A group of hackers that says it believes “AI-generated artwork is detrimental to the creative industry and should be discouraged” is hacking people who are trying to use a popular interface for the AI image generation software Stable Diffusion with a malicious extension for the image generator interface shared on Github.
ComfyUI is an extremely popular graphical user interface for Stable Diffusion that’s shared freely on Github, making it easier for users to generate images and modify their image generation models. ComfyUI_LLMVISION, the extension that was compromised to hack users, is a ComfyUI extension that allowed users to integrate large language models GPT-4 and Claude 3 into the same interface.
The ComfyUI_LLMVISION Github page is currently down, but a Wayback Machine archive of it from June 9 states that it was “COMPROMISED BY NULLBULGE GROUP.”
Honestly, I feel like being a Luddite and everytime someone shows art from now on, critique the ever loving hell out of their process.
“Did you make the brushes yourself from sheep you raised? Did you grind the pigments from plants you grew yourself?”
Art is amazing, but artists are some of the most delicate people. Their entire career is, in a way, a showcase of themselves, and if you take any part of that away from them or judge it, they become incredibly hostile and take it deeply personally. But literally the same kind of criticisms they’re making now are taught in art history about previous advancements. It’s just the same fragile egos afraid that they’re not as special anymore.
Imo, there are too many good artists and not enough of a market.
The problem with the market is that they don’t want to pay what artists want. For every one person who wants a bespoke painting is about 30 people who are okay with mediocre and probably couldn’t tell the difference between someone who spent weeks versus a few hours on a painting.
I’m not saying artists don’t deserve to get paid. There are just not enough people willing to pay what they want. Is AI stealing their jobs? Probably. But they weren’t getting those jobs in the first place.
A few years ago, I was looking for an art student who would be willing to paint a very simple beach painting for me. Nothing fancy and really I probably could have done it on my own. There was an art school nearby and I went to a showcase and asked around. For an 8x10 canvas, it was going to be $1k minimum.
That’s insane. I wasn’t asking for detail. Just something with a sky, ocean, and sand. I found something similar to what I was looking for at a yard sale for $5.
I was willing to pay up to $300 with the possibility of doing more commissions down the road.
During the pandemic, I ended up taking some painting classes and learned to do the simple painting on my own for the price of a good bottle of wine.
If you want to make a pie from scratch…
I’m sure there’s plenty of people that make their living (or maybe barely scrape by) off digital art that are affected by this so I can understand some touchiness. I mean why pay $100 for an account avatar or other small commissions when you can generate it yourself in one second. But also, why pay a scribe to copy an entire book by hand when a printing press does it faster? The only difference in these statements is that hand scribe wasn’t a widespread profession 5 years ago.
To me an artist is someone who uses tools to realize their vision. As technology progresses so do the tools. ComfyUI is leagues better of a tool than something like DallE will ever be, but no the entirety of “AI Generated Art” is a sin and must be attacked. Oh, not the corporate zeitgeist heisters, but instead the users of the community driven software.
