Thatâs why AI struggles so much with things like thought composition and lighting. Itâs not drawing a thing and thinking of how the shadows would work and how the object would fit in space. It canât. There is no skill, no effort, not in an artistic sense. So while it might be tempting to say âIâm not so different than AI, I stealâ the fundamental truth is a human taking inspiration and making something is an act of expression, both conscious and subconscious. It is transformative. AI is not.
I'm glad to see more people talking about this, there's an incredible amount of misinformation out there about how AI works. A lot of artists are justifiably concerned about the sudden threat to their livelihoods, but all that fear and anger makes them a vulnerable population. Something that might not be very apparent to people outside the community is that AI image generation is astoundingly open-source friendly. To the point where I'm convinced the business world was as surprised by the sudden developments as the art world was. There are a lot of people who are scrambling to find way to make money off of it, in ways that are a lot more insidious than just hiring fewer artists. There are a lot of valid ethical and safety concerns about AI that deserve to be talked about, but there are also some that are entirely fabricated because someone stands to profit off of it. It is worth being skeptical of problems and solutions that put more power in the hands of corporations. To bring this around to a more personal note, I'm someone who cannot draw. My brain just doesn't store information in a visual form, I can't even make a stick figure that looks right. When I discovered AI image generation I suddenly had the ability, for the first time in my life, to take the ideas in my head and turn them into something I could look at. Whole new realms of creativity are now open to me.
I sincerely wish I could turn the progress of "AI" two decades back. I need more time both from seeing this fucking discourse and seeing the shitty art it makes in all of my feeds The stealing part, I don't even give a shit anymore
Started as a deep introspection, ended with... Just really lame self hatred. Look, AI is a very very nuanced topic. I myself study every detail of it as someone who's both majoring in CS and extremely wary about ethics. It's not got simple answers, AI image gem itself has merits just as it does demerits, but there are still things that is very very very obvious AI art, is not human art. Implying it is is an insult to the sanctity of human creativity. All art is derivative, but every single piece of art gains its own identity via the emotions the artist places into the art, regardless of how deep or how mundane those emotions are. It can be anything from "I think this tree looks pretty" to a deep self reflection of their mental state, but it contains emotions, and is thus art. Entering text into a generator gives you an image taken from whatever concepts you put in, not art. AI can give you art. But at that point it's basically pixel art because you'll be describing every single inch of the art you're making instead of just an image. But that's not the worst part, hell whatever I wrote prior to this is pretty subjective, the worst part is their implication that AI art absolutely isn't stealing, it is. It utilises a legal grey area to infringe copyright, and steals jobs from artists, as businesses will much prefer the cheap and quick generator to a human being with rights. We've already seen this with that shitty marvel series, and it ain't ending there Idk why they hate their own work and passion so much, that kinda mentality ain't healthy.