Ask Lemmy

AI feels like a Lovecraftian horror to me. It's trying to look authentic, but it's wrong on a fundemental level. Nothing's the right shape, nothing's the right texture, nothing's consistent, nothing belongs together... But somehow, nobody else has noticed what should be blatantly obvious! And when you try to point it out, you get a hivemind responding that it's good actually, and you're just a luddite.

But let's assume AI stops being awful in a technical sense. It's still awful in a moral sense.

Artists are poor. That's a well known sentiment you see a lot and, given how many times I see commission postings, it's pretty accurate. That artist needs to work to live, and that work is creating art.

AI is deliberately depriving these artists of work in order to give the AI's owner a quick, low quality substitute. In some cases, it will copy an artist's style, so you're deliberately targetting a specific artist because they're good at their job. And it's using the artist's work in order to replace them.

As an artist who has had her art stolen before for usage in an AI output, being against any and all art theft is the default and perfectly reasonable standpoint for an artist. On some art websites, AI generated images fall under the rule against art theft. This is because AI models scrape artists' work without their consent, and the output of a prompt is reliant on the amalgamation of the aforementioned scraped artworks. I've personally seen some AI images in which the mangled remains of artists' signatures are still visible.

The best analogy I can offer to explain why this is theft is that typing in a prompt into an AI image generator is like commissioning an artist to draw something for you, except the artist turns out to be someone who traces people's art and picks stolen artwork to trace from to match the prompt, and then claiming that it was you who created the image.

Why would you need an argument beyond AI art is lifeless?

From an artists view, it basically makes them obsolete. Sucks. Also, legally trained AI has a lot less training data, therefore worse output and so illegal models will always be preferred.

From a tech view, AI does not create anything new. It remixes. If we remove artists, which will happen as AIs are simply cheaper, we won't have anything new. From there on, you can imagine it like that: An artist creates images that are 99-100% of what the goal was, dictated by clients or digitally identified by tags, due to logic, reason, creativity and communication. And they only get better. With AIs, they have like 90% accuracy, due to technical limitations. And once a generated image, which only has 90% accuracy, is used as training data for new images, it only gets worse.

For example, if there are enough images with 6 fingers, created by AI, in training data, that will become the norm.

Basically, authors, artists etc. will be obsolete for a few years, until the AI bubble mostly collapses and quality is so bad that companies and individuals hire professionals again. Then AIs will be used for low-requirement things only again, eg. private memes or roleplay.

So artists are probably angry because they are replaced by much inferior things, that leeched off of themselves and will be gone in a few years anyway. AI just does not make sense, in most cases.

Art is largely about feeling and emotion, but you insist on rejecting arguments that are arguing about emotion.

Interesting.

I heard a bunch of explanations but most of them seem emotional and aggressive, and while I respect that this is an emotional subject, I can’t really understand opinions that boil down to “theft” and are aggressive about it.

Why the anger?

How do you earn a living yourself? Or even better, what is your most precious hobby? Whatever it is that you love doing for the love of it (that's the definition of a hobby) try imagining being told one day, out of the blue: 'Guys, my fancy but completely soulless computer can do as good as many of you. And it can do it in seconds. Wanna compete?'

Now, imagine it's your job and not your hobby, the way you earn your living (and pay your rent/mortgage and those always more expensive bills) and imagine being told 'That way you used to earn a living? It's gone now. It instantly vanished in a magical cloud of 1 and 0s. This AI-thing can do in mere seconds something that would take you weeks and it can do it well enough that quite many of your customers may not want to spend (a lot more) money to pay you for doing the exact same job even if you do it much better. How happy would you feel about that?

So, yeah, like you said it's kinda 'emotional' topic...

is there an argument against models that were legally trained?

Being 100% sure there exists such a database that contains no stolen creation, and then that AIs were indeed restricted to it for their training is already something worth debating and doubting (the second it is not open source), imho.

There had been a similar problem a few centuries ago, when photography first appeared many painters rightfully considered photography a threat to their business model as one could have their portrait (edit: or have a picture of a landscape) made in mere minutes (it was a longer than that, early days photography was far from being as quick as we know it but you get the idea).

What happened to them and their practice?

1. Some painters had to find rich sponsors that were OK to pay in order to get a portrait that would be more unique than a pĥotography (I know what I would prefer between having my photo taken by even a decent photographer or, say, a painted portrait made by Sargent), others found niche domains were to could still earn a living, while others simply went out of business.
2. Others decided painting could be much more than just being realistic like it (mostly) was before photography became a thing and they quickly started offering us amazing new kind of paintings (impressionism, abstract painting, cubism, expressionism,...)

And here we are in the XXI century. Painting is still doing fine in its own way (exposed in art galleries and in the home of rich people). There is also a lot more hobbyist painters that will paint all they can including realistic scenes no matter how much 'better' a photo could be. They don't care. Next to those, there are many photographers taking countless photos (many of which being worthless too), some of them trying (and many failing) to earn a living selling them.

is it something past the saying that AI art is lifeless?

Maybe it will get better, most probably it will, but so far I feel real sad for people that are unable to see, to feel and to understand how lifeless and how clueless AI art is.

Edit: typos (yeah, this was handwritten without the help of any AI :p)

You can't understand why people don't like being stolen from by corporations, and why others don't want to buy stolen work?

You can't understand the difference between digital piracy, humans taking media from corporations for personal use, and the above, corporations taking from humans for commercial use?

For professional artists, AI art is taking away their livelihood. Many of them already lived in precarious conditions in a tough job market before and this is only getting worse now, with companies increasingly relying on cheaper AI art for things like concept art etc.

For me, as a hobbyist and art consumer, the main issue is AI art invading "my" spaces. I want to look at Human-made art and have no interest in AI-generated content whatsoever. But all the platforms are getting flooded with AI content and all the filters I set to avoid it barely help. Many users on these platforms roleplay as real artists as well and pretend their art isn't AI, which annoys me quite a bit. I don't mind if people want to look at AI art, but they should leave me alone with it and don't force it down my throat.

When a comedian becomes good enough at doing a Stephen Hawking impression, you don't suddenly expect them to start publishing science studies.

If you worked hard, learned a craft, and spent countless hours honing it and I took your work without asking you and used it to enrich myself and my talentless tech bro buddies, how would you feel?

It's a form of coattail riding. It's no different from tracing.

I have a 1 hour video from a digital artist/ programmer that will tell you essentially why it being lifeless matters.

Essentialy, everything before AI was either of mechanistic natural beauty, derived from biological chemical, physical processes, like the leaf of a plant the winding of rivers the shape of mountains etc. ,or it was made by human desicions, there was intentionality thought and perseverance behind every sentence you read, every object you held or owned, every depiction you would look at.

And this made the thing made by humanity inherently understandable as a result of human descion making, creativity, you might not agree with the causes and the outcomes of those decisions, but there was something there to retrace, and this retracing this understanding, made it beautifull, unique or interesting.

Same with the natural objects and phenomenon, you could retrace their existence to causes, causes that unfold a world in their own right, leading you to ask questions about their existence, their creation, their process.

In this retracing, these real links to people, to land and to nature lies the real beauty. The life so to say is them being part of this network for you to take a peek into, through their art, their creation, their mere existence.

Now we have a third category a thing or text or image that exists solely because an imitation machine, an AI is able to crate it, and it can fulfill some profit motive, there is no thought and no intentionality behind this writing this art and so on, it's a result of statistical models which are built on what existed in the real world, and robs most if not all of these building blocks by just existing. It fills their place, it takes the energy they needed, the intelligence and decision-making they can create, and uses it to replace them, gradually over time.

And it doesn't really give back, it doesn't create value in the sense that we can retrace and understand what it makes, it's a statistical result, there are no causes to peek into besides pretty boring math, and a collection of data it was trained on, a collection so big and varied that looking at it's entirety might as well just be looking at everything, it tells us nothing, it doesn't lead us to ask what there is behind it in the same way.

https://youtu.be/-opBifFfsMY?si=0yD3BmZSF9ijfGIE

So hear me out... I think AI could be financially very helpful to artists, while giving them a chance to do more meaningful work. Businesses buy a ton of stock photos, graphics and art. An artist could create a library of original digital pieces (they probably already have it) and use that for the source of new AI generated digital content, which in turn would go back into the source library. This reduces the cost/time associated with soulless stock/business content, but positions the artist to maintain a revenue stream. With the extra time, the artist could work on their preferred pieces or be commissioned to do one-offs.