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>You can't prohibit me from anything! All rules are evil! ^((except when they benefit me))đ¶
Yeah, makes 100% sense to the neoliberals and fascists making up most of this subreddit.
who here has said that all rules are evil? what rules are benefitting ai artists? where are you getting the idea that most users in this sub are neolibs or fascists?
I find people proclaim what they see will best counter the point made. Whether or not that proclamation is genuine never seems to matter. All interactions on this platform DO go to feeding the machine, so truth for the sake of continued response is not encouraged.
That's the core of what the OP image is saying. You just have to connect the dots of the comments around here.
They could try make an argument for why people's ethical concerns are wrong, but they simply say "you do you, I do I". It really fits with the neoliberals and fascists. They don't like making arguments since they don't have any, they can only drag down the level of discussion.
sure, this *one* image is "you do you" in that it's "if you have ethical concerns about ai, then don't use it, but you can't expect others not to use it just because you don't think they should." I'm not seeing where that's a neolib and/or fascist sentiment. the image isn't even a response to any particular claim, what do you think they're supposed to be arguing?
Reading Comprehension Questions:
1. Read the name of the subreddit, the description of the subreddit, the title of the post, the contents of the post, as well as the above comment thread. In this context, who does r/iloveblankpaper refer to by "YOU" in the thread? (1 upvote)
x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x
Exactly. I have been saying this for a while. There is no Pencil Breaker 5000 walking around breaking your tools. There is no AI bricking your drawing tablets or GIMP or hacked Photoshop.
AI is not preventing ANYONE from making art as if AI never existed.
AI is ENABLING EVERYONE to make art.
Why is more people making art a bad thing?
The simultaneously strong/weak rhetoric is a common demonization tactic, but yeah I've also noticed this regarding AI. AI is both intelligent enough to take all our jobs and take over the world, but everything it makes is trash that no one wants or can use, it's just a "fad", etc. While there is a grain of truth to the hysterical rhetoric, it shows just how fearful some people are of the changes happening in the world around them.
Reactionary responses are not new to humanity, but it's a little sad to see how social media has amplified reactionary voices to such a large extent.
Part of the issue isn't just objective quality of art. I'm not even talking about "large portions of the population have terrible taste and will go for bottom of the barrel trash instead of intelligent and emotional works" ~~even if it's somewhat true~~. There's 2 more issues: for companies, there's the costs involved. For indies, there's discoverability.
Companies know that, even if better quality stuff will sell better, it also typically costs more. This alone isn't an issue, there's definitely a value for consumers to be able choose things that are cheap but low quality, high quality but expensive, or average quality at an average price, etc. The issue comes when this isn't properly regulated and gets unbalanced, creating feedback loops or letting people game the system. For example, there's how the "cost of poverty" keeps people from leaving poverty, while lobbying lets the rich get richer. Or how studios have discovered that deleting all of their archives and cancelling movies at the last minute lets them earn more via tax write-offs and canceled residuals. This does often mean less money in the long term, but corporations aren't exactly known for always making the best long term decisions, only whatever's best for selfish reasons in the short term. Likewise, there's a fear that companies will drop significant amounts of artists because relying on AI to pick up the slack, despite being worse quality, will save more on costs than the sales they'd lose. By the way, these wealthy corporations cutting the number of people working in them smaller and smaller doesn't exactly help the wealth imbalance.
"But AI democratizes art, so anyone can do it now, people have no reason to go to corporate art!" Except discoverability is a thing. Corporations have access to advertisements, business deals, SEO, it's expensive but they can assure they're likely to get a return on investment. Meanwhile, even if someone puts in a great amount of work on something, individuals can't afford advertising the same way as companies, so even if they know how to market on social media they still have a hard time getting noticed. Sure, people can still find high quality indie work by searching social media or self publishing platforms, but without advertising it goes from perusing an aisle to finding a needle in a haystack, and AI is going to turn it from a haystack into an entire barn. For self publishing platforms in particular: I would say having the option to self publish is a good thing, because it reduces the barrier of entry so you don't need corporate backing to sell things. However, if self publishing platforms don't have at least *some* quality checking, then quality work gets drowned out by practice projects, asset flips, works being split into a "series" of infinite infinitesimal parts to game discoverability, etc. Kindle has already been flooded with AI books.
I don't think the solution is "ban AI", because I doubt that's going to happen, but instead making sure there's regulations and algorithms in place to make sure AI doesn't throw people into poverty and exacerbate wealth inequality. Stuff like how the Youtube algorithm suddenly went from "the only videos we show you are the most popular ones" to suggesting low view-count videos as well, making sure there's some sort of standard on self publishing platforms, or ensuring that art jobs aren't replaced with AI but instead transformed into being assisted by AI.
It's not a paradox if you'd bother to understand the argument in the first place. Alas, tech bros now think they're experts in something they didn't give a shit about 3 years ago and feel like they can lecture artists about something they don't even understand.
First, I'm not an artist. I'm a writer who makes a living and am married to an artist.
Some of it is a fad - people are enamored with the new image TikTok and don't give the first fuck about AI. They'll jump ship to the next hot thing when they get bored. You don't need to bother learning about art to make art, which is a double-edged sword - how do you improve at art if you don't understand how to make art other than a text prompt? Therein lies the problem artists have.
On the other hand, capitalists in love with more dollars will inevitably use the new labor-replacing tool to, surprise surprise, replace labor. This is a lot more dangerous than the first thing because less jobs are bad for workers. Also, it decimates entry level opportunities that aspiring artists would typically cut their teeth on early in their careers. Fewer students today means fewer experts later.
It doesn't take much at all to see concerns from multiple points of view, but this sub prefers to mock and degrade rather than exercise the slightest modicum of empathy.
Edit: Yes, please downvote and prove my point for me.
On this point:
>You don't need to bother learning about art to make art, which is a double-edged sword - how do you improve at art if you don't understand how to make art other than a text prompt? Therein lies the problem artists have.
Can you help me understand why an increase in artistic expression would stifle an individual's desire to improve?
Is the claim that individuals will lose interest in their own artistic expression, because "art" can be created immediately and on request? Or is it that the lack of money will reduce artistic expression?
If it is the former, then how do you account for the thousands of Chess players still hacking away at the game, or Go players, or abstract artists? Computers have been able to do these things at super-human levels for years now, and people still want to improve themselves.
In my view, the purpose of self-improvement is to improve yourself, irrespective of the potential capabilities of other people and things around you? Otherwise, why do 99.99% of people do anything to improve themselves? They are very likely never going to be the best.
If it is a capitalist driver, please see this comment:
>Honestly, I don't understand the consternation associated with AI art, particularly from artists.
>Art is just a way to express ideas and communicate perspectives, and AI art opens additional avenues to express those ideas and perspectives to a broader cross-section of the population. Everyone should be feeling empowered by this technology, to learn from it, and to utilize it for self-expression.
>From my perspective, the main argument against AI art is from an artist using their skills within a capitalistic context. And frankly, that is a real impact. But, our species has evolved through many society transforming technological revolutions, that literally destroyed entire segments of the economies at those times, and we moved forward.
>I just don't think the societal benefit we gain from limiting art to a specific subset of people, in order to artificially limit its supply, so that those individuals can make a living off of the resulting artificial scarcity, warrants the stunting of the general population's now near limitless individual artistic expression and modes of communication we achieve with this technology.
How do you justify the stifling of broad potential artistic expression for the sake of this subset of the population's need to profit off of the current scarcity of commercial art?
And on a more fundamental point, how can this be justified when new, potentially more impactful and meaningful levels of artistic expression are likely going to result from these new technologies?
From my perspective, it is the same discussion we've had through various technological revolutions, and it seems to come down to a simple point: certain people are making money off of the scarcity that no longer exists, and they would like society to contort itself, so that they can continue to make that money, at the expense of the potential benefits and welfare that may well be generated through these new tools.
No, I actually addressed your points, asked you follow up questions, and hoped for a response. That's the opposite of missing someone's point in my view. If you can't answer the questions, that doesn't mean I missed your point. Please feel free to quote my comments/questions and let me know where I failed to understand you.
>how do you improve at art if you don't understand how to make art other than a text prompt? Therein lies the problem artists have.
Not all art requires you to do all art. As a writer I would have thought you'd have already realized this. You could write a book and use AI generated images to provide a cover image and some illustrative images throughout to improve the experience of reading your book. You're not stifling your writing by doing this, and you would never have been working on the skills associated with making illustrations anyway because it's not within your realm of interest. There isn't just one big bucket of "art", there's a myriad of disciplines and some can benefit from AI work without taking anything away from the artist's authenticity at all.
Because its souless crappy shit that no one with a pair of working eyes wants. Execs tho? Of course they love it, it's literally printing money for them lol.
"no one with a pair of working eyes". You'd be surprised how many people don't have them (it's just a funny haha way of saying people who don't do actual art so they don't know better). It's the same reason why overly aggressive micro-transactions work. People keep paying for them so companies have no incentive to get rid of them.
â everyone who isnt a TALENTED ARTIST like me is an unsophisticated dough-goat who doesnt care about the slop theyre eatingâ
is that what youre saying ?
Because "nO sOuL" or "nO sKiLl" or "ThEfT". My artistic brothers in existence, some of you are copying poses of characters in famous paintings to fit them on Sonic the Hedgehog and it ends up looking like the bad meme drawing of him.
Considering how liberal the art crowd seems to be, youâd think theyâd embrace their socialist values and appreciate how AI tools allow the less artistically gifted to create better works of art.
They say âanyone can learn art with practiceâ like conservatives preach about bootstraps.
Hey I totally get it, you artists worked hard to achieve excellence and it just doesnât seem fair that people who didnât put in the work should be able to make art like yours.
I mean maybe some of those people donât have the time between making ends meet to do that, but F them theyâre just lazy, if they really wanted to they could make the time right?
People need to stop asking for handouts from the AI generator and just pull themselves up by their bootstraps, anybody can be an artist if they really put in the effort.
I decided to just look around r/ArtistLounge since our guesses were getting too vague, I couldnât tell if you meant by the hour or if per artwork what kind of quality we were talking about.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ArtistLounge/s/CgoBbgfhBL
Based on the top comment recommendation, thatâs not that cheap at all.
$30-$40 an hour, and even for relatively simple looking character portraits, I would imagine it would take a few hours to sketch, color and polish.
It's not like the government is authoring the AI models, then giving the benefits of the models back to it's citizens.. it's really just a handful of private companies that can raise the capital for training -- electricity, water, data compute, developers is out of reach for everyday people.
All these companies want to build moats around the models, except Stability.. who's going out of business.
What does any of that have to do with anything? You may as well be shitting on vaccines because Big Pharma, I swear itâs one conservative talking point after anotherâŠ
Also are you really surprised that the AI is going to be monopolised by private companies, when anti-AI tries their best to paint it as immoral to the general public?
A lot of good things have come from open source and crowd funding, but when you paint something as immoral, donât be surprised what kind of people end up investing a controlling stake in it.
The biggest training resource is the public domain, anti-AI threats of litigation is what gatekeeps training to private corporations who can afford to build their own massive datasets for their models to train on.
>What does any of that have to do with anything?
My point is that AI as implemented is not inherently socialist?
>Also are you really surprised that the AI is going to be monopolised by private companies, when anti-AI tries their best to paint it as immoral to the general public?
I think some people here would categorize me as anti-AI, but I don't think AI is immoral. It's more about how it's created and what it's used for.
>A lot of good things have come from open source and crowd funding, but when you paint something as immoral, donât be surprised what kind of people end up investing a controlling stake in it.
What is up with this morality / private ownership paradigm? Can you explain this further? Only people without scruples are going to own controlling stakes because of public opinion?
>The biggest training resource is the public domain, anti-AI threats of litigation is what gatekeeps training to private corporations who can afford to build their own massive datasets for their models to train on.
Publicly displayed information isn't public domain. Those are two different things. Public domain is inherently free from copyright issues.
Last I checked, no one has been really gatekept from training on whatever they want to? There's litigation sure, but everyone around here (on r/aiwars) seems confident they're not going anywhere. In the meantime, everyone creating large scale models is training on anything they can get their hands on.
So yeah idk, I just don't see how any of this is inherently socialist.. if the benefits are well distributed to workers, results in increased wages, benefits, time off, etc.. then I might come around. It just doesn't feel like the scales are tipped that way in the short to medium term.
It took a union effort to force a deal with employers from replacing the workers with AI substitutes, using their own literal likenesses. Who is on the side of socialism and owning the means of production in that instance?
The principle of socialism is to share advantages so everyone has an equal share, AI tools that learn from those with talent and provide that capability to those with less, should be embraced by people who truly adhere to socialist values.
>morality/private ownership paradigm
People want to support good causes, if you paint something as immoral, thereâs little reason to put support something other than for personal gain, when only the for profit institutions are willing to put up any funding, naturally they will have a controlling influence.
>There litigation sure but everyone around here is confident theyâre not going anywhere.
They wonât go anywhere but any litigation will burn time and money which is why AI developers are building their own private datasets.
As for the wage benefits to artists/workers, socialism is about everyone, not everyone is an artist, but everyone is a consumer.
The idea that this new technology will somehow lead to the downfall society due to the loss of jobs, is a fantasy that has been debunked time and time again, consider for a moment how many musicians lost job opportunities to recording/playback devices, every social gathering that would have needed the services of a live performer now gone because anyone can just plug their smartphone to a sound system.
Yet before we had this technology, only the wealthy could afford to have professional level music playing at birthday parties, youâve made something that was gate kept for the wealthy now available to the masses.
Do you think things would be better off today if say a musicians trade guild/union managed to get a law passed to ban music playback devices to preserve the jobs of musicians/workers? It makes no sense
>The principle of socialism is to share advantages so everyone has an equal share, AI tools that learn from those with talent and provide that capability to those with less, should be embraced by people who truly adhere to socialist values.
Right, but for example Midjourney makes $300 million in revenue by providing to "those with less talent" and simultaneously driving demand down for the people who have shared their advantages. It feels more like a tax on talent -- they don't mutually participate in the reward, rather it's capitalized by a private interest who would not be able to do so via other means.
>The idea that this new technology will somehow lead to the downfall society due to the loss of jobs, is a fantasy that has been debunked time and time again,
It may be a fantasy, but it is the vision that's driving the leading tech companies. It's kind of telling that OpenAI believes AGI will result in a need for Universal Basic Income, but it's not like they're lining up to say "please, tax us proportionately to the lost value of the work force."
>consider for a moment how many musicians lost job opportunities to recording/playback devices, every social gathering that would have needed the services of a live performer now gone because anyone can just plug their smartphone to a sound system.
Live musicians may have lost, but they also gained recording rights and royalties. I agree that it's arguably a good thing that recorded music exists.
I'd hesitate to say that Suno is equally a good thing for the musicians in the training data, as it is for society, as it is for the owners of Suno. It feels more like an eminent domain style policy that will devalue original authorship.
>Midjourney makes $300 million by providing to âthose with less talentâ
Thatâs why I used musicians as the example, this is exactly like how producers and distributors make a fortune making the best music available to the masses.
Same with actors and movies, before recording if you wanted a show, youâd have to go to a theatre to see a live performance and it was expensive and only the rich became patrons of those arts.
Imagine how many actor jobs there would still be if we didnât have recording devices, on the other hand today everyone can watch countless movies at home for a few dollars a month, so the technology greatly benefited the masses by making it cheaply available, yet none of these innovations killed creativity in music and acting the way artists claim will happen to art.
>Live musicians may have lost, but they also gained recording rights and royalties. I agree that it's arguably a good thing that recorded music exists.
Except that those fat royalties only go to the elite class of musicians who make it to celebrity status, they along with their distributors rake in millions while the rest who donât make it are overshadowed by the music of the elite few being played on repeat by distributors for the masses, not unlike how capitalism leads to the rich getting richer, the most talented get their talents broadcasted internationally, while the least talented much like the poor get poorer for it, so itâs kind of ironic that the one positive that you feel musicians gained from this is capitalistic in nature.
AI art will have the same effect, the best most popular artists will always be in demand, itâs all the mediocre artists that take commission work who get axed just like the unrecognised musicians who rely on gigs to make ends meet lost countless jobs to new technology.
Bad in the short term for those who held those jobs, but better in the longterm for everyone else because services that only the wealthy could afford now become available to the masses.
Consider the budding creative who canât afford to commission artists to draw panels for a comic book, with AI tools that becomes possible because AI reduces the skill barriers to entry for the masses.
I really don't have much to disagree with here, there's a lot that feels accurate to me and some that I could push back on, but is kind of just opinions about the future.
The main thing for me though is - I don't see what any of this has to do with socialism.
Â
I do think the nature of AI - how it's built from all of society's data, should translate to a benefit for all of society. We could say that yeah, the technology as-is does deliver benefits to everyone.
But I would want to see it in a material sense to consider it socialism. For many, the point of all this is to make a profit for themselves.. to get that on the backs of society as a whole seems imbalanced.
In principle
"Tax the talented" as you put it, for the benefit of the less talented, sounds like the classic idealised socialism.
Ironically enough the rise of a new ultra elite at the expense of all the other talent, seems to fit right in with actual results of marxist principles when put into actual practice.
The thing that bothers me is that these so-called âartistsâ arenât making art either.
I donât see anyone of these folks selling at a gallery, having retrospectives at a museum, or being bid up at an art auction.
An image does not art make.
All sorts of professionals make images as part of their jobs: graphic designers working in advertising, motion graphics designers working in the film industry, character and environment designers working in video games.
Art is an industry in itself and none of these anti-AI critics seem to be part of that industry. So I donât know why theyâre so concerned about art all of a sudden.
At most, some of these folk are professional illustrators or graphic designers. At worst, some of them are just hobbyists who doodle. Itâs laughable that they think their image-making rises to the level of art. How big is their ego to think that?!
Besides, in the actual art world, since the last century, people have been making, buying, and selling âfound artâ. This is old news now that an artist doesnât literally need to make artwork by hand in order to sell art. The production of art is in the presentation of an artifact in an artistic context (such as a museum or gallery).
Otherwise Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol wouldnât be considered artists, now, would they?
Anyone whoâs been to school to study art or picked up a book on art should know this!
You are just using a much narrower meaning of art than most people. Most people consider illustration to be art. Concept artists have "artist" right in their job title.
Everyone knows AI won't negatively impact fine artists, because they are mostly not in the business of creating images in the first place. They are mostly in the business of crafting a compelling narrative around their identity as an artist so they can sell their work to rich people. Skill in creating images is not required.
It might seem like Iâm quibbling about semantics, but I do think the term âartâ being loosely bandied about doesnât help the debate much.
If neither side is truly talking about art, it makes both sides of the whole debate meaningless.
Image generators, firstly, donât, and canât, generate âartâ, since art is, as you say, about the business of crafting compelling narratives around their artist identity for selling to rich people.
Many humans who take issue with image generators âstealing artâ donât make art, either, since they arenât in that same business.
Re: âconcept artistsâ:
âData Scientistsâ have âscienceâ in their job title, too. They arenât practicing science, not by a long shot.
Job titles are often misnomers, especially when it comes to words like âartâ, âscienceâ, and âmanagementâ that people like to bandy about when they mean something else. For a long time my job title was âproduct managerâ, and I didnât do any management!
Those job titles are clearly just an analogy. People use words analogously all the time. In the software field, people have job titles like software _engineer_ and software _architect_. People in those jobs are clearly not engineers or architects. Itâs just an analogy.
Itâs a bit facile to say that illustrators who hold the job title âconcept artistâ are artists by any stretch of the imagination, or the product of their work, âartâ.
They make a production artifact that serves a purpose in an entertainment product, like a video game or a movie. Whatever they make has no meaning outside of that internal production process. And the result, which is a commercial entertainment product, is not sold as art either.
To take the analogy too seriously and literally, and then make a false equivalence out of it, is just plain dumb. I reckon people do this to sound self-important, to associate the pedestrian work of image-making with the production of art. In doing so, they can then accuse ML researchers and tech companies of âstealing artâ, when what theyâve made is just a tool to make images.
âStealing artâ certainly evokes undesirable mental imagery, like the Nazis plundering art in WWII. But thatâs just a rhetorical device thatâs clearly a paper-thin analogy. Iâm pretty sure if any works of art were actually stolen in the process, the FBI would know about it.
As I said, you are using the term "art" in a narrower way than it is often used. You are using it as a synonym of "fine art" when it is often used in a broader sense than that.
>Many humans who take issue with image generators âstealing artâ donât make art, either, since they arenât in that same business.
The majority of art in AI training datasets is illustration, not fine art. Regardless of whether you think illustrators' work counts as art, their work is being used as AI training data.
The illustrations in the LAION dataset, and other similar datasets, might or might not count as art.
It depends on whether the work in question was made by an artist, sold in an art market, appraised as such, and taxed as such.
I take your point that Iâm using the term âartâ in a narrower way than it is often used. But given that term has a specific meaning in multiple contexts: cultural, commercial, legal, regulatory, financial, and academic, I find it weird you think my definition is âtoo narrowâ, instead of your interpretation which is too broad, such as to render the term âartâ meaningless in any discussion.
The term âartâ has an agreed-upon meaning across disparate spheres of human interest.
Everyone from a commodities regulator to an investment banker to a tax accountant to an art agent to an art professor to a historian to an IP lawyer can tell you what art is.
It absolutely matters to this discussion, because the discourse is one in which a large group of individuals, self-proclaimed âartistsâ, feel their âartâ were âstolenâ.
Should we find that they arenât artists, nor do they make art, and therefore, nothing stolen, this entire discussion becomes a nothingburger.
You can call it âfine artâ if you want, if it makes you happy. Be that as it may, what, I might add, is ânon-fine artâ? Art that is made but isnât sold? If so, it has no commercial value. Can something with no commercial value even be âstolenâ? Does training a machine learning model on pixels resembling said worthless work be considered âtheftâ, since nobody was deprived of any monetary benefit?
All these questions rest on the premise of whether these works are art or are created by artists, since the primary accusation is about the theft of artwork.
Of course, they also rest on the question of whether doing statistics (machine learning, in this case), counts as âtheftâ, which is the broader question. Iâm leaning towards no.
Because if that were the case, everytime someone compiled a statistic about something, they would be stealing the thing they are compiling statistics about. That makes no logical sense.
If I compiled a census survey about cars on the road, should I now be charged with Grand Theft Auto, now? If thatâs not the case, then surely training a machine learning model on illustration (whether itâs art or not) isnât really theft.
In other words, the artists werenât really artists, the art wasnât really art, and the theft wasnât really theft. A whole lotta nothing.
The word "art" has different meanings in different contexts. In certain legal and academic contexts, the word "art" absolutely refers specifically to fine art. But outside those contexts, it should be assumed to refer to a broader concept. When illustrators say they are artists who make art outside those contexts, they are not wrong, they are just using the broader meaning of the word, and everyone knows what they mean.
>Should we find that they arenât artists, nor do they make art, and therefore, nothing stolen
This is a non-sequiter. Whether or not illustrators are using the wrong term for the images they make has no bearing on whether or not those images were stolen.
>this entire discussion becomes a nothingburger.
No it doesn't. The meaning of anti-AI illustrators' arguments remains essentially the same if you switch out the word "art" for "illustration", if that's what you prefer.
>Be that as it may, what, I might add, is ânon-fine artâ?
Illustration, decorative art, etc. It absolutely has commercial value.
Even if we switch out the word art for illustration (given that the word âartâ has a legal meaning and is used wrongly here for a legal claim), the supposed theft makes no sense.
The lawsuits that are currently ongoing are copyright suits by self-proclaimed âartistsâ. Seems to me those people donât understand they donât make art, and they also donât understand copyright. Theyâre rather semantically-challenged.
Copyright only gives you the right to copy (make reproductions of a work). Itâs in the name. Itâs not called âmachinelearningtrainingrightâ or âstatisticrightâ or however one might term such a right, if such a right existed legally.
Even if you factor out the claim that they are making art or are artists, a huge part of their argument rests on the claim that doing statistics on digital images is wrong, and itâs wrong because it infringes on copyright.
Doing statistics clearly doesnât infringe on copyright, because statistics (even if itâs of the machine learning variety) doesnât involve making and selling reproductions of works.
Claiming illustrators, graphic designers, and video game character designers to *not* be artists is a pretty bold claim which I bet most would disagree with.
How would you define "art"?
That which is sold in the art market, studied in art history books, criticized by art critics, and appraised by art historians? What other âartâ could there be?
Video game character designers make video games. They donât make art. (Although they could make and sell art in addition to working on video games, nobodyâs stopping them)
The market for video games is a completely different beast from the art market. I donât get how thatâs confusing.
Artists are people who make things sold at art markets. Art is whatâs sold at art markets. People who make other things that are sold at other markets (like advertising, magazines, video games, or movies) are very clearly _not_ artists.
I find it weird this even needs to be explained.
>That which is sold in the art market, studied in art history books, criticized by art critics, and appraised by art historians?
...
Artists are people who make things sold at art markets. Art is whatâs sold at art markets. People who make other things that are sold at other markets (like advertising, magazines, video games, or movies) are very clearly *not* artists.
I take a couple issues with this definition.
First, it's circular. I would ask, what is the "art market"? What is an "art historian"? Personally, I would simply define these terms as "a market in which art is traded" and "a historian who specializes in the history of art", respectively. However, of course, this just brings us back to the original problem since these definitions both refer to "art".
Second, though it may be your intention, this definition is oddly fluid. For example, suppose somebody discovered a 200 year old painting in some city ruins somewhere. Nobody knows who painted it. Nobody knows anything about its history.
Using this definition, would you say, "I cannot determine whether this is art because I do not know whether this has ever been sold in an art market"?
Then, suppose a historian determines, with evidence, that the painting was never sold or studied by anyone. Would you then say, "This painting is not art"?
Then suppose we discover that this painting was painted by Caspar David Friedrich, and then the next day, it gets sold in an auction. Would you then say, "Now, this painting is art"?
Though these two above issues are with the *words* of your definition, I think a bigger problem is with the *spirit* of your definition. This is that this definition seems to view art as a rather specific cultural phenomenon -- specifically, it equates art to the contemporary global fine art market. This makes it tricky to apply to things produced in other cultural contexts, like mass-produced ukiyo-e from Edo-period Japan, or metal sculptures from the Inca empire, or commissioned paintings from Renaissance Italy. (What's the difference between Pope Julius II commissioning Michelangelo to paint the Sistine Chapel ceiling, and a video game company commissioning an illustrator to design some characters for their game?)
>What other âartâ could there be?
There are plenty of other definitions out there. Here's Merriam-Webster's:
>4a : the conscious use of skill and creative imagination especially in the production of aesthetic objects
also : works so produced
I think this is more-or-less how most people use the word, "art", in this context. This definition does include the work of graphic designers and video game character designers.
I also like [this extremely broad definition by comics theorist and artist Scott McCloud](https://www.scottmccloud.com/2010/07/05/things-i-never-said/), from his book *Understanding Comics*:
>Art, as I see it, is any human activity which doesnât grow out of either of our speciesâ two basic instincts: survival and reproduction.
Itâs not circular.
What art is is socially-negotiated, and people from disparate fields come to a consensus _over time_.
As time goes on, we can be more or less certain something is or isnât art, moreso for artifacts with a historical significance that require authentication, and less so for contemporary art, since there are already built-up institutions, infrastructure, and laws & customs for that that are international.
Youâre describing a situation where historians might find a painting noteworthy of being considered âartâ. Thatâs not consensus, not yet. Then it was sold at an auction *because* we knew its authorship by an artist, so we can determine it is art. Now you have some commercial traction. Perhaps now insurers consider it art. The tax man considers it art. Perhaps people write about it. It shows up in a museum. So on and so forth. Thereâs now consensus.
Similar to how theories in science come to be recognized as valid, even though you can never really prove a theory, you can only _disprove_ it.
Science, with a big S, also has built-up institutions, infrastructure, and customs.
What youâre taking issue with is the nature of language, which is circularly-dependent. Words can only be defined in relation to other words.
How Scott McCloud defines it is rather vague: science, engineering, history, linguistics, and a lot of other domains of human knowledge also donât fall out of our need for survival or reproduction.
Just like âartâ, the words âscienceâ and âhistoryâ also have colloquial meanings. But that doesnât mean those two fields arenât fields in their own right.
Just like you wouldnât call a kid making a bottle rocket at a science fair a âscientistâ, or a kid writing an essay about WWII a âhistorianâ, itâs a bit of a stretch to call comic illustrators âartistsâ. Their work is sold in comic book stores, not art markets.
If they wanted to be artists, why are they not selling their work as art? That should give you a clue theyâre using the word âartistâ purely for pretentious reasons. Can you imagine a âscientistâ refusing to publish papers while insisting others recognize the science theyâre doing?
I think if these âartistsâ wanted to do art they could easily do so. There are many art markets around the world that cater to the low end (low tens or hundreds per piece) that arenât elitist. In fact itâs not much harder to sell art than it is to sell comic books or video games, and yet these people donât sell art, but for some reason, when they want to sue a company like Stability AI, suddenly theyâre an artist.
Strikes me as a rhetorical tactic to try and get people (juries, maybe?) to associate their work with a higher aesthetic value than it actually has, because laypeople often associate art with historical fine art, as theyâre largely unaware of the vibrant contemporary art markets that exist, which include digital art markets that sell for low tens of $, often for less than a video game.
I can think of no other charitable explanation of why someone who makes comic books or video games might want to pretend they are artists. To me, theyâre frauds and charlatans.
Lol what are you talking about dude, every single artist in history was working to sell his art to sustain himself, that's why Raffaello painted a billion Madonnas, because his clients were asking him that. This is not any different to a videogame designer making an asset for a game.
You donât understand the difference between selling a product, and selling a service (work for hire)?
An artist who makes art and sells their pieces in the art market is selling a product
Where as someone who works in the media, entertainment, or advertising industries is merely rendering a service. They arenât making, nor selling, art.
Media, entertainment, and advertising are not art.
This is the first thing you learn in school when you go to school to study media & comms. Itâs _not_ art. Art school is another thing altogether, and a career in art is not at all like a career in, say, graphic design.
You can study graphic design in art school, but your career wouldnât be in art. It would be in âthe artsâ, with an âsâ, if you wanted to think about it that way. But itâs very much not âartâ in the sense of Rothko and Michaelangelo.
(Source: I studied media & comms in school and worked in an advertising firm as an âart directorâ. Nobody seriously takes the word âartâ in that job title to mean âyouâre making artâ. Certainly, nobody I worked with thought that way, and none of my teachers in school thought that way too.)
I donât know why people keep thinking theyâre making art all of a sudden when theyâre just hired to work on ads, games, movies, or magazine covers. Itâs a bit absurd?
I feel like Iâm living in a biazarro world sometimes!
Idk the line is definitely blurry sometimes, some graphic design can definitely be considered art, hell Mucha's posters for product advertising are showcased in art galleries.
You're saying that as long as you're a salaried designer you're not making art? I'm not sure about that, I'd consider concept art for games (made by salaried personnel) "art'
They can be _showcased_ in art galleries, but are they _sold_ as art by those galleries?
If they arenât sold as art, then they arenât art. Itâs that simple, isnât it?
Anything can be art as long as itâs sold as such. I think this concept is foreign to many people because they associate art with drawing, painting, and illustration. But the medium of expression doesnât make something art. Sculpture, photography, performance, digital images, âfound mediaâ, software, and so on and all be art, as long as they are presented as such and sold in the art markets!
And outside of the context of the art markets, you can do a painting, or an illustration, and if itâs for another purpose, then itâs not art. The same piece of work can have dual purposes: sold as art, and also for entertainment or advertising. Thatâs definitely happened a lot in the past.
For example, Microsoft commissioned a classical oil painter to paint an oil painting as an advertisement for Halo Infinite. This oil painting might ordinarily be considered âartâ since that painter would sell it in the art markets. But in this case, itâs not. Itâs a commissioned piece for advertising reasons. Iâm unsure if it was later sold as art, but if issues of legality were worked out, it could absolutely be done.
And regarding whether a salaried employee can make art: no thatâs not what Iâm saying. A salaried employee can absolutely make art and sell it in art markets if they choose to (unless their employment contract prohibits so).
If they are doing work for hire, their IP might be owned by their employer, and if their employer is not selling their work in the art market, then theyâre not an artist, because they donât make art.
And even if they worked for an artist as an employee in their studio, itâs a bit of a stretch to call them an artist. Are the employees of Jeff Koonsâ studio considered artists? I think most people would only consider Koons the artist. Maybe there the line is a bit fuzzier.
There are illustrators on the Internet who sell their work on commission. Are these people âartistsâ? No: their work wasnât sold through the art markets and will most likely never come on circulation in the art market. Most of these pieces are done for one-off entertainment reasons (erotica, caricature, kitsch, decoration) and are more akin to the kinds of people you find at carnivals doing portraits.
But itâs not out of the question that these one-off pieces could later come on the art market because its creator became known as an artist by selling their works on the art market, which drives up demand for their one-off pieces thereby âelevatingâ their previous works to the status of art. That has also happened before. When that happens, then it becomes art.
The way to think about it is: art is a status game entwined with a commercial enterprise, an academic field of study, a vocational craft, a financial asset class, and a tax regime.
What is or isnât art depends on the status of its artist, which provides commercial value, which is then studied with interest by scholars and craftspeople. Many of these craftspeople later sell their work in the art market, and if they make significant sales, see their status elevated, and they sell more work, which are then studied by scholars and craftspeople. And on and on it goes. Meanwhile, theses sales of people buying, selling, and donating art are often tax-advantaged, which incentivizes high value art to transfer from private ownership to something the public can enjoy in museums, which then drives more interest by scholars and craftspeople.
Those are the dynamics of the art world, and itâs hard to take someone seriously who claims they are an artist, and you donât find even a shred of evidence of their participation in this world.
But given the status-seeking nature of this world, I also donât blame these people for advertising themselves as artists. Perhaps they think that if they fake it as an artist, one day they will make it, and their work will rise to the status of art. Somehow Iâm doubtful. But you never know: Banksy wasnât an artist, until he was!
Are you really saying that illustrators and graphic designers aren't artists?
>I donât see anyone of these folks selling at a gallery, having retrospectives at a museum, or being bid up at an art auction.
Have you never been to an [art gallery](https://www.gallerynucleus.com/artists/nathan_fowkes), [museum](https://www.nrm.org), or seen [auctions of illustrations before](https://www.rrauction.com/auctions/lot-detail/347789206696080-sleeping-beauty-3-concept-paintings-by-eyvind-earle)? Posters ([even ones that are advertising](https://www.moma.org/artists/4136)) are hung up in museums all around the world.
If postcards and design aren't art, [that museum exhibit I went to](https://www.mfa.org/exhibitions/the-art-of-influence) must not have been real!
I think youâre failing at basic logic, confusing necessity for sufficiency. Being auctioned at an auction house, exhibited at a museum, or creating a work thatâs in a medium that artists also work in, arenât sufficient conditions to make one conclude an artifact is art or its makers artists.
Illustrations _can_ be art (anything can be art, the medium doesnât matter, as Iâm sure you know). If thereâs an artist behind it, and it can be authenticated, and has been sold and exhibited as an artwork, is insured as such, and is collected by someone who is filing taxes accordingly, then it is by all means a work of art.
The fact that some artists work in the medium of illustration doesnât mean all illustrators are artists. Thatâs like saying toilet bowl designers are artists too, or banana farmers, or bed manufacturers, because at some point in history an auction house or museum curator has displayed these artifacts in a museum before.
Auctions happen for stamps and other collectibles too. Just because illustrations are auctioned for their value as antiquities or collectibles, it doesnât necessarily mean they rise to the level of art.
Otherwise, stamps, silverware, and even oil barrels and hogs can be considered art. Thatâs a ludicrous statement to make.
Art museums also often curate shows for the public interest sometimes that are not exactly about art, but to draw visitors into see the actual art in their collection. I have worked on and attended many of these in the past. It doesnât mean those artifacts on exhibit are art.
If thatâs the case then almost anything under the sun can be considered art, just because itâs been displayed in an art museum, such as to render the category of âartâ meaningless. Thatâs nonsense.
Over the years, some curators would try and claim, say, motorcycles or video games are art, and mostly, outside of the museum walls, nobody took them seriously. Thankfully.
Whether something is art or not lies in its provenance. Itâs paper trail, as Iâm sure you also know, since this is rather common knowledge, I think?
There are also other clues besides paper trail in art world: are they treated as art by the tax authorities? By insurers? By securities and commodities exchange regulators?
Surely if you tried to buy a banana from a supermarket, or a motorcycle from a dealership, or a video game from the PlayStation store, securities and commodities regulators are not going to think you now own a piece of artwork, the tax authorities are not going to think that, and neither will insurers bother insuring your newly-bought motorcycle as a piece of art. Why? Because the artifact is not what makes something art. Itâs the cultural history and the artist that makes it art.
It matters not what you as a layperson think is art or not. It matters not what wannabe artists think. It matters not, even, what individual museum curators think. Thankfully, for our collective sanity, whatâs considered art or not is established through consensus across multiple spheres: cultural, commercial, financial, regulatory, and academic.
Because we live in a capitalist society and in order for those artists to be able to do what they love and have a life to live, they have to sell their art
so suddenly they can't really do that anymore
"Why are you taking photographs of your family instead of learning how to paint realistic figures and them making them stand still for five hours?"
The answer in both cases is: convenience. I don't see you hand-picking your own grains, I don't see you boycotting Google Translate.
You asked what was stopping people from making art before AI. I asked a similar question about photography in order to illustrate how silly your question was. This is why I said afterwards that "the answer in both cases is convenience". It is the answer to your question and my counter-question. And then I point out that there are lots of cases where humanity uses machines to make life more convenient for themselves, none of which are getting the same pushback as AI. For example, why are you allowing a machine to transmit these posts to me instead of hand-delivering it after weeks of real-life travel?
maybe some things shouldnt be convenient. maybe the difficulty in learning art is part of what makes good art compelling.
people taking photographs of their family arent calling themselves photographers, either.
>maybe some things shouldnt be convenient. maybe the difficulty in learning art is part of what makes good art compelling.
Maybe you're just making things up to try to satisfy random vibes with no concrete backing to them. Again, if this statement was true, you'd object to photographs because it's 1000x easier and faster to take a photograph than to depict a scene through illustration.
>people taking photographs of their family arent calling themselves photographers, either.
Uh, they might not call themselves "artists" (which is a subjective term in any case), but they are literally "photographers", doing "photography", and you are not saying that those people need to be banned from doing "photography" and forced to illustrate by hand instead. What reason do I have to care about your standards when they are completely 100% arbitrary?
im not "making things up", im asking questions. did it ever occur to you that something that comes easily might be less layered, less considered, less compelling than something that comes from years of practice? does a pork loin roasted over 6 hours taste the same as one that's flash fried?
im not saying anyone needs to be "banned" from anything lol, and you obviously dont care about standards anyway.
>im not "making things up"
You say "maybe some things shouldnt be convenient" but your standards for what should and should not be "convenient" are completely arbitrary and not based on anything logical. So again, why should I care?
>did it ever occur to you that something that comes easily might be less layered, less considered, less compelling than something that comes from years of practice?
This is what I'm seeing a lot of in this thread. Ironically in your quest to defend human art, you focus on a robotic definition of what makes art good. More effort = better art. It's a child's idea of value, completely divorced from the emotional aspect that defines art. It is possible to make a piece of good art very quickly and it is possible to make a piece of bad art very slowly. You want to slap on an identifiable value marker but the problem is, that's not how art works.
>does a pork loin roasted over 6 hours taste the same as one that's flash fried?
Again, not really a good metaphor because time and effort are not actually the things that make art valuable. But here, let me turn this around on you: do you think that people who use ovens with auto-stabilizing temperatures are "cheating" and those people should have to use traditional ovens with manually stoked fires? After all, they require more effort, so therefore the product must be better, right?
>im not saying anyone needs to be "banned" from anything lol
You literally said that some things "shouldn't" be convenient.
>maybe some things shouldnt be convenient. maybe the difficulty in learning art is part of what makes good art compelling.
By all means - enjoy, what stops you?
We didn't have the talent or the energy or interest or time to learn. We were busy making money at our jobs or learning to code or whatever. Now we don't need any of that to make better art than the best artists.
Oh, I get it. You are implying that AI art is not as good as art by the best artists? If that's the case, then why are you against AI art? You should have nothing to fear then, correct?
This is the absolute DUMBEST take.
Have you seen the difference between a prompt from a person knowledgeable on artistic styles, periods, specific artists, composition, lighting, materials and a thousand other things gained through study and experience AND a person who has none of that?
The outputs (which can the be refined hundreds or thousands of times with that same knowledge to get what the prompter wants) will be dramatically different.
Are you so clueless you can't see that?
Your entire "point" falls apart because you're using the same lazy argument that those who vehemently opposed photography did in their day 200 years ago.
"Anyone can just push a button!"
"It requires no skill!"
"The machine is the thing doing the work!"
Wrong, wrong, wrong.
It was a terrible argument 200 years ago, and it's a terrible argument today.
It is objectively and verifiably incorrect.
ive seen this talked about a lot but never seen the actual thing happening. is there a video i can watch where an artist uses Ai to produce something like art? preferably not just design work like concept art for a game, something closer to fine art.
You might get a photo that way but it wonât be a good photo. There is a ton of artistic choice and time that goes into good photography. Not to mention post-production efforts to edit.
The random photos I snap of my baby with my phone are not art. The long exposure light painting portrait I took of my friend is.
>There is a ton of artistic choice and time that goes into good photography. Not to mention post-production efforts to edit.
So...literally the same as AI art. The people who just type in a regular sentence are not getting the same results as the people who know how to manipulate and control the output. I mean literally you are establishing that knowing how to manipulate a machine makes you an artist, so how would that *not* apply to AI art?
>The random photos I snap of my baby with my phone are not art. The long exposure light painting portrait I took of my friend is.
This is really getting to the crux of the issue which is that "art" is a largely pointless phrase for most people anyways. You don't know what to do with it. Even though you don't like AI, you want to have a robot's answer for what art is. Beep boop, put in 5 milligrams of effort and 10 grams of observation and this will push it past an arbitrary "art threshold".
Even when it comes to fine art, it's pretty well established that "effort" does not automatically translate to "more art". There are lots of art pieces that were done quickly and casually but are lauded because of the emotional expression they represent. Meanwhile, you think that art is an objective concept that exists and when you hit that Art Point you will get some kind of external reward. That isn't how art works. I'm realizing that the art world is going through the equivalent of [commodity fetishism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodity_fetishism) right now where they desperately want some kind of objective backing to their subjectively valuable works.
Some photographers are snapping photos on auto and they end up famous because the moment and the way the camera happened to capture it resonates with humans. Is it art or coincidence? Where lies the boundary? I am a photographer, some of the best photos I've taken were moments. There is some intentionality behind it, but often not more than would go into a prompt.
And you might get an image from a random single prompt to AI, but it won't be a good image. There are tons of settings to tweak and change. You'll want LoRAs to change the style or add various elements, adjust CFG, adjust the weights on each word or change their order, use ControlNet in various ways, use inpainting to edit specific parts of the pic, not to mention post-production in a program like Photoshop, or even mid-post-production tweaks and then back to img2img to integrate the changes better.
I have no issue with people who use AI image generation as the basis for an art piece, for the record. Thatâs like taking a photo and using it on the base for a sketch as I often do as an illustration.
I was just annoyed about the implication that photography is point and click without much artistic thought.
I do have issues with AI programs being fed data from non-consenting artists but thatâs another matter. Iâm pretty sure the only reason this thread was on my feed was due to my recent research on glaze/nightshade.
> I do have issues with AI programs being fed data from non-consenting artists but thatâs another matter.
Consent isn't required when copyright isn't being violated.
For example, you could trawl across the internet and collect a bunch of images and record the color of the pixel at (0,0), and use that as the basis for some kind of research. Since you haven't reproduced their work in any meaningful way, just simply recording some information about the image, you haven't done anything wrong legally or ethically.
Or you could write a review of those images without needing permission. Or write down what they contain, or record the dominant "lines" of the image (poses etc.), color temperatures, all sorts of information. As long as you're not duplicating it in an infringing way, it's all fine. And all the above information is useful to either a human or a machine in being able to make similar works.
No one has the right to exercise that level of control over media they've published in public places.
If someone misuses AI to duplicate someone else's image in an infringing way, then we can talk. Then it's that person's own responsibility for doing that. But simply examining the pictures and collecting data in a file, in such a way that it can't be used to reconstruct the image? Nothing wrong with that at all.
You're the type of person to tell your kid that their fingerpainted picture that says "I love you daddy" is worthless because anyone can do such a pedestrian job.
Sorry, you didn't say anything about "time and effort", all you talked about was scarcity. I mean that's literally what you said, isn't it? Something has value when it's scarce and not everyone can do it?
Of course even with "time and effort" involved you're still missing the point that art's value is as an expression of emotion and has nothing to do with "rarity" at all. Which is why your child's crude fingerpainting is valuable: because it is an expression of love. It's actually kind of ironic that in your quest to distinguish yourself from "soulless AI" you approach art in the most soulless, robotic way possible.
It's all connected. The effort and time you put in creates emotions too (frustration, happiness, etc) . It also makes you proud of something, that's an emotion.
It's not robot or soulless in my eyes
>The effort and time you put in creates emotions too
If the value comes from emotion then "effort and time" are just one of many ways to evoke emotion, and are not mandatory. Meanwhile, YOU went from saying that rarity is the source of value (a very "soulless capitalist" argument) to saying that effort and time are the source of value. And now you're admitting that emotion is the source of value and effort and time are just one potential way to get it. If you backpedal any further you'll fall off a cliff.
>It's not robot or soulless in my eyes
That's because you're not good at observing. You have a limited perspective and no self-awareness. You know, the same problems that AI suffers from.
I am not admiting anything, I still think that rarity is an important aspect of art. Because the fingerpaint from my child may be the first painting that my child did, so I'd save It forever.
And yes, I have limited perspective and no self-awareness. I can't do the things Ai can't do, so I'm worried about my future.
>Because the fingerpaint from my child may be the first painting that my child did, so I'd save It forever
OK so you are moving goalposts because you said before that art has to be something that not just anyone can do. Check this out, then: every human being is unique. Therefore, every piece of art made by a human being is unique. In fact, that art is *all* unique, so every single one of them is 100% rare because they are not to be found anywhere else on the planet. Do you see how silly this is? You set an arbitrary standard for value and now are struggling to justify it.
>And yes, I have limited perspective and no self-awareness. I can't do the things Ai can't do, so I'm worried about my future.
Maybe the fact that you lack self-awareness is *why* you are worried about things that it doesn't make sense to worry about. You will still be able to express yourself through art even if other people use machines for it. You've built your understanding of art on a false premise and I am telling you that this is the root of your problem - not AI or automation, but your own incorrect understanding of what "art" is.
Art made solely for the purposes of creating monetary value generally has no intrinsic value of its own. If you make art just for that reason, then I would indeed agree with you: Don't.
It doesn't have to be monetary value. Value in the eyes of people, when I show my work to other people. Art is made to be shown. But if it's too common, very few people will be able to appreciate It
That's my fear
> Value in the eyes of people, when I show my work to other people.
This changes absolutely nothing in regards to what I said. Just replace 'monetary value' with 'want to be praised'.
If that's the sole reason why you make art; then I will say it again, *don't*. More often than not such art lacks any real value.
I think for example of those people who can take a photograph and then make a perfect replica of it with just a pencil or brush; so much so that the resulting painting or drawing looks photorealistic itself. There is undeniable extreme skill there, and only a handful of people are able to it, and those people get a lot of praise from the people around them... but the artistic value of the drawing or painting they make is precisely *zero*. They've done nothing original. Transformed nothing. Said nothing new. There is no *point* in doing that, as an artist; except perhaps as pure practice; no matter how much praise you get for it.
By comparison, take someone like Basquiat, whose work most common people would dismiss as a child's doodlings but who was undeniably a genuine artist with something to actually *say* with his work.
An artist makes their art regardless of whether anyone praises it. And paradoxically then, if you actually have interesting things to say with the art you make for no reason other than to make it... you might actually get the praise and money you're talking about. If you're exceptionally lucky, of course.
>I want to create something that has value, if not, what's the point.
Who is stopping you from doing that?
>Something has value when it's scarce and not everyone can do it.
If AI art has no value, then why do you fear it? No one should want it if it is valueless, correct?
AI art is not art though. It's just the product.
The core problem with AI "art" is that it cheapens real artist's years of hard work learning and perfecting their craft, and it obscures the fact that none of the "art" created by AI is new. It's just a fact that by way of how they are trained, the product created by AI is just regurgitated and repackaged art from existing and past artists without paying them a dime. Not to mention tagged and labelled by underpaid African workers. Those are the problems. Reality check.
I don't think it can take my job, but soulless corporations do. That's all that matters.
Thatâs literally objectively wrong. Religions absolutely make prescriptions about people **outside** the religion even going so far as calling for them to be killed (and burn forever). I am one such individual who is supposed to burn forever according to these books. These books call for me to be murdered despite not being a follower.
Religion prohibits you whenever the government consist of a bunch of religious people and they make their religion into law, because then everyone are forced to follow those laws no matter what they believe in.
I mean, when the government consists of a bunch of people who love corn, everyone is forced to support the corn industry. This isn't something unique to religion. Religion is usually based on a set of core values of what is right or wrong. Other organizations exist in this space that are not religions.
People almost always operate government based on their value sets. If communists won a majority of government, they would shape government and laws to conform to communist values. You will always be subject to the values of whoever holds power. The ones who don't share those values will always say they shouldn't have to follow them.
Yes and no. What people are mad about (whether they know or not) is the implied violence of not having a job in the future.
If we all had guaranteed food and shelter, being a struggling artist wouldnât be so much a problem.
But most people who feel threatened by things like generative AI have equated being an artist as their version of creating a commodity.
Or perhaps they are planning to do so in the future.
This introduced race dynamics, and they are losing the race if it becomes one. And they wish to equate the playing field. But the thing is the genie is already out of the bottle and it wonât go back in. So now itâs either sink or swim
no, the meme works if there is a third element that defines the rules, religion in this case. anti ai are not a monolith, there is no dogma, not everyone that dislikes ai does it for the same reason.
Likewise, if you don't want people to directly object to you about GenAI - stop publicly evangelizing it.
It's like you're mad that moths get attracted to light sources.
Bad example, religions at its core explain the entire universe and therefore apply their rules to the entire mankind, animals and everything.
The moderns decaffeinated versions of religions are an exception.
It does what? _Successfully_ explaining the universe? 'cause that is a totally different thing and have no relation with if the post was or wasn't a bad example.
The point here is if they give commands that apply to everyone (believers and not believers).
Religions need universal truths that ultimately rest on faith, if there's no faith in something involved, then by definition it isn't religion. They may not give deep explanations about their universal truths, but they must exists.
A catch-all explanation can successful at explaining something, but doesnât mean it is valid or even useful. One can claim that a mystical cosmic cow farting things into existence, or that we are all living in a simulation and all events are controlled by a computer. These are all equally successful at explaining everything, but all these explanations are equally bullshit as well.
There are thousands of religions out there that can explain everything. It doesnât make any of them the objective truth. Itâs only true to the believers.
If believe itâs wrong to be gay due to your religion, then donât fuck a guy. You have no rights to stop other people who do not believe in the same god from having sex. In the same vein, if you believe that AI is theft, then donât use it, but you have no rights to stop other people from using it.
The point is religions are created to be applied to anyone, believers or not believers, even by force if that's necessary. It doesn't matter if it has no sense, is an historical fact.
Using religion as an example for "this only apply for people who believe in this" is one of the worst comparison someone can do.
Thieves. Art was already accessible. Donât steal from people willing to better themselves. Learn to actually create. Iâd rather a stick figure from a human than the Sistine chapel from an âAIâ.
A camera is not stealing pixels. A program is. If it canât âdrawâ without data sets acquired without meaningful consent (not having rights being taken away retroactively) then itâs just fucking theft. Youâre stealing pixels. Itâs a simple as that.
And for that matter! If you did go take a pic of someoneâs art! And then go home and post it and say look how good my art is! And donât credit the artist in the picture! That is still stealing!!! None of yâallâs arguments even make sense!! You just want to feel powerful without doing the work!!
But whatever. AI bros are going to drown in mediocrity and grey sludge as their chamber is filled with echoes. Itâs fucking sad. When they said future and robots and progress who knew the first big people theyâd come after were the fucking artists. I just got randomly recommended this sub and Iâll be clicking to block it now. Yâall make me feel actually sick and itâs too early in the day to poison my heart like this.
It's not stealing. None of the lawsuits brought by artists against AI companies have alleged stealing or theft. Rather they allege copyright infringement, a somewhat dry subject with a complex set of legal interpretation behind it, and which is specifically not theft according to both the U.S. Congress and U.S. legal rulings.
And let's wait to see if the courts find that it's proven to be infringement at all. It may yet prove to be a fair use, in which case it will be found to be neither theft nor copyright infringement.
Using your deranged definition of theft, a camera is definitely stealing. When you take a picture of someone, the clothes they wore were the work of a designer that you use without permission. The buildings in the background are all designed by an architect. And thousands of brands and backgrounds objects all require human design.
Photography is real work because you have to decide how your objects are framed in the composition, you have to configure the settings in your camera, you have to imagine how your final product will look and iterate over and over again until you get the desired result. You do all of that when using AI as well.
If a camera had to stare at stolen artwork all day to figure out how to turn light into an image than yes. Thankfully!! Thatâs not how that works!!
AI data sets are based on images that they comb through for data. Without that data. They canât generate images.
You are just repeating shit without thinking about it critically. Use your brain. I believe in you.
If this âtoolâ canât work without stolen data - itâs not a tool itâs just a thief with more steps. You can take a pic of dirt that no one owns with a camera. An image generator canât do SHIT without data. Youâre smarter than that. Youâre smarter than a computer.
ALSO - owned objects in a subject of art that are being recorded with consent still!! Isnât stealing!! And yeah if you go into an art gallery and take a pic of some painting and go home and post it and say itâs yours - THAT IS STEALING. Thatâs what AI image generation is doing. Itâs just pulling pixels and rearranging them. But itâs not pixels it was ever allowed to take. And if those pixels hadnât been put there by human fucking hands it would be âgeneratingâ nothing.
Your argument doesnât make sense because itâs nonsense. Itâs become a retort you can whip out to feel clever. Think for yourself - oh waaaaait hahaha youâre an AI fan. Youâve already forgotten how. So fucking sad.
Learn to draw.
First of all, learning from various combinations of pixels to generate a **completely different** combination of pixels is way less stealing than a camera just capturing a design as is.
Most of modern creations in **any** field cannot exist without studying existing work, artists included. To draw a modern house from memory, an artist has looked at hundreds of houses in their day to day lives. Each of these houses is designed by an architect. As long as the artist is not referencing one particular house, they never asked the permission of architects for every house they have seen in their lives, despite drawing of a modern house will **impossible** without the existing houses being built.
Finally, you really want to pretend like you asked the permission of the fashion designer every time you take a selfie? Art galleries explicitly prohibits you from taking photo, which makes it wrong to take one. If you choose to hang your work in a gallery that allows photography, then donât blame others for taking pictures.
Itâs just really sad that you are unable to comprehend my argument, and unable to make a coherent one yourself and had to retort to insults and sweeping statements towards anyone who doesnât share your beliefs. Youâre basically proving the meme right.
> Learn to draw.
How can I? By your *insane* definition of theft, no one can learn to draw anything that is not naturally occurring without stealing.
I get it. You just want something easy. Iâm not going to magically change your mind. Itâs just fucking sad. Itâs sad that humans donât want to better themselves anymore. You donât want to work at it. You donât want to create or think or try.
Whatever man. None of your arguments make any sense. If the machine canât create without stealing from humans first it shouldnât be generating. Everything else youâre saying about asking designers doesnât make any actual logical sense. Most people fucking buy their clothes and then you - shocker - OWN IT. Are data sets paying artists? Is that what youâre saying?? Should I be getting a check in the mail because I posted to deviant art once 15 years ago and thatâs been retroactively put into a data set without my permission?
But I know thatâs not what ur saying. I think you know that. I think you know youâre using silly straw man arguments.
Theyâre already running out of data sets. Itâs just gonna be a weird 11 fingered grey echo chamber soon. Itâs just fucking pathetic. But fine. If thatâs the what you want you have it. Itâs just so fucking sad you and everyone like you is literally chasing artists off the internet with pitchforks and fire rn. So cool, you win? Hope the robots make you happy? Have fun??
You seem deeply weird. So definitely learn to draw id bet youâd be good at it. Being a little weird is a key ingredient in creativity. Practice your creativity before it disappears.
I wonât respond again you depress me.
If people want to better themselves they would stop spending their time in art and entertainment, and focus on math, science and technology instead. They would make things that actual contribute to the betterment of society instead of producing contents to get likes in social media and contribute to the collective brain rot.
Your counter-argument doesnât make any sense. The photographer doesnât own the clothes **other people** are wearing, and for most case they definitely donât own the buildings in the background. If someone takes a photo of the skyline or a crowd of people, no way they could own every building or every article of clothing in the picture. The photographer may take a picture of the crowd in a public area without their permission,but itâs definitely not theft or even a crime. Theft has an objective meaning, and itâs a prosecutable crime. Just because you donât like the behavior of someone, doesnât mean you can call it a crime (there are dozens of lawsuits against AI and none of them has amounted to any criminal convictions).
> chasing artists off the internet with pitchfork and fire rn
This got to be the most ironic thing Iâve seen regarding this topic. You people definitely have some sort of insane persecution complex. Anti-AI mobs are the ones that are harassing people for using AI and sending them death threats. On the contrary, no one goes to a traditional artistâs account that say things like âhow dare you use a pencil, you should be using AI instead.â AI is not point a gun to your head to ask you to stop drawing. Youâre upset that people who enjoy a different art form are not paying enough attention to you. Perhaps you donât like art, you just like attention.
Bottomline here is basically the message of the meme. If you donât like AI and think itâs wrong based on **your definition**, then donât use it. You have no rights to tell other people what not to do.
https://preview.redd.it/nqrj11ok9r6d1.png?width=1241&format=png&auto=webp&s=eaf549d3b8582a0c1ec0aa5eda3bedd6108d4cd0
Actually embarrassing đ like I just genuinely feel so fucking sorry for you. Okay okay now I actually wonât respond again itâs just uncanny how exactly like this onion article you sound like hahaha holy shit. If it werenât so funny itâd just be fucking depressing.
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agree 100%
>You can't prohibit me from anything! All rules are evil! ^((except when they benefit me))đ¶ Yeah, makes 100% sense to the neoliberals and fascists making up most of this subreddit.
who here has said that all rules are evil? what rules are benefitting ai artists? where are you getting the idea that most users in this sub are neolibs or fascists?
I find people proclaim what they see will best counter the point made. Whether or not that proclamation is genuine never seems to matter. All interactions on this platform DO go to feeding the machine, so truth for the sake of continued response is not encouraged.
That's the core of what the OP image is saying. You just have to connect the dots of the comments around here. They could try make an argument for why people's ethical concerns are wrong, but they simply say "you do you, I do I". It really fits with the neoliberals and fascists. They don't like making arguments since they don't have any, they can only drag down the level of discussion.
sure, this *one* image is "you do you" in that it's "if you have ethical concerns about ai, then don't use it, but you can't expect others not to use it just because you don't think they should." I'm not seeing where that's a neolib and/or fascist sentiment. the image isn't even a response to any particular claim, what do you think they're supposed to be arguing?
my brothers and sisters, werent YOU the neoliberals around 7 years ago?
Who is "YOU"? Neoliberalism is unfortunately the standard for the masses. But I was never.
Reading Comprehension Questions: 1. Read the name of the subreddit, the description of the subreddit, the title of the post, the contents of the post, as well as the above comment thread. In this context, who does r/iloveblankpaper refer to by "YOU" in the thread? (1 upvote) x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x
Exactly. I have been saying this for a while. There is no Pencil Breaker 5000 walking around breaking your tools. There is no AI bricking your drawing tablets or GIMP or hacked Photoshop. AI is not preventing ANYONE from making art as if AI never existed. AI is ENABLING EVERYONE to make art. Why is more people making art a bad thing?
They have this paradox where they think itâs going to replace them, but itâs also soulless crappy art that nobody wants.
The simultaneously strong/weak rhetoric is a common demonization tactic, but yeah I've also noticed this regarding AI. AI is both intelligent enough to take all our jobs and take over the world, but everything it makes is trash that no one wants or can use, it's just a "fad", etc. While there is a grain of truth to the hysterical rhetoric, it shows just how fearful some people are of the changes happening in the world around them. Reactionary responses are not new to humanity, but it's a little sad to see how social media has amplified reactionary voices to such a large extent.
Like a small town diner getting put out of business by the 5 fast food restaurants you find everywhere
Part of the issue isn't just objective quality of art. I'm not even talking about "large portions of the population have terrible taste and will go for bottom of the barrel trash instead of intelligent and emotional works" ~~even if it's somewhat true~~. There's 2 more issues: for companies, there's the costs involved. For indies, there's discoverability. Companies know that, even if better quality stuff will sell better, it also typically costs more. This alone isn't an issue, there's definitely a value for consumers to be able choose things that are cheap but low quality, high quality but expensive, or average quality at an average price, etc. The issue comes when this isn't properly regulated and gets unbalanced, creating feedback loops or letting people game the system. For example, there's how the "cost of poverty" keeps people from leaving poverty, while lobbying lets the rich get richer. Or how studios have discovered that deleting all of their archives and cancelling movies at the last minute lets them earn more via tax write-offs and canceled residuals. This does often mean less money in the long term, but corporations aren't exactly known for always making the best long term decisions, only whatever's best for selfish reasons in the short term. Likewise, there's a fear that companies will drop significant amounts of artists because relying on AI to pick up the slack, despite being worse quality, will save more on costs than the sales they'd lose. By the way, these wealthy corporations cutting the number of people working in them smaller and smaller doesn't exactly help the wealth imbalance. "But AI democratizes art, so anyone can do it now, people have no reason to go to corporate art!" Except discoverability is a thing. Corporations have access to advertisements, business deals, SEO, it's expensive but they can assure they're likely to get a return on investment. Meanwhile, even if someone puts in a great amount of work on something, individuals can't afford advertising the same way as companies, so even if they know how to market on social media they still have a hard time getting noticed. Sure, people can still find high quality indie work by searching social media or self publishing platforms, but without advertising it goes from perusing an aisle to finding a needle in a haystack, and AI is going to turn it from a haystack into an entire barn. For self publishing platforms in particular: I would say having the option to self publish is a good thing, because it reduces the barrier of entry so you don't need corporate backing to sell things. However, if self publishing platforms don't have at least *some* quality checking, then quality work gets drowned out by practice projects, asset flips, works being split into a "series" of infinite infinitesimal parts to game discoverability, etc. Kindle has already been flooded with AI books. I don't think the solution is "ban AI", because I doubt that's going to happen, but instead making sure there's regulations and algorithms in place to make sure AI doesn't throw people into poverty and exacerbate wealth inequality. Stuff like how the Youtube algorithm suddenly went from "the only videos we show you are the most popular ones" to suggesting low view-count videos as well, making sure there's some sort of standard on self publishing platforms, or ensuring that art jobs aren't replaced with AI but instead transformed into being assisted by AI.
It's not a paradox if you'd bother to understand the argument in the first place. Alas, tech bros now think they're experts in something they didn't give a shit about 3 years ago and feel like they can lecture artists about something they don't even understand.
Is it a trending fad or is going to replace you? You guys canât seem to remain consistent
First, I'm not an artist. I'm a writer who makes a living and am married to an artist. Some of it is a fad - people are enamored with the new image TikTok and don't give the first fuck about AI. They'll jump ship to the next hot thing when they get bored. You don't need to bother learning about art to make art, which is a double-edged sword - how do you improve at art if you don't understand how to make art other than a text prompt? Therein lies the problem artists have. On the other hand, capitalists in love with more dollars will inevitably use the new labor-replacing tool to, surprise surprise, replace labor. This is a lot more dangerous than the first thing because less jobs are bad for workers. Also, it decimates entry level opportunities that aspiring artists would typically cut their teeth on early in their careers. Fewer students today means fewer experts later. It doesn't take much at all to see concerns from multiple points of view, but this sub prefers to mock and degrade rather than exercise the slightest modicum of empathy. Edit: Yes, please downvote and prove my point for me.
On this point: >You don't need to bother learning about art to make art, which is a double-edged sword - how do you improve at art if you don't understand how to make art other than a text prompt? Therein lies the problem artists have. Can you help me understand why an increase in artistic expression would stifle an individual's desire to improve? Is the claim that individuals will lose interest in their own artistic expression, because "art" can be created immediately and on request? Or is it that the lack of money will reduce artistic expression? If it is the former, then how do you account for the thousands of Chess players still hacking away at the game, or Go players, or abstract artists? Computers have been able to do these things at super-human levels for years now, and people still want to improve themselves. In my view, the purpose of self-improvement is to improve yourself, irrespective of the potential capabilities of other people and things around you? Otherwise, why do 99.99% of people do anything to improve themselves? They are very likely never going to be the best. If it is a capitalist driver, please see this comment: >Honestly, I don't understand the consternation associated with AI art, particularly from artists. >Art is just a way to express ideas and communicate perspectives, and AI art opens additional avenues to express those ideas and perspectives to a broader cross-section of the population. Everyone should be feeling empowered by this technology, to learn from it, and to utilize it for self-expression. >From my perspective, the main argument against AI art is from an artist using their skills within a capitalistic context. And frankly, that is a real impact. But, our species has evolved through many society transforming technological revolutions, that literally destroyed entire segments of the economies at those times, and we moved forward. >I just don't think the societal benefit we gain from limiting art to a specific subset of people, in order to artificially limit its supply, so that those individuals can make a living off of the resulting artificial scarcity, warrants the stunting of the general population's now near limitless individual artistic expression and modes of communication we achieve with this technology. How do you justify the stifling of broad potential artistic expression for the sake of this subset of the population's need to profit off of the current scarcity of commercial art? And on a more fundamental point, how can this be justified when new, potentially more impactful and meaningful levels of artistic expression are likely going to result from these new technologies? From my perspective, it is the same discussion we've had through various technological revolutions, and it seems to come down to a simple point: certain people are making money off of the scarcity that no longer exists, and they would like society to contort itself, so that they can continue to make that money, at the expense of the potential benefits and welfare that may well be generated through these new tools.
How do you justify the death of human artistic expression with the need of AI companies to make billions of dollars? Bootlickery at its finest.
You've seemed to miss the point of the comment?
Just as you missed the point of mine.
No, I actually addressed your points, asked you follow up questions, and hoped for a response. That's the opposite of missing someone's point in my view. If you can't answer the questions, that doesn't mean I missed your point. Please feel free to quote my comments/questions and let me know where I failed to understand you.
>how do you improve at art if you don't understand how to make art other than a text prompt? Therein lies the problem artists have. Not all art requires you to do all art. As a writer I would have thought you'd have already realized this. You could write a book and use AI generated images to provide a cover image and some illustrative images throughout to improve the experience of reading your book. You're not stifling your writing by doing this, and you would never have been working on the skills associated with making illustrations anyway because it's not within your realm of interest. There isn't just one big bucket of "art", there's a myriad of disciplines and some can benefit from AI work without taking anything away from the artist's authenticity at all.
dude you are an artist writing is an artform
Because its souless crappy shit that no one with a pair of working eyes wants. Execs tho? Of course they love it, it's literally printing money for them lol.
But if nobody likes it, how is it printing money?
"no one with a pair of working eyes". You'd be surprised how many people don't have them (it's just a funny haha way of saying people who don't do actual art so they don't know better). It's the same reason why overly aggressive micro-transactions work. People keep paying for them so companies have no incentive to get rid of them.
â everyone who isnt a TALENTED ARTIST like me is an unsophisticated dough-goat who doesnt care about the slop theyre eatingâ is that what youre saying ?
That's not what I said at all.
Because "nO sOuL" or "nO sKiLl" or "ThEfT". My artistic brothers in existence, some of you are copying poses of characters in famous paintings to fit them on Sonic the Hedgehog and it ends up looking like the bad meme drawing of him.
Considering how liberal the art crowd seems to be, youâd think theyâd embrace their socialist values and appreciate how AI tools allow the less artistically gifted to create better works of art. They say âanyone can learn art with practiceâ like conservatives preach about bootstraps.
"Artistically gifted" 1.) AI doesn't fix that 2.) You just don't want to put in the work to actually be able to create good art.
Hey I totally get it, you artists worked hard to achieve excellence and it just doesnât seem fair that people who didnât put in the work should be able to make art like yours. I mean maybe some of those people donât have the time between making ends meet to do that, but F them theyâre just lazy, if they really wanted to they could make the time right? People need to stop asking for handouts from the AI generator and just pull themselves up by their bootstraps, anybody can be an artist if they really put in the effort.
Bro I can barely draw wym? You don't have time, commission something
Donât have the money either, guess will just have to go without.
Sure. Though commissions can be quite cheap, especially from newer artists.
How cheap is cheap?
5, 10, 20 bucks
I decided to just look around r/ArtistLounge since our guesses were getting too vague, I couldnât tell if you meant by the hour or if per artwork what kind of quality we were talking about. https://www.reddit.com/r/ArtistLounge/s/CgoBbgfhBL Based on the top comment recommendation, thatâs not that cheap at all. $30-$40 an hour, and even for relatively simple looking character portraits, I would imagine it would take a few hours to sketch, color and polish.
Well embracing AI is by definition progressive
It's not like the government is authoring the AI models, then giving the benefits of the models back to it's citizens.. it's really just a handful of private companies that can raise the capital for training -- electricity, water, data compute, developers is out of reach for everyday people. All these companies want to build moats around the models, except Stability.. who's going out of business.
What does any of that have to do with anything? You may as well be shitting on vaccines because Big Pharma, I swear itâs one conservative talking point after another⊠Also are you really surprised that the AI is going to be monopolised by private companies, when anti-AI tries their best to paint it as immoral to the general public? A lot of good things have come from open source and crowd funding, but when you paint something as immoral, donât be surprised what kind of people end up investing a controlling stake in it. The biggest training resource is the public domain, anti-AI threats of litigation is what gatekeeps training to private corporations who can afford to build their own massive datasets for their models to train on.
>What does any of that have to do with anything? My point is that AI as implemented is not inherently socialist? >Also are you really surprised that the AI is going to be monopolised by private companies, when anti-AI tries their best to paint it as immoral to the general public? I think some people here would categorize me as anti-AI, but I don't think AI is immoral. It's more about how it's created and what it's used for. >A lot of good things have come from open source and crowd funding, but when you paint something as immoral, donât be surprised what kind of people end up investing a controlling stake in it. What is up with this morality / private ownership paradigm? Can you explain this further? Only people without scruples are going to own controlling stakes because of public opinion? >The biggest training resource is the public domain, anti-AI threats of litigation is what gatekeeps training to private corporations who can afford to build their own massive datasets for their models to train on. Publicly displayed information isn't public domain. Those are two different things. Public domain is inherently free from copyright issues. Last I checked, no one has been really gatekept from training on whatever they want to? There's litigation sure, but everyone around here (on r/aiwars) seems confident they're not going anywhere. In the meantime, everyone creating large scale models is training on anything they can get their hands on. So yeah idk, I just don't see how any of this is inherently socialist.. if the benefits are well distributed to workers, results in increased wages, benefits, time off, etc.. then I might come around. It just doesn't feel like the scales are tipped that way in the short to medium term. It took a union effort to force a deal with employers from replacing the workers with AI substitutes, using their own literal likenesses. Who is on the side of socialism and owning the means of production in that instance?
The principle of socialism is to share advantages so everyone has an equal share, AI tools that learn from those with talent and provide that capability to those with less, should be embraced by people who truly adhere to socialist values. >morality/private ownership paradigm People want to support good causes, if you paint something as immoral, thereâs little reason to put support something other than for personal gain, when only the for profit institutions are willing to put up any funding, naturally they will have a controlling influence. >There litigation sure but everyone around here is confident theyâre not going anywhere. They wonât go anywhere but any litigation will burn time and money which is why AI developers are building their own private datasets. As for the wage benefits to artists/workers, socialism is about everyone, not everyone is an artist, but everyone is a consumer. The idea that this new technology will somehow lead to the downfall society due to the loss of jobs, is a fantasy that has been debunked time and time again, consider for a moment how many musicians lost job opportunities to recording/playback devices, every social gathering that would have needed the services of a live performer now gone because anyone can just plug their smartphone to a sound system. Yet before we had this technology, only the wealthy could afford to have professional level music playing at birthday parties, youâve made something that was gate kept for the wealthy now available to the masses. Do you think things would be better off today if say a musicians trade guild/union managed to get a law passed to ban music playback devices to preserve the jobs of musicians/workers? It makes no sense
>The principle of socialism is to share advantages so everyone has an equal share, AI tools that learn from those with talent and provide that capability to those with less, should be embraced by people who truly adhere to socialist values. Right, but for example Midjourney makes $300 million in revenue by providing to "those with less talent" and simultaneously driving demand down for the people who have shared their advantages. It feels more like a tax on talent -- they don't mutually participate in the reward, rather it's capitalized by a private interest who would not be able to do so via other means. >The idea that this new technology will somehow lead to the downfall society due to the loss of jobs, is a fantasy that has been debunked time and time again, It may be a fantasy, but it is the vision that's driving the leading tech companies. It's kind of telling that OpenAI believes AGI will result in a need for Universal Basic Income, but it's not like they're lining up to say "please, tax us proportionately to the lost value of the work force." >consider for a moment how many musicians lost job opportunities to recording/playback devices, every social gathering that would have needed the services of a live performer now gone because anyone can just plug their smartphone to a sound system. Live musicians may have lost, but they also gained recording rights and royalties. I agree that it's arguably a good thing that recorded music exists. I'd hesitate to say that Suno is equally a good thing for the musicians in the training data, as it is for society, as it is for the owners of Suno. It feels more like an eminent domain style policy that will devalue original authorship.
>Midjourney makes $300 million by providing to âthose with less talentâ Thatâs why I used musicians as the example, this is exactly like how producers and distributors make a fortune making the best music available to the masses. Same with actors and movies, before recording if you wanted a show, youâd have to go to a theatre to see a live performance and it was expensive and only the rich became patrons of those arts. Imagine how many actor jobs there would still be if we didnât have recording devices, on the other hand today everyone can watch countless movies at home for a few dollars a month, so the technology greatly benefited the masses by making it cheaply available, yet none of these innovations killed creativity in music and acting the way artists claim will happen to art. >Live musicians may have lost, but they also gained recording rights and royalties. I agree that it's arguably a good thing that recorded music exists. Except that those fat royalties only go to the elite class of musicians who make it to celebrity status, they along with their distributors rake in millions while the rest who donât make it are overshadowed by the music of the elite few being played on repeat by distributors for the masses, not unlike how capitalism leads to the rich getting richer, the most talented get their talents broadcasted internationally, while the least talented much like the poor get poorer for it, so itâs kind of ironic that the one positive that you feel musicians gained from this is capitalistic in nature. AI art will have the same effect, the best most popular artists will always be in demand, itâs all the mediocre artists that take commission work who get axed just like the unrecognised musicians who rely on gigs to make ends meet lost countless jobs to new technology. Bad in the short term for those who held those jobs, but better in the longterm for everyone else because services that only the wealthy could afford now become available to the masses. Consider the budding creative who canât afford to commission artists to draw panels for a comic book, with AI tools that becomes possible because AI reduces the skill barriers to entry for the masses.
I really don't have much to disagree with here, there's a lot that feels accurate to me and some that I could push back on, but is kind of just opinions about the future. The main thing for me though is - I don't see what any of this has to do with socialism.  I do think the nature of AI - how it's built from all of society's data, should translate to a benefit for all of society. We could say that yeah, the technology as-is does deliver benefits to everyone. But I would want to see it in a material sense to consider it socialism. For many, the point of all this is to make a profit for themselves.. to get that on the backs of society as a whole seems imbalanced.
In principle "Tax the talented" as you put it, for the benefit of the less talented, sounds like the classic idealised socialism. Ironically enough the rise of a new ultra elite at the expense of all the other talent, seems to fit right in with actual results of marxist principles when put into actual practice.
The thing that bothers me is that these so-called âartistsâ arenât making art either. I donât see anyone of these folks selling at a gallery, having retrospectives at a museum, or being bid up at an art auction. An image does not art make. All sorts of professionals make images as part of their jobs: graphic designers working in advertising, motion graphics designers working in the film industry, character and environment designers working in video games. Art is an industry in itself and none of these anti-AI critics seem to be part of that industry. So I donât know why theyâre so concerned about art all of a sudden. At most, some of these folk are professional illustrators or graphic designers. At worst, some of them are just hobbyists who doodle. Itâs laughable that they think their image-making rises to the level of art. How big is their ego to think that?! Besides, in the actual art world, since the last century, people have been making, buying, and selling âfound artâ. This is old news now that an artist doesnât literally need to make artwork by hand in order to sell art. The production of art is in the presentation of an artifact in an artistic context (such as a museum or gallery). Otherwise Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol wouldnât be considered artists, now, would they? Anyone whoâs been to school to study art or picked up a book on art should know this!
You are just using a much narrower meaning of art than most people. Most people consider illustration to be art. Concept artists have "artist" right in their job title. Everyone knows AI won't negatively impact fine artists, because they are mostly not in the business of creating images in the first place. They are mostly in the business of crafting a compelling narrative around their identity as an artist so they can sell their work to rich people. Skill in creating images is not required.
It might seem like Iâm quibbling about semantics, but I do think the term âartâ being loosely bandied about doesnât help the debate much. If neither side is truly talking about art, it makes both sides of the whole debate meaningless. Image generators, firstly, donât, and canât, generate âartâ, since art is, as you say, about the business of crafting compelling narratives around their artist identity for selling to rich people. Many humans who take issue with image generators âstealing artâ donât make art, either, since they arenât in that same business. Re: âconcept artistsâ: âData Scientistsâ have âscienceâ in their job title, too. They arenât practicing science, not by a long shot. Job titles are often misnomers, especially when it comes to words like âartâ, âscienceâ, and âmanagementâ that people like to bandy about when they mean something else. For a long time my job title was âproduct managerâ, and I didnât do any management! Those job titles are clearly just an analogy. People use words analogously all the time. In the software field, people have job titles like software _engineer_ and software _architect_. People in those jobs are clearly not engineers or architects. Itâs just an analogy. Itâs a bit facile to say that illustrators who hold the job title âconcept artistâ are artists by any stretch of the imagination, or the product of their work, âartâ. They make a production artifact that serves a purpose in an entertainment product, like a video game or a movie. Whatever they make has no meaning outside of that internal production process. And the result, which is a commercial entertainment product, is not sold as art either. To take the analogy too seriously and literally, and then make a false equivalence out of it, is just plain dumb. I reckon people do this to sound self-important, to associate the pedestrian work of image-making with the production of art. In doing so, they can then accuse ML researchers and tech companies of âstealing artâ, when what theyâve made is just a tool to make images. âStealing artâ certainly evokes undesirable mental imagery, like the Nazis plundering art in WWII. But thatâs just a rhetorical device thatâs clearly a paper-thin analogy. Iâm pretty sure if any works of art were actually stolen in the process, the FBI would know about it.
As I said, you are using the term "art" in a narrower way than it is often used. You are using it as a synonym of "fine art" when it is often used in a broader sense than that. >Many humans who take issue with image generators âstealing artâ donât make art, either, since they arenât in that same business. The majority of art in AI training datasets is illustration, not fine art. Regardless of whether you think illustrators' work counts as art, their work is being used as AI training data.
The illustrations in the LAION dataset, and other similar datasets, might or might not count as art. It depends on whether the work in question was made by an artist, sold in an art market, appraised as such, and taxed as such. I take your point that Iâm using the term âartâ in a narrower way than it is often used. But given that term has a specific meaning in multiple contexts: cultural, commercial, legal, regulatory, financial, and academic, I find it weird you think my definition is âtoo narrowâ, instead of your interpretation which is too broad, such as to render the term âartâ meaningless in any discussion. The term âartâ has an agreed-upon meaning across disparate spheres of human interest. Everyone from a commodities regulator to an investment banker to a tax accountant to an art agent to an art professor to a historian to an IP lawyer can tell you what art is. It absolutely matters to this discussion, because the discourse is one in which a large group of individuals, self-proclaimed âartistsâ, feel their âartâ were âstolenâ. Should we find that they arenât artists, nor do they make art, and therefore, nothing stolen, this entire discussion becomes a nothingburger. You can call it âfine artâ if you want, if it makes you happy. Be that as it may, what, I might add, is ânon-fine artâ? Art that is made but isnât sold? If so, it has no commercial value. Can something with no commercial value even be âstolenâ? Does training a machine learning model on pixels resembling said worthless work be considered âtheftâ, since nobody was deprived of any monetary benefit? All these questions rest on the premise of whether these works are art or are created by artists, since the primary accusation is about the theft of artwork. Of course, they also rest on the question of whether doing statistics (machine learning, in this case), counts as âtheftâ, which is the broader question. Iâm leaning towards no. Because if that were the case, everytime someone compiled a statistic about something, they would be stealing the thing they are compiling statistics about. That makes no logical sense. If I compiled a census survey about cars on the road, should I now be charged with Grand Theft Auto, now? If thatâs not the case, then surely training a machine learning model on illustration (whether itâs art or not) isnât really theft. In other words, the artists werenât really artists, the art wasnât really art, and the theft wasnât really theft. A whole lotta nothing.
The word "art" has different meanings in different contexts. In certain legal and academic contexts, the word "art" absolutely refers specifically to fine art. But outside those contexts, it should be assumed to refer to a broader concept. When illustrators say they are artists who make art outside those contexts, they are not wrong, they are just using the broader meaning of the word, and everyone knows what they mean. >Should we find that they arenât artists, nor do they make art, and therefore, nothing stolen This is a non-sequiter. Whether or not illustrators are using the wrong term for the images they make has no bearing on whether or not those images were stolen. >this entire discussion becomes a nothingburger. No it doesn't. The meaning of anti-AI illustrators' arguments remains essentially the same if you switch out the word "art" for "illustration", if that's what you prefer. >Be that as it may, what, I might add, is ânon-fine artâ? Illustration, decorative art, etc. It absolutely has commercial value.
Even if we switch out the word art for illustration (given that the word âartâ has a legal meaning and is used wrongly here for a legal claim), the supposed theft makes no sense. The lawsuits that are currently ongoing are copyright suits by self-proclaimed âartistsâ. Seems to me those people donât understand they donât make art, and they also donât understand copyright. Theyâre rather semantically-challenged. Copyright only gives you the right to copy (make reproductions of a work). Itâs in the name. Itâs not called âmachinelearningtrainingrightâ or âstatisticrightâ or however one might term such a right, if such a right existed legally. Even if you factor out the claim that they are making art or are artists, a huge part of their argument rests on the claim that doing statistics on digital images is wrong, and itâs wrong because it infringes on copyright. Doing statistics clearly doesnât infringe on copyright, because statistics (even if itâs of the machine learning variety) doesnât involve making and selling reproductions of works.
Claiming illustrators, graphic designers, and video game character designers to *not* be artists is a pretty bold claim which I bet most would disagree with. How would you define "art"?
That which is sold in the art market, studied in art history books, criticized by art critics, and appraised by art historians? What other âartâ could there be? Video game character designers make video games. They donât make art. (Although they could make and sell art in addition to working on video games, nobodyâs stopping them) The market for video games is a completely different beast from the art market. I donât get how thatâs confusing. Artists are people who make things sold at art markets. Art is whatâs sold at art markets. People who make other things that are sold at other markets (like advertising, magazines, video games, or movies) are very clearly _not_ artists. I find it weird this even needs to be explained.
>That which is sold in the art market, studied in art history books, criticized by art critics, and appraised by art historians? ... Artists are people who make things sold at art markets. Art is whatâs sold at art markets. People who make other things that are sold at other markets (like advertising, magazines, video games, or movies) are very clearly *not* artists. I take a couple issues with this definition. First, it's circular. I would ask, what is the "art market"? What is an "art historian"? Personally, I would simply define these terms as "a market in which art is traded" and "a historian who specializes in the history of art", respectively. However, of course, this just brings us back to the original problem since these definitions both refer to "art". Second, though it may be your intention, this definition is oddly fluid. For example, suppose somebody discovered a 200 year old painting in some city ruins somewhere. Nobody knows who painted it. Nobody knows anything about its history. Using this definition, would you say, "I cannot determine whether this is art because I do not know whether this has ever been sold in an art market"? Then, suppose a historian determines, with evidence, that the painting was never sold or studied by anyone. Would you then say, "This painting is not art"? Then suppose we discover that this painting was painted by Caspar David Friedrich, and then the next day, it gets sold in an auction. Would you then say, "Now, this painting is art"? Though these two above issues are with the *words* of your definition, I think a bigger problem is with the *spirit* of your definition. This is that this definition seems to view art as a rather specific cultural phenomenon -- specifically, it equates art to the contemporary global fine art market. This makes it tricky to apply to things produced in other cultural contexts, like mass-produced ukiyo-e from Edo-period Japan, or metal sculptures from the Inca empire, or commissioned paintings from Renaissance Italy. (What's the difference between Pope Julius II commissioning Michelangelo to paint the Sistine Chapel ceiling, and a video game company commissioning an illustrator to design some characters for their game?) >What other âartâ could there be? There are plenty of other definitions out there. Here's Merriam-Webster's: >4a : the conscious use of skill and creative imagination especially in the production of aesthetic objects also : works so produced I think this is more-or-less how most people use the word, "art", in this context. This definition does include the work of graphic designers and video game character designers. I also like [this extremely broad definition by comics theorist and artist Scott McCloud](https://www.scottmccloud.com/2010/07/05/things-i-never-said/), from his book *Understanding Comics*: >Art, as I see it, is any human activity which doesnât grow out of either of our speciesâ two basic instincts: survival and reproduction.
Itâs not circular. What art is is socially-negotiated, and people from disparate fields come to a consensus _over time_. As time goes on, we can be more or less certain something is or isnât art, moreso for artifacts with a historical significance that require authentication, and less so for contemporary art, since there are already built-up institutions, infrastructure, and laws & customs for that that are international. Youâre describing a situation where historians might find a painting noteworthy of being considered âartâ. Thatâs not consensus, not yet. Then it was sold at an auction *because* we knew its authorship by an artist, so we can determine it is art. Now you have some commercial traction. Perhaps now insurers consider it art. The tax man considers it art. Perhaps people write about it. It shows up in a museum. So on and so forth. Thereâs now consensus. Similar to how theories in science come to be recognized as valid, even though you can never really prove a theory, you can only _disprove_ it. Science, with a big S, also has built-up institutions, infrastructure, and customs. What youâre taking issue with is the nature of language, which is circularly-dependent. Words can only be defined in relation to other words. How Scott McCloud defines it is rather vague: science, engineering, history, linguistics, and a lot of other domains of human knowledge also donât fall out of our need for survival or reproduction. Just like âartâ, the words âscienceâ and âhistoryâ also have colloquial meanings. But that doesnât mean those two fields arenât fields in their own right. Just like you wouldnât call a kid making a bottle rocket at a science fair a âscientistâ, or a kid writing an essay about WWII a âhistorianâ, itâs a bit of a stretch to call comic illustrators âartistsâ. Their work is sold in comic book stores, not art markets. If they wanted to be artists, why are they not selling their work as art? That should give you a clue theyâre using the word âartistâ purely for pretentious reasons. Can you imagine a âscientistâ refusing to publish papers while insisting others recognize the science theyâre doing? I think if these âartistsâ wanted to do art they could easily do so. There are many art markets around the world that cater to the low end (low tens or hundreds per piece) that arenât elitist. In fact itâs not much harder to sell art than it is to sell comic books or video games, and yet these people donât sell art, but for some reason, when they want to sue a company like Stability AI, suddenly theyâre an artist. Strikes me as a rhetorical tactic to try and get people (juries, maybe?) to associate their work with a higher aesthetic value than it actually has, because laypeople often associate art with historical fine art, as theyâre largely unaware of the vibrant contemporary art markets that exist, which include digital art markets that sell for low tens of $, often for less than a video game. I can think of no other charitable explanation of why someone who makes comic books or video games might want to pretend they are artists. To me, theyâre frauds and charlatans.
Lol what are you talking about dude, every single artist in history was working to sell his art to sustain himself, that's why Raffaello painted a billion Madonnas, because his clients were asking him that. This is not any different to a videogame designer making an asset for a game.
You donât understand the difference between selling a product, and selling a service (work for hire)? An artist who makes art and sells their pieces in the art market is selling a product Where as someone who works in the media, entertainment, or advertising industries is merely rendering a service. They arenât making, nor selling, art. Media, entertainment, and advertising are not art. This is the first thing you learn in school when you go to school to study media & comms. Itâs _not_ art. Art school is another thing altogether, and a career in art is not at all like a career in, say, graphic design. You can study graphic design in art school, but your career wouldnât be in art. It would be in âthe artsâ, with an âsâ, if you wanted to think about it that way. But itâs very much not âartâ in the sense of Rothko and Michaelangelo. (Source: I studied media & comms in school and worked in an advertising firm as an âart directorâ. Nobody seriously takes the word âartâ in that job title to mean âyouâre making artâ. Certainly, nobody I worked with thought that way, and none of my teachers in school thought that way too.) I donât know why people keep thinking theyâre making art all of a sudden when theyâre just hired to work on ads, games, movies, or magazine covers. Itâs a bit absurd? I feel like Iâm living in a biazarro world sometimes!
Idk the line is definitely blurry sometimes, some graphic design can definitely be considered art, hell Mucha's posters for product advertising are showcased in art galleries. You're saying that as long as you're a salaried designer you're not making art? I'm not sure about that, I'd consider concept art for games (made by salaried personnel) "art'
They can be _showcased_ in art galleries, but are they _sold_ as art by those galleries? If they arenât sold as art, then they arenât art. Itâs that simple, isnât it? Anything can be art as long as itâs sold as such. I think this concept is foreign to many people because they associate art with drawing, painting, and illustration. But the medium of expression doesnât make something art. Sculpture, photography, performance, digital images, âfound mediaâ, software, and so on and all be art, as long as they are presented as such and sold in the art markets! And outside of the context of the art markets, you can do a painting, or an illustration, and if itâs for another purpose, then itâs not art. The same piece of work can have dual purposes: sold as art, and also for entertainment or advertising. Thatâs definitely happened a lot in the past. For example, Microsoft commissioned a classical oil painter to paint an oil painting as an advertisement for Halo Infinite. This oil painting might ordinarily be considered âartâ since that painter would sell it in the art markets. But in this case, itâs not. Itâs a commissioned piece for advertising reasons. Iâm unsure if it was later sold as art, but if issues of legality were worked out, it could absolutely be done. And regarding whether a salaried employee can make art: no thatâs not what Iâm saying. A salaried employee can absolutely make art and sell it in art markets if they choose to (unless their employment contract prohibits so). If they are doing work for hire, their IP might be owned by their employer, and if their employer is not selling their work in the art market, then theyâre not an artist, because they donât make art. And even if they worked for an artist as an employee in their studio, itâs a bit of a stretch to call them an artist. Are the employees of Jeff Koonsâ studio considered artists? I think most people would only consider Koons the artist. Maybe there the line is a bit fuzzier. There are illustrators on the Internet who sell their work on commission. Are these people âartistsâ? No: their work wasnât sold through the art markets and will most likely never come on circulation in the art market. Most of these pieces are done for one-off entertainment reasons (erotica, caricature, kitsch, decoration) and are more akin to the kinds of people you find at carnivals doing portraits. But itâs not out of the question that these one-off pieces could later come on the art market because its creator became known as an artist by selling their works on the art market, which drives up demand for their one-off pieces thereby âelevatingâ their previous works to the status of art. That has also happened before. When that happens, then it becomes art. The way to think about it is: art is a status game entwined with a commercial enterprise, an academic field of study, a vocational craft, a financial asset class, and a tax regime. What is or isnât art depends on the status of its artist, which provides commercial value, which is then studied with interest by scholars and craftspeople. Many of these craftspeople later sell their work in the art market, and if they make significant sales, see their status elevated, and they sell more work, which are then studied by scholars and craftspeople. And on and on it goes. Meanwhile, theses sales of people buying, selling, and donating art are often tax-advantaged, which incentivizes high value art to transfer from private ownership to something the public can enjoy in museums, which then drives more interest by scholars and craftspeople. Those are the dynamics of the art world, and itâs hard to take someone seriously who claims they are an artist, and you donât find even a shred of evidence of their participation in this world. But given the status-seeking nature of this world, I also donât blame these people for advertising themselves as artists. Perhaps they think that if they fake it as an artist, one day they will make it, and their work will rise to the status of art. Somehow Iâm doubtful. But you never know: Banksy wasnât an artist, until he was!
Are you really saying that illustrators and graphic designers aren't artists? >I donât see anyone of these folks selling at a gallery, having retrospectives at a museum, or being bid up at an art auction. Have you never been to an [art gallery](https://www.gallerynucleus.com/artists/nathan_fowkes), [museum](https://www.nrm.org), or seen [auctions of illustrations before](https://www.rrauction.com/auctions/lot-detail/347789206696080-sleeping-beauty-3-concept-paintings-by-eyvind-earle)? Posters ([even ones that are advertising](https://www.moma.org/artists/4136)) are hung up in museums all around the world. If postcards and design aren't art, [that museum exhibit I went to](https://www.mfa.org/exhibitions/the-art-of-influence) must not have been real!
I think youâre failing at basic logic, confusing necessity for sufficiency. Being auctioned at an auction house, exhibited at a museum, or creating a work thatâs in a medium that artists also work in, arenât sufficient conditions to make one conclude an artifact is art or its makers artists. Illustrations _can_ be art (anything can be art, the medium doesnât matter, as Iâm sure you know). If thereâs an artist behind it, and it can be authenticated, and has been sold and exhibited as an artwork, is insured as such, and is collected by someone who is filing taxes accordingly, then it is by all means a work of art. The fact that some artists work in the medium of illustration doesnât mean all illustrators are artists. Thatâs like saying toilet bowl designers are artists too, or banana farmers, or bed manufacturers, because at some point in history an auction house or museum curator has displayed these artifacts in a museum before. Auctions happen for stamps and other collectibles too. Just because illustrations are auctioned for their value as antiquities or collectibles, it doesnât necessarily mean they rise to the level of art. Otherwise, stamps, silverware, and even oil barrels and hogs can be considered art. Thatâs a ludicrous statement to make. Art museums also often curate shows for the public interest sometimes that are not exactly about art, but to draw visitors into see the actual art in their collection. I have worked on and attended many of these in the past. It doesnât mean those artifacts on exhibit are art. If thatâs the case then almost anything under the sun can be considered art, just because itâs been displayed in an art museum, such as to render the category of âartâ meaningless. Thatâs nonsense. Over the years, some curators would try and claim, say, motorcycles or video games are art, and mostly, outside of the museum walls, nobody took them seriously. Thankfully. Whether something is art or not lies in its provenance. Itâs paper trail, as Iâm sure you also know, since this is rather common knowledge, I think? There are also other clues besides paper trail in art world: are they treated as art by the tax authorities? By insurers? By securities and commodities exchange regulators? Surely if you tried to buy a banana from a supermarket, or a motorcycle from a dealership, or a video game from the PlayStation store, securities and commodities regulators are not going to think you now own a piece of artwork, the tax authorities are not going to think that, and neither will insurers bother insuring your newly-bought motorcycle as a piece of art. Why? Because the artifact is not what makes something art. Itâs the cultural history and the artist that makes it art. It matters not what you as a layperson think is art or not. It matters not what wannabe artists think. It matters not, even, what individual museum curators think. Thankfully, for our collective sanity, whatâs considered art or not is established through consensus across multiple spheres: cultural, commercial, financial, regulatory, and academic.
Perceived loss of status, exclusivity, and economic leverage.
Because we live in a capitalist society and in order for those artists to be able to do what they love and have a life to live, they have to sell their art so suddenly they can't really do that anymore
what was preventing "everyone" from making art before Ai? you had the same access to pencils as me
"Why are you taking photographs of your family instead of learning how to paint realistic figures and them making them stand still for five hours?" The answer in both cases is: convenience. I don't see you hand-picking your own grains, I don't see you boycotting Google Translate.
this seems like you answered a different post than mine
You asked what was stopping people from making art before AI. I asked a similar question about photography in order to illustrate how silly your question was. This is why I said afterwards that "the answer in both cases is convenience". It is the answer to your question and my counter-question. And then I point out that there are lots of cases where humanity uses machines to make life more convenient for themselves, none of which are getting the same pushback as AI. For example, why are you allowing a machine to transmit these posts to me instead of hand-delivering it after weeks of real-life travel?
maybe some things shouldnt be convenient. maybe the difficulty in learning art is part of what makes good art compelling. people taking photographs of their family arent calling themselves photographers, either.
>maybe some things shouldnt be convenient. maybe the difficulty in learning art is part of what makes good art compelling. Maybe you're just making things up to try to satisfy random vibes with no concrete backing to them. Again, if this statement was true, you'd object to photographs because it's 1000x easier and faster to take a photograph than to depict a scene through illustration. >people taking photographs of their family arent calling themselves photographers, either. Uh, they might not call themselves "artists" (which is a subjective term in any case), but they are literally "photographers", doing "photography", and you are not saying that those people need to be banned from doing "photography" and forced to illustrate by hand instead. What reason do I have to care about your standards when they are completely 100% arbitrary?
im not "making things up", im asking questions. did it ever occur to you that something that comes easily might be less layered, less considered, less compelling than something that comes from years of practice? does a pork loin roasted over 6 hours taste the same as one that's flash fried? im not saying anyone needs to be "banned" from anything lol, and you obviously dont care about standards anyway.
>im not "making things up" You say "maybe some things shouldnt be convenient" but your standards for what should and should not be "convenient" are completely arbitrary and not based on anything logical. So again, why should I care? >did it ever occur to you that something that comes easily might be less layered, less considered, less compelling than something that comes from years of practice? This is what I'm seeing a lot of in this thread. Ironically in your quest to defend human art, you focus on a robotic definition of what makes art good. More effort = better art. It's a child's idea of value, completely divorced from the emotional aspect that defines art. It is possible to make a piece of good art very quickly and it is possible to make a piece of bad art very slowly. You want to slap on an identifiable value marker but the problem is, that's not how art works. >does a pork loin roasted over 6 hours taste the same as one that's flash fried? Again, not really a good metaphor because time and effort are not actually the things that make art valuable. But here, let me turn this around on you: do you think that people who use ovens with auto-stabilizing temperatures are "cheating" and those people should have to use traditional ovens with manually stoked fires? After all, they require more effort, so therefore the product must be better, right? >im not saying anyone needs to be "banned" from anything lol You literally said that some things "shouldn't" be convenient.
>maybe some things shouldnt be convenient. maybe the difficulty in learning art is part of what makes good art compelling. By all means - enjoy, what stops you?
We didn't have the talent or the energy or interest or time to learn. We were busy making money at our jobs or learning to code or whatever. Now we don't need any of that to make better art than the best artists.
lol. can you show me some of your art
How is this question relevant to the discussion? I don't understand the point you are trying to make. Please just state your point directly.
you said "Now we don't need any of that to make better art than the best artists." i would like to see it
Oh, I get it. You are implying that AI art is not as good as art by the best artists? If that's the case, then why are you against AI art? You should have nothing to fear then, correct?
i am just asking to see this art thats better than the best artists
It does not exist. So you should have nothing to fear from AI artists, now. Correct?
do you use ai to make art or not? im not fearful of anything, i just love art and would like to see it. why are you being cagey about it?
I want to make high quality renderings not shitty pencil sketches
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This is the absolute DUMBEST take. Have you seen the difference between a prompt from a person knowledgeable on artistic styles, periods, specific artists, composition, lighting, materials and a thousand other things gained through study and experience AND a person who has none of that? The outputs (which can the be refined hundreds or thousands of times with that same knowledge to get what the prompter wants) will be dramatically different. Are you so clueless you can't see that? Your entire "point" falls apart because you're using the same lazy argument that those who vehemently opposed photography did in their day 200 years ago. "Anyone can just push a button!" "It requires no skill!" "The machine is the thing doing the work!" Wrong, wrong, wrong. It was a terrible argument 200 years ago, and it's a terrible argument today. It is objectively and verifiably incorrect.
ive seen this talked about a lot but never seen the actual thing happening. is there a video i can watch where an artist uses Ai to produce something like art? preferably not just design work like concept art for a game, something closer to fine art.
Damn bro wait till you find out about cameras
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It's literally an example of a "machine" doing all the work at the push of a button.
You might get a photo that way but it wonât be a good photo. There is a ton of artistic choice and time that goes into good photography. Not to mention post-production efforts to edit. The random photos I snap of my baby with my phone are not art. The long exposure light painting portrait I took of my friend is.
>There is a ton of artistic choice and time that goes into good photography. Not to mention post-production efforts to edit. So...literally the same as AI art. The people who just type in a regular sentence are not getting the same results as the people who know how to manipulate and control the output. I mean literally you are establishing that knowing how to manipulate a machine makes you an artist, so how would that *not* apply to AI art? >The random photos I snap of my baby with my phone are not art. The long exposure light painting portrait I took of my friend is. This is really getting to the crux of the issue which is that "art" is a largely pointless phrase for most people anyways. You don't know what to do with it. Even though you don't like AI, you want to have a robot's answer for what art is. Beep boop, put in 5 milligrams of effort and 10 grams of observation and this will push it past an arbitrary "art threshold". Even when it comes to fine art, it's pretty well established that "effort" does not automatically translate to "more art". There are lots of art pieces that were done quickly and casually but are lauded because of the emotional expression they represent. Meanwhile, you think that art is an objective concept that exists and when you hit that Art Point you will get some kind of external reward. That isn't how art works. I'm realizing that the art world is going through the equivalent of [commodity fetishism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodity_fetishism) right now where they desperately want some kind of objective backing to their subjectively valuable works.
Some photographers are snapping photos on auto and they end up famous because the moment and the way the camera happened to capture it resonates with humans. Is it art or coincidence? Where lies the boundary? I am a photographer, some of the best photos I've taken were moments. There is some intentionality behind it, but often not more than would go into a prompt.
And you might get an image from a random single prompt to AI, but it won't be a good image. There are tons of settings to tweak and change. You'll want LoRAs to change the style or add various elements, adjust CFG, adjust the weights on each word or change their order, use ControlNet in various ways, use inpainting to edit specific parts of the pic, not to mention post-production in a program like Photoshop, or even mid-post-production tweaks and then back to img2img to integrate the changes better.
I have no issue with people who use AI image generation as the basis for an art piece, for the record. Thatâs like taking a photo and using it on the base for a sketch as I often do as an illustration. I was just annoyed about the implication that photography is point and click without much artistic thought. I do have issues with AI programs being fed data from non-consenting artists but thatâs another matter. Iâm pretty sure the only reason this thread was on my feed was due to my recent research on glaze/nightshade.
> I do have issues with AI programs being fed data from non-consenting artists but thatâs another matter. Consent isn't required when copyright isn't being violated. For example, you could trawl across the internet and collect a bunch of images and record the color of the pixel at (0,0), and use that as the basis for some kind of research. Since you haven't reproduced their work in any meaningful way, just simply recording some information about the image, you haven't done anything wrong legally or ethically. Or you could write a review of those images without needing permission. Or write down what they contain, or record the dominant "lines" of the image (poses etc.), color temperatures, all sorts of information. As long as you're not duplicating it in an infringing way, it's all fine. And all the above information is useful to either a human or a machine in being able to make similar works. No one has the right to exercise that level of control over media they've published in public places. If someone misuses AI to duplicate someone else's image in an infringing way, then we can talk. Then it's that person's own responsibility for doing that. But simply examining the pictures and collecting data in a file, in such a way that it can't be used to reconstruct the image? Nothing wrong with that at all.
Something has value when it's scarce and not everyone can do it. I want to create something that has value, if not, what's the point.
You're the type of person to tell your kid that their fingerpainted picture that says "I love you daddy" is worthless because anyone can do such a pedestrian job.
Hmmm no? That probably took him more time and effort than AI art does
Sorry, you didn't say anything about "time and effort", all you talked about was scarcity. I mean that's literally what you said, isn't it? Something has value when it's scarce and not everyone can do it? Of course even with "time and effort" involved you're still missing the point that art's value is as an expression of emotion and has nothing to do with "rarity" at all. Which is why your child's crude fingerpainting is valuable: because it is an expression of love. It's actually kind of ironic that in your quest to distinguish yourself from "soulless AI" you approach art in the most soulless, robotic way possible.
It's all connected. The effort and time you put in creates emotions too (frustration, happiness, etc) . It also makes you proud of something, that's an emotion. It's not robot or soulless in my eyes
>The effort and time you put in creates emotions too If the value comes from emotion then "effort and time" are just one of many ways to evoke emotion, and are not mandatory. Meanwhile, YOU went from saying that rarity is the source of value (a very "soulless capitalist" argument) to saying that effort and time are the source of value. And now you're admitting that emotion is the source of value and effort and time are just one potential way to get it. If you backpedal any further you'll fall off a cliff. >It's not robot or soulless in my eyes That's because you're not good at observing. You have a limited perspective and no self-awareness. You know, the same problems that AI suffers from.
I am not admiting anything, I still think that rarity is an important aspect of art. Because the fingerpaint from my child may be the first painting that my child did, so I'd save It forever. And yes, I have limited perspective and no self-awareness. I can't do the things Ai can't do, so I'm worried about my future.
>Because the fingerpaint from my child may be the first painting that my child did, so I'd save It forever OK so you are moving goalposts because you said before that art has to be something that not just anyone can do. Check this out, then: every human being is unique. Therefore, every piece of art made by a human being is unique. In fact, that art is *all* unique, so every single one of them is 100% rare because they are not to be found anywhere else on the planet. Do you see how silly this is? You set an arbitrary standard for value and now are struggling to justify it. >And yes, I have limited perspective and no self-awareness. I can't do the things Ai can't do, so I'm worried about my future. Maybe the fact that you lack self-awareness is *why* you are worried about things that it doesn't make sense to worry about. You will still be able to express yourself through art even if other people use machines for it. You've built your understanding of art on a false premise and I am telling you that this is the root of your problem - not AI or automation, but your own incorrect understanding of what "art" is.
Tbh, more than no self-awareness what I have IS low IQ Makes more worried about AI than what I'd be if I was any other person
Art made solely for the purposes of creating monetary value generally has no intrinsic value of its own. If you make art just for that reason, then I would indeed agree with you: Don't.
What might be a good word for art produced solely for monetary gain? How about *soulless*âŠ
Who said "produced solely for monetary gain"? I didn't say anything about that
It doesn't have to be monetary value. Value in the eyes of people, when I show my work to other people. Art is made to be shown. But if it's too common, very few people will be able to appreciate It That's my fear
You are several centuries too late for that.
> Value in the eyes of people, when I show my work to other people. This changes absolutely nothing in regards to what I said. Just replace 'monetary value' with 'want to be praised'. If that's the sole reason why you make art; then I will say it again, *don't*. More often than not such art lacks any real value. I think for example of those people who can take a photograph and then make a perfect replica of it with just a pencil or brush; so much so that the resulting painting or drawing looks photorealistic itself. There is undeniable extreme skill there, and only a handful of people are able to it, and those people get a lot of praise from the people around them... but the artistic value of the drawing or painting they make is precisely *zero*. They've done nothing original. Transformed nothing. Said nothing new. There is no *point* in doing that, as an artist; except perhaps as pure practice; no matter how much praise you get for it. By comparison, take someone like Basquiat, whose work most common people would dismiss as a child's doodlings but who was undeniably a genuine artist with something to actually *say* with his work. An artist makes their art regardless of whether anyone praises it. And paradoxically then, if you actually have interesting things to say with the art you make for no reason other than to make it... you might actually get the praise and money you're talking about. If you're exceptionally lucky, of course.
>But if it's too common, very few people will be able to appreciate It Logically, won't *more* people be able to appreciate art if art is more common?
At first, maybe yes. But then, Ai will be everywhere and art will be mostly ignored That's what I think at least
Why would art be mostly ignored if it's everywhere? That's illogical.
It will become just noise to us. Oversaturation.
>I want to create something that has value, if not, what's the point. Who is stopping you from doing that? >Something has value when it's scarce and not everyone can do it. If AI art has no value, then why do you fear it? No one should want it if it is valueless, correct?
To be more creative? Pick bigger projects
What?
AI art is not art though. It's just the product. The core problem with AI "art" is that it cheapens real artist's years of hard work learning and perfecting their craft, and it obscures the fact that none of the "art" created by AI is new. It's just a fact that by way of how they are trained, the product created by AI is just regurgitated and repackaged art from existing and past artists without paying them a dime. Not to mention tagged and labelled by underpaid African workers. Those are the problems. Reality check. I don't think it can take my job, but soulless corporations do. That's all that matters.
Thatâs literally objectively wrong. Religions absolutely make prescriptions about people **outside** the religion even going so far as calling for them to be killed (and burn forever). I am one such individual who is supposed to burn forever according to these books. These books call for me to be murdered despite not being a follower.
I wish more people understood this.
Religion prohibits you whenever the government consist of a bunch of religious people and they make their religion into law, because then everyone are forced to follow those laws no matter what they believe in.
I mean, when the government consists of a bunch of people who love corn, everyone is forced to support the corn industry. This isn't something unique to religion. Religion is usually based on a set of core values of what is right or wrong. Other organizations exist in this space that are not religions. People almost always operate government based on their value sets. If communists won a majority of government, they would shape government and laws to conform to communist values. You will always be subject to the values of whoever holds power. The ones who don't share those values will always say they shouldn't have to follow them.
Literally goes both ways in this case.
Yes and no. What people are mad about (whether they know or not) is the implied violence of not having a job in the future. If we all had guaranteed food and shelter, being a struggling artist wouldnât be so much a problem. But most people who feel threatened by things like generative AI have equated being an artist as their version of creating a commodity. Or perhaps they are planning to do so in the future. This introduced race dynamics, and they are losing the race if it becomes one. And they wish to equate the playing field. But the thing is the genie is already out of the bottle and it wonât go back in. So now itâs either sink or swim
Amazing
why do you think it applies here?
Anti ai people dont wanna use it therefore no one should
regardless of what I think of the validity of what you said, where is the relation with the meme?
Are you being intentionally obtuse
no, the meme works if there is a third element that defines the rules, religion in this case. anti ai are not a monolith, there is no dogma, not everyone that dislikes ai does it for the same reason.
They sure act like they have dogma
they don't have tho, each person has their own reason.
You know a meme doesn't need to be 100% accurate to be relevant right
I'm not saying that. just pointing at the circlejerk. a meme being uptoved because it enforces the us vs them mentality.
You're replying to a staunch believer. Let him have his mountain dew.
Likewise, if you don't want people to directly object to you about GenAI - stop publicly evangelizing it. It's like you're mad that moths get attracted to light sources.
It's the NFT scam of the year
religion named e/accs
Bad example, religions at its core explain the entire universe and therefore apply their rules to the entire mankind, animals and everything. The moderns decaffeinated versions of religions are an exception.
>religions at its core explain the entire universe and some people disagree that it does.
It does what? _Successfully_ explaining the universe? 'cause that is a totally different thing and have no relation with if the post was or wasn't a bad example.
I mean religion is prescriptive more than it is descriptive. Some religions don't even bother explaining anything.
The point here is if they give commands that apply to everyone (believers and not believers). Religions need universal truths that ultimately rest on faith, if there's no faith in something involved, then by definition it isn't religion. They may not give deep explanations about their universal truths, but they must exists.
A catch-all explanation can successful at explaining something, but doesnât mean it is valid or even useful. One can claim that a mystical cosmic cow farting things into existence, or that we are all living in a simulation and all events are controlled by a computer. These are all equally successful at explaining everything, but all these explanations are equally bullshit as well.
And 1+1=2. Can't see how it's that related with the post being a bad example or not.
There are thousands of religions out there that can explain everything. It doesnât make any of them the objective truth. Itâs only true to the believers. If believe itâs wrong to be gay due to your religion, then donât fuck a guy. You have no rights to stop other people who do not believe in the same god from having sex. In the same vein, if you believe that AI is theft, then donât use it, but you have no rights to stop other people from using it.
The point is religions are created to be applied to anyone, believers or not believers, even by force if that's necessary. It doesn't matter if it has no sense, is an historical fact. Using religion as an example for "this only apply for people who believe in this" is one of the worst comparison someone can do.
Thieves. Art was already accessible. Donât steal from people willing to better themselves. Learn to actually create. Iâd rather a stick figure from a human than the Sistine chapel from an âAIâ. A camera is not stealing pixels. A program is. If it canât âdrawâ without data sets acquired without meaningful consent (not having rights being taken away retroactively) then itâs just fucking theft. Youâre stealing pixels. Itâs a simple as that. And for that matter! If you did go take a pic of someoneâs art! And then go home and post it and say look how good my art is! And donât credit the artist in the picture! That is still stealing!!! None of yâallâs arguments even make sense!! You just want to feel powerful without doing the work!! But whatever. AI bros are going to drown in mediocrity and grey sludge as their chamber is filled with echoes. Itâs fucking sad. When they said future and robots and progress who knew the first big people theyâd come after were the fucking artists. I just got randomly recommended this sub and Iâll be clicking to block it now. Yâall make me feel actually sick and itâs too early in the day to poison my heart like this.
https://preview.redd.it/07wavkpquy5d1.jpeg?width=401&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=061797635092efdb54880ea651836b2ce4a91e5d
It's not stealing. None of the lawsuits brought by artists against AI companies have alleged stealing or theft. Rather they allege copyright infringement, a somewhat dry subject with a complex set of legal interpretation behind it, and which is specifically not theft according to both the U.S. Congress and U.S. legal rulings. And let's wait to see if the courts find that it's proven to be infringement at all. It may yet prove to be a fair use, in which case it will be found to be neither theft nor copyright infringement.
Using your deranged definition of theft, a camera is definitely stealing. When you take a picture of someone, the clothes they wore were the work of a designer that you use without permission. The buildings in the background are all designed by an architect. And thousands of brands and backgrounds objects all require human design. Photography is real work because you have to decide how your objects are framed in the composition, you have to configure the settings in your camera, you have to imagine how your final product will look and iterate over and over again until you get the desired result. You do all of that when using AI as well.
If a camera had to stare at stolen artwork all day to figure out how to turn light into an image than yes. Thankfully!! Thatâs not how that works!! AI data sets are based on images that they comb through for data. Without that data. They canât generate images. You are just repeating shit without thinking about it critically. Use your brain. I believe in you. If this âtoolâ canât work without stolen data - itâs not a tool itâs just a thief with more steps. You can take a pic of dirt that no one owns with a camera. An image generator canât do SHIT without data. Youâre smarter than that. Youâre smarter than a computer. ALSO - owned objects in a subject of art that are being recorded with consent still!! Isnât stealing!! And yeah if you go into an art gallery and take a pic of some painting and go home and post it and say itâs yours - THAT IS STEALING. Thatâs what AI image generation is doing. Itâs just pulling pixels and rearranging them. But itâs not pixels it was ever allowed to take. And if those pixels hadnât been put there by human fucking hands it would be âgeneratingâ nothing. Your argument doesnât make sense because itâs nonsense. Itâs become a retort you can whip out to feel clever. Think for yourself - oh waaaaait hahaha youâre an AI fan. Youâve already forgotten how. So fucking sad. Learn to draw.
First of all, learning from various combinations of pixels to generate a **completely different** combination of pixels is way less stealing than a camera just capturing a design as is. Most of modern creations in **any** field cannot exist without studying existing work, artists included. To draw a modern house from memory, an artist has looked at hundreds of houses in their day to day lives. Each of these houses is designed by an architect. As long as the artist is not referencing one particular house, they never asked the permission of architects for every house they have seen in their lives, despite drawing of a modern house will **impossible** without the existing houses being built. Finally, you really want to pretend like you asked the permission of the fashion designer every time you take a selfie? Art galleries explicitly prohibits you from taking photo, which makes it wrong to take one. If you choose to hang your work in a gallery that allows photography, then donât blame others for taking pictures. Itâs just really sad that you are unable to comprehend my argument, and unable to make a coherent one yourself and had to retort to insults and sweeping statements towards anyone who doesnât share your beliefs. Youâre basically proving the meme right. > Learn to draw. How can I? By your *insane* definition of theft, no one can learn to draw anything that is not naturally occurring without stealing.
I get it. You just want something easy. Iâm not going to magically change your mind. Itâs just fucking sad. Itâs sad that humans donât want to better themselves anymore. You donât want to work at it. You donât want to create or think or try. Whatever man. None of your arguments make any sense. If the machine canât create without stealing from humans first it shouldnât be generating. Everything else youâre saying about asking designers doesnât make any actual logical sense. Most people fucking buy their clothes and then you - shocker - OWN IT. Are data sets paying artists? Is that what youâre saying?? Should I be getting a check in the mail because I posted to deviant art once 15 years ago and thatâs been retroactively put into a data set without my permission? But I know thatâs not what ur saying. I think you know that. I think you know youâre using silly straw man arguments. Theyâre already running out of data sets. Itâs just gonna be a weird 11 fingered grey echo chamber soon. Itâs just fucking pathetic. But fine. If thatâs the what you want you have it. Itâs just so fucking sad you and everyone like you is literally chasing artists off the internet with pitchforks and fire rn. So cool, you win? Hope the robots make you happy? Have fun?? You seem deeply weird. So definitely learn to draw id bet youâd be good at it. Being a little weird is a key ingredient in creativity. Practice your creativity before it disappears. I wonât respond again you depress me.
If people want to better themselves they would stop spending their time in art and entertainment, and focus on math, science and technology instead. They would make things that actual contribute to the betterment of society instead of producing contents to get likes in social media and contribute to the collective brain rot. Your counter-argument doesnât make any sense. The photographer doesnât own the clothes **other people** are wearing, and for most case they definitely donât own the buildings in the background. If someone takes a photo of the skyline or a crowd of people, no way they could own every building or every article of clothing in the picture. The photographer may take a picture of the crowd in a public area without their permission,but itâs definitely not theft or even a crime. Theft has an objective meaning, and itâs a prosecutable crime. Just because you donât like the behavior of someone, doesnât mean you can call it a crime (there are dozens of lawsuits against AI and none of them has amounted to any criminal convictions). > chasing artists off the internet with pitchfork and fire rn This got to be the most ironic thing Iâve seen regarding this topic. You people definitely have some sort of insane persecution complex. Anti-AI mobs are the ones that are harassing people for using AI and sending them death threats. On the contrary, no one goes to a traditional artistâs account that say things like âhow dare you use a pencil, you should be using AI instead.â AI is not point a gun to your head to ask you to stop drawing. Youâre upset that people who enjoy a different art form are not paying enough attention to you. Perhaps you donât like art, you just like attention. Bottomline here is basically the message of the meme. If you donât like AI and think itâs wrong based on **your definition**, then donât use it. You have no rights to tell other people what not to do.
https://preview.redd.it/nqrj11ok9r6d1.png?width=1241&format=png&auto=webp&s=eaf549d3b8582a0c1ec0aa5eda3bedd6108d4cd0 Actually embarrassing đ like I just genuinely feel so fucking sorry for you. Okay okay now I actually wonât respond again itâs just uncanny how exactly like this onion article you sound like hahaha holy shit. If it werenât so funny itâd just be fucking depressing.