Hey mates, recently I've developed a tool to use the GenerativeAI on the AI Horde to created random avatars and banners on lemmy. To keep things spicy, I wanted to deploy to rotate the /c/piracy banner daily, as I've done in a bunch of other communities like [email protected] and the lemmy.dbzer0.com.
So now this is now active!
In case you're curious,. the current prompt used is this:
"A of a (solo:1.2) {cyberpunk|steampunk|solarpunk|dieselpunk|anarchist|fantasy|science fiction} {disney pixar 3D|realistic|dreamworks 3D animation} {male|female|androgynous} {Abkhazian|Afghan|Åland Island|Albanian|Algerian|American Samoan|Andorran|Angolan|Anguillan|Antarctic|Antiguan|Argentine|Armenian|Aruban|Australian|Austrian|Azerbaijani|Bahamian|Bahraini|Bangladeshi|Barbadian|Belarusian Belgian|Belizean|Beninois|Bermudian|Bhutanese|Bolivian|Bonaire|Herzegovinian|Botswana|Bouvet Island|Brazilian|BIOT|Bruneian|Bulgarian|Burkinabé|Burundian|Cabo Verdean|Cambodian|Cameroonian|Canadian|Caymanian|Central African|Chadian|Chilean|Chinese|Christmas Island|Cocos Island|Colombian|Comorian|Congolese|Congolese|Cook Island|Costa Rican|Croatian|Cuban|Curaçaoan|Cypriot|Czech|Danish|Djiboutian|Dominican|Dominican|Timorese|Ecuadorian|Egyptian|Salvadoran|English|Equatorial Guinean|Eritrean|Estonian|Swati|Ethiopian|European|Falkland Island|Faroese|Fijian|Finnish|French|French Guianese|French Polynesian|French Southern Territories|Gabonese|Gambian|Georgian|German|Ghanaian|Gibraltar|Greek|Greenland|Grenadian|Guadeloupe|Guamanian|Guatemalan|Guernsey|Guinean|Bissau-Guinean|Guyanese|Haitian|Heard Island|Honduran|Cantonese|Magyar|Icelandic|Indian|Indonesian|Iranian|Iraqi|Irish|Manx|Israelite|Italian|Ivorian|Jamaican|Jan Mayen|Japanese|Jersey|Jordanian|Kazakhstani|Kenyan|Kiribati|North Korean|South Korean|Kosovan|Kuwaiti|Kyrgyzstani|Laotian|Latvian|Lebanese|Basotho|Liberian|Libyan|Liechtensteiner|Lithuanian|Luxembourgish|Macanese|Madagascan|Malawian|Malaysian|Maldivian|Malinese|Maltese|Marshallese|Martiniquais|Mauritanian|Mauritian|Mahoran|Mexican|Micronesian|Moldovan|Monégasque|Mongolian|Montenegrin|Montserratian|Moroccan|Mozambican|Myanma Burmese|Namibian|Nauruan|Nepalese|Dutch|New Caledonian|New Zealand|Nicaraguan|Nigerien|Nigerian|Niuean|Norfolk Island|Macedonian|Northern Irish|Northern Marianan|Norwegian|Omani|Pakistani|Palauan|Palestinian|Panamanian|Papuan|Paraguayan|Peruvian|Filipino|Pitcairn Island|Polish|Portuguese|Puerto Rican|Qatari|Réunionnais|Romanian|Russian|Rwandan|Saban|Barthélemois|Saint Helenian|Kittitian|Saint Lucian|Saint-Martinoise|Miquelonnais|Vincentian|Samoan|Sammarinese|São Toméan|Saudi|Scottish|Senegalese|Serbian|Seychellois|Sierra Leonean|Singaporean|Sint EustatiusStatian|Sint Maarten|Slovak|Slovenian|Solomon Island|Somali|South African|South Georgia Island|South Ossetian|South Sudanese|Spanish|Sri Lankan|Sudanese|Surinamese|Svalbard|Swedish|Swiss|Syrian|Taiwanese|Tajikistani|Tanzanian|Thai|Timorese|Togolese|Tokelauan|Tongan|Trinidadian|Tunisian|Turkish|Turkmen|Turks and Caicos Island|Tuvaluan|Ugandan|Ukrainian|Emirati|British|American|Uruguayan|Uzbekistani|Ni-Vanuatu|Vaticanian|Venezuelan|Vietnamese|British Virgin Island|U.S. Virgin Island|Welsh|Wallis and Futuna|Sahrawi|Yemeni|Zambian|Zanzibari|Zimbabwean} pirate {standing in front of a sail|sitting in front of a monitor}, {Rococo|Digital Art|Baroque} style, wearing a {red|blue|yellow|green|black|white} {bandana|hat|scarf} and holding a {crimson|gold|silver|emerald|magic|azure|obsidian|ebony} {sword|keyboard|compass|mug|treasure|flag|club|amulet|fruit}, rich detailed {open|cloudy|stormy|sunny} sky background###multiple people, duo, cleavage, bitcoin"
Pretty long ye? The way this works is that each a random option is picked from each collection wrapped in { } which allows me to generate versatile options every day to keep things fresh
Here's some sample images that will be created
If you have improvements you want to see on the prompt, do let me know in the comments. In the future I'm having thoughts of allowing the community here to automatically send adjustments ideas to the prompt for funsies.
I have problems with so-called "AI" image generators at every level. Economic, ecological, functional, artistic, and moral.
Do you want an essay or just the bullet points?
Your personal feelings aside, this doesn't practically affect you in any way from how it used to be until now.
Practically, if a website I use implements features that I don't want to see, then I am effected. I quit Facebook for similar reasons 15 years ago.
Facebook implements things that affect what you get to see and experience (more ads, less people you follow, propaganda etc) for their own profit and empowerements at the cost of the whole society. This just replaces one GenAI image with another for funzies. But sure, if that's the hill you're willing to die on, do what you have to do.
The same could be said for the electricity you wasted because you didn't want to make your own banner.
You realize that making my own banner would waste order more electricity, right? The electricity expended to generate one new image is about as much as the amount you wasted writing these comments
Electricity spent to provide humans with a comfortable working environment isn't wasted. Electricity spent to deprive an artist of the opportunity to practice their craft absolutely is.
My random banners don't stop anyone from opportunities to practice their art. What kind of drugs are you on? Also, you realize you're in the /c/piracy community, yes? Do you also go and complain about copyright violations?
Your comments are anything but "a comfortable working environment".
Anyway, my point is that your comment "waste" is below trivial. Just like my genAI images. My computer is far more wasteful in a single session of video gaming. Or are you railing against those too?
Exactly, you never intended to commission an artist because you think so-called "AI art" is good enough to replace them.
Of course not, the marginal cost of duplicating an existing digital work is trivial. The cost of producing work is not, which is why freelance artists work on commission.
If the images are so trivial then why spend so much effort defending them?
You clearly care about this, just not enough to pay an artist for custom work or even to copy something an artist already created.
Again, of course not. You're a person and not a machine designed to replace paid work with a generic plagirism laundromat.
You gotta be fucking kidding me...I didn't commission an artist for an image per day A) because that would be insane and B) I'm poor and C) Because the point is being creative myself!
I assure you, the cost of reproducing downloading a single mp3 greater than the cost to generate a single image.
The...what? Read again The cost of creating such images is below trivial! Therefore the potential waste of such an action is not a concern.
Yes, because read above.
And as a person, my making the automation to generate these images gives me fulfilment like a video game. Are we done here?
Then do that instead.
The average image generator burns between 10 and 30 watt-hours per image. Downloading 4mb from a server costs about 0.000026 watt-hours. (Sources: https://mcengkuru.medium.com/the-hidden-cost-of-ai-images-how-generating-one-could-power-your-fridge-for-hours-174c95c43db8 https://www.devsustainability.com/p/approaches-to-calculating-network-website-energy-and-carbon )
Sure seems like it is a concern since the energy usage of datacenters is expected to double in the next year and a half.
https://www.theverge.com/2024/1/24/24049047/data-center-ai-crypto-bitcoin-mining-electricity-report-iea
I did? It took me hours to design this automation (not to mention the months developing the AI Horde)
lol. I don't know where you get your numbers buddy, but it takes me a 2-3 seconds per image on my PC. And my PC is already running because I have to answer to ridiculous arguments on lemmy...
Lol, even your own articles dunk on you
So? I don't use datacenters.
And the process of setting that up is creative?
Hate to break it to you, but programming is creative plus I don't like making visual art manually.
"A conservative estmate of 800 watts"? Where the fuck are you getting these number mate? My GPU at full power is not even half that.
I do automation for a living, I'm well aware that computer engineering can be a creative process, but it is not an artistic one.
I don't like seeing visual art automated.
I don't know what's in your computer, but some high-end graphics cards can pull more than 300W at full load all on their own. 400W total power output seems a pretty conservative estimate to me.
Great? I find the automation creative.
I don't care?
Most high-end graphic cards actually use close to 100W when not in demanding workloads. Mine certainly does.
You said double that. Most people's PCs idle at 200-W300W as a total. And even if 400W was the total PC usage, as I said, my PC is already on.
If you didn't, then you wouldn't be in this thread defending your creative choices. You could have ignored me like a person who doesn't care would do.
As per Tom's Hardware, the average high-end card comes in somewhere north of 250W. But even if we half the total power estimate again we're still talking about an eigth of a watt-hour, or 50,000 times more than a 4mb download, per image.
I revised my estimate while you were replying.
My PC idles at about 75W, and tops out just shy of 600W with all cores, cards, and drives running.
I am autistic. I actually hate that my brain is forcing me to reply to this drivel.
Great, so a generated image would be done at 2-10 seconds at like 200W usage. Anyway, this is a stupid argument. Even if it's not as an mp3, it's like a movie, what-the-fuck-ever.
I am also autistic, but I enjoy a good argument and will never pass up the chance to complain when people put generated images on my screen. There's more real art out there in the world to see than could be seen in a lifetime, so why should anyone waste time with computer-generated approximations of art?
We are comparing apples to oranges here, but the fact remains that serving existing content will always be cheaper than serving content one has to generate first.
And generated content can be randomized and automated, which you can't do with existing content, which is what I wanted to do
Sure you can, you just need a sufficiently diverse database of images at which to point your random number generator. No generation necessary, just aggregate human artistic output.
That's orders of magnitude harder in a bad non automated than what I'm going now for worse results and more risk. It's a frankly terrible idea
Randomly generated content is usually a bad idea on public-facing websites. Generating and displaying it automatically means you only get to inspect the results after the fact, so you're relying on the image generator to never produce something unacceptable.
Having a DB of prepared images means you can pick through and remove all the unacceptable ones before they have a chance to be displayed.
The ai horde already takes care of any problematic stuff. This is all solved
I can understand the concern with the ethics of AI art and plagiarism, but you're painting with a broad brush when you say that computer engineering can't be art.
Without considering AI, you can certainly make art through code. Math can be beautiful. Shaders in particular are a ripe avenue for programmatically generating art.
There are a lot of artists out there creating art through code, and there have been for significantly longer than the AI fad has been around. The act of creating the art is simply in writing the code, rather than in picking up a paintbrush. I doubt you accuse people who paint in Photoshop of "letting the computer paint for them", even if they use filters or something like the bucket fill tool. That's code creating art right there. But someone still had to input creativity, and writing code to create art that looks good requires creativity and effort and is absolutely art.
AI art has different problems with it, but "programming isn't art" isn't one of those reasons.
An artist preparing a brush to paint with is not doing art, they're doing engineering to make art tools.
They employ those art tools to make art, but the tools themselves are works of engineering, not art.
That isn't to say that art tools cannot be art, such as source code that's formatted like poetry or ASCII images, but that's a very different sort of design work than the development of base functions.
My analogy was off the mark a bit, you're right. But for example, have you seen some of the stuff people have made on Shadertoy? Incredible art, made from pure shader code.
Weird argument to make on a piracy sub, honestly. The existence of an AI generated image does not imply that a somewhere an artist lost a commission. Nobody was replaced. It's not a choice between AI art and commissioned art, it's a choice between AI generated images and nothing at all because that was the point of his project.
Whether we find it tasteful or interesting is another topic.
That's a false dichotomy. If there's no budget to commission new art then ideally the space should have been used to promote artists via their existing work.
"Instead of working on that project that you were enjoying working on in your spare time, why not do this completely different other thing?"
That's not reasonable.